tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post3193594701954212359..comments2024-03-27T16:48:21.039-05:00Comments on Wuthering <br>Expectations: The Persians by Aeschylus - soon new disaster gushes forthAmateur Reader (Tom)http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comBlogger36125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-30288802682757991792022-12-15T17:30:22.386-06:002022-12-15T17:30:22.386-06:00Yes, that looks like a good compilation of the pla...Yes, that looks like a good compilation of the plays. As you will see, there are a few duds along the way. Not many.<br /><br />i am glad you are joining in, even at a remove. You will help keep the plays fresh in my mind.Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-27566167238375067352022-12-15T01:40:11.262-06:002022-12-15T01:40:11.262-06:00Coming in very late to the project I read this in
...Coming in very late to the project I read this in<br />The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides-Preface, general introduction, play introductions, and compilation by 2016 by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm, which seems to me a very good starting point in Greek Drama. I look, forward to your Roman Drama project Mel uhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08714473754458914681noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-89677182408936976632022-02-26T10:14:30.621-06:002022-02-26T10:14:30.621-06:00Maybe Poetics in September. Back to school Aristo...Maybe <i>Poetics</i> in September. Back to school Aristotle. We'll have read enough Sophocles to see why Aristotle is right, and enough Euripides to see why he is wrong.Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-90838833109684007962022-02-26T06:02:09.581-06:002022-02-26T06:02:09.581-06:00I would like that. This Greek literature is so fas...I would like that. This Greek literature is so fascinating.Clare Shepherdhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18023202926551339975noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-40290450130275869142022-02-23T18:56:33.248-06:002022-02-23T18:56:33.248-06:00I am sorry to hear about your partner's health...I am sorry to hear about your partner's health, but so happy to hear that you are reading along. The comments here, and other people's writing, which I have linked, have been helpful for me, too. Pretty good for a bunch of literature lovers with little Greek (a couple of commenters have some Greek).<br /><br />Xerxes did not have a happy end to his life, but his murder occurred after the performance of the play.Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-70836704336469806632022-02-23T17:07:14.710-06:002022-02-23T17:07:14.710-06:00I'm just getting started on the plays, as my p...I'm just getting started on the plays, as my partner had a health crisis for the last 2 months. I've read The Persians, and everyone's comments, which I find most educational, thanks all. <br />My own take on it, being utterly ignorant of Greek plays or any other plays (professionally I was in the sciences before I retired), is that Aeschylus has compassion for the Persians who lost so badly, but he also is making a few points: Xerxes was an arrogant and naive young twit who threw so many men into battle without knowing what he was doing and that he was being tricked; his Mum was right all along, it was going to be a disaster and he should have stuck with land battles which the Persians , or at least his Dad, apparently had expertise in; the counsellors were pretty useless as they predicted 'all will be well' if Mum only made the proper rituals and libations (so much for counsellors, and libations) ; and yes, a teeny bit of gloating about how the smaller but craftier Athenians defeated the mighty Persians. <br />I was also disappointed that no one seems to have held Xerxes accountable...it seems he was still the King, after all, no matter how inept he had been in battle....but I guess that is one of the many, many differences between our time and Aeschylus' time. <br /><br />I'm looking forward to the next play(s) and learning from everyone's comments. <br />joseehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02204311670375232901noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-59407827412273969452022-02-11T20:00:36.364-06:002022-02-11T20:00:36.364-06:00The Argumentative Old Git writes about The Persian...<a href="https://argumentativeoldgit.wordpress.com/2022/02/06/the-persians-by-aeschylus/" rel="nofollow">The Argumentative Old Git</a> writes about <i>The Persians</i>: "So we don’t see any of this in the play; what we see instead are the characters’ reactions to all this, and their understanding, or their coming to an understanding, of what it all signifies."<br /><br />And <a href="https://acommonreader.st/the-risk-of-being-real-phrynichus/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-risk-of-being-real-phrynichus" rel="nofollow">The Common Reader</a> looks at another episode, described in Herodotus, where a playwright wrote about current events and suffered for it: "However you look at it, the fine was not a minor inconvenience for producing a play on a realistic topic."Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-13674101032658993702022-02-09T09:26:56.538-06:002022-02-09T09:26:56.538-06:00Me too. I did have some doubts about my "one...Me too. I did have some doubts about my "one a week" schedule, and I sure I will trip over it at some point, but right now it is all still pretty exciting.Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-87314375426588641342022-02-09T07:58:18.022-06:002022-02-09T07:58:18.022-06:00I just am finding they are so worth the effort, an...I just am finding they are so worth the effort, and you just get into them. I'm really excited by the plays.Clare Shepherdhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18023202926551339975noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-58707112795017483662022-02-07T08:25:29.856-06:002022-02-07T08:25:29.856-06:00Clare, it warms the heart to hear this. Thank you ...Clare, it warms the heart to hear this. Thank you for commenting.<br /><br />My experience has been that the plays really build on each other, however one reads them. Aeschylus becomes more interesting the more Aeschylus plays I read; the plays generally become more interesting the more of them I read; Euripides makes Sophocles and Aeschylus more interesting. On like that. Wait until we get to <i>The Frogs</i>.<br /><br />Still, it will not hurt that some plays are coming up that look more like our, or my, usual idea of plays. I can recalibrate a little.Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-18316516343920625332022-02-07T01:47:31.504-06:002022-02-07T01:47:31.504-06:00I am new to Greek drama and struggled with the fir...I am new to Greek drama and struggled with the first few plats, but reread "The Pedsians" immediately and it made more sense. I have kept to the reading schedule and am really getting more out of each play. It's almost like I have grasped the idea of these amazing plants, so different from any drama I have experienced before. I'm so glad that this project caught my attention. Thanks for all the postings. They have been a great help.Clare Shepherdhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18023202926551339975noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-78925147768366551262022-02-06T18:13:21.392-06:002022-02-06T18:13:21.392-06:00I thought I would be reviewing and extending what ...I thought I would be reviewing and extending what I knew about Greek theater and so on, and I have, but I have also been looking at sources more carefully, which has been undoing some of what I thought I knew. Which is good, which is good.<br /><br />I am glad you have joined in. There are going to be a lot of surprises along the way, as well as some titanic masterpieces.<br /><br />Amanda's post <a rel="nofollow">is here</a>.Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-33508538823048544002022-02-06T17:16:15.534-06:002022-02-06T17:16:15.534-06:00I'm a few weeks behind, but I finally finished...I'm a few weeks behind, but I finally finished The Persians and my first thought was similar to yours--surprise at how sympathetic to the Persians Aeschylus seems to be. But reading through the comments and reflecting on how little we really know about the ancient Greek world and theater, I'm willing to acknowledge that might be an interpretation based on 21st century US thinking. I feel like I'm very lacking in knowledge of the Greek world/writings, so it will be interesting to follow along with the posts and to work my way through the plays. amanda @ simplerpastimeshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14127945915013121105noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-73821267911848425642022-01-18T11:16:33.379-06:002022-01-18T11:16:33.379-06:00Stallings is so great. That tree! Amusing, altho...Stallings is so great. That tree! Amusing, although horrifying, to see the Greeks get whipped up against the, I guess, Turks.<br /><br />Vellacott does a nice job of - what do I think he is doing - signaling when he thinks the chorus is singing. He switches to rhymed verse. Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-46157301041638440322022-01-18T08:20:26.732-06:002022-01-18T08:20:26.732-06:00A. E. Stallings has a nice piece about the play in...A. E. Stallings has a nice <a href="https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/watching-the-persians-in-greece-freelance-a-e-stallings/" rel="nofollow">piece</a> about the play in the Sept. 25, 2020 TLS; a couple of tidbits:<br /><br />The tragedy plays differently to Greek and non-Greek audiences. Reviews of the live-streamed production in the <i>Guardian</i> (subtitled “a triumph of empathy for a time of Covid-19”) and the <i>New York Times</i> praised the production for its timely lessons on hubris and its message of empathy. But for the overwhelmingly Greek audience present, thrilled to be out of doors at a production at all after a long lockdown, and potentially on the brink of war, the play was rousingly patriotic. The image of Greece as a scrappy little country punching above its weight, taking no orders from kings and exerting its naval prowess to push back against a larger threatening power, was as appealing as ever. [...]