AESCHYLUS, ORESTEIA

by Richmond Lattimore '26. University of Chicago Press.1953. 171 pp. $2.50.

The organic nature of language, with the resulting Changes in semantic values and aesthetic overtones of words, makes necessary the periodic creation of new translations of ancient Greek and Latin authors. Our own century, distinguished academically by the almost'complete disappearance from American higher education of a knowledge of Greek and Latin literature in the original languages, has seen a flowering of admirable translations, especially of Greek poets. Perhaps the very ignorance about these poets in the original has created an increased curiosity in the role they have played in European civilization and, indeed, in American civilization as well.

Professor Lattimore is well known to the world of letters as a poet in his own right and as a distinguished translator of Homer, Pindar, and Greek tragedy. This combination of poet and scholar is a singularly fortunate event in affording a comprehension of the continuity and dissemination of Greek ideas in an increasingly Greekless age.

An informative and critically illuminating Introduction precedes the translation It treats of the following subjects: The Life of Aeschylus, Early Tragedy, The Story of the House of Atreus, Variations of the Legend, "Agamemnon." I dea and Symbol, Dramatic Structure and Lyric Dimension, Lyric Tragedy, The Libation Bearers," and "The Eumenides" (The Furies). It is a model of what an introduction should be, never otiose, never prolix, confining itself to matters that make possible a deeper and fuller understanding of the plays. It is also enlivened and made more suggestive by pertinent and arresting parallels from English literature, in which the author is so widely read.

In this volume the Libation Bearers and the Eumenides, the second and third plays of the Oresteia trilogy, appear for the first time in Professor Lattimore's translations. The Agamemnon has already appeared in print. These last two plays of the trilogy present enormous difficulties to the scholar and to the translator, both because of the uncertainties of the textual tradition and because of the obscurity of the religious and anthropological problems which they present. Professor Lattimore has brought to his task sound scholarship, poetic insight, and a literary style having the requisite Greek "clarity and propriety."