The culture of classical Greece was a performance culture. It valorised competitive public display across a vast range of social institutions and spheres of behaviour. The gymnasium with its competitions in manliness, the symposium with its performances of songs and speeches, and the theatre become - with the spreading of Greek culture throughout the Mediterranean world in the wake of Alexander the Great - the key signs of Greekness itself. The dominant culture of Athens in the fifth century is particularly influential in the development of these institutions, and can be said to have invented the theatre. Yet in this, as in most respects, Athens is not a typical Greek city. For the unique institutions of Athenian democracy constitute a special type of performance culture. The lawcourts and the Assembly are the major political institutions of democracy, the city's major sites of conflict and debate, its citizens' major route to positions of power. Both lawcourts and Assembly involve large citizen audiences, public performance by speakers, and voting to achieve a decision and a result. Democracy made public debate, collective decision-making and the shared duties of participatory citizenship central elements of its political practice. To be in an audience was not just a thread in the city's social fabric, it was a fundamental political act. The historian Thucydides has Cleon, a leading politician of the fifth century, refer dismissively to the Athenians as theātai tōn logōn, 'spectators of speeches' (Thuc. 3.38); Athenian political ideology proudly highlighted democracy's special commitment to putting things es meson, 'in the public domain to be contested'. A discussion of the audience of Greek tragedy must take as its frame not modern theatrical experience but both the pervasiveness of the values of performance in Greek culture and in particular the special context of democracy and its institutions, where to be in an audience is above all to play the role of democratic citizen.

A history of the influence of Greek tragedy on later Western literature and thought, if it could be written at all, would be not only enormously long but also extremely complicated. Given the cultural prestige of tragedy, however, it is striking how rarely the plays themselves were brought to the stage until relatively recent times. The extraordinary beginning made with the production of Sophocles' Oedipus the King at Vicenza in 1585 remained a more or less isolated event until the end of the eighteenth century, and indeed it is only in the last few decades that productions of Greek tragedy have become common occurrences (see Ch. 11). What did happen, and on a large scale, was the adaptation of tragic plots to create a new corpus of dramatic texts, more often than not the product of 'contamination' with Senecan tragedy, and drawing on historical and mythological lore from non-tragic sources as well as current religious, philosophical, and political ideas.

This chapter confronts some of the intellectual and aesthetic issues involved in the process of coming to terms with Greek tragedy over the last five centuries. I limit myself largely to plays and operas (and, in the final paragraphs, films and television) that are clearly based on extant Greek originals, not because these plays are necessarily of the highest literary or cultural importance in and of themselves (though no doubt a number are), but because they suggest in obvious ways the challenge that adapters from the Renaissance onwards faced in assimilating a particularly prestigious but in many ways intractable heritage.

In retrospect, the career of Virgil seems to trace out an inevitable progression. Working within a tradition which defined poetry composed in dactylic hexameter verse as epos (connoting 'word' or 'utterance'), the poet of the Eclogues, through the figure of the shepherd-singer Tityrus, recalls how his earliest poetic production involved a rejection of martial themes (reges et proelia, 'kings and battles', Eel. 6.3) in favour of a pastoral mode, avowedly lowly and humble (cf. EcL 4.1-2), which looked back to the 'Syracusan verse' of Theocritus (EcL 6.1-2). Taking leave of this mode at the end of the final poem of the collection, the shepherd-singer, in his characteristic pose recumbent in the shade of a tree, announces his intention to rise (surgamus, EcL 10.75), presaging the composition of the Hesiodic Georgics. He thereby attributes to that poem a more elevated stylistic level, reiterates a hierarchy within the received types of epos, and begins to map an upward trajectory through those types on to the poet's life-cycle. In the opening lines of the Third Georgic, a further move upwards is envisaged (G. 3.8-9):

