Ancient Greek Tragedy and Comedy

Leader: Dr. Michael Ivins, Humane Letters Teacher, Great Hearts Academies

This seminar will study six plays from classical Greece, three tragedies and three comedies. While every play stands on its own as an interpretable whole, each session will alternate between genres in the hopes of gaining a better sense of the complex relationship between tragedy and comedy by setting them in such close proximity.

In particular we will be looking at Euripides and Aristophanes, who are two key figures in Greek literature with peculiar social associations. Not only might there be subtextual dialogue between many of their plays, Aristophanes takes explicit aim at Euripides by making him a central character in two of his plays (Women of Thesmaphoria and Frogs) and has characters in others offer direct criticism of his work. Seeing how these two playwrights address one another through their work may serve to give some particular angle on the generic question of the relation between tragedy and comedy.

June 4-June 20

Tuesdays and Thursdays

11:00 am - 1:00 pm (AZ), 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm (CDT)

View the Syllabus

FREE for Great Hearts employees: use voucher code ghemployee (case sensitive) at checkout.