Although Euripides rarely expresses social optimism about cities, he consistently presents Athens as a place that can cope, ritually and artistically, with the violence represented by the terrible heroes of myth. If Athens can accept Medea after she deliberately "sacrificed" her children, why not Heracles? The Medea passage about Athens (824-65) seems to hint, however, that this special capacity of Athens is associated with the greatness of her artistic traditions; wisdom dwells where Harmony gave birth to the nine muses. The Heracles, as we shall see, makes the hero's killing of his children a tragic sacrifice to the muses.

If the approach and thematic concerns outlined here risk adopting a 'totalizing' lens and reading chorality into each and every space the Greeks frequented - the oceans they crossed in their choregic ships equipped with dancing oars, the springs and fountains houses from which they fetched their water, the cultivated fields where they sloughed strophic and antistrophic furrows - and in all manner of heterogeneous routine activities and practices, then the central position that the chorus held in daily life goes some way to justifying this perspective.

Adamovich’s superliterature has no single author, no single protagonist. It is a chorus—the communal voice of witness in Greek tragedies—that includes the voices of rural Belarusian communities after the three years of massacres. In his essay “On Grief and Reason,” Joseph Brodsky writes, “In a real tragedy, it is not the hero who perishes; it is the chorus.” After World War II, Belarus honors the heroes, while what is left of the chorus is bones and ashes.

The language and action of the play allow Dionysus, until the return of the second messenger, to make the play and the manifestation of his divinity an indivisible process. His role as stage director/actor corresponds with his role in the plot - to demonstrate and then to avenge his divinity; his role as chorodidaskalos is inseparable from his roles as leader and god of his worshippers; his role as producer of stage illusions matches his ability to inspire a change of mental state in his followers; and, as we shall see, his presentation of his smiling mask, his "comic" performance in a tragic agon, communicates to the audience his religious ambiguity. Dionysus makes his chorus his players and the destruction of Pentheus a "play," replete with set, costume, and spectators. Until the final messenger speech there is no action in the play (the chorus', Cadmus', Tiresias', the therapon's, the first messenger's) that is not controlled by or voluntarily supportive of the god except, for a brief period, Pentheus'. The play itself becomes the net in which the increasingly isolated Pentheus is trapped. Euripides' characters, especially his gods, sometimes seem to control the staging of the play. [example from Medea] But in the Bacchae Dionysus' control over the stage action becomes a pervasive expression of both the god's own nature and of his control over theater as its patron. Yet Dionysus' play within a play does not, like many modern plays within plays or like the comic parodies of ancient tragedy, function primarily to distance the audience from the drama and call attention to and question its own reality as art; instead, it implicates the audience in the drama and calls attention to its own art as reality. That is, theatrical illusion demonstrates the reality of the god, and illusion and symbol are the only modes of access to a god who can take whatever form he wishes (hopoios ethel', 478).

Man is quite ill in Aeschylus, but still thinks of himself somewhat as a god and does not want to enter the membrane, and in Euripides, finally he splashes about in the membrane, forgetting where and when he was a god.

☕️producing classical plays in the modern era

One girl, her shoulder-piece loosened, revealed a white breast to the moonlight as she lay. Meanwhile another girl danced and laid bare her left flank. Naked, she appeared in full view in the open air, and she resembled a living picture; her white complexion met the eye with an answering gleam, the work of dark shadow. Another girl exposed her lovely arms, throwing her hands around another's feminine neck, and this one showed a glimpse of thigh beneath the folds of a torn cloak; and hopeless love set its seal upon her smiling bloom. Drowsily they sank down upon the calamint, crushing the dark-petalled violets and the crocus which smeared the shadowy trace of its sunny image on their woven garments, and the sturdy marjoram, nurtured by the dew; and they lay there, stretching out their necks in the soft meadows.