One way or another, sexuality has always been a topic of interest to Virgil's readers. In his life of the poet, Suetonius reports that Virgil inclined toward the love of boys and that he addressed a favourite named Alexander under the name 'Alexis' in the Second Eclogue; Martial pretends to believe that it was this rosy-lipped young slave who excited the poet to compose his Aeneid (Mart. 8.5.11-20). It is only in the past two decades, however, that scholarly interest has begun to focus on the topic of 'sexuality and gender' in antiquity. The 'and' here covers a whole range of questions - for example, how is sexual difference represented in antiquity, how is it implicated with other kinds of socially constructed differences, is 'sexuality' a discrete concept or is it still awaiting its 'invention'? I will begin this essay by surveying Virgil's Eclogues (with side-glances at the Aeneid) to see what light they can shed on some of these issues. I will then turn to my central project, which is to sketch some of the ways sexual and gender differences help to articulate Virgil's poetry.

Greek tragedy has enjoyed a vigorous afterlife on the modern stage both in the original Greek and in translation. Yet whilst the production history of, say, Shakespeare has long been the subject of academic inquiry, it is only very recently that classical scholars have appreciated both the value and the importance of charting the fortunes of Greek drama in the modern period. It is not simply that classicists need to be aware of the extent to which their own area of study has shaped major dramatic trends in Europe from at least the 1880s onwards. It is not even that a general lack of interest in such matters has meant that classical scholars have remained unaware of the (by no means insignificant) fact that Sophocles' Oedipus the King was banned from the professional stage in Britain until 1910. What a survey of modern productions of Greek plays does, above all, is provide us with a salutary reminder that contemporary investigations into Greek drama are no less time-bound than those of previous periods. Indeed, every encounter with artworks of the past is really an exploration of current concerns and needs; and nowhere is this better illustrated than through a study of the performance histories of Greek tragedies.

Yet the tendency of classical scholarship to ignore the fortunes of Greek tragedy on the modern stage is somewhat surprising. For the production histories of these plays reveal that close ties have, in fact, existed between the professional theatre and the world of scholarship since at least the nineteenth century. The row that followed Nietzsche's capitulation to Wagner and Bayreuth at the end of the nineteenth century may well be notorious (cf. Ch. 12, pp. 324-5), but it is the exceptional nature of the episode that has guaranteed its notoriety.

In Plato's Republic, when Socrates is describing the imperviousness to fear of the Guardians of his new Republic, he catches himself using rather grand metaphorical terms, and he immediately rebukes himself for speaking tragikos, 'tragically', 'like a tragic character' (4i3b4). Demosthenes, the great orator, dismisses the rhetoric of Aeschines, his opponent, as bombast with the verb tragoidein, 'to play in a tragedy' (which is also a dig at his former career as an actor) (18.13; 19.189). The comic playwright Aristophanes, who repeatedly parodies the language of tragedy, has a character in his play Peace wonder why the hero didn't fly on Pegasus rather than a dung-beetle, and thus appear tragikoteros, 'more tragic', 'more like a tragic hero' (136). Already, in the classical polis, 'the tragic' has become synonymous with a certain grandeur of expression, high-flown periphrasis and even heroic posturing. Tragedy is - and was perceived to be - made up of a particular register of language: there is a style and vocabulary proper to the genre. So how is the language of tragedy to be characterised? There are several types of answer that can be given to this question, that take us far beyond generalisations about the grand and the heroic. What is more, the tragic texts themselves are deeply concerned with how language is (to be) used. This chapter will explore the questions of tragic language.

The first type of answer that can be developed is a formal one. One basic articulation of tragedy is the difference between scenes and choral odes. The scenes are conventionally divided into rhēseis and stichomythia. A rhēseis (plural rhēseis) is a set speech of varying length (rarely more than a hundred lines) in which a figure offers an exposition of his or her position, or a description of an event, or a reflection on events.

