What is your favourite Greek play?

Lmao why would I read a fucking play let alone a play by a bunch of dead meds?

twenty five decades in ms paint

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It was neither a petty or arbitrary exception to the law, but one motivated by noble and magnanimous feeling. I suppose Cleon didn't have a choice though when it came to prosecuting it. That's the whole point of tragedy, good people suffer because they do the right thing.

I've only read Oedipus so it's that, best play of all time though

Prometheus Bound by Ayyyyskilloz.
Felt an emotion upon finishing Antigone that I to my knowledge had never felt before and not since.

>Prometheus Bound by Ayyyyskilloz.
I reeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaally want to read that. Very high up in my to read list. The Oresteia was mind blowingly good

>the gods ordered agamemnon to kill his daughter so he must have wanted to do it so it's completely right to ogle with his loser cousin while he's off fighting for the nation and stab him in the back when he returns, family bonds only apply when they support muh feelings

He was told by an oracle that if he wanted to have a successful expedition he needed to kill her. This is wrong on two fronts:
1. The war against Troy was completely unjustified and nigger-tier looting behavior.
2. It's his fucking daughter. He should have just taken a chance or not gone at all.

Greek plays were shit. They are only relevant because they influenced later, better works.

The gods and the community willed it. It was outside his control, and that made him a tragic hero. Read Fear and Trembling.

The whole lesson of the Oresteia runs contrary to that. Athena helps Athens found it's own law court so people don't have to follow the retarded laws of the gods

The Trojan Women, Euripides

this one

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Tragoedy is overrated. Take the Aristophanes-pill

Yes, the gods that condemn Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter.

my big fat greek wedding

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It's the Oresteia.

Called by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe “the masterpiece of masterpieces” and by Algernon Charles Swinburne “the greatest achievement of the human mind,” Aeschylus’s Oresteia is the monumental accomplishment of drama’s greatest early visionary and progenitor. Considered by the Greeks the “father of tragedy,” Aeschylus, “more than anyone,” according to classical scholar C. M. Bowra, “laid the true foundations of tragedy and established the forms and spirit which marked it out from other kinds of poetry.” The Oresteia, the only surviving Attic tragic trilogy, dramatizes the working out of the curse on the house of Atreus from Agamemnon’s homecoming from Troy and his murder by his wife, Clytemnestra, through her subsequent death at the hands of her son, Orestes, and the consequences for human justice and cosmic order. Aeschylus presents the archetypal family tragedy, the infl uences of which can be felt in subsequent theatrical depictions of the houses of Oedipus, Tyrone, Loman, Corleone, and Soprano and other uses of the family as the locus for dramatic conflict. Aeschylus points the way by which a domestic tragedy can serve in the hand of a great poet and stage craftsman as a profound enactment of the human condition and human destiny on a truly colossal dramatic scale.

cont.

Aeschylus reportedly stated that his plays were merely “slices of fish from Homer’s great feasts.” However, the Oresteia, combining themes from both the Iliad and the Odyssey, is in every sense a dramatic main course in which the playwright attempts nothing less than to explore with a truly Homeric amplitude the key confl icts in the human condition: between humans and the gods, male and female, parent and child, passion and reason, the individual and community, vengeance and justice. The background for his drama is the curse laid upon the ruling house of Argos when Atreus revenged himself on his brother Thyestes for having seduced his wife by serving Thyestes’ children to him at a banquet. Cursing Atreus, Thyestes leaves Argos with his one remaining son, Aegisthus, vowing retribution. Thyestes’ curse is visited on the next generation, on Atreus’s sons, Menelaus and Agamemnon, through the seduction of Menelaus’s wife, Helen, by the Trojan Paris, which provokes the Trojan War. The Greek force, led by Agamemnon, sets out to regain Helen and take revenge on the Trojans, but their fl eet is initially beset by unfavorable winds. Agamemnon, choosing his duty as a commander over his responsibilities as a father, sacrifi ces his daughter Iphigenia as the price for reaching Troy and ultimate victory. The Oresteia considers the consequences of Agamemnon’s act and the Greek’s defeat of the Trojans at the decisive moment of his homecoming to Argos.

cont.

Agamemnon, the fi rst play of the trilogy, which has been called by some the greatest of all Greek tragedies, works out the revenge of Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, for their daughter’s death. Having taken Thyestes’ son, Aegisthus, as her lover, Clytemnestra both betrays her husband and plots to usurp his throne with his bitterest enemy. Agamemnon returns to a disordered homeland in which all is not as it appears. Clytemnestra’s welcoming of her returned husband is shockingly revealed as a sinister pretense for his murder in what critic Shirley J. Stewart has called “a play of distortion.” Agamemnon is shown arriving in his chariot, proud, self-willed, and oblivious to the insincerity of his wife or his own hypocrisy, riding alongside his prize from Troy, Cassandra, the embodiment of his excessive destruction of the Trojans and an insult to his wife. He is invited to walk on an outspread crimson carpet into his palace. The red carpet, one of drama’s fi rst great visual stage effects, becomes a striking symbol of Agamemnon’s hubris, for such an honor is reserved for the gods, and Agamemnon fi guratively trods a trail of blood to his own demise. “Let the red stream fl ow and bear him home,” Clytemnestra states, “to the home he never hoped to see.” After Cassandra’s prediction of both Agamemnon’s and her own death comes true, Clytemnestra returns to the stage, bloodspattered, revealing for the fi rst time her savage hatred of Agamemnon and her bitter jealousy of Cassandra. Clytemnestra justifi es her act as the avenger of the house of Atreus who has freed it from the chain of murder set in motion by Atreus’s crime. Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon, however, only continues the series of retributive murders affl icting the house of Atreus, while demonstrating the seemingly unbreakable cycle that “Blood will have blood.” The play ends with Clytemnestra and Aegisthus ruling Argos by force and intimidation with the renewal of the demands of blood vengeance suggested by the Chorus’s reference to Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, who must someday return to avenge his father’s death.

