This chapter introduces the human as a question. It revolves around the figure of the Theban Sphinx and her interaction with Oedipus and traces her presence from the ancient world into the works of Sigmund Freud. The chapter invokes the Sphinx as a presence that both prompts and challenges the way we think the human. Oedipus’ troubled humanity stands at the intersection between his success in solving the Sphinx’s riddle and his apparent failure to understand how her words apply to his own existence. As such, the Sphinx’ intervention at Thebes exposes a deep-seated vulnerability at the core of the human condition – a vulnerability springing from the fact that while the riddle can be solved with the powers of reasoning, the human as a riddle remains enigmatic and beyond the application of logos.

Heidegger, in the 1946 essay Letter on Humanism, famously remarks that the tragic dramas of Sophocles are in some sense superior to the philosophical ethics of Aristotle in their ability to “preserve” the site of human dwelling in language. This chapter first offers a reading of Aristotle’s Ethics, suggesting in what sense they might be deficient, from Heidegger’s perspective. Next, Heidegger’s reading of Sophocles’ Antigone in the 1942 lecture course Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” provides our focus, and we find there a poetization of the site of human dwelling, as opened up by a play between homeliness and unhomeliness, familiar order and uncanniness, presencing and absencing. Thirdly and finally, we ask precisely how Sophocles’ poetizing manages to preserve this dynamic play and, moving beyond Heidegger, we suggest that Antigone herself, as she moves through the plot of Sophocles’ play, eventually and dramatically models how humans properly inhabit this site as such, in her questioning way of thinking and in her hesitating way of taking action.

Similes in Apollonius’ Argonautica tell two contrasting tales. On the one hand, humans with skilled expertise can exert an exhilarating amount of control over the world around them. The power of knowledge reflects the contemporary culture of Hellenistic Alexandria where new forms of knowledge were sprouting up everywhere. But such skills are largely useless for women, and they fail in the face of human passions. While characters in the simile world of the Argonautica use strategy to overcome danger in a way that is largely out of reach in the Homeric simile world, similes also highlight the intractable power of erotic desire as powerful and deadly as the battlefield of the Iliad. The Argonautica represents the first post-Homeric chapter in the story of epic similes. Simile structures take on a range and variety that previously was found only in the content of the similes. These new forms bring forward simile features that are peripheral in Homeric to reshape the epic genre in ways that reflect the ideas of the Hellenistic period. At moments of powerful emotion in the Argonautica, similes weave “erudition” and “emotion” inextricably together.

The Moschopoulean comments on Sophocles are among the many materials for the teaching of high-register Medieval Greek that emerged from the well-regarded school of Maximos Planoudes and Manuel Moschopoulos in Constantinople between the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries. The aim of this contribution is to explore this complex material, examining what its focus was and what this can tell us about Medieval Greek education in the late Middle Ages. This chapter takes as a case study the Moschopoulean scholia on Sophocles’ Electra. Previously unpublished passages from its prologue are here edited and discussed.

The use of the present tense to refer to the past in scenic narrative, that is, narrative passages where discourse time comes close to story time, depends on the pretense that the past events are being currently re-enacted. This pretense is facilitated by a mimetic style of narrating: the narrative is construed in such a way that the activity of processing the narrative is similar to the processing of actual experience. This is achieved in three ways. First, by narrating events that are concrete and appeal to our sensorimotor faculties. Second, by depicting the narrative events through gesture, direct speech representation, sound symbolism, and other means. Third, by using simple grammar to mimic the immediacy of actual experience. Moreover, the present tense is more likely to be used when the narrated events are high in communicative dynamism, which means that they are particularly newsworthy or important for the development of the discourse.

This chapter explores in particular the 'greek presence' in the small organon, as manifested in the form of greek tragedy and/or its theorist aristotle. This is embedded within a broader analysis of this key work as a fundamenal contribution to theatre theory. New archival material in the form of brecht's type-written inserts into his personal copy of aristotle's 'poetics' is published for the first time and discussed in detail.

