Tragedy and Philosophy: Exploring the Depths of Human Existence - Anchor Books Edition | Perfect for Literature Studies, Philosophy Courses & Book Club Discussions

I am a retired professor of Classics. So it is with painful humility that I must acknowledge that this book, written by a philosopher, is the most astute and insightful book I have ever read on ancient Greek tragedy and Aristotle's Poetics. (It also offers perceptive and important observations on Homer and post-Classical drama and criticism.)Kaufmann has read Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides carefully and sensitively in Greek and has approached them with a powerful beacon light and an equally powerful broom. The light illuminates them and enables the reader to see their greatness clearly. The broom sweeps away centuries (in some cases, millennia) of misconceptions, misdirections, and pseudo-problems.For example, on pages 64-68, Kaufmann points out that the Greek word hubris did not mean pride in Greek tragedy; it meant insult, insolence, and/or outrageous conduct. I will add that the same is true in Homer. For instance, in the first book of the Iliad (lines 203 and 214), both Achilles and the goddess Athena describe Agamemnon's seizure of Achilles' woman, Briseis, as hubris. (Douglas Cairns pointed out (Journal of Hellenic Studies 116, 1996, pages 1-32) that hubris sometimes means the state of mind that leads to such actions; and that state of mind can be translated as pride. However, Kaufmann is right: in Greek tragedy, hubris never means simply pride.)I will admit that I zealously searched for any mistakes that I, as a professional Classicist, could pounce on. I found only two. On page 155, footnotes 17 and 18, Kaufmann notes where he has changed Rieu's translation of the passages he quotes from the Iliad in order to bring them closer to the Greek. On the rest of page 155 and on 156, he quotes verbatim Rieu's translation of three other passages of the Iliad. In them are the words "best," "better," and "better." However, when Homer applied the words being translated to a warrior, they always referred to his battle prowess; they meant "stronger-braver." (The same word meant both strong and brave, because in the culture Homer described only results counted. One of Homer's greatnesses was to make the leading Trojan, Hector, the most sympathetic character in the Iliad by portraying the tragic effect that this results-culture had on him and his family.)Kaufmann's second mistake is on page 112. There he cites Bernard Knox for importance of Sophocles' frequent punning on the similarity between Oedipus' name and the ancient Greek word for "know" (oida"); a similarity that highlights the horror of Oedipus' situation: his ignorance of who he is. Kaufmann writes (footnote 20), "but these are hardly, as he [Knox] puts it `puns;' there is nothing funny about them, they are terrifying." However, Knox did not mean for the word pun to indicate a humorous coincidence between the sounds of two words. Classicists know that ancient peoples - Greeks, Romans, and Israelites - thought that language inheres in the nature of objects and activities. So, similarity in sound between two words indicates that they have something important in common. In fact the word "etymology" comes from an ancient Greek word, the components of which are the study (logos) of what is true (etumos). (I refer the reader to pages 116-7 of the second edition (1960) of E. Dodds' commentary on Euripides' Bacchae, a book which Kaufmann cites. For the crucial importance of puns in the Odyssey, see G. Dimock, "The Name of Odysseus," in Hudson Review, 9, 1956, pages 52-70.)