Inscriptional Records for the Dramatic Festivals in Athens


Book Description

IG II2 2318–2325 represent the most substantial surviving body of evidence for the institutional history of the Athenian dramatic festivals from their establishment at the end of the 6th century BCE to their disappearance sometime in the mid- to late 100s. Millis and Olson offer a completely updated text of the inscriptions, based on a close study of the stones themselves; detailed explanations of the restorations of the dimensions and organization of the original records, with numerous redatings and the like; and new — and in some cases radically different — reconstructions of the monuments on which they were inscribed. The volume also includes substantial interpretative essays on each set of records, a full epigraphic and prosopographic commentary, and several indices.




Greek Tragedy After the Fifth Century


Book Description

What happened to Greek tragedy after the death of Euripides? This book provides some answers, and a broad historical overview.




Aristophanes: Frogs


Book Description

A comedy about tragedy and a play about playmaking, Aristophanes' Frogs (405 BCE) is perhaps the most popular of ancient comedies. This new introduction guides students through the play, its themes and contemporary contexts, and its reception history. Frogs offers sustained engagement with the Athenian literary scene, with the politics of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War, and with the religious understanding of the fifth-century city. It presents the earliest direct criticism of theatre and a detailed description of the Underworld, and also dramatizes the place of Mystery cults in the religious life of Athens and shows the political concerns that galvanized the citizens. It is also genuinely funny, showcasing a range of comic techniques, including literary and musical parody, political invective, grotesque distortion, wordplay, prop comedy, and funny costumes. Frogs has inspired literary works by Henry Fielding, George Bernard Shaw, and Tom Stoppard. This book explores all of these features in a series of short chapters designed to be accessible to a new reader of ancient comedy. It proceeds linearly through the play, addressing a range of issues, but paying particular attention to stagecraft and performance. It also offers a bold new interpretation of the play, suggesting that the action of Frogs was not the first time Euripides and Aeschylus had competed against each other.




A Cultural History of Comedy in Antiquity


Book Description

Drawing together contributions from scholars in a wide range of fields inside Classics and Drama, this volume traces the development of comedic performance and examines the different characteristics of Greek and Roman comedy. Although the origins of comedy are obscure, this study argues that comedic performances were at the heart of Graeco-Roman culture from around 486 BCE to the mid first century BCE. It explores the range of comedies during this period, which were fictional dramas that engaged with the political and social concerns of ancient society, and also at times with mythology and tragedy. The volume centres largely around the surviving work of Aristophanes and Menander in Athens, and Plautus and Terence in Rome, but authors whose plays survive only in fragments are also discussed. Performances and plays drew on a range of forms, including satire and fantasy, and were designed to entertain and amuse their audiences while also asking them to question issues of morality, privilege and class. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identities, the body, politics and power, laughter and ethics. These eight different approaches to ancient comedy add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.




The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy


Book Description

The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy marks the first comprehensive introduction to and reference work for the unified study of ancient comedy. From its birth in Greece to its end in Rome, from its Hellenistic to its Imperial receptions, no topic is neglected. The 41 essays offer cutting-edge guides through comedy's immense terrain.




Reperforming Greek Tragedy


Book Description

An inexplicably understudied field of classical scholarship, tragic reperformance, has been surveyed in its true dimension only in the very recent years. Building on the latest discussions on tragic restagings, this book provides a thorough survey of reperformance of Greek tragedy in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, also addressing its theatrical, political, and cultural context. In the fifth and fourth centuries, tragic restagings were strongly tied to cultural mobility and exchange. Poets, actors, texts, vases, and vase-painters were traveling, bridging the boundaries between mainland Greece and Magna Graecia, boosting the spread of theater, facilitating theatrical literacy, and setting a new theatrical status quo, according to which popular tragic plays were restaged, by mobile actors, in numerous dramatic festivals, in and out of Attica, with or without the supervision of their composers. This book offers a holistic examination of ancient reperformances of tragedy, enhancing our perception of them as a vital theatrical practice that played a major part in the development of the tragic genre in the fifth and fourth centuries BC.




