I'm reading and talking about Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics.

Ted listed SIX Greek dramas for this week: Bacchae (Euripides), Lysistrata (Aristophanes), Agamemnon (Aeschylus), and the three Theban plays from Sophocles, Oedipus the King, Oedipus in Colonus and Antigone.

We discuss how to read drama in general. I tried to read a little bit of background on each play before I dove in. One thing that’s easy to forget with Greek drama is that the audience didn’t have any spoilers; they knew all of these stories really well. They were there to see HOW it came together. That meant that some of the plot gets treated with shorthand in some ways.

I tried to figure out the major players, and how they might have interacted with characters I had met elsewhere. It’s astonishing how all of these characters are connected by one or two degrees of separation. Bill and I joke that it feels exactly like when we moved to Charleston a couple of years ago. I swear that every person we meet knows someone else we know through one or two people. It’s the strangest thing, and Greek drama is exactly like that.

I also flag my books like crazy: one flag for the cast of characters; one for the endnotes; one for a map, even if it’s in a different book. As a matter of fact, my Fagles translation of the Odyssey came in handy this week. Not only are there some great maps, there is also a glossary of all the proper names in the Odyssey. Many, many of the characters I came across this week also put in an appearance in the Odyssey.

Finally, I kept a brief “plot summary” of each play as I read. Only Bacchae was divided into scenes, but for each play I tried to keep a brief synopsis of the action as I read. This kept me from mixing up characters too much, and also it helped me to get an idea of how the various stories fit together.

In addition, I read out loud occasionally, especially if I found myself alone in the house. It’s easy to lose the thread of some of these long passages, especially where the chorus has an extended explication of action taking place off stage. Reading out loud helped me capture the rhythm of the language and also the drama of it in a way that reading silently could never do.

I started with Euripedes’ Bacchae, translated by Paul Woodruff. To be honest, half the reason I bought this edition was that it had Elvis on the cover as Dionysus! Not long after the founding of Thebes, Dionysus appears to bring his cult to the city. Dionysus is a son of Zeus but also the grandson of the founder of Thebes, Cadmus. Dionysus’ cousin Pentheus is now king, and he refuses to acknowledge the god-status of Dionysus. Let’s just say Pentheus regretted that decision. This play was shockingly brutal to me, even though all the violence always takes place off-stage in a Greek drama. There are ideas of redemption, and lack of it, woven throughout the play. Bacchae left me curious about anything related to the practice of the cult of Dionysus. Apparently the rites were so secret that nothing, not one thing, survives to help us understand what they did.

Next I read Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. This is a comedy, truly a farce, whose entire plot revolves around the women of Greece coming together to deny all their men sex so they will quit fighting with each other. It is hilarious, and I’d love to see this one performed live. I love a good marriage quote:

Happily, I bought an edition of Lysistrata that also had three other plays translated by Aaron Poochigian. Clouds, in particular, is a send-up of Socrates and that one is...