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“... in it, their glory, stare out death for death for death (ii) CASSANDRA: ‘I know that smell’ (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1333) Gorges down black drops white water after shadows plunge out of wild all around to deep trees a white cock crows. Deer in snow at a deer angle the sudden drenching its black throat. White ...”

“... At the start​ of Aeschylus’ Oresteia a watchman sees a flaming beacon. This is supposed to be the sign that Troy has fallen and that Agamemnon is coming home from the Trojan war. The watchman briefly rejoices. Then he says (in Richmond Lattimore’s translation): ‘The rest/I leave to silence; for an ox stands huge upon/my tongue ...”

“... Aeschylus’​ Oresteia begins with the story of a grieving, righteously angry woman seeking justice for her daughter. The child was killed by her father, the woman’s husband, in order to enable a vast war. Each of the three plays is radically different in style, mood and action. But each centres on female anger and female grief at violent loss of life and the willingness of family members to kill one another ...”

“... in particular. Gruen begins with the Persians, as depicted in both Herodotus’ Histories and Aeschylus’ historical tragedy Persae, and they are in many ways paradigmatic. The people Gruen is interested in are the well-organised and powerful neighbours of the Greeks and Romans, especially those who came into conflict with them. He looks through Greek ...”

“... her sharp, sceptical, often laconic version of three plays about the legacy of Atreus, one each by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, as well as in her translations of four other plays by Euripides,* I kept hearing an invitation to extend and refine the thought. These gods are the names of forces humans cannot otherwise name and must still name somehow. Do ...”

“... however, suggests to the adult Aurora, by now a poet with an interest in tragedy, the death of Aeschylus, who according to legend was killed when a circling eagle or vulture, mistaking his bald pate for a rock, dropped a tortoise on it from a great height in order to crack open its shell. Perhaps the beginnings of this thought had struck the young Aurora ...”

“... the Fire-Bringer has been lost altogether. Prometheus Bound has traditionally been ascribed to Aeschylus, but there are no Festival records to confirm his authorship. The case against this attribution has been made with particular force in recent decades, most compellingly by M. Griffith in The Authenticity of ‘Prometheus Bound’ (1977). In a recent ...”

“... the heart of tragic experience, and he pursues it not only through Shakespeare’s Othello, but in Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Racine. Green’s interpretations of individual plays are sustained by a formidable theory of dramatic representation, set out in a densely written ‘Prologue’ bristling with structuralist terminology. Frank Kermode, who ...”

“... in a general way is probably correct.Winnington-Ingram lays strong emphasis on the influence of Aeschylus, and is everywhere aware of the importance of religion in the work of Sophocles. After dealing with the three supposedly early plays, he frames his chapter on the Oedipus Tyrannus between a chapter on the Erinyes in Sophocles – he calls them by the ...”

“... attempts a sadly misconceived and portentous expansion of the sensible paragraphs on Wagner and Aeschylus in Cooke’s I saw the world end and in the two biographies of Wagner by Curt von Westernhagen. Given his willingness to countenance far more tenuous parallels, it is surprising that he deliberately denies the influence of Prometheus Bound (as expounded ...”

“... works, and he gives short shrift to his Marxist predecessors in the field. George Thomson, whose Aeschylus and Athens excited me very much when it came out in 1940, is dismissed in three curt sentences. But Dr de Ste Croix is no less critical of his fellow Classical historians, among whom he commonly refers favourably only to A.H.M. Jones and P.A. Brunt. Sir ...”

“... crowd-poets whom Aristotle praised for their command of spectacle and song, pity and terror. ‘Aeschylus tragical on stilts,’ sighed Aldous Huxley. ‘Bawling sublimities through a tortured mouth-hole!’ It is not for his ‘artistic merit’ that I would compare him with those old Greeks, only for his choice of medium. The crowd-poetry of ...”

“... about audience reaction, what the Athenians would have thought about the meaning, for instance, of Aeschylus’ the Eumenides? Would the play have made Athenians aware during their ritual libations to Dionysus (Choes) that they were surrounded by polluting waste-matter (normally unseen), because of their ability, as family members, to bring grief to the ...”

“... Pam and Cliff are smitten with the hereditary curse of ‘neurofibromatosis’ – and instead of Aeschylus and Sophocles we have the goat-songs of Edward Deblasio and Joel J. Feigenbaum. Sue Ellen’s drinking bouts are a hangover from the Bacchanals of Cithaeron. Blake Carrington’s ‘I’ll be in the library’ harks back to the oracle (who today, in the ...”

“... observation I keep thinking about showcases him at his most delightfully oblique: he reads that Aeschylus died in 456 BC when an eagle, mistaking his bald head for a rock, dropped a tortoise on it. Sedaris’s reaction: eagles make mistakes? He doesn’t elaborate, and I wonder which figure in this story Sedaris identifies with. Is he ...”