Cultural History of Tragedy in Antiquity : Vol. 1

The genre of tragedy thrived and developed in Athens, in the fifth century BCE. But tragedy was also created and performed outside Athens in non-democratic Greek cities, and tragedies continued to be created, performed and re-performed in much later periods of Greek and Roman antiquity. The pieces of this long and complex history are often studied in isolation from one another. In this volume, tragedy in antiquity is examined synoptically, from its misty origins in archaic Greece, through its central position in the civic life of ancient Athens and its performances across the Greek-speaking world, to its new and very different instantiations in Republican and Imperial Roman contexts. Lively, original essays by eminent scholars trace the shifting dramatic forms, performance environments and social meanings of tragedy as it was repeatedly reinvented. Tragedy was consistently seen as the most serious of all dramatic genres; these essays trace a sequence of different visions of what the most serious kind of dramatic story might be, and the most appropriate ways of telling those stories on stage.
Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality