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Euripidean Tragedy and Theology
Mastronarde, Donald J.
UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2002)
This article discusses aspects of the representation of gods in the tragedies of the ancient Athenian playwright Euripides (5th cent. BCE). A first section considers difficulties of method arising from the nature of Greek religion and from the special characteristics of gods as represented in Greek poetry containing stories of the age of heroes. The second section argues for the importance of analyzing the dialectic of hope and despair in the human characters of the drama, with detailed discussion of Iphigenia in Tauris, Ion, and Orestes. The third section studies the spectrum of possibilities regarding the inference by an audience of the operations of the gods in the background. The examples of Medea and Hecuba receive detailed treatment. A fourth section briefly presents some ancillary conclusions. An appendix lists examples of possible actions of unseen gods in the tragedies of Euripides.
Actors on High: The Skene Roof, the Crane, and the Gods in Attic Drama
Classical Papers (1990)
Postprint of article "Actors on High: The Skene Roof, the Crane, and the Gods in Attic Drama" published in Classical Antiquity, volume 9, October 1990, pages 247-94, copyright 1990 by the Regents of the University of California.
Discussion of the probable form of the roof as acting space in the fifth-century Theater of Dionysos in Athens, arguing for flat roof with no regular second story or superstructure above the one-story skene building; means of access to the roof by ladder or trapdoor or the theater crane; use of roof as acting space for human characters, gods, and ghosts; significance of spatial separation of human characters and divine characters and of the distinctiveness of divine locomotion. Appendix 1 lists uses of roof and crane and testimonia about the crane. Appendix 2 argues that crane had the form of a pivoted counterweighted beam (or shadouf) and offers speculation about its dimensions and operations.
Contact and Discontinuity: Some Conventions of Speech and Action on the Greek Tragic Stage
Other Recent Work (1979)
A digital version of University of California Publications: Classical Studies, Volume 21 (1979).
An investigation of the conventions governing the relation between the spoken words of the Greek tragic texts and the probable actions of the characters, with detailed attention to the characters' awareness (aural and visual) of their surroundings and of others present, and to the conventional, stylistic, and psychological factors that may signal reduced awareness and loss of "contact." This work also features a rhetorical analysis of many types of questions, study of roundabout and skewed responses to questions, and study of the delayed execution or ignoring of commands. The interpretations and textual readings of dozens of passages in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are discussed.
The digital version (prepared May 2008) was produced by scanning and careful proofreading, including re-entry of the Greek in Unicode, so that the text is completely searchable.
Review of David Kovacs' Euripidea (Euripidean testimonia and textual criticism)
Review discussion of a collection of ancient indirect evidence for the life and artistry of Euripides, with comments on text and translation of the citations, together with discussion of some textually difficult passages in Euripides' Cyclops, Alcestis, and Medea.
Digitized Images of the Lost Servius Manuscript Metz 292 (revised)
This document explains the set of images of a manuscript destroyed in WW II that have been placed in open access on Shared Shelf Comments. A group of 175 images was made available in early 2016. In May 2018, 106 additional images were made available, and this revised version of the document takes account of the additions and provides other updates to the documentation.
Preliminary Studies on the Scholia to Euripides
California Classical Studies (2017)
This work presents five studies that are parerga to the online edition of Euripidean scholia (EuripidesScholia.org), for which the release of a much more complete sample covering Orestes 1–500 is planned for 2018. The first chapter reviews the achievements and shortcomings of previous editions of Euripidean scholia and argues for a more comprehensive treatment of this and similar corpora of scholia and for the importance of glosses. It assesses the few surviving traces in the scholia of views attributed to philologists and commentators working from Hellenistic times to early Byzantium. The second chapter illuminates a genre of annotation termed here "teachers' scholia," prominent in many of the younger manuscripts, but also present to a small degree in the oldest witnesses. Evidence for the teaching of Ioannes Tzetzes related to Euripides is gathered more completely than previously, as is that for Maximus Planudes. The third chapter offers an edition and commentary on a miscellany of teachers' notes on Hecuba first attested in 1287 but clearly copied from an older source, and treats some other unusual notes related to Hecuba carried in Palaeologan sources. The connection of this material with middle Byzantine sources (especially Tzetzes and Eustathius) is assessed. The fourth chapter marshals the evidence for the dating of the Marcianus graecus 471 (M) in the 11th (and not the 12th) century and provides palaeographic and codicological details. The fifth chapter argues that any possibly Planudean connections to Vaticanus graecus 909 (V) are to be found only in the cursive notes added more than a generation after the codex was produced (probably ca. 1250–1280, as proposed by Nigel Wilson). The hands of the two scribes who worked in tandem on V are described, and the distribution of their work documented.
Digitized Images of the Lost Servius Manuscript Metz 292
The 9th-century manuscript Metz 292 (Metz, France, Bibliothèque municipale) of Servius' commentaries on the poems of Vergil was destroyed in World War II. Photographs taken in the 1930s for the Harvard Servius Project are the only surviving evidence for this important manuscript of Servius.
This short document provides background information for the placing of digitized versions of the photographs in the open-access Shared Shelf Commons (ArtStor) and the URL for access.
Euripides Scholia: Scholia on Orestes 1–500
This book has been produced for the purpose of digital preservation of the content of the author's site EuripidesScholia.org. That site provides for download of the source files as well as for the variable display of the content for which the online project was conceived, and it wil also contain revisions and corrections not present in this version.
This book was created in August and September 2020 based on the files used in Release 1.02 of the online edition (all of the full version of the edition, and most of the content of the informational pages).
This edition of the scholia on the plays of Euripides is conceived as an open-ended repository of the ancient and medieval annotations in Greek found in the papyri and medieval manuscripts. It aims for a comprehensiveness that is impossible in orthodox printed editions of scholia, and is meant to serve purposes beyond giving classicists access to the material that is believed to be most reflective of ancient commentaries in the Hellenistic and early Roman imperial period.
Review Article: Euripides' Heracles
A discussion of the commentary on Euripides' tragedy "Heracles" by Godfrey W. Bond (Oxford 1981), including comments and suggestions on dramatic interpretation, imagery, staging, style, meter, and textual choices.
August W. Schlegel, Comparaison entre la Phèdre de Racine et celle d'Euripide: a digital edition
August W. Schlegel published his essay "Comparaison entre la Phèdre de Racine et celle d'Euripide" in Paris in 1807 and included a very slightly revised version in his Essais littéraires et historiques in 1842, but these publications are not widely available and are not included in German editions of Schlegel's works. The "Comparaison" makes detailed comments on Jean Racine's Phèdre of 1677 and Euripides' Hippolytus of 428 BCE (Racine's major source, although he also drew on Seneca's Phaedra and other classical sources), and is an interesting document in the reception of Euripides and of Racine as well as useful evidence of the development of tragic theory in the German neoclassical and romantic traditions.
This digital edition presents the text of the 1842 edition (with critical notes recording the variants of the 1807 version) with introduction, glossary of proper names, and annotations (many identifying quotations and allusions made by Schlegel without bibliographic reference), as well as some paragraphs from the preface to the 1842 book that comment on the circumstances of original publication.
A subsequent version or versions of this digital edition will contain a more extensive introduction and an English translation of Schlegel's essay.