About Homer:
Quote: the hearts of the great can be changed
An ancient Greek blind poet, is traditionally accredited with composing two sagas, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Scholars know almost nothing about him. Some say he lived in a Greek speaking city on the eastern shore of the Aegean Sea or on the island of Smyrna. Others simply say he never lived at all and is merely a legend.
After Homer's time, the two poems were recited during great religious festivals in Greece. Copies of the poems became basic textbooks that Greek children used to learn how to read and study the legends and myths of ancient Greece. As a result the Greeks formed their religious views from Homer's portrayals of the gods and goddesses.
Homer's greatest contribution to the Greeks was his philosophy of holism, meaning to develop your full self. He used the example of soldier scholar, meaning be smart and scholarly, but also to be brave, strong, and powerful.
About Sophocles:
He was born 495 B.C. about a mile northwest of Athens. He was to become one of the great playwrights. He was the son of a wealthy merchant he would enjoy all the comforts of a thriving Greek Empire. He studied all of the arts. By the age of 16 he was known for his beauty and grace and was chosen to lead a choir of boys at a celebration of the victory of Salamis. By the age 28 all of his studies were complete and he was ready to compete in a festival that is held every year at the theatre in Dionysus in which new plays are presented.
He took first prize by defeating Aeschylus (Alfred Jerry writer of Ubu Rex). He went on and won 18 first prizes, and never failed to make at least second.
He was an accomplished actor and performed in many of his own plays. In his plays Nausicaa and The Women Washing Clothes he had acts of a juggler and fascinated his audience so much that it was the talk of Athens for many years. His voice was beginning to weaken so eventually he had to pursue other ventures.
Shortly after the production of Oedipus at Colonus in 405, Sophocles passed away. He joined Aeschylus who had long since gone to his grave and Euripides who had passed on a few months earlier. Thus the first great age of tragedy came to an end.
About Euripides:
He was born in 480 B.C. in Vicinity of Athens. He was son of Mnesarchides. He hasn't won his first victory until about 441 B.C. Actually he has only won about five awards and the fifth one wasn't awarded until after his death. He wrote about 92 plays. He was ignored by the judges of the Greek Festival because he didn't cater to the fancies of the Athenian crowed. He didn't approve of their superstitions and refused to condone their moral hypocrisy. He did not approve of their superstitions and refused to condone their moral hypocrisy. He was a pacifist, a free thinker, and a humanitarian in an age when such qualities were increasingly overshadowed by intolerance and violence.
Many of his plays dealt with personal issues, he did not shy away from the social issues of the time. His Trojan Women was written in response to an Athenian expedition in 416 B.C. which destroyed the city of Melos and slaughtered its men. As the play begins, Troy has fallen, its men have been murdered, its shrines desecrated, and its women bound and enslaved. Ten years earlier, he had written another stinging indictment of war in Hecuba which documents the cruelty of Greek warriors who enslave the Trojan queen and sacrifice her daughter at the tomb of Achilles.
About
Aeschylus:
The "father of tragedy". He was born in 525 B.C. in the city of Eleusis. Immersed early in the mystic rites of the city and in the worship of the Mother and Earth goddess Demeter, he was once sent as a child to watch grapes ripening in the countryside. According to Aeschylus, when he dozed off, Dionysus appeared to him in a dream and ordered him to write tragedies. The obedient young Aeschylus began a tragedy the next morning and "succeeded very easily."
Although Aeschylus is said to have written over ninety plays, only seven have survived. His first extant work, The Suppliants, reveals a young Aeschylus still struggling with the problems of choral drama. The tale revolves around the fifty daughters of Danaus who seek refuge in Argos from the attentions of the fifty sons of Aegyptus. His second extant drama, The Persians, recounts the battle of Salamis--in which Aeschylus and his brother actually fought--and deals primarily with the reception of the news at the imperial court. This play contains the first "ghost scene" of extant drama.