Edith Hall - Ancient Greece in Film, Opera and the Arts

# playlist (click the video's upper-left icon)

source: GreshamCollege 2017年11月27日
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The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-an...

1 [private video]
2 50:03 Homer's Iliad via the Movie Troy (2004)
Homers Iliad, the earliest Greek poem, narrates the archetypal war between Europeans and Asiatics divided by the Hellespont. Looking at Wolfgang Petersons blockbuster Troy (2004), the lecture describes the genesis of the Iliad between the Mycenaean Late Bronze Age and the 8th century, when it was first written down with the aid of the new, phonetic script adapted from the Phoenician civilisation of the Levant. It explores the poems plot, tragic perspective on the human condition, and the despair caused by untimely death on an immense scale.
3 54:01 The Age of Tyrants: Sappho via Gounod's Opera
The heroine of Charles Gounods French opera Sapho (1851) sings her last aria O My Immortal Lyre on a Greek cliff before plunging to her death. Sappho, the most famous poet of the Lyric Age of Greece, in the 7th to 6th centuries BC, addressed passionate love poems to women.
This lecture uncovers what we know about the real Sappho, an aristocrat who lived between 630 and 570 BCE on the island of Lesbos and socialised in the lavish courts of upstart tyrants. This historical context in no way diminishes her songs astonishing immediacy and erotic power.
4 51:44 Slave Stories: Aesop and Walter Crane
In 1887 the influential arts-and-crafts book illustrator Walter Crane published The Babys Own Aesop, bringing the homespun wisdom of ancient Greek peasants to a new generation of children. This lecture uses these fables to tackle the least attractive feature of ancient Greece - institutionalised slavery. Beneath the semi-legendary figure of Aesop himself, a barbarian sold to a Greek slave-owner in the 6th century BCE, lie tens of thousands of his real-life equivalents.
The lecture asks how the ancient fables address power relations in a slave society. Were they primarily stories for and by slaves, or did they serve ruling-class interests?