In a series of articles and essays, the literary critic Baruch Kurzweil (1907–1972) portrayed the history of modern Hebrew literature as a history of crisis: of the breakdown of the old traditional world of religion and faith and the emergence of a new secular world. Kurzweil saw this history as a tragedy. Though the figure of crisis became associated with Kurzweil, he was by no means the first critic to employ it. In fact, it has played a central role in modern Hebrew literary criticism since its inception. Indeed, crisis emerged as a privileged figure for portraying the relationship between evolving literary forms, themes, figurations, and vocabulary to rapidly changing demographic, social, cultural, economic, and political contexts. In this chapter, I attempt to contextualize Kurzweil’s ideas within the framework of crisis and tragedy in Hebrew literary criticism, and then briefly suggest their potential implications for the present moment.

The importance of the body – in its own right and as a political, cosmic, and metapoetic symbol – in Attic and Senecan tragedy has long been recognized in scholarship, as has the significance of contemporary medical theories for these plays, but this motif has not been discussed in relation to the surviving fragments of Ennian tragedy. Yet those fragments – frustratingly exiguous though they are – feature substantial depictions of Alcmeo’s mental and physical pathology, the war-wounds of Eurypylus, and Thyestes’ verbal dissection of his brother Atreus, alongside numerous briefer references to disease, injury, and the body. This chapter explores these Ennian engagements with the body and medical theory through various historicizing lenses; with due caution, moreover, it explores the ways in which these lenses can be used to build a provisional picture of the role of the medical and the corporeal in the poet’s tragedies.

The importance of music is conspicuously evident in Cicero’s responses to Ennian tragedy: he refers to connoisseurs who could identify characters from single notes played in the tibia and to accompanied performance. The metres used in the fragments of Ennius’ tragedies reveal that Ennius made the Greek tragedies he adapted considerably more musical, and that music contributed significantly to the plots and emotional tone of the plays and to Ennius’ portrayal of character. In his Medea, for example, Ennius appears to have added music to Medea’s initial address to the chorus (90 TrRF II), to the agon between Jason and Medea (92 TrRF II), and to Medea’s final farewell to her children (97 TrRF II).

This pithy Introduction justifies the existence of the volume and explains why its contributors do not apply the term “minor works” to Ennius’ corpus. It then provides an overview of the diversity of this corpus, zooming in on the remains of his comedy as an example of what is not quite lost, and briefly shows that Ennius deeply influenced the Roman literary tradition as a multiform author (not just as an epicist). The Introduction closes by explaining the dispensation of the volume and what its contributors achieve.

This chapter takes a new look at Ennius’ Andromacha and particularly at her self-description as arce et urbe orba sum (23 TrRF II). Scholarship has well explicated how the formulaic words arce et urbe characterize Andromacha, to quote Jocelyn, as “a stateless person in terms of Roman law” (Jocelyn 1967). But scholarly focus on the religious formula has obscured the equally poignant allusion encoded in her choice of verb. Orbus is a word whose primary definition is of a child deprived of their parents or, conversely, of a parent who has lost a child. This chapter explores how Ennius boldly harnesses these familial connotations to create an arresting metaphor that totalizes Andromache’s loss. In doing so, he subtly genders Andromacha’s meditation on the loss of her recent past as well as significantly prefiguring the greater loss that the audience (but not yet Andromacha) knows is coming by the tragedy’s end, the tossing of Astyanax from the arx of Troy.

This chapter offers an analysis of the reception of Ennian tragedy in republican Latin poetry, focussing on Pacuvius, Accius, Lucretius, and Catullus. The main methodology employed is that of intertextual analysis. The main thesis advanced is that, while Ennian tragedy seems to have retained its generic distinction and importance in subsequent tragic poetry of the second century bce, by the late Republic, Ennius seems to be more important because of what he has come to represent as a poetic figure and as a repository of poetic material than as a tragedian or epicist.

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.

