Few characters in world literature have been read as violently in opposite directions as Medea. To some critics and directors, she is one of the earliest and most powerful indictments […]
Greek tragedy generally ran on a kind of moral accounting, however brutal: characters who overreached, who committed hubris against the gods or the natural order, eventually paid for it, often […]
Fifteen Corinthian women stand in the orchestra of the Theatre of Dionysus, watching a foreign princess plan the murder of her own children, and they do not stop her. They […]
Long before the knife appears, Medea is already a bloodbath — just a rhetorical one. Euripides gives his two leads a series of verbal duels that function like sword fights: […]
There is a moment in Medea where the title character stands alone on stage, knife-logic already decided, and argues with herself out loud about whether to go through with killing […]
Every city needs someone to define itself against. For fifth-century Athens, watching Euripides’ Medea unfold in 431 BCE, that someone walked onto the stage speaking Greek perfectly, dressed like any […]
Homer never calls Odysseus brave in the poem’s opening line. He calls him polytropos — “the man of many turns,” or “of many ways,” depending on the translator, a word […]
While Odysseus is off blinding cyclopes and resisting witches, the Odyssey quietly runs a second plot back home that is, by any fair measure, just as hard as anything he […]
Every stranger who washes up on a shore in the Odyssey is a test. Not of strength, not of cunning — of manners. Long before anyone reaches for a sword, […]
Troy fell in ten years. Getting home took Odysseus ten more. Somewhere in that gap between “the war is won” and “the hero returns,” Homer found the only plot twist […]
