Trivium Home School · Language Games
Masks, choruses and the Theatre of Dionysus: the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the comedies of Aristophanes and Menander, and the plays still performed in Philo’s Alexandria, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria, grammar at every level and a gamebook for each play.
Sophocles’ Theban plays have a series of their own: Oedipus. All language games
Where and how the plays were performed.
The Theatre of Dionysus: the City Dionysia, Thespis, masks, the chorus and the competition, with the present simple and the passive for how things work and theatre vocabulary.
The first great tragedian, and the only trilogy that survives.
Aeschylus’ The Persians, the oldest surviving play, which shows the Persian defeat at Salamis through the enemy’s eyes, with reported speech, reporting verbs and the language of sympathy.
Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the king’s return, Clytemnestra’s revenge and Cassandra’s unheeded prophecy, with the future in the past, dramatic irony and the language of fate.
Aeschylus’ Eumenides, the trial of Orestes and the founding of the first jury court, with courtroom language, balanced argument and formal obligation.
Prometheus Bound: the god who gave humans fire and every art, chained for defying Zeus, with verbs with two objects (give, teach, show), hedging about authorship and the language of defiance.
Heroes who will not bend.
Sophocles’ Ajax: honour, shame and the generosity of Odysseus to his rival, with the third conditional, should have, ashamed of / proud of and the language of respect.
Sophocles’ Electra and the famous recognition scene with the urn, with the past perfect, the past perfect continuous, it turned out that and the language of grief and hope.
Sophocles’ Philoctetes: is it right to lie for the common good?, with must / have to / should / ought to, be supposed to, it is right to, and the language of honesty and loyalty.
The most modern of the three, and the most disturbing.
Euripides’ Medea: a foreign wife betrayed and exiled, her speech on women’s lives, and her terrible revenge, with cleft sentences, emphatic do, mixed conditionals and the language of injustice.
Euripides’ The Trojan Women: the captive women of Troy, written after the Athenian destruction of Melos, with the passive in many tenses, by + agent, and the language of war, loss and refugees.
Euripides’ The Bacchae: Dionysus in disguise and the young king who tried to control him, with participle clauses (disguised as, having been warned), and the language of appearance and reality, control and freedom.
Euripides’ Alcestis and The Cyclops, the only complete satyr play, with comparatives and superlatives (as… as, the least), would rather, and the language of hospitality and humour.
From Aristophanes’ fantasies to Menander’s family comedies.
Aristophanes’ The Clouds: Socrates in a basket and the Weaker Argument, with question forms, tag questions, indirect questions and sarcasm.
Aristophanes’ The Birds: Cloudcuckooland, the city in the sky, with going to, will and the present continuous for plans, decisions and arrangements, and the language of cities.
Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and The Frogs: the women who stopped a war, and Dionysus judging Aeschylus against Euripides, with whereas, while, compared with, on the one hand, prefer… to, and the language of argument.
Middle Comedy and its fragments: Antiphanes, Alexis, Eubulus, the pumpkin of Plato’s Academy and stock characters, with hedging, inference from evidence and the language of reconstruction.
Menander’s The Grouch, the only complete New Comedy, found on an Egyptian papyrus, with character adjectives, adverbs of frequency with the present simple and the language of personality and change.
The theatre in Philo’s own city.
Drama in Alexandria: Aristotle’s Poetics, the Pleiad, Herodas’ Mimes and Ezekiel’s Exagoge, the Jewish tragedy about Moses, with the language of definition and academic explanation.
Premium lessons and gamebooks need the premium password; once it has been entered, they stay open on that device.