The Wire is an example of the way that new technologies and methods of dissemination have made realism possible on television. Where broadcast TV required episodes that could be watched independently and that were structured by the need for commercial interruptions, pay networks such as HBO and the more recent streaming services allow for long-form narratives that develop over many weeks and stretch on for years. The Wire has been widely recognized for its realism, which, however, is usually equated with what is seen as the program’s accuracy. I show how it makes use of conventions of realism inherited from nineteenth century fiction, which are enabled by its structure as a long-form program. The Wire makes use of genres not typically associated with realism, including crime fiction (the police procedural), TV’s police melodramas, and the ancient genre of tragedy as a plot form in Hayden White’s sense. The series incorporates this variety of genres in the service of a vision of ordinary life that continually surprises the viewers. The Wire thus demonstrates the power of new forms of television to represent social complexity to a degree not found in media other than print.

Chapter 5 is a study of Troilus and Criseyde, a poem that showcases Chaucer’s transformation of the language of blisse into that of erotic and transcendent joy. Chaucer constructs a new language of love’s joy indebted to the French and Italian traditions while at the same time shaped around an innovative semantics of love’s blisse. This language, crucially, constructs itself in opposition to philosophical felicity: in quasi-apophatic discourse, the poem expresses the ‘passing’ quality of the lovers’ joy, which exists beyond the conceptual language of philosophical happiness. This last chapter focuses on the writing of love’s joy within tragedy: the bliss of love is what it is because of its precarity, because it is surrounded by death. But if Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde offers an exceptionally memorable scene of joy, it is because of its use of a transcendent language of bliss that arrests, albeit briefly, the passage of time.

In this chapter, I argue, drawing primarily on passages from the Gorgias, the Republic and the Laws, that Plato understands tragedy to be, in essence, an imitation of the finest and noblest life. According to Plato, the only thing that is genuinely good and valuable is wisdom and virtue, and it is this life that tragedy imitates. This definition may seem deeply counterintuitive, lacking core tragic notions of loss, failure and suffering, but Plato would say these depend on prior conceptions of gain, success and flourishing. Ideal tragedy includes adversity, obstacles and limitations to living the best life – it is not an easy life of uninterrupted success – but it foregrounds the goodness and value of the life rather than dwelling on the obstacles. I formulate four constraints on ideal tragedy: the veridical constraint, which holds that only the life that is genuinely the best should be imitated as best; the educative constraint, which holds that tragic imitation must aim at educating the audience by encouraging them to pursue virtue and wisdom; the emotional constraint, which holds that the tragic imitation should cause appropriate and appropriately moderate emotional reactions; the political constraint, which holds that no living citizen should be portrayed as living the best life.

In this chapter, I provide an interpretation of the famous claim at the end of the Symposium that “the same man” ought to be able to write both comedy and tragedy, and a speculative reconstruction of the arguments that Socrates might have used to secure that claim in his discussion with Agathon and Aristophanes. I argue that ideal comedy and tragedy are unified in at least three ways. First, they constitute a teleological unity, in that their ethical imitations both aim at moral improvement; second, they constitute an ethical unity, in that they both rely on, and endorse, a single theory of value, according to which wisdom and virtue are good and ignorance and vice are bad; and third, they constitute an epistemic unity, in that the objects that they imitate – ridiculousness and seriousness in agents and actions – form opposite parts of the same branch of knowledge, such that one cannot know one without knowing the other. I further argue that actual comedy and tragedy are unified but in a much weaker sense that does not involve any knowledge. In the end, I discuss the possibility of tragicomedy and consider in what sense it might be correct to understand Plato’s dialogues as tragicomedies.

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.

In this chapter, I argue that Plato’s depiction of the last day of Socrates in the Phaedo is not only a tragedy in Plato’s ideal sense, but it also repeatedly contrasts its own presentation of the death of Socrates with how a traditional tragedy might portray it. This contrast brings into stark relief the intellectual, moral and emotional gap between ideal and actual tragedy, in addition to an important disagreement about the nature and goodness of death. For actual tragedy, death is the worst thing that can happen. In the Phaedo, death is presented as a kind of liberation from the body, but this conception of death reveals the insurmountable limitations on the attainment of knowledge that living embodiment entails. The problem is not with argument itself, but with our all-too-human grasp of it. This means that, because of our embodied finitude, we can never actually be certain that the arguments for Socrates’ optimistic picture of divine redemption really are sound. My interpretation highlights Socrates’ epistemic uncertainty and the role of hope, and it makes misology passage more central to the dialogue’s argument than usually recognized. In the end, I assess the dialogue in light of the constraints on ideal tragedy articulated in Chapter 4.

