5. Ritual and Cult

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we consider the importance of ritual for the understanding of Greek theatre, focusing in particular on: (i) the fact that tragedies were performed at a religious festival and surrounded by rituals of various kinds, e.g. prayers, processions, sacrifices, etc.; (ii) the origins of both tragedy and comedy from ritual and the influence of these ritual origins of the form of Greek theatre, e.g. the wearing of masks, the presence of the chorus, etc.; (iv) the narrative arc of ancient ritual (= crisis followed by resolution) and its relation to the narrative arc of tragedy itself; (v) the tendency for tragedy to enact or evoke real-life rituals (e.g. weddings, funerals, sacrifices, etc.), which adds to the emotional fabric of the play; and (vi) the ways in which the success or failure of ritual maps on to the tension between the individual and the state.

Course

In this course, Professor Richard Seaford (University of Exeter) explores several aspects of Greek tragedy and comedy. In the first module, we think about the contribution made by vase painting to our understanding of Greek theatre. After that, we think about the significance of the chorus in Greek tragedy and comedy In the third module, we consider what Greek theatre can tell us about contemporary history and society, before turning in the fourth module to think about the extent to which Greek theatre was a ‘democratic’ institution. In the fifth module, we consider the importance of ritual for the understanding of Greek theatre, before moving on in the sixth module to consider the ‘purpose’ of Greek theatre. Is it supposed to teach us something? If so, what? In the seventh module, we think about the importance of music and spectacle to Greek theatre. And in the eighth and final module, we consider whether Greek theatre is better understood as a traditional genre or an innovative one.

Lecturer

Richard Seaford is a professor of the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter in England. He is the author of academic books, especially on ancient Greece, and has penned over seventy academic papers.

His work on Athenian tragedy and religion has led him to investigate the historical conditions for the radical development of Greek culture in the sixth century BC (sometimes called the origin of European culture), and to argue that a crucial factor in this development was money: the advanced Greek polis of this period was the first society in history that we know to have been thoroughly monetised.

Money and the Early Greek Mind. Homer, Tragedy, Philosophy (Cambridge 2004) explores the socio-historical conditions that made this first monetisation possible as well as its profound cultural consequences, notably the invention of 'philosophy' and of drama.

The investigation is taken further in several recent papers, for instance in ‘Money and Tragedy’ in W. V. Harris (ed.), The Monetary Systems of the Greeks and Romans (2008). His most recent book is Cosmology and the Polis: the Social Construction of Space and Time in the Tragedies of Aeschylus (Cambridge 2012). In 2005-2008 he was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust. For 2013-4 he was awarded an AHRC Fellowship for a comparative historical study of early Indian with early Greek thought.