Articles

1. Weiberg, E. "Weapons as Friends and Foes in Sophocles’ Ajax and Euripides’ Heracles." The Materialities of Greek Tragedy. Edited by Telò, M; Mueller, M.  Bloomsbury Academic  63-78.

   Abstract:
   Sophocles’ Ajax and Euripides’ Heracles stage a warrior’s suicide and rejection of suicide, respectively, as confrontations with weapons as material friends and foes. Drawing connections between recent work on moral injury and the new materialist concept of the assemblage, this essay examines the social, material, and affective forces at play in these warriors’ responses to their traumatic loss of philia (friendship/kinship). Each play locates the warrior’s encounter with loss in re-enactments of past conflict staged by weapons. Through their interactions with these material friends and foes, Ajax and Heracles model two different responses to traumatic loss that parallel Freud’s categories of “acting out” and “working through.” The theatrical performance of these responses carved out a space in fifth-century Athenian life for reflection on the tension between one’s obligations to friends and family and military service for the polis.