Introductory description

This module brings together several authors from archaic and classical Greece, surveyed chronologically but also thematically. It considers how we might think about the politics of literary production in the ancient world – not just in terms of content, but also and perhaps especially in terms of form.
But what might we mean by ‘a politics of form’? How do texts do political work in the world? How do we investigate the nature of social structures in ancient Greek texts, and what sense do we make of them?
How do we negotiate the nature of politics as an historical / historiographical / theoretical / literary-theoretical phenomenon?
How do we negotiate the relation between the politics of form and the politics of context, and how might we understand the relation between these frames of reference?
This module is also available to undergraduates from other departments, subject to the agreement of the Classics Department and their home department.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Illustrative Syllabus (subject to minor modifications):
Set texts in translation:
Homer, Iliad 1, 7, 9, 19; selections from Alcaeus; Pindar, Pythian 1; Bacchylides 17;
Euripides, Supplices; Aristophanes, Knights; Herodotus 3; Gorgias, Encomium of Helen; Thucydides 3.82–3

Set texts for Q800 students:

• Homer, Iliad IX, ed. Jasper Griffin (Oxford)
• Pindar, Pythian 1, ed. Snell-Maehler, Teubner (supplied as a course extract)

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• demonstrate a broad knowledge of a variety of texts in a range of genres in which power is figured, mediated, and discussed;
• demonstrate an appreciation of the contributions of literary form to cultures of power and their assessment;
• demonstrate the ability, in detail, to situate literary texts in relation to broader cultural and ideological contexts.
• demonstrate skills in close reading of literary texts, whether in translation, or in the original Greek (for Q800/Q801 students);

Indicative reading list

Illustrative Bibliography:

Conceptual/Theoretical:
Rancière, J. The Politics of Literature (London 2011)
And:
Culler, J. Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA 2015), esp. chapters 3, 'Theories of the Lyric', and 7, 'Lyric and Society'.
Dimock, W. C. ‘After Troy: Homer, Euripides, total war’, in R. Felski (ed.) Rethinking Tragedy (Baltimore, 2008), 66-81.
Felski, R. Uses of Literature (Malden, MA 2008), esp. chapters 2, 'Enchantment', 3, 'Shock', and 4, 'Knowledge'.
Halliwell, S. Between Ecstasy and Truth: Interpretations of Greek Poetics from Homer to Longinus (Oxford 2011), esp. chapters 2, 'Is there a poetics in Homer?', 3, 'Aristophanes’ Frogs and the failure of criticism', and 6, 'Poetry in the light of prose: Gorgias, Isocrates, Philodemus'
Hammer, D. The Iliad as Politics: The Performance of Political Thought (Norman, OK 2002)
Payne, M. ‘On being vatic: Pindar, pragmatism, historicism’, American Journal of Philology 127 (2006) 159–84
Ruffell, I. A. Politics and Anti-realism in Old Comedy: The Art of the Impossible (Oxford 2012)
Silk, M. Aristophanes and the Definition of Comedy (Oxford 2000)

Homer:
Barker, E. T. E. Enter the Agon: Dissent and Authority in Homer, Historiography, and Tragedy (Oxford 2009), ch. 1
Hammer, D. 'The politics of the "Iliad"', The Classical Journal 94.1 (1998) 1–30
Haubold, J. Homer's People: Epic Poetry and Social Formation (Cambridge 2000)
Martin, R. P. The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad (Ithaca, NY 1989)
Morris, I. 'The use and abuse of Homer', in D. L. Cairns (ed.) Oxford Readings in Homer's Iliad (Oxford 2001)
Purves, A. Homer and the Poetics of Gesture (Oxford 2019)
Raaflaub, K. A. 'A historian's headache: how to read "Homeric society"?', in N. Fisher and H. van Wees (eds.), Archaic Greece: New Approaches and New Evidence (London 1998) 169–93
Redfield, J. Nature and Culture in the Iliad (Chicago 1975)
Rose, P. W. 'Thersites and the plural voices of Homer', Arethusa 21 (1988) 5–25
Rose, P. W. 'Ideology in the Iliad: polis, basileus, theoi', Arethusa 30 (1997) 151–99
Schofield, M. 'Euboulia in the Iliad', Classical Quarterly 36 (1986) 6–31
Taplin, O. P. 'Agamemnon's role in the Iliad', in C. B. R. Pelling (ed.) Characterization and Individuality in Greek Literature (Oxford 1990) 60–82
Thalmann, W. G. ‘“Anger sweeter than dripping honey”: violence as a problem in the Iliad’, Ramus 44 (2015) 95–114

Lyric:
Fearn, D. W. Bacchylides: Politics, Performance, Poetic Tradition (Oxford 2007) (pp. 242–56 on Bacchylides 17)
Fearn, D. W. 'The Keians and their choral Lyric: Athenian, epichoric, and panhellenic perspectives’, in L. Athanassaki and E. L. Bowie (eds.), Archaic and Classical Choral Song: Performance, Politics & Dissemination (Berlin 2011) 207–34
Fearn, D. W. Pindar's Eyes: Visual and Material Culture in Epinician Poetry (Oxford 2017)
Fearn, D. W. (2018) ‘Materialities of political commitment? Textual events, material culture, and metaliterarity in Alcaeus’ in F. Budelmann and T. Phillips (eds.) Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece (Oxford, 2018), 93–113.
Golden, M. Sport and Society in Ancient Greece (Cambridge 1998)
Hornblower, S. Thucydides and Pindar: Historical Narrative and the World of Epinikian Poetry (Oxford 2007)
Kurke, L. The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy (Baltimore 1991) ch. 8, 'Envy and Tyranny'
Morgan, K. Pindar and the Construction of Syracusan Monarchy in the Fifth Century B.C. (New York 2015)

