Call for Papers
deadline 30th of June 2018
International conference
in classical studies
In Search of Lost Myth
Mythological Characters of Lost Tragedies
University of Siena
October 8-9, 2018
The University of Siena and the Centro Antropologia del Mondo Antico, in collaboration with the University of Turin and the Centro Studi sul Teatro Classico, are pleased to present this call for papers for the conference In Search of Lost Myth held at the University of Siena on 8th and 9th of October 2018.
In his last years, Giuseppe Verdi entrusts his final work to the pen of Arrigo Boito, a poet of refined taste who found an almost inexhaustible basin of metaphors in the Graeco-Roman mythology: when one of John Falstaff's henchmen teases the burgeois Mr Ford for the infidelity of his wife the lowlife says: “The crown which adorned the brow of Acteon / is sprouting on your head” (Falstaff, act I, second part).
The persistence of the myth of Actaeon in later literature – and the fame that it already had among the Greeks – is above all caused by the representation that the tragic poets, certainly Aeschylus and Euripides, gave of it.
We can say the same for Clytemnestra: little more than an accomplice of the vegance of Aegisthus in the Homeric poems, the tragic scene enshrined her as a virile woman, ἀνδρόβουλος, as we find her in the famous monologue of Marguerite Yourcenar.
Tragedy, therefore, had the capacity to constitute in the classical era the most relevant source of myths and mythological characters.
But what dynamics are established when a myth survives the loss of the tragedy (or tragedies) that represented it?
The conference In Search of Lost Myth, result of the collaboration of the universities of Siena and Turin, aims to investigate the myths object of tragic fragmentary tragedies (or known for indirect tradition), investigating the relationships between the stage version of these and the whole mythographic tradition.