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This chapter explores how Greek tragedy evokes epinician poetry. The chapter begins with a discussion of epinician as a genre, drawing on both Pindar and Bacchylides. In particular, it explores how epinician was regarded in fifth‐century Athens: a society whose democratic values are frequently believed to be at odds with the aristocratic and individualistic values of epinician. The second part of the chapter explores how tragedy makes use of epinician motifs, using two case‐studies: Euripides' Heracles, and Electra. It is argued that in both these plays the clustering of epinician language is used to explore problematic values associated with epinician poetry: in particular, questions about what constitutes aretē (excellence), and the relationship between individual and community.

This chapter analyzes two Greek myths — the story of Iambe and Demeter, and that of Heracles and the Cercopes — as a reflection of how Greeks could conceptualize comic mockery as “performance”, mediated by form, context, and generic marking.

This chapter examines the portrayal of monsters, ogres, and demons in Sicilian and Attic comedy throughout the 5th century bc. In early comedy and mime (Epicharmus, Sophron, Cratinus, Crates) the monster was typically confronted and vanquished by a mythical hero (often Heracles), and this pattern reappeared in one lost early play of Aristophanes. In Acharnians, however, we meet the politician (Lamachus) as monster, and, far more spectacularly, Cleon a year later in Knights; by Wasps, Aristophanes himself has become the Heracles figure who defeats the giant. In Frogs, on the other hand, uniquely, a monster figure—Aeschylus—is victorious; and meanwhile Aristophanes' contemporary Phrynichus seems to have begun a process of demythologizing and humanizing the monster/demon which eventually led to the antisocial types depicted by Menander (Knemon, Smikrines).

The reaction to the Americanization of the Vietnam conflict posed serious political problems for the president. Like Heracles confronting the Hydra—the mythical beast that would grow two heads when one was severed—Johnson found himself dealing with opposition to his policies from both conservatives and liberals. He became a political juggling act of monumental proportions; the president battled a multiheaded opposition on Vietnam as the war evolved. As Johnson fought the forces advocating negotiations or withdrawal, he had to simultaneously fend off those who pushed for a more aggressive approach in Vietnam. This chapter focuses on Johnson's efforts to manage these countervailing forces from the 1966 midterm elections, which brought a number of influential GOP doves into office, to the eve of the 1968 presidential election.

This chapter applies spatial theory to the general themes of the poem. The Argo’s voyage involves a material, bodily experience of space, but it produces space by connecting the places on its itinerary as interrelated constituents of a spatial system. It defines that space also by tracing routes or “pathways” on the sea, and also because the Argonauts leave signs of their presence in places where they stop. These signs imply narratives of what they did, and these narratives explain landmarks or ritual and other cultural practices associated with the Argonauts and exemplary for later times. In these stories (called aitia by the Greeks), space and time fuse together, and space is a signifying system, as is the poem itself, which is self-reflexively identified with the voyage. The Argo is a mobile embodiment of Greek space, confronting the alterity of foreign places and peoples. Herakles’ random movement through space provides a contrast with the systematic production of it by Jason and the Argonauts.

This chapter examines the character of the Athenian panegyric in suppliant drama against the background of the development of Athens’ empire. Suppliant plays predominantly depicted Athens as a haven for suppliants and outsiders. Further probed, this fixed representation allowed the playwrights to represent Athens as a hegemonic city and to explore the character of her power. The ramifications of this reading are discussed in relation to Euripides’ Children of Heracles; the depiction of Athens as a free city in this play varies the coordinates of the shared pattern in response to the contingencies facing Athens at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. In the course of the play, the negotiation of the suppliants’ reception demonstrates the effort expended in justifying the benefits Athens reaps from her ventures on behalf of mythical suppliants.

The song to Hermias now takes center stage again, this time using its literary background to highlight the multiple generic stances adopted by the speaker. The song’s opening verses are examined in light of the rhetorical categories of ethos—the speaker’s character as projected by the poem—and pathos—the effects on the audience. A poem by Sappho and an Attic skolion are studied to show that Aristotle blended hymnic form with an old poetic game in which singers discoursed on what is “the finest thing” in life. This heritage suggests that the song’s ethos and pathos have much in common with contemporary protreptic literature. The traditional quality of such a poetic posture and the possibilities it offered for creative expansion and variation are brought out by comparing a very similar discourse on virtue in Sophocles’ Philoctetes.

