Spirit of Aristophanes

Mary C. English is Professor of Classics and General Humanities at Montclair State University. She is co-editor of the Thornton Wilder Journal. With Lee M. Fratanuono, she edited Pushing the Boundaries of Historia (Routledge, 2018); and with Georgia L. Irby, she authored A Little Latin Reader (OUP, 2e 2017) and A New Latin Primer (OUP, 2015). She also has written numerous articles and book chapters on the staging of ancient comedy and the reception of Greek drama by contemporary American playwrights. Dustin W. Dixon is Assistant Professor of Classics at Grinnell College. He is co-author of Performing Gods in Classical Antiquity and the Age of Shakespeare (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). He has published articles on ancient tragedy and comedy, fragmentary drama and classical reception in Classical Philology, Classical Quarterly, and Classical Receptions Journal.

• Editors’ AcknowledgementsContributorsA Note on the TextPreface, Mary C. English and Dustin W. Dixon 1. Female Genitalia Onstage in Aristophanes, Amy Richlin2. ‘Let Loose the Melodies of Holy Hymns’: Voice, Agency and Gender in Aristophanes’ Birds, Daniel Libatique3. Performing Ritual Sacrifice in Aristophanes’ Peace and Birds, Mary C. English4. Political Ambition and Poetry in Aristophanes’ Birds and Plato’s Aristophanes, I-Kai Jeng5. Sophocles and Happy Endings, Anne Mahoney6. Heroism in the Middle in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, Emily Austin7. διδαγμάτων ἥδιστον: Storytelling and the Origin of Religion in the Sisyphus Fragment (43 Fr. 19 TrGF), Andrew Ford8. The Whetstone of Love: Helen’s Blemished Beauty, Dustin W. Dixon9. Virginity and the Postmortem State of the Body: Reading Mary and Hippolytus in Dialogue, Chris Synodinos10. Literal Truth, Mythic Truth and Narrative in Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, William Owens 11. The Body’s Borders: Violation and the Visual in the Carmina Priapea, Tyler T. Travillian12. What Are the Goals of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura?, James J. O’Hara13. Not So Funny After All: On Deconstructing (and Reconstructing) the Text of Petronius, John P. BodelIndex

This collection of essays by former students of Jeffrey Henderson offers a rich and often provocative response and tribute to Jeff’s areas of scholarly expertise including editing and interpreting the language, performance and ideology of comedy. The essays question received categories of interpretation in a wide range of authors and genres.