Books by Marco Duranti
Die Dissertation besteht in der Analyse der Figuren in Euripides' Iphigenia Taurica (IT) im V... more Die Dissertation besteht in der Analyse der Figuren in Euripides' Iphigenia Taurica (IT) im Vergleich mit Goethes Iphigenie auf Tauris. Die Figuren werden als Vermittler der philosophisch-religiösen Aussage berücksichtigt, die der Dramatiker mitteilen will. Das erste Kapitel zieht die Figur Iphigenia als Erzählerin im Prolog der euripideischen IT in Betracht. Es beginnt mit einer allgemeinen Vorbemerkung, die zeigt, wie Euripides, durch die Innovation seiner diegetischen Prologe, die Regeln 'Euripides stellt also klar, dass seine Werke neue intellektuelle und ethische Werte mitteilen, die sich von den anerkannten Werten der Gesellschaft entfernen können. Die tragische Gattung wird ein Laboratorium, in dem Euripides Experimente – die Tragödien – durchführt, um die Verträglichkeit zwischen dem Mythos, Grundstoff des Dramas, und den neuen Ansprüchen, die von den Figuren ausgesprochen werden, austesten kann. Unter diesem Gesichtspunkt ist der Prolog eine Einleitung, in der die V...
Skenè. Texts and Studies, 2022
In sixteenth-century England only two Greek plays in Greek were published: Euripides’ Troades (15... more In sixteenth-century England only two Greek plays in Greek were published: Euripides’ Troades (1575) and Aristophanes’ Equites (1593). This book raises questions on the scarceness of editions of Greek dramas and their late appearance in the English Renaissance, compared to continental editorial practices. It also seeks to reconstruct the intellectual and political context in which these two dramas were published. To this end, it examines the paratexts, especially the prefatory letters addressed either to patrons or to the readers, contained in contemporary Greek grammars and catechisms. Troades and Equites were probably published for educational purposes and their lack of paratexts invites further investigation as to the status of knowledge of Greek and how these editions were to be used in teaching. Against this backdrop, Troades and Equites appear as part and parcel of a humanistic programme connected with the education of the ruling class. The book shows that the Elizabethan age witnessed a growing interest in Greek as part of an overall project of consolidation of the Church of England and the monarchy, inspired by Protestant nationalism. In this context, reading and staging Greek dramas was regarded as a means to acquire rhetorical, ethical, philosophical, and political knowledge. These paratexts help us to understand the role of Greek and Greek literature in the making of modern England.
Articles by Marco Duranti
Skenè 7.2, 2021
This article aims to explore whether and how the lyric metres of Greek drama were studied in earl... more This article aims to explore whether and how the lyric metres of Greek drama were studied in early modern English schools and universities. To this purpose, I have examined the treatises or book chapters on prosody which were either published in England or imported from continental Europe. My analysis points out that the study of prosody was mainly focused on Latin. Greek prosody was conceived after the model of the Latin one and included a limited selection of feet: mainly hexameters, pentameters, iambic trimeters, and sapphic odes. Greek verses were less systematically composed than Latin ones and the utility of this exercise was disputed. Moreover, the different performative value of the different metres of Greek drama was not appreciated. Therefore, we can conclude that the standard education in grammar schools and universities did not allow the educated Englishmen to get acquainted with the lyric metres of Greek tragedy or comedy.
Greece and Rome 69.2, 2022
This article offers a new interpretation of the wave which, in the finale of Euripides' Iphigenia... more This article offers a new interpretation of the wave which, in the finale of Euripides' Iphigenia Taurica, prevents the Greek ship from leaving the Taurian land, thus making it necessary for the goddess Athena to intervene. My contention is that the wave is the predictable consequence of the sacrilege which the Greeks are committing by stealing Artemis' cult statue from the Taurian temple. Therefore, we can detect in IT the same religious offence-punishment-compensation structure that can be found in Aeschylus' Eumenides. However, unlike in Aeschylus' tragedy, in IT Athena's final decrees compensate only the goddess Artemis and not the human characters: after deeply suffering as instruments of the divine will, not even in the future will they be allowed to fulfil their desires. Thus, we may say that a supernatural 'wave' prevents humans from leaving in accordance with their will.
This article focuses on the first Greek edition of a work of classical antiquity printed in Engla... more This article focuses on the first Greek edition of a work of classical antiquity printed in England, namely Euripides’ Troades, published by John Day in 1575. This is not a new edition of Euripides’ text, but it reproduces the text established in the editions derived from the Aldine one, without any of Willem Canter’s 1571 changes. Basing their discussion on a textual and contextual analysis, these notes focus on the book’s typographical peculiarities, suggesting that Day’s Greek types may have been used later by Dawson. The article also attempts to identify Day’s printing purposes and the possible readership of this entirely unusual printing venture. Keywords: Greek theatrical literature; reception of Greek literature; early modern English culture; reception of Euripides
Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 56 (4), 2016
Summary: this article compares Euripides’s Iphigenia Taurica with Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris, ... more Summary: this article compares Euripides’s Iphigenia Taurica with Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris, and
investigates how the theme of love between siblings is related to the religious issue in both tragedies.
