#iphigeneia

—OC-tober Day 24 | Azem

not super specifically (@kallimakhos or @finelythreadedsky might be able to help you better) but i wrote a paper on the Antigone and civil disobedience in Athenian democracy for my MA, so i dug up the bibliography for you. I'm currently writing on Iphigeneia, but not in tragedy, so idk how much that would help you. There's some stuff floating around in my tags #antigone and #iphigeneia for sure (mind the e in how i spell it). the ones i recall as discussing the depiction/symbolism of female death specifically are highlighted.

antigone:

Bennett, Larry J., and Wm. Blake Tyrrell. “Sophocles' Antigone and Funeral Oratory.” The American Journal of Philology, vol. 111, no. 4, 1990, pp. 441–456.

Burns, Tony. "Sophocles' Antigone and the history of the concept of natural law." Political   Studies 50.3 (2002): 545-557.

Santirocco, Matthew S. "Justice in Sophocles' Antigone." Philosophy and Literature 4.2 (1980): 180-198.

Tyrrell, William Blake, and Larry J. Bennett. Recapturing Sophocles' Antigone. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998. -> discusses funerary norms and the historical politics behind athens depicting thebes as transgressing these norms in the 5th century iirc

iphigeneia:

SANSONE, DAVID. “Iphigeneia Changes Her Mind.” Illinois Classical Studies 16, no. 1/2 (1991): 161–72. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23064353.

FOLEY, HELENE P. “MARRIAGE AND SACRIFICE IN EURIPIDES’ ‘IPHIGENEIA IN AULIS.’” Arethusa, vol. 15, no. 1/2, 1982, pp. 159–80. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26308108. -> analyses the conflation of marriage and sacrifice on the plane of kleos (glory)/honour/the social telos (destiny) of women.

generic:

Rehm, Rush. 2019. Marriage to Death: The Conflation of Wedding and Funeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy. Princeton Legacy Library ; v. 5262. University Press.

Carter, David M., ed. Why Athens?: a reappraisal of tragic politics. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Dowden, Ken. 1989. Death and the Maiden: Girls’ Initiation Rites in Greek Mythology. Routledge. -> discusses the cultic foundation for myths about virgins dying before marriage. not super up to date but still a seminal work and a good read.

Stocking, Charles H. 2017. The Politics of Sacrifice in Early Greek Myth and Poetry. University Press.

Hey all!!!

So this won the poll, I apologize for being late with it! Y'all I am in the middle of grad school apps and I am SO busy!! But I wanna keep up with this blog. SO. Big massive huge disclaimer: I AM AWARE that hero worship, as it was practiced in ancient times, WAS CHTHONIC.

I do not practice it in a chthonic way!

So in NONE of this post am I claiming it was done this way in the past! This is SOLELY my praxis and way of worshipping heroes. (And yes, it is WORSHIPPING - THAT absolutely happened in the past!)

I do often have altars, yes, in fact my Achilles and Hektor altar is right in front of my PS4 right now, next to Zeus and Hera. (all four are little statues. poor hektor lost his right hand and left arm. and achilles lost his head.) It's on the TV stand! I set little candles in front of them (I do NOT light these - there are too many wires and it's very flammable.) I bow to them, and I ask for their strength when I play video games! Another thing I'll do a lot is have an offering in the form of sharing the current drink I have, USUALLY an energy drink. I'll have a Red Bull and go "this is for you, King Odysseus" or "here, Achilles" or whoever I think of! This is the bulk of it lol (again, grad school apps.)

Polyxena's death is different. It is not placed at the beginning or the end of the play but muffled in the middle; does not constitute either cause or culmination of the action; it does not change the plot or other people in any substantial way, and it forces us to no moral conclusion at all except that such a sacrifice is irrelevant to the world in which it is staged.

Polyxena is a shooting star that wipes itself across the play and disappears. And Euripides wants us to notice this -- this irrelevance of Polyxena.