As we consider myths about Heracles, we'll want to think about the kinds of stories in which he appears. There were epic poems about Heracles in antiquity, but most of them no longer exist. But we do have ancient tragedies — serious plays — about the hero, and I want to look at one of them on Friday.
But because ancient tragedy is a peculiar genre — there's really nothing quite like it in the modern era, not even in the Shakespearean corpus — we need to do some additional work in order to appreciate how a Heracles myth follows tragic conventions, and how tragic conventions can help shape the myth.
For Friday, September 20, please do the following:
(1) Watch this suite of four videos, which will orient you to the genre of tragedy, to its conventions, and to our tragic author, Euripides:
These video podcasts were created by the Skidmore Classics Department for our Classical World course, but we use them in other classes, too. Here, they'll save me from having to lecture extensively about the genre of tragedy. It's easy to generalize about epic; tragedy, not so much.
(2) Read the play Heracles by Euripides. The packet has many pages, but note how the print is in verse form: Greek tragedy was poetry, which means the print on the page is less dense than it might appear at first. Regardless, read the whole thing, including the choral odes, and consider starting your reading earlier than Wednesday or Thursday night.
As you explore these materials, please bear in mind these suggestions and questions:
- Use Pause/Play to your advantage when watching the videos, and be sure to take notes, just as you would during an in-class lecture.
- If you hadn't known the Heracles was a tragedy, how would you prove that it belongs to this genre?
- What impact does the genre of tragedy have on the Heracles myth? Did the play surprise you in any way? How so?
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