ANCIENT GREECE Greek 414 BCE
Great Books notes from meeting at the Huso Family home led by Jennifer Kinard 2012-11-04
Reading/performing two excerpts, loose translations by Penguin, interjected much more humor than was found in the text. Nice job Jen!
What were the characters looking for at the beginning? – A new place to live with freedom from the gods and men, taxes, and litigiousness in Athens. Possibly hopeless about winning the Peloponnesian War.
EPOPS, the Hoopoe / Tereus: He was a fiend that raped and mutilated his sister (by cutting out her tongue) in law and the gods turned him and the women into birds.
Philamela – nightingale or swallow
Procne – swallow or nightingale
Tereus – Hoopoe
Pisthetaerus and Euelpides (roughly translated as Trustyfriend and Goodhope)
Euelpides seemed to be the ‘straight man’ always saying, ‘this is another fine mess that you have gotten me into’, ‘translates the vision – puts meat on the bones of the quest’.
Pisthetaerus was the smooth talker, like the Music Man.
Aristotle said that the comic character and the tragic figure were distinctly different. The tragic figure was exceptional and the comedic Life goes from bad to good.
The audience was typically thoroughly drunk at this point (when the comic started) in the Dionysus Festival.
The Greek Comedy typically had a section in the play where the author would speak directly to the audience, usually the chorus would speak these words. Much political criticism.
3 sections of an ancient Greek Comedy
Song sung at the beginning
Formal debate between the main characters and moderated by the chorus.
Playwright speaks – usually through the chorus
Did the main characters find that city that they were looking for? They built a city, and Pisthetaerus became the de facto leader, and the society seemed to resemble Athenian society. Is this allegory?
It was noted that over the course of the three works that we have studied (Odyssey, Oedipus and Birds), the power of the gods have greatly diminished.
Why might this be on our Great Books List? It is the oldest comedy, and it survived in its entirety. The elements of modern day comedy are here. The use of a straight man, playing on the interpersonal relationship of two people, slapstick, bawdy, humor having to do with sex, lampooning the politics of the day, caricature, satire, wordplay (for example puns) and the comic hero is a regular guy with no special ability. Aristophanes wrote his comedy as poetry with rhyme, rhythm and meter.
Notes by John Seefried, modify, edit or expand them as you see fit.