I guess the Ionian light damaged his αι’s. (Sorry, too esoteric?)
What has pster done to his picture of my favourite author? Makes him look like a James Bond villain …
‘No, Mr. Cleon, I expect you to die!’
John
Where you just setting up your joke? Or should we get Stevie Wonder on the phone?
You’ll have to make them more esoteric if you want to catch up with Scribo.
Which tragedies have the easiest, ie most prose-like, dialogue? More generally, which Attic poems are the easiest?
Which tragedies have the easiest, ie most prose-like, dialogue?
You might try Medea. In my experience, Euripides is generally less difficult than the others. But I wouldn’t say the language is necessarily prose-like.
There’s a good Cambridge Green & Yellow series edition of this play by Mastronarde–yes, I know, you’ve expressed your dislike for Mastronarde’s textbook elsewhere. But whatever you read, you’ll need to equip yourself with a good commentary, and his is up-to-date and thorough. You can’t just pick up the text of a tragedy and expect to read it as you would an English text. David Kovacs has produced an excellent new Loeb series of Euripides, but your experience of working through a tragedy will really be enormously enriched and enhanced if you use a modern commentary, with help on the grammar and lots of background information.
Tragedy, by the way, isn’t composed in the Attic dialect. The dialogue is Ionic and the choruses are Doric. There really isn’t much poetry in the Attic dialect, except perhaps the dialogues of Aristophanes. There was no genre of poetry associated with Attic, and even Solon wrote verse in the Ionic dialect. However, the Ionic and Doric of Athenian tragedy are really not too different from Attic, with an Ionic or Doric veneer that you’ll get used to quickly.