The Singularity of the Tragic Day

2025-07-01

Abstract No other genre of literature is so closely identified with a specific span of time as classical Athenian tragedy is with the single day. The confinement of the tragic plot to this brief period can be variously attributed to tragedy’s formal concision; to its reflection of contemporary political and legal institutions that involved swift and consequential decision-making; and to its vision of human life as subject to sudden, transformative changes of fortune. By the late fifth century, the single decisive day was so closely identified with tragedy that it served as a signature for the genre, as can be seen in paratragic moments in comedy. Tragedy itself also subjected this definitive feature to complication and critique, whether to acknowledge the artificiality of the tragic plot; or to reveal continuities of character or situation that resist temporal disruption; or to give some glimpse of a perspective that transcends the limits of human understanding and dramatise the stories of exceptional individuals who themselves transcend normal human limits. The human conception of individual days as distinct and momentous is enlarged and qualified by a divine perspective according to which all days are the same. Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Euripides’ Medea both include characters who mistakenly believe that they can impose a one-day exception on their own and others’ inherent natures. Sophocles in particular exposes the myopia of the human inclination to privilege the single day. In Oedipus at Colonus, he looks back at his own Oedipus the King and re-evaluates the revelations and reversals of that one-day plot in relation to the full trajectory of Oedipus’ life. In Ajax, he uses the plot motif of a single day of danger to question the assumption that the meaning of a human life is necessarily fixed at the point of death.

Taming the Extraordinary: Shifting Motives and the Psychology of Tragic Actors

2025-05-19

Voices of Recovery in Josephine Balmer’s The Paths of Survival

2025-01-01

Book 3

2025-11-20

Abstract Book 3 describes the first of two visits that make up the “Telemachy,” the story of Telemachus’s quest for information about his father and his introduction to his father’s world of aristocratic heroes who fought at Troy. During a two-day stay with Nestor at Pylos, Telemachus experiences a well-functioning community, outstanding for its piety and hospitality. With the guidance of Athena, he develops the courage to speak up and is recognized as resembling his father. He is welcomed into Nestor’s household and acquires Nestor’s son Peisistratus as his companion for the next stage of his journey. Nestor is unable to give Telemachus the information he requests about Odysseus’s fate and sends him on to Menelaus, but his account of the Achaeans’ departure from Troy up until the point when he and Odysseus parted company fills in some of the backstory to the Odyssey, and the information he supplies about the disastrous homecoming of Agamemnon points to possible models for Telemachus in the figures of Orestes and Menelaus. Through Nestor’s narrative, which resembles a poetic performance, the poet incorporates and acknowledges other traditional material, much of which constituted the so-called “Epic Cycle,” while also subordinating it to the Odyssey’s own priorities.

Reading the Mind of Ajax

2023-06-01

Abstract This chapter focuses on Sophocles’ Ajax to show how tragedy dramatizes the utility of mindreading as one model for the human capacity to envision the thoughts, intentions, and emotions of others. As an especially cerebral and self-conscious form of social cognition, mindreading is required and rewarded by the baffling, unforeseen, and disruptive events that typically occur within a tragic plot. An especially challenging event in Ajax is a powerful, eloquent, and enigmatic speech, in which the hero Ajax seemingly renounces a previously announced intention of killing himself, and which is in turn seemingly contradicted when he in fact goes on to kill himself. Sophocles gives no clear insight into the motivation behind this speech, which is difficult to interpret through conventional models of literary characterization, but he does provide a portrait of Ajax’ friends and supporters applying their mind-reading skills to make sense of it, drawing in particular on the folk-psychological concept of change of mind. At the same time, Sophocles makes it clear that these acts of proficient mindreading reflect not only the capacities but also the limitations of human cognition: the concept of change represents humans’ experience of their ephemeral, unstable existence in a universe ruled by unchanging gods.

(J.R.) MARCH (ed.) Sophocles: <i>Oedipus Tyrannus</i>. Text, Translation, and Commentary (Aris &amp; Phillips Classical Texts). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020. Pp. viii + 314. £95. 9781789622546.