Theatre
Bennett, L. J. and W. B. Tyrrell, 'Making sense of Aristophanes' Knights', Arethusa 23 (1990) 235–54
Bowie, A. M. 'Tragic filters for history: Euripides’ Supplices and Sophocles' Philoctetes', in C. B. R. Pelling (ed.) Greek Tragedy and the Historian (Oxford 1997), 39–62
Goldhill, S. Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge 1986)
Goldhill, S. and Osborne, R. Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy (Cambridge 1999)
Halliwell, S. 'Comic satire and freedom of speech in Classical Athens', Journal of Hellenic Studies 111 (1991) 48–70
Heath, M. Political Comedy in Aristophanes (Göttingen 1987)
Henderson, J. 'The demos and the comic competition', in J. J. Winkler and F. I. Zeitlin (eds.), Nothing to do with Dionysos? (Princeton, NJ 1990) 271–313
Henderson, J. 'Attic comedy, frank speech, and democracy', in D. Boedeker and K. Raaflaub (eds.) Democracy, Empire and the Arts in Fifth-Century Athens (Cambridge, MA 1998) 255–73
Mendelsohn, D. Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays (Oxford 2002)
Michelini, A. N. 'Political themes in Euripides' Suppliants', American Journal of Philology 115 (1994) 219–52
Raaflaub, K. A. 'Father of all, destroyer of all: war in late fifth-century Athenian discourse and ideology', in D. R. McCann and B. S. Strauss (eds.) War and Democracy: A Comparative Study of the Korean War and the Peloponnesian War (Armonk, NY 2000), 307–56
Robson, J. Aristophanes: An Introduction (London 2009)
Storey, I. C. Euripides: Suppliant Women. Duckworth Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy (London 2008)
Wilson, P. The Athenian Institution of the Khoregia: The Chorus, the City, and the Stage (Cambridge 2000)

Herodotus
Dewald, C. '“I didn't give my own genealogy”: Herodotus and the authorial persona', in E. Bakker, I. de Jong, and H. van Wees (eds.) Brill's Companion to Herodotus (Leiden 2002) 267–89.
Fowler, R. L. 'Herodotus and his contemporaries', Journal of Hellenic Studies 116 (1996) 62–87
Munson, R. V. 'The madness of Cambyses (Herodotus 3.16–38)', Arethusa 24 (1991) 43–65
Munson, R. V. 'Interpretation and evaluation', in Telling Wonders: Ethnographic and Political Discourse in the Work of Herodotus (Ann Arbor, MI 2001) 134–72
Pelling, C. B. R. 'East is East and West is West—or are they? National stereotypes in Herodotus', Histos 1 (1997)
Pelling, C. B. R. 'Speech and action: Herodotus’ debate on the constitutions', Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 48 (2002) 123–58
Raaflaub, K. A. 'Herodotus, political thought, and the meaning of history', Arethusa 20 (1987) 221–48
Redfield, J. 'Herodotus the tourist', Classical Philology 80 (1985) 97–118
Thomas, R. Herodotus in Context (Cambridge 2000)
Winton, R. 'Herodotus, Thucydides, and the sophists', in C. Rowe and M. Schofield (eds.) The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought (Cambridge 2005) 89–121

Gorgias
Gagarin, M. 'Did the sophists aim to persuade?', Rhetorica 19 (2001) 275–91
Gagarin, M. and Woodruff, P. 'The sophists', in P. Curd and D. W. Graham (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy (Oxford 2008), ch. 13
Goldhill, S. The Invention of Prose (Oxford 2002)
Guthrie, W. K. C. A History of Greek Philosophy, Volume Three: The Fifth-Century Enlightenment (Cambridge 1969)
Guthrie, W. K. C. The Sophists (Cambridge 1971)
Kerferd, G. B. The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge 1981)
Lloyd, G. E. R. The Revolutions of Wisdom: Studies in the Claims and Practice of Ancient Greek Science (Berkeley, CA 1987)
Porter, J. I. The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience (Cambridge 2010)
Walker, J. Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (Oxford 2000)
Wardy, R. The Birth of Rhetoric: Gorgias, Plato and their successors (London 1996)

Thucydides
Cobet, J. 'Herodotus and Thucydides on war', in I. Moxon, J. Smart, and A. Woodman (eds.), Past Perspectives: Studies in Greek and Roman Historical Writing (Cambridge 1986) 1-18

Hornblower, S. Thucydides (London 1994)

Loraux, N. The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City (Cambridge, MA 1996)

Macleod, C. M. ‘Thucydides on faction (3.82–83)’, in Collected Essays, ch. 12.
Macleod, C. M. 'Thucydides and tragedy', in Collected Essays, ch. 13.
Monoson, S. 'Citizen as "erastes": erotic Imagery and the idea of reciprocity in the Periclean funeral oration', Political Theory 22 (1994) 253–76

Ober, J. Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton 1988) chapter 2, 'Public speech and brute fact: Thucydides'
Rabel, R. J. 'Agamemnon's empire in Thucydides', Classical Journal 80 (1984) 8–10

Rood, T. Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation (Oxford, 2004).
Winton, R. 'Herodotus, Thucydides, and the sophists', in C. Rowe and M. Schofield (eds.) The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought (Cambridge 2005), 89–121.

Subject specific skills

By the end of this module all students should expect to have:
acquired a broad knowledge of a variety of texts in a range of genres in which power is figured, mediated, and discussed;
gained an appreciation of the contributions of literary form to cultures of power and their assessment;
gained the ability, in detail, to situate literary texts in relation to broader cultural and ideological contexts;
developed skills in close reading of literary texts, whether in translation, or in the original Greek (for Q800/Q801 students)

Transferable skills

• Communication
• Information Literacy
• Critical Thinking