Greco-Roman Writers
Aristophanes || Euripedes || The Baccahe || Heraclitus || Livy || Ovid || Pliny || Plato || Plutarch || Greco-Roman Dictionary
Aristophanes The Frogs THE FROGS was
probably produced at the Lenaean festival in Athens
in January, 405 B.C. where it took first prize. It
scored such a hit that it was staged a second time,
probably in March of the same year, at the Great
Dionysia. It is typical of the lyrical-burlesques of
Aristophanes.
Dionysus is in Hades and almost at once loud quarreling is heard. The disturbance turns out to be Aeschylus and Euripides disputing the place of honor as King of Tragedy, a position which Aeschylus holds and Euripides wants. It is finally agreed that since their plays were written for performance at the Dionysian festivals, Dionysus shall decide their dispute.
It is in Aristophanes' The Frogs that we get the closest look at the comic dimensions of the god. Lois Spatz points out that in this play Dionysus is also Iachus, god of mysteries. "It is he who leads the sacred procession from Athens to Demeter's shrine at Eleusis." The combination of the two gods offered to everyone, including women and slaves, the opportunity to become initiates into a cult which promised a blessed afterlife.
Euripides
(c. 480–406 BCE)
was born on Salamis, and
died in Macedonia in 406. Though he was scarcely a generation
younger than Sophocles, his world view better reflects the
political, social, and intellectual crises of late 5th-century
Athens. He was friendly with the philosophers Anaxagoras and
Socrates and with Sophists such as Protagoras and Prodicus, and
his plays reflect contemporary ethics, rhetoric, and science. He
may have been prosecuted for impiety by the demagogue Cleon.
Less reverent than Aeschylus or Sophocles, Euripides criticized
traditional religion and shocked contemporaries by representing
mythical figures as everyday, unheroic people or even as
abnormal or neurotic personalities.Euripides was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, along with Aeschylus and Sophocles. Euripides first competed in the famous Athenian dramatic festival (the Dionysia) in 455 BCE, one year after the death of Aeschylus. He came in third. It was not until 441 BCE that he won first place, and over the course of his lifetime, Euripides claimed a mere four victories. Euripides' final competition in Athens was in 408 BCE. Although there is a story that he left Athens embittered because of his defeats, there is no real evidence to support it. He died in 406 BCE, probably in Athens or nearby, and not in Macedon, as some biographers repeatedly state.
Euripides. The Bacchae
The Bacchae was
performed after his death in 405 BCE.
Shortly
after 408 he left Athens for the court of Archelaus, king of
Macedon, and there wrote one his greatest plays, The Bacchae,
the most demonic known work of the ancient Attic theater,
revealing the punishment that the wine god Dionysus visits upon
Thebes and its youthful king, the puritanical Pentheus, for
rejecting his divinity. Euripides advances a bewildering array
of techniques and ideas. Divine, human, animal, and sexual
identities are confused; miracles and distortions of world,
psyche and behavior abound. The Bacchae is the most explicit
expression of Euripides' involvement with the ambiguities,
paradoxes, and deceptions residing in the human condition.
mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/aristophanes/frogs.htm
prepared by Ian Johnston of Malaspina
University-College, Nanaimo, BC, Canada, is in the
public domain
www.eoneill.com/library/essays/larner2.htm
Heraclitus
of Ephesus (Greek -- Herakleitos)
(about 535 - 475 BC), known as 'The Obscure,' was a pre-Socratic
Greek philosopher from Ephesus in Asia Minor. As with other
pre-Socratics, his writings only survive in fragments quoted by
other authors. He disagreed with Thales, Anaximander, and
Pythagoras about the nature of the ultimate substance and
claimed instead that everything is derived from the Greek
classical element fire, rather than from air, water, or earth.
This led to the belief that change is real, and stability
illusory. For Heraclitus everything is "in flux", as exemplified
in his famous aphorism "Panta Rhei":
Heradotus [c.
484-425B.C.] the Father of History
Herodotus was to make journeys to places like
Asia Minor, Babylonia, Egypt and Greece during his lifetime, and
he wrote about the different people and cultures he met.
It was Herodotus who was the first person to speak about the
idea of the free men of the west against the slaves of the east.
At the age of about 37 he went to Athens, and won the admiration
of many people, including Pericles and his good friend Sophocles.
A few years later he settled in southern Italy, in the Greek
colony Thurii. He was to spent the rest of his life working on
his History, which describes the history and civilization of the
ancient world.
Herodotus tried to achieve objectivity and tried to separate
what he held for true and what he thought was improbable.
