Euripides Revolution Under Cover

In this provocative book, Pietro Pucci explores what he sees as Euripides’s revolutionary literary art. While scholars have long pointed to subversive elements in Euripides’s plays, Pucci goes a step further in identifying a Euripidean program of enlightened thought enacted through carefully wrought textual strategies. The driving force behind this program is Euripides’s desire to subvert the traditional anthropomorphic view of the Greek gods—a belief system that in his view strips human beings of their independence and ability to act wisely and justly. Instead of fatuous religious beliefs, Athenians need the wisdom and the strength to navigate the challenges and difficulties of life. Throughout his lifetime, Euripides found himself the target of intense criticism and ridicule. He was accused of promoting new ideas that were considered destructive. Like his contemporary, Socrates, he was considered a corrupting influence. No wonder, then, that Euripides had to carry out his revolution "under cover." Pucci lays out the various ways the playwright skillfully inserted his philosophical principles into the text through innovative strategies of plot development, language and composition, and production techniques that subverted the traditionally staged anthropomorphic gods.

Euripides's Revolution under Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Euripides's Poetic Game and Law of Composition -- 2. Anthropomorphism -- 3. The Protection of the Self and the Role of Sophia -- 4. Some Connotations of Sophia -- 5. Polyneices's Truth -- 6. Hecuba's Rhetoric -- 7. Eros in Euripides's Poetics: Sex as the Cause of the Trojan War -- 8. The Lewd Gaze of the Eye -- 9. The Power of Love: Who Is Aphrodite? -- 10. Phaedra -- 11. Hermione: The Andromache -- 12. Female Victims of War: The Troades -- 13. The Survival in Poetry -- 14. Figures of Metalepsis: The Invention of "Literature"--15. The Failure of Politics in Euripides's Poetics: Politics in the Suppliant Women -- 16. Political Philosophy: A Universal Program of Peace and Progress -- 17. How to Deliberate a War -- 18. Democracy and Monarchy -- 19. The Battle -- 20. The Rescue of the Corpses -- 21. Return to Arms -- 22. The Polis's Loss of Control and Authority -- 23. The Bacchants' Gospel and the Greek City -- 24. Pentheus and Teiresias -- 25. Dionysus's Revenge: First Round -- 26. Revenge Prepares Its Murderous Weapon -- 27. Initiation and Sacrifice -- 28. Victory and Defeat -- 29. Euripides's Poetry -- Bibliography -- Subject Index -- Index Locorum

A bold new reconception of ancient Greek drama as a mode of philosophical thinking The Philosophical Stage offers an innovative approach to ancient Greek literature and thought that places drama at the heart of intellectual history. Drawing on evidence from tragedy and comedy, Joshua Billings shines new light on the development of early Greek philosophy, arguing that drama is our best source for understanding the intellectual culture of classical Athens. In this incisive book, Billings recasts classical Greek intellectual history as a conversation across discourses and demonstrates the significance of dramatic reflections on widely shared theoretical questions. He argues that neither "literature" nor "philosophy" was a defined category in the fifth century BCE, and develops a method of reading dramatic form as a structured investigation of issues at the heart of the emerging discipline of philosophy. A breathtaking work of intellectual history by one of today's most original classical scholars, The Philosophical Stage presents a novel approach to ancient drama and sets a path for a renewed understanding of early Greek thought.

This volume sheds new light on the experience of ancient Greek warfare by identifying and examining three fundamental transitions undergone by the classical Athenian hoplite as a result of his military service: his departure to war, his homecoming from war having survived, and his homecoming from war having died. As a conscript, a man regularly called upon by his city-state to serve in the battle lines and perform his citizen duty, the most common military experience of the hoplite was one of transition – he was departing to or returning from war on a regular basis, especially during extended periods of conflict. Scholarship has focused primarily on the experience of the hoplite after his return, with a special emphasis on his susceptibility to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but the moments of transition themselves have yet to be explored in detail. Taking each in turn, Owen Rees examines the transitions from two sides: from within the domestic environment as a member of an oikos, and from within the military environment as a member of the army. This analysis presents a new template for each and effectively maps the experience of the hoplite as he moves between his domestic and military duties. This allows us to reconstruct the effects of war more fully and to identify moments with the potential for a traumatic impact on the individual.

In this volume, tragedy in antiquity is examined synoptically, from its misty origins in archaic Greece, through its central position in the civic life of ancient Athens and its performances across the Greek-speaking world, to its new and very different instantiations in Republican and Imperial Roman contexts. Lively, original essays by eminent scholars trace the shifting dramatic forms, performance environments, and social meanings of tragedy as it was repeatedly reinvented. Tragedy was consistently seen as the most serious of all dramatic genres; these essays trace a sequence of different visions of what the most serious kind of dramatic story might be, and the most appropriate ways of telling those stories on stage. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual, and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.

Designed to take students from "Reading Greek" to wider reading.

Over the past decades there has been something of a revolution in the way we view classical drama generally and Euripides in particular. This book, updated in a second edition, reflects that revolution and aims to show how Euripides was continually reinventing himself. A truly Protean figure, he seems to set out on a new journey in each of his surviving 19 plays. Between general introduction and final summary, Morwood's chapters identify the themes that underlie the plays and concentrate, above all, on demonstrating the extraordinary diversity of this great dramatist. New to this edition, which is updated throughout, are further details on the individual plays and extra suggestions for background reading. The volume is a companion to The Plays of Sophocles and The Plays of Aeschylus (both by Alex Garvie) also available in second editions from Bloomsbury. A further essential guide to the themes and context of ancient Greek tragedy may be found in Laura Swift's new introductory volume, Greek Tragedy.

A reader for intermediate students of ancient Greek, introducing three of ancient Greece's most important authors, Euripides, Thucydides and Plato.