Sophocles - Blog Posts

that feeling when you bring eight tragedies along to a family friend's destination wedding trip.

i got my girlypop greatest tragedies o shakespeare and my theban plays

i regret nothing.

Think about the difference between a classical Greco-Roman statue and a roughly carved wooden mask. The Greco-Roman statue is both realistic and idealizing, rational, and dreamlike. Apollonian. The mask is rough and emotive, messy, affecting us on some level other than our rational mind... Dionysian. Statue = Euripides, Mask = Sophocles

listened to medea today and i gotta say. nietzsche's beef with euripides is truly crazy. like. i mean antigone was a good play but medea was a really good play. seems unambiguously to be an advancement of the art form. also idk, is it really meaningfully more apollonian and less dionysian than previous works. like. i means it not clear what he means by those words basically at all (i see this everywhere glossed as like "order" vs "chaos" and.... maybe that's part of what he means? it's clearly not all of what he means. well actually what he means is "of the nature of the narrative section of the play" and "of the nature of the chorus section of the play" but what that nature is...). medea is calculating but she's clearly passionate, and i feel like the way she takes everything from everyone has a very dionysian feel, the...abandonment of care, the willfullness. idk if this is anything. the chorus IS much more pedestrian and less spooky. so. he's right there

ANYWAY i think the most parsimonious explanation is "nietzsche hates slaves, and doesnt like that theyre portrated as people in this play" (he specifically mentions the centering of slaves as a bad thing! because he thinks it makes the play more pedestrian, i guess? but idk, it throw medea's otherworldliness into sharp relief! if the volume of eveyry character is turned up, you cant hear them in the din)