Tyranny and Theater in the Ancient World

Command Performances

Anne Duncan (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

256 Seiten

2025
Bloomsbury Academic (Verlag)
978-1-350-42654-2 (ISBN)

Noch nicht erschienen (ca. Februar 2025)
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Exploring persistent connections between absolute rulers and dramatic performance in Greek and Roman drama and history, Anne Duncan offers the reader a comprehensive insight into the juxtaposition between tyranny in the Greco-Roman theatre and world. From the mad kings of Greek and Roman tragedy to the relationships that Greek tyrants and Roman emperors cultivated with actors and playwrights, absolute power has had an inescapably theatricalising effect on ruler and regime.

Traversing various Greco-Roman playwrights, such as Euripides, Sophocles and Octavia, this book analyses the dangerous, unstable tyrants of ancient tragedy alongside the dangerous, unstable tyrants of ancient historiography in order to map out the ancient world’s discourses about the allure and peril of absolute power. Duncan argues that while any kind of political display has theatrical qualities, it is tyranny that has an especially theatrical mode. The conclusion is that tyrants and playwrights began to influence each other over the course of Greco-Roman antiquity, so that tragedy tyrants began to resemble real rulers, and real rulers began to style themselves after tragedy tyrants, each trying to tap into the other’s power to command audiences.

Anne Duncan is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, UK. She is the author of Performance and Identity in the Classical World (2006).

Introduction

Chapter 1: Naïve Spectators: Barbarian Kings in Greek Tragedy
Chapter 2: Writing for Tyrants: Athenian Playwrights at Court
Chapter 3: ‘Transformed from a Man to a Wolf’: Stock Tyrants in Greek Tragedy
Chapter 4: The Tyrant Tragedian: Dionysius I of Syracuse
Chapter 5: Alexander’s Divine Performances
Chapter 6: Seeing Monsters: Mad Kings in Greek and Roman Tragedy
Chapter 7: Atreus and Thyestes: Icons of Misrule
Chapter 8: The Julio-Claudian Emperors: Unmasking a Dynasty
Chapter 9: Tragic History: the Octavia

Epilogue: ‘The Worst Actor Plays the King’

Notes
Bibliography
Index Locorum
General Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag	6.2.2025
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Klassiker / Moderne Klassiker
	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Vor- und Frühgeschichte
	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Altertum / Antike
ISBN-10	1-350-42654-7 / 1350426547
ISBN-13	978-1-350-42654-2 / 9781350426542
Zustand	Neuware