(Port) Coquitlam Odysseus

Aristophanes’ Peace is a political statement that is apparently structured as an ode masquerading as a play. I’m being a bit facetious, as the work in question is a play–but one with virtually no action or decent characterization. A farmer ascends to heaven on a dung beetle, finds the gods have left Greece to War, [...]

Where Aristophanes’ Acharnians was somewhat boring, and his Knights was somewhat less so, Clouds was enjoyable. Aristophanes’ Wasps has characterization that is better than Clouds, and no “stale jeering at Euripides”–or Socrates, for that matter. (There is still stale jeering at Cleon, though.) The play itself is humorous call for the Athenians of the day [...]

In 1862, Ivan Turgenev published his most famous work, Fathers and Sons. This book depicted lives of a few nihilistic would-be revolutionaries; it ended on a note of love and redemption. Essentially, Turgenev appears to be saying, give the young nihilists a bit of lovin’, and they’ll be fine. In response, Turgenev’s more famous compatriot [...]

It’s impossible to discuss Aristophanes’ Knights, with all of its food and explicit homosexual humour, without becoming X-, or at least R-rated; click below for the post.

Internet image, difficult to source to an original, showing a Marsh Arab village during the 1970′s before the desertification caused by Saddam Hussein This is the third and final (for now, anyways) blog post of my mini-series on the Epic of Gilgamesh; the purpose of this post is to summarize, in ordinary language, the highly [...]

Image of a modern Marsh Arab house in traditional style taken from A Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East, by Michael Roaf (Facts on File, 2000) Before my most recent re-reading of the Epic of Gilgamesh, I never realized just now well-integrated into the story of Gilgamesh the Flood story was. There [...]

Line drawing of a cylinder seal impression by Joanna Richards, taken from “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” translated by Andrew George (Penguin Books, 2003) Although I have read the most famous part of the Epic of Gilgamesh–the flood story many times, I experienced unusual pleasure upon returning to this first epic odyssey in its entirety. This [...]

I just finished reading Aristophanes’ play Acharnians. Aristophanes is the best preserved of all the ancient Greek comedians, with eleven complete plays preserved; indeed, no other complete plays by any other ancient Greek authors from the Old, Middle, or New Comedy periods are extant. Aristophanes is thus the chief representative of his period, which is [...]

[UPDATE]: I am updating this post as I add new entries. I will likely change the time stamp several times. – Note: I have edited this post to remove a few grammatical infelicities. – Over the last three years or so, and on as many blogs, I have read and commented on virtually every book [...]

I have now finished reading all the plays of Euripides (see the forthcoming post), and remain very much impressed with him. Some have said that Sophocles remains the most modern of the Tragedians, but I disagree. It is Euripides who makes foreigners, women, children, and even babies speak in the world of drama. It is [...]