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Naomi Weiss

Harvard University, Classics, Faculty Member

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Much of my research has focused on the performance and representation of music and dance in archaic and classical Greece, particularly in tragedy, on which I have published multiple articles. My first book, The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater (University of California Press, 2018) takes a new approach to the study of the classical Greek theater by exploring the dramatic function of mousikē (music, song, dance) in the plays of Euripides. My co-edited volume, Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2021; edited with Lauren Curtis), explores music’s role in discourses of cultural memory, communication, and commemoration in ancient Greek and Roman societies.

I have also co-edited Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models (Brill, 2019; edited with Margaret Foster and Leslie Kurke), which foregrounds innovative approaches to the question of genre, what it means, and how to think about it for ancient Greek poetry and performance.

My second monograph, Seeing Theater in Classical Athens (University of California Press, forthcoming 2023), examines how ancient Greek theater shapes its audiences as viewers -- how tragedy, comedy, and satyr play construct the phenomenological experience of their audiences, and how this experience is restaged and appropriated in other media.

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Papers by Naomi Weiss

Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models

Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models, 2020

Ancient GreekChoreia

A Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Music

Speaking Sights and Seen Sounds in Aeschylean Tragedy

Performing the Wedding Song in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis

Paths of Song, 2018

The Choral Architecture of Pindar’s Eighth Paean

summary: This paper argues that the interplay between the narrative and performance of Pindar’s e... more summary: This paper argues that the interplay between the narrative and performance of Pindar’s eighth paean embeds it within the physical environment of Delphi, at the site of the Alcmaeonid temple for which it was composed. The use of choreographic and musical images to describe the temple’s mythical predecessors merges with the chorus’s own choreia, which thus has a doubling effect, visually and acoustically overlaying the Alcmaeonid temple with these older structures in a complex interaction of real and imagined space.

Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds

In Greek mythology, the Muses are Memory's daughters. Their genealogy suggests a deep connect... more In Greek mythology, the Muses are Memory's daughters. Their genealogy suggests a deep connection between music and memory in Graeco-Roman culture, but how was this connection understood and experienced by ancient authors, artists, performers, and audiences? How is music remembered and how does it memorialize in a world before recording technology, where sound accumulated differently than it does today? This volume explores music's role in the discourses of cultural memory, communication, and commemoration in ancient Greek and Roman societies. It reveals the many and varied ways in which musical memory formed a fundamental part of social, cultural, ritual, and political life in ancient Greek- and Latin-speaking communities, from classical Athens to Ptolemaic Alexandria and ancient Rome. Drawing on the contributors' interdisciplinary expertise in art history, philology, performance studies, history, and ethnomusicology, eleven original chapters and the editors' Introdu...

Performance, Memory, and Affect

Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds, 2021

Generic Hybridity in Athenian Tragedy

Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models, 2019

Tragic form in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

Classical Receptions Journal, 2021

This article examines Kamila Shamsie’s adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone in Home Fire (2017), a n... more This article examines Kamila Shamsie’s adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone in Home Fire (2017), a novel focused on Muslim identity, Islamophobia, and citizenship rights in contemporary Britain. It demonstrates that this novel is a multimedia work full of theatrical traces: a literary archive that preserves the dramatic quality of Sophocles’ play but also encompasses multiple other forms of media and performance, from theatre and television to social media. The article focuses not so much on how Shamsie has adapted the plot of Antigone but on her reworking of tragedy’s formal features or structures, such as dialogue, the chorus, and the messenger speech. In this polyphonic novel, such multimedia theatricality facilitates something that Greek tragedy itself produces: a contestation of multiple voices for audiences to hear, critique, and put against their own. Shamsie’s manipulation of tragic form thus contributes to Home Fire’s political import.

Classical Antiquity, 2020

This paper explores the construction of dramatic space in the prologues of classical Greek drama.... more This paper explores the construction of dramatic space in the prologues of classical Greek drama. Drawing from theater scholarship on the phenomenology of space, I show how tragedians and comedians alike experimented with how to shape their audience’s understanding of a play’s setting. I focus on opening scenes in plays by Sophocles and Aristophanes where a character sees with and for the audience, and demonstrate how these moments of staged spectatorship are not necessarily straightforward or seamless; they can facilitate the viewing of dramatic space but also, by laying it bare, reveal its complications. Sometimes there are multiple representational possibilities for physical space within and around the theater; sometimes physical and fictional space are to be seen simultaneously; sometimes the representational gap between physical and fictional space is kept open for a surprisingly long time. Such exposure of the process of theatrical representation, I argue, can draw the audienc...

