Poetics
Stageira, Macedonia
Ethics
Poetics
Introduction
Aristotle was much admired in the ancient world for the elegance and clarity of his style.
Unfortunately, the writings which earned him that esteem have not survived.
Notes (perhaps in many cases lecture notes)
in general the style is cryptic, condensed and elusive
Aristotle’s ideas on poetry
The three books On Poets
The six books of Homeric Problems
Except for scattered fragments quoted by other ancient authors these two works have been lost.
The Poetics itself does not seem to have been widely known in antiquity.
Since the Renaissance its influence on literary theorists and critics has been massive.
There have been, and still are, fundamental disagreements about the meaning even of key concepts like hamartia and katharsis.
The historic influence of the Poetics is one reason why it merits continues attention.
One reason that it may help us to a better understanding of Greek tragedy.
To be sure, Aristotle was not a direct contemporary of the great fifth-century tragedians whose plays have survived; and although he numbered later tragedians (such as Theodectes) among his acquaintances, tragedy in the fourth century was not the same as tragedy in the fifth – as Aristotle himself was aware.
It is widely accepted that he failed to appreciate fully the significance of the gods in fifth-century tragedy.
Another reason why the Poetics is worth studying closely is the quality of its thought.
Aristotle had an exceptionally penetrating an subtle intellect.
The challenge of trying to understand Aristotle’s thought.
This desire to understand.
- Human culture, poetry and the Poetics
‘All human beings by nature desire knowledge.’
This, the opening sentence of the Metaphysics.
Animals act by instinct
Humans are capable of acting from understanding
This is what Aristotle calls in Greek tekhne, the word is conventionally translated as ‘craft’, ‘skill’ or ‘art’, but Aristotle defines tekhne as a productive capacity informed by an understanding of its intrinsic rationale (cf. NIchomachean Ethics, 114oa2of.)
Aristotle’s example is mathematics
Ultimately philosophy emerged
Human beings produce, among other things, poems, and a production of poems too can be a tekhne; it is an activity with its own intrinsic rationale, and it can be rendered intelligible.
In chapter 8 he leaves open the question of whether Homer’s grasp of correct plot structure was due to tekhne or instinct.
Trial and error established a repertoire of first-rate tragic stories.
Poets must be able to project themselves into the emotions of others; natural talent, or even a touch of insanity, are necessary for this (55a30-4)
Moreover, metaphor (which Aristotle regards as the most important feature of poetic language) depends on the ability to perceive similarities; this he says, is a natural gift and cannot be taught (59a4 -8)
It is unrealistic to think of the Poetics as a do-it-yourself manual for would be poets. Aristotle’s interest is philosophical, that is, it is driven by his desire to understand.
His own appetite for understanding was omnivorous (he did pioneering work in – among other things – logic, physics, and metaphysics, biology, psychology, ethics and politics), and poetry was an important feature in the public culture of ancient Greek communities.
The Greeks habitually talked of the intense pleasure to be derived from poetry, and of the bewitching enchantment it could work.
The analogy implies a sophisticated observer
The expert’s naturalist pleasure
…An expert critic derives his or her appreciation of a painter’s skill.
The Poetics may enhance the pleasure we derive from a well-constructed play by helping us to understand why it is good.
- Imitation
Parts of Animals
Expert critics
The skillful depiction
The expertise
Recognition
Cognition
For Aristotle, in itself pleasurable (NIchomachean Ethics 1174b14-5a21)
He believes both painting and poetry to be forms of mimesis, a word which I shall translate as imitation
‘representation’
Aristotle’s conception of mimesis as similarity
He says, for example, that melody and rhythm can be likenesses and imitations of character and emotion (Politics, 134oa18-28, 38f.)
Mimesis
Such as the mimicry of animal noises and other sounds (Poetics, 47a20, cf. Plato, Republic, 397a, Lewis, 669c-d) and children’s play-acting (Poetics, 48b7f., cf. Politics, 1336a32-4).
Aristotle’s contention, then, is that human beings are by nature prone to engage in the creation of likenesses, and to respond to likenesses with pleasure, and he explains this instinct by reference to their innate desire for knowledge.
The pleasure which human beings take in rhythm and melody.
The evolution of poetic forms
Over time
Thus tragic poets
Trial and error
Clearly then, Aristotle saw the history of poetry as a social and not simply a natural, phenomenon.
The first is that poetry is better if it has a structured plot
The importance of a coherently structured plot is a crucial element in the Poetics
Aristotle’s second premise is that poetry is better if …its mode is dramatic rather than narrative
The Homeric poems
Improvisatory poetic forms in which a soloist led and responded to a chorus (49a9-14)
Chorus declined in importance
Plot-structure
Dramatic mode
The Poetics concentrates on tragedy, the most highly developed forms of poetry concerned with superior persons. Epic is given relatively brief treatment as a pendant to tragedy.
A full discussion of comedy is promised (49b21f.) but the promise is not fulfilled in the extant Poetics, this is one of several indications that the text we have is incomplete.
- The analysis of tragedy
The framework for the analysis of tragedy is set out in chapter 6.
A famous definition states what tragedy is…
Tragedy, like all poetry, is imitation
Plot
Performed by agents
Character and reasoning
To see what Aristotle means by these two terms, imagine that you have left me alone with your silver spoon…
A moral disposition
Reasoning
To use a phrase that recurs persistently throughout the Poetics, it is necessary or probable that I will steal the spoons if I am dishonest and think that I can get away with it.
Thus, character sets my agenda (what would I like to do?). and reasoning relates that agenda to a given situation (what is it feasible to do in these circumstances?)
Plot, character and reasoning relate to the object of tragic imitation.
Diction and lyric poetry.
Tragedy also includes spectacle
We must be cautious here. A tragedy is a poem, not a performance.
By purification (katharsis); here it is sufficient to note that tragedy aims to excite a response of pity and fear.
5. Plot: the basics
Chapters 7-14 are devoted almost entirely to an analysis of plot.
Complex plots
Superior to simple ones
The best kind of tragic plot
A fatum dictum: ‘a whole is that which has a beginning a middle and an end’.
An ordered structure
A connected series
A self-contained series
Closure
‘Bill strangled Ben’s cat. So Ben strangled Bill’s cat in retaliation.’
This is better:
We can now see how the two events… (p.XXIII introduction)
The minimum criteria
Consider Harold Pinter’s Betrayal
to take a classical example The Odyssey
after defining completeness, Aristotle moves on to magnitude.
A change from bad fortune to good fortune, or from good to bad.
Out of remorse (as it may be) for having strangled his rival’s cat.
Discussion of the best kind (or kinds) of tragic plot -chapters 13 and 14.
He is going to strangle another of Ben’s cats tomorrow.
Connected sequence of events.
Poetry ‘tends to express universals’
Poetic plots do not deal in generalizations
‘Bill got up this morning’
Orestes killed his mother; but it is not true that people kill their mothers, nor even that people like Orestes generally kill their mothers in such circumstances; such circumstances do not arise in general – that is one reason why Orestes’ situation is such a potent basis for tragedy.
Aeschylus’ Oresteia
To talk about universal structures is to talk about the things in which philosophy is interested. The universality of poetry therefore gives it something in common with philosophy.
While philosophy is concerned with universal truths, what lies behind an effective poetic plot may be universalization of a conventional falsehood…
‘Tragedy is not an imitation of persons, but of actions’ (50ai6f.).
6. Reversal and recognition
Astonishment (thaumaston in Greek) covers a range of related ideas: surprise, amazement, wonder)
A man called Mitys is murdered; later a statue of Mitys topples and kills his murderer.
As if fate…
Recognition (anagnorisis) is ‘a change from ignorance to knowledge’
Bad fortune: Oedipus’ world
Reversal (peripeteia)
7. the best kinds of tragic plot
The plot most effective in arousing pity and fear
Since pity and fear are responses to bad fortune, the change from good fortune to bad is rated more highly then the reverse.
The Poetics: error
Hamartia
Hamartia
If a bridge collapses with great loss of life because of an engineer’s negligent calculation, the moral aspect of this error is serious, but this does not necessarily mean that the engineer is a wicked person.
Since hamartia can take a variety of forms, the best kind of tragic plot is not narrowly prescribed.
8. the pleasure of tragedy
Pleasure of comedy (53a35f.).
Is complex and multi-layered
‘language made pleasurable’
With rhythm (and some parts) melody
Process of recognition and understanding
The next step brings us to a much-discussed, and probably insoluble problem: katharsis
Music
‘enthusiasm’, by which he means hysterical or ecstatic frenzy such as that associated with certain religious cults, like the cult of Dionysus.
His outlook differs from that of Plato, whose critique of poetry in Book 10 of the Republic is based in part on a profound suspicion of the emotions.
