The Vulgar Eclectic

Tag: classics

  • Mozart and Salieri by Alexander Pushkin

    I also read a short play by Alexander Pushkin called Mozart and Salieri (1832), translated by A. F. B. Clark.  Despite being a very, very short play it has been influential, and was an inspiration for the play Amadeus (by Peter Schaffer), which in turn was adapted for film.  The play has only two speaking…

  • The Trojan Women by Seneca

    I finished reading The Trojan Women by Seneca (translated by E. F. Watling), a tragedy written in the first century AD. This might be my favorite of Seneca’s plays thus far. It tells the fate of Polyxena and Astyanax after the fall of Troy at the hands of the conquering Greeks. This is a familiar…

  • Eugénie Grandet by Balzac

    I just finished reading Eugénie Grandet; by Honoré de Balzac, a short novel published in 1833 and translated by Marion Ayton Crawford. This is only the second novel I’ve read by Balzac, and I wasn’t feeling deeply enmeshed in the story at first. Thankfully, I stuck with it and ended up loving the book. By…

  • Phaedra by Seneca

    I read Thyestes by Seneca a couple weeks ago and then decided to try another of his plays, this time reading Phaedra. I’m very pleased I decided to read another one, as I enjoyed Phaedra a great deal. Here is the little reaction to it I wrote: I finished reading Phaedra, a play written around…

  • Thyestes by Seneca

    I read Thyestes by Seneca (translated by E. F. Watling), a tragedy written in the first century AD. This is the first play by Seneca I’ve read, having only read his letters to Lucilius Junior in the past. Euripides, one of my favorite writers, wrote a play with the same title some 500 years earlier.…

  • Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë

    I finished reading Agnes Grey (1847) by Anne Brontë. This is the first book she published and the only one I have read by her.  The novel carried me away to Agnes’s world and I could often relate to her inner thoughts. The fictive world that Brontë builds is simple and clean, and feels bright…

  • Pharsalia by Lucan, video

    I just posted the first video I’ve made for The Vulgar Eclectic. Here it is:

  • Pharsalia by Lucan

    “No, it will be the match we always have— Liberty pitted against a Caesar“ I recently finished reading Pharsalia (written about 65 AD) by the Roman poet Lucan, translated by Jane Wilson Joyce. This is an epic in ten parts written in verse in the tradition of Homer and Virgil. Unlike those poems, however, Pharsalia…

  • Carmina Achilochi: the Fragments Of Archilochos

    I read this collection of poems by the Greek lyric poet Archilochus back in January of 2021 and wrote a very brief reaction: I just finished reading Carmina Archilochi: the Fragments Of Archilochos, translated by Guy Davenport. Archilochos was a 7th Century Greek poet and soldier. This book was really fun to read and felt…

  • The Queen of the Air

    I finished reading The Queen of the Air (1861) by John Ruskin, an English writer who explored a wide range of topics throughout his life. This book was a collection of four different pieces, all connected in some way to the ideas represented by the Greek goddess Athena. It took me a while to fall…