Revenge in Attic and Later Tragedy.

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Overall very good and clean. - Moderns tend to view the drama of ancient Athens as a presentation of social or moral problems, as if ancient drama showed the same realism seen on the present-day stage. Because it was a state theater, the Attic stage is also supposed to have offered lessons in the peaceable virtues that the city required. Such views are belied by the plays themselves, in which supremely violent actions occur in a legendary time and place distinct both from reality and from the ethics of ordinary life. On the stage, gods and men breach their discrete realms and meet. Characters at once magnificent and helpless perform outsized and impossible deeds, and resist or fit themselves into a pattern determined by more powerful nonhuman forces. Events depicted in such mythic dramas are by definition distorted and extreme because the infinite supernatural cannot break into a finite creation without disrupting the order of the everyday human world. Dionysus, the patron god of Attic theater, ruled not over civic virtue but over its opposite: excess and disruption. We who live among tired and demystified political institutions are afraid that individuals unrestrained by the influence of the community may resort to crime and violence. Yet in an Attic vengeance play, a treacherous �criminal� triumphs over a victim. How could the city of Athens show its citizens Medea�s murder of her children? Orestes� killing of his mother? Anne Burnett reveals a larger reality in these ancient plays, comparing them to later drama and finding in them forgotten and powerful meaning. - Anne Pippin Burnett is Professor of Classics, Emerita, at the University of Chicago. Her previous books include Catastrophe Survived: Euripides� Plays of Mixed Reversal; Three Archaic Poets: Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho; and The Art of Bacchylides. ISBN 9780520210967