For some years past there has been a welcome change of emphasis towards the consideration of staging in books published on Greek tragedy; and yet with that change also a curious failure to be explicit about the central problem connected with all stagecraft, namely that of the acting-area. In this study two scholars with considerable experience of teaching classical drama in performance consider this problem of the acting-area in close relation to major scenes from two Greek tragedies, and suggest some general conclusions. The article must stand to some extent as a critique of the succession of books that has followed the apparently pioneering study of Oliver Taplin, none of which has made any substantial or sustained attempt to indicate where actors might have acted in the performance of Greek tragedy, though most, if not all, have been prepared to discard the concept of a raised ‘stage’ behind the orchestra.

Hippolytus (428 BC) is the earliest of the surviving plays of Euripides to involve three speaking actors in one scene. Both Alcestis (438 BC and Medea (431 BC almost certainly require three actors to be performed with any fluency, but surprisingly present their action largely through dialogue and confrontation — surprisingly, perhaps, because at least since 458 BC and the performance of the Oresteia it is clear that three actors were available to any playwright.

In May of 1868, less than two years after Gerard Manley Hopkins left the English Church to become a Roman Catholic and after eight months spent teaching at Newman's Oratory School in Birmingham, the classical scholar burned nearly all of his poetry; he called the act ‘the sacrifice of my innocents’. Austin Warren describes Hopkins as feeling caught through his life between conflicting desires to be a pdet and to be a saint. This strain and the anxieties it produced appear in his later poems, such as ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ and ‘Heaven Haven’, and in his journals and letters. In the latter he describes the emotional effect he wanted poems to have upon readers: some poems must, Hopkins asserted, ‘explode’ within the reader. Intensifying the psychological reaction of the readers of literature was one of Hopkins's aims when he created poetry, just as it was a goal when he wrote redactions of the speeches in Shakespeare's tragedies or when he chose from among variant readings for Greek drama. In September 1868, when he entered the priesthood as a Jesuit, Hopkins began a new life of personal intensity and, perhaps to his own surprise, a second poetic career. But a number of poems survived the destruction. One is his translation of Horace's Odes 3.1, the longer of the only two extant translations of complete Latin poems. As with A. E. Housman's sole surviving translation of a Latin ode, Horace's 4.7, this one reveals a profound identification with Horace, a subtle understanding of the original poem, and an intense revelation of the mind of the English writer during the period of translating. The emotional intensity, technical virtuosity and psychological richness of the translation make Hopkins's version of 3.1 a significant poem for scholars of English and classical poetry.

These words are as true today as when they were written by A. E. Taylor over fifty years ago. Despite some very important contributions to our understanding of the dialogue, it is precisely because the dramatic aspects have either been misinterpreted or, even worse, failed to draw attention that the misunderstandings have continued until today. And, of course, Taylor himself was one of the worst in this respect. Not only did he believe that the hiccough incident was intended merely to be amusing (a view shared by many); he even attributed no purpose to Aristophanes' speech other than to be entertaining.

These remarks are occasioned by the virtual neglect allotted to the dramatic action which is most important to our understanding of the dialogue, the scene which occurs at the beginning before any of the speeches are made. It is true that a few critics have sensed the significance of these episodes, and certainly the methodology of how to interpret dramatic action in Plato has been well understood; but the episode itself has never received a complete or proper interpretation.

This discussion is concerned with the structure of Sophocles' Ajax, in particular with the question of why, following the suicide of the hero, the dramatist makes Teucer engage in successive debates with Menelaus and Agamemnon over the fate of the corpse. The aim is certainly not just to dust the cobwebs off old talking points. Rather it is to use these (the talking points not the cobwebs) as a means of exploring different attitudes to Sophocles' supposed aims, methods and achievements as a dramatist, in order to work towards the adoption of a balanced critical position in this regard. Work by H.D.F. Kitto provides a special stimulus for the treatment of the broader issue, while the discussion of the double debate develops mainly in response to a recent article by Philip Holt.

English shame and German scham derive from the Gothic schama, ‘to hide, cover, conceal’. German Hemd (shirt) and English and French chemise are other derivatives. In some languages the word for ‘shame’ and the word for ‘wound’ are the same. A wound exposes and can thereby advertise vulnerabilty and a cause for shame. Hiding or covering may seek to guard against wounding, humiliating exposure.

Shame is self-evidently an important human emotion. Insofar as animals are innocent of shame, experience of it is a mark of humanity. Much human behaviour is influenced by fear of shame and embarrassment. Living in the face and eyes, shame is very close to the experienced self. Self-image and self-esteem are heavily determined by one's susceptibility to shame. Experience of shame is impossible without a sense of individuation, without a sense of discreteness from the world and of being an object in the eyes of another. Study of shame sensitivity therefore offers many clues to an individual's or a culture's behaviour, sense of identity and relationship to the environment.

