The first book-length comparative study of Pindar and Aeschylus in more than six decades, this volume will appeal to students of Greek poetry and modern performance alike. By addressing commonalities rather than differences, Uhlig offers a novel perspective on poetic performance in the 'song culture' of early fifth-century BC Greece.
What would Pindar and Aeschylus have talked about had they met at some point during their overlapping poetic careers? How do we map the space shared by these two fifth-century choral poets? In the first book-length comparative study of Pindar and Aeschylus in over six decades, Anna S. Uhlig pushes back against the prevailing tendency to privilege interpretive frames that highlight the differences in their works. Instead, she adopts a more inclusive category of choral performance, one in which both poets are shown to be grappling to understand how the vivid here and now of their compositions are in fact a reenactment of voices and bodies from elsewhere. Pairing close readings of the ancient texts with insights from modern performance studies, Uhlig offers a novel perspective on the 'song culture' of early fifth-century BC Greece.
Reviews
' should prove worthwhile and fascinating for specialists in both early fifth-century literature and classical performance studies.' David Studdard, Classics for All ' a distinctive and ambitious book ' David Fearn, Bryn Mawr Classical Review
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Argues that the songs of Pindar and Aeschylus share a "theatrical" spirit that illuminates choral performance in Classical Greece.
Introduction: Pindar and Aeschylus in dialogue;
1. Voices of others: embedded speech in Pindar and Aeschylus;
2. Anachronistic harmonies: Agamemnon parodos, Pythian 4;
3. Vocal tools: Pythian 12, Olympian 13, Seven Against Thebes;
4. Somatic semblances: Choephoroi, Olympian 8, Pythian 2;
5. Locating the revenant: Pythian 8, Persians.
Anna S. Uhlig is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of California, Davis, where she is also a member of the Graduate Group in Performance Studies. Her research focuses on the performance culture of Greek lyric and dramatic poetry in the archaic and classical periods. She has published on a wide range of topics related to ancient Greek song and is co-editor (with Richard Hunter) of Imagining Reperformance in Ancient Culture: Studies in the Traditions of Drama and Lyric (Cambridge, 2017).
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