# Euripides - 1/24 Meeting ### Course requirements: Grades will be based on regular attendance, participation (including prepared translations), and a final project, which may be analytical or creative according to the preference of each individual student. Brief riffs: Euripides got fed up with the way that most performers could dance well, but couldn't carry a tune. - Started hiring professional singers and training them as actors - Monodies? [Greg? Is this right?] Hippolytus: A very young queen falls in love with her husband's bastard son (who happens to be the most beautiful creature to ever exist) - Handmaids speculating as she washes her laundry - The only time in Greek literature (outside of medical handbooks) that we see a reference to a woman's menstrual cycle - Choruses can represent different stages of life - "Female rhythms" expressed in terms of 'harmonia' <br> --- <br> ### Greg's Thesis: Euripides would go around and collect myths of remote peoples - particularly those unknown by fellow Athenians Other playwrights - Aeschylus, Sophocles - might know a handful of myths, whereas Euripides knew hundreds Euripides composes on the basis of the myths he collected. Troezen - quite remote, especially with regard to Classical Athenians (though if you look to the north-east you can still see a bit of the acropolis) - Euripides visits and encounters a number of "strange" singing and dancing traditions which have to do with female ceremonies of initiation - Fascinated by the love-songs being performed, which all concern the myth of a young queen who falls in love with her husband's son - Initiation in traditional societies frequently inextricably linked with (often tragic) love songs <br> --- <br> ### The Parthians Riff on mania for setting everything to music Hellenized Parthians substituted head of Crassus for the head of Pentheus in a staging of the Bacchae. - Not originally a sung part, but by this era everything was music --- ### Artemis v Aphrodite Aphrodite: sex Artemis: everything else GN: Originally similar goddesses, but very different by the time of Euripides - This tension between the goddesses leads to tragedy in Hippolytus. --- ### Dante notes the water imagery in Hippolytus GN: Big classical theme in general; artificial v natural springs - paper on how water pressure works in poetry - Corinth: fountain that somehow gets pumped down into the city centre - songs, poems written about it --- ### Introductions **Mella:** Greg's "music teacher" - put on Renn/Medieval concerts; primarily a classical musician but interested in lots of kinds of music **Dante:** Piano; Latinist, narrative texts of any sort; relations of these texts to previous models **Susanna:** Greek literature; Clytemnestra **Olympia:** Bacteria and bacteria biofilms, symbiosis **Alexander "Alex":** Cultural exchange within Roman empire; Greek handling of barbarian "others" **Lindsey:** Mitigating pitfalls of late-stage capitalism **Sara:** Applied math --> digital humanities track --> Greek within DH **Nosa:** Classics, old books in general; Stories of gods and histories and how these work together **Molly:** Ancient political thought; Latin prose literature, especially Cicero **Joseph:** Story-telling, how people make sense of the world they're born into **Maria:** Greek folk dance; loves dance, song, poetry **Pietro:** East Asian studies; intellectual and medical history; also interested in Chinese, myth in general **Sophie:** Applied math; took Heroes and Introduction to the Ancient Greek World **Esther:** Likes thinking about translation **Henrique:** Political and moral philosophy --> intersection with history of ideas; GN suggests exploring "big lie" with regard to Euripides