The Journal of Hellenic Studies · 2023-05-29

(J.R.) MARCH (ed.) Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrannus. Text, Translation, and Commentary (Aris &amp; Phillips Classical Texts). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020. Pp. viii + 314. £95. 9781789622546. - Volume 143

Race, Recovery, and Hope

TAPA · 2022-09-01

Race, Recovery, and Hope Shelley P. Haley and Sheila (Bridget) Murnaghan keywords archives, Baltimore, Helen Maria Chesnutt, John Wesley Gilbert, race, racism, William Sanders Scarborough 1. BACKGROUND TO THE PRESIDENTIAL PANEL OF SHEILA (BRIDGET) MURNAGHAN (2020) AND OF SHELLEY P. HALEY (2021) two incidents, one of racial profiling and another—in the most charitable of readings—of racially inflammatory speech, occurred during the sesquicentennial meeting of the Society of Classical Studies in January 2019. Those two incidents became central to shaping the leadership going forward. They spurred Haley to stand for election as President-Elect via petition and once elected, to work with Bridget Murnaghan (President, 2020) on consecutive presidential panels focusing on race and the APA/SCS. Furthermore, both Bridget and Shelley presented their panels under the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic and its variants. The disproportionate effect the pandemic has had on Black and Brown communities made our topic even more salient. 2. WILLIAM SANDERS SCARBOROUGH AND BLACK CLASSICISM AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (BRIDGET MURNAGHAN) This pair of presidential panels had its origins in discussions among the SCS Board of Directors about how best to acknowledge the shameful incident in 1909 when the APA—as the SCS was then known—met in Baltimore, and William Sanders Scarborough, an eminent Classicist and the President of Wilberforce University, was disinvited from the conference banquet and [End Page 295] therefore chose not to attend the conference or deliver his scheduled paper. This happened because, as the chair of the local arrangements committee put it, "The Hotel Belvedere will not undertake to serve a dinner at which members of your race might be present." The SCS board wanted to do more than issue a belated apology. We needed a way of responding that would have intellectual substance and would give serious consideration to what was lost when colleagues like Scarborough were excluded from full participation in our profession and—until far too recently—from the institutional memory of our discipline. Our sense of urgency about this was reinforced by the incidents of the 2019 annual meeting in San Diego, which ruled out any easy assumption that, more than a century after that Baltimore incident, race was no longer a bar to full acceptance in Classical Studies. When Shelley Haley became the SCS President-Elect, she and I decided that we would devote both of our presidential panels to this project. The first of the two, entitled "William Sanders Scarborough and Black Classicism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," took its bearings quite closely from that 1909 incident. It was especially meaningful for me personally because I grew up in Baltimore, in a cityscape still dominated in one of its central sections by the towering presence of the Belvedere Hotel, and I remain attached to my hometown, with its volatile history and complicated cultural geography. I was pleased that I was able to recruit a diverse group of speakers who were mostly not SCS regulars. These included: Michele Valerie Ronnick, Professor of Classics at Wayne State University, a leading expert on Scarborough himself and the editor of his autobiography and collected papers, as well as an energetic pioneer in raising awareness of the rich tradition of Black classicism; Andre Davis, one of Baltimore's foremost Black civic leaders, with a distinguished legal career as a private practitioner, US Attorney, law professor, federal judge, and Baltimore City Solicitor; John W. I. Lee, a historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the author of a new book The First Black Archeologist: A Life of John Wesley Gilbert on Scarborough's contemporary, the first Black member of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens; and Ashley Hairston, Associate Dean for Academic Advising and University Professor at Wake Forest University, the author of a groundbreaking study of African American classical reception The Ebony Column: Classics, Civilization, and the African American Reclamation of the West. Given the origins of the panel, it was fitting that Andre ended his presentation by reading Countee Cullen's 1925 poem "Incident." This brief lyric evokes the experience of being a carefree boy in "old Baltimore" until being attacked with the most vicious of...

New Hope for Old Stories: Yiyun Li’s Gilgamesh and Ali Smith’s Antigone

2021 · 3 citations

• Art
• Literature
• Ancient history

Myth may be a source of hope for children and young adults, but children may themselves be envisioned as myth’s best hope: fresh readers whose engagement with stories grants those stories continuing life. This hope is at the heart of the “Save the Story” series, in which noted authors rewrite literary works for children. Two books in the series retell ancient myths: Yiyun Li’s The Story of Gilgamesh and Ali Smith’s The Story of Antigone. Both writers produce stories they hope will help their readers grow into admirable adults. Li recasts Gilgamesh as a child, his journey glossed as progress towards adult understanding; Smith uses animal intermediaries and flashes of irreverence to temper a story she presents as terrible yet nourishing. Their hope is that readers will so value stories that have made them who they are that they will in turn perpetuate those stories, keeping them safe from oblivion.

