Word: agamemnon
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...Translator Graves theorizes, is that the Iliad was meant to be entertainment, not solemn tragedy. In Graves's view, the poem is a satirical work in which Homer lampooned the princelings at whose courts he recited, while pretending to hymn the heroes of the past. In this view, Agamemnon, leader of the Achaeans, is the prize buffoon. And when Hector, the Trojan leader, offers to stake the whole war on a single combat, the Greeks respond at first with resounding silence. Then Menelaus, whose wife Helen set off the strife by running away with Paris, grudgingly accepts the challenge...
Jogging Verse. Each Greek leader, of course, has his day of bloodshed-even Agamemnon is transformed for a few lines into a ferocious slaughterer of Trojans. Homer found this a necessary dodge, Graves believes, because powerful men in the poet's time considered themselves descendants of Troy's besiegers. While Homer composed in verse, presumably because it made the Iliad easier for court singers to memorize. Graves uses a combination of jogging, rhymed verse-for invocations, hymns and similes-and clear, unornamented, semicolloquial prose. His opening invocation suggests the rhymed couplets of Alexander Pope's Iliad: Sing...
...Harvard University associate professor is writing plays. "The Agamemnon" was printed in 1952 in "Botteghe Oscure," a magazine run by an Italian nobleman who lives on a "street of dark shops." Then the play was published in book form, and it will be produced in New York in the fall...
...black-gowned women and loinclothed men about her moved in an unhurried, severely ritualistic style that became occasionally monotonous in the long preludes to violence. But the economy of movement also produced fascinating effects, such as the shuttling plotters' dance in Act II, with Agamemnon's ghost in platform shoes tottering over them like a crippled bird. Throughout, Dancer Graham's movements of whiplike vitality and agonized angularities brought to life the rage in Clytemnestra's mind...
...Jephta saves the tribe that cast him out is one of the most famous tales in the Book of Judges. Jephta's sacrifice of his beloved daughter fascinated poets and artists as much as its Greek equivalent-Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia at Aulis. Like Author Fast's Moses, Author Feuchtwanger's book falls far short of the story's greatest possibilities, but it is told competently and plausibly in the simple, direct language of a veteran historical novelist (Jew Suss, Josephus). Both books reflect the intelligent spirit of the text that Author...