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”
Tag Archives: Athens
The Illiad
The Greeks chose, as their founding story, not triumph but rupture. The Iliad opens with epic anger: leaders divided, an army stalled, a coalition nearly undone before it reaches the walls of Troy. The ancient Greeks did not ground their civilization in harmony, but in the conditions that make order fragile; pride, rivalry, misjudgment, theContinue reading “The Illiad”
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”