While in his major works – the Treatise, Enquiries, History of England, and writings on religion – Hume makes observations about ‘art’ and ‘the arts’ and refers to subjects that fall under the then nascent discipline of ‘aesthetics’, these appear tangentially, in the course of pursuing other matters; only in the Essays does he address these subjects directly and in sufficient detail to warrant his inclusion among figures who have made an original contribution to ‘philosophical aesthetics’ and its history. With these observations in mind, this chapter provides a systematic presentation of Hume’s views as he develops them in the ‘aesthetic essays’, where he engages in contemporary debates on various topics – ‘Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion’, ‘Of Eloquence’, ‘Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing’, ‘Of Tragedy’, and ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ – as well as in others where he either treats the arts historically (‘Of the Rise of the Arts and Sciences’) or as an element of political economy (‘Of Commerce’ and ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’). The discussion proceeds thematically, organizing his thought under the headings of ‘taste and its standard’, ‘literary style and artistic representation’, ‘the paradox of tragedy’, and, finally, ‘a history and political economy of the arts’.

This chapter is a reading of the scouts episode (Numbers 13–14). It begins life within the triumphant annalistic version of the wilderness narrative as a positive reconnaissance mission that preceded the conquest of Canaan in Numbers 21. It became a complaint episode when the wilderness narrative was reemplotted as a tragedy, with key features as defined by Aristotle, including error, reversal, recognition, and pathos, as well as a character (Caleb) who steps into the action in order to offer perspective that might help avoid a pathetic ending. The allegorical mode of the wilderness narrative remains active, as Caleb represents Zerubbabel, the Davidide in whom Haggai and Zechariah placed their hope for a restored temple. The return of an actual king was unlikely under Persian rule, but the tragic version of the wilderness narrative uses kingship discourse in order to frame this vision in terms of land, as the series of independent inheritances in Joshua 18–19 is transformed into a bounded territory dominated by Judah and inflected with Davidic resonances.

This chapter describes the development of Russian drama over the first two centuries of its history. It begins with the court theatre of the seventeenth century, which formed under the influence of Polish and Ukrainian examples, and goes on to trace the slow development of public theatre. The chapter presents the political and social transformation of the audience as both a driving force behind the evolution of Russian drama and an important theme of numerous authors, including but not limited to Aleksandr Sumarokov, Denis Fonvizin, Aleksandr Griboedov, Nikolai Gogol, and Aleksandr Ostrovskii. The work of these authors reflected the shifting values and conditions of Russian society and state ideology, and influenced spectators and readers by offering up models of behaviour.

Critical discussions of the novel of ideas have often asked us to take seriously the ideas articulated by fictional characters, and assumed that these ideas are sincerely held by those characters. This is in fact a good description of the serious novel of ideas, whose formal dynamics can be mapped onto theories of tragedy by Hegel, Lukács, and David Scott. But often, comedy and hypocrisy disrupt the presumed continuity between public utterances and private convictions or behaviours. This also often involves disrupting essentialist conceptions of identity and group belonging. Through readings of novels by Rose Macaulay, Doris Lessing, Jonathan Coe and Jeanette Winterson, this chapter argues that comic novels of ideas thrive on such discontinuities, diffusing and deflating identity categories as well as tragic collisions, and offering a distinctive orientation towards discursive liberalism as the primary medium of politics.

This chapter considers some aspects of the intertextual and intervisual dynamics of Euripides’ Cyclops with particular reference to the cave represented by the skēnē. The particular links of the Cyclops to Sophocles’ Philoctetes are used to explore a network of allusive possibilities in both plays going back to Homer’s ‘Cave of the Nymphs’ in Odyssey 13 and embracing the lost Philoctetes plays of Aeschylus and Euripides. The powerful mediating role of Homer’s cave is seen to be transferred to the caves of drama as the boundary between the seen and the unseen, between the past, present, and future, and as a strongly suggestive marker of the difference between epic narrative and dramatic representation. As the Homeric cave had separate entrances for mortals and gods, so did the Athenian stage. In exploring some of the richness of ‘intertextual allusion’ in fifth-century drama, the chapter also contributes to the appreciation of the differences in allusive practice between tragedy, comedy, and satyr play and of how poets acknowledged and exploited those differences.

Lucian is an author inextricably connected to prose. In this chapter, I argue that poetry is a crucial and overlooked aspect of his literary identity. After an initial account of the striking presence of poetry in Lucian’s oeuvre and in wider Second Sophistic intellectual production, which operates beneath and beyond statements of disdain and disavowal, I turn to a close examination of three very different pieces of Lucian’s verse writing – from remixed tragic and epic ‘quotations’ in the Menippus and Zeus Tragoedus, to the ghostly new Homeric compositions in the True Histories – and highlight some key features of a Lucianic poetics. I ultimately suggest how this poetics articulates Lucian’s wider approach to the literary tradition, and his perception of his own role in continuing it. Lucian’s new-old verse provides him with a self-constructed mandate to reanimate the genres and conventions of the inherited past, to deflate them, disrupt them, and ultimately repossess them.

How much continuity was there in the allusive practices of the ancient world? This chapter explores this question here by considering the early Greek precedent for the so-called ‘Alexandrian footnote’, a device often regarded as one of the most learned and bookish in a Roman poet’s allusive arsenal. Ever since Stephen Hinds opened his foundational Allusion and Intertext with this device, it has been considered the preserve of Hellenistic and Roman scholar-poets. This chapter, however, argues that we should back-date the phenomenon all the way to the archaic age. By considering a range of illustrative examples from epic (Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiod), lyric (Sappho, Pindar, Simonides), and tragedy (Sophocles, Euripides, Theodectes), it demonstrates that the ‘Alexandrian footnote’ has a long history before Alexandria.

