Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 12 minutes is free, concerns Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata and Euripides’s tragedies Medea and Bacchae. We consider the Old Comedy and the New and their divergent legacies, as well as the conservative subversions of Aristophanic satire. Then we turn to Euripides’s controversial innovations in the art of tragedy (deprecated by Aristophanes, among others) and his association with radical currents in Athenian life. Added commentary by Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Nietzsche, Anne Carson, and Camille Paglia. Please like, share, and comment! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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