Greek Tragedy

In Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy, the monstrous goddesses known as the Furies or “Erinyes” embody a system of blood-vengeance with a presence that intensifies across the three plays. After their mysterious song “welling up” in the chorus of Agamemnon and their haunting phantoms in Choephoroi, the Furies emerge fully embodied as a chorus in the Eumenides.

In this paper, I deploy the riddle of the Sphinx to illuminate the divergent spatial programs of fifth-century lyric and tragedy. This case study stems from a book project that investigates the ways in which ancient Greek lyric poetry and tragedy speak to each other within a dynamic and evolving generic economy of fifth-century choral song. The book tracks lyric poetry’s varied but targeted responses to Athenian tragedy’s imperial ideology: fifth-century lyric poems resist, facilitate, and grapple with the ideological strategies of tragedy.

Reclaiming a Father: A Psycho-Analytical Interpretation of Neoptolemus’ Fictitious Tale (Ph. 343-90)

While dramatised trials and references to law are common throughout Athenian tragedy (see e.g. Allen 2005; Harris, Leaõ & Rhodes 2010), Euripides’ Hippolytus stands out especially for its close engagement with contemporary legal discussions. In a set of opposing speeches (936-80, 983-1035), Theseus and Hippolytus effectively partake in a form of litigation as they argue concerning the latter character’s supposed sexual violation of his stepmother Phaedra (see e.g. Barrett 1983 ad loc., Lees 1891: 28-31).

A Lost Tragedy for a Lost War? Receiving Euripides’ Lost Philoctetes

This paper examines Parmenidean resonances in the Hymn to Zeus of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Ties to presocratic and other contemporary thinkers are increasingly well-established in Aeschylean scholarship, and have yielded interpretive fruit in discussions of style, metaphysics, and ethics (Seaford, Scapin, Kouromenos, Poli Palladini). Likewise, analysis of the Parmenidean influences in the Agamemnon can contribute to our understanding of Aeschylean Zeus.

This paper argues that Euripides’ Medea problematizes the interrelation between trauma and revenge through the antinomy of pain and pleasure, which pervades the dramatic narrative. The tragedy brings into sharp relief the hedonics of anger (Blondell 1989, 26-8), the emotion inherent in the act of vengeance, which it dramatizes as a perverted form of koufisis (“alleviation”) from the experience of pain (Med. 374).

Euripides’ choice to set his second Hippolytus play in Troezen, and that setting’s role in the tragedy, have long invited scholarly inquiry (Barrett 1964, Jeny 1989, Mills 1997, Wiles 1997, Kowalzig 2006). In this paper I re-evaluate Hippolytus’ Troezenian setting in connection with the play’s representation of liminality—the fraught condition of social ambiguity, marginal existence, and transitional movement across ideational boundaries, perhaps best emblematized in Hippolytus by the title character’s uneasy status between ephebe and adult (esp.

According to Janssen (1984:21), both Euripides’ tragedy Orestes and Timotheus’ citharodic nome Persae were performed in Athens for the first time in 408/407 BCE. There are striking similarities between Euripides’ Phrygian slave’s monody in Orestes 1369–1502 and Timotheus’ Phrygian soldier’s speech in Persae 140–161:

The prologue of the Trojan Women has struck critics as highly unusual because of its incongruity with the actions that follow (Wilson, Rodighiero). The play begins with Athena and Poseidon, who do not mention the women whom the drama actually concerns but instead plan how to destroy the Greek forces in the future. As Dunn has shown, the opening scene functions more like a conclusion. This prologue does not introduce the tragedy’s events but rather undercuts them. This paper examines the tension between prologue and plot in light of the epic allusions throughout the play.