I’m about to embark on my first Greek tragedy and am divided between Hippolytus and Ajax.
They both have good commentaries: Finglass for Ajax and Barrett for Hippolytus.
I see from the previous discussion on this forum that people have been engaged in the Ajax. I’m interested in Greek religion, so Hippolytus is obviously a good for that (not to mention its rich reception history); but the Ajax also raises interesting questions about madness and the divine, and I find the whole dilemma that the play focuses on so fascinating.
In terms of the Greek: is there one that is more suitable for an intermediate level Greek reader?
I think in terms of language as a first tragedy Medea is your best option. Mastronarde’s commentary is very good.
Religion (in some form or other) pervades all tragedy. They were first performed, in Athens at least, at a religious festival in honour of Dionysos.
I recommend reading Goldhill and Easterling (Ed.).
As I have said before Finglass is excellent on philology but disappointing in terms of interpretation especially in his dismissal of contemporary (to Sophocles) politics.
The easiest play that I’ve come across so far has been Cyclops. It’s fun too. I don’t know whether commentaries exist to it or not, but it’s pretty straightforward.
Well, I wouldn’t call it a comedy, though it was very funny. But however you’d like to classify it, I found that the language and vocabulary was a good easy introduction to Euripides, and it covered a section from the Odyssey that everyone knows well. I read Alcestis immediately after, and that took substantially more effort.
Oh boy. There’s tragedy, satyr drama, and comedy: these are the three established and institutionalized genres in which Athenian playwrights composed. For each competition at the Greater Dionysia a tragedian submitted a set of three tragedies (a “trilogy”) and a satyr drama to accompany them. Tragedy and comedy were kept quite distinct, and playwrights composed either tragedies or comedies, never both. These are some of the basics, all very basic. (Exceptions are virtually non-existent; the “prosatyric” Alcestis is unique.) The classification of plays was theirs, and we should respect it before introducing different classifications .of our own.
For a first tragedy I recommend Euripides’ Helen. It’s kinda fun (in a way).
Or perhaps his Andromache, more conventionally “tragic.”
They’re both set after the Trojan War.
You could try the Ajax (see the pinned thread at the top of this board), but Sophocles’ Greek presents difficulties that Euripides’ does not.
I’d leave the Hippolytus till you have some familiarity with tragic convention.
Make as little use of translations as you can.
Yes, I’m aware of the distinction. And still, for Aristotle it’s a continuum: tragedy pretends man better than he is, and comedy worse. So where are the satyr plays? (Answer: It depended on the play, I imagine, of which we have one in full, and ours doesn’t sound too much like the satyr plays that Aristotle described.)
But none of that invalidates or even speaks to my point: for language and vocabulary purposes, Cyclops is a good introduction to the language that’s going to be seen in tragedy, and maybe even to some of the conventions.
Thanks, mwh! So even though you say that Euripides is on the whole more approachable than Sophocles, you think that the Hippolytus is particularly difficult, and even more difficult than Ajax? What makes Hippolytus so challenging among Euripides’ tragedies?
Hello again helios. I wouldn’t say the Hippolytus is especially difficult, as tragedies go. In many ways it’s your typical tragedy, with a simple progressive structure and a chain to tragic deaths, and it has all the “religion” anyone could want (Aphrodite and Artemis in mutual opposition, along with their victims). And the Greek is no more difficult than in any other tragedy.
It’s just that it’s such a splendid play that I thought you might do well to take a different tragedy first (and the two I suggested are very different), to introduce you to tragic idiom and to something of the genre’s variety..
But if you do choose to start with the Hipp. (as you might well), I suggest you use the Bryn Mawr commentary by Rick Hamilton to help you get through the text. There’s an older and truly admirable commentary by W.S. Barrett, much more substantial, but that’s not for first-timers.
Don’t get me wrong. Barrett’s Hippolytos is an exemplary edition, and his commentary is a wonder of discernment and good judgment. Use it by all means, right from the start, and if you want you could use Hamilton supplementarily to speed you along. Working your way through Barrett will be slow going, but you’ll come out of it with a vastly improved knowledge of Greek, and a vastly enhanced appreciation of Euripidean tragedy—just as I did many years ago.
Just mind you don’t get bogged down in commentary. The important thing is for you to make direct contact with the Greek, and only then make use of other resources. Why wait?
I’d recommend starting with Medea or Hippolytos. In terms of language and style density Sophocles is a whole different ballgame IMO.
