Word: aeschylus
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...produced when he was eighty-seven. The legend of the wounded hero abandoned by the Greeks on Lemnos on their way to Troy, and later eagerly sought by them when he and his famous bow were needed for the capture of the city, had been treated by both Aeschylus and Euripides. Sophocles made changes in the myth which lift the plot from the level of a common intrigue to a study of the highest psychological and ethical interest. He intensified the loneliness of the here by making Lemnos a deserted island, where Philoctetes lived in hardship, a prey alike...
...great trilogy, Aeschylus made Prometheus, the fire-bringer, pay a fearful price for defying Zeus. On seeing Sophocles' Oedipus Rex & Oedipus Tyrannus good Athenian audiences were properly shocked at the King's insensate stubbornness in attempting to influence economic conditions. The mythical hubris of the Trojans before their city was sacked was only matched by the historical hubris of the Athenians themselves just before their defeat in the Peloponnesian...
...search all Aeschylus and Sophocles without finding a better example of hubris than Mr. Hoover's behavior in 1928. [His] . . . was not the wanton violence of the ancient tragic heroes but a smug arrogance. . . . His campaign promises ran to that excess which above all things offended the Greek temperament, which seemed above all things to invite the correcting interposition of Nemesis. . . . Compare him. for example, with Oedipus. Oedipus, like Hoover, thought very well of himself. We first see him when his country is suffering from a severe and unexpected depression. . . . He has appointed Kreon as a fact-finding commission. Kreon...
...praised him as a genius. To Yeats Synge read a play called. "The Shadow of the Glen." This time Yeats confined his praise to a single word: "Euripides!" A year later, when "Riders to the Sea" was written the poet still could find only a single word: "Aeschylus...
...church's once potent ally, religious drama. Much U. S. Protestant church drama, complained Professor Fred Eastman of Chicago Theological Seminary, is of low quality. There has been improvement in recent years. But U. S. churches must strive for results comparable to those of the religious dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; or the Canterbury Cathedral play written four years ago by John Masefield, with music by Gustav Holst...