Because my objective here was to become familiar with Greek mythology, I’m going to give short shrift to the history of tragedy, and its structure. Those are topics worthy of deep dives, but a cursory glance will do for now.

It seems tragedy grew out of both epic poetry, including those recording the myths of antiquity, and song-and-dance celebrations of Dionysius. Scholars know of at least 324 plays by four playwrights – Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes (who wrote comedies rather than tragedies) but only 43 have survived complete to the current day. It seems they were performed in a contest, a sort of Greece’s Got Talent. Presumably, the winners’ plays were the ones that survived, but who knows what runners-up we might enjoy today. As far as structure, Aristotle wrote his Poetic to teach us about that, and it remained something of a standard of drama – and, eventually, fiction – for centuries.

As I browsed Youtube for performances or lectures on Greek tragedies, I noticed something odd.  A great many videos about ancient Greece have been created … for sleep. “Boring Greek Myths for Sleep… Wind down tonight with a sleep story designed to calm your thoughts and ease you gently into deep rest.” “This compilation of Greek Mythology Sleep Stories will take you on a journey through ancient times and beliefs and will help you ease towards a night of restful and relaxing sleep.” “Greek Mythology Sleep Stories” “Fall Asleep to 9 Hours of Greek History – ASMR History Learning.” “ASMR Greek Mythology.” Are you guys out of your minds? Have they actually listened to the words? Stabbings, kidnappings, rapes, incest, exile, deaths – guaranteed nightmares, I’d say.

But let’s move on.

When I started this project, I wasn’t sure how to proceed. I remembered that Erik Rostad, aka Books of Titans, had done a read of the plays. Turns out he had a post suggesting various approaches. I followed his suggestion to work on the Theban plays, which were set in the earliest times, then the Trojan plays, and came back to the miscellaneous works, set in a variety of times, later. I ignored Aristophanes completely, which troubles me; he’s important in that he’s the Andy Borowitz of ancient Greece, making fun of various personages. But I wanted to limit this investigation to mythology, and I wanted to finish it in January, so I merely salute him for now as I move on.

You may note I said I worked on the plays, rather than I read them. I confess, I didn’t read much of the plays, though they’re all readily available online in multiple translations. I don’t like reading drama, and third, there are a lot of them (though most are fairly short).

It was by great fortune I happened across a gold mine: Reading Greek Tragedy Online, a set of 90-minute Zoom sessions on each play, recorded back during the Pandemic by Prof. Joel Christensen of Brandeis University (and of the wonderful Sententiae Antiquae blog, which I’ve been following for a couple of years now, currently examining the Iliad in detail) along with the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University, the Out of Chaos theatre in the UK, and a broad array of Tragic experts from around the world. These included scenes from the plays, discussions of important points to notice, and notes on performance. In most cases, the translations used were available online. It was an incredible experience.

And if you’re thinking a play can’t be performed on Zoom, you’d be surprised. One of the participants commented how restrictions generate creativity (can you say Oulipo?) and they showed it with lighting, costuming, implied interframe interaction, and just with voice and expression: acting, in other words. It was a tremendous way to learn about the plays. I do still need to read them, but for my objective of learning about mythology, this was perfect.

Another interesting aspect most of the Zoom recordings covered was the interaction of the play, set in a mythological past, and the situation in Athens at the time of their performance, most frequently, the Peloponnesian War or forms of government. The relevance to contemporary situations also came up frequently, since many of the plays involve the way refugees, immigrants, and women are treated by society.

Here are some of my impressions from the plays I enjoyed the most, or learned the most from:

Euripides: The Bacchae

I have to admit I was less interested in the Theban plays. The Bacchae introduces Dionysus, and continues the myth of Cadmus, which is where I focused my attention. Herodotus  believed Cadmus had introduced the alphabet to Greece. That’s not totally off the wall: Cadmus was from Phoenicia, and it was the Phoenician alphabet the Greeks adopted when they began writing again following their Dark Age. But Cadmus the character comes with other baggage, particularly, a curse from slaying the sacred dragon, and that propels itself throughout the Theban myths, such as Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (I learned a while ago never to call it Oedipus Rex  to a classicist, for you will be scolded for mixing Greek and Latin), Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone.

