Howling Frog Books

Hello there studymates, it's the end of the month; have you read any Greek literature to finish off your summer?  This month I tried to play some catch-up and so I read Plato's Symposium and four plays by Euripides.  I started Aristotle's Rhetoric , but Euripides was more fun, so I still have a way to go in that book. How about you?

She Stoops to Conquer , by Oliver Goldsmith It's another perfect 18th century comedy!  Here we have a squire, his wife, a bumptious stepson, a lovely daughter, and a poor cousin.  Enter two handsome young men and watch the antics!  This one was a lot of fun; it's just as Georgian a piece as the Sheridan play, but it's in a country-squire flavor rather than London society.  If you enjoyed Tom Jones , this one is for you.

Helen , by Euripides Helen was performed in 412 BC and may have been a companion piece to Iphigenia in Tauris .  Their plots are virtually identical! Helen, Queen of Sparta, was not carried off to Troy by Paris after all.  Hera gave Paris a magic phantom and spirited the real Helen off to Egypt, where she was placed under the protection of the king.  Helen has been waiting ever since for Menelaus to come and rescue her, and her time is running out; the old king has died and the new king wants her for his wife.  It's now been 17 years since she arrived in Egypt, so hope is fading, and she has taken refuge at the old king's tomb. Menelaus, meanwhile, has been wandering for 7 years, trying to get home.  Shipwrecked on the coast of Egypt, he hides his companions and his (phantom)wife and arrives at the palace.  Once they recognize each other and Menelaus is convinced, Helen hatches a plan for their escape.  It is a very similar plan to Iphigenia's. ...

The Owl and the Nightingale, Cleanness, St. Erkenwald, trans. by Brian Stone I found a nice little Penguin Classics paperback at my mom's house containing three long medieval poems that serve as examples of genres in religious literature.  St. Erkenwald is a saint's legend, Cleanness is a Biblical epic, and The Owl and the Nightingale is a debate.  They are nice digestible poems and rather fun to read. St. Erkenwald tells a story about how workers found an ancient tomb with the body still intact.  The bishop--Erkenwald--arrives and commands the dead man to speak; he turns out to have been a just judge back in pagan times.   Erkenwald's tears baptize the judge, at which point he sinks back into the grave and his miraculously preserved body disintegrates as his soul flies to heaven. Cleanness is a poem about spiritual purity.  It tells several Old Testament stories and draws morals from  them: Likewise, if you lay claim to the love of God, And lo...

Now that I've covered three plays, let's learn a little something about Euripides.  He is the third great ancient Greek playwright, and younger than Sophocles and Aeschylus, though not by much.  More of his plays survive, partly because he stayed in fashion longer.  Euripides produced 92 (or perhaps a few more) plays during his lifetime, and we have 18 or 19 complete texts and fragments of quite a few more. Aeschylus and Sophocles both made important innovations in Greek drama, expanding the number of actors onstage and so on.  Euripides built upon this and developed still more innovations.  His plays are more psychological and reveal more of the characters.  He played with form; some of his productions aren't really very tragic and can better be called comedies (in our sense) or problem plays.  He doesn't always put a chorus in.  His audiences must often have been shocked!  On the whole, his plays feel much more like modern plays--they a...

Iphigenia, priestess, meets her brother Iphigenia in Tauris , by Euripides Hey, good news everyone!  Iphigenia was not horribly slaughtered by her father Agamemnon as a sacrifice after all!  At the last second, Artemis substituted a deer and whisked Iphigenia off to the ends of the earth (the Crimea), where she has been serving as a temple priestess ever since.  She has been pining for her Greek home for a good twenty years, it seems.  Now she is in mourning because she has had a prophetic dream that she believes tells her that Orestes, her brother and her one hope for rescue (however remote), is dead. But Iphigenia is wrong!  Orestes is still being chased by some Furies and he has arrived in Tauris to try to get rid of them once and for all.  (Only some of them were pacified by the whole Eumenides maneuver in Athens.)  Apollo has let him know that if he can steal the image of Artemis from this temple and take it back to Athens, he'll be free....

Medea escaping Corinth in her dragon chariot Medea , by Euripides This one is a real tragedy, with nothing but blood and horror.  Medea is a foreign princess from Colchis and a great sorceress besides; she is not Greek and seems therefore to be prone to violence.  Medea and Circe both must have carried many ancient nightmares about powerful and alien women, and black magic, and so on.  Medea is like a Greek man's worst nightmare: cunning, powerful, and vengeful, a womanly character gone horribly wrong.  (Alcestis, the ideal Greek woman, is her opposite number.) The original audience would have known all of the backstory well: Jason arrived in Colchis on his ship the Argo, and Medea helped him get the Golden Fleece.  In order to escape with Jason, she killed her own brother and scattered pieces of him around the harbor to delay pursuit (as everyone had to collect the pieces for a proper burial before chasing Jason).  They went to Iolchus, where Jason...