Peter Burian
Author
Language
English
Description
An extraordinary drama of flight and rescue arising from women's resistance to marriage, The Suppliants is surprising both for its exotic color and for its forceful enactment of the primal struggle between male and female, lust and terror, brutality and cunning. In his translation of this ancient Greek drama, Peter Burian introduces a new generation of readers to a powerful work of Aeschylus' later years. He conveys the strength and daring of Aeschylus'...
Author
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Pub. Date
2011
Language
English
Description
Aeschylus was the first of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays can still be read or performed, the others being Sophocles and Euripides. He is often, described as the father of tragedy: our knowledge of the genre begins with his work and our understanding of earlier tragedies is largely, based on inferences from his surviving plays. Only seven of his estimated seventy to ninety plays have survived into modern times. Fragments of some other...
3) The Oresteia
Author
Language
English
Description
"Aeschylus' Oresteia is a tragedy of inescapable killing within one family, such that each generation must avenge it in kind. Right and wrong are ambiguous in this harsh system. Their conflict is resolved, and the family saved from extinction, in the case of Orestes the matricidal killer. The gods' wisdom and human process together inaugarate a way of just conduct which will ensure stable families and community; and the exemplary setting for this...
4) Ion
Author
Language
English
Description
One of Euripides' late plays, Ion tells the story of Kreousa, queen of Athens, and her son by the god Apollo. Apollo raped Kreousa; she secretly abandoned their child, assuming thereafter that the god had allowed him to die. Ion, however, is saved to become a ward of Apollo's temple at Delphi. In the play, Kreousa and her husband Xouthos go to Delphi to seek a remedy for their childlessness; Apollo, speaking through his oracle, gives Ion to Xouthos...