Greek Theatre in the Fourth Century BC


Book Description

Age-old scholarly dogma holds that the death of serious theatre went hand-in-hand with the 'death' of the city-state and that the fourth century BC ushered in an era of theatrical mediocrity offering shallow entertainment to a depoliticised citizenry. The traditional view of fourth-century culture is encouraged and sustained by the absence of dramatic texts in anything more than fragments. Until recently, little attention was paid to an enormous array of non-literary evidence attesting, not only the sustained vibrancy of theatrical culture, but a huge expansion of theatre throughout (and even beyond) the Greek world. Epigraphic, historiographic, iconographic and archaeological evidence indicates that the fourth century BC was an age of exponential growth in theatre. It saw: the construction of permanent stone theatres across and beyond the Mediterranean world; the addition of theatrical events to existing festivals; the creation of entirely new contexts for drama; and vast investment, both public and private, in all areas of what was rapidly becoming a major 'industry'. This is the first book to explore all the evidence for fourth century ancient theatre: its architecture, drama, dissemination, staging, reception, politics, social impact, finance and memorialisation.




Music, Text, and Culture in Ancient Greece


Book Description

What difference does music make to performance poetry, and how did the ancients themselves understand this relationship? Although scholars have long recognized the importance of music to ancient performance culture, little has been written on the specific effects that musical accompaniment, and features such as rhythmical structure and melody, would have created in individual poems. This volume attempts to answer these questions by exploring more fully the relationship between music and language in the poetry of ancient Greece. Arranged into two parts, the essays in the first half engage closely with the evidential and interpretative challenges posed by the interaction of ancient music and poetry, and propose original readings of a range of texts by authors such as Homer, Pindar, and Euripides, as well as later poets such as Seikilos and Mesomedes. While they emphasize different formal features, they also argue collectively for a two-way relationship between music and language: attention to the musical features of poetic texts, insofar as we can reconstruct them, enables us to better understand not only their effects on audiences, but also the various ways in which they project and structure meaning. In the second part, the focus shifts to ancient attempts to conceptualize interactions between words and music; the essays in this section analyse the contested place that music occupied in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, and other critical writers of the Hellenistic and Imperial periods. Thinking about music is shown to influence other domains of intellectual life, such as literary criticism, and to be vitally informed by ethical concerns. These essays illustrate the importance of music for intellectual culture in ancient Greece and the ancients' abiding concern to understand and control its effects on human behaviour.




The Chorus of Drama in the Fourth Century BCE


Book Description

The Chorus of Drama in the Fourth Century BCE seeks to upend conventional thinking about the development of drama from the fifth to the fourth centuries and to provide a new way of talking and thinking about the choruses of drama after the deaths of Euripides and Sophocles. Set in the context of a theatre industry extending far beyond the confines of the City Dionysia and the city of Athens, the identity of choral performers and the significance of their contribution to the shape and meaning of drama in the later Classical period (c.400-323) as a whole is an intriguing and under-explored area of enquiry. This volume draws together the fourth-century historical, material, dramatic, literary, and philosophical sources that attest to the activity and quality of dramatic choruses and, having considered the positive evidence for dramatic choral activity, provides a radical rethinking of two oft-cited yet ill-understood phenomena that have traditionally supported the idea that the chorus of drama 'declined' in the fourth century: the inscription of χοŕο*u~ με ́λο*s in papyri and manuscripts in place of fully written-out choral odes, and Aristotle's invocation of embolima (Poetics 1456a25-32). It also explores the important role of influential fourth-century authors such as Plato, Demosthenes, and Xenophon, as well as artistic representations of choruses on fourth-century monuments, in shaping later scholars' understanding of the dramatic chorus throughout the Classical period, reaching conclusions that have significant implications for the broader story we wish to tell about Attic drama and its most enigmatic and fundamental element, the chorus.




The Formal Education of the Author of Luke-Acts


Book Description

Steve Reece proposes that the author of Luke-Acts was trained as a youth in the primary and secondary Greek educational curriculum typical of the Eastern Mediterranean during the Roman Imperial period, where he gained familiarity with the Classical and Hellenistic authors whose works were the focus of study. He makes a case for Luke's knowledge of these authors internally by spotlighting the density of allusions to them in the narrative of Luke-Acts, and externally by illustrating from contemporary literary, papyrological, and artistic evidence that the works of these authors were indeed widely known in the Eastern Mediterranean at the time of the composition of Luke-Acts, not only in the schools but also among the general public. Reece begins with a thorough examination of the Greek educational system during the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial periods, emphasizing that the educational curriculum was very homogeneous, at least at the primary and secondary levels, and that children growing up anywhere in the Eastern Mediterranean could expect to receive quite similar educations. His close examination of the Greek text of Luke-Acts has turned up echoes, allusions, and quotations of several of the very authors that were most prominently featured in the school curriculum: Homer, Aesop, Euripides, Plato, and Aratus. This reinforces the view that Luke, along with other writers of the New Testament, lived in a cultural milieu that was influenced by Classical and Hellenistic Greek literature and that he was not averse to invoking that literature when it served his theological and literary purposes.




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