The little white attic

1/ The Argonautica has a clear structure: the first half (Books 1 and 2) is about Jason and the Argonauts’ voyage to Colchis for the golden...

1/ Ah, the beginning of it all! Menelaus and Agamemnon are on the way to Troy to retrieve Helen and sack Troy, but their ships are stuck, du...

1/ It would have been quite interesting, I suppose, to read Orestes immediately after the Oresteia and the two Electra plays—I just couldn’...

1/ I don’t know if classical literature is more violent—graphic—than modern literature, but Metamorphoses is full of violent images.  “… An...

In an earlier blog post, I wrote “I actually had more trouble trying to understand the characters in The Tale of Genji (about 1,000 years ol...

Seneca (ca 4 BC – AD 65) was influenced by the ancient Greeks, and he himself influenced Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. For someone like ...

There was a time when pretty much all I read was novels and short stories; the plays I knew were those assigned at school or university. The...

1/ Could anyone love ancient Greek drama and not love The Frogs ?  The premise is this: Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles are all dead; th...

All the writings I have so far come across tell me that Shakespeare probably didn’t read ancient Greek plays: there were no English translat...

1/ Another blasphemous play from Euripides.  This is how the play starts: amidst the chaos in Thebes, Lycus attacks the town, kills King Cre...

1/ Written ca 424 BC, it’s set around the same time as The Trojan Women , which was performed in 415 BC. Is it not interesting that Euripide...