From Agent to Spectator : Witnessing the Aftermath in Ancient Greek Epic and Tragedy.

Intro -- Preface -- Contents -- Introduction -- The powerless spectator: Witnessing the limits of the human condition -- Voicing their vision: Emotional response and character -- Time, knowledge, and power -- Narrative in tragedy, tragedy as narrative -- Perceptions and values -- Chapter Outline -- Chapter One: The Helpless Witness: Achilles, Patroclus, and the Portrayal of Vulnerability in the Iliad -- Methodology -- Watching through the eyes of philoi -- Seeing and pitying -- Helpless spectators, mortal and immortal -- Zeus's helplessness: Regarding the death of Sarpedon -- Looking on from the walls of Troy: The death of Hector -- The Death of Patroclus -- No witness, no pity? -- You, Patroclus -- Calling out to the threatened warrior: The Patrocleia and Patroclus's doom -- Apostrophes and turning points: danger or death -- The downfall of Patroclus -- Negativity and absence -- Apostrophes and the poetics of helplessness -- Absence and presence: The Voice of the Helpless Spectator -- Achilles' delayed vision -- Mortal Achilles -- Chapter Two: Spectatorship, Agency, and Alienation in Sophocles' Trachiniae -- Watching through Deianeira's eyes -- Pity and Vulnerability -- From spectator to agent: Playing Aphrodite -- Watching Deianeira watch Heracles burn -- The divine agent and spectator: Cypris -- Watching Deianeira die -- Watching Heracles die -- The silence of Heracles -- Divine agents and spectators -- Chapter Three: From Murderer to Messenger: Body, Speech, and Justice in Greek Tragedy -- Part One: The Murder of Agamemnon: Imagery and vision -- Clytemnestra's moment of truth -- Part Two: Matricide: Speech and the Body -- The Death of Clytemnestra in Aeschylus: The Tyranny and the robe -- Sophocles' Electra: Viewing Clytemnestra's body through other eyes -- Euripides' Electra: Motherhood destroyed.

Chapter Four: Neoptolemus Between Agent and Spectator in Sophocles' Philoctetes -- The healing presence of a witness and interlocutor -- Pain and its perceiver -- A blind eye and a deaf ear: The averted gaze and selective hearing of Odysseus -- Watch yourself, young man -- The sounds of Neoptolemus's moral awakening -- How to "act?" -- Bibliography -- Index.

Trends in Classics, a new series and journal to be edited by Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos, will publish innovative, interdisciplinary work which brings to the study of Greek and Latin texts the insights and methods of related disciplines such as narratology, intertextuality, reader-response criticism, and oral poetics. Both publications will seek to publish research across the full range of classical antiquity. The series Trends in Classics Studies welcomes monographs, edited volumes, conference proceedings and collections of papers; it will provide an important forum for the ongoing debate about where Classics fits in modern cultural and historical studies. The journal Trends in Classics will be published twice a year with approx. 160 pp. per issue. Each year one issue will be devoted to a specific subject with articles edited by a guest editor.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.