I firstly analyze how, in the Euripidean tragedy, the value of familiar love can connect the two worlds of
gods and humans, thanks to the parallel between the human (Iphigenia and Orestes) and the divine couple
of siblings (Artemis and Apollo). By sharing this human value, the gods demonstrate that they can be different from the immoral deities depicted in myth, and correspond to Iphigenia’s ethically purified image
of them. However, the Euripidean plot included at least three elements which an Eighteenth-century intellectual could not accept (paragraph three): the obscurity of the divine messages; the centrality of theft and
cunning; the inability of men to solve the tragic predicament autonomously. The value of family affection
is momentous for the removal of those elements (paragraph four): in the Goethean play, the Gods demonstrate that they share it not by directly intervening, but by providing the human sister with the powers of
the divine sister: therefore, Iphigenia can heal her brother, and the statue of Artemis need not to be stolen.
Iphigenia proves that the gods speak to the human heart, and in this way the problem of communication
with the supernatural sphere is solved.
Skenè, 2017
Taking Iphigenia Taurica as a case in point, this article will investigate the narrative artifici... more Taking Iphigenia Taurica as a case in point, this article will investigate the narrative artificiality of Euripides' prologues. By creating prologic pieces which defied the dramatic festivals' conventions, the Greek playwright distanced his tragedies from that kind of theatrical rituality, transforming them into a vessel for newly established and independent principles and values. Hence Euripides' prologues set and defined the preconditions of his dramas, which may be perceived as a new intellectual construction. This article will explore the relationship between the prologue and the rest of the play, epilogue included and will, therefore, consider the play as a tripartite integrated structure which tests the possibility of conciliating myth, and its divine protagonists, with men's new intellectual and ethical values.
This article investigates the extent to which the character of Aegisthus in Euripides’s Electra e... more This article investigates the extent to which the character of Aegisthus in Euripides’s Electra embodies the tyrant as described in Xenophon’s Hiero and Plato’s Republic where fear is identified as his most relevant characteristic. By analyzing various aspects and causes of Euripides’ dramatization of the tyrant’s fear, the article will show how Euripides challenges the distinction between tyrant and king, hinting that the latter may experience a typically tyrannical condition. This has a crucial ‘philosophical’ bearing on the understanding of myth and human society. Contrary to Xenophon’s and Plato’s tyrant, Aegisthus is not afraid of domestic threats; it is instead the legitimate heir, Orestes, who is forbidden to enter the city, as the old man tells him; he has no friends in Argos, and the contamination (miasma) ensuing the matricide he will commit, as predicted by Apollo, must be prevented. This paradox entails the reversal of the mythical construction of Orestes as a triumphant hero. It also, and especially, implies a corrosive criticism of that overall myth itself as developed by Aeschylus and Sophocles. Matricide is a crime which cannot be atoned for, it entails an ethical fault that cannot be cancelled, thus alienating the individual from the political community. But human society itself is no less to blame than the mythical deities, as it proves unable to reintegrate the matricide, as it happened in Aeschylus’s Oresteia with the help of Athena. Along the fil rouge of Aegisthus’ fear of the legitimate yet alienated heir to the throne, the article will discuss the paradoxes of a play revising the Oresteia myth from the standpoint of the tyrant’s fear of a hero exiled from his homeland and his family alike, an outcast doomed to experience the pain of human loneliness.
Book chapters by Marco Duranti
Verona: Skenè Texts DA - CEMP, 2022
This chapter investigates the paradoxes of Euripides' Helen and their relevance for the issue of ... more This chapter investigates the paradoxes of Euripides' Helen and their relevance for the issue of the limits of human knowledge. After pointing out how the entire plot of Helen can be regarded as a doxastic paradox, it focuses on Menelaus' bewildering experience of meeting two Helens (the real one and the phantom). It appears that the character experiences a logical paradox, whereas the audience both know more than him and identify with him. Then the chapter illuminates how, in the second part of the play, Helen and Menelaus manage to flee from Egypt by using the illusionistic power of words to create a new paradox. Menelaus himself, by announcing his own death to Theoclymenos, is paradoxically both alive and dead. The two spouses manipulate reality and stage a play within the main play, with disturbing metatheatrical implications on the distinction between reality and illusion.
