Posts Tagged Aristophanes

General Introduction
- What is a triptych, anyway?
- We stand outside of time
- What’s on the blog?

Euripides the Man
- What do we know?
- Making fun of Euripides
- Misogynist
- Troubled loner
- The “happy plays”

Hippolytus
- His unfortunate story
- Other sources for the myth
- Euripides’ first version
- Those amoral gods!
- Who’s really to blame here?

The Deus Ex Machina
- Petty yet ultimately vindictive behavior
- Aphrodite as metaphor
- Being kind to Aphrodite

Hippolytus’ Suffering
- For what does he suffer?
- Plato’s criticism of Euripides
- The realistic turn
- Absence of hamartia
- Hippolytus’ modern heirs
- Immoderate celibacy
- Misogyny

Medea
- Her long, troubled fate
- Never give a witch an inch
- Is she a proto-feminist or a monster?
- Medea’s original reception
- Rapidly changing characters
- Aegeus’s cameo
- How does it compare to Seneca’s version?

Euripides’ Influence
- Medea as godly woman
- Euripides and Paul’s advice
- The dark side of paganism
- Melville’s quarrel
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Aristophanes. The Frogs and Other Plays. Trans. Shomit Dutta. New York: Penguin, 2007.

Aristotle. Trans. Joe Sachs. Newburyport, Mass.: Focus, 2005.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. New York: Norton, 2005.

Euripides. Alcestis and Other Plays. Trans. Philip Vellacott. New York: Penguin, 1974.

—. Medea and Other Plays. Trans. John Davie. New York: Penguin, 2003.

McIntyre, Alasdair. A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century. South Bend, Ind.: U of Notre Dame P, 1998.

Melville, Herman. Pierre; or, the Ambiguities. New York: Penguin, 1996.

Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. New York: Penguin, 1998.

Murray, Gilbert. Euripides and His Age. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011.

Ovid. Heroides. Trans. Harold Isbell. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. New York: Hackett, 1995.

—. Republic. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic, 1991.

Seneca. Six Tragedies. Trans. Emily Wilson. New York: Oxford UP, 2010.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. New York: Arden, 1997.

This week’s music is the 1982 Daniel Amos classic “The Double,” one of the few songs I know about Platonism. It’s crazy out of print (and just crazy), so it plays in its entirety at the end of the episode. Enjoy.

General Introduction
- An apology for blog silence
- An explanation for repetition

Platonic Idealism
- David explains the Theory of Forms
- Where the math comes in
- Plato’s bizarre theory of learning and knowing
- Children remembering heaven

Democracy
- Will Michial rant about populism?
- Plato’s terrifying ideal society
- Four types of lesser societies
- Why American society is an oligarchy
- How literal is The Republic?
- The poet at the gates

Augustine and a New Kind of Platonism
- Thank God for Plato
- Why it’s a waste of time to talk to atomists
- Augustine’s dissatisfaction
- How antimaterialist is Augustine?
- Autobiography and theology
- C.S. Lewis and the sins of ideas

The Search for the Historical Socrates
- The progression from real to original
- Who is The Stranger?
- Aristophanes and The Clouds
- Is Socrates a sophist or just a jerk?

C.S. Lewis as Neo-Platonist
- “It’s all in Plato, it’s all in Plato.”
- The Narnia beyond Narnia
- The blades of diamond grass
- Platonism in the apologetics
- Independent Platonist traditions
- Did Plato read the Pentateuch?: In which we go off-topic

CL Cool P
- Why do conservatives love a radical like Plato so much?
- The shift of ages, the worship of the ancient, the distrust of the masses
- The rebellion against analytic philosophy
- Absolute truth
- How conservative was Allan Bloom, anyway?
- A long digression about what conservative and liberal really mean, anyhow
- Our modern-day Sophists and why David Grubbs is a total fascist

How Christians Should Read Plato
- A stepping stone
- Be careful
- Gilmour tries to find a place in the middle
- The importance of revelation

BIBLIOGRAPHY
I’ll refrain from giving an individual citation for all of the Plato dialogues we talked about today and just include  the edition of the collected works that I use.

Abbott, Edwin A. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2008.

Aristophanes. The Clouds. Lysistrata and Other Plays. Trans. and Ed. Alan H. Sommerstein. New York: Penguin, 2002. 65-130.

Augustine. City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. New York: Penguin, 2003.

—. Confessions. Trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin. New York: Penguin, 1961.

Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper Collins, 1932.

Lewis, C.S. The Great Divorce. New York: Harper One, 2009.

—. The Last Battle. New York: Harper Collins, 2000.

—. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. New York: Harper Collins, 2009.

—. Mere Christianity. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2001.

Lowry, Lois. The Giver. New York: Delacorte, 2006.

Plato. Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson. New York: Hackett, 1997.

General Introduction
- An apology for Nathan Gilmour’s absence
- A plug for our website
- A eulogy for J.D. Salinger

What Is Comedy?
- Comedy in a cosmic sense
- Comedy as humor
- Aristotle on comedy
- What makes us laugh?
- In which we talk about “Weird Al” Yankovic for 45 minutes

Aristophanes
- Does he hold up?
- How do you translate comedy?
- Aristophanes’ “postmodern” technique
- Socrates in The Clouds
- Michial consistently mispronounces Lysistrata
- Hymnody meets deflated content
- From Aristophanes to Vincent Price to Frasier

Shakespeare’s Comedies
- A wedding instead of a funeral
- Battles of wit and malapropisms
- Teaching Shakespearean comedy
- Shakespeare’s godlike cultural status
- Misreading Twelfth Night

Comedy and Christianity
- Are Jesus’ parables jokes?
- Humorous juxtaposition of absurdities
- Did Jesus ever laugh?
- Is all humor mocking humor?

A Christian Theory of Comedy
- What do we even mean?
- We throw Chesterton in Nathan’s face
- Why the postmodern novel is witty, not humorous
- Why humor requires meaning
- Michial recommends a few books
- Where does your plot line end?
- The crucifixion as practical joke

Movies
- We give our picks
- Why we live in a Monty Python movie
- In which we forget we’re doing a podcast
- Mel Brooks
- The repetition principle in comedy
- The Coen Brothers
- Donald Duck as impotent everyman
- Why Family Guy isn’t funny and why King of the Hill is
- Praise for Mystery Science Theater and Bethel University

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristophanes. Lysistrata and Other Plays. Trans. Alan H. Sommerstein. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Buechner, Frederick. Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. New York: HarperOne, 1977.

Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Penguin, 1950. 3 volumes.

Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991.

Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ed. Harold F. Brooks. London: Arden, 1979.

—. Much Ado About Nothing. Ed. Claire MacEachern. London: Arden, 2005.

—. Twelfth Night. Ed. Keir Elam. London: Arden, 2009.

Wood, Ralph C. The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1988.