In reading a Greek play one should always try to visualize the positions of the characters at any given moment, their movements and gestures, and hear their tone of voice in the mind's ear. For this purpose it is a good thing to know one's way around Denniston's Greek Particles and also to know the main constraints under which Greek drama operated: action out of doors, in daylight, and the concealment of facial expression by masks.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Wednesday, January 22, 2025
Reading a Greek Play
Kenneth Dover, ed., Aristophanes, Frogs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 104: