Interesting facts about a classical playwright ‘Have all the nations of the world since his time created a dramatist worthy to hand him his slippers?’ Such was Goethe’s assessment of Euripides. Even Shakespeare, it would seem, wasn’t worthy of such a slipper-carrying honour where Euripides was concerned. Here are five […]
Tag: Classical Literature
Five Fascinating Facts about Ovid
Interesting facts about a classic Roman poet 1. Ovid wrote a tragedy about Medea, but it has not survived. This is particularly galling since the Roman rhetorician Quintilian thought this among Ovid’s finest work – and this is a poet who also gave us the fantastic (in more ways than […]
Five Fascinating Facts about Aristophanes
Facts about classical literature’s greatest comic writer 1. We have eleven of Aristophanes’ plays, but he is thought to have written more than forty. Aristophanes is the earliest comic playwright, or at least the earliest whose work has survived so that we can read it. We are lucky to have […]