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The Bacchae won the play competition of 404BC, but its author Euripides of Salamis had died of old age in exile two years before. The play uses a foreign name from Asia Minor for the deity and it tells of his arrival at the city of Thebes in Boeotia, not far north of Athens. This is Dionysus birthplace and Thebes is now ruled by his cousin, Pentheus. Pentheus was angry at the women of Thebes, including his mother, Agave, for denying his divinity and worshipping Dionysus against his will.
In this play, Dionysus comes to Thebes to avenge the wrongs he feels he has suffered - his mother's own sisters have spread the tale that Semele lied about being impregnated by a god. This means that they also reject Dionysus' godhood. The opening song of the chorus of Lydian and Phrygian
women, dancing in honor of Dionysos.
There the celebrant, wrapped in sacred fawnskin, flings himself on the ground surrendered, while the swift-footed company streams on; there he hunts for blood, and rapturously eats the raw flesh of the slaughtered goat, hurrying on to the Phrygian or Lydian mountain heights. Possessed, ecstatic, he leads their happy cries; the earth flows with milk, flows with wine, flows with the nectar of bees; the air is thick with a scent of Syrian myrrh. The celebrant runs entranced, whirling the torch that blazes red from the fennel-wand in his grasp, and with shouts he rouses the scattered bands, sets their feet dancing, as he shakes his delicate locks to the wild wind.
(Euripides, Bacchae 135-150,
And forth upleapt a fountain's showry spray: One in earth's bosom planted her reed-wand, And up there through the god a wine-fount sent: And whoso fain would drink white-foaming draughts Scarred with their finger tips the breast of earth, And milk gushed forth unstinted: dripped the while Sweet streams of honey from their ivy staves. The first half of the play, the audience laughs often. Even Semele's sisters, the mother and aunts of the present King Pentheus, believe her lover had been a mere mortal. The King is indignant that the women would dare to ignore their household duties and go off gallivanting on their own. Dionysus targets the young King Pentheus, son of Semele's sister Agave, grandson of the former king Cadmus. Dionysus tempts the king to go and spy on the women, to watch "their obscene acts."
Pentheus refuses to accept Dionysus as a god.
Dionysus arranges for Agave, maddened beyond reason, to rip
her own son to shreds, thereby killing two birds with one
stone. Euripides’ Bacchae
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 Aeschylus reminds us that Orpheus voice affected
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Aristophanes The Frogs THE FROGS was
probably produced at the Lenaean festival in Athens
in January, 405 B.C. where it took first prize. It
scored such a hit that it was staged a second time,
probably in March of the same year, at the Great
Dionysia. It is typical of the lyrical-burlesques of
Aristophanes.
Dionysus is in Hades and almost at once loud quarreling is heard. The disturbance turns out to be Aeschylus and Euripides disputing the place of honor as King of Tragedy, a position which Aeschylus holds and Euripides wants. It is finally agreed that since their plays were written for performance at the Dionysian festivals, Dionysus shall decide their dispute. It is in Aristophanes' The Frogs that we get the closest look at the comic dimensions of the god. Lois Spatz points out that in this play Dionysus is also Iachus, god of mysteries. "It is he who leads the sacred procession from Athens to Demeter's shrine at Eleusis." The combination of the two gods offered to everyone, including women and slaves, the opportunity to become initiates into a cult which promised a blessed afterlife. |
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| Euripides
(c. 480–406 BCE)
was born on Salamis, and
died in Macedonia in 406. Though he was scarcely a generation
younger than Sophocles, his world view better reflects the
political, social, and intellectual crises of late 5th-century
Athens. He was friendly with the philosophers Anaxagoras and
Socrates and with Sophists such as Protagoras and Prodicus, and
his plays reflect contemporary ethics, rhetoric, and science. He
may have been prosecuted for impiety by the demagogue Cleon.
Less reverent than Aeschylus or Sophocles, Euripides criticized
traditional religion and shocked contemporaries by representing
mythical figures as everyday, unheroic people or even as
abnormal or neurotic personalities.
Euripides was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, along with Aeschylus and Sophocles. Euripides first competed in the famous Athenian dramatic festival (the Dionysia) in 455 BCE, one year after the death of Aeschylus. He came in third. It was not until 441 BCE that he won first place, and over the course of his lifetime, Euripides claimed a mere four victories. Euripides' final competition in Athens was in 408 BCE. Although there is a story that he left Athens embittered because of his defeats, there is no real evidence to support it. He died in 406 BCE, probably in Athens or nearby, and not in Macedon, as some biographers repeatedly state.
mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/aristophanes/frogs.htm |
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Heraclitus
of Ephesus (Greek Ἡράκλειτος Herakleitos)
(about 535 - 475 BC), known as 'The Obscure,' was a pre-Socratic
Greek philosopher from Ephesus in Asia Minor. As with other
pre-Socratics, his writings only survive in fragments quoted by
other authors. He disagreed with Thales, Anaximander, and
Pythagoras about the nature of the ultimate substance and
claimed instead that everything is derived from the Greek
classical element fire, rather than from air, water, or earth.
This led to the belief that change is real, and stability
illusory. For Heraclitus everything is "in flux", as exemplified
in his famous aphorism "Panta Rhei":
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Heradotus [c.
