Drama Queens: Daniel Mendelsohn on Greek Tragedy

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The three great Athenian tragedians—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—gave a powerful new expressiveness and a profound interiority to the heroines of myth. In Agamemnon (Week 1), Aeschylus gives Clytemnestra—who avenges her husband’s sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigeneia, by murdering him upon his return from the Trojan War—a remarkable complexity, at once deeply sympathetic and horrifyingly violent. Sophocles’ Electra (Week 2) is a remarkably acute portrayal of Clytemnestra’s traumatized young daughter, Electra, whose obsessive mourning for her murdered father triggers a dreadful act of vengeance. Euripides, famous above all in antiquity for his portrayals of “women on the verge,” turned his attention to the women of Troy in two of his most electrifying plays (Week 3): in Hecuba, he paints a harrowing portrait of frenzied grief that curdles into unspeakable violence, and in Trojan Women he brings together the defeated city’s women—Hecuba, the widow Andromache, the mad virgin prophetess Cassandra, and of course Helen of Troy herself—in a kind of pageant, self-consciously parading the main archetypes of femininity before the audience.

This course will use the following translation for all plays: The Greek Tragedies (University of Chicago Press). Seminar members will receive a 40% discount code in their order confirmation. 

Three one-hour sessions: November 5, 12, 19. All sessions will start at 7pm EDT. Memberships begin at $99 (excluding Eventbrite fees). Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.

About Daniel Mendelsohn

Daniel Mendelsohn is an award-winning author, critic, essayist, and translator. His eleven books include the international bestsellersAn Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an EpicandThe Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million; a translation, with commentary, of the Modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy; and three collections of essays, most recentlyEcstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones (2018). Over the past thirty years. Mr. Mendelsohn has contributed over three hundred essays, reviews, articles, and translations to numerous publications, most frequentlyThe New YorkerandThe New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large, and has been a columnist forThe New York Times Book Review,New Yorkmagazine, andBBC Culture. His writing for mainstream publications covers a wide range of subjects, from Classical civilization to contemporary literature, as well as film, theater, opera, and television. Mr. Mendelsohn’s honors include the National Jewish Book Award, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Prose Style, the Society for Classical Studies Presidents’ Medal, Princeton University’s James Madison Medal, the Prix Médicis in France and the Malaparte Prize in Italy, that country’s highest literary honor for foreign authors. In 2022, he was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Republic of France. Since 2019, he has been the director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust that supports writers of nonfiction, essay, and criticism.

Daniel Mendelsohn, the Charles Ranlett Flint professor of Humanities at Bard College, lives in the Hudson Valley of New York. His translation of Homer’sOdyssey was published by the University of Chicago Press in Spring 2025.

About this series

The figure of the tragic heroine—suffering, abject, grandiose, vengeful, self-sacrificing, murderous, noble, seductive—has gripped the Western imagination for nearly thirty centuries, from the Homeric epics to twentieth-century cinema and theater. Our cultural obsession with these characters raises a compelling question: Why have male authors focused so consistently on the representation of suffering females—often for the benefit of male audiences? In this four-part NYRSeminar, New York Review of Books Editor-at-Large Daniel Mendelsohn will take participants through a series of close readings of major works that established and then developed our female literary archetypes— from Homer’sOdyssey to representative works of Greek tragedy, and from the nineteenth-century novel and opera to four major works of twentieth-century theater—as we explore the aesthetic nature and ideological roots of this cultural preoccupation.