Johanna Hanink

Scholars have disagreed about whether the Great Dionysia was celebrated in 404 bce, despite the grim circumstances in Athens on the eve of the city’s surrender to Sparta. This article reconsiders the problem and reviews the positive documentary evidence for the festival’s celebration. The
evidence indicates that the festival was indeed held, which speaks to the centrality of the Great Dionysia to Athenian civic life. The article then re-examines the conditions in Athens in the spring of 404, the practical consequences that these may have had for the festival, and the celebration of other festivals during times of war and crisis. Despite the evidence that the Great Dionysia was celebrated, the scale of its festivities must have been reduced. The first regular celebration after the war did not likely take place until 402/1, when the posthumous premiere of Sophocles’ Oidipous at Kolonos would have served partially as a symbolic proclamation that Athens’ great theatrical tradition would continue undiminished.

Fourth-century Athenian orators of epitaphioi logoi and other Athenian panegyric attempt to portray fifth-century tragedy as fundamentally encomiastic of Athens. This is borne out by the rhetorical reception of two ‘epitaphioi mythoi’, i.e. myths handled by both tragedians and orators: Erechtheus’ repulsion of Eumolpus’ invasion of Athens and Theseus’ efforts to secure the burial of the ‘Seven against Thebes’. The orators’ ‘encomiastic’ view of tragedy marks a new departure in Athenian intellectual history and should be read against the background of other attempts to curate the city’s tragic heritage in the third quarter of the fourth century.

In a recent article in Arethusa, J. Wise argues that the theory of tragedy put forth by Aristotle in the Poetics was one heavily distorted by his own experience of contemporary tragic performance. In this response I argue that, although the Poetics does provide evidence of fourth-century dramatic practice, Aristotle was far more aware of the arc of Athenian theater history than Wise’s article presupposes. I also suggest that the problem of the “missing” polis in Aristotle’s Poetics can be largely explained by the fact that by Aristotle’s own time, Athenian tragedy was the city’s most successful cultural export, a circumstance that opened the genre to analysis independent of the festal and political contexts that had given birth to it.

SGO I 01/01/07 is a highly refined 20-line elegiac epitaph from Cnidus which probably dates to the first century BC. Despite the poem's striking formal features and poetic qualities it has received almost no attention since its first publication by Sir Charles Newton in 1863. The first four sections of this article demonstrate that the inscription represents an important witness to certain epigraphic practices and epitaphic traditions, including those of inscribed dialogue and lament. The final section then presents a reading of the poem which centres on the competing poetics of consolation, memory and forgetfulness proposed by the epitaph's two speaking voices.

The earliest surviving poetic representation of Euripides, outside of comedy, appears in a piece of early third-century Alexandrian poetry and the picture it paints of the Athenian tragedian is in some ways a surprising one. In his ‘Catalogue of loves’, a terribly corrupt fragment from the third book of the Leontion, Hermesianax of Colophon introduces his lines on Euripides' doomed romantic infatuation with the affirmation that ‘even he’ (ϰἀϰεîνον), that notorious hater of women, was once ‘struck by the crooked bow’. Night did not relieve his suffering,While one of the themes Hermesianax' catalogue foregrounds is how lovesick poets of the past left home to pursue their beloveds abroad, the lines on Euripides are remarkable for their elision of this poet's native Attica.