School of Suspicion

Tag: Hellenic

Greek myth, from Homer and Hesiod to Ovid’s retellings.

  • Cadmus — The Dragon’s Teeth

    Cadmus — The Dragon’s Teeth

    Cadmus kills the guardian of the spring, sows its teeth, and founds Thebes with the survivors. Read once as courage and reparation, once as a foreign settlement told from the side that won.

  • Arachne: The Glory and the Crimes of Heaven

    Arachne weaves what Athena’s tapestry leaves out, and the goddess tears it rather than answer it. A reading of Ovid’s weaving contest through the disguises of the gods, the looms of Penelope and Philomela, and the spider of the Upanishads.

  • The Serpent Slayers

    The Serpent Slayers

    Genesis 3:15 is usually called the first messianic prophecy, and the reading is old and serious. God turns to the serpent, promises lasting hostility between its offspring and the woman’s, and says that one will be struck on the head and the other on the heel. Christian tradition has read that as the announcement of…

  • Ion — The Patriarchal Blessing and the Father of a Nation

    Ion — The Patriarchal Blessing and the Father of a Nation

    Apollo forces Creusa in a cave under the Acropolis, has their son raised in his temple at Delphi and hands him to her husband as the husband’s own. Euripides’ Ion beside Joseph and the supposed father of Luke’s genealogy, the boy Jesus in his Father’s house, Rebekah and Jacob, and the question Athens put to…

  • Phaethon — Chariot of the Sun

    Phaethon — Chariot of the Sun

    Epaphus tells Phaethon that his father is a picture his mother made up, and the boy goes to the Sun for proof. Read beside Herod’s oath, the chariots of the sun that Josiah burned, Plato’s Egyptian priest and Peter’s fire, with Lucian’s boatmen on the Eridanus, who had never heard of him.