Ancient Greek Tragedies

From the moderator of The New York Times philosophy blog "The Stone", an audiobook that argues that if we want to understand ourselves, we have to go back to theater, to the stage of our lives.

Blood, gore, thrills, chills, and romance abound in these plays by three of the great Greek authors. Included are "Medea" by Euripides; "Antigone" by Sophocles; and "Agamemnon" by Aeschylus.

Inspired by the mythic house of Thebes, Sophocles’s defining Greek tragedies follow the fates that befall three doomed generations.

This compassionate, personal, and illuminating work of nonfiction draws on the author's celebrated work as a director of socially conscious theater to connect listeners with the power of an ancient artistic tradition. For years Bryan Doerries has been producing ancient tragedies for current and returned servicemen and women, addicts, tornado and hurricane victims, and a wide range of other at-risk people in society.

It's 412 BC, and Athens' invasion of Sicily has failed catastrophically. Thousands of Athenian soldiers are held captive in the quarries of Syracuse, starving, dejected and hanging on by the slimmest of threads. Lampo and Gelon are local potters, men with no work and barely two obols to rub together. With not much to fill their time, they take to visiting the nearby quarry, where they discover prisoners who will, in desperation, recite lines from the plays of Euripides in return for scraps of bread and a scattering of olives. And so an idea is born: the men will put on Medea in the quarry.

Love can be a cruel fate. In the shadow of ancient Greece's grandeur palace, a secret love blossoms between Christos, a chiseled soldier, and the lonely queen. But their passion is doomed from the start. When King Minos discovers their affair, his rage unleashes a terrible fate. Desperate to eliminate the rival for his queen's heart, Minos turns to the dark sorceress Circe, who weaves her malignant magic. Christos is forever changed, trapped in the form of the Minotaur, a monstrous creature bound to the labyrinth. Can their love survive the beast within, or will it succumb to the darkness ...

We might think we are through with the past, but the past isn't through with us. Tragedy permits us to come face to face with the things we don't want to know about ourselves, but which still make us who we are. It articulates the conflicts and contradictions that we need to address in order to better understand the world we live in. A work honed from a decade's teaching at the New School, where Critchley on Tragedy is one of the most popular courses, Tragedy, the Greeks and Us is a compelling examination of the history of tragedy.

A compassionate, personal, and illuminating work of nonfiction that draws on the author's celebrated work as a director of socially conscious theater to connect listeners with the power of an ancient artistic tradition.

"Physiology of the Opera" by John H. Swaby describes the opera and its actors in great detail - on the stage and behind the curtains. Excerpt: As an introduction to the dissertation upon which we are about to enter, such an antiquarian view of the subject might be taken as would tend to establish a parallel between the ancient Greek tragedy and the modern sanguinary Italian opera, the strong resemblance therein being displayed of Signor Salvi trilling on the stage, to the immortal Thespis jargoning from a dung-cart.