Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy

Johanna Hanink is Assistant Professor of Classics and Robert Gale Noyes Assistant Professor of Humanities at Brown University, Rhode Island, where she is also a member of the Graduate Field Faculty in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies. She works primarily on the intellectual and performance cultures of classical Athens and has published widely on Athenian tragedy and its reception in antiquity.

• Introduction: through the Lycurgan looking glass; Part I. Classical Tragedy and the Lycurgan Programme: 1. Civic poetry in Lycurgus' Against Leocrates; 2. Scripts and statues, or a law of Lycurgus' own; 3. Site of change, site of memory: the 'Lycurgan' Theatre of Dionysus; Part II. Reading the Theatrical Heritage: 4. Courtroom drama: Aeschines and Demosthenes; 5. Classical tragedy and its comic lovers; 6. Aristotle and the theatre of Athens; Epilogue: classical tragedy in the age of Macedon.

'Hanink writes in a lucid and engaging style, bringing together the disparate evidential strands, archaeological, epigraphical and literary, into a persuasive synthesis, and handling deftly the balance and interplay between the political and literary aspects of her topic … the book makes a very valuable, well-rounded, contribution to our understanding of the literary, political and monumental aspects of post-fifth-century tragedy in general and its role in the Lycurgan policy agenda in particular; and the lively, well-crafted and accessible style in which it is written will make it attractive to teachers and students as well as useful to researchers.' Stephen Lambert, Bryn Mawr Classical Review