Book contents
- Ancient Theatre and Performance Culture around the Black Sea
- Frontispiece
- Ancient Theatre and Performance Culture around the Black Sea
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Map
- Part I Approaches
- Part II Places
- Part III Plays
- 11 Space, Place and the Metallurgical Imagination of the Prometheus Trilogy
- 12 Fragmentary Greek Tragedies Set in the Black Sea
- 13 Black Sea Back Story: Euripides’ Medea
- 14 Dare to Believe: Wonder, Trust and the Limitations of Human Cognition in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris
- 15 Visualising Euripides’ Tauric Temple of the Maiden Goddess
- Part IV Performative Presences
- Epilogue: Dancing around the Black Sea: Xenophon, Pseudo-Scymnus and Lucian’s Bacchants
- References
- Black Sea Index
15 - Visualising Euripides’ Tauric Temple of the Maiden Goddess
from Part III - Plays
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 November 2019
- Ancient Theatre and Performance Culture around the Black Sea
- Frontispiece
- Ancient Theatre and Performance Culture around the Black Sea
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Map
- Part I Approaches
- Part II Places
- Part III Plays
- 11 Space, Place and the Metallurgical Imagination of the Prometheus Trilogy
- 12 Fragmentary Greek Tragedies Set in the Black Sea
- 13 Black Sea Back Story: Euripides’ Medea
- 14 Dare to Believe: Wonder, Trust and the Limitations of Human Cognition in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris
- 15 Visualising Euripides’ Tauric Temple of the Maiden Goddess
- Part IV Performative Presences
- Epilogue: Dancing around the Black Sea: Xenophon, Pseudo-Scymnus and Lucian’s Bacchants
- References
- Black Sea Index
Summary
The Black Sea is the focus of a text by Lucian of Samosata, Toxaris: A Dialogue of Friendship, written in the second century AD. A Greek named Mnesippus converses with a Scythian named Toxaris (‘Archer’). Toxaris claims that the Scythians are better than Greeks at admiring exemplary heroes, and cites as illustration the Oresteion, a temple in Scythia to Orestes and Pylades. They are counted as honorary Scythians because of their unparalleled mutual loyalty (5–6). Their deeds are engraved on a bronze pillar, and they are honoured with sacrifices. Moreover, children in Toxaris’ country are obliged to commit the list of deeds (first dramatised in Euripides’ IT) to memory, and see the exploits of the Greeks in their country in ‘pictures by the artists of old’ hanging in the temple corridor (6).
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- Information
- Ancient Theatre and Performance Culture Around the Black Sea , pp. 305 - 328Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019