Faces of Silence in Ancient Greek Literature

Book excerpt: The volume offers new insights into the intricate theme of silence in Greek literature, especially drama. Even though the topic has received respectable attention in recent years, it still lends itself to further inquiry, which embraces silence's very essence and boundaries; its applications and effects in particular texts or genres; and some of its technical features and qualities. The particular topics discussed extend to all these three areas of inquiry, by looking into: silence's possible role in the performance of epic and lyric; its impact on the workings of praise-poetry; its distinct deployments in our five complete ancient novels; Aristophanic, comic and otherwise, silences; the vocabulary of the unspeakable in tragedy; the connections of tragic silence to power, authority, resistance, and motivation; female tragic silences and their transcendence, against the background of male oppression or domination; famous tragic silences as expressions of the ritualized isolation of the individual from both human and divine society. The emerging insights are valuable for the broader interpretation of the relevant texts, as well as for the fuller understanding of central values and practices of the society that created them.