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Title: Prometheus Bound/the Suppliants/Seven Against Thebes/the Persians by Philip Vellacott, Aeschylus ISBN: 0-14-044112-3 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: August, 1961 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (5 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Old yet ageless tragedy by "the other Greek tragedian"
Comment: In life and death, Aeschylus is overshadowed by Sophocles. The most tragic thing about Aeschylus is the fact that the great majority of his work was lost in the mists of time. Three of these plays are the only surviving members of three different trilogies. The Suppliants is the conclusion of Aeschylus' own Oedipus trilogy, focusing on the final battle of the twice-cursed sons of Oedipus. Not only was this play overshadowed by Sophocles' Antigone, the final few pages are apparently spurious; someone a half century after it was written felt compelled to add Antigone and Ismene to the action, countering the writer's original presentation of the tragedy. The Persians is interesting because it is based on real history, namely the routing of the Persian army by the Athenians at Salamis. Eight years are all that separate the battle and Aeschylus' dramatization of it.
I must say that tragedy is the right word for these plays. I would dub them "poor me" dramas. In each case, one or more characters suffers an ignominious fate and bemoans his/her/their lot in life, sometimes cursing the gods to boot. In Prometheus Bound, the giant Prometheus has been chained to a rock on a mountainside as divine punishment for stealing fire from Hephaestas and giving it to humans. Prometheus is proudly defiant and has a word or two to say to just about every man and god he is exposed to. The Persians must have been received very well by the Athenians because it casts Persia and her king Xerxes in a pitiful light. When a long-overdue messenger arrives home with word that the Persian army has been decimated, the whole community wails and mourns their fate; when the defeated Xerxes arrives, he takes the suffering to yet another level, his pride destroyed and replaced with self-loathing and defeatism. Seven Against Thebes details the attack by Polyneices and his followers on his brother Eteocles and the city of Thebes. While much of the play consists of the naming of the opposing champions to lead the fight at each gate, I was most interested in the dialogue between the chorus of Theban women and Eteocles. The women rush in fright to the statues of the gods, pleading for mercy and grieving over their fate. Eteocles is offended by their defeatist words, saying such talk will spread doubt and fear among the city's defenders and is an injustice reflecting a loss of faith in the gods whose likenesses they are embracing.
I consider The Suppliants the best of these four dramas, as it contains some action whereas the other plays are basically static in setting. The story of Io, a fair maiden turned into a cow/human creature and cursed by a maddening gadfly by Hera due to Zeus' pursuit of her, forms a provocative background to this tale. Io's descendants number 50 women and 50 men, and the lustful men seek to forcibly take their female cousins for wives. The women run to Argos and seek the protection of its king and people, setting the stage for a great battle (which unfortunately takes place in a lost drama).
I enjoyed these dramas, although I can't say I would care to see them presented on stage. For the most part, nothing happens, but everyone is miserable and none too shy to broadcast that misery. There can be no mistaking these plays for comedies, yet they do speak to timeless matters of the human spirit even today.
Rating: 3
Summary: Some of Aeschylus's bothersome plays
Comment: Prometheus Bound is one of the most tragic and would likely bother most people about his fate and the uptmost arrogance of Strenght. Oh, how furious he makes me! ::Rips into Strength's face:: The way he spoke to Hephestus is appalling and I do cast his hardness and his pitilessness at him! And the how the Egyptain threatens the Suppliant maids is too much. There is too much harshness in these plays. Unless you like plays that are heavy, and please don't let what I say stop you, stay away from this.
Rating: 3
Summary: So I don't like Greek drama - sue me.
Comment: Call me an ignoramus if you like, but I just don't like Greek drama. Prometheus Bound is the third one I've tried - after Oedipus Rex and The Clouds - and I've found them all lacking, the tragedies overblown and rigid, the comedy an imposter to the name. It's not an antipathy to antique culture per se - Homer's epics overflow with life, Ovid is a master of imagery, incident and invention, Juvenal's spleen is still bracing. It's just hard for anyone raised on Shakespeare, Wilde, Ionesco or Beckett to actually care about these rudimentary dinosaurs. I'm sure they're not really rudimentary - they must have some complexity and relevance for fusty dons to thrill over them for so many centuries, but I'm hanged if I can spot what they see in them. Just because they were the first doesn't make them the best. I grant that much will be lost in translation, especially the poetry, but as a conflict of ideas rather than people, it seems a didactic, airless, undramatic thing. Not that there aren't merits: for all its philosophy, there is a remarkable physicality to its opening, a still shocking violence I hadn't experienced since The Bald Primadonna. Although there is subsequently little of visual interest, there is a wonderful faith in storytelling, a transmutation of the present moment into the mythological or historical through imagination, that is reminiscent of magic realism. Io's plight is very moving on paper, until you visualise her as a cow perpetually pestered by a wasp, it is very difficult to suppress the giggles. Prometheus' prophecy of ther forthcoming adventures verges on the beautiful, fusing the visionary and the actually painful. In general, though, the antique mindset is too remote for me - I'd rather read Joyce.
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Title: The Oresteian Trilogy by Aeschylus, W. Bedell Stanford, Philip Vellacott ISBN: 0140440674 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: December, 1956 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Euripides: 10 Plays by Paul Roche, Euripides, Euripedes ISBN: 0451527003 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: October, 1998 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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Title: The Bacchae and Other Plays (The Penguin Classics, L44) by Euripides, Philip Vellacott ISBN: 0140440445 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: October, 1954 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Sophocles: The Complete Plays by Paul Roche, E. A. Sophocles ISBN: 0451527844 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: 06 March, 2001 List Price(USD): $6.50 |
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Title: Aeschylus I: Oresteia (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides) by Aeschylus, David Grene, Richmond Alexander Lattimore ISBN: 0226307786 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: December, 1983 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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