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1、2.4 Athenian Drama1.Drama is one of the great cultural achievements of the ancient Greek culture.The center of this art was Athens.This is the theatre of Dionysusin AthensOrigin of drama.In chapter one,we mentioned in Archaic Greece there were two tyrants ruled Athens for 35 years,Peisistratus and h
2、is sonHippias promoted festivals.At the festival of Athena large parts of Homers the Iliad and the Odyssey were recited.At the Dionysia,the festivalof Dionysus,God of wine,tragedies and comedies were performed.Since then drama had become popular,not only in Athens but throughout theGreek world.2.The
3、re were three dramatic genres;genre is a kind of artistic workTragedy is extremely sad,and often ends with the death or failure of the great man.Greek tragedy is an extension of the ancient rites carried out inhonor of Dionysus;tragic plots were often based on myths from the archaic epics,the Iliad
4、and the Odyssey.Plot is the series of events whichmake up the story.German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche believed Dionysus represented what was unrestrained chaotic and irrational,whileApollo represented the rational and ordered.Nietzsche also believed Greek Tragedy was entirely based on suffering
5、 of Dionysus.Comedy is intended to make people laugh.Many Greek comedies are political satires.Satire is the use of humor or exaggeration in order to showhow foolish or wicked some peoples behavior or ideas are.And Greek comedies were full of sexual innuendos.Innuendo is indirect reference tosomethi
6、ng rude or unpleasant.3.Satyr play is short,played after tragedy.It could make audiences laugh and give them some relief to the sadness atmosphere of the hours longtragedy.It was a kind of tragicomedy,between tragedy and comedy but more close to comedy.The stories were based on Greek mythology andep
7、ics.In Satyr plays drunken satyrs interact with gods and human,full of pranks and sexual jokes.In Greek mythology,satyrs were companions ofDionysus;usually have horse-like ears and tails,and a permanent,exaggerated erected penis.In the play actors use a prop,an object to representa penis.In Roman my
8、thology satyr was a goat man,Roman name faun.Have you seen the movie the Chronicles of Narnia,this goat man is a faun,named Mr.Tumnus.The only satyr play survived is Euripides Cyclops based on Odysseus adventure.Cyclops are giants having a single eye.4.Aeschylus c.525/524 c.456/455 BC is often descr
9、ibed as the father of tragedy.He wrote maybe ninety plays but only seven survived,remember the picture of the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens;many of Aeschyluss plays were performed there at the Dionysia,the festival ofDionysus.He had won the first prize in nearly every years competition.Aeschylus was
10、 a war hero;he fought Persians at the Battle of Marathonand Salamis.His paly the Persians,was the only surviving classical Greek tragedy concerned with contemporary events.5.Oresteia is the only survived trilogy of Greek plays.It has three parts;tells a bloody story of murder and revenge.After the T
11、rojan WarAgamemnon,King of Argos returned but soon murdered by his wife and her lover.What was the reason?Before the war,Agamemnon killed andsacrificed their daughter to the gods so that the gods would blow the winds and allow the Greek fleet to sail to Troy.Another reason wasAgamemnon brought back
12、a Trojan woman.Finally Agamemnon son Orestes killed his mother and her lover.6.Sophocles c.497/6 406/5 BC wrote over 120 plays but only seven survived.Oedipus the King is the most famous one.The city stateThebes was suffering from a plague.The oracle from Delphi told King Oedipus the reason of the p
13、lague was that the murderer of their former kinghas never been caught.Oedipus asked a blind prophet for help.A prophet is a person who is believed to be chosen by God to say the things thatGod wants to tell people.The prophet told the king:you are the murder,you killed the former king your father,an
14、d you married to your ownmother.This was so horrible.Many years ago,the former king and queen had a boy.A prophet told them:the child would kill his father and marry his mother.They gave thebaby to a shepherd and asked him to abandon the boy on the mountainside.But the shepherd gave the boy to anoth
15、er shepherd and finally the boywas brought to Corinth and adopted by a couple.When the boy grew up,someone told him he didnt know his true father.He went to Delphi forthe oracle,the oracle said:you will kill your father and marry your mother.He didnt know he was adopted.To avoid this he left Corinth
16、,on theway he argued with a man and killed him,the man actually his father.He arrived Thebes and married the beautiful queen,his mother.Wheneverything was clear,the queen hung herself.Oedipus took the long gold pins of the queen,stabbed into his own eyes in despair.7.He was a blind man now and begge
17、d to be exiled as soon as possible.8.The Riddle of the SphinxOn the way to Thebes,Oedipus was asked a riddle by a Sphinx;a sphinx is a mythical creature with the head of a human and the body of a lion.Which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?she would
18、kill and eat anyone who could notanswer.Oedipus solved the riddle:Manwho crawls on all fours as a baby,then walks on two feet as an adult,and then uses a walking stick inold age.9.The Oedipus complex is a concept created by Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.It refers to a young boys unconscious s
19、exual desirefor his mother and hatred for his father or a young girls sexual desire for her father and hatred for her mother.Freud used this concept to analyzethe Hamlets delay.We know Hamlet was suffered by the“to be or not to be,it is a question”.Why Hamlet delayed?Freud believed Hamletwas pressur
20、ed by the thought:his uncle killed his father and married his mother,and that was what Hamlet himself wished to do.Freuds theorysounds horrible,right?10.Euripides c.480 c.406 BC was the youngest of the three great tragedians.He wrote 95 plays but only 19 survived.Euripides charactersresembled contem
21、porary Athenians rather than heroic figures of myth.He demonstrated sympathy towards all victims of society including women.1Passion ruled his plays.His characters even doubted the gods:“Does someone say that there are gods in heaven?There are not,unless onechooses to follow old tradition like a foo
22、l”Aristophanes c.446 c.386 BC is the Father of Comedy.He wrote 40 plays and 11survived.In his work Aristophanes used wit,imaginationand dirty jokes to poke fun at prominent people like statesmen,philosophers,and artists even gods.In his famous comedy Lysistrata,a Greekwoman called a meeting of women from all city states across Greece and persuaded them to refuse to have sex with their husbands and lovers,why?They wanted to force the men to end the Peloponnesian War and to negotiate peace.11.Key words:Dionysia Three,Tragedians,Satyr,Oedipus the King,the Oedipus complex2
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