Greek Drama and the Invention of Rhetoric (eBook)

David Sansone is Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Illinois. A former editor of the journal Illinois Classical Studies, he has also served on the editorial boards of Classical Philology and Bryn Mawr Classical Review, and been a member of the Board of Directors of the American Philological Association. He is the author of Greek Athletics and the Genesis of Sport (1988), Plutarch: Lives of Aristeides and Cato (1989) and Ancient Greek Civilization (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

Preface

Part One: What Drama Does and How It Does It

1. Setting the Stage

2. Seeing is Believing

3. The Muse Takes a Holiday

4. "It's counterpoint," he countered, and
pointed.

5. Illusion and Collusion

6. Reaction Time

Part Two: The Second Stage: The Invention of Rhetoric

7. Paradigm Shift Happens

8. Perhaps You Will Object

9. Putting the Accuser on Trial

Works Cited

"Every reader, both novice and expert, will learn a great
deal from this insightful and refreshing study."
(Vorlagen und Nachrichten, 1 November 2014)

"The book is lively and readable, and should be read by everyone
interested either in tragedy or in the origins of rhetoric."
(Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 16 June 2013)

"Sansone considers a wide range of text and offers
a valuable discussion of how many features of formal rhetoric may
be traced back to drama and earlier literary genres."
(Anglo-Hellenic Review, 1 March 2013)

"The book is elegantly and often wittily written, with a
wide range of cultural reference, and can strongly be recommended
to anyone interested in the drama of any period."
(Rogueclassicism, 26 February 2013)





"An impressively erudite, elegantly crafted argument for
reversing what 'everybody knows' about the relation of
two literary genres that played before mass audiences in the
Athenian city state."

- Victor Bers, Yale University

"Sansone's book is first-rate and should be read by
any scholar interested in the origins of Greek rhetorical theory
or, for that matter, interested in Greek tragedy. That Greek
tragedy contains elements properly described as rhetorical is
familiar, but Sansone goes far beyond this understanding by putting
Greek tragedy at the heart of a counter-narrative of those
origins."

- Edward Schiappa, The University of Minnesota