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Alan H. Sommerstein

AESCHYLEAN TRAGEDY

ottobre 1995, pp. 300, £ 68.000.

Aeschylus (ca. 525/4 - 456/5 BC) was the dramatist who made Atheniam tragedy one of the world's great art-forms. In this book Alan H. Sommerstein, analysing his seven surviving plays and utilizing what knolewdge we have of the seventy or more whose texts have not survived, explorers his poetic, dramatic, theatrical and musical techniques, his social, political and religious ideas, and the significance of his drama for our own day.

Sommario: Preface - Note to the Reader - 1. The life and time of Aeschylus - 2. Aeschylus' theatre: 2.1. The performing space; 2.2. Performers and properties; 2.3. The spectators - 3. The tetralogy; Appendix: Scenes, time, intervals and choruses in Aeschylean tetralogies - 4. The Persians - 5. The Theban plays: 5.1. Seven against Thebes; 5.2. Steps to catastrophe; 5.3. Character and curse; 5.4. Oikos and polis; 5.5. The trilogy; 5.6. The ending of Seven - 6. The Danaid plays: 6.1. The Suppliant Maidens; 6.2. The trilogy; 6.3. Lyrical Tragedy?; 6.4. Movement and spectacle; 6.5. Io - 7. The Oresteia: 7.1. Agamemnon; 7.2. Choephoroi; 7.3. Eumenides; 7.4. Aeschylus and his predecessors; 7.5. Metre and music; 7.6. Visual dimensions: 7.6.1. The house, 7.6.2. Tableaux and scene changes, 7.6.3. Clothing, 7.6.4. Weapons and implements, 7.6.5. Silent performers, 7.6.6. The murder scene in Choephoroi; 7.7. Imagery; 7.8. Male and female; 7.9. Justice and the gods; 7.10. A tale of three cities - 8. The Prometheus plays: 8.1. Prometheus Bound; 8.2. Structure, logic and action; 8.3. Problem of staging; 8.4. The Prometheus trilogy?; 8.5. The question of authenticity - 9. Aeschylean satyr-drama - 10. Slices from Homeric feasts: 10.1. The Iliadic tetralogy; 10.2. The Odyssean tetralogy - 11. Aeschylus, the gods and the world: 11.1. Puppets of the gods?; 11.2. Agamemnon's dilemma; 11.3. Maradona and Farmers Jones; 11.4. Niobe and divine malevolence; 11.5. The ultimates realities behind the universe; 11.6. Evolutionary theology - 12. Aeschylean drama and the political moment: 12.1. Eumenides and 459/8; 12.2. The Suppliant Maidens and ... 462/1?; 12.3. The Persians and 473/2; 12.4. Aeschylus, prophet of democracy - 13. Of an age, or for all time?: 13.1. War; 13.2. Gender and hybris; 13.3. Justice, deterrence and retribution; 13.4. The good society - Genealogies - Bibliographical Guide - References - Addenda - Index.

In copertina: Tomb of a maiden, Pergamonmuseum, Berlin.

ISBN 88-7949-106-7 

Readership: All those interested in the History of Greek Life and Greek Literature.