The Thebais from the Epic Cycle contains the core of the story of Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, which generates several other plays dealing with the aftermath. Greek tragedy, like the mythology, incorporated variations and contradictions; Euripides’ The Phoenician Women, for instance, has Oedipus and Jocasta still alive. It also contains the line “A refugee must put up with any fool in power” which resonated at the time of the Zoom recording five years ago as much as it does now.

Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia at Tauris

When I read about the Cypria from the Epic Cycle, I was very glad to finally understand the sacrifice of Iphigenia. This play really drives it home. Greek tragedy is built on reversals, and here everyone reverses themselves: Agamemnon at first refuses to sacrifice his daughter (well, duh), but when the troops, all eager to go kick Trojan butt if he can only get Artemis to let the winds blow, start to get restless, he changes his mind. Achilles shows up, thinking he’s about to be married, and discovers he’s a lure. Iphigenia herself, at first horrified that she’s been summoned to what she thought was her wedding but is actually her execution, becomes the unsung hero of the Trojan war, facing her death with courage unmatched by any of the war-hungry men.

And the messenger – an unnamed messenger – gives the speech of a lifetime, reporting on the sacrifice:

So did Iphigenia die, or not? Is he perhaps telling a lie to soothe the emotions of, among others, mother Clytemnestra? Apparently, it didn’t work, since Mom had her vengeance ten years later in The Agamemnon (though it’s always possible she had other more personally advantageous reasons as well). Euripides wrote a sequel, Iphigenia in Tauris, which seems to bear out the messenger’s news. That second play, by the way, is also very interesting; as Prof. Christensen says, it has the longest, most dramatic recognition scene in all tragedy, and the actors didn’t let Zoom be a hindrance at all to their performance.

Sophocles: Philoctetes

The basis of this play is from the Little Iliad of the Epic Cycle; he’s also mentioned as being in absentia in the Iliad. He’s in absentia because Odysseus left him behind on the island of Lemnos because he had a stinky foot. Ok. Technically, it was a wound that was stinky, but Odysseus didn’t like it so they sailed off and left him on the island for almost ten years, until an omen told them they needed his bow, the bow of Heracles, to defeat Troy. Philoctetes had been given the bow of Heracles (if you’re talking to a classicist, never call him Hercules in a Greek context; it was decades before I realized they were the same guy) because he lit the pyre that burned away Heracles’ mortal flesh and freed his immortal being, and now that bow was key to victory. So Odysseus, accompanied by Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son, went back to get him, stinky foot and all. As might be imagined, he’s in no mood to be cooperative. And his foot still stinks. And hurts.

The play is a marvelous balance of Neoptolemus as a young innocent who wants to convince Philoctetes to return for the good of the Hellenes, to be a hero, all that, and wily Odysseus who just wants the kid to trick the old guy into putting the bow down, then steal it.

Neoptolemus gives in, then feels guilty and gives the bow back.  This is the kid who, just a short time later in another play, is going to throw a baby from the walls of burning Troy and take the baby’s mother as his slave, so don’t get too attached. When Philoctetes finds out Odysseus is behind all this, he refuses to help them, and asks Neoptolemus to take him back to his homeland.

It looks like that’s what’s going to happen until Heracles shows up on the deus ex machina, which before it became a literary term was an actual machine used to bring the gods into the play. He tells Philoctetes to go to Troy and kill Paris and win the war, and who wouldn’t do what their best friend descended from the heavens told them to do.

While the story itself is really cool, there’s an interesting take on the dramatic appearance of Heracles proposed by Prof. Michael Davis in the introductory lecture to his Philosophy of Tragedy course at Sarah Lawrence College. This hinges on both  Odysseus’ celebrated cleverness, and on the way Greek tragedy was performed in Athens: only three actors per play, plus the chorus.

I haven’t been able to find this academic debate, but it’s a hard thing to google for. And once again, I have to point out that Homer really cleaned up Odysseus, compared to his actions in other myths.

Euripides: Medea

I paid particular attention to this play since I’d just encountered it as part of a contemporary short story, “Unfathomably Deep” by Sophie Madeline Dess, in my read of Best American Short Stories 2025. Medea is the princess/sorceress who aided Jason in his quest to obtain the golden fleece, and now she finds herself in dire circumstances: he has married another princess and Medea and her children are to be cast out. This is a dire situation for a woman of the time. As Prof. Christensen says in the Zoom discussion of the play, it has “some themes that have nothing to do at all with today, right, oath-breaking, gender equity, and what it’s like to be a foreigner and a country in trouble.”

