Examination of the foundation traditions of Magnesia on the Maeander, an Aeolian polis of western Anatolia, and the various Aeolian mythic traditions attached to this city located within Caria.

This chapter examines some of the specific methodological challenges of reading dramatic fragments intertextually. It also explores some broader aspects of intertextuality, literary culture, readership, orality, and memory in relation to Greek drama in general. It begins by noting the tendency of commentators and critics to use the formula ‘cf.’ when identifying any sort of similarity between fragmentary texts (or between fragmentary texts and extant ones). But ‘cf.’ on its own is inadequate as an interpretative strategy. This chapter investigates what types of textual relationship are actually being signified by ‘cf.’, and whether it is always possible to know for certain. It also asks to what extent the poor state of the evidence hampers our understanding of textual relations between fragmentary plays, and it raises the problem of how to discern which text is responding to which. These questions are addressed by looking in detail at a number of case studies from works by Aeschylus, Phrynichus, Glaucus, Ion, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes.

The investigation of Aeolian foundation myths continues in this chapter, with examination of traditions of the founding of Boeotian Thebes. Ancestral Indo-European tradition is again evident, as is an Anatolian stratum, one which foregrounds technological expertise of Asian origin.

Further investigation of sacralized warrior relationships, focusing on that of the epíkouroi ‘allies’ as they appear in the Linear B tablets and also in Homeric epic, where the term typically identifies Anatolian allies. In those few instances in the Iliad in which the epic poet uses epíkouros to characterize Greek alliances, the poet does so within a certain Aeolian framing – cataloguing Aeolian contingents participating in the siege of Troy and, inversely, describing the search for Achaean allies to offer warrior aid in an epic assault on a great Aeolian city.

Evocations of Classical Greece and Rome pervade Robert Lowell’s entire oeuvre. His fascination with Latin literature in particular shaped his own poetry. The density and involved syntax of Virgil and Propertius are echoed in the crabbed and tortured involutions of Lowell’s earlier poetry. His confessional verse is in part a response to Catullan frankness. His view of America as declining from republic into empire was colored by the historiography of Suetonius and Tacitus, in whose portraits of imperial tyrants Lowell found a frame for depicting the darker elements of his own character. He essayed many (usually very free) translations or versions of Greek and Roman poems, often with autobiographical inflections. A number of “original” poems can be shown to have originated as translations from Catullus, Virgil, Propertius, or Horace. In contrast with his almost obsessive engagement with Roman literature, Lowell’s engagement with Greek was less extensive, often mediated through later European literature, and (notably in his versions of Aeschylus) less vivid.

Chapter five demonstrates how the ambition to preserve the past in song and stone leads to the hope of securing a stable sense of the future in the poetry of Pindar and the tragedies of Aeschylus. Here we see how the mere image of writing becomes a vehicle in epinician and tragic poetry not only for imagining systems of memorialization and justice, but also for questioning the systems thus imagined.

This chapter discusses how translation and adaptation are key factors in the 'thick' cultural processes that reconnect past and present. Starting from the premise that translations are works in their own right, the argument shows how translation and adaptation of works from other times, places, and languages are themselves forms of reception and of cultural commentary. Special attention is given to situating mediations, displacements, and moments of heightened receptivity in language, performance, and hermeneutics. Three examples from the translation and performance history of Aeschylus' Oresteia are analysed in depth: the subtitled YouTube production of the Watchman's scene by Barefaced Greek; the collaboration in text, performance, and mask design between Tony Harrison and Jocelyn Herbert; and the symbiosis of translation and adaptation in Yael Farber's Molora. The concluding section of the discussion points to future directions in the relationship between translation/adaptation and the construction of cultural memories.

Modern Greece offers us a distinctive example of the reception of ancient drama that testifies to the complications introduced by questions of national identity, vested ideological interests, and deep political divisions. On the modern Greek stage, the performance of ancient Greek drama has been characterised by an ongoing struggle between tradition and innovation. The traditional approach privileges ‘authenticity’, as part of a wider intellectual project that seeks to invest modern Greece with the glamour and cultural capital of ancient Greece. This chapter investigates the tension between this inherently conservative approach to performing ancient drama and freer, more innovative responses, as exemplified by the work of one of the country’s premier theatrical companies, the National Theatre of Greece. My analysis focuses on four representative case studies, two from 2000 and two from 2015–16, as a representative sample from the opposite ends of the tradition vs. innovation spectrum.

