Of all the scholars and critics who have interpreted Euripides in the last hundred years no one – at least in the English-speaking world – can match Gilbert Murray (1866–1957) in terms of influence and popularity. But Murray’s most substantial work on Euripides was done before the First World War, and there is something to be said for trying, at this distance, to put his reading in context and to account for the remarkably strong impact that it made both in its own time and for many years afterwards. The task is all the more relevant nowadays, when Murray is more likely to attract attention as a ‘Cambridge Ritualist’ than for his reading of Euripides, and we need to make a real effort to grasp what made this so distinctive.1

This paper is concerned with a problem that has long been one of the most controversial in the Oedipus Coloneus, namely Sophocles’ precise intention in juxtaposing Oedipus’ terrible cursing of Polynices and his mysterious and solemn passing. I cannot claim to offer a new interpretation of these scenes, but I believe that there is at least a little that is new to be learned from a close study of Sophocles’ use of language, an approach which has not often been allowed to play an important part in critical work on the Oedipus Coloneus, despite the very rich poetic texture of the play.

Oedipus is twice importuned by the outside world, first by Creon, who is portrayed as so repellent a hypocrite that we are in no doubt that we are right to sympathize with Oedipus when he contemptuously rejects him. But Sophocles predisposes us to be much more sympathetic towards the next visitor, Polynices.

In many respects Euripides’ Medea is not a problematic play. It is a singularly bold, clear-cut, assured piece of writing, the concentration and dramatic intensity of which are readily felt by reader or audience and command the respect even of those who find the subject matter repellent or who cavil at the Aegeus scene and the dragon chariot. But its starkness makes it deeply disturbing; and this unease is reflected in the critical literature on the play. The language, though consistently powerful, lacks the rich expansiveness of Hippolytus or Bacchae, almost never allowing us to range in imagination away from the immediate painful situation; it is typical that one of the most prominent of the recurring images is of Medea as a wild beast.1

A quotation from Romola in S. H. Butcher’s essay on Sophocles (1891)1 first led me to George Eliot as a reader of Greek tragedy.

The Iliad conveys an impression of, infinite resources of storytelling. The scale is vast, in terms of the numbers of people and divinities involved and the range of places included: besides Troy and its immediate surroundings, and the divine vantage-points of Olympus and Ida, there are the Troad and nearby islands, scene of Greek raids during the long years of the wars against Troy, and the many cities of Greece associated with the different Achaean heroes. But all this material is handled in a strictly selective way,1 and the effect is to concentrate and intensify, to give greater weight to those details that are chosen for attention. The terms ‘economy’ and ‘scope’, often used to characterise the system of formulaic composition, can just as usefully be applied to the narrative design.

This paper asks what might seem like an unanswerable question: can the ancient scholia on tragedy, in this case particularly the scholia on Sophocles, tell us anything coherent about the conceptualization of space shared by dramatists, performers and audiences? The material does not look promising. The surviving notes are often scrappy and seemingly random, having been excerpted from different sources, cut down, reshuffled and sometimes corrupted in the long process of transmission; this means that the great majority are anonymous and undatable, and only a few can be attributed to particular scholars. Their references to what is to be imagined about the stage action may be disappointingly cryptic, or may look like little more than armchair guesswork, and it is easy to dismiss them altogether.

The remains of ancient commentaries, transmitted in the margins of a number of manuscripts of the Greek tragedians, have been known to scholars since the Renaissance.1 Is there anything new to be discovered in these notes, which can often seem banal, cryptic or confused? They have of course been assiduously studied over the centuries by scholars in search of textual variants, of quotations drawn from lost works, of historical or mythological information that may be contained within them, but the literary interests and judgments of the commentators have received little attention. Only in the past twenty years or so, in fact, have these texts begun to be studied systematically, with a view to discovering the critical principles and reading habits of their authors.2

This brief paper began life as the second part of a joint seminar held at the Institute of Classical Studies in December 1991. The first part was contributed by Eric Handley, who gave us a magisterial survey of the types of evidence for Menander’s survival in antiquity: records of production; souvenirs of performances; copies of plays, and derivatives such as excerpts, quotations, translations, imitations, commentaries; references to library lists; evidence of educational use; images of the author. My task was to consider the possible reasons why the work of a writer so triumphantly successful and so widely influential throughout the period of antiquity should have been lost after about the sixth or seventh century AD. I was conscious then that my arguments were speculatively constructed out of more or less insecure pieces of evidence; I am even more conscious of their vulnerability now, when they have to stand alone, unsupported by the erudition of the first half.