The Virgilian Vitae impose on the poet's life a strong pattern of linear development, a teleology which constructs the Aeneid as the simultaneous closure - ideological and narrative - of Virgil's life and his writings. Within this pattern, which distinguishes Virgil from his contemporaries and makes of him a paradigm for his successors, the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid become part of one text, which we might call 'the Book of Virgil', or (referring to the development from the relatively modest beginning in the short Eclogues to the final project of the Aeneid) 'the poetic career'. In the Middle Ages for instance, the biographical sequence found in the Vitae, which links the heroic epic with its bucolic and didactic predecessors, is mapped onto a hierarchy not only of literary genres but also of social rank: the Rota Virgilii (the 'Wheel of Virgil'). Here, the triadic career is pictured in the form of concentric circles, a quasi-cosmic image, in which the texts of Virgil come to stand for all possible forms of human life and expression. The notion of the career, a triadic biography to match the triadic oeuvre, may also be found in the well-known epitaph quoted by Donatus:

Since antiquity Virgil the epicist has also been viewed as Virgil the tragedian; Martial describes him simply as Maro cothurnatus, 'Virgil in buskins' (5.5.8, 7.63.5). The task of collecting the numerous parallels between the Aeneid and tragedies both Attic and Roman was well under way by the time of the late-antique commentators Servius and Macrobius. But why should the poet who set out to write the definitive Roman epic include so many elements from the distinct (if historically related) genre of tragedy?

A recent study shows the inseparability of formal study of tragic sources for the Aeneid from wider questions of interpretation. Oliver Lyne exploits an allusion to the Sophoclean Ajax in the characterisation of Aeneas to reinforce a prevalent modern reading of the Aeneid as a 'tragic' (with a small 't') poem: 'a further [non-epic] voice naggingly insinuates a quite different message', a message that makes of the poem a pessimistic, even subversive and anti-Augustan epic. Here the opposition of 'epic' and 'tragic' implies a conflict between the Aeneid's function as a public panegyric of Roman history and the valuation to be given to the private experience of loss and grief.

Despite the innumerable labours of many critics, Virgil's Georgics remains one of the most fundamentally intractable works of ancient literature. In recent years, most interpreters have agreed that the poem does not really tell us about farming but about ourselves and our world: 'didacticism about agriculture proves metaphor for didacticism about man'. While this consensus may result in part from a modern distaste for and unfamiliarity with agriculture, it has yielded a diversity of compelling interpretations that cannot be wholly explained by changing cultural needs. If we are to understand more fully what this poem does, we need to abandon the interpretive paradigm that seeks some authoritative discursive unity without taking refuge in mere relativism (quot homines, tot sententiae). I would like to argue that the diversity of compelling interpretations is part of the Georgics' larger value and meaning.

We do not need to choose between a poem about dirt and dung and a poem about metaphysics, because this poem addresses the great abstracts (knowledge, history, power, psychology, ethics, art, death) in the way our lives do: by 'contact' with things, by fictions and interpretations, by witty and elegant postures, and ultimately by the failure of projects and systems. The poem captures a double movement: particulars serve as allegories of human problems and values, while allegories are inhabited by things with their particular tasks, objects, and (sometimes colliding) perspectives.

Scrutiny of character has long been a concern of conventional literary criticism. As a result, the notion of character has come to be ignored or bypassed by critics and theorists who do not want to be conventional. They see the study of characterisation as the haven of connoisseurs. However, characterisation involves a large set of questions which bear on fundamental issues of textual interpretation. The way we attempt to answer common questions about Virgil's characters will determine - or be determined by - the way we read Virgil's corpus in general.

For instance, a preoccupation with characters as 'types' (e.g. as epic or tragic figures) is often indicative of a generic reading of Virgil's poetry. Alternatively, to regard Virgilian characters as 'individuals' is to presuppose that his poems function as forms of representation: simply postulating the 'development' of a character like Aeneas involves an essentialised notion of a person which the Aeneid would then be supposed to portray. Again, appreciation of Virgil's construction of character could equally require a conception of his poems as forms of expression. In characterising Dido or anyone else, the poet is simultaneously characterising or expressing himself. Such a view of character could entail a type of rhetorical criticism of Virgil's poetry.