I argue in Chapter 4 that Wole Soyinka’s essentially dramatic gifts are geared more towards anti-mimeticism than towards any form of naturalistic representation and that when staging character and setting in his anti-mimetic plays, he elects a dramatic medium that allows their largely aesthetic-political messages to be communicated through cryptic and often elusive ritual meanings. Thus, in The Road, Professor illustrates a sense of edginess through the amplifying delirium that he experiences in attempting to merge Yorùbá and Christian epistemologies in pursuit of the Word. While Death and the King’s Horseman presents a minute interpretation of the moving parts involved in an error of judgment, reversal of fortune, and anagnorisis that would have been much appreciated by Aristotle. The latter play also illustrates several elements reminiscent of the Greeks, such as a strong degree of disputatiousness, a carefully choreographed chorus-function, and an idea of the pharmakos that aligns sacrifice directly with the welfare of the polis.

Chapter Two is the first of four chapters on Athenian drama, and it takes as its focal point Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. In this chapter, I observe that the representation of the maiden Io as a wild and erratic dancer engages with images of female choreia and the precarious position of the outstanding maiden soloist that originate in Archaic poetry but develop a special force within Athenian tragedy. Building on arguments developed in Chapter One, I explore how the image of the maiden chorus creates space for the female soloist to relate positively to her choral group, and then demonstrate that Io disrupts that paradigm by appearing utterly unmoored from any sense of chorality. I argue that Io embodies the play’s vision of mortal life and offers an image of resistance to the authority of Zeus distinct from the static suffering of Prometheus himself – a resistance that is grounded in the twin forces of mobility and maternity.

This chapter explores Wagner’s use of Greek myth as a framework for his operatic reform and as the basis for key aspects of plot and character in the Ring cycle. Providing an overview of the composer’s lifelong fascination with the Greeks, it highlights Wagner’s aim of creating a new form of “music drama” that would capture the spirit of ancient Greek tragedy while constituting its rebirth in a modern Germanic guise. It further calls attention to parallels between the Ring and elements of Greek tragedy but shifts the customary focus away from Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Prometheus trilogy toward the Oedipus myth and specifically the character of Antigone, who bears several similarities to Brünnhilde. Wagner’s apparent use of Antigone as a model for Brünnhilde reflects his understanding of both figures as redemptive agents who, through a self-effacing and thoroughly human kind of love, enact a symbolic destruction of the state and thereby point the way toward a more utopian future characterized by a downfall of the existing world order along with a return of the cultural and artistic significance of myth.

Woolf calls Hardy “the greatest tragic writer among English novelists,” and I argue that she shares his tragic sense. Both a “Dionysiac” view of time as unceasing flux (the view held by Friedrich Nietzsche, Jane Ellen Harrison, and Henri Bergson) and a mathematical view of time as abstract continuum (the view held by Bertrand Russell) make for tragedy in Woolf’s fiction. Her novels are devoid of the ritual and mythic consolations so often misattributed to ancient drama. Woolf’s Dionysiac time is severed from Dionysiac rituals’ cyclical renewals. Woolf’s mathematical time is severed from redemptive myth. Like Darwin, Woolf makes tragic chance inseparable from the theater of life. Woolf depicts the nonteleological, nonanthropocentric change and persistence of nonhuman nature, as well as the inhuman permanence of Russell’s “universals.” To the Lighthouse and The Waves set the “still space” of characters’ most cherished moments against “the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars.” Woolf’s fiction accentuates time’s passing and models characters’ Sisyphean resistance to it.

This chapter addresses the extensive fragment attributed to Aeschylus’ Carians/Europa, in which the speaker Europa describes her rape by Zeus, the births of her three children, and her fear for the safety of her son Sarpedon; this speech allows the audience ‘to contemplate the sufferings of Europa over a woman’s full lifecycle, culminating in her role as aged mother awaiting her only surviving son’s return’. Considering issues of lexicon and dramatic technique, the chapter supports a date for the play in the 420s, noting with sympathy Martin West’s argument this play’s author was Aeschylus’ son Euphorion.

The influence of the extant plays has been so immense and far-reaching that it is easy to forget that other tragic versions of these characters existed. This is true above all in the case of Euripides’ Medea, whose terrible, tortured act of infanticide is to many modern readers and audiences the single defining aspect of her tragic characterisation. The final chapter destabilises this preconception by drawing together evidence for the full range of tragic Medeas, including a play in which she is not guilty of the act that has come to define her, the killing of her own children. Wright recovers a more accurate picture of Medea on the tragic stage, and suggests that what ‘made Medea Medea’ for the ancient audiences was not her infanticide, but rather the sheer range and malleability of stories in which she featured. This survey offers an important corrective to widespread conceptions of this iconic figure, and powerfully demonstrates how the legacy of a single surviving version has distorted our understanding of the kinds of female characters with which ancient tragic audiences would have been familiar.