Afroditi Angelopoulou’s study offers a sustained examination of how bodies and sensory experience shape the dramatic world of Greek tragedy, with particular focus on the Oresteia, Persians, Trojan Women, Ajax, Medea, and Philoctetes. Operating within an enactivist model, Angelopoulou throws into sharp relief the role of bodily imagery in bridging the divide between “the page and the stage” (p. 2). Distancing herself from analyses that treat Greek theater primarily as a visual medium in which the distal sense of sight supposedly reigns supreme over the other, more earthy senses, Angelopoulou foregrounds in her introduction the importance of the embodied perspective for unearthing “deeper layers of meaning and affect” (p. 16) in these plays. She shows that the experience of the ancient spectator need not be understood through the Aristotelian notion that tragedy can achieve its end through reading alone (Poet. 1462a11–13). Instead, she brings into focus the religious context within which tragedies were performed, with its intersensory stimulation through festival practices such as feasting and drinking. In support of her argument, Angelopoulou draws not only on recent scholarship that restores sight to its embodied context, but also on sources seemingly hostile to tragedy itself: Plato’s critique in the Republic, for instance, where the Muse of poetry is described as ἡδυσμένη (607a), with all the carnal overtones, already undermines the modern misconception that ancient Greek drama was primarily an intellectual experience divorced from emotional engagement.
The first chapter focuses on the semantics and affective logic of greed in the Oresteia, highlighting the trilogy’s preoccupation with transgressive consumption. Angelopoulou first examines the Agamemnon in order to foreground the role of visceral imagery as a means of eliciting an aesthetic and moral response from the audience. Accordingly, the author emphasizes the play’s tendency to subvert cultural practices such as feasting: first appearing in Artemis’ reaction to the eagles’ feast (Ag. 137), the gut feeling of disgust (στυγεῖν) emerges as a pivotal term tied to the lower senses of smell and taste. The author identifies several textual cues that engage the audience’s sensorium (e.g., the fishy smell associated with Agamemnon’s “purple-strewn path” at Ag. 911, evoking “the stink of wealth” [p. 36]), yet the play’s cannibalistic voracity culminates in Cassandra’s vision of Thyestes’ banquet, which she envisions with repulsion “located in her mind’s eye” (p. 41). Angelopoulou then turns to the other plays of the trilogy to show how, once Athena tames the Furies, disgust is transferred from female transgressors of the natural order to outsiders, thus becoming institutionalized as a legitimate psychological and political tool.
Chapter 2 explores the concept of weight against the backdrop of the trilogy’s motif of δράσαντα παθεῖν (Cho. 313), which enmeshes the individual in an inescapable nexus of necessity, action, and suffering. Angelopoulou traces terms signifying the yielding body, paying particular attention to cognates of τλῆναι as illustrative of the inseparability of “daring” and “enduring” in the Oresteia’s conceptualization of suffering (p. 53). From the unbearable consequences of Helen’s decision to follow Menelaus (Ag. 407–8) and Agamemnon’s own misuse of the language of burden (Ag. 832–7) to Cassandra’s daring, yet futile attempts to regain a sense of agency, the concept of weight looms over the trilogy as a force that threatens to trample the political order. In the last sections of the chapter, the author examines how the Furies, pressed by the weight of their own suffering, are eventually transformed into the Kindly Ones through Athena’s persuasive intervention, as she offers to share in the burden of their anger, thus replacing the Furies’ empathic response with a sympathetic model of “co-suffering” (p. 69) that inspires awe (σέβας) instead of horror and disgust.
In chapter 3, Angelopoulou provides a sustained analysis of the somatosensory language of the Persians, foregrounding with remarkable clarity how the playwright invites the audience to participate in constructing the moving Persian body, thereby evoking their haptic knowledge. The first emblematic image is found in Atossa’s dream and the eagle omen, which set the tone for the ensuing descriptions of the affected Persian body. The author notes, in particular, the function of the metaphor of the yoke in the depiction of the destabilization of power relations that structure higher and lower orders, encapsulated in the semantics of πίπτειν: thus, Xerxes’ fall as a result of the Greek woman’s resistance to being reined in foreshadows the downfall of the king’s army and the body politic. The author then sketches out insightfully the ideological dimensions bound up with the sense of touch, focusing on how the dramatist manipulates current preconceptions about ἁβροσύνη and the Eastern lifestyle: through the repeated juxtapositions of the hard physicality of the Greek landscape and the vulnerability of the enemy body, the audience is invited to “handle and feel the enemy body with their mind’s eye” (p. 83), thus ultimately realizing its humanity.
The next chapter is devoted to the experience of motion in space as a central schema in the conceptualization of fortune’s reversal in the Trojan Women. The author brings the conceptual metaphor ”life is a journey” to the fore and unearths several interrelated linguistic patterns that depict the brutal transition of the Trojan inhabitants to their wretched fate. First, she notes how the audience is primed with terms denoting ease of movement and gesture early on in the play (e.g., the image of the Nereids’ whirling feet already in line 3), arguing that emphasis placed on the feet presents in concrete terms the motif of fortune pressing heavily on the human body. Angelopoulou then brings into focus the function of Hecuba’s prostrate body as a prefiguration of Troy’s collapse, while highlighting textual cues that enable the construal of Cassandra’s mobility as forced motion occasioned by chance and fate. Next, the author turns to the absence of movement, as exemplified by Astyanax’s corpse: the lifeless body, she argues, in its irreversible loss of the ability to move, instantiates “the burden of suffering” (p. 108). She thus explicates an implicit trajectory that runs through the play—from lightness of voluntary motion to coercion and utter immobility—by noting how the exodus, with Hecuba and the rest of the Trojan women forced into slavery, reenacts the tension between motion and stasis that pervades the narrative.
