Recent Book Club discussion prompted me to think about how human emotions were depicted in some of the readings from Greek antiquity. In the Trojan Women, Andromache’s reaction to her son’s fate—death by being thrown out of the battlements—is not physical, a loud, wailing lament, but a subdued, courageous reaction. To get a proper burial for her son, she does not fight back vehemently when the child is taken. The… Read more
In an epic text, how were poets able to represent emotion? How can we understand today their way of speaking? Did Achilles “copy” the behavior of warriors from those distant times? Or might it be the reverse: did the epic influence certain real behaviors? Our Book Club selection for April is taken from Hélène Monsacré: The Tears of Achilles, available online at CHS. This book, originally published in French as… Read more
“A World of Emotions: Ancient Greece, 700 BC–200 AD” Onassis Cultural Center New York Onassis Foundation USA, 645 5th Ave., New York Through June 24, 2017 A guest post by David A. Beardsley Much of my own ongoing fascination with the ancient Greeks is in that theirs is the first culture with which I can readily connect, and this is largely because of the way they display their emotions. The… Read more