Recent work on ritual has had a stimulating effect on the interpretation of Greek tragedy. Critics have at last felt free to set aside the old question of origins and the search for archetypal patterns, and to focus attention instead on the ritual language used in tragic texts. The impetus has come from outside – from structuralist anthropology and the work of such writers as Karl Meuli, René Girard and Victor Turner – but the application of these theories to ancient drama has only been possible because the groundwork had been laid by generations of scholars active in the field of Greek religion, with their studies of sacrifice, mysteries, festivals, cult songs, funerary practices and the rest.1

This short paper considers the problems involved in the writing of intellectual history, or – to be less grandiose – in the attempt to give an account of Attic tragedy in the first half of the fourth century b.c. Not surprisingly, it poses questions rather than offering answers.

The period I have in mind, roughly that of the first couple of generations after the Peloponnesian War, is poorly represented by surviving evidence. No tragedy of the period, apart perhaps from Rhesus, has been preserved for us complete, and what we have, in quotations and papyrus fragments, is not easy to evaluate. This is in striking contrast with the fascinating range of material surviving from the last decade of the fifth century: Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus, Orestes, Iphigeneia at Aulis, Bacchae and perhaps also Ion and Phoenissae.

This chapter aims to qualify any defined boundaries between educated Roman women and their political or public engagement. As one moves further into the post-triumviral period, women pursuing cultural and educational endeavours appeared to gain more acceptance and admiration. This observation is particularly applicable to the case of Octavia Minor, the sister of Octavian Augustus and the fourth wife of Marcus Antonius. This chapter explores instances of Octavia’s educational pursuits, such as her involvement in creating networks of philosophers and tutors to educate her son, Marcellus (Strabo), her patronage (Vitruvius and the Porticus Octaviae) and instances of speech crafted for the Plutarchan Octavia, which blend the political and private spheres and are interpreted as a suasoria (Plutarch). Through these examples, this study positions Octavia as a prominent figure who exemplifies how female political engagement and paideia could be reconciled during the triumviral period.

Given a brief to discuss ‘female voices’ in ancient Greek poetry one might be tempted to choose Sappho or other women poets – like Praxilla or Telesilla – who were influential enough in their own time (and later) to have lyric meters named after them. But the surviving scraps of their poetry are not easily placed in their exact cultural context, and I have chosen instead to use a familiar text that survives in extenso and offers a range of extraordinarily influential paradigms for ways of behaving, thinking and feeling in ancient Greek society – the Iliad.

The publication of a generous selection of Pat Easterling’s articles requires little justification. Alongside the commentaries on Trachiniae and Oedipus at Colonus and the monumental (and intensely collaborative) editorial work, articles have been a preferred medium for Pat Easterling (PE) throughout her career. PE uses the concision of the article, as indeed the commentator’s note, to put forward tersely considered arguments that have the weight of much longer discussions. All are significant; many have established themselves as major points of reference. PE’s articles are responsible, even more probably than the path-breaking Trachiniae commentary and the still essential Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, for her status as one of the most influential Hellenists of her generation.

The relation between drama and ritual is an absorbing and complex question, too vast even to begin to address in this short chapter. All I attempt here is a preliminary sketch of just one of its many aspects, the way drama and ritual – and more particularly Greek tragedy and ritual – relate to time.

I was first made to think about this years ago when I came across an account by the neurologist Oliver Sacks of a patient he called the ‘lost mariner’, a man whose memory of a large portion of his past – and of his identity – had vanished, and whose state of mind was only free from deep disorientation when he was attending a religious service, watching a play, or taking part in a game.1

Composed of twenty-four states (2.6 million square miles), the Trans-Mississippi region was once described as the “Great American Desert”, due to its sparse population. This narrative gave way to one of settlement and progress as the region became home to white settlers, who displaced Indigenous Americans. To many, the region represented the West, agriculture, and the frontier. Omaha (Nebraska) hosted the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in 1898. The fair aimed to demonstrate that Omaha and the Trans-Mississippi region were economically important. The fair organizers utilized ancient architecture to create the fair’s main court and purposefully evoked Chicago’s Court of Honor. The fair’s architects incorporated original details that reflected the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement. The fair’s second season, named the Great American Exposition, reused the fairgrounds and its architecture to create the first colonial exhibition in the United States. The intersection between classicizing architecture and colonialism is also explored. Ancient Egyptian architecture was erected only in the Midway, the fair’s entertainment zone, reflecting a shift in how Americans perceived Egypt and architecture. Lastly, the chapter explores how Indigenous Americans were architecture-less at this fair and how this reflects their marginalized position in American society.

The starting point for this paper is a short passage in Oedipus at Colonus (1224–1227).