In Propertius 4.5 the lena (‘procuress’) Acanthis gives advice to nostra arnica (‘my girlfriend’, 63), almost certainly Cynthia, to cultivate rich lovers and avoid the poet who offers only verses. For Georg Luck the purpose of Propertius' ‘caricature’ of Acanthis is a moralizing condemnation of Rome's decadent demi-monde. According to Judith Hallett, ‘Propertius and his ideals are vindicated’ when at the close of 4.5 ‘Acanthis dies penniless and unmourned.’ Gordon Williams remarks on the poem's ‘vividness and drama’, the active effort it demands of the reader, through ‘the gradual revelation of the lena's death and the realization that the poet is actually standing on her grave’. Margaret Hubbard rightly challenges the overly dramatic readings made by many scholars and insists that the point of the poem is not ‘a genre picture of a bawd’ but an expression of ‘the lover's reactions’, his fear of Acanthis' powers conveyed by the lines leading up to her speech (1-20) and his relishing of her death at the poem's close (63-78).

T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’

I invoke the much-abused Eliot because here, at least, I believe he is essentially correct, especially when we consider Propertius as an individual talent working within and furthering a tradition. For Propertius wrote during what was perhaps the greatest flowering of the lyric spirit in Europe (I use the term ‘lyric’ quite generally here), along with that quite different age of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Coleridge. Perhaps no other Latin poet had such an overt concern with his relationship to the tradition, past, present and future. Overlapping with late Vergil, early Ovid, and written after Homer, Hesiod, Callimachus and Catullus (to name but a few), it comes as little surprise that Propertius' work is fraught with allusions to and comments on other poets and poetry in general — especially his favorite poet, Callimachus. In this paper I will examine in particular poems 2.1, 2.34B and 3.1, where Propertius devotes considerable effort to the delineation of his thoughts on poetry and poets. I will argue that these poems form a group which presents a consistent and coherent argument which establishes Propertius in an elegiac and Alexandrian tradition.

As a pastoral prose romance, Longus' Daphnis and Chloe is something of an anomaly in a genre dominated for centuries by verse. Yet the work is quintessential pastoral, less because of its shepherd protagonists than because of the author's narrative strategy, with its mixing of genres and the cool distance it establishes between character and reader. Crucial in establishing this distance is the author's emphasis on the pastoral scene as artifact, a crafted work to be viewed and admired by the connoisseur.

The stress on artifact appears from the start. Rather than plunging his readers into the story or vouching for the veracity of what is to follow by presenting himself as an eyewitness or participant, Longus identifies himself, in a narrator's preface, as a sophisticated outsider, and informs his readers that what they are about to read is an extended ekphrasis, a literary description of a work of visual art:

The narrator's first words identify him as a hunter rather than a shepherd, no matter how literary. In fact he ranges himself alongside the urban gentlemen holiday-makers and hunters whom his readers will soon meet within the frame of the story (the Methymnean youths, the young master Astylos whose very name proclaims his urban identity — astu is the word for city) and whose aesthetic values they undoubtedly share.

No Greek of any calibre, at least in the fifth century, could remain intellectually or spiritually altogether unconditioned by a conscious feeling for, or awareness of, the tragic in human affairs. His poetry and his art, indeed his history, were saturated with the idea of the tragic. Thucydides is certainly no exception, and the most uninformed reader of his History will come away from the work with a keen sense of the immediately perceptible tragic coloration with which it is permeated. Interpreted from any leading, unifying thematic idea the explanation of Thucydides' work must include as central and dominant the tragic deterioration of Athens from the Periclean ideals so well expressed in the Funeral Oration, through the nadir of cynicism and moral decline of the Melian Dialogue, to the utter demoralization expressed through the catastrophe of the Sicilian campaign and its aftermath.

One has merely to examine the obvious and purposefully wrought antitheses throughout the History to determine the dramatic nature of Thucydides' work. The drastic metamorphosis in Athenian character that occurs between Books One and Five, for instance, points up such a tragic contrast. The Athenians of the first assembly at Sparta claim that they more than any others were the saviors of Hellas (1.74.2), fearless and self-sacrificing in the common cause of all allies, that they acted with sagacity of judgement (1.75.1), that the empire had not been acquired by force (1.75.2) but by necessity of circumstances, that they had been more observant of justice than actually required, the overwhelming balance of power being in their favor (1.76.3), that in the courts in Athens suits of allies are judged under the same laws (1.77.1). If we compare these same Athenians with the Athenians of the Melian Dialogue it becomes abundantly clear that a deterioration of character and moral standards has taken place and that Thucydides has linked the moral with the tragic. The earlier Athenians, in spite of their desire for imperial expansion, were at least concerned with a minimum of justice and fair play in their international dealings. The Athenians of the Melian Dialogue do not even make a pretence of upholding the commonly accepted nomoi which had from time immemorial been established among men to protect the weaker. Thucydides' strong editorial statements on the effects of anomia (‘lawlessness’) during and following the plague (2.52-53), and during the stasis on Corcyra (3.81ff.) also make firm the link between the moral and the tragic.