A COMPANIONTO

GREEK TRAGEDY

Edited by

Justina Gregory

A COMPANIONTO

GREEK TRAGEDY

BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO THE ANCIENT WORLDThis series provides sophisticated and authoritative overviews of periods of ancient history, genres ofclassical literature, and the most important themes in ancient culture. Each volume comprises betweentwenty-five and forty concise essays written by individual scholars within their area of specialization. Theessays are written in a clear, provocative, and lively manner, designed for an international audience ofscholars, students, and general readers.

ANCIENT HISTORY

Published

A Companion to the Ancient Near EastEdited by Daniel C. Snell

A Companion to the Hellenistic WorldEdited by Andrew Erskine

In preparation

A Companion to the Archaic Greek WorldEdited by Kurt A. Raaflaub and Hans van Wees

A Companion to the Classical Greek WorldEdited by Konrad H. Kinzl

A Companion to the Roman RepublicEdited by Nathan Rosenstein and Robert Morstein-Marx

A Companion to the Roman EmpireEdited by David Potter

A Companion to the Roman ArmyEdited by Paul Erdkamp

A Companion to ByzantiumEdited by Elizabeth James

A Companion to Late AntiquityEdited by Philip Rousseau

LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Published

A Companion to Ancient EpicEdited by John Miles Foley

A Companion to Greek TragedyEdited by Justina Gregory

A Companion to Latin LiteratureEdited by Stephen Harrison

In preparation

A Companion to Classical MythologyEdited by Ken Dowden

A Companion to Greek and Roman HistoriographyEdited by John Marincola

A Companion to Greek ReligionEdited by Daniel Ogden

A Companion to Greek RhetoricEdited by Ian Worthington

A Companion to Roman RhetoricEdited by William J. Dominik and Jonathan Hall

A Companion to the Classical TraditionEdited by Craig Kallendorf

A Companion to Roman ReligionEdited by Jorg Rupke

A COMPANIONTO

GREEK TRAGEDY

Edited by

Justina Gregory

� 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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First published 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to Greek tragedy / edited by Justina Gregory.

p. cm.—(Blackwell companions to the ancient world. Ancient history)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-0770-9 (alk. paper)ISBN-10: 1-4051-0770-7 (alk. paper)

1. Greek drama (Tragedy)—History and criticism. I. Gregory, Justina.

II. Series.

PA3131.C56 2006

882’.0109—dc22 2004024920

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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Maenad and aulos-player. Attic red-figure pelike in the style of the earlier Mannerists. ca.460 BCE. BPK Berlin, Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen Zu Berlin. Photo: JohannesLaurentius.