cont.

In The Libation Bearers Orestes does arrive, echoing the homecoming of his father in the fi rst play. Meeting his sister Electra before their father’s grave, Orestes, Hamlet-like in his indecision, reveals his dilemma and the crux of the trilogy’s moral, religious, and political confl ict. Ordered by Apollo to avenge his father, by doing so, Orestes must kill his mother, thereby incurring the wrath of the Furies, primal avengers charged with protecting the sanctity of blood-kinship. By doing what is right—avenging his father—Orestes must do what is wrong—murdering his mother. His confl ict is dramatized as a kind of cosmic schism between two divine imperatives and world orders, as a fundamental confl ict between the forces of vengeance and justice. Orestes’ seemingly insolvable quandary sets the tragic confl ict of the entire trilogy that dramatizes the means by which the seemingly unbreakable cycle of violence begetting violence can come under the rule of law and the primal can give way to the civilized. If, as it has been argued, the essence of tragedy is the moment of concentrated awareness of irreversibility, then Orestes’ decision to act, accepting the certain punishment of the Furies, is the decisive tragic moment of the trilogy. Entering the palace by a stratagem, Orestes kills Aegisthus but hesitates before killing Clytemnestra, who bears her breast before him to remind Orestes that she has given him life. Orestes, sustained by the command of Apollo, fi nally strikes, but he is shortly beset by a vision of the Furies, women, “shrouded in black, their heads wreathed, / swarming serpents!”

cont

In The Eumenides Orestes is pursued by the Furies fi rst to Delphi, where Apollo is unable to protect him for long, and then to Athens, where Athena, the patroness of the city, arranges Orestes’ trial. In a trilogy that alternates its drama from the domestic confl ict of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra to the internal confl ict of Orestes, the third play widens its subject to the truly cosmic scale as Apollo, Hermes, the Furies, and Athena all take the stage, and the full moral, political, and spiritual implication of Orestes’ crime is enacted. Aeschylus searches for nothing less than the meaning of human suffering itself and the ways by which evil in the world can be overruled by justice and chaos can be replaced by order.

Ancient critics indicated that Aeschylus’s dramatic method was to aim at “astonishment,” and all of the playwright’s verbal and stage magic are fully deployed in The Eumenides. It is said that the fi rst appearance of the Furies in The Eumenides caused members of the audience to faint and women to miscarry. In the trilogy’s great reversal the competing gods’ dilemma over what to do about Orestes’ crime—matricide according to the Furies, justifi able manslaughter according to Apollo—is fi nally resolved by representatives of the play’s fi rst audience, Athenian citizens gathered by Athena into a jury. The Athenian legal system, not the gods, Aeschylus suggests, becomes the means for mercy and equity to enter the treatment of crime, breaking the seemingly hopeless cycle of blood requiring blood and ultimately lifting the curse on the house of Atreus. Orestes is acquitted, and the Furies are placated by being persuaded to become Athens’s protectors. Old and new gods are reconciled, and a new cosmic order is asserted in which out of the chaos of sexual aggression and self-consuming rage, justice and civilization can fl ourish. The fi nal triumphal exodus led by Athena of the jurors out of the theater into the city where the principles of justice and civilization are embodied must have been overwhelming in its civic, moral, and spiritual implications for its fi rst spectators. For later audiences it is the force and intensity of Aeschylus’s dramatic conception and his incomparable poetry that captivates. The Oresteia remains one of the most ambitious plays ever attempted, in which Aeschylus succeeds in uniting the widest possible exploration of universal human themes with an emotionally intense and riveting drama.

Also, he writes poetry like this:

CASSANDRA: I'll prophesy no longer like a new bride
Timidly peering out beneath her veil;
My words will be a clear, bright wind, assailing
The rising sun, surging against the rays
Like a wave, which carries suffering far greater
Than mine. It isn't riddles now that teach you.
You run with me, a witness as I track,
Like a hound, the crimes commited long before.

You just killed this thread.

Why

Spergout of textwall translations

Not that guy, but seriously: people who are too lazy to read should'nt be here. Fuck this philosophy of "we have to adapt to the new times, to the short-span generation, to the twiter and Instagram generation".

Technology is wonderful, and there are great things in modernity, but this trend of having to make everything short and concise and to the point is for mediocre minds. And people who come to Yea Forums only to shitpost are all unwanted in any good thread.