GreekTragedy

(An Evolving Web Tool)

(Classical Humanities 222, Spring 1999 Bucknell University, W. A. Johnson)

Syllabus & Schedule of Assignments || Class Notes

Summaries || Tests || Performance || Papers || Maps || External Links of Interest
 

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Syllabus and Schedule of Assignments: Details on course requirements, along with a week by week overview of topics and assignments

Class Notes: Lecture notes, arranged more or less chronologically

PRELIMINARIES

Opening ceremonies

• Learning to read Greek Tragedy


The Context of Ancient Theater, part 1

• Quick background to Classical Athens
• Ancient Theater: Scene and Production

SOPHOCLES, The Theban Plays

Oedipus the King, by Sophocles

• Background & Preliminaries
• Word play and the poetry of paradox
• The functions of the Chorus
• Oedipus versus Apollo: human versus divine intelligence
• Why must Oedipus suffer so much?

 
Antigone, by Sophocles
• Background & Preliminaries
• Passages exemplary to two central questions of the play
• Question one: who's right, who's wrong, who's more right, who's more wrong
• public versus private, state versus family, king's rights versus inalienable rights
• Question two: who's male, who's female; what is maleness, what is femaleness; and what does this have to do with the main issues of the play?
• What is it that the play seems to be trying to get you to think through?

 
Oedipus at Colonus, by Sophocles
• Background & Preliminaries
• The State
• Myth and society


AESCHYLUS

The Oresteia, by Aeschylus
 

Agamemnon
• Background & Preliminaries
• The "cinematic" function of poetry in drama
• Poetry, drama, and the construction of meaning

 
Libation Bearers (Choephoroi)
• Background & Preliminaries
• The Token Scene: why so emphatic?
• The Great Tableau: revisited
• Apollo
• Serpents and Butchers

 
Eumenides
• Background & Preliminaries
• The Gods come to the Stage: Fantasy or Reality?
• The Trial: the odd case of Apollo's speech in the Eumenides
• The Ending: a Resolution?

 
The Context of Ancient Theater, part 2
• Agonistic: A Competition
• The Festival Setting: The City Dionysia


The Prometheus Bound, by Aeschylus (probably)

• Background and Preliminaries
• The Extraordinary Staging of the Prometheus Bound
• Aeschylus versus Sophocles: the idea of the hero in Sophocles, the interest in "Theodicy" in Aeschylus
• Two critical questions posed by the play:
•     (1) why is Prometheus transformed into an intellectual and first friend of mankind, why is intellectuality linked so strongly with humanness?
•     (2) as for Zeus, how does raw divine power become a sense of divinely ordered justice and creative harmony in the cosmos?


Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides Compared

The Electra plays
 

    For Libation Bearers, by Aeschylus see above

    Electra, by Sophocles

• Background and Preliminaries
• Aeschylus and Sophocles compared: the construction of a Sophoclean Heroine
• The Sophoclean heroine: Electra and Antigone compared


    Electra, by Euripides

• Euripides, always different
• The Tokens: a comparison of how Orestes is recognized in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
• It's All about Sex


SOPHOCLES (revisited)

The Ajax, by Sophocles

• Background and Preliminaries
• The Construction of the Sophoclean Hero (again!)
• The heroic code of behavior: Do Well to your Friends, Do Ill to your Enemies
• Ajax's central speech: A speech of recantation or of deception?
• Ajax versus Odysseus: independent hero & man of action versus community hero & man of persuasion


The Philoctetes, by Sophocles

• Background and Preliminaries
• Logos (words, argument) versus Ergon (deed) : Odysseus versus Achilles/Neoptolemus
• The Oracle: the (divine?) nature of persuasion & deception
• Philoctetes: de-cultured man, innocent sufferer


EURIPIDES

Iphigenia at Aulis, by Euripides

• Background and Preliminaries
• The contemporary military situation
• The Perversion of the Norm: quintessentially Euripidean


Hippolytus, by Euripides

• Background and Preliminaries
• Hippolytus: a man with a veritable hubris of virginity (!)
• What is the moral basis for action for each of the characters in the play?
• Euripides and belief in the gods


Cyclops, by Euripides

• Background: Satyrs and the Satyr Play
• The Cyclops as an example of the Satyr Play
• The Cyclops as background to Euripides' Alcestis

 
Alcestis, by Euripides
• Background & Preliminaries
• Elements of the "satyr play" in the Alcestis
• Elements of the "fairy tale" in the Alcestis
• Tragedy or tragi-comedy?
• How to read Admetus: Admetus and Pheres
• How to read Alcestis: the "resolution" of the play