Contents

List of Illustrations x

Note on Contributors xi

Preface and Acknowledgments xvi

Abbreviations and Editions xvii

PART I CONTEXTS 1

1 Fifth-Century Athenian History and Tragedy 3Paula Debnar

2 Tragedy and Religion: The Problem of Origins 23Scott Scullion

3 Dithyramb, Comedy, and Satyr-Play 38Bernd Seidensticker

4 Tragedy’s Teaching 55Neil Croally

5 Tragedy and the Early Greek Philosophical Tradition 71William Allan

6 Tragedy, Rhetoric, and Performance Culture 83Christopher Pelling

7 Pictures of Tragedy? 103Jocelyn Penny Small

PART II ELEMENTS 119

8 Myth 121Michael J. Anderson

9 Beginnings and Endings 136Deborah H. Roberts

10 Lyric 149Luigi Battezzato

11 Episodes 167Michael R. Halleran

12 Music 183Peter Wilson

13 Theatrical Production 194John Davidson

PART III APPROACHES 213

14 Aeschylean Tragedy 215Suzanne Saıd

15 Sophoclean Tragedy 233Ruth Scodel

16 Euripidean Tragedy 251Justina Gregory

17 Lost Tragedies: A Survey 271Martin Cropp

18 Tragedy and Anthropology 293Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood

19 Values 305Douglas Cairns

20 The Gods 321Donald Mastronarde

21 Authority Figures 333Mark Griffith

22 Women’s Voices 352Judith Mossman

23 Marginal Figures 366Mary Ebbott

PART IV RECEPTION 377

24 Text and Transmission 379David Kovacs

viii Contents

25 Learning from Suffering: Ancient Responses toTragedy 394Stephen Halliwell

26 Polis and Empire: Greek Tragedy in Rome 413Vassiliki Panoussi

27 Italian Reception of Greek Tragedy 428Salvatore Di Maria

28 Nietzsche on Greek Tragedy and the Tragic 444Albert Henrichs

29 Greek Tragedy and Western Perceptions of Actorsand Acting 459Ismene Lada-Richards

30 The Theater of Innumerable Faces 472Herman Altena

31 Justice in Translation: Rendering AncientGreek Tragedy 490Paul Woodruff

Bibliography 505

Index 541

Contents ix

Illustrations

Frontispiece: Maenad and aulos-player. Attic red-figure pelike v

7.1 Andromeda. Attic red-figure pelike 106

7.2 Medea. Lucanian red-figure calyx-krater 107

7.3 Oedipus. Sicilian calyx-krater 110

7.4 ‘‘Telephus’’ threatening ‘‘Orestes.’’ Apulian bell-krater 111

7.5 Telephus threatening Orestes with Clytemnestra. Lucanianred-figure calyx-krater 113

7.6 Orestes, Pylades, and Iphigenia among the Taurians.Roman wall painting 114

17.1 The death of Thersites. Greek, South Italian volute-krater 289

17.2 The death of Thersites (detail) 290

27.1 Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza. Interior view 431

27.2 Scena tragica. Sebastiano Serlio 439

30.1 Production of Aars! directed by Luk Perceval 478

30.2 Production of Euripides’ Children of Heraclesdirected by Peter Sellars 480

30.3 Production of De Trojaansen directed by Mirjam Koen 484

30.4 Production of Bacchanten directed by Johan Simons and Paul Koek 487

Contributors

William Allan is McConnell Laing Fel-low and Tutor in Classics at UniversityCollege, Oxford. His publications in-clude The Andromache and EuripideanTragedy (Oxford, 2000; paperback,2003), Euripides: The Children of Hera-cles (Aris and Phillips, 2001), and Euripi-des: Medea (Duckworth, 2002). He iscurrently writing a commentary on Eu-ripides’ Helen for the Cambridge Greekand Latin Classics series.

Herman Altena is a freelance academicand translator with a one-man business,Antiek Theater. He teaches ancientGreek drama and its reception in theNetherlands at the Department of The-ater Studies of the University of Utrecht.He has translated several Greek tragediesfor the Dutch professional theater andworked as a dramaturge. He is theDutch representative in the EuropeanNetwork of Research and Documenta-tion of Ancient Greek Drama.

Michael J. Anderson is an associate pro-fessor of Classics at Yale University. Hisprincipal research interests are archaicand classical Greek poetry and theGreek novels. His book The Fall of Troyin Early Greek Poetry and Art (Oxford,

1997) includes a study of treatments ofthe sack of Troy in Athenian tragedy.

Luigi Battezzato studied at the ScuolaNormale Superiore, Pisa, at the Univer-sity of California, Berkeley, and at Uni-versity College London. He has written abook on monologues in Euripides, andseveral articles on Greek tragedy. His re-search interests include literary and socialproblems in ancient Greek texts. He hasalso published on textual criticism, andon ancient Greek language and meter.He teaches at the Universita del Pie-monte Orientale, Vercelli, Italy.

Douglas Cairns has taught at the uni-versities of St. Andrews, Otago, Leeds,and Glasgow, and is now Professor ofClassics in the University of Edinburgh.He is the author of Aidos: The Psychologyand Ethics of Honour and Shame in An-cient Greek Literature (1993) and editorof Oxford Readings in Homer’s Iliad(2001) and (with R. A. Knox) of Law,Rhetoric, and Comedy in Classical Athens(2004).

Neil Croally assisted in the Royal Shake-speare Company’s production of TheThebans in 1990–91. His doctorate was

published as Euripidean Polemic byCambridge University Press in 1994.Since 1990 he has taught Classics at Dul-wich College in London. Teaching hasleft little time for theorizing; instead hehas used his school’s resources to stage anumber of Greek plays in a variety ofinauthentic ways. He thanks Jo, Mary,and Puss.

Martin Cropp is Professor of Greek andRoman Studies at the University of Cal-gary. He studied at Oxford and Torontobefore moving to Calgary in 1974. Hisbooks include commentaries on Euripi-des’ Electra (1988) and Iphigenia inTauris (2000), contributions to Euripi-des: Selected Fragmentary Plays (Vol. 1:1995; Vol. 2: 2004) with ChristopherCollard, Kevin Lee, and John Gibert,and the edited volume Euripides andLate Fifth Century Tragic Theatre (Illi-nois Classical Studies 24/25, 1999–2000, with Kevin Lee, David Sansone,and others).

John Davidson holds the Chair of Clas-sics at Victoria University of Wellington,New Zealand, where he has been since1969 after completing a doctorate atLondon. T. B. L. Webster Fellow at theSchool of Advanced Studies in Londonin 2003, he has published extensively onvarious aspects of Greek drama, includ-ing theatrical production and the rela-tionship between the Homeric texts andthe tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides.

Paula Debnar, an associate professor ofClassics at Mount Holyoke College, isthe author of Speaking the Same Lan-guage: Speech and Audience in Thucydi-des’ Spartan Debates (2001) and severalarticles on the rhetoric of Thucydideanspeakers. She is currently at work on anarticle on the figure of Cassandra in Aes-chylus’ Agamemnon and a study of theSpartan general Brasidas.