He founded the grounds for historiography in trying to draw
moral lessons from various events, showing for example how the
gods punish the arrogant.
Livy
Titus
Livius
 |
|
--The
best known evil is the most tolerable.
--Vae victis! =Woe to the vanquished |
(Titus Livius (around 59 BC - 17 AD), known as Livy in English, wrote a monumental history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita, from its founding (traditionally dated to 753 BC). Livy was a native of Padua on the Po River in northern Italy
Livy's work was originally composed of 142 books, of which only 35 are extant; these are 1-10, and 21-45 (with major lacunae in 40-45).
Ovid
Actual name was
Publius Ovidius Naso (Sulmona, March 20, 43 BC – Tomis, now
Constanta AD 17) Ovid, the Roman poet wrote on topics of
love, abandoned women, and mythological transformations. From
his own time until the end of Antiquity Ovid was among the most
widely read and imitated of Latin poets; his greatest work,
the Metamorphoses.|
Ovid is among the most quotable of early writers: |
Augustus banished Ovid in AD 8 to Tomis on the Black Sea for reasons that remain mysterious. Ovid himself wrote that it was because of an error and a carmen – a mistake and a poem (Tr. 2.207). Likely referring to his publishing the Art of Love, a treatise that made no careful distinction between the seduction of citizens' wives and more conventionally accessible Roman demimondaines.
Even though he was friendly with the natives of Tomis, a people known as the Scythians. He still pined for Rome and his beloved third wife. Ovid died at Tomis after nearly ten years of banishment.
To understand the significance of Ovid, one has to set him up as a clear foil to Virgil, who was his contemporary. Virgil is famous for Rome's national epic the Aeneid, high nationalist poetry, as well as his status as Augustus's star artist. Ovid wrote fragmented, non-linear works like Metamorphoses, The Art of Love, and The Heroides.
Ovid's work has been remembered fondly as a testament to the playful and erotically experimental side of Rome, the feel-good side of the Roman spirit, the comedic genius of its social life, and of course, the pain of being ultimately disgraced and shunned for speaking one's mind. Thus Ovidian sensibility is more transgressive, naughty, bohemian---more Carnaval like.
- Ovid Illlustrated: The Renaissance Reception of Ovid in Image and Text (An elaborate environment allowing simulanteous access to Latin text, English translations, commentary from multiple sources along with wood cut illustrations by Virgil Solis.)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamorphoses_%28poem%29
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ovidius.htm
"He had been hailed as the successor to
Virgil, but
lived his last ten years among barbarians, keeping up the hope
of return to Rome. ... The reasons behind the emperor's
decisions are unsolved, but he may have objected to a rumored
affair between Ovid and the emperor's nymphomaniac daughter
Julia."
Pliny
Pliny the Elder Gaius Plinius Secundus, (23–79) better known as Pliny the Elder, was an ancient author and Natural philosopher of some importance who wrote Naturalis Historia. He completed a History of his Times in thirty-one books, possibly extending from the reign of Nero to that of Vespasian, and deliberately reserved it for publication after his death. Pliny collected much of the knowledge of his time into his great work, the Naturalis Historia, an encyclopedia.
Pliny was an adherent to the
Stoics. He was also influenced by the Epicurean and
the Academic and the revived Pythagorean schools. But his view
of nature and of God is essentially Stoic. It was only (he
declares) the weakness of humanity that had embodied the Being
of God in many human forms imbued with human faults and vices .
The Godhead was really one; it was the soul of the eternal
world, displaying its beneficence on the earth, as well as in
the sun and stars [penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/
L/Roman/Texts/Pliny_the_Elder/2*.html#154
Pliny the Younger: Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus (63-ca.
113), better known as Pliny the Younger, was a lawyer, author
and a natural philosopher of Ancient Rome.The nephew of Pliny
the Elder, who is considered by many to be the greatest
naturalist of antiquity.
Pliny was orphaned at an early age. He had Virginius Rufus (an
important man and general in the Roman army) as his tutor. He
was later adopted by his uncle Pliny the Elder, who brought him
to study in Rome, where his teachers were Quintilian and Nices
Sacerdos. Pliny was considered an honest and moderate man
and rose through a series of Imperial civil and military
offices, the cursus honorum.
wiki/Pliny_the_Younger
Plato
(427 BC – ca. 347 BC) was an immensely influential classical
Greek philosopher, student of Socrates, teacher of Aristotle,
writer, and founder of the Academy in Athens. Plato was also
deeply influenced by a number of prior philosophers, including:
the Pythagoreans, whose notions of numerical harmony have clear
echoes in Plato's notion of the Forms; Anaxagoras, who taught
Socrates and who held that the mind, or reason, pervades
everything; and Parmenides, who argued for the unity of all
things and may have influenced Plato's concept of the soul.
