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”
Category Archives: Opinions
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”
Narcissus
The daffodils have begun to flower. Narcissus emerges from the ground. The Greeks named the flower for a boy who could not look away. The myth remembers something about spring that the botanical name preserves without explaining: that the eye, given something sufficiently beautiful, stops. The will follows the gaze. The season announces itself throughContinue reading “Narcissus”
Protective Arts 