Exploration of the mythic concept of Aia, region of the rising sun, and its Hurrian and Luvo-Hittite background, its introduction to European Mycenaean Greeks by the Ur-Aeolians (Ahhiyawans) of Anatolia, and Aeolian Argonautic elaborations.

This chapter locates Wagner’s response to Aeschylus in the Ring in the context of the three great theatrical responses to Greek tragedy which preceded his; Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris, Schiller’s Die Braut von Messina, and Grillparzer’s Medea. The relationship of human beings to fate, and the power of the curse, are explored as themes which all four works have in common.

Ecphrasis, as we saw in Chapter 4, is a characteristic feature of the enargeia of epic, but there is one case in which an expected ecphrasis is conspicuous for its absence. The Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes tells the myth of Jason, Medea, and the Argonauts, already encountered in Chapter 2. The Golden Fleece, one of the most famous supernatural objects in all mythology, calls for a detailed description, but Apollonius does not provide one. Films that retell the myth must, however, show it. Hence the concept of neo-mythologism, a useful term coined by director Vittorio Cottafavi: an original work based on myth must be changed for its visual adaptation. The chapter reviews and interprets the different appearances of the Golden Fleece in romantic adventure films (Hercules, The Giants of Thessaly, Jason and the Argonauts), art-house cinema (Medea, The Golden Thing), Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation, and computer-generated images.

After a brief overview of Heidegger’s motivations and interest in engaging Greek tragedy understood as a downgoing in the realm of shadows, this chapter addresses three shadow figures that mark Greek tragedy as an experience of the uncanny – Oedipus, Antigone, and Medea. Whereas Heidegger addresses the first two figures at length, there is no mention of Medea in his works. By focusing on the notion of passion for being (originally advanced by Heidegger’s reading of Oedipus), this chapter explores relations of homeliness and unhomeliness, internal and external enmity, family and polis, citizen and foreigner/stranger, love and resistance, trust and betrayal of trust in Heidegger’s reading of tragedy. Ultimately, the chapter points to Medea’s (absent) character as a needed figure to maintain Heidegger’s relation to tragedy open to the possibility of a politically and existentially non-totalizing way of thinking aligned with Heidegger’s initial ambitions when returning to Greek tragedy as a theme for philosophy.

Similes in Apollonius’ Argonautica tell two contrasting tales. On the one hand, humans with skilled expertise can exert an exhilarating amount of control over the world around them. The power of knowledge reflects the contemporary culture of Hellenistic Alexandria where new forms of knowledge were sprouting up everywhere. But such skills are largely useless for women, and they fail in the face of human passions. While characters in the simile world of the Argonautica use strategy to overcome danger in a way that is largely out of reach in the Homeric simile world, similes also highlight the intractable power of erotic desire as powerful and deadly as the battlefield of the Iliad. The Argonautica represents the first post-Homeric chapter in the story of epic similes. Simile structures take on a range and variety that previously was found only in the content of the similes. These new forms bring forward simile features that are peripheral in Homeric to reshape the epic genre in ways that reflect the ideas of the Hellenistic period. At moments of powerful emotion in the Argonautica, similes weave “erudition” and “emotion” inextricably together.

Chapter 3 focusses on the temple of Hera at Foce del Sele north of the Greek colony of Poseidonia-Paestum in southern Italy. New archaeometric analysis on the metopes from the Hera sanctuary near the mouth of the river Sele has made it possible to propose a new reconstruction of the oldest Hera temple on the site, which belongs to the first generation of Doric stone temples. The study of the architectural elements confirms the decorative nature of the first Doric friezes. Moreover, by analyzing the mythological subjects on the frieze and comparing them with other early Doric temples in Selinous, Delphi, and Athens, it can be shown that the tendency to choose Panhellenic themes over local traditions is a general feature of early Doric temples. Because of the detachment of the imagery from local traditions, the Doric temple is described as a “non-place” according to the definition of the French anthropologist Marc Augé. Conceiving temples as standardized “non-places” that could be set up in any given local environment was crucial to the agendas of Greek elites, who needed to reorganize agricultural and urban landscapes to regulate population pressure and social tensions – both in the colonies and in homeland Greece.

Chapter 4 discusses autonomy (or its lack) as a key element in characters’ fictional ontology. It divides the topic into three themes - freedom, revenge, and suicide - each of which plays a vital role in Seneca’s dual concept of personal and fictional independence. The first section addresses Stoic isolationism as an assertion of individual sovereignty and demonstrates that this trait is shared by Seneca’s sapiens and tragic characters alike. The second section examines revenge as, simultaneously, an amplification and limitation of characters’ autonomy. Finally, the chapter considers Senecan suicide as an expression of free agency in the midst of misfortune, charting its importance across both the prose and the dramatic works.

This chapter explores what we mean by ‘adaptation’ when discussing classic Greek tragedy in performance and to what extent terms such as translation, version, (re)writing, (re)imagining, etc. can or indeed should be distinguished from one another. Examining the nomenclature attached to four different recent theatrical adaptations of classic Greek tragedy, namely Medea, Phaedra, Iphigenia, and The Persians, this chapter establishes that the differentiation between adaptation and related modalities such as rewriting, translation, and version, is intrinsically linked to processes of reception. Elucidating the difficulty of establishing boundaries between original writing and rewriting, or indeed adaptation for performance, this chapter takes the position that the act of (re)writing asserts the validity of an established dramatic text; it confirms that a text belongs to the category of classic drama. At the same time, it promises an often radical (re)investigation of its premises.

