377-429

The play-tragedy Artaxerxes by Pietro Metastasio translated in demotic Greek by the scholar Ioannis Kantounis (1713-1817)

Μελέτες και άρθρα

• Πυλαρινός, Θεοδόσης

The Italian play-tragedy Artaxerxes by Pietro Metastasio is the only complete surviving translation by I. Kantounis, a scholar active before Dionisios Solomos. It is an unpublished work whose real worth, besides its theatrical value, lies in ushering the aesthetics of Neo- classicism and the ideals of liberalism in the Ionian islands. It signifies the continuous efforts by many scholars in Zante to record the local linguistic idiom of their compatriots and their unshaken belief that the cultivation of the arts for the masses was the right medium to awake their consiousness. Moreover, this intellectual ploughing prepared the conditions and prompted the blossoming of new trends which were soon articulated in the great poetic oeuvre of Dionisios Solomos and Andreas Kalvos.

• Other social sciences
• Languages and Literature

• Θέατρο, Ελληνικό
• Λογοτεχνία

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