As they were incorporated into mythological plots, the choruses of classical Athenian tragedy took on fictional identities that departed from their status as performers in a celebratory communal ritual. In ‘The Nostalgia of the Male Tragic Chorus’, Sheila Murnaghan discusses tragic choruses portraying groups of men. These choruses often interact with the protagonists in ways that reflect contested, politically charged relations between leaders and followers. Choruses with tyrannical, self-interested leaders are more fully displaced from their underlying identities as joyful singers and dancers and more thoroughly oppressed by the conditions of their fictional roles, especially the debilitating effects of absence from home and old age. Choruses with good leaders are brought safely back from adventures abroad and may undergo an experience of rejuvenation that Greek culture associated with dancing and the influence of Dionysus.

This chapter explores the theme of witnessing in Harrison’s later theatre works, especially the contrast between photographic and poetic records and accounts of trauma. It argues that Harrison’s choice of ancient plays to adapt and translate (Hippolytus, Medea, Hecuba, Iphigenia in Tauris, Trojan Women), and the central topics discussed in his original play FRAM, are closely related to his experience of the ancient Greek tragedian Euripides, especially to his messenger speeches, and above all to the messenger speech in his HERACLES. It also discusses his engagement with the figure of Gilbert Murray, whose pro-suffragette translations of Euripides were directed in Edwardian London by Harley Granville Barker, and who appears in FRAM, and describes the genesis of Harrison’s IPHIGENIA IN CRIMEA, in which Hall was closely involved.

Synchronic typology of Achilles loves (and transvestism), compared to the loves (and transvestism) of Heracles, another of the most invincible heroes of Greek mythology: Achilles and Heracles as boundary-breaking heroes. Diachrony of the fortune of Achilles' loves. After Homer's silence, the Epic Cycle must have narrated some of them to some extent, though not without developing a sort of debate, in the Aethiopis, on their epic propriety. Finally, tragedy indulged in (re-)constructing Achilles' erotic passions with no censorious stance at all. The negative viewpoint of Alessandra (Cassandra) in her re-writing of the Iliad in a anti-Greek perspective led Lycophron to elaborate a first summary of Achilles' erotic life. This perspective was totally reversed by the Latin erotic poets of the 1st cent. BC and AD. But reactions of indignation at Achilles' erotic debauchery and opposite attempts at a dignified restoration of his heroism never stopped, at least from the Hellenistic age onwards, at both the level of interpretation of existing texts and mythopoiesis of new texts.

This chapter describes Plutarch's essay The Malice of Herodotus and explains how it was an oddity among his works. It explains how the essay criticized the works of the Herodotus in all manner of prejudice and misrepresentation. It also emphasizes Plutarch's desire to rescue his ancestors' good name, the Boeotians and Corinthians, that were vilified in Herodotus' Histories. This chapter looks into Plutarch's unexpected narrow outlook as a citizen of the Roman empire and fondness for the Greek village, Chaeronea. It discusses Herodotus's treatment of Heracles that upset Plutarch and Heracles's ancestral links with Thebes that aroused his patriotism. It also outlines the simple form of Plutarch's work.

The similarities between the myths of Hermes (especially as presented in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes) and certain elements of the Heracles myths are substantial enough to indicate a relationship. Specifically, the myth of the struggle for Apollo’s tripod has to do with Heracles’ progress toward acceptance as an Olympian god. The composer of the Homeric Hymn was reacting in some degree to the Heracles myth.

The chapter argues that Archilochus’ elegy of which P.Oxy. 4708 (2005) offers a substantial fragment was a self-standing narrative, not (as generally taken) a narrative exemplum related to a contemporary military event. It is suggested the poem was composed for first performance in a festival, probably in Thasos’ important Herakleion, where by the fifth century there was a broad flight of steps with a balustrade at its foot seemingly indicating use for viewing. A later inscription attests contests involving a winning taxis. Archilochus’ subject, Telephus, both honoured Herakles and could be related by his Thasian audience to their struggles, especially with Naxians, for control of the Thracian peraea. In support it is argued that Simonides’ Plataea elegy, opening with an extended hymn to Achilles, was first performed where he had a cult, probably his sanctuary on the road leading north from Sparta, and that cultic contexts also suit Mimnermus’ Smyrneis and Callinus’ Address to Zeus.

