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While Seneca's plays evoke Aeschylus' Oresteia in narrative and characters, they also serve the important purpose of shedding light on unclear scenes in the original Agamemnon. Additionally, Seneca once again philosophizes the original story further, while adding more violently-detailed recounts of the murders that took place off-stage.
The Oresteia (Ancient Greek: Ὀρέστεια) is a trilogy of Greek tragedies written by Aeschylus in the 5th century BCE, concerning the murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra, the murder of Clytemnestra by Orestes, the trial of Orestes, the end of the curse on the House of Atreus and the pacification of the Furies (also called Erinyes or Eumenides).
Seneca Most surviving ancient Roman tragedies can be categorized as fabula crepidata (tragedy based on Greek subjects). They explored the psychology of the mind through monologues, focusing on one's inner thoughts, the central causes of their emotional conflicts, dramatizing emotion in a way that became central to Roman tragedy.
While Euripides' Medea shares similarities with Seneca’s version, they are also different in significant ways. Seneca's Medea was written after Euripides', and arguably his heroine shows a dramatic awareness of having to grow into her (traditional) role. [7] Seneca opens his play with Medea herself expressing her hatred of Jason and Creon.
Historians do not know who wrote the only extant example of the fabula praetexta (tragedies based on Roman subjects), Octavia, but in former times it was mistakenly attributed to Seneca due to his appearance as a character in the tragedy. [42] Seneca's tragedies rework those of all three of the Athenian tragic playwrights whose work has survived.
Seneca's influence in literature is reflected through other works. In Arnold's Sonnet on Shakespeare, the influence of Seneca is apparent. "The reminiscence of Atreus' speech in the Thyestes of Seneca, which might subtend Cleopatra's own passionate, distended rhetoric about Antony" (Edgecombe, 257).
In Aeschylus's Oresteia, Aegisthus is a minor figure. In the first play, Agamemnon, he appears at the end to claim the throne, after Clytemnestra herself has killed Agamemnon and Cassandra. Clytemnestra wields the axe she has used to quell dissent.
Several composers have written musical treatments of all or part of Aeschylus's trilogy. From the late 19th century comes Sergey Taneyev's full-length opera Oresteia.In the 20th century Soviet composer Yury Alexandrovich Falik composed a one-act ballet Oresteia; Darius Milhaud supplied incidental music for the plays, the Vienese composer Ernst Krenek wrote Leben des Orest (The Life of Orestes ...