Entering the Agon Dissent and Authority in Homer, Historiography, and Tragedy

by Barker, Elton T. E.

• ISBN13: 9780199542710
• ISBN10: 0199542716
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-03-25
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This book investigates one of the most characteristic and prominent features of ancient Greek literature - the scene of debate or agon, in which with varying degrees of formality characters square up to each other and engage in a contest of words. Drawing on six case studies of different kindsof narrative - epic, historiography and tragedy - and authors as diverse as Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Sophocles and Euripides, this wide-ranging study analyses each example of debate in its context according to a set of interrelated questions: who debates, when, why, and with what consequences?Based on the changing representations of debate across and within different genres, it shows the importance of debate to these key canonical genres and, in turn, the role of literature in the construction of a citizen body through the exploration, reproduction and management of dissent fromauthority.

Author Biography

Elton T. E. Barker is Lecturer in Classics, Christ Church, University of Oxford.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	p. xii
Prologue	p. 1
Epic
Introduction: founding dissent	p. 31
Challenging authority in the assemblies of the Iliad	p. 40
Sidelining debate in the Odyssey	p. 89
Historiography
Introduction: writing in dissent	p. 137
Herodotus' Odyssean enquiry	p. 144
Thucydides writes debate	p. 203
Tragedy
Introduction: institutional dissent	p. 267
Speaking back in Sophocles' Ajax	p. 281
Beyond the agon in Euripides' Hecuba	p. 325
Epilogue	p. 366
Bibliography	p. 374
General index	p. 413
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