This chapter treats Pound’s collaboration with Eliot from 1917 into the late 1930s from the perspective of their engagement with Greek. It focuses on the interconnection between drama (whether Japanese Noh or Greek tragedy) and the ambition of the long poem; consistent with their turn to formal verse in 1917, the two poets view theater through a similarly formalist lens. The author traces Pound and Eliot’s joint obsession with Aeschylus’s Agamemnon through an examination of their essays – especially Pound’s multi-part “Hellenist Series” (1918–19) and his writings on Jean Cocteau – private correspondence, and select poetic work and translations (e.g., Pound’s unpublished “Opening for Agamemnon,” Eliot’s “Sweeney among the Nightingales”). Whereas Eliot “declines the gambit, shows fatigue” and chooses to treat Aeschylus from a distance, Pound is both more ambivalent about Aeschylus’s value and more in thrall to elements of his poetic technique and language. Though Pound and Eliot’s abortive Greek projects would lie dormant for some years, the chapter examines the attempted rekindling of their Greek collaboration in the mid-1930s, which provides the transition between the early texts discussed in this chapter and their mature work.

According to Aristotle, character or ethos in tragedy is ’that which reveals what the moral choice is like’. This kind of ethos is what this book explores in Sophocles, by examining five tragedies in which moral choice is central to the course of the drama. These choices are made within the context of traditional Greek morality, which, amongst other things, expected one to help one’s friends and harm one’s enemies. Closely allied to these principles is the conception of justice as retaliation. This nexus of principles provides a pervasive ethical background to most of Greek literature and is of special significance for tragedy.

In this chapter, I discuss the voice of the comic poet in the city and, specifically, Aristophanes. Two interrelated questions provide a focus: how does the comic poet ’speak out’ before the city? What is the role of parodic quotation in Old Comedy, the voice within the voice (’speaking out’)? I begin with some general remarks about the role of poetry in the fifth- and fourth-century Athenian democratic polis, that leads into a discussion of the institution of Old Comedy in the light of modem treatments of carnival and the idea of ’ritual reversal’. The second part of the chapter – focused on the Acharnians and the Frogs – looks first at the comic poet ’speaking out’ to the city through the parabasis in particular, and second at how the poet uses other voices, especially the voice of tragedy, in parodic quotation.

Greek popular thought is pervaded by the assumption that one should help one’s friends and harm one’s enemies. These fundamental principles surface continually from Homer onwards and survive well into the Roman period, and indeed to the present day, especially in international relations. They are firmly based on observation of human nature, which yields the conclusion that most human beings do in fact desire to help their friends and harm their enemies, and derive satisfaction from such behaviour. Thus Xenophon’s Socrates can count benefiting friends and defeating enemies as one of the things which bring the ’greatest pleasures’.

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.

In Euripides’ Phoenician Women, produced around 410 BCE, actor’s lyric takes on a role of unprecedented importance in the shaping of plot and in the development of character, counterposed to and to some extent replacing choral lyric. Antigone, Jocasta, and Oedipus – all singing characters – are inextricably bound up in the ruin of their house. Three of the play’s four scenes of actor’s lyric feature Antigone; through song Euripides traces her progression from a sheltered maiden to a distraught mourner and finally to a mature woman who takes charge of her own and her father’s fate. Euripides here experiments with monody not only as a structural device to shape plot and create meaning but also as a means for the development of a complex female figure through the presentation of her evolving emotional state.

In Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians, produced around 414–412 BCE, the two monodies highlight two critical stages of the heroine’s emotional journey from stasis to purposeful action. In her first monody, Iphigenia mourns the unfulfilled potential of her young life, where each status was canceled, each promised doing undone. Iphigenia’s second monody, delivered after the reunion scene with Orestes, marks a shift in her mind and a crisis in the plot. Here monody becomes a site for thought and decisive action, acting as a deliberative rhesis wherein the heroine formulates a plan for the future. The two monodies in this play thus mark two points in the inflection of Iphigenia’s character as she leaves behind her status as a passive victim and finds her purpose as the functional head of her family.

Monody is an essential part of Euripides’ mature dramatic art. All the surviving examples of actor’s lyric by Aeschylus and Sophocles are songs of lamentation, where the use of solo song emphasizes the relationship between the isolated singer and the larger group. Reacting against this tradition, in his late plays Euripides reconfigures monody by blending it with the other traditional forms of Greek tragedy, such as the agon, rhesis, choral ode, and messenger speech. These reconfigurations, or “liberations,” are signaled so that attention is drawn in each case to the poet’s ingenuity. In addition to this formal innovation, Euripides uses monody as a vehicle to express emotion and develop character on the tragic stage.

