LIBRARY NOTES
 
Charles Rowan Beye
Greek Tragic Drama
Wednesday, May 14, 1997 at 5:30 PM
Members' Room; $60 per person
Ancient tragedy is something about which everyone has strong opinions, although usually little information and less understanding. In our discussions, we will concentrate on these nine plays in the hopes of recovering the variety of tragic experience.
We will learn about the aesthetics of all-male players moving through a rigid progression of dialogue and lyrical choral expressions danced and sung, and how the plays might have functioned as a public institution more akin to television soap opera than to serious theater.
We will also examine why so many powerful women are portrayed for an audience whose culture valorized males almost exclusively and investigate the degree to which the ideas of god and humankind and destiny are fit to the dramatic needs of the play rather than obedient to any community dogma.
Finally, we will explore how well each of these plays is expressive of the celebrated "Greek tragic sense of life".
Wednesday evenings, May 14, 21, and 28, 1997 will be devoted to reading Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy (Agamemnon,
The Libation-Bearers, and
The Eumenides); Sophocles'
Antigone,
Oedipus the King, and
Oedipus Colonus; and Euripides'
Medea, Hippolytus, and
Alcestis.
Distinguished Professor of Classics Emeritus at Lehman College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York, Charles Rowan Beye is the author of several critical studies of Greek epic poetry and tragic drama, including
Ancient Epic Poetry: Homer, Apollonius, Virgil (1993),
Ancient Greek Literature and Society (1987), and
The Iliad, the Odyssey and the Epic Tradition (1976).
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