Life of a Satyr Just keep pouring the wine. Never mind the gold. I would like to drink down a single cup of this wine, giving all the Cyclopes’ flocks in exchange for it, and then to leap from the Leucadian cliff into the brine, good and drunk with my eyebrows smoothed out. The man who does not enjoy drinking is mad: in drink one can raise this to a […]
Read moreCategory: Classics
Greco-Roman and Eastern Classics: Mythology, Philosophy, Literature.
“The Women of Trachis” by Sophocles
The Love That Kills Heracles loved Iole and because her father would not give her to him in marriage, he killed her father and other members of her family. His wife Deianira was afraid to lose him to the younger Iole, so she gave him a robe that she thought was a love charm but was in fact dipped in poison, causing Heracles to die in extreme agony. Quotes: Ah, […]
Read more“Philoctetes” by Sophocles
Perhaps this man is as well born as any, second to no son of an ancient house. Yet now his life lacks everything, and he makes his bed without neighbors or with spotted shaggy beasts for neighbors. His thoughts are set continually on pain and hunger. He cries out in his wretchedness; there is only a blabbering echo, that comes from the distance speeding from his bitter crying. There is […]
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“Ajax” by Sophocles
Quotes of Characters: Athena Who was more full of foresight than this man [Ajax], Or abler, do you think, to act with judgment? Odysseus None that I know of. Yet I pity His wretchedness, though he is my enemy, For the terrible yoke of blindness that is on him. I think of him, yet also of myself; For I see the true state of all us that live– We are […]
Read more“Iphigenia in Tauris” by Euripides
Iphigenia “From the beginning my fate was unhappy, from that first night of my mother’s marriage; from the beginning the Fates attendant on my birth directed a hard upbringing for me, wooed by Hellenes, the first-born child in the home, whom the unhappy daughter of Leda, by my father’s fault, bore as a victim and a sacrifice not joyful, she brought me up as an offering. … My father too, […]
Read more“Ion” by Euripides
Apollo raped Creusa, a young princess of Athens, who gave birth to Ion in secret and in shame and fear exposed the infant to die. Apollo arranged to have the baby brought to his temple in Delphi and raised by his priestess. Creusa, now married to Xuthus but remained childless, came to Delphi with her husband to inquire of the oracle. While writing an intriguing story of love, abandonment, treachery, […]
Read more“Helen” by Euripides
The Real Cause of the Trojan War Hera, indignant at not defeating the goddesses, made an airy nothing of Helen’s marriage with Paris; she gave to the son of King Priam not Helen, but an image, alive and breathing, that she fashioned out of the sky and made to look like Helen; and Paris thinks he has Helen—an idle fancy, for he doesn’t have her. And in turn the plans […]
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