SCS-20: The Next Generation: Papers by Undergraduate Classics Students

The first epeisodion (ll.147-273) of Euripides’ Andromache, is an extended verbal ᾰ̓γών (“contest”) between Hermione, the Spartan daughter of Helen and Menelaus and Neoptolemus’ wife, and Andromache, the widow of Hector and Neoptolemus’ concubine. Therein, the free Hermione taunts the enslaved Andromache by arguing that she, having come into the house of her husband “with a large dowry” (πολλοῖς σὺν ἕδνοις, l. 153), had the right “to speak freely” (ἐλευθεροστομεῖν‎, l. 153).

When St. Augustine reviews his literary works at the end of his life, he says of the Confessions: in [confessionum mearum libri tredecim] excitant humanum intellectum et affectum.¹ He expects his work to rouse thoughts and feelings within the reader. The reader should see, feel, and live differently.

Once when Ovid was at a dinner party, his friends asked him to cut out three lines of his poetry. Ovid promised to do so, if he could choose three lines to protect from this request. Ovid wrote down the three lines he wanted to keep, and his friends wrote what they wanted excised. When they each revealed, Ovid and his friends turned out to have written the same lines.

In an incisive explication of reception theory, this research proposes three selected texts as representatives of classical commentary, translation, and adaptation in relation to Sophocles’ Electra. Beginning with Hanna Roisman’s commentary, the researcher examines the subjectivity of even the most unmediated form in which modern readers inherit classical texts.