Hey everyone, As some may know, I'm quite into my literature, I read a lot of books, I learn languages etc., and now I want to get into the Classics. Euripides, Virgil, Homer, and the like. Not Dickens, Conrad, etc. I'm extremely well acquainted with them. My English Lit teacher lent me her copy of The Odyssey by Homer a year ago and I had to give it her back after a few days as it was too hard for me to read. That was back when I hated Shakespeare and anything even similar looking to Shakespearean language. I've just read The Tempest and I'm halfway through Macbeth now so I think it's safe to say I don't hate him anymore. According to Shmoop's 'Tough-o-meter', Macbeth is rated as an 8/10 difficulty, whereas The Odyssey is rated a 3/10 difficulty, so now that seems quite easy and I'm having no trouble whatsoever with Macbeth, just the odd word here and there which I have to look up. No footnotes/commentary either. Can anyone recommend any texts to start off with?
Beowulf, Chaucer's A Parliment of Owls and The Canterbury Tales, Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Found, any of the Arthurian Tales. And absolutely, The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish (Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne aka Mad Madge). I believe you can get the 'untouched' version, but I actually don't recommend that because the Duchess was illiterate and wrote phonetically.
If you're defining 'the classics' as classical mythology, Homer's definitely a great place to start. I'm more of a fan of epic poetry, so I wince whenever I see a prose edition of the Illiad or the Odyssey, but those work great as introductory texts. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (neither written by Homer ) are good looks at more (typical?) examples of that sort of writing. Plays to look for would be Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Thebes (I think?) and Antigone. For something a bit drier, try Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound (if you like Macbeth, you shouldn't mind). The Oresteia is a standard, or at least Agamemnon. Lysistrata is a hilariously dirty play. Hesiod's Theogony is also a standard text, but it is mostly geneology in places (think of it as a reference book). Afraid I can't speak for the Roman stuff. I vaguely remember reading The Metamorphoses a while back, but that's about all I remember of it.
I've heard lots about Paradise Lost. I might give that a go. Thanks for the suggestions, they're on my list. Thanks for these. I'll be sure to pick up the Sophocles plays. There was a collection of the three in Waterstones today and I was torn between those and The Aeneid by Virgil. I ended up buying The Aeneid. I'm going to finish off Macbeth, read Hamlet, then The Aeneid. I'm going to read some Homer eventually, but I don't know which to start with. The Iliad or The Odyssey?
The Illiad comes first chronologically. Independent of that, I prefer the Odyssey over it. It depends on the sort of story you like. I'd say the Odyssey has a more whimsical feel, of the sort that you'd expect from Greek mythology, but the Illiad reads as grander in scope and more dramatic. Eh.
Translations probably do make a huge difference. I recall in one class, we had to read excerpts from Homer, but they came from two different translations. One was a lot easier to read than the other.
The copy of The Aeneid I have is Michael J. Oakley's translation, and when I get a copy of The Odyssey, it will be Robert Fagles' translation. Fagles is purely because Ian McKellen has read an audiobook of that version.
As has been stated previously, you should definitely read some of Sophocles' works. Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus are pretty essential and the most widely known, I think, though he wrote several other plays. All are fairly quick and easy reads.