From an Aristotelian point of view any process that restores one to a natural or healthy state is pleasurable (Nichomachean Ethics, 1152b11 -20, 1154b17-19).
If a process is like healing, it applies to those who have most wrong with them
This conclusion runs counter to the widespread assumption that the reference to katharsis in the definition of tragedy in chapter 6 is meant to state the ‘final cause’ of tragedy
The natural inference is that the experience of tragic emotion is pleasurable in itself. This is a paradox, since pity and fear are forms of distress (Rhetoric, 1382a21, 1385b3.).
The sophist Gorgias had described the effects of poetry as ‘fearful’ shuddering, tearful pity and a yearning that is fond of grief’ (fragment 11.9).
Choice (proairesis)
Should not be morally bad unnecessarily
Menelaus in Euripede’s Orestes
‘Admirable’ (spoudaios)
Spoudaios
‘serious’
‘There is such a thing as a good woman and a good slave. Even though one of these is perhaps deficient and the other generally speaking inferior’ (54a20-22)
A good woman
Portrait-painters, he says, ‘paint people as they are, but make them better-looking’ (54b10f.).
Cromwell’s warts
Of the Rhetoric
10. tragedy: miscellaneous aspects
The Odyssey
A tragedy aims to excite pity and fear
Greek mythology
Oedipus
As ‘turning the story into episodes’ (55b1f.).
‘episodic’
Complication and resolution (in Greek desis and lusis, literally ‘tying’ and ‘untying’)
In Sophocles’ Oedipus
Aeschylus’ Persians
Euripides’ Medea
Aphrodite in Euripides’ Hippolytus
The role which Poseidon plays in the plot of the Odyssey (55b18)
11. Epic
An epic about the whole Trojan War
Homer
Self-contained part of the whole story of the Trojan war (the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon in the tenth year of the war.
The plot of the actual Odyssey concentrates on the last stage of Odysseus’ homecoming
The two Homeric epics: the Iliad is simple and based on suffering, the Odyssey is complex and based on character.
Mity’s murderer at the end of chapter 9 points in the same direction
Homer ‘taught’ other poets the right way to tell falsehoods (60a18f.).
Books 2 and 3 of Plato’s Republic
The fourth-century sophist Zoilus, earned the nickname ‘Homer’s Scourge’ (Homeromastix) for his nine books identifying the faults in Homer’s poems. The six books of Aristotle’s Homeric Problems collected discussions of such problem passages
Tekhne
If I am illustrating a zoology textbook, I ought to get the details of an animal’s anatomy right and resist the temptation to draw imaginary beasts, if I am painting pictures to hang in an art gallery, I can legitimately sacrifice strict zoological accuracy in the interests of the paintings balance or composition, and dragons and unicorns may be more piquant than warthogs.
Plato’s Laws
Sophocles’ Oedipus
12. Comedy
The brief account in chapter 5: ‘Comedy is…an imitation of inferior people’ (49a32f.)
‘the laughable is a species of what is disgraceful’ (49a33f.).
‘the laughable is an error or disgrace that does not involve pain or destruction’ (49a34f.).
Crates
‘The form of a lampoon’
Disjointed jokes or comic routines
Of continuity
Connectedness
13. Further reading
Stephen Halliwell’s ‘Aristotle’s Poetics (Duckworth 1986)
Elizabeth Belfiore’s ‘Tragic Pleasure: Aristotle on plot and emotion (Princeton, 1992)
Leon Golden’s ‘ Aristotle on tragic and Comic Mimesis’ (Scholar Press 1992)
Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics’, edited by A.O. Rorty (Princeton 1992)
J.L. Ackrill, ‘Aristotle the Philosopher’ (Oxford, 1981)
Jonathan Barnes, Aristotle (Oxford 1982)
W.K.C. Guthrie, Aristotle an Encounter, the sixth volume of Guthrie’s History of Greek Philosophy (Cambridge, 1981)
Jonathan Lear’s ‘Aristotle: the desire to understand’ (Cambridge, 1988)
D.A. Russell’s ‘Criticism in Antiquity’ (Duckworth), 1981)
The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 1: Classical Criticism, ed. George A. Kennedy (Cambridge, 1989)
14. Reference conventions
References to Aristotle’s other works are likewise given either by book and chapter, or by page, column and line in Bekker.
