Re: Good Lit

Daniel said:
<< But philosophy is not my interest but rather literature like the old
Greek plays etc. I've also read allot of histories like Polybius, Tacitus,
Sallust, Thucydides, Josephus etc. so now I am after imaginative works,
more like poetry and fictional works (epics, Tragedies, Comedies). >>

The surviving (complete) Greek tragedies are thirty-three in number: seven
of Aeschylus, seven of Sophocles, and nineteen of Euripides. The University
of Chicago Press has a nice series of paperbacks, collectively going under
some such title as "The Complete Greek Tragedies." I believe it comes in
two or three volumes each for Aeschylus and Sophocles and several more for
Euripides. They are well-produced books and their translations are usually
superior. Where their translations are mediocre, it is usually the case
that no exemplary translation exists. Richmond Lattimore and David Grene
edit the series and are responsible for many of the translations, and these
two men are in my opinion two of the best translators of Ancient Greek
around today, and damn good readers of Greek literature to boot.

The surviving (complete) Greek comedies are eleven, all by Aristophanes.
His comedies are frequently very lewd, often with more numerous and more
vulgar jokes concerning dicks and farts and sex and sexual play both
heterosexual and homosexual than any modern I know of. There's an old
legend that a production of his Lysistrata in San Francisco a few decades
ago was busted by police who insisted upon arresting the writer for
obscenity, only to learn that he'd be dead since the fourth century B.C.E.
Translations of his plays into English have a long history of being
horrible, and some of them even translated the especially naughty bits into
Italian instead of English (perhaps to encourage schoolboys to learn
Italian?). Most of the modern translations apparently assume that without
the context of Ancient Greek culture, we will not find Aristophanes funny,
because they tend to change and modernize his jokes. This is baffling to
me, because I find his jokes a total riot and the modernizations to be
rather stale.

Harvard University Press has for many decades (a century?) published a
series called the Loeb Classical Library, with little hardcover green books
for Greek classics and little hardcover red books for Roman classics; they
have about a million, and they cost about $25 a pop. They are excellent
books, and opening to any place you will find the Greek or Latin on the left
page and an English translation on the right. They have recently revised
their translations of Aristophanes (their old ones translated perhaps a
dozen or more Greek words, each ruder than the last, as "member," as in, "he
gripped his member"). The new Loeb translations of Aristophanes are in my
opinion the best and perhaps the only good ones in existence. They preserve
Aristophanes' own jokes and references. His plays are often very political,
and usually anti-war, as he lived and wrote through the Peloponnesian War.
The new Loeb editions, in a wonderful and admirable move, maintain his
references as he wrote them and, get this!, include footnotes that cite
relevant passages of Thucydides! Going back and forth between Thucydides
and Aristophanes like this is something like exposing oneself to the Ancient
Athenian newspapers and the Ancient Athenian Saturday Night Live, and to my
estimation is greatly favorable to reading a translator's judgments based on
his historical/cultural research or to having him simply change the words to
apply better to modern jokes and events.

Socrates lived in this same period (Plato was writing toward the end of it),
and what is probably Aristophanes' most famous play, The Clouds, lampoons
Socrates. The play's popularity, contrary to what I expect Aristophanes
wished, might have contributed to the atmosphere that led to Socrates' trial
and execution. Aristophanes appears as a character in Plato's Symposium,
where he gives a beautiful mythical account of the nature and origin of love
(it is not clear whether the account is really attributable to Aristophanes
or if Plato invented it).

All of these plays -- much of what remains for us of the Golden Age of
Classical Athens -- were produced within a period of about a century,
certainly one of the most intellectually productive centuries in human
history, spanning approximately from the Persian War (read about it in
Herodotus) to the Peloponnesian War (read about it in Thucydides).
Aeschylus came first and he helped usher Athens into the Classical period,
and he is believed to be the first writer ever to introduce a second actor
into a play where individual actors portray individual roles, instead of one
actor singing a sort of poem of many characters, perhaps with the help of
many masks. Sophocles' first play was performed in the Athenian competition
about ten years before Aeschylus died, and he beat his elder to win first
prize. Euripides was a younger contemporary to Sophocles.

If you've read the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Aeneid, then you've read
the ancient epics (I recommend the Lattimore translations for all three); I
would enthusiastically endorse reading Paradise Lost for a modern English
epic following in the tradition (it's staggering how closely Milton follows
it, in fact). The list of histories you give is very good, but I would
certainly add Herodotus -- the earliest historian, the first to use the word
historia, which means investigation, in a sense like how we use it, and who
had an idea of history that it is quite different from ours -- and Livy, who
wrote a history of Rome in which he says that he will give the ostensibly
mythical and legendary stories of early Rome no differently than the less
factually dubious ones, because he has no good way of sorting out the true
from the false, and because of all people the Romans most of all DESERVE for
such stories to be true, even if they aren't. It's an amazing book.

The fine people at Encyclopaedia Britannica have published a series called
The Great Books of the Western World. It was first published sometime
around fifty years ago, and was revised and extended and published again in
the nineties. It's a very handsome hard-back set that looks on a shelf
something like the encyclopaedia set. The newer edition comes in about 60
volumes, covering literature, philosophy, mathematics, science, theology,
politics and economics, et cetera. It includes nearly every book I've
mentioned here, and most every pre-20th century book mentioned in this whole
conversation: if you can think of a great author in the Western tradition,
you're probably thinking of someone in the set. The story of the series
tangles itself a bit with my college, and with some very good friends of the
college. Some of the books are very hard or impossible to find in print
elsewhere. It's a very impressive canon, and everything in it is worth
reading carefully (I think it includes a ten-year schedule for reading every
word). The set is quite expensive, but a table of contents can be found on
the Internet and further reading suggestions can thereby be easily found.
And if your interest becomes much greater than that, the older edition can
sometimes be found used on the Internet without extraordinary expense.

-robbie
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Received on Sun Nov 10 19:00:11 2002