This dissertation explores Aischylos' telling of myths from the Trojan cycle. Aischylos worked extensively on the story of the Trojan War in his lost corpus. He came across the stories in epic songs and brought them from epos to theatre, some of them for the first time. However, although his material came primarily from the Epic Cycle, he also drew on other sources such as Hesiod, lyric poetry and early tragedy. His reception of the stories was not passive. Aischylos endorsed but also adapted and sometimes rejected elements that he found in the earlier tradition and by doing so he reshaped many of the stories. Though the texts are long since lost, we can still detect many innovations in Aischylos' treatment of the Trojan war. The new elements that he inserted have various functions and objectives. Some may have served to minimise the distance between the mythical world of epos and that of his contemporary audience, with adjustments to the myth to make it conform to the value system of his own era and reflect ideas, social structures and politics of fifth century Athens. Some changes are meant to increase the tension in the stories and make them more shocking in order to generate stronger feelings among the audience. Passion, pain and loss were magnified to serve the purposes of the poet where needed. Aischylos' creative re-writing of one of the greatest and most famous stories in antiquity made an impression on fifth century Athens, as its reception in literature and art in general suggests. His impact on subsequent tragedy in particular, both Greek and Latin, is evident though individual poets reacted in different ways to his work, his influence could not be ignored.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:498258 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Hadjicosti, Ioanna |
| Publisher | University College London (University of London) |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1443963/ |
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