Antiochus I rose to the throne in the east from a relatively established position; in fact, he had been co-ruler since 292, eleven years before the assassination of his father. This was an innovation in the light of experience (Shipley 2000: 287), an intelligent strategy to avoid the division of… Read more
Fig. 1: A modern representation of the Agamemnon, Siracusa (Italy). Copyright E. Schembri At line 1100 of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, after Cassandra’s visions have begun to unfold progressively, the murderous plot that is about to be accomplished against the king is hinted at for the first time. The captive seer… Read more
What is there at the bedrock of reality? What are the ultimate building blocks out of which everything else is constituted? Are they things (objects, particles), or are they activities of some sort? Or is there something else, even more fundamental than they are?… Read more
William Makepeace Thackeray incorporates three types of reference to the Trojan War in Vanity Fair.[1] The first presents the elements of the story included in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon: the sacrifice of Iphigeneia sculpted and surmounting “a great French clock” (Ch. 13, 129);[2] the fighting of the war… Read more
In my first post, I discussed Thucydides’ vision for cultivating sensitive reason and sensible emotion in order to equip the dêmos for competent collective action. Here I turn to Aeschylus’ Eumenides that famously dramatizes the foundation of the Areopagus as the first criminal court in Athens and examine the role… Read more