<br /><br />The battle was a significant marker in the lives of all three of the major Athenian playwrights: Aeschylus fought in it; Sophocles was sixteen (the age of my son now) at the time of the victory, when he was chosen as a handsome youth to lead the victory hymn. Euripides was in utero, and according to legend picked the battle of Salamis as a propitious time to be born, his mother going into labour as she and other Athenian refugees fled for the safety of the island by boat.<br /><br />There were two things I particularly wanted to see on Salamis. One was the cave where, according to legend, Euripides wrote his plays, having rowed over from the mainland, and holing up there in a sort of proto writers’ retreat. After driving around the island’s surprisingly large pine forest (the oldest such in the Saronic), we found it, and I was surprised at how far up the hillside it was, how steep. The other thing was an ancient olive tree; this my husband was less sanguine about tracking down, as we had no information other than that it exists. The tree is estimated to be 2,500 years old and has been called the only surviving eyewitness of the battle. Yet the tree is not widely known on the island. We were lucky in that our waiter at lunch was a native Salaminian, and gave us a general idea of its whereabouts. Even so, as we drove up and down the stretch of road at the village he had mentioned, no one we asked had heard about a <i>particular</i> old olive tree. We were about to give up, though knowing it must be close, when a woman driving past offered to lead the way.<br /><br />The tree is so old that it has devolved from its enormous central trunk to a circle of offshoots, each itself as thick as a centuries-old olive tree. Odysseus’ rooted marital bed was carved from a living olive tree. And I thought: this is such a tree. A small wooden sign says: “The Olive Tree of Orsa”. According to local lore, Orsa was a young woman in medieval times whose dowry consisted solely of the ancient tree. (It would have been close to 2,000 years old then.) We patted its flanks, and marvelled at the litter of last autumn’s shrivelled olives carpeting the earth underfoot; the tree evidently still produces masses. It may have been a sapling during the battle itself, and a young tree when Euripides wrote his plays.<br />Languagehathttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13285708503881129380noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-64116706934547724472022-01-18T01:10:42.870-06:002022-01-18T01:10:42.870-06:00Dollymix, Benardete does say in his intro that he&...Dollymix, Benardete does say in his intro that he's trying to preserve the feel of the meter, but I can't say that it feels successful. Do you think that opening passage feels like a march? It doesn't to me. Looking at the Greek, that opening choral section strikes me as not the usual thing, especially from line 66 or so, but Benardete's version doesn't get it across for me. And the language is spare in Greek, I think. (That means even with my rusty Greek I can read it...) and Benardete certainly doesn't feel spare to me.<br /><br />There were a few other oddities in the translation, I thought. Theomastor--which means, to go all Fragment of a Greek Tragedy,'like to the gods in counsel', but in any case a perfectly Greek word--he renders as Padshah.<br /><br />Dollymix, Tom, thanks for the info on Ian Johnston's translation. I'll check it out.reesehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15818057262934008241noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-90697873319606348282022-01-17T10:53:36.995-06:002022-01-17T10:53:36.995-06:00Yes, I can vaguely imagine Blake's illustratio...Yes, I can vaguely imagine Blake's illustration of the scene.<br /><br />A more modern version of the story would be about the soldiers, the ordinary people. It is surprising to see the King as the tragic figure, although I guess not surprising given the genre. We're going to see lots of tragic kings this year.<br /><br />Ian Johnston's translation <a href="http://johnstoniatexts.x10host.com/aeschylus/persianshtml.html" rel="nofollow">is here</a>.Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-8850109941893327742022-01-17T09:52:11.908-06:002022-01-17T09:52:11.908-06:00The work that The Persians' positioning most r...The work that The Persians' positioning most reminds me of - a quasi-propaganda view of a military defeat by an opposing power that is nonetheless sympathetic in many ways - is the 1939 Powell/Pressburger movie The Spy In Black, about a failed (fictional) German operation in World War I. The tone is somewhat "our enemies are real people with real feelings, but they'll still do evil if left to their own devices and we therefore must stop them." Maybe there's a hint of that in The Persians - no matter how sympathetic the chorus may be, and by extension the Persian people, they're still beholden to the whims of their leader. dollymixnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-67625707852960006512022-01-16T21:32:59.732-06:002022-01-16T21:32:59.732-06:00The closest thing I took to a moral is to not disr...The closest thing I took to a moral is to not disrespect the gods, the culmination of what Darius' ghost tells his wife. And gods are also part of the most striking bit of the play for me - Atossa's recounting of her allegorical dream about Greece and Persia, followed by her witnessing of a hawk killing an eagle at the altar of Apollo. I don't know exactly what that bit is supposed to mean, but it's an unsettling image that hangs over the entire recounting by the messenger. Felt a little William Blake to me.