Aeschylus I
The Persians, The Seven Against Thebes, The Suppliant Maidens, Prometheus Bound
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The Persians, The Seven Against Thebes, The Suppliant Maidens, Prometheus Bound
Ratings1
Average rating5
Aeschylus I contains “The Persians,” translated by Seth Benardete; “The Seven Against Thebes,” translated by David Grene; “The Suppliant Maidens,” translated by Seth Benardete; and “Prometheus Bound,” translated by David Grene. Sixty years ago, the University of Chicago Press undertook a momentous project: a new translation of the Greek tragedies that would be the ultimate resource for teachers, students, and readers. They succeeded. Under the expert management of eminent classicists David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, those translations combined accuracy, poetic immediacy, and clarity of presentation to render the surviving masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in an English so lively and compelling that they remain the standard translations. Today, Chicago is taking pains to ensure that our Greek tragedies remain the leading English-language versions throughout the twenty-first century. In this highly anticipated third edition, Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most have carefully updated the translations to bring them even closer to the ancient Greek while retaining the vibrancy for which our English versions are famous. This edition also includes brand-new translations of Euripides’ Medea, The Children of Heracles, Andromache, and Iphigenia among the Taurians, fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus, and the surviving portion of Sophocles’s satyr-drama The Trackers. New introductions for each play offer essential information about its first production, plot, and reception in antiquity and beyond. In addition, each volume includes an introduction to the life and work of its tragedian, as well as notes addressing textual uncertainties and a glossary of names and places mentioned in the plays. In addition to the new content, the volumes have been reorganized both within and between volumes to reflect the most up-to-date scholarship on the order in which the plays were originally written. The result is a set of handsome paperbacks destined to introduce new generations of readers to these foundational works of Western drama, art, and life.
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Aeschylus I: Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus
I read Prometheus Bound as part of the Online Great Books program.
This is a fascinating story. it is, of course, a Greek play written in the 5th century BC. The story is written in a form of prose poetry with dialogue and monologues intercut with contributions from the chorus to provide background and move the story along. The translation in this edition is quite accessible to the lay reader. This edition has a nice glossary that briefly explains references to persons and places in the text.
The story involves the “nailing” of the titan Prometheus to a mountain for offending Zeus by giving fire to man. The text is very clear that all of man's arts come from Prometheus and that Zeus's great ambition for man was to destroy mankind and start again.
The story moves in dialogue format. Prometheus talks to Io - a woman who has been horribly mistreated by the gods - and Hermes - who interrogates Prometheus about a prophecy that Zeus will be overthrown by a son (and who assigns the eagle to tear out Prometheus's liver for his refusal to share his knowledge.)
Reading this text at this point in my life makes me regret my misspent youth. This text raises questions about theodicy and the role of the gods in paganism. The sense I got was that Greeks viewed the goes with ambivalence. There is a lot of talk about Zeus being great and the first cause, but Zeus does awful things to individuals for petty and venal reasons. Likewise, Prometheus comes across as a kind of proto-savior, but one who denies a resurrection.
Again, this is a fruitful book for discussion and contemplation.
