I Used to Know That_ Stuff You Forgot From School - Caroline Taggart [16]
☞ JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
(1749-1832, German)
Once called “Germany’s greatest man of letters,” Goethe is best known for his two-part drama Faust, the tragic play about a man who sells his soul to the devil—here called Mephistopheles—in return for worldly success. Surprisingly, he is saved by angels. Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus was the inspiration for Goethe’s work. Goethe’s influence spread, extending across Europe, becoming a major source of inspiration in music, drama, poetry, and philosophy.
☞ HOMER (c. 9th century B.C., Greek)
The great epics the Iliad and the Odyssey are the basis of pretty much everything we know about the Trojan War and about Odysseus (Ulysses)’s 10-year journey to get home to Ithaca. A quick rundown on the Trojan War: Paris, prince of Troy, abducted Helen, the beautiful wife of Menelaus, who was the King of Sparta (in Greece). Various Greek heroes—Odysseus, Achilles, Agamemnon—were pledged to fight to bring her back. They laid siege to Troy for 10 years before finally hitting on the idea of a wooden horse: Soldiers hid inside it, the Trojans were fooled into taking it within the city walls, the soldiers leaped out, and the Trojans were defeated. The Trojan hero was Paris’s older brother, Hector. Their parents were Priam and Hecuba, and their sister Cassandra was the one who made prophecies that no one believed. Then Odysseus set off for home, encountering Circe, Calypso, and the Cyclops Polyphemus on the way. Back home his wife, Penelope, had promised her suitors that she would marry one of them when she had finished the piece of weaving she was doing, but she secretly unraveled the day’s work every night.
☞ VICTOR HUGO (1802-85, French)
One of the most notable French Romantic writers, Hugo created his own version of the historical novel by combining historical fact with vivid, imaginative details. His great achievements were Notre-Dame de Paris, known to us as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, and Les Miserables. The hunchback Quasimodo is the bell ringer at Notre-Dame, and the plot concerns his love for the Gypsy girl Esmeralda. Les Miserables, known to many because of its successful stage adaptations, is set in Paris in 1815, at the time of the Battle of Waterloo. The central character, Jean Valjean, is a reformed thief who is persecuted by the police agent Javert.
☞ SOPHOCLES (c. 496-406 B.C., Greek); EURIPIDES
(c. 480-406 B.C.); ARISTOPHANES (c. 448-380 B.C.) Oedipus Rex, also known as Oedipus the King, is the play about the man who accidentally married his mother. It is the first in Sophicles’s Oedipus Trilogy, followed by Oedipus at Colonus and then Antigone. Medea, the play about the woman who murdered her children to avenge herself on their father is by Euripides, who lived around the same time. And while we’re at it, there was the comic playwright Aristophanes, who wrote Lysistrata, about the women who put a stop to the Peloponnesian War by refusing to have sex with their husbands.
☞ LEO TOLSTOY (1828-1910, Russian)
Born into Russian nobility and widely regarded by fellow writers as one of the world’s greatest novelists, Tolstoy is best known for his epic, War and Peace. A rich tale of early 19th century czarist Russia under Alexander I, it discusses the absurdity and shallowness of war and aristocratic society. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is the book he considered to be his first novel. Considered a true example of realist fiction, it centers on adultery and self-discovery while social changes storm through Russia.
☞ VIRGIL (70-19 B.C., Roman)
His most famous work is The Aeneid, the story of the Trojan prince Aeneas, the ancestor of the Roman people (also an ancestor of Romulus and Remus, who actually founded the city). Some of The Aeneid was inspired by Homer and relates to the story of the fall of Troy. Escaping from Troy, Aeneas eventually reached Italy but stopped off en route in Carthage, where he had an affair with the queen, Dido, who burned