Euripides

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

For students of advanced Greek only, in this course students read two of Euripides’ most admired tragedies, Hippolytus and Bacchae, and engage these ancient texts on numerous levels. Each play offers students an opportunity, while improving their ability to read ancient poetic Greek, to learn how to interpret tragedy in its cultural setting, the fifth-century Athenian polis. Tragedy was staged during a most important religious festival, the Greater Dionysia, and thus serves as a prism that refracted complicated layers within Athenians’ understanding of themselves, their gods, and their past. Students will also study fundamental technical aspects of the ancient Greek tragic genre, including its highly refined poetic language and its stichic meters as well as the stylized structure of an ancient tragedy with its lyric choruses. By reading significant works of modern scholarship relevant to the Hippolytus and the Bacchae, students will gain an understanding of the most important interpretive issues surrounding each play; they will also learn to think and write about tragic drama in intellectually sophisticated ways.