The first detailed cultural and theatrical history of a major literary form, this landmark introduction examines Roman tragedy and its place at the centre of Rome’s cultural and political life. Analyzing the work of such names as Ennius, Pacuvius and Accius, as well as Seneca and his post-Neronian successors, Anthony J. Boyle delves into detailed discussion on every Roman tragedian whose work survives in substance today. Roman Tragedy examines: the history of Roman tragic techniques and conventions the history of generic form and change the debt that Rome owes to Greece, and text owes to text the birth, development and death of Roman tragedy in the context of the cities evolving, institutions, ideologies and political and social practices tragedy proper and the historical drama (fabula praetexta), which the Romans allied to tragedy. With parallel English translations of Latin quotations, this seminal work not only provides an invaluable resource for students of theatre, Roman political history and cultural history, but it is also accessible to all interested in the social dynamics of writing, spectacle, ideology and power.

Roman tragedies were written for over three hundred years, but only fragments remain of plays that predate the works of Seneca in the mid-first century C.E., making it difficult to define the role of tragedy in ancient Roman culture. Nevertheless, in this pioneering book, Mario Erasmo draws on all the available evidence to trace the evolution of Roman tragedy from the earliest tragedians to the dramatist Seneca and to explore the role played by Roman culture in shaping the perception of theatricality on and off the stage. Performing a philological analysis of texts informed by semiotic theory and audience reception, Erasmo pursues two main questions in this study: how does Roman tragedy become metatragedy, and how did off-stage theatricality come to compete with the theatre? Working chronologically, he looks at how plays began to incorporate a rhetoricized reality on stage, thus pointing to their own theatricality. And he shows how this theatricality, in turn, came to permeate society, so that real events such as the assassination of Julius Caesar took on theatrical overtones, while Pompey's theatre opening and the lavish spectacles of the emperor Nero deliberately blurred the lines between reality and theatre. Tragedy eventually declined as a force in Roman culture, Erasmo suggests, because off-stage reality became so theatrical that on-stage tragedy could no longer compete.

Until the Renaissance the centrality of Roman tragedy in Western society and culture was unchallenged. Studies on Roman Republican tragedy and on Imperial Roman tragedy by the contributors have been directing the gaze of scholarship back to Roman tragedy. This volume has two goals: first, to demonstrate that Republican tragedy had a far more central role in shaping Imperial tragedy than is currently thought, and quite possibly more important than Classical Greek tragedy. Second, the influence of other Roman literary genres on Roman tragedy is greater than has formerly been credited. Studies on von Kleist and Shelley, Eliot and Claus help reconstruct the ancient Roman stage by showing how moderns had thought to change it for contemporary aesthetics.

(Applause Books). A collection of eight plays along with accompanying critical essays. Includes: "The Oresteia" Aeschylus; "Prometheus Bound" Aeschylus; "Oedipus the King" Sophocles; "Antigone" Sophocles; "Medea" Euripides; "The Bakkhai" Euripides; "Oedipus" Seneca; "Medea" Seneca.

The "Eumenides", the concluding drama in Aeschylus' sole surviving trilogy, the "Oresteia", is not only one of the most admired Greek tragedies, but also one of the most controversial and contested, both to specialist scholars and public intellectuals. It stands at the crux of the controversies over the relationship between the fledgling democracy of Athens and the dramas it produced during the City Dionysia, and over the representation of women in the theatre and their implied status in Athenian society. The "Eumenides" enacts the trial of Agamemnon's son Orestes, who had been ordered under the threat of punishment by the god Apollo to murder his mother Clytemnestra, who had earlier killed Agamemnon.In the "Eumenides", Orestes, hounded by the Eumenides (Furies), travels first to Delphi to obtain ritual purgation of his mother's blood, and then, at Apollo's urging, to Athens to seek the help of Athena, who then decides herself that an impartial jury of Athenians should decide the matter. Aeschylus thus presents a drama that shows a growing awareness of the importance of free will in Athenian thought through the mythologized institution of the first jury trial.

The first detailed cultural and theatrical history of a major literary form, this landmark introduction examines Roman tragedy and its place at the centre of Rome’s cultural and political life. Analyzing the work of such names as Ennius, Pacuvius and Accius, as well as Seneca and his post-Neronian successors, Anthony J. Boyle delves into detailed discussion on every Roman tragedian whose work survives in substance today. Roman Tragedy examines: the history of Roman tragic techniques and conventions the history of generic form and change the debt that Rome owes to Greece, and text owes to text the birth, development and death of Roman tragedy in the context of the cities evolving, institutions, ideologies and political and social practices tragedy proper and the historical drama (fabula praetexta), which the Romans allied to tragedy. With parallel English translations of Latin quotations, this seminal work not only provides an invaluable resource for students of theatre, Roman political history and cultural history, but it is also accessible to all interested in the social dynamics of writing, spectacle, ideology and power.

Oedipus, king of Thebes, is one of the giant figures of ancient mythology. Through the centuries, his story has inspired works of epic poetry, lyric poetry, tragedy, opera, a gospel musical and more. The myth has been famously deployed in psychology by Sigmund Freud. It may not be too bold to claim that Oedipus is the name from Greco-Roman mythology best known beyond the academy at the present time, thanks to Freud's famous phrase 'the Oedipus complex'. The most famous version of the Oedipus myth from antiquity is the Greek play by Sophocles. But there is another version, the Latin drama by the Roman philosopher and politician Seneca. Seneca's version is an entirely different treatment from that of Sophocles and reflects concerns special to the author and his Roman audience in the first century AD. Moreover, the play actually exercised a much greater influence on European literature and thought than has usually been suspected. This book offers a compact and incisive study of the multi-faceted Oedipus myth, of Seneca as dramatist, of the distinctive characteristics of Seneca's play and of the most important aspects of the reception of the play in European drama and culture. The scope of the book ranges chronologically from Homer's treatment of Oedipus myth in the Odyssey down to a twenty-first century Senecan treatment by a Lebanese Canadian dramatist. No knowledge of Latin or other foreign languages is required.