ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to shed light onto three further manifestations of Beethoven’s penchant for Greco-Roman culture: texts by Xenophon, Euripides and a series of Greek poets. When reading Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, the first volume of Borhek’s translation, he evinced a fondness for such topics as fame, great deeds, reputation, good and bad, virtue, duty, and evocations to the ineffable. These features, all related to morals, bespoke his personal convictions. Of overriding importance of the Xenophon entries in his Tagebuch is that the volume he read incorporated an elucidation of Platonic thought. Beethoven also read the tragedies of Euripides: through his publisher he acquired the five volumes by Heinrich Bothe, and found relish in them. He may still have consulted them later, as is tentatively suggested by a musical vignette from 1820 in a sketchbook (’Thut auf’), on a few lines that may have been drawn from ’Trojan Women’. In 1810, he subscribed to a translation of the ’Greek anthology’, a collection of translated Greek epigrams by Johann Erichson. Althought some opportunism may have been involved, this contextualizes the significance for him of Greek antiquity.
