Greek tragedy from East to West: the reception of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides from Byzantium to Western Europe – REGRET

The absence of dramatic literature in Byzantium tends to mask the fact that Byzantine scholarship was a landmark in the history of the reception of Greek tragedy. Byzantine scholars preserved and shaped the canon of Greek tragic plays that were passed on to later generations of scholars. Importantly, the textual tradition of the Greek tragedians relies heavily on the work of Byzantine scholars. However, in spite of their indisputable influence on later scholarship, there has been no comprehensive study of the reception of Greek tragedy in Byzantium.
This project intends to investigate the Byzantine literary reception of the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, a field remaining unexplored within classical reception, from the 9th to the 16th century.
Firstly, this project aims at defining a corpus of Byzantine testimonies on ancient Greek tragedy spanning various sources and literary genres: it will survey the textual transmission, the scholia and the work of the lexicographers, the scholarly tradition as well as Byzantine literature.
Secondly, this project will study and analyse the Byzantine literary and scholarly discourse on Greek tragedy. This corpus will then be made accessible to a large audience through a digital online database. While balancing the Western narrative defining the early-modern period as the dawn of literary history and scholarship, this project will also bridge a gap in cultural history, in the history of the reception of Greek tragedy, and of theatre in general.