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# System prepended metadata

title: Euripides - 1/24 Meeting

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# 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'
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### 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
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### 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

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### 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.

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### 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

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### 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
