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: Oedipus
Helen
Medusa reveals something the Greeks already suspected. Beauty and terror are not opposites. They are twins. Both arrest the mind through the eye. A man who sees Medusa cannot move. A man who sees Helen often cannot act. The mechanism is identical. The Greeks understood this long before philosophers explained it. The eye commands theContinue reading “Helen”
The Use of Myth
Hesiod stands at the beginning. He is the first to write down stories that had been circulating for centuries. His account is not a moral arc in the way the Hebrew tradition would later tell its story. Hesiod is part farmer’s almanac and part chronicler. This is how the seasons work, and this is whoContinue reading “The Use of Myth”
Protective Arts 