Ancient Greek drama from Aeschylus to Menander: poetry, spectacle and plot

‘Drama’ is a loan word in English: the word drama means ‘action’ in the original Ancient Greek, and this arguably reveals the importance of action to drama. An Ancient Greek play, after all, is basically a script, and even though we mainly read them today we are never left to doubt that this poetry was designed for performance.

This course will survey in a roughly chronological manner what little (sadly) remains of Ancient Greek drama in its two main extant forms, tragedy and comedy. We will start with the three great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, then look at the comedies of Aristophanes and Menander. Beyond understanding the form and content of drama, however, we will need to contextualize this poetry within some other major poetic traditions in Ancient Greece, such as epic and lyric, and we will need to appreciate the larger function of myth in Ancient Greek society. Yet these plays were not performed in the abstract: far from it, they bear witness to some of the most important cultural revolutions in western history, such as the invention of democracy and philosophy: how do such changes resonate in these plays? What about contemporary history? Aeschylus, for instance, fought at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC and there is hardly a page of Aristophanes that does not seek to mock some figure of authority. But even the apolitical Menander needs to read against the changed circumstances of a new Hellenistic world order.