School of Suspicion

Tag: Hellenic

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

  • Cassandra and Jesus — Prophets of a Doomed City

    Cassandra and Jesus — Prophets of a Doomed City

    Apollo gave Cassandra true sight and took away belief. Jesus wept over a city that would not hear him. Aeschylus and the Gospels side by side, with Ovid’s Paris taking her fire for love, Josephus’s other Jesus crying woe on the walls, the Locrian girls sent to Troy for a thousand years and the lampstand…

  • Sons of God, Daughters of Men, and Nephilim – The beginning of Ancient religions

    Genesis 6:4 ends with a phrase that belongs to Homer more than to Moses. The children born to the sons of God by the daughters of men, it says, became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. That is heroic vocabulary. It is the language a poet uses of Achilles or of Gilgamesh,…

  • Endymion: Prince of Dreams

    Endymion chooses to sleep forever, and the moon comes down to him. A reading of the shepherd who charted the moon, through Pliny, Lucian, Apollonius, Athenaeus, Pausanias, Nonnus’s link to Narcissus, and Kierkegaard on sleep as genius.

  • Narcissus: Beauty Awakens

    Narcissus: Beauty Awakens

    Narcissus comes to the water thirsty. A reading of Ovid’s myth through Echo, Conon’s rejected lover Ameinias, the twin sister Pausanias records, Hegel on beauty, and the flower that keeps his name.