Dionysus' unexpected decision at the end of the play is generally thought to reflect the notion that poets such as Aeschylus and Euripides had practical moral insight to offer their audiences and to promote an "Aeschylean" over a "Euripidean" approach to life. I argue, however, that this ending offers a curiously offbeat combination of aesthetic insight and intertextual playfulness that ultimat...

We describe here the first release of the Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank (AGDT), a 190,903-word syntactically annotated corpus of literary texts including the works of Hesiod, Homer and Aeschylus. While the far larger works of Hesiod and Homer (142,705 words) have been annotated under a standard treebank production method of soliciting annotations from two independent reviewers and then reco...

Lionel Abel coined the word ‘metatheatre’ in his 1963 book, Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form, claiming he had discovered a new type of theatre, and cited Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the first metatheatrical play. Over the intervening decades, various scholars have pushed the incidence of the earliest metatheatrical play back beyond Hamlet. Richard Hornby, in his 1986 book, Drama, Metadrama,...

The late Emanuele Severino (1929–2020) was an Italian philosopher whose work on Aeschylus has not yet been made available in English. In Il giogo: alle origini della ragione: Eschilo (The Yoke: At the Origins of Reason: Aeschylus, 1989), seeks to demonstrate that belongs amongst founders philosophy, i.e., first set down some philosophy’s most fundamental principles, including ontological becomi...