Barrett is one of the exemplary commentaries. Reading Barrett alongside the text sort of equals an entire seminar in graduate school (sadly, back in 1964, when it was first published, college would have more been the level). Together with Dodds’ commentary on Bacchae it may be seen as the start of really great and exhaustive tragedy commentaries.
In Hipp could use the Bryn Mawr commentary alongside the Barrett. Unlike some others I have always been a fan of harnessing one’s reading with two commentaries, preferably from different generations or schools of thought. Without it there’s a risk you’re just reading words, rather than great literature.
The only problem of this classification is that it tends to privilige, er, bad-end tragedies (not to be confused with bad-ass ditto) over pieces that do not end with the stage strewn with dead bodies.
Many tragedies, and not just by Euripides, have comedic elements that make them kind of hard to interpret.
No, Herman, with respect, their classification system does not privilege bad-end tragedies in the least. The Helen, for example, which I recommended, qualified as a tragedy no less than the Hippolytus despite its ostensibly “happy” ending, even if we might wish to classify it differently.
Tragedy and comedy were recognized as separate genres, and treated as such. The differentiation is never compromised.
I’m totally happy to defer to your view. However, I cannot help but think that one of the reasons why Euripides is (or formerly was) regarded as not on the same level as Sophocles and Aeschylus, is that many of his plays seem to drift away from the body-strewn tragedy form.
I am fully aware that we, in the modern age, with only a handful of tragedies remaining, have really no way of knowing what the Fifth Century audiences expected at the Dionysia, but isn’t it true that plays like OT and Antigone and Medea and Hippolytus are now regarded as the pinnacle, because of the way they end (bad)? And that especially in the 19th and 20th centuries we have tended to feel a little ambivalent about plays like Helen (which I happen to like) or Orestes (same) because of their non-bloody, happy ends?
Clearly contemporary audiences had no problem with this. Orestes was a big hit in the fourth century BC, in spite, or maybe because of it’s boy-gets-the-girl end. As long as the characters were noble and familiar from the epic cycle the play was regarded as a tragedy?
Sure, Cyclops is “satyr-drama” in the lists. However, in construction Cyclops is a tragedy (Odysseus and the Cyclops), to whom a group of satyrs have been added. At the beginning the satyrs are mock-heroic, describing the voyage in search of Dionysus, and singing about sheep herding and heroic sheep in highfalutin language. The satyr elements decline quickly, however, once Odysseus comes on scene, and by the end the story of Odysseus and the Cyclops is played almost entirely straight, with a wonderful set of speeches from the thoroughly atheist Polyphemus, though the satyrs join up with Odysseus at the end, if I recall correctly.
Aristotle talks about a type of satyr play from which tragedy and comedy appeared as an outgrowth, but Cyclops sounds somewhat different in meter and conception from what Aristotle describes.
One might even be tempted to ask the question why did every satyr play but Cyclops perish? Was it simply random chance, or because Cyclops was different from the norm, in a way that interested the collectors of tragic drama? I imagine that someone who has read the various fragments of satyr plays (ie., not me) could give an authoritative answer to that.
Whatever the answer to that, however, it doesn’t change the fact that Cyclops is “tragedy-lite” and a good language introduction for someone who is simply interested in reading the plays.
Ghermanius, It’s true that Euripides, ostentatiously innovative, could play rather fast and loose with established tragic conventions, and took tragedy in new directions (incidentally laying the groundwork for the eventual emergence of New Comedy). Tragedy was a fast-moving genre, and an audience’s horizons of expectation in the later 5th century were different what what they would have been when Aeschylus and Phrynichus still dominated the scene. But we mustn’t let our own evolved notions of what makes a tragedy a tragedy distort later-5th-cent. realities.
Aristotle’s aesthetic criteria and preferences, which were formed against that background, have had understandably enormous but often pernicious influence on criticism and practice ever since. And I’m afraid that to regard bad-ending tragedies as “the pinnacle” betrays anachronistic prejudices (which nonetheless I share to an extent).
Of course you’re right, as was Aristotle, to note that Attic tragedy was expected to feature noble and known characters. That’s another important difference from Attic comedy.
Another thing worth bearing in mind is that the surviving plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles represent a selection made by later generations, whereas most of Euripides’s are a more random bunch (which happened to include the Cyclops, btw). And fragmentary papyri have done much to change the picture.
(Joel, you are still fixated on the Cyclops, and I’m not going to take you up on it. It would take too long to deal with your misapprehensions. You could start a new thread if you wanted.)