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“... easily from Job to Jakobson, Hillel and Horace to Dickens and Dickinson, Plato to Wittgenstein, Aeschylus to Ashbery. And he returns to the essay’s origin by adopting georgic digression as his structural principle. Philosophers’ questions lead to questions answered by questions; self-questionings lead on to closure by question, and that, in turn, to the ...”

“... of the plays’; he is speaking of Greek tragedies and comedies. He points out that, though Aeschylus was neither a social thinker nor a political philosopher, he was a great tragic poet, and so a kind of thinker, though not a thinker of the same type. Coming from one who has always stood for a tough-minded and unsentimental approach towards ...”

“... including the women of the family, and loyalty to the public community, dominated by men. Aeschylus’ version of the myth, in the Agamemnon, presents the sacrifice of Iphigenia as the primary dilemma on which a new model of patriarchal democratic politics must eventually be founded. It is both a choice and no choice at all: the girl is bound and ...”

“... efforts was rewarded with the comment: ‘one is lost to understand what this reworking of Aeschylus’ The Persians has to do with the African American experience’ (the infelicity of the phrase ‘one is lost to understand’ is another injection of unnecessary cruelty unfairly administered). When Monk’s sister, a doctor who runs a loss-making ...”

“... on achieving it at any cost and against all the odds. In 1894, his paper ‘On the Manuscripts of Aeschylus’ appeared in the Journal of Philology alongside articles by Housman and Nettleship. It should have been the beginning of a useful second career as a philologist, but in the long run the only thing that came out of it was a mention, with qualified ...”

“... they had messed up.)Go back to one of the very earliest Greek dramas to survive, the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, first performed in 458 bc, and you’ll find that its antiheroine, Clytemnestra, horribly encapsulates that ideology. In the play, she becomes the effective ruler of her city while her husband is away fighting the Trojan War; and in the process she ...”

“... added to the stock of revenge plots that had dealt with questions of justice and liberty since Aeschylus and Euripides through Seneca to Shakespeare’s tragedy about the former slave Othello. Certainly the earliest texts that look extensively at the slave trade – Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko (1688) and Thomas Southerne’s stage adaptation of it ...”

“... when it throws its voice, can dissolve hatreds by deepening understanding: The Persians, in which Aeschylus dramatises the terrible grief of the enemy Xerxes’s mother, represents an early instance of this potential. In pursuit of this possibility, Phillips contrasts in The Nature of Blood two stories taken from the past and plaits them into his Holocaust ...”

“... at a standstill under snow. Outside there’s not much light and not a sound. Those lines from Aeschylus! How do they go? It’s almost half-way through Prometheus Bound. I think they’re coming back. I’m concentrating ...μουσομητορ εργανην ... Damn! I forget, but, remembering your dad, I’m celebrating being in love, not too ...”

“... When rockets point like pines in tundra Towards the profaned moon? he asks in ‘Cyprus, Aeschylus, Inanition’. The title poem considers the transformation wrought on St John’s vision of apocalypse ‘when the fire has crept into a governed switch’. A powerful line – but those that follow it suffer from a metaphor that mixes its ...”

“... philosophy; another such library might possess Archilochus, or Ennius, or lost tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Many of the papyrus rolls discovered long ago are carbonised, so that they have not been opened; scholars are working at a new technique for dealing with them. Late in 1833, Gell guided round the sites the rich, well-born novelist and ...”

“... classical Greek and Roman heroes hesitate no less than modern ones. His earliest example is Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, the second play in the Oresteia. Orestes returns home to take revenge on those who killed his father: his mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus. Orestes kills Aegisthus without scruple, but as he lifts his sword to kill his ...”

“... with the case endings making distinctions of sense, a device also employed in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus but here, as Hughes demonstrates, used to a quite different purpose. In the 18th century dramatists and composers preferred happy endings to stories of human sacrifice. Even the story of Jephtha’s daughter could be made less severe by emphasising the ...”

“... of Paulina, discovered lines on the beloved face. Here surely the Euripidean displacement of Aeschylus is reversed. When Cave writes about the Middle Ages he has nothing to say about the recognition by Dante of the burned features of Brunetto Latini or (still more majestic) Ben son, ben son Beatrice. It is true that Cave is too good a critic not to be ...”

“... Although he will find it ‘a positive advantage not to have read most modern discussions’ of Aeschylus’s plays, he will eagerly seek out Richard Reizenstein’s analysis of Greek novels in his brilliant Hellenistische Wundererzählung. Such readers may once, I suppose, have manned the farthest outposts of the Empire, but nowadays they are surely rare ...”