Reviews for Characters. Herodas: Mimes. Sophron and Other Mime Fragments (Loeb Classical Library)

The average rating for Characters. Herodas: Mimes. Sophron and Other Mime Fragments (Loeb Classical Library) based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-10-09 00:00:00 Rmi Lauzon The Viking Portable Library collection is a gem. The worst of the volumes are merely uninspired. The Portable Hawthorne , for example, contains The Scarlet Letter (which is often included in collections of Hawthorne's "short" fiction regardless of the fact that Hawthorne wrote only two or three longer works!) and the regular short stories. The only inspired addition to Hawthorne's collection are the letters. But why not The Blithedale Romance or House of Seven Gables? A casual Hawthorne reader could get the same material in any other collection, and the Hawthorne aficionado learns nothing new. Compare this with an inspired volume like Malcolm Cowley's The Portable Faulkner, which creates a new synthesis of Faulkner's universe. Or the utilitarian volumes: The Portable James Joyce includes Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist, along with Joyce's play and his poems; the most avid Joycean needs only the two other novels to have a complete collection of Joyce's completed work. A true Joyce nut may want excerpts from Stephen Hero, but at that point you are a scholar, and not a reader. The Portable Dante is perfect. Gibbon and Cervantes are nearly synonymous with these author's greatest works, though truncated. Auden's Greek Reader is one of the worst volumes of the Portable Library. Auden's perspective, laid out in his introduction, is that we cannot know the true feelings of the ancient Greeks. Well! This is maybe the definition of a sad modernist--he has destroyed his ability to understand before he even gets started. This is the literary equivalent of the guy who goes on a date and spends the first fifteen minutes telling the woman why she's too good for him. If he weren't good enough to be with her, they wouldn't be on the date. And if the Greeks were uninterpretable to us, we wouldn't be reading this book. The selections: How can one deride The Oresteia, Plato, Aristotle? Yet Auden's selections are strange. Why choose "Timeaus" as the one complete dialogue to include? Plato has a rightful claim to being the most influential thinker in human history. Yet the cosmology he describes in "Timeaus" has not held great sway since the Emperor Constantine at least. Why include a dialogue which no longer resonates, when so many of Plato's dialogues are as fresh and liberating as when they were written. To go back to the claim that we cannot know the Greeks--before understanding them, first we must make an effort to meet them at some common ground. Plato is as good of a bridge as anyone. Yet Auden chooses one of the very few of the dialogues which can be appreciated only from a historical perspective. Again, our tour guide through ancient Greece simply does not want to allow us to leave the station. Like The Divine Comedy, the latter two parts of The Oresteia are often ignored in favor of its violent first part. But like The Comedy, The Oresteia is a tale of hope and redemption, not the tale of misery and woe which one might presume after reading only the first book. It is appreciated that Auden includes the entirety of Aeschylus' work. Because there is no translator listed next to the translation of "The Birds" included in this volume, I assume it is Auden's. It is quite poor. Too gross to be funny. The many excerpts from great works are lacking. Again, if Auden really thought it was possible for the modern reader to understand the workings of the ancient Greek mind, it would have been more likely he included one of the more philosophical tracts from Thucydides, which still have much to teach us about the nature of foreign relations and war. But Auden's selection, which describes the Syracuse fiasco, only describes a historical event. Its location at the end of the volume seems to be Auden's attempt to make a statement about the end of the greatness of Greece. But this defeat came before Plato, Aristotle, Alexander... Anyway, Auden's volume is probably the worst of the all the Reader volumes of the Portable Library. One assumes this is the result of Auden's name. An anonymous professor at a small liberal arts school would have less of a vision in putting together the volume, and therefore more respect for the material. A more haphazardly collected volume would be more enlightening--for the greatest works of the Greeks need no accompaniment--but also a lot more fun. Our tour guide Auden is more interested in navel-gazing than exploring the Greek isles.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-08-17 00:00:00 Peter Almes There were a few interesting selections and some obvious ones. Nothing really blew me away, especially with some of the dated translations. Sadly, the introduction really soured me on the volume. Auden's arrogance and privilege put me off from the very beginning.