Review of R. Mitchell-Boyask, Plague & the Athenian Imagination: Drama, History, & the Cult of Asclepius

Kachuck, Aaron
(2009) BMCR — Vol. 2009.02.10, n° 2009.02.10, p. Online (2009)

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Abstract
In 1956, Bernard Knox published a seminal article on “The Date of the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles” ( AJP 77:133-147) in which he urged 425 BC as the year of that play’s production by explicating various puzzling features of OT within a context of Athenian response to the waves of plague after 430. Mitchell-Boyask’s most recent book, Plague and the Athenian Imagination, expands Knox’s observations to a wider array of tragedies (Euripides’ Hippolytus, Heracles, Phoenissae; Sophocles’ OT, Trachiniae, Philoctetes), to a greater variety of “political” events, and to a series of general investigations into the valence of words for sickness ( nosos, loimos) in Athenian tragedy. Observing spikes in the frequency of words for disease in extant tragedy around particular dates (the plague in 430, the construction of the Athenian Asclepieion in 420, the oligarchic coup of 411) M-B attempts to read Athenian drama against the backdrop of these events. Though much of the work inevitably involves issues of dating, M-B’s primary goal is not strictly speaking historical but rather literary, insofar as he attempts to revivify various phrases, scenes, characters, and aspects of tragedy that prior to being subjected to his nose for nosological allusions had gone unnoticed. Most pages of this book contain myriad original interpretative suggestions; my summary focuses only on what I have taken to be the most central and/or exemplary interpretive attempts.
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Kachuck, A. (2009). Review of R. Mitchell-Boyask, Plague & the Athenian Imagination: Drama, History, & the Cult of Asclepius. BMCR, 2009.02.10(2009.02.10), Online. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/100949 (Original work published 2009)