Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens. ROSALIND THOMAS

The past is narrated in retrospect. Historians can either capitalize on the benefit of hindsight and give their narratives a strongly teleological design or they may try to render the past as it was experienced by historical agents and contemporaries. This book explores the fundamental tension between experience and teleology in major works of Greek and Roman historiography, biography and autobiography. The combination of theoretical reflections with close readings yields a new, often surprising assessment of the history of ancient historiography as well as a deeper understanding of such authors as Thucydides, Tacitus and Augustine. While much recent work has focused on how ancient historians use emplotment to generate historical meaning, 'Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography' offers a new approach to narrative form as a mode of coming to grips with time.

Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography: Futures Past from Herodotus to Augustine

There have been few issues in the contemporary analysis of Greek tragedy as hotly debated as what I shall call ‘civic ideology and the problem of difference’. By this I mean a nexus of interrelated questions concerning the political import of tragedy both for the fifth-century Athenians and for subsequent generations: how does the festival of the Great Dionysia—its rituals and dramatic performances—relate to the dominant ideological structures of democracy? How should critical or contestatory discourse be located within the dramatic festival and within the polis? How should the texts of tragedy be related to the society in which they were produced—and to the societies in which they are still being read and performed? The problem is not merely essential to our understanding of the genre of tragedy, but is also intimately connected to the history and theory of democracy and its discontents. To what degree can democracy respond to criticism and what space can it allow, in theory and in practice, for alternative viewpoints or opposition? In its most aggressive form, such questioning of the exclusions and repressions of democracy is sometimes articulated as a challenge as to whether the costs of (ancient) democracy outweigh its benefits.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0075426900019558

Civic Ideology and the problem of difference: the politics of Aeschylean tragedy, once again

It was once believed that the ancients invented and perfected certain genres and that the works they left might serve as models for later writers. Today belief in ideal patterns is a distant memory, and our interest in genre takes other forms. Classicists, by engaging with the specific problems presented by Greek and Roman literature and with the speculative discourse taking place throughout literary studies, have developed very different approaches to genre from the ones that prevailed in the past; but outside of classics, it appears that a traditional (and, now, outmoded) conception of the role that genre plays in classical literature continues to hold sway. This conception has a distinguished pedigree, and in fact derives from classical genre theory. But the practice of ancient writers was much more sophisticated than anything that classical theory could account for, and it is mainly on this practice that classicists now base their understanding of ancient ideas about genre.1 In this essay, I will briefly run over some familiar aspects of classical genre theory, but will be mainly concerned to illustrate how attention to the practice of ancient writers has led to an outlook on Greek and especially Roman literary genres that is very different from the traditional story and that has much more to contribute to the contemporary discourse about genre.

/pdf/classical-genre-in-theory-and-practice-f5btygven7.pdf

Classical Genre in Theory and Practice

Introduction 1 Reading dangerously: Phyllis, Dido, Ariadne, and Medea 2 Reading the future: Hypsipyle, Medea, and Oenone 3 Benefits of communal writing: Canace and Hypermestra 4 A feminine reading of epic: Briseis and Hermione 5 Reading magically: Deianira and Laodamia 6 Reading like a virgin: Phaedra and Ariadne 7 Caveat lector: thoughts on gender and power Appendix A The authenticity (and 'authenticity') of Heroides 15 Bibliography Index Index Locorum

/pdf/the-ovidian-heroine-as-author-reading-writing-and-community-15ebcdfw3a.pdf

The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides

Preface Ch. 2 Equal Honor and Future Glory: The Plan of Zeus in the Iliad Ch. 3 Odes and Ends: Closure in Greek Lyric Ch. 4 Wanton Kings, Pickled Heroes, and Gnomic Founding Fathers: Strategies of Meaning at the End of Herodotus's Histories Ch. 5 Ends and Means in Euripides' Heracles Ch. 6 Lucretian Conclusions Ch. 7 Closure in Latin Epic Ch. 8 Final Exit: Propertius 4.11 Ch. 9 Endgames: Ovid's Metamorphoses 15 and Fasti 6 Ch. 10 How Novels End: Some Patterns of Closure in Ancient Narrative Ch. 11 Is Death the End? Closure in Plutarch's Lives Ch. 12 Afterword: Ending and Aftermath, Ancient and Modern Bibliography Index

Classical closure: reading the end in Greek and Latin literature

Francis Dunn explores the novel gestures that close the dramas of Euripides, showing how these deny access to an authoritative reading of the plays, reinforce innovations in plot and structure, and open up tragedy to comic, parodic, and narrative impulses. The author provides the first large-scale study of closure in classical literature, and includes readings of plot, ending, and generic innovation in Hyppolytus, Trojan women, Hercules, and the late plays Helen, Orestes, and Phoenician Women.

Tragedy's End: Closure and Innovation in Euripidean Drama

Introduction: beginning at Colonus Francis M Dunn How Greek poems begin William H Race The Muse corrects: the opening of the Odyssey Victoria Pedrick Sappho 16, Gorgias' Helen and the preface to Herodotus' histories Hayden Pelliccia Tragic beginnings: narration, voice and authority in the prologues of Greek drama Charles Segal Plato's first words Diskin Clay Plautine negotiations: the Poenulus prologue unpacked Niall W Slater Proems in the middle Gian Biagio Conte Openings in Horace's Satires and Odes: poet, patron and audience Barbara K Gold An aristocracy of virtue: Seneca on the beginnings of wisdom Thomas N Habinek Beginnings in Plutarch's Lives Thomas G Rosenmeyer 'Initium mihi operis Servius Galba iterum T Vinius consules ' Thomas Cole

Beginnings in classical literature

At two places in Greek tragedy a rare and obscure word, ἐµασχαλίσθη, is used to describe an obscure practice. Most commentators take the word to denote a ritual in which a victim’s body parts are strung underneath his armpits, hence the term ἐµασχαλίσθη, ‘was arm-pitted’. This paper argues that the term denotes a simpler practice and one more suited to the dramatic context, and closes by considering why the word has been misunderstood.

The Mutilation of Agamemnon (A. Ch. 439 and S. El. 445)

This book depicts the state of disorientation brought about by sudden cultural upheavals in 5th century Athens. Francis Dunn's "Present Shock in Late Fifth-Century Greece" examines the widespread social and cultural disorientation experienced by Athenians in a period that witnessed the revolution of 411 B.C.E. and the military misadventures in 413 and 404 - a disturbance as powerful as that described in Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. The late fifth century was a time of vast cultural and intellectual change, ultimately leading to a shift away from Athenians' traditional tendency to seek authority in the past, toward a greater reliance on the authority of the present. At the same time, Dunn arguez, writers and thinkers not only registered the shock, but explored ways to adjust to living with this new sense of uncertainty. Using literary case studies from this period, Dunn shows how narrative techniques changed to focus on depicting a world in which events were no longer wholly predetermined by the past, impressing upon readers the rewards and challenges of struggling to find their own way forward. Although Present Shock concentrates upon the late fifth century, this book's interdisciplinary approach will be of broad interest to scholars and students of ancient Greece, as well as anyone fascinated by the remarkably flexible human understanding of time.

Francis M. Dunn

Papers

Classical closure: reading the end in Greek and Latin literature

Tragedy's End: Closure and Innovation in Euripidean Drama

Beginnings in classical literature

The Mutilation of Agamemnon (A. Ch. 439 and S. El. 445)

Present Shock in Late Fifth-Century Greece