Word: aeschylus
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...this film, cheap horror is carefully avoided, and the blood-sucking scenes are all tactfuly done. The great theme is illustrated with an assembly of vivid episodes mounting in tension to the Transylvanian crescendo; the total effect is terrifying in the way an Aeschylus tragedy is terrifying. A representative scene is that in which a team of surgeons tries in vain to save the latest victim. "He has died of an unnatural loss of blood," says one over the corpse, and then after a chilling silence come the ominous words: "If only we knew what caused those two puncture marks...
...Death of Tragedy, by George Steiner. Well equipped with caustic wit as well as learning, the author ably follows his subject from Aeschylus to Brecht...
Moving from Greece to Elizabethan England, Steiner notes that Victor Hugo called Shakespeare "Aeschylus the second." It wasn't quite true. Shakespeare violated the classic unities of time, place and action and altered the tragedy of destiny to the tragedy of will. The underlying unity of Shakespearean tragedy, as Steiner sees it, is "the universal drama of the fall of man." This introduces Christian values without the Christian metaphysic, which is nontragic, since it contains the hope of heaven and redemptive grace. Critic Steiner fails to explore one pagan link between Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, the obsession with death...
...topic of love, and many more to faith. But . . . poor little hope*... is not even listed." Often the downgrading of hope was not by accident but by design. Most of the great Greeks held that fate was unchangeable, so hope was an illusion and therefore evil. To Aeschylus it was "the food of exiles," and to Euripides, "man's curse." And 2,500 years later Nietzsche echoed: "Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment...
Comparative Literature 185, "The Shape and Content of Classical Drama," to be taught by Eric A. Havelock, professor of Greek and Latin, will compare representative plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes and Seneca, in an attempt to better understand the literature of Greece and Rome...