Yaays!

My 10 credits for Doctor Who letter arrived :-D

... now I get to have fun finding out if this letter is all they want or if there's some more complicated bit of paperwork that needs waiting for.

Inheritance and law and tragedy

I've been reading ... er, I just put it back in the bag. I'd have to move. Something about Euripedes, women, and sexuality. A bunch of essays on those themes. I got it mostly because it's the least falling apart looking book in the Euripedes section.
( Read more... )

What the plays look like from here, what they'd have looked like at the time, and what they'd look like all the other times, very much shaped by law and custom, which is really historically specific.

I can't actually think of any that would agree with what Medea did though.
Generally laws are clear on the idea that killing children is wrong.

I hope.

Been reading more

Having a bag full of books I been checking index and contents and reading the bits that mention Medea. There's waaaaaay too many books on the list to read from cover to cover, even if it is all interesting. I think I've read enough that I've started finding repeats and patterns and places where people are deliberately picking an argument with something someone else has written.

There's a lot of argument.
Quite a lot of it about women. There's arguing about if they were allowed to watch. Mostly people say no, but the maybes are interesting.

Translations are... varied and complicated. Which is fun. As long as someone gives a translation.
I can understand using greek terms when they're more precise than English ones. I think it's polite to give a quick translation once the first time you use it, but I'm sure everyone involved thinks they're perfectly ordinary words and doesn't see why they should. I don't know where 'greek tragedy for dummies' or 'introduction to greek tragedy' would be, but they aren't the things I been reading. I shall have to poke around. Somewhere there's notes.

Bernard Knox excels himself in this area by providing untranslated not only greek but french and german and I think some other languages too. And not just in the notes, which would be fair enough. Not even in the main body of the text with some rephrasing around it. Oh no. He goes and makes the point of the sentence in sodding greek. Yes, thanks, we know you're very clever, but for the benefit of those of us who *aren't*... *sigh*

Still, am getting bits and pieces of interesting about Medea. Is good.

Now I have to go to sleep cause I get up at 0630 on Thursdays.
Have I mentioned that?
That's not my favourite fact ever.

I realise quite a lot of people have to be somewhere at 0900 every single day, but presumably their sleep/wake cycle hasn't happily settled on an 0400-1200 sleep. *sigh*