It is a privilege to be contributing, even in absentia, to this celebratory event in memory of a great Hellenist whose work has exercised extraordinary influence in our field. Jacqueline de Romilly’s eloquent illumination of classical literature and society has opened up new perspectives to scholars and teachers from different generations and traditions, and I am proud to count myself among her beneficiaries and admirers. I hope that the choice of a large topic for a short paper is one of which our honorand would have approved.

Why this subject? Names matter: for the shaping of memory, history and identity; and poets are always potentially interested in exploiting them.1

One of the most disturbing features of our contemporary world is the passion for revenge, which shows no signs of becoming a thing of the past – a type of motivation to be associated with ‘primitive’, ‘uncivilised’ or ‘pre-Enlightenment’ societies. Perhaps this helps to explain why Greek tragedy continues to be so popular in the theatre, and with ever more diverse audiences, or that plays like Medea, Hecuba and Orestes, not to mention the Oresteia, which explore revenge with particular directness, are chosen for what seems like their relevance to our own times.

Supposing we could transpose this occasion back in time by seventy or eighty years, the topic I have chosen – the Survival of Greek – would have been one that presented no problems. As a professional promoter of Greek culture talking about my subject I should have been able to appeal confidently to my audience’s shared assumptions and large certainties. Let me give you a sample of what I might have said (this was published in 1914).

The introduction argues that architecture is a valuable but underutilized medium for understanding classical reception. It contextualizes architectural studies in classical reception research and explores why scholars have not fully examined architecture as a lens for reception. It also provides an overview of the current state of the field of classical reception studies and the role of architectural studies within it. The book’s central argument is that ancient architecture at U.S. world’s fair–specifically in Chicago, Nashville, Omaha, St. Louis, and San Francisco–embodied abstract ideas and ambitions, helping each city project itself as a modern, progressive metropolis with a unique local identity, rivaling major global cities like New York, London, and Paris. The introduction outlines theoretical frameworks such as hyperreality, which can be applied to the study of the architecture of world’s fairs. It also introduces the neo-antique, a concept for analyzing the reception of classical (Greco-Roman) and Egyptian architecture together. Additionally, the chapter surveys the historiography of world’s fairs and situates this study within this context, arguing for the importance of architecture as a type of evidence for understanding world’s fairs as a phenomenon. The introduction concludes with a summary of the book’s five chapters.

Critics of ancient drama are still keenly engaged in a long-running debate about character, despite a readiness on everyone’s part nowadays to acknowledge significant differences between play-worlds and ordinary social reality. No one any longer asks the equivalent, in relation to Greek tragedy, of the question ‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’, naively supposing that the stage figures can be studied as if they were beings with a continuing off-stage existence. And most critics are much more willing to recognize that the old certainties about character and personality can no longer be taken for granted. But there is still plenty of room for disagreement, and in this chapter I try to suggest why this should be so, without pretending to wish away, let alone resolve, the difficulties that arise.

How do the property rights that are explored in this volume compare with those of women in the different world of ‘modern’ Europe. Welch and Scott examine several situations, including pre-1870 England, Scotland, revolutionary and post-revolutionary France and the states that would go to make up Germany after unification. Each of these contexts was different in itself, but none offered to women the same potential for agency as did ancient Rome, even though even in Rome gender circumscribed that agency in many important ways. Moreover, a significant divergence can be seen between legal systems that favoured English/Norman notions of coverture (whereby a married woman was largely denied legal personhood) and those that maintained a relationship with the Roman past. The conclusions that can be drawn from a necessarily brief and selective survey are significant. Some of the rights at law that Roman women enjoyed were denied to many European women until well into the lifetime of the authors of this chapter and are still denied to many others alive today. There is no doubt that Roman women of different social levels and over different historical situations suffered in different ways under the weight of gender expectations but the law did not stand in their way as it did in other contexts. Even more importantly, the industrial revolution had a profound impact on the economic roles of (especially) middle-class women in the nineteenth century, resulting in a new belief that a respectable married woman stayed at home and ran the house. When male writers of Roman history wrote their narratives, they wrote about Roman women in ways that reflected their own prejudices and attitudes towards a ‘woman’s place’. No history runs in a straight line, including the history of women. An awareness of the variability of contexts for women allows us to appreciate what was different about Rome as well as the way things both change and remain the same.

My subject this evening is the ‘Greek tragedy explosion’ that we have been witnessing in recent years. How are we to account for a huge growth of general interest, in this country and internationally, in performances of ancient drama, particularly tragedy, in the last 25 years or so, and a corresponding exponential rise in the number of translations and adaptations being published? If this had been merely a passing fashion, one option among many that attract the media for a while and quickly look dated, it ought to have passed by now, but there are no signs of declining interest yet.