Dr Paul Epstein is a distinguished classicist and Professor Emeritus of Classics at Oklahoma State University, renowned for his extensive knowledge of Greek and Latin literature.
In this lecture and discussion—delivered in Savannah during the inaugural year of Ralston College’s MA in the Humanities program—classicist Dr Paul Epstein considers how Sophocles’s tragedy The Women of Trachis and Aristophanes’s comedy Frogs arise from—and reflect upon—the polis-centered polytheism of Ancient Greece as it appeared during the Athenian flourishing of the fifth century BC.
Professor Epstein explores how these Greek dramas articulate the relationship between human beings, the gods, and the community. Tragedy, in Professor Epstein’s account, is about the overall structure of the community, while comedy starts with the individual’s exploration of that community. Yet both forms ultimately reveal an understanding of the individual that is inseparable from the polis in which he or she lives. Professor Epstein argues that our contemporary notion of the self as an entity fundamentally separate from context would be entirely alien to the Ancient Greeks. Grasping this ancient understanding of the individual is vitally necessary if we are to correctly interpret the literary and philosophical texts of Hellenic antiquity.