This chapter continues the theme of dissemination by investigating two Pompeian wall paintings of Medea – one from the House of Jason and the other from the House of the Dioscuri – that show her contemplating the murder of her children. Building on the previous chapter, the argument now turns to the literal and figurative domestication of this ultimate monstrosity. By analyzing these paintings in conjunction with Ovid’s Heroides 12 (Medea’s epistle to Jason), we see how these images of Medea in a domestic setting invite viewers to (re)create the heroine’s own inner struggle – a process that would have rendered her sympathetic in the eyes of ancient spectators attuned to the figure of an abandoned elegiac lover. Whereas the lovers discussed in the previous chapters primarily evince tenderness through togetherness, Medea in her isolation becomes sympathetic through Jason’s conspicuous absence, which drives her to her horrific deed. That absence, of course, is also the necessary conceit of Ovid’s epistolary elegiac fictions. Far from the haughty, vengeful goddess of Euripidean tragedy, Medea in the poetry and painting of first-century Rome displays tender characteristics that resonate with early Imperial notions of marriage and domesticity.

Senecan tragedy is also imperial in that it often locates its characters in relation to the disorientation of global empire. Hercules Furens places its hero’s violent madness at the very moment of world conquest, for instance, and Medea, which features a very famous choral ode about how sea-voyaging rewrites the world, is about the global reach of Roman ambition and desire. Several of Seneca’s philosophical writings (and especially his De Consolatione ad Helviam) likewise examine the tension between stoic self-command and the expansive restlessness of imperial desire. This chapter reads Titus Andronicus as a Senecan exploration of a late-imperial Roman moment in which the Roman scepter commands the whole world and in which racially heterogeneous people and competing modes of imaging civic life are all uneasily incorporated at once. It understands Senecan tragedy as a literary resource for imagining the resulting disorientation. The last section of the chapter examines Titus together with George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, and argues that Senecan tragedy provides a model of psychological interiority that is paired with blackface to create the emergent stage stereotype of the wicked Moor.

Senecan tragedy is also imperial in that it often locates its characters in relation to the disorientation of global empire. Hercules Furens places its hero’s violent madness at the very moment of world conquest, for instance, and Medea, which features a very famous choral ode about how sea-voyaging rewrites the world, is about the global reach of Roman ambition and desire. Several of Seneca’s philosophical writings (and especially his De Consolatione ad Helviam) likewise examine the tension between stoic self-command and the expansive restlessness of imperial desire. This chapter reads Titus Andronicus as a Senecan exploration of a late-imperial Roman moment in which the Roman scepter commands the whole world and in which racially heterogeneous people and competing modes of imaging civic life are all uneasily incorporated at once. It understands Senecan tragedy as a literary resource for imagining the resulting disorientation. The last section of the chapter examines Titus together with George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, and argues that Senecan tragedy provides a model of psychological interiority that is paired with blackface to create the emergent stage stereotype of the wicked Moor.

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.

The idea of being overwhelmed by musical and visual effects is a recurrent theme in the critical reception of Cherubini’s three Parisian operas of the 1790s. The word ‘sublime’ is frequently employed, and in ways that suggest something more specific than a critical shorthand for excellence: a quality rooted in revolutionary experience. In Médée, it was the talents of the singer Julie-Angelique Scio in the title role that most attracted the term: the vengeful heroine murders her children and leaps into the flames that are consuming the palace. When Médée premiered in 1797, the nation was still recovering from the trauma of the Terror following the fall of Maximilien Robespierre in July 1794: Parisians of all political stripes were coming to terms with this extended period of violence and vengeance. The power and vulnerability apparently conveyed by Scio in the role can be understood as allowing spectators to experience Médée’s sublimation of her fury as the sublimation of their own unresolved emotions following the Terror.

This chapeter offers close readings of two complex embedded speeches in order to show the sophisticated manipulation of voice to play with time, space, and identity.

Chapter 4 explores corpse abuse in both the Hellenistic and Flavian Argonautica poems, though the emphasis falls on Valerius’ epic. The treatment of the dead comes to the fore particularly in the intestine violence in Valerius’ depiction of the Lemnian massacre in VF 2 and in the Colchian war between the brothers Perses and Aeetes in book 6. In each case the conflict is tinged with the stain of Lucanesque civil war, culminating in a degeneration of violence with abuses aimed at the living and the dead. Valerius’ most extensive engagement with the theme comes during the Argonauts’ confrontation with king Amycus, whose rustic cave is a horror-show of corporal savagery and sadism. The major scene of corpse abuse in Apollonius’ Argonautica occurs when Jason murders Medea’s brother Absyrtus and ritually truncates his corpse. Though this particular mythic scene does not appear in Valerius’ epic, the influence of Apollonius’ poem sends clear shockwaves through the Flavian epic. While Valerius’ poem shows evidence of Apollonian and Lucanian influence in the handling of post mortem violence, it pushes back upon these more visceral expositions by reviving Virgilian distancing effects.