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“... model for the Ring was, quite self-consciously, not Lear or anything else Shakespearean, but Aeschylus’ Oresteia sequence, of which the Ring offers a sort of dialectical critique (the suggestion has been made before – see, for example, Michael Ewans’s Wagner and Aeschylus: The ‘Ring’ and the ...”

“... embodied only in the earlier period of the Greek Classical Age – above all, in the tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles. Of these, Nietzsche tends to emphasise Aeschylus, who was indeed the earlier, but (as Silk and Stern point out) it is certainly Sophocles who most clearly and unpityingly embodies what Nietzsche had in ...”

“... themselves in music. In Aristophanes’ comedy Frogs (the first documented response to Euripides), Aeschylus complains that Euripides ‘picked up Cretan monodies’ and dragged gamous (‘marriages, fucking’) into tragedy. ‘Cretan monodies’, whatever they are, go with sex. Neither belongs in tragedy’s music or libretti as ...”

“... Dionysius of Halicarnassus once likened Aeschylus’ poetry to this Cyclopean wall beneath Apollo’s temple before us, this wall I always gaze on whenever in Delphi, blocks shaped like continents pre-early Jurassic where capers cascade down landlocked Pangaea, polygonal Gondwanaland, in tasselly swathes. Unspaced Greek capitals cross all the cracks keeping blocks bonded with alphabet tack-stitch, manumission inscriptions that seal all the junctures ...”

“... real-life catastrophe, as we do today, is a case of life imitating art. It follows from this that Aeschylus is tragic but Auschwitz is not. Although sorrow and despair constitute a lingua franca among human beings, tragic art tends to flourish only in highly specific circumstances. Tragedy is an act of collective mourning, remembrance and meditation, an ...”

“... so that they may live together beneath the earth for the rest of time. When Orestes and Electra in Aeschylus’s Libation-Bearers call upon their father’s ghost, they are not so much performing a magical incantation as rallying the family together for the next dreadful challenge that faces them. The 19th-century scholar Fustel de Coulanges had on the basis ...”

“... with a single blink. The other day, in a move that would have made Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus call suddenly for more papyrus, Ms Pryce announced to the court that she wanted to ‘expose’ Huhne’s ‘true character’. There is a design fault in the modern male that allows his true character to make itself felt only after he has cheated on ...”

“... if you had plumped for a Pinter or an Ibsen or a David Hare. When we hear, for instance, that Aeschylus’ rival Phrynichus was particularly noted for his choreographies, or learn from Peter Wilson in Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy that the shawm (aulos) which always accompanied a performance came in various shapes and sizes depending on the ...”

“... In​ Aeschylus’ Oresteia, and in the myth he was staging, the Furies that drove vengeance and justice are appeased, and converted into the so-called Kindly Ones. Pier Paolo Pasolini accepted this story as still current in Italy in the 1960s, but with an important variant. The transformation did not mean the Furies were any the less ‘irrational and archaic’, only that instead of haunting our dreams, ‘they reign over works of poetry, of affective imagination ...”

“... to alter their plays, but he was more fortunate when he directed Robert Lowell’s version of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. Since Miller did not want to set this play in the Caucasus, with an actor tied to a rock, he ‘superimposed another level of translation by setting it in a 17th-century limbo. Lowell was pleased to discover that his own work, not ...”

“... Euripides for searching too far into motives and feelings. He contrasted him unfavourably with Aeschylus and Sophocles, for whom the principle ‘in order to be beautiful, everything must be reasonable’ meant the story must be subject to law, divine and human, without allowing individuals or their passions to make a difference. Euripides took this ...”

“... recall the scene so vividly, she has neither the education nor the discipline to know anything of Aeschylus beyond this chance acquaintance – an acquaintance casually ‘picked up’ in one of those luxurious houses where the beautiful but impoverished young woman has been a perpetual hanger-on. Having failed to make a wealthy marriage or otherwise to place ...”

“... of poetry – will be a pervasive presence in the society he describes. Yes, he did banish Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes – the greatest names of Greek literature. But not because they were poets. He banished them because they produced the wrong sort of poetry. To rebut Plato’s critique of poetry, what is needed is not a defence of ...”

“... of course – by no means as ‘revolutionary’ as the dust-jacket tries to suggest. From Aeschylus (Choephori, 665-7) to Dale Spender, there have been numerous attempts to define the differences between male and female modes of language. But Tannen, in her popular, ‘Everything you wanted to know’, style does a good job in teasing out the details ...”

“... In 1949, few people wanted to be reminded of the war, and the book hardly sold. (Whether it’s Aeschylus’ Persians or Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front or Kevin Powers’s Yellow Birds, it rarely takes less than ten years for a public to build up an appetite, curiosity or tolerance for discussions of recent conflict.) All Böll’s early ...”