Secular Dreams, Bloody Oracles: Staging State and Religion in Classical Athens and Enlightenment Paris

I perform a comparative reading of <em>Iphigeneia Among the Taurians</em> by Euripides (around 414 BCE) and the adaptation <em>Iphigénie en Tauride</em> by Claude Guimond de La Touche (1757 CE). I aim to read the development of the secular with regards to state and religion as it became articulated in the Athens of Euripides and later adapted on the French stage during the Enlightenment. I briefly include some observations on contemporary claims about the separation of church and state in the United States to deepen my comparative reading about the development of the secular as I define it in this thesis.