Wilson Emily (ed.) A Cultural History of Tragedy in Antiquity

Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. — 232 p.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.Emily Wilson is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. She is the author of The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca (2014). She was the Classics editor, third edition of the Norton Anthology of World Literature (2012), and translator of Six Tragedies of Seneca (2010). She is also the author of The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (2007), and Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton (2004), which won the Charles Bernheimer Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, 2003.