Table of Contents

1. Introduction: the chorus in the middle Renaud Gagné and Marianne Hopman; 2. Choral polyphony and the ritual functions of tragic songs Claude Calame; 3. Chorus, conflict, closure in Aeschylus' Persians Marianne Hopman; 4. Choral intertemporality in the Oresteia Jonas Grethlein; 5. Choreography: the lyric voice of Sophoclean tragedy Simon Goldhill; 6. Conflicting identities in the Euripidean chorus Laura Swift; 7. The choral plot of Euripides' Helen Sheila Murnaghan; 8. Transcultural chorality: Iphigenia in Tauris and Athenian imperial economics Barbara Kowalzig; 9. Maenadism as self-referential chorality in Euripides' Bacchae Anton Bierl; 10. The Delian maidens and their relevance to choral mimesis in Classical drama Gregory Nagy; 11. Choral persuasions in Plato's Laws Lucia Prauscello; 12. The comic chorus and the demagogue Jeffrey Henderson; 13. Dancing letters: the Alphabetic Tragedy of Kallias Renaud Gagné; 14. Choral dialectics: Hölderlin and Hegel Joshua Billings; 15. Enter and exit the chorus: dance in Britain, 1880–1914 Fiona Macintosh; 16. 'The thorniest problem and the greatest opportunity': directors on directing the Greek chorus Peter Meineck.

Promotional Information

This book analyses how the choruses of Greek tragedy creatively combined media and discourses to generate their own specific forms of meaning.

About the Author

Renaud Gagné is a University Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College. His main research interests are early Greek poetry and Greek religion. He is a co-editor of Sacrifices humains. Perspectives croisées et représentations (2013) and the author of Ancestral Fault in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2013). Marianne Govers Hopman is Associate Professor of Classics and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University, Illinois, where she specialises in ancient Greek and Latin poetry and mythology. Her publications include articles on Homer, Greek tragedy, Greek hymns and Roman satire, and a book, Scylla: Myth, Metaphor, Paradox (2013).

Reviews

'Excellent … offers a sophisticated exploration of both the richness and the strangeness of the chorus as a phenomenon of ancient Greek culture.' The Times Literary Supplement

'… the elasticity of [its] approach allows the book to offer sixteen diverse but uniformly rich essays that show how the chorus is a mediating figure for scholarly interests as much as it was a figure of shifting meanings on the Athenian stage for its inventors, performers, and observers.' Sarah Nooter, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

'This excellent volume occupies a distinctive place within the growing body of scholarship on the Greek chorus. It will be of great interest to scholars working on Greek tragedy and on ancient performance culture more broadly.' Lauren Curtis, The Classical Journal