Parole Rubate : Rivista Internazionale di Studi sulla Citazione, 2019
This article provides an analysis of Eccl. 730-745, where a citizen loyal to the new women’s regi... more This article provides an analysis of Eccl. 730-745, where a citizen loyal to the new women’s regime, in alienating his objects in favour of the community, personifies them and addresses them as if they were the personnel involved in the procession of the Panathenaea. The analysis is aimed at understanding the function of the objects’ ersonification in this scene against the backdrop of the employment of this device in ancient Greek comedy. I first show that the parody of public rites by means of daily objects is a typical feature of comic literature. I then distinguish the different types of object-personification within Greek comedy. This was probably a common comic device, employed in order to trigger hilarity in the audience. However, in Crates’ fragment 16 K.-A. it is used ›seriously‹, as moving objects can free men from the necessity of working. In Aristophanes, on the contrary, no serious message is to be found in personification. Finally, I examine the following scene in Eccl., where the loyal citizen is confronted by a sceptical one, who declares that he will not alienate his belongings. The sceptic does not personify objects, and the contrast between the two views on the objects expresses the different political positions of the two characters. In the conclusions, I explore the implications of this contrast between the two characters on the general issue of utopia in the Eccl.
Keywords:
personification, automatos bios, utopia
Reviews by Marco Duranti
The Ifigenia, liberata ( Iphigenia, Freed ), written by Carmelo Rifici and Angela Dematte and per... more The Ifigenia, liberata ( Iphigenia, Freed ), written by Carmelo Rifici and Angela Dematte and performed at the Piccolo Teatro Strehler in Milan from 27 April to 7 May 2017, is a challenging theatrical experiment on Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis . This piece illustrates how the conceptual premises of the play are to be found in Rene Girard’s theorization of human violence. In this light, Iphigenia’s sacrifice becomes the means to placate the mimetic rivalries among the Greek warriors and eventually pursue the expedition against Troy. But Rifici and Dematte were also inspired by the Italian scholar Giuseppe Fornari, who argues that in Iphigenia in Aulis Euripides exposed the cruelty of the sacrifice and its sordid motivations, while being unable to oppose to it a new ethics. These stances intriguingly materialize in the re-working of the Euripidean play through the interaction of words, stage setting, and filmic images.
Conferences by Marco Duranti
Università di Pavia, 16/01/2015
Uploads
Books by Marco Duranti
Articles by Marco Duranti
investigates how the theme of love between siblings is related to the religious issue in both tragedies.
I firstly analyze how, in the Euripidean tragedy, the value of familiar love can connect the two worlds of
gods and humans, thanks to the parallel between the human (Iphigenia and Orestes) and the divine couple
of siblings (Artemis and Apollo). By sharing this human value, the gods demonstrate that they can be different from the immoral deities depicted in myth, and correspond to Iphigenia’s ethically purified image
of them. However, the Euripidean plot included at least three elements which an Eighteenth-century intellectual could not accept (paragraph three): the obscurity of the divine messages; the centrality of theft and
cunning; the inability of men to solve the tragic predicament autonomously. The value of family affection
is momentous for the removal of those elements (paragraph four): in the Goethean play, the Gods demonstrate that they share it not by directly intervening, but by providing the human sister with the powers of
the divine sister: therefore, Iphigenia can heal her brother, and the statue of Artemis need not to be stolen.
Iphigenia proves that the gods speak to the human heart, and in this way the problem of communication
with the supernatural sphere is solved.
Book chapters by Marco Duranti
Keywords:
personification, automatos bios, utopia
Reviews by Marco Duranti
Conferences by Marco Duranti
investigates how the theme of love between siblings is related to the religious issue in both tragedies.
I firstly analyze how, in the Euripidean tragedy, the value of familiar love can connect the two worlds of
gods and humans, thanks to the parallel between the human (Iphigenia and Orestes) and the divine couple
of siblings (Artemis and Apollo). By sharing this human value, the gods demonstrate that they can be different from the immoral deities depicted in myth, and correspond to Iphigenia’s ethically purified image
of them. However, the Euripidean plot included at least three elements which an Eighteenth-century intellectual could not accept (paragraph three): the obscurity of the divine messages; the centrality of theft and
cunning; the inability of men to solve the tragic predicament autonomously. The value of family affection
is momentous for the removal of those elements (paragraph four): in the Goethean play, the Gods demonstrate that they share it not by directly intervening, but by providing the human sister with the powers of
the divine sister: therefore, Iphigenia can heal her brother, and the statue of Artemis need not to be stolen.
Iphigenia proves that the gods speak to the human heart, and in this way the problem of communication
with the supernatural sphere is solved.
Keywords:
personification, automatos bios, utopia