From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Sun Jul 12 1998 - 05:56:18 EDT
At 2:21 PM +0000 7/11/98, clayton stirling bartholomew wrote:
>Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>
>> If you had Codex Bezae and perhaps two other MSS of Acts, you might be in a
>> better position to compare the Agamemnon of Aeschylus and the book of Acts,
>> but it still wouldn't be a very fair comparison, inasmuch as Aeschylus (and
>> his contemporary, Pindar) wrote the most difficult of Greek verse to be
>> found in antiquity and Luke wrote one of the clearest of prose styles. I
>> don't believe for a moment that Luke would have written a participle to
>> stand in for a finite verb. No way (IMHO).
>>
>
>I am certainly glad that Carl didn't waffle on this. I hate waffling. "No way"
>is the kind of response I understand.
>
>BTW, Carl, I thought you used Agamemnon for your intro course in Greek
>Tragedy. Perhaps I got this wrong. Is Agamemnon as difficult as Oedipus Rex?
>After plowing through over 400 lines of Oedipus Rex I put it aside for a
>while, decided it was a form of self abuse.
The Oedipus Rex is difficult enough, but not nearly so difficult as the
Agamemnon. No, I don't think I ever taught an "introductory course" in
Greek tragedy; I've taught Greek tragedy in translation, and I've used
translations of Greek tragedy in teaching mythology. But the plays in Greek
I've taught in individual semester courses many times, the Oedipus Rex last
spring with four grad students, the Agamemnon a year ago with one grad
student and a very bright undergrad. They are both wonderful plays but very
different from one another. The Oedipus is magnificent for its characters
(Sophocles is supposed to have said at some time, hO MEN EURIPIDHS POIEI
ANQRWPOUS hWS EISI, EGW de hWS CRH--wonderfully ambiguous, because it's
clear that Euripides does indeed draw his characters with a powerful
realism, but does Sophocles mean that he draws them "as one ought to draw
them" or "as they ought to be?" I've always thought it was, "as they ought
to be." But Aeschylus seems to me to have a more profound sense of what
suffering means--and the poetry of his choral odes is wrenchingly haunting;
I think of that one in the Agamemnon in which the chorus begins rejoicing
over the sack of Troy and gradually shifts over to contemplation of what it
would be like to be the victims of the sacking of a city, and so it ends:
OUK EIHN PTOLIPORQOS ... -- "I would not be a sacker of cities ..."
In sum, both plays are difficult enough, but both will richly reward the
effort paid to read them.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
Summer: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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