In Euripides’ Ion, produced around 414 BCE, the central conflict of the play receives its most explicit expression through the diametrical opposition of passionately held views. These views are expressed at length, but in song and separately, in the monodies of Ion and Creusa. In his opening monody, Ion manifests his devotion to Apollo, his concern with purity and propriety, and his position as an orphan. At the pivotal moment of the play, the Athenian queen Creusa delivers a musical accusation against the god who once violated her and, as she believes, left their infant son to die. Is Apollo benevolent and bright, or violent and uncaring? In the two monodies, Euripides brings together the legalistic exposition typical of agonistic rhesis and the emotionality of lyric song.

The Introduction situates the monodies of Euripides’ late plays in the context of theatrical and musical innovation in Athens in the late fifth century. In plays produced after 415 BCE – in particular Ion, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Phoenician Women, and Orestes – Euripides departs from the model of actor’s lyric established by Aeschylus and Sophocles and followed in his own previous work. Solo song is no longer restricted to women, to royalty, or to situations that call for lamentation; nor is the soloist necessarily closely tied to the chorus. In his late plays, Euripides successively redefines monody: each song takes over a traditional Bauform of tragedy and builds upon it. Monody becomes a site of formal innovation and experimentation. At the same time, solo song facilitates the creation of an individual voice of broad emotional and expressive range.

Euripides’ Orestes, produced in 408 BCE, stands as the culmination of a decade of experimentation with monody as a versatile dramatic form. At the climax of the play, the disappearance of Helen is reported not by a messenger in an iambic rhesis, but by an anonymous Phrygian slave in a virtuosic monody that is twice as long as all the combined songs of the chorus. The tonal and rhetorical ambiguities in the Phrygian’s song underscore the increasing fragmentation and chaos of the plot. This monody overturns the expectations of the audience through its combination of the traditionally antithetical genres of monody and messenger speech. The Phrygian is an unprecedented type of narrator in tragedy, offering instead of an objective reporting of events a “polyphonic” account that draws on multiple genres and styles.

This chapter has two core aims: first, it argues that a ‘discursive’ approach to im/politeness, which foregrounds interactants’ own (emic) evaluations of the (in)appropriateness of language as they arise in discourse, is needed to properly capture the nuances of social interaction in Greek and Roman literature. Second, it seeks to demonstrate the utility of Conversation Analysis in approaching this emic perspective. The chapter sets out from various passages in Greek tragedy in which speakers explicitly comment on the inappropriateness of their interlocutors’ language (metapragmatic comments), and shows that such comments regularly coincide with disruptions of regular conversational sequencing. The chapter then offers an extensive analysis of the herald scene in Euripides’ Supplices, a passage rich in metapragmatic commentary. Theseus’ principal concern in that scene, it is argued, is the correct procedural conduct of inter-polis diplomacy, rather than any putative personal face wants. Accordingly, expressions traditionally interpreted as politeness formulae should in this scene be seen as procedural rather than face-oriented devices.

The chapter opens by making the case for a capacious understanding of the psychology of the religious imagination. Psychological capacities and propensities, it is suggested, are enabling as much as they are constraining, and religious actors creatively employ these capacities and propensities as much as they are unknowingly subject to them. The particular phenomenon for which this notion of the religious imagination is then explored in the bulk of the chapter is the deus ex machina of Greek tragedy; the relevant imaginative capacity is the human propensity for make-believe. The chapter argues that both externally, as a form of make-believe, and internally through details of the dialogue between god and characters, deus ex machina scenes pull systematically in two directions: the religious experience they enable is one in which there is room simultaneously for both belief and disbelief, trust and distrust, commitment and distance. A subsidiary strand of the argument aims to contribute to current debates about the notion of ‘belief’ in scholarship on Greek religion. The chapter emphasizes that ‘belief’ is usefully understood as sometimes including an attitudinal dimension. This attitudinal dimension comes to the fore in the deus scenes.

Chapter 3 dissects the role of black skin color in Aeschylus’s Suppliants (c. 463 BCE). In this tragedy, Danaus’s black daughters, the Danaids, flee from Egypt to Argos to escape a forced marriage to their Egyptian cousins. Their knowledge of Greek religious rites convinces the Argive ruler, Pelasgus, that they are distant kin even though this Greek identity is seemingly contradicted by their black skin. This chapter asserts that the Danaids are sophisticated performers who successfully reduce the relevance of their physical alterity and declare their hybrid identity as black Egyptian Greeks. They are versatile and subtle ethnographers of the Argive Greeks to whom they supplicate. Conversely, their Argive audience – the intra-dramatic spectators of the Danaids’ difference – prove less able to comprehend their hybridized identity. An exploration of political resonances, particularly in relation to metics, draws the fifth-century BCE audience away from the distant mythical realm and towards their own political reality. Altogether, the drama speaks to the complicated exteriority of race in an ancient Greek tragedy.

This chapter explores in particular the 'greek presence' in the small organon, as manifested in the form of greek tragedy and/or its theorist aristotle. This is embedded within a broader analysis of this key work as a fundamenal contribution to theatre theory. New archival material in the form of brecht's type-written inserts into his personal copy of aristotle's 'poetics' is published for the first time and discussed in detail.