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In his beautifully written tribute to the ancient Greeks. Thomas Cahill interprets Euripides\u2019 Medea <\/i> as a cautionary tale to aristocratic Athenian men. The question he poses to the audience is: \u201cWhat could drive a woman to such extremes that she would kill her own children.\u201d Cahill\u2019s summary of Euripides\u2019 target is revealing (and at least R-rated, for you kids out there): <\/p>\n
\u201cFor the strutting aristoi <\/i> of the symposia, the nature of life was obvious: you gave it or you got it. To represent ancient Greece as a homosexual society is to miss the central lesson. It was a militarized society that saw everything in terms of active and passive, swords and wounds, phalloi <\/i> and gashes. Aristocratic boys were courted by aristocratic men as part of a puberty ordeal, the last step before adulthood, during which the man was to act as a model and help the boy achieve bristling manhood . . . . He was not . . . allowed to make him a passive partner. Of course, he \u2013 and any male citizen \u2013 could do whatever he liked to anyone else, male or female, adult or child, so long as his object was not another citizen or a properly married woman. If she were divorced, as Medea was about to be, she was as fair game as anyone. The Homeric insights into longtime love between two people \u2013 Hector and Andromache, Odysseus and Penelope \u2013 are never spoken of again in Greek literature after the close of the Odyssey. Sappho\u2019s expressed preference for love of an individual \u2013 \u2018black earth\u2019s most beautiful thing\u2019 \u2013 over the beautiful cavalries, infantries, and navies that entranced most Greeks remains a solitary preference, never again voiced after her death in the early sixth century. Rather, the Greeks became ever more striving, ever more competitive, ever more bellicose. Sometimes, all they seemed to be left with was f***ing or getting f***ed.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In his beautifully written tribute to the ancient Greeks. Thomas Cahill interprets Euripides\u2019 Medea as a cautionary tale to aristocratic Athenian men. The question he poses to the audience is: \u201cWhat could drive a woman to such extremes that she would kill her own children.\u201d Cahill\u2019s summary of Euripides\u2019 target is revealing (and at least […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-classics"],"yoast_head":"\n