Volume 23, Number 1 · February 5, 1976
Greek for the Greekless
By Bernard Knox
The Oresteia
by Aeschylus, translated by Robert Fagles
Viking, 343 pp., $15.00
The Bacchae of Euripides, A Communion Rite
by Wole Soyinka
Norton, 97 pp., $1.95 (paper)
Thirty-two Greek tragedies have come down to us intact, a pitiful remnant of the Athenian theater's great century; it is about one-tenth of the known work of the three great tragedians, who were, however, only three among many. The composition of this remnant was determined by factors which are hardly ideal from a purely aesthetic standpoint; suitability as school texts in early Byzantium was a governing consideration, for example. And it was blind chance which decided that over half of our sample should be from the pen of Euripides; one volume of a complete edition of his work somehow survived the sack of Byzantium by the licensed brigands of the Fourth Crusade and their destructive fifty-year occupation of the city. Given this hit-and-miss process of selection, it seems almost miraculous that though three of the Aeschylean plays we still possess are dramatic fragments, torn from the trilogic frame for which they were composed, three others, Agamemnon, Libation-bears, and Eumenides, constitute the trilogy Aeschylus produced in the competition of 458 BC, the Oresteia.
Review, 2645 words
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