Antigone

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”

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”

Athena

I am suffering a sinus infection that is giving me a pounding headache. The phrase is overplayed but accurate. The pain behind my eyeballs is impossible to ignore; it pulses with a dull insistence. A steady, hammering rhythm. One imagines Zeus felt something like this. Zeus had taken Métis, the goddess of cunning intelligence, asContinue reading “Athena”