| This dissertation begins from the premise that emotional expression in Greek tragedy reflects ideas and evaluative processes that address similar ideas and processes under negotiation in the plays' cultural context. I focus on the tragic chorus and argue that the choral discourse of pity and fear provides one of the competing logoi that partake in the representation, problematization, and constant redefinition of the sociopolitics of the emotions in 5th c. BC Athens. By re-inscribing the emotions in the sociopolitical realm, questioning the capacity of that realm to contain them, and enacting diverse models of reaction that inherently offer new models of action, the choral discourse of pity and fear suggests new ways of social practice through feeling.;Chapter One, Fear Institutionalized: The Chorus as the Agent of the Emotions, suggests that active choruses are instrumental in the rationalization of fear for its incorporation in the legal and religious institutions of the polis. The choral discourse in Aeschylus' Eumenides and Supplices justifies the institutionalization of fear. Euripides' Bacchae on the other hand dramatizes the limits of the ability of the political to incorporate extreme but vital emotion.;Chapter Two, War, argues that the choral expression of female victims of war (in Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes and Euripides' Hecuba and Trojan Women) is aimed as a rival to the epitaphios logos: it dramatizes the inevitability of excessively impious behavior in war which threatens even the victors' communities from within and asks for active pity in the politics and praxis of war.;Chapter Three, Nosos, examines the ethics of pity and fear as a response to (a) literal disease (in Sophocles' Philoctetes ) and (b) the metaphorical disease of eros (in Sophocles' Trachiniae and Euripides' Hippolytus and Medea). I argue that pity as a co-operative value ought to result in action that stems from the evaluation of shared ideas about justice, reverence, and duty. As a response to the nosos of eros, choral emotional expression and imagery offer paradigms for coping with private and public demands of eros and create, more generally, cultural mediators for dealing with emotionality in judgment and moral evaluation. |
