Hello, ladies and gentlemen and welcome back to Chronicles. This week we're going to be talking all about Cyclops by Euripides.

I kind of feel like it should be called the Cyclops, but Cyclops it is.

And the reason that I decided to talk about this of all of the plays by Euripides this week

is because it very neatly finishes off the trilogy, sort of, you

know, informal trilogy. We've done these past few weeks looking at an ancient Greek tragedy,

an ancient Greek comedy, and now a satire play. And it's actually the only surviving satire

play that we have. Now, what is a satire play?

Let's just talk about that before we actually begin to discuss the contents of the play itself.

So the satire play, as I briefly mentioned back speaking with Stelios,

was a play that was very much mandatory during the Dionysian Festival in Athens,

when all of the playwrights would come and they'd have a trilogy of tragedies,

and there would be traditionally a satire play performed at the end of it as a fourth play,

kind of as a pall palate cleanser, really.

After some very, very heavy, tragic and dark themes in all three of those tragedies,

the satire play was supposed to be something more comic, more reverent,

and to basically let the audience go home with a good feeling.

No different really to how, you know, when we're on the podcast, we just tend to put the

funnier, light-hearted segment at the end for you all.

However, one of the things that is also probably important to mention as well, is that even though it is a lighter

sort of play, it actually draws upon a lot of elements of ancient Greek tragedy as well.

For example, in the Cyclops that we're going to be talking about today. Of course the cyclops is polythymus.

The cyclops at Odysseus has to outwit during the events of the Odyssey.

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