When he was 40 years old, Plato founded one of the earliest
known organized schools in Western civilization on a plot of
land in the Grove of Academe. it operated until AD 529,
when it was closed by Justinian I of Byzantium because he saw it
as a threat to the propagation of Christianity. Many
intellectuals were schooled in the Academy, the most prominent
one being Aristotle.
Plato's thought is often compared with that of
his most famous student, Aristotle, whose reputation during the
Western Middle Ages completely eclipsed that of Plato.
Plato's original writings were essentially lost to Western
civilization until they were brought from Constantinople in the
century before its fall. Medieval scholars knew of Plato only
through translations into Latin from the translations into
Arabic by Persian and Arab scholars. These scholars not only
translated the texts of the ancients, but expanded them by
writing extensive commentaries and interpretations on Plato's
and Aristotle's works
Only in the Renaissance, with the general resurgence of interest
in classical civilization, did knowledge of Plato's philosophy
become widespread again in the West. Many of the greatest early
modern scientists and artists who fostered the flowering of the
Renaissance, with the support of the Medici family of Florence,
saw Plato's philosophy as the basis for progress in the arts and
sciences.
| Plato's Whine about Wine |
| "Shall we not pass a law that,
in the first place, no children under eighteen may
touch wine at all, teaching that it is wrong to pour
fire upon fire either in body or in soul ... and
thus guarding against the excitable disposition of
the young? And next, we shall rule that the young
man under thirty may take wine in moderation, but
that he must entirely abstain from intoxication and
heavy drinking. But when a man has reached the age
of forty, he may join in the convivial gatherings
and invoke Dionysus, above all other gods,
inviting his presence at the rite (which is also the
recreation) of the elders, which he bestowed on
mankind as a medicine potent against the crabbedness
of Old Age, that thereby we men may renew our youth,
and that, through forgetfulness of care, the temper
of our souls may lose its hardness and become softer
and more ductile ..."
---[Plato, Laws 666b] |
| Pederasty |
| "When an older lover and a young
man come together and each obeys the principle
appropriate to him - when the lover realizes that he
is justified in doing anything for a loved one who
grants him favors, and when the young man
understands that he is justified in performing a
service for a lover who can make him wise and
virtuous - and when the lover is able to help the
young man become wise and better, and the young man
is eager to be taught and improved by his lover -
then, and only then, when these two principles
coincide absolutely, is it ever honorable for a
young man to accept the lover." ---Symposium |
Plutarch
Mestrius Plutarch (cz.
46-ca. post 127) was a Greek historian, biographer, and
essayist.His best-known work is the Parallel Lives, a series of biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, arranged in tandem to illuminate their common moral virtues or failings. The surviving Lives contain twenty-three pairs of biographies, each pair containing one Greek Life and one Roman
Life,
as well as four unpaired single Lives. As he explains in the
first paragraph of his Life of Alexander, Plutarch was not
concerned with writing histories, as such, but in exploring the
influence of character — good or bad — on the lives and
destinies of famous men.
His collected works under the title of the Moralia (loosely translated as Customs and Mores) is an eclectic collection of seventy-eight essays and transcribed speeches, which includes On the Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander the Great - an important adjunct to his Life of the great general, On the Worship of Isis and Osiris (a crucial source of information on Egyptian religious rites
Plutarch lived most of his life at Chaeronea, and was initiated into the mysteries of the Greek god Apollo. However his duties as the senior of the two priests of Apollo at the Oracle of Delphi apparently occupied little of his time - he led a most active social and civic life and produced an incredible body of writings, much of which is still extant.
Plutarch's philosophy was eclectic, with borrowings from the Stoics, Pythagoreans, and Peripatetics (but not the Epicureans) grouped around a core of Platonism. His main interest was in ethics, though he developed a mystical side, especially in his later years; he reveals that he had been initiated into the mysteries of the cult of Dionysus, and both as a Platonist and as an initiate he believed in the immortality of the soul.
Plutarch's writings had enormous influence on English and French literature. Shakespeare occasionally quoted — and extensively paraphrased — Thomas North's translation of several of the Lives in his plays. American poet, philosopher, and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists were greatly influenced by the Moralia (Emerson wrote a glowing introduction to the five volume 19th century edition of his Moralia).