Forms and Media

A Cultural History Of Tragedy in Antiquity, 2020

The genre of tragedy thrived and developed in Athens, in the fifth century BCE. But tragedy was a... more The genre of tragedy thrived and developed in Athens, in the fifth century BCE. But tragedy was also created and performed outside Athens in non-democratic Greek cities, and tragedies continued to be created, performed and re-performed in much later periods of Greek and Roman antiquity. The pieces of this long and complex history are often studied in isolation from one another. In this volume, tragedy in antiquity is examined synoptically, from its misty origins in archaic Greece, through its central position in the civic life of ancient Athens and its performances across the Greek-speaking world, to its new and very different instantiations in Republican and Imperial Roman contexts. Lively, original essays by eminent scholars trace the shifting dramatic forms, performance environments and social meanings of tragedy as it was repeatedly reinvented. Tragedy was consistently seen as the most serious of all dramatic genres; these essays trace a sequence of different visions of what the...

Hearing the Syrinx in Euripidean Tragedy

Oxford Scholarship Online, 2018

References to the syrinx are mostly absent from extant tragedy until the late fifth century BC, w... more References to the syrinx are mostly absent from extant tragedy until the late fifth century BC, when the instrument suddenly starts appearing in Euripides’ plays, especially in the choral odes. This chapter demonstrates that the syrinx is almost always mentioned alongside the aulos, the double pipe that accompanied dramatic choreia, or in such a way that the aulos is strongly suggested, so that the one instrument is meant to be heard as the other. Such instrumental mimesis in Euripides’ tragedies does more than just show off his own skill and engagement with contemporary musical trends and discourse: it is also always used for a particular dramatic effect, thus providing evidence of his increasing experimentation towards the end of his career with the role(s) music could play within a tragedy.

Music of Tragedy

University of California Press, 2018

The Music of Tragedy offers a new approach to the study of classical Greek theater by examining t... more The Music of Tragedy offers a new approach to the study of classical Greek theater by examining the use of musical language, imagery, and performance in the late work of Euripides. Drawing on the ancient conception of mousikē, in which words, song, dance, and instrumental accompaniment were closely linked, Naomi Weiss emphasizes the interplay of performance and imagination—the connection between the chorus’s own live singing and dancing in the theater and the images of music-making that frequently appear in their songs. Through detailed readings of four plays, she argues that the mousikē referred to and imagined in these plays is central to the progression of the dramatic action and to ancient audiences’ experiences of tragedy itself. She situates Euripides’s experimentation with the dramaturgical effects of mousikē within a broader cultural context, and in doing so, she shows how he both continues the practices of his tragic predecessors and also departs from them, reinventing trad...

Tracing Timbre in Ancient Greece

The Oxford Handbook of Timbre, 2018

This chapter investigates the timbral world of ancient Greece through a close analysis of particu... more This chapter investigates the timbral world of ancient Greece through a close analysis of particular types of sonic language in a selection of poetry and prose treatises, from Homeric epic to fifth-century BCE tragedy to the treatises of Aristotle and his school. By trying to locate this elusive category within accounts of music-making and sound more generally, it demonstrates not just the rich vocabulary for conveying different elements of an acoustic experience in the ancient Greek world, but the cultural valences of specific terms and images. In particular, the chapter shows how frequently the various auditory qualities that we might—however anachronistically—associate with timbre are as much social constructions as physical properties.

Noise, Music, Speech: The Representation of Lament in Greek Tragedy

American Journal of Philology, 2017

The Antiphonal Ending Of Euripides’Iphigenia in Aulis(1475–1532)

Classical Philology, 2014

Performance, Memory, and Affect Animal Choruses in Attic Vase Painting

Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds, edited by Lauren Curtis and Naomi Weiss, 2021

by Naomi Weiss and Lauren Curtis

Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds, edited by Lauren Curtis and Naomi Weiss, 2021

by Naomi Weiss and Leslie Kurke

Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models, 2019

Speaking Sights and Seen Sounds in Aeschylean Tragedy

The Materialities of Greek Tragedy: Objects and Affect in Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, edited by Mario Telò and Melissa Mueller, 2018

Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models

Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models, 2020

Ancient GreekChoreia

A Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Music

Speaking Sights and Seen Sounds in Aeschylean Tragedy

Performing the Wedding Song in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis

Paths of Song, 2018

The Choral Architecture of Pindar’s Eighth Paean

summary: This paper argues that the interplay between the narrative and performance of Pindar’s e... more summary: This paper argues that the interplay between the narrative and performance of Pindar’s eighth paean embeds it within the physical environment of Delphi, at the site of the Alcmaeonid temple for which it was composed. The use of choreographic and musical images to describe the temple’s mythical predecessors merges with the chorus’s own choreia, which thus has a doubling effect, visually and acoustically overlaying the Alcmaeonid temple with these older structures in a complex interaction of real and imagined space.

Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds

In Greek mythology, the Muses are Memory's daughters. Their genealogy suggests a deep connect... more In Greek mythology, the Muses are Memory's daughters. Their genealogy suggests a deep connection between music and memory in Graeco-Roman culture, but how was this connection understood and experienced by ancient authors, artists, performers, and audiences? How is music remembered and how does it memorialize in a world before recording technology, where sound accumulated differently than it does today? This volume explores music's role in the discourses of cultural memory, communication, and commemoration in ancient Greek and Roman societies. It reveals the many and varied ways in which musical memory formed a fundamental part of social, cultural, ritual, and political life in ancient Greek- and Latin-speaking communities, from classical Athens to Ptolemaic Alexandria and ancient Rome. Drawing on the contributors' interdisciplinary expertise in art history, philology, performance studies, history, and ethnomusicology, eleven original chapters and the editors' Introdu...

Performance, Memory, and Affect

Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds, 2021

Generic Hybridity in Athenian Tragedy

Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models, 2019

Tragic form in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

Classical Receptions Journal, 2021

This article examines Kamila Shamsie’s adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone in Home Fire (2017), a n... more This article examines Kamila Shamsie’s adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone in Home Fire (2017), a novel focused on Muslim identity, Islamophobia, and citizenship rights in contemporary Britain. It demonstrates that this novel is a multimedia work full of theatrical traces: a literary archive that preserves the dramatic quality of Sophocles’ play but also encompasses multiple other forms of media and performance, from theatre and television to social media. The article focuses not so much on how Shamsie has adapted the plot of Antigone but on her reworking of tragedy’s formal features or structures, such as dialogue, the chorus, and the messenger speech. In this polyphonic novel, such multimedia theatricality facilitates something that Greek tragedy itself produces: a contestation of multiple voices for audiences to hear, critique, and put against their own. Shamsie’s manipulation of tragic form thus contributes to Home Fire’s political import.

Classical Antiquity, 2020

This paper explores the construction of dramatic space in the prologues of classical Greek drama.... more This paper explores the construction of dramatic space in the prologues of classical Greek drama. Drawing from theater scholarship on the phenomenology of space, I show how tragedians and comedians alike experimented with how to shape their audience’s understanding of a play’s setting. I focus on opening scenes in plays by Sophocles and Aristophanes where a character sees with and for the audience, and demonstrate how these moments of staged spectatorship are not necessarily straightforward or seamless; they can facilitate the viewing of dramatic space but also, by laying it bare, reveal its complications. Sometimes there are multiple representational possibilities for physical space within and around the theater; sometimes physical and fictional space are to be seen simultaneously; sometimes the representational gap between physical and fictional space is kept open for a surprisingly long time. Such exposure of the process of theatrical representation, I argue, can draw the audienc...

Forms and Media

A Cultural History Of Tragedy in Antiquity, 2020

The genre of tragedy thrived and developed in Athens, in the fifth century BCE. But tragedy was a... more The genre of tragedy thrived and developed in Athens, in the fifth century BCE. But tragedy was also created and performed outside Athens in non-democratic Greek cities, and tragedies continued to be created, performed and re-performed in much later periods of Greek and Roman antiquity. The pieces of this long and complex history are often studied in isolation from one another. In this volume, tragedy in antiquity is examined synoptically, from its misty origins in archaic Greece, through its central position in the civic life of ancient Athens and its performances across the Greek-speaking world, to its new and very different instantiations in Republican and Imperial Roman contexts. Lively, original essays by eminent scholars trace the shifting dramatic forms, performance environments and social meanings of tragedy as it was repeatedly reinvented. Tragedy was consistently seen as the most serious of all dramatic genres; these essays trace a sequence of different visions of what the...

Hearing the Syrinx in Euripidean Tragedy

Oxford Scholarship Online, 2018

References to the syrinx are mostly absent from extant tragedy until the late fifth century BC, w... more References to the syrinx are mostly absent from extant tragedy until the late fifth century BC, when the instrument suddenly starts appearing in Euripides’ plays, especially in the choral odes. This chapter demonstrates that the syrinx is almost always mentioned alongside the aulos, the double pipe that accompanied dramatic choreia, or in such a way that the aulos is strongly suggested, so that the one instrument is meant to be heard as the other. Such instrumental mimesis in Euripides’ tragedies does more than just show off his own skill and engagement with contemporary musical trends and discourse: it is also always used for a particular dramatic effect, thus providing evidence of his increasing experimentation towards the end of his career with the role(s) music could play within a tragedy.

Music of Tragedy

University of California Press, 2018

The Music of Tragedy offers a new approach to the study of classical Greek theater by examining t... more The Music of Tragedy offers a new approach to the study of classical Greek theater by examining the use of musical language, imagery, and performance in the late work of Euripides. Drawing on the ancient conception of mousikē, in which words, song, dance, and instrumental accompaniment were closely linked, Naomi Weiss emphasizes the interplay of performance and imagination—the connection between the chorus’s own live singing and dancing in the theater and the images of music-making that frequently appear in their songs. Through detailed readings of four plays, she argues that the mousikē referred to and imagined in these plays is central to the progression of the dramatic action and to ancient audiences’ experiences of tragedy itself. She situates Euripides’s experimentation with the dramaturgical effects of mousikē within a broader cultural context, and in doing so, she shows how he both continues the practices of his tragic predecessors and also departs from them, reinventing trad...