484-425B.C.] the Father of History Herodotus was to make journeys to places like
Asia Minor, Babylonia, Egypt and Greece during his lifetime, and
he wrote about the different people and cultures he met. |
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Livy
Titus
Livius
(Titus Livius (around 59 BC - 17 AD), known as Livy in English, wrote a monumental history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita, from its founding (traditionally dated to 753 BC). Livy was a native of Padua on the Po River in northern Italy Livy's work was originally composed of 142 books, of which only 35 are extant; these are 1-10, and 21-45 (with major lacunae in 40-45). |
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Ovid
Actual name was
Publius Ovidius Naso (Sulmona, March 20, 43 BC – Tomis, now
Constanta AD 17) Ovid, the Roman poet wrote on topics of
love, abandoned women, and mythological transformations. From
his own time until the end of Antiquity Ovid was among the most
widely read and imitated of Latin poets; his greatest work,
the Metamorphoses.
Augustus banished Ovid in AD 8 to Tomis on the Black Sea for reasons that remain mysterious. Ovid himself wrote that it was because of an error and a carmen – a mistake and a poem (Tr. 2.207). Likely referring to his publishing the Art of Love, a treatise that made no careful distinction between the seduction of citizens' wives and more conventionally accessible Roman demimondaines. Even though he was friendly with the natives of Tomis, a people known as the Scythians. He still pined for Rome and his beloved third wife. Ovid died at Tomis after nearly ten years of banishment. To understand the significance of Ovid, one has to set him up as a clear foil to Virgil, who was his contemporary. Virgil is famous for Rome's national epic the Aeneid, high nationalist poetry, as well as his status as Augustus's star artist. Ovid wrote fragmented, non-linear works like Metamorphoses, The Art of Love, and The Heroides. Ovid's work has been remembered fondly as a testament to the playful and erotically experimental side of Rome, the feel-good side of the Roman spirit, the comedic genius of its social life, and of course, the pain of being ultimately disgraced and shunned for speaking one's mind. Thus Ovidian sensibility is more transgressive, naughty, bohemian---more Carnaval like.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamorphoses_%28poem%29
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ovidius.htm |
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| "... Praise wine that is old, but praise the flowers of songs that are new." [Pindar, Olympian Odes 9.49] | ||||
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Pliny
Pliny the Elder Gaius Plinius Secundus, (23–79) better known as Pliny the Elder, was an ancient author and Natural philosopher of some importance who wrote Naturalis Historia. He completed a History of his Times in thirty-one books, possibly extending from the reign of Nero to that of Vespasian, and deliberately reserved it for publication after his death. Pliny collected much of the knowledge of his time into his great work, the Naturalis Historia, an encyclopedia. Pliny was an adherent to the
Stoics. He was also influenced by the Epicurean and
the Academic and the revived Pythagorean schools. But his view
of nature and of God is essentially Stoic. It was only (he
declares) the weakness of humanity that had embodied the Being
of God in many human forms imbued with human faults and vices .
The Godhead was really one; it was the soul of the eternal
world, displaying its beneficence on the earth, as well as in
the sun and stars [penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/ |
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Plato's thought is often compared with that of
his most famous student, Aristotle, whose reputation during the
Western Middle Ages completely eclipsed that of Plato.
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| Plutarch
Mestrius Plutarch (cz.
46-ca. post 127) was a Greek historian, biographer, and
essayist. His best-known work is the Parallel Lives, a series of biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, arranged in tandem to illuminate their common moral virtues or failings. The surviving Lives contain twenty-three pairs of biographies, each pair containing one Greek Life and one Roman  Life,
as well as four unpaired single Lives. As he explains in the
first paragraph of his Life of Alexander, Plutarch was not
concerned with writing histories, as such, but in exploring the
influence of character — good or bad — on the lives and
destinies of famous men.
His collected works under the title of the Moralia (loosely translated as Customs and Mores) is an eclectic collection of seventy-eight essays and transcribed speeches, which includes On the Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander the Great - an important adjunct to his Life of the great general, On the Worship of Isis and Osiris (a crucial source of information on Egyptian religious rites Plutarch lived most of his life at Chaeronea, and was initiated into the mysteries of the Greek god Apollo. However his duties as the senior of the two priests of Apollo at the Oracle of Delphi apparently occupied little of his time - he led a most active social and civic life and produced an incredible body of writings, much of which is still extant. Plutarch's philosophy was eclectic, with borrowings from the Stoics, Pythagoreans, and Peripatetics (but not the Epicureans) grouped around a core of Platonism. His main interest was in ethics, though he developed a mystical side, especially in his later years; he reveals that he had been initiated into the mysteries of the cult of Dionysus, and both as a Platonist and as an initiate he believed in the immortality of the soul. Plutarch's writings had enormous influence on English and French literature. Shakespeare occasionally quoted — and extensively paraphrased — Thomas North's translation of several of the Lives in his plays. American poet, philosopher, and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists were greatly influenced by the Moralia (Emerson wrote a glowing introduction to the five volume 19th century edition of his Moralia). |
Plato|
Greco-Roman Dictionary |
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 A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, John Murray, London, 1875.
Published first in 1842 to the last in 1890‑91. The standard
encyclopedia reference with over 1 million words
A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities John Murray, London, 1875. William Smith, D.C.L., LL.D.: This index page collects the articles in Smith's Dictionary on religion: temples, ritual, festivals, divination, priesthoods etc. For general information about the Dictionary, and for about 400 articles on other topics, see its homepage. Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (search), and Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (search) |
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| Pliny the Elder's encyclopedic Natural History, (search), a remarkable snapshot of the state of Geography, Ethnography, Astronomy, Biology, and Geology in the early Roman empire. | |
http://www.in2greece.com/english/ |
Main Page: Carnaval.com