This chapter shows that the faculty of the will was presented as a ubiquitously dangerous facet of selfhood in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, when used to gratify selfish or sinful desires. ‘Punishing the Transgressive Will’ explains how this convention helped define how the limitations of human ambition and the boundaries of moral transgression were depicted. I do so primarily through a comparative analysis of the notorious acts of wilfulness performed in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Dr Faustus, and Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam. Enticing as it was dangerous, the capacity for the will to incite violence or disorder was commonly shown to be the primary cause of its own ruin. This literary topos is, however, importantly refuted in Cary’s play through the character of Salome. Among all of the excessively wilful characters who feature in Renaissance drama, Salome proves to be an exceptional type of Neo-Senecan villain whose will functions without limit: her will is not self-defeating, nor is she punished for exercising it. I propose that Salome’s fate can help to redefine our understanding of transgressive acts in Renaissance tragedies.

The modernist encounter with classical tragedy challenges received notions about tragic form and tragic sensibility: that it is incompatible with modernity (George Steiner) and that it is primarily a European/Eurocentric legacy. In engaging with classical Greek tragedy, modernist writers and theatre-makers (from T. S Eliot, W. B. Yeats, H. D., Ezra Pound, Edward Gordon Craig, and Isadora Duncan, to George Abyad, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, and the later postcolonial iterations of Wole Soyinka, Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona) create a set of relationships that radically rewrite ideas of influence and tradition and gesture towards an understanding of tragedy as a form of theatricality rather than as a play-text. This theatricality, read in conjunction with primitivism and orientalism, is not a quest for authenticity or for the lost humanism of the classics but helps to construct an experimental laboratory in translation, in performance, and in adaptation. From the Cambridge Ritualists to the later postcolonial readings, modernism helps to revision tragedy as part of world theatre.

One distinctive feature of the Peloponnesian War is the intimacy of its violence. The war is characterised by the sacking of cities, civil war and the impoverished existence of vulnerable communities living their lives as refugees in exile. In every other recorded conflict, this is a recipe that leads to high rates of sexual violence against women and children. Yet our historical sources are almost entirely silent about the occurrence of such abuse. This chapter explores the implications of the premise that there was a significant rate of unrecorded sexual violence during the Peloponnesian War. It details all the various circumstances in which such abuse was likely to occur and draws upon comparative material from other conflicts to show the strong likelihood of sexual violence. It also explores ways in which the topic of sexual abuse was addressed indirectly in art and drama through the metaphor of the sacking of Troy and the sexual violation of women in myth. The messages of these cultural products gain greater resonance and vitality when placed against a backdrop in which sexual violation is a regular occurrence as part of the nature of war.

This chapter discusses the increasing presence of antithesis, rather than aggregation, in fifth-century Greek historiography, tragedy and vase-painting. In certain key incidents and in narrative patterns in Herodotus and Attic tragedy, we find antithesis in the form of the unity of opposites and the reversal of an apparently stable situation. This reflects the influence of mystic initiation, Pythagorean thinking (in the case of Aeschylus), and, in a broader sense, the emergence of the polis, in which social oppositions are contained within a political unit. In fifth-century Attic vase-painting and sculptural groups, there is also a progressive shift from aggregation to antithesis, paralleling the pattern found in the newly emerging genres of historiography and tragedy. This too reflects the increasing prevalence of monetary exchange and interactions within the unified framework of the polis.

The first example of mechanical epiphany that the book sets forth is that of the well-known ‘god on the machine’ (deus ex machina) employed in the ancient Greek theatre. Moving beyond interpreting the theatrical crane as a plot device, this chapter forefronts the mēchanē’s material qualities to explore the theological potential of the object as a mode of visual epiphany. Vital to the success of this mode of epiphany was the challenge to the viewer to recognise divine intervention as well as the mechanics that constructed and enabled it. The evidence of Old Comedy, both fragmentary and the fuller plays of Aristophanes, help demonstrate how uses of the comic crane (kradē) undercut the interpretative symbiosis between man, machine, and divine agency on which tragedy was predicated. The chapter closes by exploring how the theatre as a form of mass media made it fertile ground for development and exploration of theological ideas, not just a reflection of literary norms.