Greek Tragedy and the Epic Cycle: Narrative Tradition, Texts, Fragments

Ancient Greek literature;Greek tragedy;Greek epic;literary fragments;Classics

Dooley, Daniel ChristopherMontiglio, Silvia ;

Johns Hopkins University

关键词: Ancient Greek literature;    Greek tragedy;    Greek epic;    literary fragments;    Classics;   

Others  :  https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/59132/Dooley_dissertation_ETD.docx?sequence=4&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: JOHNS HOPKINS DSpace Repository

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation analyzes the pervasive influence of the Epic Cycle, a set of Greek poems that sought collectively to narrate all the major events of the Trojan War, upon Greek tragedy, primarily those tragedies that were produced in the fifth century B.C. This influence is most clearly discernible in the high proportion of tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides that tell stories relating to the Trojan War and do so in ways that reveal the tragedians’ engagement with non-Homeric epic. An introduction lays out the sources, argues that the earlier literary tradition in the form of specific texts played a major role in shaping the compositions of the tragedians, and distinguishes the nature of the relationship between tragedy and the Epic Cycle from the ways in which tragedy made use of the Homeric epics. There follow three chapters each dedicated to a different poem of the Trojan Cycle: the Cypria, which communicated to Euripides and others the cosmic origins of the war and offered the greatest variety of episodes; the Little Iliad, which highlighted Odysseus’ career as a military strategist and found special favor with Sophocles; and the Telegony, which completed the Cycle by describing the peculiar circumstances of Odysseus’ death, attributed to an even more bizarre cause in preserved verses by Aeschylus. These case studies are taken to be representative of Greek tragedy’s reception of the Epic Cycle as a whole; while the other Trojan epics (the Aethiopis, Iliupersis, and Nostoi) are not treated comprehensively, they enter into the discussion at various points. Both the poems of the Epic Cycle and the majority of the tragedies that derived their stories from them survive only in meager fragments, and this study aims to improve how these small texts are read and how their lost contexts are reconstructed while also elucidating how the tragedians used and adapted the Cycle.