Recent Views on Tragedy Ancient and Modern

In 1958 the American Council of Learned Societies devoted its thirty-ninth annual meeting to a consideration of ‘the present-day vitality of the classical tradition.’ The focal point in the two-day program was the persistent influence of certain aspects of Greek tragedy upon the arts in our time: two versions of the Antigone (Sophocles’ and Jean Anouilh's) were presented on the same evening; there were lectures on ‘the tragic sense’ in Picasso's Guernica and in contemporary painting and music; but the most striking affirmation of the theme was a lecture on ‘The Vitality of Sophocles’ by Professor H. D. F. Kitto of the University of Bristol. One of the most distinguished of modern classical scholars, Mr. Kitto is well known among American students for his book, Greek Tragedy, published in 1939. In addition to his work on tragic drama here considered there appeared in print last year a small volume by him on Sophocles as dramatist and philosopher. In 1957 Harvard University published a long-awaited, monumental study of Aristotle's Poetics by Professor Gerald F. Else of the University of Michigan, and in 1958 The Johns Hopkins Press published in book form six lectures delivered in Baltimore by Professor Richmond Lattimore on The Poetry of Greek Tragedy. That these classical scholars should have, during recent years, made such varied contributions to an understanding of Greek tragedy — a field to which each of them has devoted a major portion of his academic life — is noteworthy but scarcely surprising, since the Greek theatre and the Greek tragedians have been a perennial subject in the history of classical philology.