Chaos and Catharsis: War and Theater in Ancient Athens

Chaos and Catharsis: War and Theater in Ancient Athens is a Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies class taught by Robert Meagher.

Course Description
The century in which Greek drama was developed?twenty-five centuries ago?was for Athens a century of war so like our own that General George C. Marshall, as Secretary of State, once said "I doubt seriously whether a man (sic) can think with full wisdom and with deep convictions regarding certain of the basic international issues today who has not at least reviewed in his mind the period of the Peloponnesian War and the Fall of Athens." The same may be said of a less international issue: not how and where best to wage war, but how and where best to recover from it. For the ancient Athenians, the answer lay in the theater. Jonathan Shay, author of Achilles in Vietnam, puts it quite simply when he argues that "Athenian theater was created and performed by combat veterans for an audience of combat veterans; they did this to enable returning soldiers to function together in a 'democratic' polity." The core texts of this class will be the Peloponnesian War of Thucydides and the anti-war dramas of Euripides and Aristophanes.