This book brings together case studies delving into different, unstudied aspects of the Nachleben of selected lost tragedies either in their once extant form or in their fragmentary state in later periods of time. It seeks to explore the ways in which the plays in question were reworked, discussed, represented or reperformed within varying frameworks. Notably enough, research on the reception of tragic fragments could yield insight not only into the receiving work, but also into the facets of the source text that have attracted attention in its subsequent refigurations. It could thus shed light on the ideological and cultural routes through which these fragmentary tragedies were received by the poet, the scholar, the artist, the viewer, the reader and the spectator in each case. The complex process of the refiguration of a fragmentarily preserved play within different contexts could form a yardstick of its cultural power and elucidate the dynamics of fragmentation in modern times. Τhe volume is of particular interest to scholars in the fields of classics, reception, cultural and performance studies, as well as to readers fascinated by Greek tragedy and its vibrant afterlife.

Produced in honor of White's eightieth birthday, Re-Figuring Hayden White testifies to the lasting importance of White's innovative work, which firmly reintegrates historical studies with literature and the humanities. The book is a major reconsideration of the historian's contributions and influence by an international group of leading scholars from a variety of disciplines. Individual essays address the key concepts of White's intellectual career, including tropes, narrative, figuralism, and the historical sublime while exploring the place of White's work in the philosophy of history, postmodernism, and ethics. They also discuss his role as historian and teacher and apply his ideas to specific historical events.

A recently-published second-century papyrus, P.Oxy. 5283, contains prose summaries (hypotheses) of six plays by the Greek dramatist Euripides, including two lost plays depicting the hero Perseus, Dictys and Danaë. This book demonstrates the significance of this discovery for our understanding of Greek tragedy. After setting out the mythological and dramatic context, and offering a new text and translation based on autopsy, the book analyses the light which the papyrus sheds on these plays, whose narratives, centred on female resistance to abusive male tyrants, speak as powerfully to us today as they did to their original audiences. It then investigates Euripides’ tragic trilogy of 431 BC, which ended with Dictys and began with Medea, whose dramatic power now stands in sharper focus given our improved understanding of the production in which it originally appeared. Finally, it ponders the purpose which these hypotheses served, and why readers in the second century AD should have wanted a summary of plays written more than half a millennium before. All Greek (and Latin) is translated, making the book accessible not just to classicists, but to theatre historians and to anyone interested in Greek literature, drama, and mythology.

This multiauthored volume, as well as bringing into clearer focus the notion of drama and oratory as important media of public inquiry and critique, aims to generate significant attention to the unified intentions of the dramatist and the orator to establish favourable conditions of internal stability in democratic Athens. We hope that readers both enjoy and find valuable their engagement with these ideas and beliefs regarding the indissoluble bond between oratorical expertise and dramatic artistry. This exciting collection of studies by worldwide acclaimed classicists and acute younger Hellenists is envisaged as part of the general effort, almost unanimously acknowledged as valid and productive, to explore the impact of formalized speech in particular and craftsmanship rhetoric in general upon Attic drama as a moral and educational force in the Athenian city-state. Both poet and orator seek to deepen the central tensions of their work and to enlarge the main themes of their texts to even broader terms by investing in the art of rhetoric, whilst at the same time, through a skillful handling of events, evaluating the past and establishing standards or ideology.

"A wide-ranging collection by an exciting group of scholars, this is a timely and impressive contribution to a topic that, since Plato, has continued to perplex and stimulate philosophers and literary scholars alike."--Jacket.

Brill’s Companion to Euripides, as well as presenting a comprehensive and authoritative guide to understanding Euripides and his masterworks, provides scholars and students with compelling fresh perspectives upon a broad range of issues in the field of Euripidean studies.

Friendship (philia) is a complex and multi-faceted concept that is frequently attested in ancient Greek literature and thought. It is also an important social phenomenon and an institution that features in classical Greek social, cultural, and intellectual history. This collected volume seeks to complement the extensive modern scholarship on this topic by shedding light on complementary representations, nuances and tensions of friendship in a range of different sources, literary, epigraphic, and visual. It offers a broad overview of the contours of this important social phenomenon and helps the reader get a glimpse of its depth and richness.

This is the second volume of a collection which includes all the significant remains of tragedies produced by the contemporaries and successors of the three classic Greek tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides). Greek texts and sources are accompanied by English translations, related historical information, detailed explanatory notes and bibliographies. Volume Two includes more than a dozen poets of the fourth and early third centuries (Astydamas, Carcinus, Chaeremon, Theodectas, Moschion and others), the Alexandrian Pleiad, Ezechiel's Exag�g� (a tragedy based on the biblical Exodus), and some anonymous material derived from ancient sources or rediscovered papyrus texts. Remnants of the satyr-plays of this period are included in a separate Aris & Phillips Classical Texts volume, Euripides Cyclops and Major Fragments of Greek Satyric Drama, edited by Patrick O'Sullivan and Christopher Collard (2013).

This volume examines whether dramatic fragments should be approached as parts of a greater whole or as self-contained entities. It comprises contributions by a broad spectrum of international scholars: by young researchers working on fragmentary drama as well as by well-known experts in this field. The volume explores another kind of fragmentation that seems already to have been embraced by the ancient dramatists: quotations extracted from their context and immersed in a new whole, in which they work both as cohesive unities and detachable entities. Sections of poetic works circulated in antiquity not only as parts of a whole, but also independently, i.e. as component fractions, rather like quotations on facebook today. Fragmentation can thus be seen operating on the level of dissociation, but also on the level of cohesion. The volume investigates interpretive possibilities, quotation contexts, production and reception stages of fragmentary texts, looking into the ways dramatic fragments can either increase the depth of fragmentation or strengthen the intensity of cohesion.

Refiguring the Hero reassesses the social significance of several of the most widely read plays of Spain's Golden Age in light of then-contempory ideas about heroism. The Spanish dramatists Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón de la Barca, near contemporaries of Shakespeare, are hailed by Hispanists as democrats at heart for making heroes, in both the literary and the positive moral sense, of peasants. Spanish drama is alleged to be the first literature in the Western world to find the common man worthy of heroic status. Refiguring the Hero reevaluates the place of the canon of Spanish Golden Age drama within its European context. The book discusses European literary heroism through the seventeenth century, with particular attention to the Spanish or moral enlightenment were essential characteristics of a hero. However, the protagonists of Spanish "peasant honor" plays do not fit into this heroic tradition. The peasant often murders a nobleman who has offended his honor, and is rewarded by the reigning monarch. The peasants gain official approval by misrepresenting the events leading up to the murders. The generous kings, in their turn, are historical figures known for their failures. While most scholars approaching Spanish Golden Age drama regard these plays a s socially subversive or revolutionary, Dian Fox contends that they are consistent with other contemporary European national dramas in reserving heroism in serious works for socially superior characters. She challenges the "democratic" view of the peasant triumphing over the nobleman as heroic and shows that political and social developments since the seventeenth century have enhanced the sympathy with which modern readers regard the violent acts of the peasants in these plays.