Customer Reviews

Three Greek Plays: Prometheus Bound / Agamemnon / The Trojan Women

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Edith Hamilton's choices for this fine small collection of Greek Plays includes two selections from Aeschylus and Euripide's Trojan Women. Her brief but insightful analysis introducing each play is alone worth the price of this book. It is clear she favors Euripide's and her exposition of the Trojan Women as the greatest of all Anti- War literature is thought provoking and a wonderful way to introduce the reader to the play that follows. I've had this book for many years and have returned to it numerous times. These are works that have as much meaning today as they did to their Greek audiences over 2,500 years ago. Quite an achievement.

Edith Hamilton does such a fine piece of work. We gave it as a gift to an an admirer of Edith Hamilton. Joyfully received.

Edith Hamilton does a good job prefacing these three plays and also talking about the difficulties of translating ancient Greek poetry. Her enthusiasm, competence, and knowledge, is evident, and this is a fair selection as far as ancient Greek plays go.

"The Trojan Woman" is made mildly interesting because of Hamilton's historical preface, but without the context it would simply not be worth reading, as far as general entertainment goes. "Agamemnon" is less interesting. Its main merit is a tenuous connection to Homer. Dramatists and theater-goers might enjoy these plays, but the average person will not.

On the other hand, "Prometheus Bound" though flawed also stands out at times. The start, where Hephaestus is reluctantly applying the bonds to the main character is fairly dramatic. Prometheus's talking down to Hermes, while supine and chained, is pretty engrossing, but the character of Ocean and his four legged bird-mount seems fairly non-sequitur and weakens the story. To my mind it is about as ineffective as Shakespeare's attempts at comedy.

Ultimately, most modern readers will not enjoy Greek tragedy. It lacks Shakespeare's great monologues. Because it had to be acted out, it is more limited in scope than Homer. It also lacks much of anything in the way of musical language. Virgil was not happy with "The Aeneid", though he tinkered with it until he died, but Augustus made sure it wasn't destroyed. On the other hand, many ancient Greek plays were simply lost to us. Probably in part because they weren't judged to have the same value. In these plays, poetry is more often cited than made. Two out of the three are derivative of Homer, while Prometheus was probably just derivative of the pre-existing myth.

To add to it, the tone here is always pretty melancholy, and the writing doesn't have the countervailing force of action or direct historical facts. People are made slaves of, while they mourn the dead. Cities burn. Babies are thrown from walls. Wives murder husbands and helpless slaves. The benefactor of man is chained for near eternity. At the time this sort of thing was meant to be cathartic, and Plato though its popularity meant that it was crass. But technology has made more forms of entertainment available to us.

Sure, it is interesting to learn more about the ancient Greeks, but I like lighter fare than this. If you are like me, try Xenophon or Homer. If you do read this and later ache for a happy Trojan ending, try the Aeneid. Technically, it is not Greek, but Virgil read a lot of Homer.