Medea, by Euripides

• Background and Preliminaries
• Mythic background
• Ancient variants to the tale
• A Dream of Passion (Jules Dassin, 1978)
• Medea as a woman in defiance of the male view
• Medea as a process of inversion: the two AGONs


Orestes, by Euripides

• Background and Preliminaries
• The "Baroque" in Euripides: extreme variety in tone, in audience response
• The strange opening scene: the figure of Helen
• The opening sequence: note the variety of tone, emotion, lyricism
• The strange figure of Orestes
• The bizarre figure of the Phrygian messenger
• Orestes as an anti-Eumenides
• Ending: "an apparent resolution which in fact resolves nothing"


Bacchae, by Euripides

• Background and Preliminaries
• Images of Dionysus
• Who is this strange god Dionysus?
• Dionysus, the God IN US: enthousiasmos, ekstasis; sparagmos, homophagia
• Euripides as Theater of the Absurd, revisited
• Euripides as Atheist, revisited

 
THEORIES OF TRAGEDY

Plato and Aristotle

• Background
• Question: The Nature of Tragedy
• Plato, Poetry, and Tragedy: Plato's Republic
• Aristotle on Tragedy: the Poetics


Nietzsche

• Background
• The Birth of Tragedy: Marriage of the Apollonian and the Dionysiac


Some Final Thoughts

• Definition: what is "tragedy"
• Question: why is pathos pleasurable when we see it on stage?


Coda: Frogs, by Aristophanes

Summaries: structural summaries of the plays, along with other aids, for study & review

AESCHYLUS

            Agamemnon

            Libation Bearers (Choephoroi)

            Eumenides

            Prometheus Bound

SOPHOCLES

            Oedipus the King

            Antigone

            Oedipus at Colonus

            Electra

            Ajax

            Philoctetes

EURIPIDES

            Electra (not available)

            Iphigenia at Aulis (not available)

            Hippolytus

            Cyclops

            Alcestis

            Medea

            Orestes

            Bacchae

Tests: Description of format, and some sample questions

Sample Test
 
• first half-hour test: Friday, January 29: covering Oedipus the King, Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus

 
• second half-hour test: Monday, February 22: covering the Oresteia, Prometheus Bound, Electras (both!), and the festival context of the ancient theater
• Some possible answers to the questions on the second half-hour test (all of which have been posted to the web pages all along)
1. identifications: at the end of the class notes for each play is listed all the identifications that you need to know for the tests
2. festival context of ancient theater
3. Apollo's speech in Aeschylus' Eumenides
4. Token scene in Euripides' Electra, compared to the other token scenes

 
• third half-hour test: Monday, March 29: covering the Ajax, Philoctetes, Iphigenia at Aulis, Hippolytus, Cyclops, Alcestis, Medea; also Cacoyannis' Iphigenia, Jules Dassin's Dream of Passion

 
• fourth test, 15 minutes only: Wednesday, April 21, covering Orestes, Bacchae, theories of tragedy

Performance Guidelines: some helpful hints as you design the scene you'll enter into our "performance competition"

Papers:
 

Further Reading in Greek Tragedy: some bibliographical suggestions

Short paper #1 (due noon on Thursday, February 11)

Short paper #2 (due noon on Tuesday, March 2) (due in class on Monday, March 22)

Final paper (prospectus due Monday, April 26; paper due Monday, May 3)

Maps

The Eastern Mediterranean & Mesopotamia

Homeric Geography

Mediterranean Basin

Perseus Project Atlas

External Links of Interest: some useful links from around the world for the study of antiquity in general, and epic in particular

Perseus links (Perseus is a large-scale database with many texts and images relating to ancient Greece and Rome)

• Search for an English word in Aeschylus (using Perseus)
• Search for an English word in Sophocles (using Perseus)
• Search for an English word in Euripides (using Perseus)

• Other links of interest from Perseus

• Link to Perseus home page (Bucknell now has access to its 13,000+ images):
• Link to Vases Browser
• Link to Primary Text Index: English Translations
• Link to Encyclopedia
• Link to Atlas
• Link to Look-Up Tool (data from art and archaeology catalogs, encyclopedia, browser, English index, and English-Greek word search in a simple standard interface)

Other External Links from around the world

• Didaskalia: A web site devoted to ancient theater (images and some text from this was adapted to make the syllabus) [UC Berkeley]

• Diotima: Materials for the study of Women and Gender in the Ancient World
• Timeline of Greek History and Literature (from the University of Victoria)