Читать книгу Looking for Aphrodite - David Price Williams - Страница 53

As I read the last few lines, I can hardly bring myself to finish, so sudden is the sensation, so immediate is the passion. For the others sitting there, I can sense that they feel the same. We have reached the very heart of Greek tragedy, where the audience automatically sympathises with the core of the calamity and the nexus of the people involved. That play would have been performed in this very theatre, here at Knidos, maybe many, many times. And the audience, like us today, would have been drawn into the same emotional climax.

Then two things strike me most forcibly. This play is about actual people. It is a real tragedy. Parents in Susa that long time ago did become childless in their old age. But more astoundingly, it was a Greek audience who, like us, would have cried, lamenting the tragedy of a people, the Persians, who had so recently been their sworn enemies.

In that moment I touch the past, not only in a physical way by being in that theatre among those ancient stones which had witnessed the same play long ago, but in a spiritual way too, empathising with peoples who have throughout time sought to cope with impending doom and actual disaster.

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