Salvatore Di Maria is Professor of Ital-ian at the University of Tennessee. Hisscholarly interests range from Dante andAriosto (his annotated bibliography ofAriosto was published by the Universityof Missouri Press in 1984) to Machiavel-li’s theater and political writings. He re-cently published The Italian Tragedy inthe Renaissance (Bucknell, 2002). At pre-sent he is working on the originality ofimitation in the Renaissance theater.

Mary Ebbott is an assistant professor ofClassics at the College of the Holy Crossin Worcester, Massachusetts, and an ex-ecutive editor for the Center for HellenicStudies in Washington, DC. She is theauthor of Imagining Illegitimacy inClassical Greek Literature (Lanham,Md., 2003). Her current work focuseson the language of physical pain and itslimitations in Greek epic and tragedy.

Justina Gregory is Professor of ClassicalLanguages and Literatures at Smith Col-lege. Her books include a translation ofAesop’s Fables (1975, with Patrick Greg-ory), Euripides and the Instruction of theAthenians (1991), and a commentary onEuripides’ Hecuba (1999). She is cur-rently working on representations ofeducation in Greek literature.

Mark Griffith is Professor of Classics,and of Theater, Dance, and PerformanceStudies, at the University of California,Berkeley. He has published editions ofPrometheus Bound and Antigone in theCambridge Greek and Latin Classics ser-ies, as well as a number of articles onGreek tragedy, poetry, and culture.

Michael R. Halleran is Professor ofClassics and Divisional Dean of Arts andHumanities in the College of Arts andSciences at the University of Washington.His primary area of scholarship is ancientGreek drama, and he has published

xii Contributors

widely on Greek literature and culture,including Stagecraft in Euripides(1985), The Heracles of Euripides: Trans-lated with Introduction, Notes, and Inter-pretative Essay (1988), Euripides:Hippolytus, with Translation and Com-mentary (1995), and Euripides’ Hippoly-tus: Translated with Introduction, Notes,and Essay (2001).

Stephen Halliwell is Professor of Greekat the University of St. Andrews. He is theauthor of seven books (including workson Aristophanes, Aristotle, and Plato), ofwhich the most recent is The Aesthetics ofMimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Prob-lems (2002), and more than sixty articleson Greek literature, philosophy, rhetoric,and interdisciplinary cultural themes. Heis currently working on Greek Laughter:A Study in Cultural Psychology. See fur-ther at www.st-andrews.ac.uk/classics/staff/ halliwell.shtml.

Albert Henrichs is Eliot Professor ofGreek Literature at Harvard University.Born and educated in Germany, he re-ceived his Dr. phil. and his habilitationfrom the University of Cologne. He haswritten extensively on Greek literature,religion, and myth. His major areas ofresearch include the Greek god Dionysusand his modern reception, the represen-tation of ritual in literature and art, thereligious self-awareness of the Greeks,and the history of classical scholarshipsince 1800. He is the author of Die Got-ter Griechenlands: Ihr Bild im Wandelder Religionswissenschaft (1987) and ofWarum soll ich denn tanzen? Dionysischesim Chor der griechischen Tragodie(1996).

David Kovacs is Professor of Classics atthe University of Virginia. He is the edi-tor and translator of Euripides for theLoeb Classical Library. In addition tothe six Loeb volumes he has written

three companion volumes discussingtextual problems and setting out the an-cient evidence for the life of Euripides.He is also the author of two monographson Euripides and some thirty articles ontragic topics.

Ismene Lada-Richards is a lecturer inClassics at King’s College London. Sheis the author of Initiating Dionysus: Rit-ual and Theatre in Aristophanes’ Frogs(Oxford, 1999) and numerous articleson Greek drama in its ritual and per-formative context. Her current researchinterests range from post-hellenistic the-ater and Roman drama to aspects of theclassical tradition and the cultural historyof the European stage. She is completinga book on pantomime dancing in imper-ial and late antiquity.

Donald Mastronarde was educated atAmherst College, Oxford University,and the University of Toronto. Since1973 he has taught at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, where he is nowMelpomene Distinguished Professor ofClassical Languages and Literature. Hehas edited Euripides’ Phoenissae in theTeubner series (1988), produced com-mentaries on Euripides’ Phoenissae(Cambridge, 1994) and Medea (Cam-bridge, 2002), and published on othertopics in ancient drama.

Judith Mossman is Professor of Classicsat the University of Nottingham. She haspublished a book on Euripides’ Hecubaand is currently preparing an edition ofEuripides’ Medea. She is also working ona book on women’s speech in Greektragedy.

Vassiliki Panoussi is an assistant profes-sor of Classics at Williams College. Herresearch focuses on intertextuality, cul-tural anthropology, and the study ofwomen and gender in antiquity. She is

Contributors xiii