Old News

TAPA · 2021-01-01

Old News Sheila Murnaghan most of the conversations i have had in the last few weeks have included some reference to 2020 as the year that everyone was glad to leave behind. Speaking for myself, 2020 has certainly been a strange year in which to be President of the Society for Classical Studies, but that has not been a wholly negative experience. I feel lucky to have had this vantage point from which to observe the resilience, perseverance, and good will with which members of our profession have confronted the past year's many waves of bad news: the pandemic with its immediate losses and far-reaching assaults on the field of education, and the unending series of insistent, cumulative reminders, crystallized for many by the killing of George Floyd, that we live in a society shaped by systemic racism. Before turning to my somewhat more academically focused main topic, I would like, therefore, to take note of what I have been privileged to witness. I have in mind especially, of course, the far-sightedness and adaptability of the SCS's over-stretched and dedicated staff. Before I myself had any idea what was hitting us, our executive director Helen Cullyer had drawn up a fullscale contingency plan for how our operation could be kept going remotely and online, which she and her colleagues then implemented with impressive efficiency. Helen saw and seized the opportunity to apply for an NEH grant designed to preserve humanities jobs, which has significantly mitigated the financial damage to the SCS of these hard times. Cherane Ali, working closely with our Vice President for Program Cynthia Damon, redirected her meeting planning skills to the organization of a completely different kind of event, the highly successful virtual gathering which we have all been experiencing over the last few days. Erik Shell, who directs our placement service, has risen to the challenge of a year in which very little placement is happening at all with [End Page 239] an innovative series of career development webinars. And those are only a few of the ways in which the three of them have pivoted to handle unforeseen developments. The extraordinary efforts of the SCS staff have been echoed throughout the Classical Studies community, with many people devoting large amounts of time and energy to the transition to remote teaching. Particular recognition is owed to the K-12 teachers who have been delivering a fulltime curriculum to students whose access to broadband internet is especially variable, while dealing with a host of other issues. The stresses of this moment have also been especially severe for graduate students, international students, contingent faculty, and those at early stages of their careers. SCS was pleased to join with the Women's Classical Caucus (WCC) in establishing the Covid-19 Relief Fund, also supported by CANE, CAAS, and CAMWS, which provides immediate micro-grants to classicists, particularly graduate students and contingent faculty, who are experiencing precarity as a result of the pandemic. Heartfelt thanks to all of you who have contributed to the sum of just over $100,000 which has been raised so far, through which we have been able to make a small but meaningful difference for many of our colleagues. This need will be ongoing, and it is vitally important that those who are in a position to support this initiative continue to do so. The effects of the pandemic on college and university budgets have also made this a busy and taxing year for the Classics Advisory Service, an important arm of the SCS that does not always get as much recognition as it deserves, partly because its most effective work is done behind the scenes. We owe a big debt of gratitude to Jeff Henderson, the current director of the CAS, a rather misleading title, since this is essentially a one-person operation. Jeff has been my valued ghost-writer this year, drafting too many letters of concern addressed to administrators enacting or contemplating the elimination or diminution of programs in classics. But those letters, which tend to arrive late in the game, are only one especially visible sign of what the CAS does, and Jeff has devoted much...

Our Mythical Hope. The Ancient Myths as Medicine for the Hardships of Life in Children’s and Young Adults’ Culture

2021 · 17 citations

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Aesthetics

Classical Antiquity is a particularly important field in terms of “Hope studies” […]. For centuries, the ancient tradition, and classical mythology in particular, has been a common reference point for whole hosts of creators of culture, across many parts of the world, and with the new media and globalization only increasing its impact. Thus, in our research at this stage, we have decided to study how the authors of literary and audiovisual texts for youth make use of the ancient myths to support their young protagonists (and readers or viewers) in crucial moments of their existence, on their road into adulthood, and in those dark hours when it seems that life is about to shatter and fade away. However, if Hope is summoned in time, the crisis can be overcome and the protagonist grows stronger, with a powerful uplifting message for the public. […] Owing to this, we get a chance to remain true to our ideas, to keep faith in our dreams, and, when the decisive moment comes, to choose not hatred but love, not darkness but light. Katarzyna Marciniak, University of Warsaw, From the introductory chapter