In chapter 5, Angelopoulou offers an examination of the somatic dimensions of trauma in Sophocles’ Ajax. The central premise of her argument is that the emotional numbness resulting from war trauma impacts severely and irreversibly the bonds of affection between the traumatized individual and their φίλοι. She thus starts by focusing primarily on the sense of sight in the prologue: Odysseus’ invisibility to Ajax provides a cue about the latter’s upcoming isolation, while the latter’s identification of sight with pain likewise distances him from ordinary conceptions of sentience. Unlike Aeschylus’ Ajax, who delights in communal life, the Sophoclean hero lacks such sociability and is characterized by a perverse hedonism that misapplies terms of sensory pleasure: the symposiastic context spills over subtly to the environment of warfare, and the pleasures of food and drink, rejected by the warrior, are only mentioned in his vengeful prayer to the Erinyes to feed on the army (γεύεσθε, Aj. 844). Angelopoulou then corroborates this reading through Aristotelian and Platonic notions that identify συναισθάνεσθαι as an indispensable basis of social bonds, and goes on to show how Ajax progressively becomes estranged from his community through his inclination to engage in physical contact only in martial environments. In the last section, the author focuses on the sense of touch, which comes to dominate the ending of the play, emphasizing in particular the materialization of the hero’s invisible pain through his suicide by falling on his sword—an act that symbolizes the tearing apart of the communal bonds.
In the following chapter, the author discusses the interconnections between trauma, revenge, and embodied ethics in the Medea. She starts by analyzing Medea’s denial of the pleasure of nourishment, opting instead to be “fed by the pleasure of vengeance” (p. 138), thus underscoring the heroine’s dissociative attitude and her replacement of ordinary appetites with the affective and sexual dimensions of rage and revenge. Angelopoulou dwells on the conflicting ethical models endorsed by Jason and Medea, the latter conceiving of her husband’s decision to break the marital vows as moral injury in the manner of a Homeric hero: this betrayal shrinks Medea’s social bonds and leads to traumatic dissociation and emotional numbness. The author further argues that Medea’s claim that she would much rather withstand thrice the dangers of battle than give birth once subverts the literary and cultural values that give pride of place to the bond between mother and child as the example of φιλία par excellence: concluding that her birth pangs were in vain, Medea rejects these bonds, thereby subordinating “her empathic pain to the pain of her moral injury” (p. 147). Finally, Angelopoulou analyzes the function of the sense of touch, through which familial and social ties are established, and demonstrates that haptic terms as a rule signify the annihilation of the intercorporeal ties of φιλία: at the end of the play, Medea herself becomes literally untouchable, thus resembling a disembodied figure and “reaching the ultimate stage of dissociation” (p. 159).
Chapter 7 focuses on the embodied foundations of trust and moral conscience in the Philoctetes. Angelopoulou lucidly articulates the role of bodily experience and sensory knowledge in Neoptolemus’ ethical crisis and subsequent conversion. She emphasizes that sensory intensity dominates the opening of the play: the hero’s cries appear as the hallmark of his suffering, while his social isolation is highlighted by sonic images that foreground the lack of human interaction and the significance of intercorporeality in the fashioning of a sense of belonging. The author then turns to “the notion of corrupt αἴσθησις” (p. 163) and its role in the characters’ own perception of their moral attitude: Neoptolemus’ propensity to operate within the traditional belief system of embodied ethics makes him vulnerable to Odysseus’ manipulation, while Philoctetes’ first words after his fit, mistakenly identifying Neoptolemus’ presence as a token of trust, recapitulate the fallibility of perception. Angelopoulou locates the beginnings of Neoptolemus’ conversion from Odysseus’ underling (cf. Phil. 53: ὑπουργεῖν) to Philoctetes’ co-sufferer in the experiential understanding that ensues from visiting the hero’s cave. Yet the turning point in the restoration of αἴσθησις is ultimately based on the sense of touch: the haptic knowledge Neoptolemus accrues from handling the warrior’s bow leads him to resonate with Philoctetes’ plight and transforms him into a comrade-in-arms (Phil. 675: ξυμπαραστάτην), thus precipitating the partial repair of trust. Finally, Angelopoulou shows that the last step in the complete restoration of perception occurs with Heracles’ ex machina appearance: the concatenation of sensory terms in his speech, insisting on the reciprocity of φιλία and the sharing of suffering, succeeds in effecting Philoctetes’ recuperation of the sense of trust.
In the final section, the author closes the volume by discussing Platonic and Aristotelian passages which, despite their hostility to the body, attest to an intuitive understanding of its constitutive role in cognition, while also considering Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen.
The volume is well produced, with very few typos. Overall, Angelopoulou shows herself to be masterful in uncovering insightful new ways of identifying kinaesthetic dimensions in terms that might otherwise go unnoticed as formulaic expressions. Not only is she exceptionally well informed on recent theories that pinpoint the embodied foundations of cognition and ethics, but she also moves with equal ease between different ancient genres, citing from prose—especially Plato and Aristotle, but also Thucydides and Gorgias. Such methodological breadth creates the risk that the strands of analysis may occasionally seem insulated from one another and that the argument may unfold somewhat piecemeal; yet Angelopoulou nonetheless succeeds in integrating them into a coherent whole. In sum, the quality of the volume is such that it will remain an invaluable resource for scholars and students of Greek tragedy interested in embodiment.