Tracing Timbre in Ancient Greece

The Oxford Handbook of Timbre, 2018

This chapter investigates the timbral world of ancient Greece through a close analysis of particu... more This chapter investigates the timbral world of ancient Greece through a close analysis of particular types of sonic language in a selection of poetry and prose treatises, from Homeric epic to fifth-century BCE tragedy to the treatises of Aristotle and his school. By trying to locate this elusive category within accounts of music-making and sound more generally, it demonstrates not just the rich vocabulary for conveying different elements of an acoustic experience in the ancient Greek world, but the cultural valences of specific terms and images. In particular, the chapter shows how frequently the various auditory qualities that we might—however anachronistically—associate with timbre are as much social constructions as physical properties.

Noise, Music, Speech: The Representation of Lament in Greek Tragedy

American Journal of Philology, 2017

The Antiphonal Ending Of Euripides’Iphigenia in Aulis(1475–1532)

Classical Philology, 2014

Performance, Memory, and Affect Animal Choruses in Attic Vase Painting

Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds, edited by Lauren Curtis and Naomi Weiss, 2021

by Naomi Weiss and Lauren Curtis

Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds, edited by Lauren Curtis and Naomi Weiss, 2021

by Naomi Weiss and Leslie Kurke

Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models, 2019

Speaking Sights and Seen Sounds in Aeschylean Tragedy

The Materialities of Greek Tragedy: Objects and Affect in Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, edited by Mario Telò and Melissa Mueller, 2018

Review of S. Nooter, The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus

Bryn Mawr Classical Review , 2018

Review of Mossman, J. 2011. Euripides. Medea. Warminster.

Classical Review, 2016

Review of Hanink, J. 2014. Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy. Cambridge.

Classical Philology, 2016

Review of Gagné, R. and Hopman, M.G. (edd.), Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy. Cambridge 2013.

Classical Review 65.1, Apr 2015

Seeing Theater: The Phenomenologies of Classical Greek Drama

Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models

by Margaret Foster, Leslie Kurke, and Naomi Weiss

Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry foregrounds innovative approaches to the question of ... more Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry foregrounds innovative approaches to the question of genre, what it means, and how to think about it for ancient Greek poetry and performance. Embracing multiple definitions of genre and lyric, the volume pushes beyond current dominant trends within the field of Classics to engage with a variety of other disciplines, theories, and models. Eleven papers by leading scholars of ancient Greek culture cover a wide range of media, from Sappho’s songs to elegiac inscriptions to classical tragedy. Collectively, they develop a more holistic understanding of the concept of lyric genre, its relevance to the study of ancient texts, and its relation to subsequent ideas about lyric.

Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

by Naomi Weiss and Lauren Curtis

In Greek mythology, the Muses are Memory's daughters. Their genealogy suggests a deep connection ... more In Greek mythology, the Muses are Memory's daughters. Their genealogy suggests a deep connection between music and memory in Graeco-Roman culture, but how was this connection understood and experienced by ancient authors, artists, performers, and audiences? How is music remembered and how does it memorialize in a world before recording technology, where sound accumulated differently than it does today? This volume explores music's role in the discourses of cultural memory, communication, and commemoration in ancient Greek and Roman societies. It reveals the many and varied ways in which musical memory formed a fundamental part of social, cultural, ritual, and political life in ancient Greek- and Latin-speaking communities, from classical Athens to Ptolemaic Alexandria and ancient Rome. Drawing on the contributors' interdisciplinary expertise in art history, philology, performance studies, history, and ethnomusicology, eleven original chapters and the editors' Introduction offer new approaches for the study of Graeco-Roman music and musical culture.

The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater. Oakland: University of California Press

The Music of Tragedy offers a new approach to the study of classical Greek theater by examining t... more The Music of Tragedy offers a new approach to the study of classical Greek theater by examining the use of musical language, imagery, and performance in the late work of Euripides. Naomi Weiss demonstrates that Euripides’ allusions to music-making are not just metatheatrical flourishes or gestures towards musical and religious practices external to the drama but closely interwoven with the dramatic plot. Situating Euripides’ experimentation with the dramaturgical effects of mousike within a broader cultural context, she shows how much of his novelty lies in his reinvention of traditional lyric styles and motifs for the tragic stage. If we wish to understand better the trajectories of this most important ancient art form, The Music of Tragedy argues, we must pay closer attention to the role played by both music and text.