The significance of the model book, which developed out of the 1948 production of the antigone, far exceeds its immediate context. Like the production which it is based on, it is an exemplary case study for brecht's novel kind of theatre in its dramaturgical, actorial and directorial dimensons. The diverging format of the two editions of the model book and their significance are discussed. The chapter concludes with a plea for re-inventing the model book format.

An integrative concluding exploration of the book's key themes and insights which is also designed to function as a stand-alone piece.

Key themes of this book are introduced. This includes brecht's position relative to the western dramatic tradition, the structure of this book and the range of brecht's exposure to (greek) tragedy. The notions of genealogy and analogue are introduced. The chapter concludes with a case study, brecht's use of masks.

This chapter is a detailed analysis of brecht's 'the antigone of sophocles' and its first production (directed by brecht himself) in chur (switzerland) in 1948. Ruth beralau's set of colour photographs, which is published here for the first time in its entirety, is fully integrated into the analysis. The play's reception history is also considered.

Deceit plays a major role in Sophocles’ Electra, the subject of Chapter 3. As I will argue, the messenger scene at the core of this play blends together deception and aesthetic illusion – the lie of the paedagogus about Orestes’ death relies on a highly immersive narration to be analysed from an embodied and enactive perspective. It would be more than bold to envisage Electra as inspired by Gorgias fr. 23 DK; what Sophocles’ play does is show that the association of deception and aesthetic illusion pinpointed by Gorgias was somehow in the air and could be exploited to great dramatic effect. I will also suggest that Electra features reflections on aesthetic illusion that contain the seeds of the later rhetorical category of enargeia.

In this chapter, the reception of Greek tragedy in Hellenistic poetry is studied in connection with intertextuality, which is here considered a specific form of reception by which later authors recognize the importance and relevance of earlier texts by alluding to them. There is a particular focus on the fragmentary plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. It shows that Callimachus, Apollonius and Theocritus used many Greek plays that are now lost. They referred to the plays’ plots or subjects, with an apparent preference for plays with Trojan, Argonautic and Argive myths, but also alluded to striking tragic imagery. Issues to which the allusions draw attention include literary criticism, generic matters, aspects of the mythological tradition and Ptolemaic ideology. All this suggests that the Alexandrian poets were familiar with the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, particularly, but not exclusively those which were of thematic interest for their own poetry. Clearly the plays which were not included in the later canon of tragedies were still an object of active reception and consulted with eagerness in the Hellenistic period.

Ostensibly a translation of Sophocles' Antigone, Anne Carson's Antigonick (2012) is in fact a genre-bending, hybrid construct which defies boundaries. It is a crossbreed between translation, adaptation, and rewriting, as well as between text and image. It incorporates a great variety of discourse types and literary or paraliterary genres, and amalgamates hand-inked blocks of text with original colour drawings (by Bianca Stone). This 'transtextual palimpsest' engages in a fascinating dialogue not only with Sophocles' Antigone but also with its translators and commentators, as well as with authors as disparate as Hegel, Beckett, Brecht, Butler, and Irigaray. At times provocative, stirring, funny, and often all of the above, Carson's Antigonick asks us to push the boundaries of genre, textuality, and visuality towards a new synthesis, which may capture something of the unity of speech, visuality, music, and movement that Greek drama managed to achieve.

This chapter is an overview of the ways in which Seamus Heaney engages with Greek and Latin mythologies and literatures in his work, from Death of a Naturalist (1966) to Aeneid VI (2016), and from allusions to more sustained forms of intertexuality, including versions. First discussing classical presences in his early poetry, the chapter shows how Heaney became increasingly interested in Greek and Latin literatures after the late 1980s, at a time of personal and political crises in Northern Ireland. It explains that, in those years, classical texts helped him address family deaths as well as contemporary violence in the North. Finally, it argues that in his rewritings of Sophocles, and in his classical poetry, mostly inspired by Virgil, Heaney ultimately revisits Ireland as a classical and secular space, reflecting social and cultural changes on the island, in the context of the Northern Irish peace process, as well as of globalisation.