Tragic Meaning: Daniel Mendelsohn on Aeschylus

Four one-hour sessions: March 5, 12, 19, and 26. All sessions will start at 7pm EST/EDT. Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.

The plays of Aeschylus, written in verse of astonishing complexity and density, searingly explore role of fate—as expressed in family curses and divine decrees—in human affairs, while investigating the limits and nature of mortal power. Persians, the only surviving tragedy on a historical (as opposed to mythological theme), imagines, with sometimes surprising sympathy, the aftermath in Persian of the arrogant emperor Xerxes’ defeat by the Greeks at Salamis. The Oresteia, the only surviving trilogy from the tragic canon, investigates the nature of vengeance, guilt, and justice as it traces the ramifications of the M**der of Agamemnon, the commander-in-chief of the Greek expedition against Troy, by his wife Clytemnestra—a slaying that is itself revenge for a series of earlier crimes.

Daniel Mendelsohn, the Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books, is an award-winning critic, author, essayist, and translator. His books include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and three collections of essays and reviews, including Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture and Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones, both published by New York Review Books. Mr. Mendelsohn is the Charles Ranlet Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust that supports writers of nonfiction, essay, and criticism.

Tragic consciousness—the awareness that human life is bound by inescapable limits beyond our control, and against which we nonetheless struggle as we seek agency and meaning in our lives—has been central to the Western imagination since Homer’s Iliad. In this series of four weekly seminars, the author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, the New York Review’s Editor-at-Large, will lead participants through an exploration of “the idea of the tragic” as expressed in the foundational works of European civilization. The first seminar, devoted to the Iliad—the first great expression of a hero’s struggle with the meaning of mortality in the Western tradition—will be followed by sessions on selected works by the three great Athenian dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, examining how notions of fate and agency, destiny and history, glory and abjection, evolved along with tragedy during its century-long heyday in Athens.

Event Venue

Online