John Herington – författare
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Aeschylus can be called the creator of the art of tragedy in the Western tradition. Author of the first dramas that have survived in their entirety, he was also one of the world’s greatest lyric and imaginative poets. This book by John Herington is designed to introduce all aspects of his majestic achievement to the general reader.Herington begins by sketching the background to Aeschylus’ plays. He first explains the very ancient mythical conception of our universe in which Aeschylus was brought up and which continued to shape his dramaturgy and poetic expression throughout his career. Herington next discusses Athens and the momentous transition that it was experiencing during Aeschylus’ later years: the transition from age-old traditional ways of life and thought to the Periclean Enlightenment. The background material concludes with a description of the contemporary Athenian theater, which also was undergoing a crucial transition from a primarily choral performance toward an art that could be described as drama.In the second half of the book, Herington focuses on the plays of Aeschylus, providing many illustrative quotations that he himself has translated. There is a chapter on the poetry of the lost plays as they are revealed in ancient quotations and descriptions. There are then expositions of the seven extant tragedies, all of which were produced in the period between 472 B.C. and Aeschylus’ death in 456. Each play is presented to the reader not so much in summary as in vivid scenario, with concentration on the climactic points at which Aeschylus orchestrated all his poetic, histrionic, musical, and choreographic resources. Herington suggests that the sequence of the extant plays as a whole constitutes a commentary by this very great poet on the intellectual, political, and religious upheaval taking place in Athens during his last years, and that therein lies part of the endless fascination of the plays.
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Of all the poets of ancient Rome Ovid had perhaps the most influence on the art and literature of Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Even today he is probably the most accessible of all classical poets to the non-specialist, both in his subject matter and in his style. Ovid is no less fascinated than we are by the human psyche and by the ways men and women relate to each other, and many of his views on these questions seem centuries ahead of his time. Ovid’s interest in narrative technique is so much like ours that modern critical terms such as “reader-response” could have been coined for his experiments with story telling. In the creation of different personae and points of view his ingenuity is endless. For the Amores he invented a posing poet-lover; for the Art of Love, his narrator is a cynical professor of seduction who is convinced, quite wrongly, that he has love down to a science. In the Heroides, a series of verse-letters from the famous women of legend to their lovers, he brilliantly recreated great moments of heroic mythology from the feminine point of view. The longest and most enchanting of his works, the Metamorphoses, an epic-length poem on the infinite changes of mythology and history, afforded him the richest opportunities of all to experiment with narrative techniques. In this book Sara Mack introduces Ovid to the general reader. After considering Ovid’s modernity, Mack surveys his poetry chronologically. Next she examines his most influential poems: the Amores, Heroides, Art of Love, and Metamorphoses. Finally she explores Ovidian wit, concluding with a look at Ovid’s influence on the arts.