<br /><br />reese, I also started with the Bernadette translation and found a lot of it clunky. I think he was trying to preserve some of the meter, which is effective in the final lament, but less so elsewhere (e.g. when the Chorus, upon first learning of the defeat of the Persians, responds "O woe! Woeful evil, novel and hostile."). I found an online translation by one Ian Johnston that worked better for me, I may use him as a source for some of the other plays.dollymixnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-10394048811008279662022-01-16T09:00:18.930-06:002022-01-16T09:00:18.930-06:00It's Euripides who taught we not to generalize...It's Euripides who taught we not to generalize about Greek tragedies, that giant screwball. He will, at some point, contradict every generalization I might have.<br /><br />Maybe at some later point we should diverge into a group read of <i>Poetics</i>, if anyone is interested.Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-48903655308224265772022-01-15T19:15:24.421-06:002022-01-15T19:15:24.421-06:00I think the tone is more one of thanksgiving. Ever...I think the tone is more one of thanksgiving. Everyone in the ancient world knew what the price was for military failure. The playwright is simply evoking the audience's own fears in the pitiful fate of the Persians. (But it's certainly true that the Greeks didn't seem to demonise their enemies so much, and even took a great interest in them – see also, all the plays we'll get onto about Trojans). Aeschylus puts the victory down to the gods (fate etc.) rather than the Athenians themselves, which have deluded Xerxes - into making the invasion in the first place, into choosing the wrong tactics. - This idea of the gods deluding mortals into acting against their own interests recurs endlessly in Greek tragedy.<br /><br />I don't believe there are really any authorial messages in Greek tragedy (though it's never a great idea to generalise about the tragedies as a whole). If there is, maybe it's that god works in mysterious ways, and there's not much you can do about it. Tragedy seems to me rather to be concerned with provoking emotional responses in the audience, perhaps as a form of religious cleansing, by portraying people who are being pushed to emotional extremes.obookihttps://obooki.wordpress.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-76683407584533403362022-01-15T14:59:26.929-06:002022-01-15T14:59:26.929-06:00Guy, glad to hear it. It was well past time for m...Guy, glad to hear it. It was well past time for me to revisit.<br /><br />I, too, thought, the language of Aeschylus was pretty stark, although I know that can be an artifact of translation. Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-17240885944366378202022-01-15T11:48:31.509-06:002022-01-15T11:48:31.509-06:00The other thing I felt about this is how plain the...The other thing I felt about this is how plain the language is. Aeschylus is the poet of high-sounding bombast, according to the Frogs, and that's at least true of the choruses of the Agamemnon. Here not so much.reesehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15818057262934008241noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-33204211610688372542022-01-15T10:32:56.191-06:002022-01-15T10:32:56.191-06:00Many years ago, I was really into Greek and Roman ...Many years ago, I was really into Greek and Roman plays. Roll on decades and I still think about them and have recently been thinking about revisiting some. Thanks for the inspiration.Guy Savagehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07076257268558526934noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3383938214852108244.post-53052395631703658302022-01-15T09:14:54.508-06:002022-01-15T09:14:54.508-06:00We have one more ghost coming up in Aeschylus. Th...We have one more ghost coming up in Aeschylus. That might be it for ghosts. The summoning of Darius is the one big reminder in <i>The Persians</i> that we are at a religious festival.<br /><br />The play owes so much to Homer, doesn't it? The roll call of heroes at the beginning. The battle, obviously.<br /><br />I was wondering what "lines" meant in my translation. Lines on the page in front of me, yes, but with any relationship at all to an original manuscript? Probably not.Amateur Reader (Tom)https://www.blogger.com/profile/13675275555757408496noreply@blogger.com