It's like wat nigga I'm high as balls

>>24539795 (OP)
Don't just listen to an audiobook, buy a good translation and read the notes if you don't understand something.

>>24539814
>(((buy)))

>>24539822
I steal from University libraries.

>>24539829
Surely...you do not?!
Such levels of antisemitism have yet to be achieved!?

>>24539829
That's brave and disgusting. I'm a germaphobe so I could never read a copy that over the years, hundreds of university students have had their greasy fingers on and at least one weirdo has rubbed his balls all over.

>>24539840
Honey, you don't steal the textbooks. You steal the canon and all of your subfield.

>>24539795 (OP)
Tragedians assumed you were familiar with the mythological source material. They were writing for their contemporary Athenians, not for baked zoomers. Also the constraints of the dionysiaca (3 actors+chorus, the particulars of how songs were expected to be included, the use of the skene) had a big impact on how the plays were written, in particular the way that only 3 speaking actors can be on stage at once and actors who walk off stage will need time to change and enter as another written in to the script. It might be worth reading some background material before you start if you aren't already well read in Hellenic mythology.

>>24539795 (OP)
Work backwards. Start with Marlowe and Shakespeare and get a broad understanding of Greek mythology. Read The Greek Myths by Robert Graves and use it as a reference text.

>>24539982
No, the playwrights are masters and easy enough to understand on their own. Stop giving garbage advice like this -“read tangentially related thing from millennium later that has nothing at all to do with it to get ready.”

>>24539822
If you blow me I will physically travel to where you are and explain Aeschylus to you in person but the BJ is not negotiable.

>>24539986
You're retarded if you think the average person would be able to truly comprehend The Oresteia without some surface level understanding of Greek mythology.

>>24540054
Yeah but then just get an annotated copy and its not too hard. "Read all of Shakespeare plus this random secondary material" is entirely unnecessary.

>>24540054
You could perfectly understand The Oresteia by having read The Iliad and having a barely annotated version.

>>24540074
No, you see you start with Christopher Marlowe. That helps somehow apparently. You read Christopher Marlowe, four cookbooks, all Nick Land's tweets and the back of a phone book and then you can start Aeschylus.

>>24540059
Didn't say read all of Shakespeare, retard. It's just sensible to read some tradgdies before that are more modern so you understand the literary traditions. I also think Marlowe is good because it will introduce the modern reader to the concept of a Chorus, which Shakespeare lacks. I bet you're one of those retards who thinks someone with no inkling of literature can just start with the Greeks.

>>24540083
You can really open the book and read it. The chorus isn't the difficult part. The literary references are. Some things are taken for granted like in Euripides' Ajax- that you would immediately know why Ajax hates Odyesseus (for winning Achilles' armor) but its not so difficult as to read it with secondary lit.

>>24540083
Not that guy, but Shakespeare in my opinion is way harder to read than Aeschylus' Oresteia. Maybe you just read a bad translation or something, but the Fagles translation I read was super clear and easy to understand because it is translated in modern, normal english, whereis when reading Shakespeare, you constantly need to look at the notes for words and phrases that haven't been used in that context since the middle ages.

>>24540102
Not to mention that Shakespeare's stories are taken from Latin and modern (at the time) sources like the Decameron which intersect little with Aeschylus. Shakespeare is so far removed from Aeschylus that any literary ideas popping up in him are minimal.

>>24540081
Pleb, you start by interpreting neolithic cave paintings, then the Gobleki Tepe carvings, proto-Indo European studies,the ancient Egptian Coffin Texts, the Epic of Gilgamesh, then every Assyrian clay tablet (yes, including all the ones counting sheafs of grain). Now you have the background to understand your preliminary reading: the fragments of Hittite mythology, the Rig Veda (all 10,552 mantras), all the Linear A inscriptions (they're not disciphered but read them anyway), then the Iliad and Odyssey but you need to time-travel to ancient Greece to hear them recited at the Panathenaea or you haven't ACTUALLY read them, then Hamilton's Mythology for some reason, the Peloponessian War, Herodotus' Histories, and the lost Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (you need to find the original yourself, fragments don't count). Then you're ready to start reading all the background scholarship and get a PhD in classics, the whole process should only take around 8 years, so get cracking if you want to read Aeschylus before 2040..

>>24539795 (OP)
because their gods were bipolar emotional fools.
it's why the greeks developed philosophy to rectify their shitty hellenistic theology/mythology.
imagine you're Plato and you see your fellow countryman do the most retarded superstitious stuff because Zeus or Poseidon turned into a duck and raped someone.
If you're gonna have a mythology, it needs a proper teleology; hence why you need better gods and why the greek gods faded off to another dimension.

>>24540183
at least when you get into more developed philosophies, you can see better teleology emerge.
you get to the point to where Marcus Aurelius pushes stoicism because it makes for easier governance; that's has way better purpose/meaning than making sacrifices to Jupiter or Neptune.
If that's the case, then we can find better teleologies than stoicism to serve our purposes/needs such as if people want to transcend their natures.

>>24540183
You can kind of see the path emerge diverging from worship of the Greek pantheon even in Euripides. His gods are cruel and not to be looked up to or respected. They create a fake Helen to plunge the world into war and kill off the surplus population and his Bacchus tricks a man into being murdered by his own mother for the weakest slight. His views on war and polytheistic, anything goes depiction of the Gods are starkly modern in that his nihilistic reading of them starkly criticizes them and parodies them which is a shift away from previous eras.

Maybe you're just retarded and not paying attention.

>>24540202
There's a lot of anti-theistic rebellion themes in Greek Mythology from the Titanomachy to Perseus. It was a war of emancipation between the Greeks & their gods.
It's hard not to side with man after reading the natures of these gods.

>>24540260
Euripides' nihilism sets him apart for me as a favorite. Aeschylus' gods are regal, powerful and important. Sophocles' gods are farsighted and majestic. Euripides' are cunning, malicious and devious. His has the most political and theological commentary in his plays.

>>24540260
The more I think of it you could really qualify Euripides as a parodist or satirist. Not to the extent of someone like Aristophanes who branded himself a jokester with surface level observations masked as comedy but a subtler kind who took down Athenian society, politicians and religion in his works but in a deeper way not immediately apparent at first glance. Criticizing the Athenian foreign policy at Troy in Trojan women and Athenian social class and xenophobia in Medea. He was basically a satirist but an actual one who went deeper than the surface level prattle of Aristophnaes.

>>24540294
>Euripides' nihilism
was it his, or was he revealing that their Emperors & Empresses had no clothes and were sophisticated men & women when naked?
actors.