Paschini, Angela; (2019) Religious exploration in greek tragedy. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

My research project focuses on Greek tragedy’s specific contribution to fifth-century debate on issues of theodicy and on theological questions concerning the existence and nature of the gods, and their role in human lives. The relationship between the human and the divine as represented and explored in Greek tragedy is discussed with special attention to the problems inherent in the different forms of contact between deities and mankind. The dissertation is structured thematically: each of the three chapters deals with a specific religious theme and focuses on the analysis of a couple of paradigmatic plays. This project starts by studying one of the closest forms of contact between gods and mortals depicted in Greek tragedy, namely the stories of sexual intercourse between a male deity and a mortal girl (Aeschylus’ Suppliants and Euripides’ Ion). The second chapter concerns the opposition between human and divine knowledge in Sophocles’ OT and Euripides’ Bacchae, whereas the third addresses the topic of divine intervention in human life by analyzing the dramatic portrayal of the gods on stage in Aeschylus’ Eumenides and Euripides’ Orestes. This research aims to show how religious exploration in ancient Greek tragedy is tied up with a number of competing discourses informed by advances in medicine as well as by contemporary philosophical and political questions. Each chapter follows a similar methodology of close reading of the plays connecting the linguistic and thematic analyses of emblematic passages to broader fifth-century theological concerns.

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