The paper revisits two sets of fragments of the iambic poet Hipponax, frr. 74–7 W and 102–3 W, which appear to draw on the myths of Odysseus and Heracles respectively. The content and manner of these unique instances of mythic narrative in the corpus are extremely difficult to pin down due to their fragmentary state. However, together they offer an important complement to the use of mythic intertext elsewhere in Hipponax. The paper offers a close reading of the fragments and an examination of their mythic mode, which appears (i) as free-standing narrative in a presentation of multiple incidents with elements of parody (frr. 74–7 W), and (ii) as an exemplum embedded within a contemporary narrative, again most likely parodic (frr. 102–3 W). These fragments are invaluable for a better understanding of the tantalizing Hipponactean corpus, and further for rethinking the register and boundaries of iambos.

Chapter 1 lays out the myths of the great drakontes of pure form, in approximate chronological order of their first attestation: the Lernaean Hydra, slain by Heracles; Ladon the Serpent of the Hesperides, slain or outmanoeuvred by Heracles; the Delphic Serpent, known either as the female Delphyne or the male Python, slain by Apollo; the Serpent of Ares, slain by Cadmus at Thebes; the Serpent of Nemea, slain, according to different traditions, by the various members of the Seven against Thebes; the Serpent of Colchis, slain or sent to sleep by Jason and Medea; the pair of serpents slain by the baby Heracles (‘Heracliscus’); the Serpent of Thespiae, slain by Menestratus; and finally, a rather unique Roman example, the Serpent of the river Bagrada, slain by Regulus.

Chapter 2 looks at the battle myths for the great composite drakontes, and is loosely organised in accordance with the overall shapes and mythological affinities of the creatures in question. It begins with the anguipedes: Typhon, slain by Zeus; Echidna, slain by Argus; the Giants and Campe, slain by the gods; the Lamiae, slain by Coroebus and Eurybatus. We end it with a study of the drakōn-tailed quadrupeds: the Chimaera, slain by Bellerophon; Cerberus, mastered by Heracles; and Orthus, slain by Heracles. Somewhat anomalous in themselves, the Gorgons, of whom Medusa was slain by Perseus, offer a convenient bridge between these two groups by virtue of their strong thematic affinities with the Lamiae on the one hand and the Chimaera and its associates on the other. It will be seen that even the composite creatures in which the drakōn element is proportionately small, as in the cases of the Gorgons and the Chimaera, share the behaviours and narrative roles of the composite creatures with a larger drakōn element, and indeed of the pure drakontes.

Chapter 3 turns to the drakontes’ marine cousins, the kētē or ‘sea serpents.’ These present a methodological difficulty for us insofar as, despite their serpentine nature, the term drakōn is seldom applied to them. Nonetheless, they earn a place in this study by virtue of a series of specific points of correspondence with drakontes in their narrative roles. The key cases here are the highly similar ones of the Kētos of Troy, from which Heracles rescues Hesione, and the Kētos of Ethiopia, from which Perseus rescues Andromeda. These creatures are further bound in with the drakontes by virtue of two striking cross-over cases: that of the Scylla encountered by Odysseus. She seems to have morphed over the course of her tradition from a drakōn into a kētos; and that of the drakōn-pair sent against Laocoon, who contrive to combine, in their confused tradition, behaviours and narrative roles associated both with drakontes and with kētē.

Chapter 5 considers the humanoids that repeatedly interact with drakontes, both fighting against them and indeed alongside them, as masters and mistresses of them. Amongst males Apollo and Heracles are noteworthy in this regard, but it is the females that stand out more, notably Athene and Medea. Consideration of the latter’s relationship with the Colchis drakōn draws us into a discussion of the broader phenomenon of the drakōn-tending virgin. We close with a look at the mythical, or effectively mythical, races of the ancient world with special abilities to master serpents and other snakes, the Psylli of Libya, the Ophiogeneis of Parium, Phrygia and Cyprus, and the Italian Marsi.