Charles Segal’s rich study prompts discussion from many different angles. I begin with his approach to what Aristotle may have meant by catharsis, which at once takes us beyond strict commentary on Aristotelian usage in Poetics and elsewhere and encourages us to range more freely. The broad definition ‘cleansing release’1 conveniently incorporates the ideas of purgation and purification and also recalls the importance for Aristotle of the affective function of tragedy in relation to the spectator. This is a helpful way of making catharsis illuminate modern interpretations of tragedy and the tragic, and Segal’s further suggestion, that it should be associated with tragedy’s use of ritual action, is also an attractive one.

Journeying is everywhere in Sophocles, as a structuring element of plot, as a motivator of dramatic action – linking seen with unseen and present with past and future – and above all as a metaphor with an extraordinary range of resonances. The journey of life, the journey to the beyond, the wanderings of the exile, the quest, the path of destiny: all are potentially tragic images, and I want to suggest that the lasting ‘translatability’ and pervasiveness in modern culture of Sophocles’ surviving plays owes much to the complex power with which such seemingly simple images are invested. My test case will be Oedipus at Colonus, where the idea of the journey informs the whole action with particular intensity, but there are many parallels in the other plays.

The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition commemorated the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. The St. Louis fair was the first organized after the United States had obtained a territorial empire in 1898. While it might seem evident that classicizing architecture should be used to serve empire, surprisingly, it was not. The so-called “Free Renaissance” architecture of the fair was not primarily classical. Instead, under the banner of the Free Renaissance, vaguely historical and undeniably imposing, if not supersized, buildings were erected. The most original building at the fair, the Mines and Metallurgy Building, embodied the spirit of the neo-antique, combining multiple historical forms, including Egyptian, Greek, and Roman architecture. Cass Gilbert designed the fair’s Palace of Fine Arts. Now the St. Louis Art Museum, the building is modeled on the Baths of Caracalla and demonstrates that one of the most enduring appropriations of ancient architecture was for buildings associated with high and elite culture. While Roman architecture was used in several important buildings, many of the key edifices, including the Festival Hall, did not evoke ancient architecture. Certain state pavilions and territories—with no apparent connection to antiquity—employed classicizing forms to demonstrate their progress and cultural sophistication.

This chapter sets out to look for what was distinctive about Greek practice in the staging of tragic stories. There is no doubt that this new art form of the late sixth and early fifth centuries was a highly original experiment, with no obvious model in other cultures, but of course the early dramatists did not have to start from scratch. The epic and lyric traditions offered them a great range of serious narratives which had already been shaped for performance, whether by rhapsodes or by choruses, and without this precedent it would be hard to imagine Attic tragedy having developed as quickly as it did into a genre of such richness, sophistication and popular appeal.1

This chapter examines the evidence for the economic situation and legal rights of Licinnia, daughter of Publius Licinius Crassus Dives Mucianus and wife of Gaius Sempronius Gracchus. It is argued that she owned (probably as part of her dowry) the house on the Palatine where the couple lived together until Gaius Gracchus moved near the Forum in the last year of his life. The wealth Licinnia brought with her supported her married life and her husband’s prominent career. After her husband’s violent death and the confiscation of his property by the state, Licinnia retained her dowry and subsequently sued successfully for damages to her dotal property that had resulted from rioting. Licinnia’s experiences illustrate the economic and social independence of Roman women in the late second century BCE.

This paper is about Furies as stage presences in Aeschylus’ Eumenides, which may have been the first play to introduce them to the Greek theatre and certainly gave Greek literature some of its most influential images. I use ‘Furies’ as a convenient shorthand for Erinyes/Eumenides/Semnai Theai, without wishing to imply that their complex identity can be captured in a single English word.1 In concentrating on theatrical performance I am deeply indebted to Oliver Taplin’s inspiring work, and I want to use an approach akin to his in addressing a question central to interpretation of the Oresteia, namely how we are to understand Athena’s persuasion of the Furies and their ultimate acceptance of honours at Athens. Are they ‘transformed’? Are they ‘subordinated’?