It begins with a burial. Before Creon speaks, before Antigone defies him, before law is written or broken, a body lies outside the walls of Thebes. Unburied. This is where the story starts. With a fact the Greeks treated as prior to politics: the dead must be buried. The audience in the theater of DionysusContinue reading “Antigone”
Category Archives: myth
Pandora and Helen
Helen is not the subject but the test case. She is the figure around which questions of causation, perception, agency, and the reliability of language organize. The movement runs from Homer, where she is a condition, through Euripides and Gorgias, to Thucydides where she disappears entirely and the mechanism persists. The distance between the laterContinue reading “Pandora and Helen”
Neoptolemus
We have already met him. Neoptolemus arrives on Lemnos as the younger man Odysseus brings to retrieve Philoctetes and the bow of Heracles. He resists the deception Odysseus requires. That is Neoptolemus at his best: resistant to manipulation, not yet corrupted by the compromises of war. Sophocles gives him dignity in that moment of resistance.Continue reading “Neoptolemus”
Protective Arts 