This chapter challenges historiographical claims that the theatre created before the seventeenth century was a mere prelude to the symphony of the neoclassical age. French-language plays written between 1550 and 1600 under the aegis of the Pléiade poets, who were charged with renewing the French language by looking back to classical Greek and Roman writings, form the focus of their study. Despite their classical credentials, these plays are best understood not by categorizing them as ‘humanist’, but instead by ‘situating’ them within the history within which they were written: the denominational split brought about by the Protestant Reformation of Christianity in Europe, which provoked a seismic upheaval and called into question representation on social, political and even cosmological levels. Whether Protestant or Catholic, explicitly militant or seemingly apolitical, literal or analogical, these plays were inevitably affected by this crisis, otherwise known as the Wars of Religion. Bouteille and Karsenti conclude that by returning to classical antiquity, Renaissance playwrights sought as much to garland their work with greater prestige as to innovate devices capable of recounting their anguished, conflicted and traumatic world.

John D. Lyons examines some of the most canonical works of the seventeenth-century Golden Age: Corneille’s Le Cid (1637) and Rodogune (1644–45), and Racine’s Britannicus (1669) and Phèdre (1677), proposing that the decisive actions of these plays often hinge on what women say, or do not say. This is far from surprising since these works are contemporaneous with two important interrelated cultural developments in the public lives of women: increasingly, they hosted Parisian salons and gaining increased importance in the political, cultural and social spheres; and in a century that witnessed attempts to standardize and refine the French language, these salons run by women became virtual workshops for formulating rules of discourse for a worldly, non-pedantic society. Tragedies from this period, perceived as the dramatic representation of the lives of kings, queens and princes, simultaneously display the sharp contrast between what can women say in public, what they conceal owing to the constraints on what they are allowed to say, and their awareness that what they say in public can have fatal consequences. These tragedies enable an appreciation of the aptness of Roland Barthes’ assertion that language, more than death, is the core of the tragic.

This chapter explores the Hegelian context of Wagner‘s works by considering the theoretical texts authored by Wagner in advance of and in preparation for his music-dramatical works. The focus is on the philosophical foundations of The Ring of the Nibelung in the politico-philosophical works Wagner wrote in the context of the Dresden uprising of 1849, in which he took part. The first section reviews the extent and import of Wagner’s theoretical writings, including State and Revolution (1849), The Artwork of the Future (1850) and Opera and Drama (1852). The second section examines the philosophical background of the Ring of the Nibelung, moving from the overt influence of Feuerbach and Schopenhauer to its deeper shaping by Hegel‘s philosophy of world history. Special consideration is given to the agreement between Hegel and Wagner in their civico-political understanding of Greek tragedy, especially Sophocles’ Theban plays, Oedipus the King and Antigone.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s relationship to Richard Wagner and his music was complex, contradictory, even paradoxical. Neither Nietzsche’s emphatic allegiance to Wagner in his early years nor his later rejection should be taken literally. The revaluation of the performative moment in cultural analysis is part of a core of thoughts that Nietzsche chewed over again and again from his first years in Basel until his collapse in Turin. His conception of the Attic tragedy is based on the assumption that the tragedy must be considered in the original context, with its cultic background and performative outcome, as opposed to the reduction of the drama to a written text, as introduced by Aristotle and continued by the Alexandrian philologists. It is here that Nietzsche demonstrates the most in common with Wagner. Yet for Nietzsche, performativity becomes a type of thinking and writing through which he ultimately distances himself from metaphysical thinking and from Wagner.

Ancient historians regularly argue that the classical Athenians held sailors in much lower esteem than hoplites. They cite in support of this the extant funeral speech of Pericles. Certainly, this famous speech said a lot about courageous hoplites but next to nothing about sailors. Yet, it is also clear that this was not a typical example of the genre. Funeral speeches usually gave a fulsome account of Athenian military history. In rehearsing military history, funeral speeches always mentioned naval battles and recognised sailors as courageous. Old comedy and the other genres of public oratory depicted sailors in the same positive terms. All these non-elite genres assumed that a citizen fulfilled his martial duty by serving as either a sailor or a hoplite. They used a new definition of courage that both groups of combatants could easily meet. In tragedy, by contrast, characters and choruses used the hoplite extensively as a norm. In spite of this, tragedy still recognised Athens as a major seapower and could depict sailors as courageous. In Athenian democracy, speakers and playwrights had to articulate the viewpoint of non-elite citizens. Their works put beyond doubt that the Athenian people esteemed sailors as highly as hoplites.

The Invention of Athens by Nicole Loraux was the first book-length study of the Athenian funeral oration. Before its publication, ancient historians had accorded little importance to this genre. Loraux established for the first time the vital importance of this almost annual speech in the formation of Athenian self-identity. She showed how each staging of it helped the Athenians to maintain the same civic identity for over a century. Yet, in spite of its impact, Loraux’s first book was still far from complete. It left unanswered important questions about each of the surviving funeral speeches. An even larger gap concerned intertextuality: Loraux rightly saw traces of the funeral oration right across Athenian literature, but she never systematically compared the funeral oration with other types of public speech as well as drama. Therefore, she was unable to demonstrate whether the other literary genres of classical Athens were ever a counterweight to the funeral oration’s cultural militarism. The principal aim of this volume is to finish The Invention of Athens. Our book answers the important questions that Loraux left unanswered. It completes the vital intertextual analysis of the genre that is missing in The Invention of Athens.