Notes to the Introduction
2. Aristotle was born in 384 BC in Stagira in Northern Greece
Plato’s Academy at the age of seventeen, and subsequently taught there.
Tutor to Alexander
His own philosophical school, the Lyceum
Aristotle
‘learning easily is naturally pleasant to all’.
Experts in the Poetics continue to produce radically diverse interpretations (for e.g. the books by Belfiore and Golden cited in S13)
Euripides’ ‘Iphegineia in Taurus’ which he cites as often as Sophocles’ Oedipus
Plato’s ‘Ion’ (535b-e.).
The Tractatus Coislinianus
Richard Janko
POETICS
Taking first principles first
2. Poetry as a Species of Imitation
Imitations
2.1 Medium
The mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and Socratic dialogue
Homer
Empedocles
Chaermon’s Centaur
2.2. Object
Compare painters: Polygnotus portrayed better people, Pauson worse people, Dionysus people similar to us.
Homer imitates better people, Cleophon people similar to us; Hegemon of Thasos, who invented parodies, or Nicochares, the author of the Deiliad, worse people
As Timotheus and Philoxenus did the Cyclopes
2.3 Mode
Either using a different persona, as in Homer’s poetry
Medium, object and mode
Sophocles
Aristophanes
The term ‘drama’
The Dorians lay claim to tragedy and comedy. The Megarians lay claim to comedy
Poet Epicharmus
Chionides and Magnes
Peloponnesians
Athenians call them demoi
Comedians were so-called not from the revel or komos, but because they toured the villages when expelled from the town in disgrace
- THE ANTHROPOLOGY AND HISTORY OF POETRY
3.1. Origins
The universal pleasure in imitations
This is so-and-so
3.2 Early history
…with Homer we can do so (e.g. his Margites and similar poems)
Iliad and Odyssey
3.3 Tragedy
One to two by Aeschylus
Sophocles
- Comedy
Among Athenian poets it was Crates
3.5 Epic
4. TRAGEDY: DEFINITION AND ANALYSIS
4.1 Definition
Hexameter verse
Magnitude
Pity and fear
Rhythm and melody
4.2. Component parts
The spectacle
Lyric poetry and diction
Plot
Character
Reasoning
4.3 The primacy of plot
Among painters
The relation between Zeuxis and Polygnotus
4.4 The ranking completed
Of painting
‘diction’
Verbal expression
- PLOT: BASIC CONCEPTS
5.1. Completeness
Complete
A certain magnitude
A beginning, a middle and an end
5.2 Magnitude
Magnitude
5.3. Unity
The Odyssey
5.4 Determinate Structure
5.5 Universality
Herodotus
Poetry tends to express universals, and history particulars
The particular is the actions or experiences of (e.g.) Alcibiades
Lampoonists
Agathon’s Antheus
5.6 Defective plots
6. PLOT: SPECIES AND COMPONENTS
6.1 Astonishment
The statue of Mitys in Argos killed the man who was responsible for Mity’s death by falling on top of it as he was looking at it
Complex
6.3 Reversal
Oedipus
The Lynceus
6.4 Recognition
Recognition
Oedipus
E.g. Iphigeneia is recognized by Orestes
6.5 Suffering
6.6. Quantitative parts of tragedy
7.THE BEST KINDS OF TRAGIC PLOTS
7.1 First introduction
7.2 First deduction
The change to bad fortune which he undergoes is not due to any moral defect or depravity, but to an error of some kind. He is one of those people who are held in great esteem and enjoy great good fortune, like Oedipus. Thyestes, and distinguished men from that kind of family.
Alcemon, Oedipus, Orestes, Meleager, Thyestes, Telephus
Those who criticize Euripides
A double structure like the Odyssey
In comedy even people who are the bitterest enemies in the story like Orestes and Aegisthus, go off reconciled in the end, and no one gets killed by anybody.
7.3 Second introduction
Oedipus
7.4 Second deduction
Clytemnestra’s death at Orestes’ hands, or Eriphyle’s at Alcmeon’s
How Euripides portrayed Medea killing her children
Sophocles’ Oedipus
Astydamas’ Alcmeon or Telegonus in the Odysseus Wounded
e.g. Haemon and Creon in the Antigone
in the Cresphontes Merope is on the verge of killing her son…
Iphigeneia
The Helle
8. Other Aspects of Tragedy
8.1 Character
Goodness
p.24
Appropriateness
Likeness
Consistency
Menelaus in the Orestes
Odysseus’s lament in the Scylla and Melanippe’s speech
Om Sophocles’ Oedipus
Good portrait-painters
Homer portrayed Achilles as both a good man and a paradigm of obstinacy.
