"What matters about a play is not the extent to which it is like any other play, but the way in which it is different," writes Thomas G. Rosenmeyer. "This is, I suggest, how the ancient audiences received the performances.... My purpose, then, in writing these essays is twofold: ... to devote enough space to the discussion of each play to allow its special tone and texture to emerge without hindrance and at leisure ... and to include in one collection analyses of plays so different from one another that the accent will come to rest on the variety of the tragic experience rather than on any one narrowly defined norm." Greek tragedy is a vehicle for many different ideas and many different intentions. From the wealth of material that has come down to us the author has chosen six plays for analysis. He reminds us that the plays were written to be seen and heard, and only secondarily to be studied. The listeners expected each play to have a specific objective, and to exhibit its own mood. These the author attempts to recover for us, by listening to what each play, in its own right, has to say. His principal concern is with the tragic diction and the tragic ideas, designed to release certain massive responses in the large theater-going group of ancient Athens. In exploring the characters and the situations of the plays he has chosen, the author transports his reader to the world of fifth-century B.C. Greece, and establishes the relevance of that world to our own experience. The essays are not introductory in nature. No space is given, for instance, to basic information about the playwrights, the history of Greek drama, or the special features of the Attic stage. Yet the book addresses itself to classicists and nonclassicists alike. The outgrowth of a series of lectures to nonspecialists, its particular appeal is to students of literature and the history of Western thought. Parallels are drawn between the writings of the philosophers and the tragedies, and attention is paid to certain popular Greek beliefs that colored the tragic formulations. Ultimately, however, the approach is not historical but critical; it is the author's intention to demonstrate the beauty and the craftsmanship of the plays under discussion.

The Masks of Tragedy: Essays on Six Greek Dramas

Literature & Fiction

Rosenmeyer, Thomas G.

Dramas & Plays

University of Texas Press

This volume looks at Theocritus as both a source for Vergil and later writers and as a significant poet in his own right. It gives an insight into this classical author which may prove relevant not only for classicists but also for all studying the pastoral tradition in literature.

The green cabinet;: Theocritus and the European pastoral lyric

Ancient & Medieval Literature

University of California Press

The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric

History & Criticism

The Art of Aeschylus

This general work about the Greek tragedian distills established scholarship about the verse forms, style, characterizations, plots, and structure of his plays and what is known of their original staging

The art of Aeschylus

This general work about the Greek tragedian distills established scholarship about the verse forms, style, characterizations, plots, and structure of his plays and what is known of their original staging

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Nero's tutor and advisor, wrote philosophical essays, some of them in the form of letters, and dramas on Greek mythological topics, which since the early Renaissance have exercised a powerful influence on the European theater. Because in his essays Seneca, in his own eclectic way, subscribes to the philosophy of the Stoic school, scholars and critics have long been asking the question whether the plays, also, could be regarded as transmitters of Stoic thought. Various answers, ranging from a categorical no to an uneasy yes, have been given. With few exceptions, the students who have concerned themselves with this question have looked for their enlightenment in Stoic psychology and Stoic ethics. In this book, Thomas G. Rosenmeyer proposes instead to look at the Stoic science of nature, of the world and human beings in the world, as a more plausible grounding for the difference between Senecan drama and its Greek predecessors. In the process of looking at what the Stoics, especially the early Stoics, had to say about the forces determining natural phenomena, the author uncovers a deeply pessimistic strain in Stoic cosmology, and an interest in physicality and environmental tension, that he finds replicated in the theater, not only of Seneca, but also of the later European tradition indebted to him.

Senecan Drama and Stoic Cosmology

California Studies In Classical Antiquity

History

Ancient Civilizations

UNIV OF CA PRESS+

California Studies In Classical Antiquit

University of California Pr

Gordian Pr Inc

RARE SIGNED AS NEW FIRST EDITION softcover, clean NEW text, solid binding, NO remainders NOT ex-library slight shelfwear / storage-wear; WE SHIP FAST. Carefully packed and quickly sent. 201601656 SIGNED: "For Richard diffidently Tom" As a scholar, Tom Rosenmeyer became one of the leading expositors in his generation of classical Greek literature, with his distinctive combination of traditional philology and flexible, finely-nuanced literary analysis. He was able to draw skillfully both on philosophically-based aesthetic theory (German as well as Anglo-American) as well as an impressive range of literary-critical models-the fruit of his formidably wide and deep reading. In his early career he published numerous articles on Plato. His first book, The Masks of Tragedy (1963), collected several provocative essays on Greek plays. The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Tradition (1969) is an excellent example of his comparative approach, as it brings a wide-ranging chronological and cultural perspective to the study of Greek and Latin poetry, points up interconnections between literature and philosophy, and shows the continuing relevance of the classics for the understanding of later literature. The Art of Aeschylus (1982) is likewise a remarkable tour de force, erudite, sophisticated, and pithily written; and, in a late turn to Latin literature, Senecan Drama and Stoic Cosmology (1989) argues for an original thesis concerning the interconnection of Stoicism with Seneca's tragedies. In these books and in numerous shorter contributions, the important characteristics of Tom Rosenmeyer's scholarship were these: sensitive and provocative attention to the ancient texts in the light of an immense range of ancient and modern literature; faWe recommend selecting Priority Mail wherever available. (No shipping to Mexico, Brazil or Italy.)

Deina Ta Polla: A Classicist's Checklist of Twenty Literary-Critical Positions (Arethusa Monographs)

Arethusa Monographs

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