Varying degrees of tragic stylization are also visible in other stories of Persian and Hellenic monarchs. Tragic effects cluster at the beginning and end of Herodotus’ “biography” of Cyrus. The story of his birth has folktale roots enhanced by various tragic features (intra-familial violence, fated doom precipitated by preventive measures, a variation on the Atreusmahl myth); the story of his last campaign includes tragic vocabulary and a corrective reference to the Aeschylean law of “learning through suffering.” His successor Cambyses is portrayed as a tragic protagonist on his deathbed, when he learns “too late” the true meaning of divine communications he had previously misinterpreted, with disastrous personal and political consequences. Among Greek tyrants, Herodotus portrays the Samian Polycrates and the Corinthian Periander in tragic fashion, the latter in a narrative that bears several hallmarks of Sophoclean tragedy, including sibling conflict over devotion to a dead parent (cf. the playwright’s Electra).

This chapter presents the chorus’ ability to interact and participate directly in dramatic action and dialogue as an overlooked aspect of the chorus’ polyphony. The chapter begins by tackling modern assumptions about ancient tragic performance, including the myth of the tragic coryphaeus, the chorus leader figure who allegedly spoke on behalf of the collective, to whom modern editors assign all choral speech. It then analyses the various lyric dialogues that are found in the surviving corpus of each of the three major tragedians, illustrating how the chorus’ extensive range across the various modes of delivery (sung, recitative and spoken) maps onto tensions of exchange and violence that are typical of Greek drama. The chapter ends with an extended examination of the dynamic interplay between actors and chorus that Sophocles stages in Electra, Philoctetes and Antigone. In the case of Antigone, Sophocles features a silent chorus who refuse to engage with Antigone’s and Creon’s mourning, a silence which reflects the creative ways in which tragedians can direct the chorus’ lyric interactions with actors.

This chapter tracks Pound’s plunge into Greek studies – especially focused on Sophocles – during his incarceration at St. Elizabeths after the Second World War; it examines his unpublished correspondence during this period as well as his also unpublished translation of the Sophoclean Elektra (1949). An opening reading of the Pisan Cantos (wr. 1945) argues that Pound explicitly ties the fate of his epic poem, and of American poetry tout court, to a re-engagement with Greek, and especially tragic, poetics. The bilingualism of his Elektra – the play is half in English, half in transliterated Greek – encodes its antithetical ambitions, one poetic and the other political, as Pound uses the translation on the one hand to devise a new prosody for his writing after the war, returning to the prosodic experiments of his early years, and on the other, to continue the fascist ghost theater of the Pisan Cantos.