8.2
Such as Carcinus used in his Thyestes
The use of the boat in Tyro
Orestes in the Iphigenia
The ‘voice of the shuttle’ om Sophocles’ Tereus.
Dicaeogenes’ Cyprians, where he sees the painting and bursts into tears, and in the tale told to Alcinous , where Odysseus listens to the lyre player, is reminded of his past and weeps; recognition results in both cases these are perhaps deficient and the other generally speaking inferior.
Choephori
Theodectes’ Tydeus
The Sons of Phineus
In Odysseus the False Messenger
Inference
8.3 Visualizing the action
Carcinus
Amphiarus
8.4 Outlines and episodization
The Odyssey
Poseidon
8.5. Complication and resolution
Every tragedy consists of a complication and a resolution
8.6 Kinds of tragedy
Tragedy of suffering (e.g. plays about Ajax or Ixion; tragedy of character (e.g. Women of Pythia and Peleus); and fourth, simple tragedy (e.g. Daughter of Phorcys, Prometheus, and plays set in the in underworld).
Contrasting and comparing tragedies
8.7 Tragedy and epic
A Sack of Troy as a whole, and not presented piecemeal like Euripides, or a Niobe and not like Aeschylus, has either failed or done badly in the competition; even Agathon failed in this one respect.
8.8 Astonishment
When someone who is clever but bad (like Sisyphus)
As Agathon said, it is probable for many improbable things to happen.
8.9 The chorus
Euripides
Sophocles
Agathon
9. DICTION
9.1. Introduction
p.31
rhetoric
e.g. pity, fear, anger, etc.
in the points Protagoras criticized
9.2 basic concepts
A verb
An utterance
e.g. Cleon
e.g. The Iliad
‘human being’ is a single utterance
Signifying a single object
9.3 Classification of nouns
e.g. most of those from Marseilles, such as ‘Hermocaicoxanthus’
sigunon is current among the Cypriots
a metaphor is the application of a noun which properly applies to something else. The transfer may be from genus to species, from species to genus, from species to species, or by analogy.
‘Odysseus has in truth performed ten thousand noble deeds’
A cup stands in similar relation to Dionysus as a shield does to Ares; so one may call a cup the ‘shield of Dionysus’ or a shield the ‘cup of Ares’
So one may speak of evening as the old age of the day (as Empedocles does)
‘sowing the god-created fire’
e.g. one might call a shield not ‘ the cup of Ares’ but ‘the wineless cup’.
A coined noun
‘sproutage’ for horns and ‘invocator’ for priest
For Peliedou, ‘of Peleus’ son’
9.4 Qualities of poetic style
As can be seen from the poetry of Cleophon, and that of Sthenelus
‘I saw a man welding bronze upon a man with fire’ and such like.
Gibberish
Homer
The elder Eucleides
Epic poetry
Aeschylus and Euripides
Aeschylus wrote, in his Philoctetes, ‘the canker that eats up my foot’s flesh’, Euripides substituted ‘feasts’ for ‘eats up’.
Ariphrades
‘Achilles round about’ for ‘around Achilles’
10. EPIC
10.1. Plot
The naval engagement of Salamis and the battle against the Carthaginians in Sicily occurred simultaneously without in any way tending towards the same end.
Homer’s brilliance
The other poets write
e.g. the poet of the Cypria and the Little Iliad.
The Iliad and the Odyssey
e.g. Adjudication of Arms, Neoptolemus, Eurypylus, Spartan Women, Sack of Troy, Putting to Sea; also Sinon and Trojan Women.
10.2 Kinds and parts of epic
Homer
Iliad is simple and based on suffering, the Odyssey is complex…and based on character.
In addition he everyone in diction and reasoning
10.3 Differences between tragedy and epic
10.4 Quasi-dramatic epic
Homer
None of them are characterless: they have character
10.5 Astonishment and irrationalities
The irrational (which is the most important source of astonishment
Achilles
A implies the existence or occurrence of B
In the bath-scene
Like Oedipus’ ignorance of the manner of Laius’ death and not in the play itself (like the report of the Pythian Games in the Eleatics, or the man who comes from Tegea to Mysia without speaking of the Mysians)
In Odysseus’ being put ashore in the Odyssey.
