Tragic Failures: Alexandrian Responses to Tragedy and the Tragic

263 Pages·2016·1.76 MB·English

by  Evina Sistakou

EvinaSistakou
TragicFailures
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Volume 38
Evina Sistakou
Tragic Failures
Alexandrian Responses to Tragedy and the Tragic
ISBN978-3-11-047912-6
e-ISBN(PDF)978-3-11-048232-4
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ISSN1868-4785
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To the late Daniel Jacob
who would make an ideal reader of this book

Contents
Preface IX
Introduction: From Tragedy to the Tragic 1
. Tragedy, from Athens to Alexandria 11
The contexts of Hellenistic tragedy 11
Ptolemaic cultural politics and tragedy 15
Performing, reciting or reading tragedy? 20
Tragedy enters the Library 25
. The Metaclassical Tragic 31
Tragedy as philosophy and its Hellenistic reworking 31
The impossibility of Aristotelian tragedy 38
Callimachus on (not) writing tragedy 44
Establishing tragedyand the tragic in Alexandria 52
. Alexandrian Tragedy 63
The star system of the Alexandrian tragedians 63
Rupture and revival of tragic myth 69
Historical tragedymakes a comeback 77
Generic divergences and tragic crossovers 82
. Callimachus Displaces the Tragic 89
Transcending the tragic in the Hymns 89
Tragic fragmentariness in the Aetia 98
Hecale, a mundane tragedy 105
. Redefining the Tragic in the Idylls of Theocritus 115
A messenger speech without a messenger 115
The bucolic world’s a stage 122
Simaetha’s tragic failures 131
. Tragedy into Epic in Apollonius’ Argonautica 141
Distilling Attic tragedy into the Argonautica 141
Epic teleologies and tragic modalities 153
An Alexandrian epic on tragic passions 161
VIII Contents
. In the Metatragic Cosmos of the Alexandra 168
The Alexandra, a metatragic play 168
From the tragedy of Cassandra to ‘becoming Alexandra’ 176
Tragedy as textual unconscious 185
. The Romantic Tragic 193
Domesticizing tragedy 193
The tragedy of love 202
Parthenius, from tragedy to melodrama 211
Conclusion: Tragic Failures and Hellenistic Challenges 221
Bibliography 227
Abbreviations 227
Editions 227
Translations 227
Bibliography 228
Index 243
Preface
Thisbookhasitsoriginsinaseriesofvexingquestionsthatkeptarisingduring
myovertwentyyearsofengagementwithHellenisticscholarship:Whyistragedy
mostlyneglectedintheintertextualandaestheticanalysisofHellenisticpoetry,
whereas archaic epic and lyric take center stage in the relevant bibliography?
Why is Homer unequivocally accepted as ‘the’ archetype for the Hellenistic
poets,whereas Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides are not? Why is the tragic
idea, both as represented on stage and as a philosophical quality, rarely used
as a key for the interpretation of Alexandrian poetics? Did the learned poets,
whosephilologicalactivityintheMuseumwasdedicatedtothestudyofclassical
tragedyalongsideepicandlyric,considertragedyadeadgenrebytheirownar-
tisticstandards?DidtheAlexandrianpoetsandtheiraudiencesvaluethetragic
effect,the arousal of pity-and-fear emotions, stemming from the representation
ofaclassicaltragedyonstage?Canaheightenedsenseof ‘thetragic’berecon-
ciled with the new outlook on life and art in the Hellenistic era?
Questions maybe easilymultiplied,yet bibliographyscarcelyprovidesade-
quateanswers.Whilemymonographwasstillinprogress,Icameacrossoneex-
ception, namely the study of Agnieszka Kotlińska-Toma, Hellenistic Tragedy.
Texts,TranslationsandaCriticalSurvey(publishedbyBloomsburyin2015).Kot-
lińska-Toma offers a comprehensive survey of Hellenistic tragedy with a com-
mentary on the surviving testimonies and fragments, a study that only partly
overlapswith mychapteron Alexandrian tragedy. Luckily Iwas able toconsult
this book before completing mine. Following the pattern of my previous mono-
graphs(Reconstructing the Epic. Cross-Readings of the Trojan Myth in Hellenistic
Poetry, Leuven 2008 and The Aesthetics of Darkness. A Study of Hellenistic Ro-
manticism in Apollonius, Lycophron and Nicander, Leuven 2012), I have tested
the main thesis of mybookagainst the broadrange of Hellenistic poetry rather
than review a particular poem or poet in isolation from the entire Alexandrian
‘corpus’. Studies of the latter type in regard to the tragic are occasionally
found in Hellenistic bibliography. An illustrating example is Apollonius’ Argo-
nautica,which has been examined from the viewpoint of tragedy reception in
aseries oflesserknowndissertations(F.Stoessl,ApolloniosRhodios.Interpreta-
tionenzurErzählungskunstundQuellenverwertung,Bern-Leipzig1941;J.M.Nish-
imura-Jensen, Tragic Epic or Epic Tragedy. Narrative and Genre in Apollonius of
Rhodes’ Argonautica, University of Wisconsin-Madison 1996; I. A. Schmakeit,
Apollonios Rhodios und die attische Tragödie. Gattungsüberschreitende Intertex-
tualität in der alexandrinischen Epik, Groningen 2003). An exceptional case is