This chapter examines the various ways in which ancient tragic and comic playwrights constructed race on their stages. Inspired by Geraldine Heng’s articulation of race in the premodern past as an ‘essentialised difference’, I explore essentialised conceptions of ethnicity and descent featured in various plays and how these intersected with broader cultural and political discourses around identity in fifth-century Athens. I trace the discourses of alterity and inferiority that feature in various tragic plots centred on interactions between Greeks and barbarians from Aeschylus’ Suppliants to Euripides’ Medea, as well as notions of superiority that foreground the various myths of Athenian autochthony staged across the fifth-century BCE, most prominently in Euripides’ Erechtheus and Ion.

This essay examines the oracular responses of the oracle of Dodona portrayed in fifth-century BCE Attic tragedies. This analysis explores the wording of the oracular answers, characterized by extreme conciseness and clarity, and the topic of the queries, on household security, family matters, and final journeys. The evidence from the lead tablets at Dodona corroborates this focus, showing that while the oracle addressed various concerns, a significant number of private queries dealt with family, health, marriage, and travel. Additionally, the responses from Dodona were brief and straightforward, in contrast to the cryptic nature of Apollo’s oracles at Delphi.

Ancient audiences ascribed personal religious views to individual playwrights – a fact that confirms ‘personal religion’ as a meaningful category in the study of ancient Greek society in general and the theatre in particular. Aeschylus was especially devoted to Demeter; Sophocles was exceptionally pious; Euripides was hell-bent to show that there were no gods. The oeuvres of these playwrights inspired such inferences, to be sure, but other factors mattered too. Comedies staged the tragic poets as characters and ascribed various religious views to them. Face-to-face encounters with the playwrights gave rise to anecdotes and recollections, which no doubt circulated orally but were also occasionally written down. All this meant that the playwrights could build on their public personae and assume that audiences would recognize characteristic concerns in their plays. We uncover a dynamic set of interactions in which the poet shaped his plays but was also shaped by how audiences received them. We show that we should not construct an opposition between personal and polis religion: The religious views ascribed to the tragedians were personal and communally owned.

In this chapter, I argue that Plato borrows from Euripides’ Antiope, in order to frame the terms of the debate between Socrates and Callicles in the last part of the Gorgias about whether the philosophical or the political life is best. I argue that Plato’s engagement with this tragedy is an instance of paratragedy, that is, the non-parodic adaptation of a work of tragedy in order to enrich the dramatic situation. What redeems the Antiope in Plato’s eyes is its endorsement of the superiority of the intellectual over the political life. In adapting the Antiope for his own purposes, Plato defends an account of good life as spent in the cooperative pursuit of wisdom and virtue. This life runs up against two limits that are thematized in the Gorgias: human obstinacy, the refusal to cooperate and recognize the force of argument; and endemic uncertainty due to our finite capacity for argument. Since Socrates is portrayed as both defending the life of philosophy in argument, and actively living it, then the Gorgias itself counts as an ideal tragedy. This reading of the dialogue sheds important light on the arguments concerning the nature and value of rhetoric. In the end, I assess the dialogue in light of the constraints on ideal tragedy articulated in Chapter 4.

Extant Greek tragedy contains several instances of choral division, scenes when the chorus appears either to split into individual performers (as in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon) or, more commonly, to divide into small groups (semichoruses). As these scenes involve the (always temporary) disintegration of tragedy’s emblematic collective, a collective that is customarily conceived of as a unified group, this chapter frames such scenes in terms of fragmentation. These various states of fragmentation illustrate not only the way in which tragedians play with the chorus’ ability to slide towards and away from uniform collectivity but also the assumptions about wholeness which have implicitly informed critical and editorial approaches to both tragedy and the chorus. In addition to examining these divisions in tragedy, the chapter analyses similar divisions in satyr play, comedy and Rhesus, the only surviving example of fourth-century tragedy, demonstrating how the divisions of the comic and satyric choruses are more readily accepted by critics.

This chapter offers in-depth case studies to display how playwrights both used and innovated with mechanical epiphany. Six ancient tragedies are discussed, grouped in thematic pairs. Euripides’ Helen and Bacchae, are taken together as plays that use the deus ex machina to comment on divine form. While the mēchanē in the Helen confirms divine form in a play otherwise full of illusion; the mēchanē in the Bacchae is presented as yet another epiphanic mode of the mimetically inclined patron god of theatre, Dionysus. Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Euripides’ Heracles use the mēchanē to explore issues of space, movement, and the connectedness of divine and mortal. Finally, Euripides’ Orestes and Medea both make use of the mēchanē to question divine epiphany by bringing to the fore issues of ontological boundaries between human and divine.

Notions of the double have a long antiquity. The expression of the concept of the double in Euripides’s The Women of Troy is discussed as is the expression of the double in Plautus’s Amphitryon and The Brothers Menaechmus. The treatment of the double in the Epic of Gilgamesh and in the stories of Loki, the Norse god, is also explored.

This chapter studies H.D.’s translations of choruses from Euripides’s Iphigeneia in Aulis (1915) and Hippolytus (1919). Tracing her shifting concern from image to sound, the author argues that her work mirrors Eliot’s and Pound’s preoccupations of that period; her play Hippolytus Temporizes (1927) – abstract and formalist, yet rooted in the specific circumstances of its time – especially reflects this. More specifically, she show that the “Choruses from Iphigeneia” are a first attempt to compose, on the one hand, a long Imagist poem and, on the other, to write a “poem including history.” She then homes in on H.D.’s treatment of Euripidean rhythm and meter in the Hippolytus plays, through which H.D. questions the relationship between “antiquity” and “modernity” as well as the possibility and value of writing poetry itself. H.D. engages with discourses on Greek antiquity, which are woven into her translations and play; unlike Pound and Eliot’s mostly rhetorical engagement, H.D. measures out in her work how to translate Greek poetics into English, and yet is almost as ambivalent as Pound about the value of Greek.