10.6 Diction
11. PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS
11..1 Principles
(i) the poet is engaged in imitation, just like a painter
(iii) in addition, correctness is not the same thing in ethics and poetry, nor in any other art and poetry
11.2 Applications
The art of poetry itself
The pursuit of Hector
e.g. Sophocles
Euripides
Perhaps Xenophanes was right
The Illyrians
Since Cretans call facial beauty ‘beauty of appearance’
The Trojan plain
As in the Hippias of Thasos
Empedocles: at once mortal things were born that before were immortal, and things unmixed, formerly mixed’.
Ganymede is said to pour wine for Zeus
Of what Glaucon describes
In the case of Icarus
11.3 Conclusion
…impossible for people to be as Zeuxis painted them
As Euripides fails to use Aegeus or of the wickedness (as that of Menelaus in the Orestes)
Impossible, irrational, harmful, contradictory, or contrary to correctness in the art
12. COMPARITIVE EVALUATION OF EPIC AND TRAGEDY
12.1 the case against tragedy
The Scylla
Mynniscus used to call Callipides ‘monkey’ because of his excesses, and Pindarus was viewed in much the same way
Like Sosistratus
Callipides
The women they imitate are not respectable
Tragedy has everything that epic does
Sophocles’ Oedipus
The Iliad
A unified plot
The Iliad and the Odyssey
So tragedy surpasses epic in all these respects, and also in artistic respects
Clearly then, because it achieves its purpose more effectively than epic, tragedy must be superior.
13. CONCLUSION
So much for tragedy and epic, the number and variety of their forms and component parts, the causes of their success and failure, and criticism and solutions
NOTES TO TRANSLATION
For imitation (mimesis)
The dithyramb was a kind of lyric poetry performed by a chorus
Pipe (aulus) and lyre (kithara) were the two most common forms of Greek wind and string instruments
Pan-pipes (syrinx)
Plato, Republic, 397a, Laws, 669c-d
Sophron and his son Xenarchus
Plato
Xenophon
The fifth-century philosopher Empedocles expounded his theories of nature in hexameter verse
He is cited several times in the Poetics
Centaur
Rhapsody
The dithyramb was a kind of choral lyric
All fifth century painters
Polygnotus
Pauson’s work
Polygnotus
Philoxemus of Cythera
Plato’s Republic
Unlike Aristotle, Plato regarded the dramatic mode with disfavour
Plato
Rhetoric
The Margites
A burlesque
Satyr-plays were mythological burlesques with a chorus of satyrs (idle, drunken and lascivious followers of Dionysus, with a mixture of human and animal features
Iambiv verse
Rhetoric
The blinded Oedipus
An Athenian dramatic festival
The earliest official comical competition in Athens was 486 B.C.
Katharisis: see Introduction S8
Zeuxis
Statesmanship
Rhetoric (1417a16-28)
p.52
water-clock
as a young man Odysseus was wounded by a boar during a hunt, later he tried to avoid joining the Greek expedition against Troy by pretending to be insane.
30. for Aristotle’s view of history cf. 59a21-9
Agathon was a prominent Athenian tragic poet of the late fifth century (Plato’s Symposium)
His Antheus is otherwise unknown
Demosthenes
Oedipus’ parricide and incest
Lynceus, by Aristotle’s friend Theodectes
Philia
Euripides Iphigeneia in Taurus
Euripides
Euripides’ Medea punishes the infidelity of her husband Jason by killing their children
The distraught Haemon tries to stab his father Creon, and then in remorse kills himself
The monster Scylla
In Euripides’ Iphigeniea in Aulis, Iphigeniea’s first reaction on learning that she is tp be sacrificed to Artemis to secure the Greek army’s passage to Troy is to plead for her life (1211-52), but later she patriotically embraces her fate (1368-1401)
Euripides’ Medea
The ‘earth-born’ were the men who sprang from the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus
Arisrophanes
Danaus ordered his daughters to kill their husbands
The Sack of Troy
Euripides’ Trojan Women and Hecuba
The Hermus, Caicus and Xanthus are all rivers in the region of Phocaea
Marseilles
Sophocles’ Electra
129. Xenophanes, a poet and philosopher
Iliad
Odyssey
Glaucon is unknown
Zeuxis
Euripides’ Medea
Timotheus’ Scylla
Xenophon, Symposium, 3.11
In respectable women
Homer’s poetry A fortiori
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