She has two great speeches. In the first, she rages against the status quo for women in the Hellenic world. They must take a husband, but then they are at the mercy of that man. She then confronts the (former) husband who has betrayed her, has left her a stranger in a strange land:

Notice there’s reference to the people she’s killed. Medea is no angel. What she did, she did for Jason, but she did the killing. And her rage drives her to kill again: not Jason, but her own children. The idea is that she is hurting him in that action, but if he’s casting out the children along with her, how hurt is he going to be?

In the Zoom recording from Reading Greek Tragedy Online, Fiona Macintosh of Oxford says something very interesting: in Georgia (the country, not the state), which is the area Medea originally came from, there’s a statue of her, and people sometimes name their daughters Medea. I found a picture of the statue, which was erected in 2007; she’s holding the Golden Fleece, so maybe they restrict their view of her to that deed.

Medea is mentioned in a fragment of the Nostoi segment of the Epic Cycle; I can’t tell if this is where the substance of her story comes from, or if that merely relates the voyage of the Argo.

Euripides: Helen

I’m not sure this is a tragedy, since it has a happy ending – at least, as far as it goes – and it has definite comedic elements. The basis of the play is that Helen, the wife of Menelaus whose abduction caused the Trojan War, never got to Troy; Paris went off-course and went ashore in Egypt where Hera replaced Helen with a phantom, letting the real Helen stayed in Egypt, unspoiled by adultery, the whole time. The play takes place after the end of the war, when the warriors are returning home.

This is not something Euripides came up with on his own. The poet Stesichorus, in the 6^th century BCE, wrote a poem titled the Palinode, meaning an apology for an earlier work. He’d criticized Helen, and this poem, which only survives in fragments and mentions, takes it back and proposes the phantom theory. Herodotus lays out a related theory in Book 2 of his Historia: as he describes Proteus’ judgment of Paris:

Herodotus also insists Homer knew of this story and dropped hints that he knew it in various works, but “since it was not as appropriate for epic composition as the other one which he adopted, he rejected it…” and none of this includes Paris returning to Troy with a phantom. What this version of events does say, loud and clear, is that the war was fought over nothing. As Prof. Christensen says in his Zoom recording, the play is about the “difference between reality and appearances…. What’s true or not true doesn’t matter as much as what people believe is true.”

By the way, I came across this last year when reading John Barth’s “Menelaiad” in his short story collection Lost in the Funhouse, which places Helen in Egypt. Unfortunately, it’s one of Barth’s more stylistic, less comprehensible pieces – nesting quotes seven levels deep – so I haven’t really read it. The layers of “he said that he said that he said that he said” strikes me as parallel to the confusion of what is real and what  is merely said to be real, a phenomenon we are very familiar with these days.

The play itself – no, I haven’t forgotten – contains two wonderful scenes, one of non-recognition, and one of recognition. It is Teucer, who washes up on the shore of Egypt  and looks for help; he happens upon Helen quite by accident, and is amazed by the resemblance but doesn’t get it. As a result, he speaks volumes of ironic truth:

Notice how he speaks viciously of phantom-Helen who caused the war, and kindly of real-Helen who helps him get on his way. It’s an almost comic twisting of reality and rumor that doesn’t seem so comic right now. And Helen never tells him who she really is.

Helen’s meeting with Menelaus is similarly comic. He’s hidden phantom-Helen in a cave, and now he comes face-to-face with another Helen.

A messenger (oh, another messenger, they really have great parts in these things) tells him that phantom-Helen has disappeared, gone up to the sky. Eventually Menelaus gets over his confusion, and they start working on ways to escape and go home. I’m curious about what happens when they get home. If Teucer is to be believed, all of Hellas hates Helen; what will life be like for her, as she bears the blame? But Euripides doesn’t tell us. Homer does, in the Odyssey; when Telemachus visits the couple, they seem to be just fie. Maybe she, as queen, doesn’t have to mingle with the population that much.

Another interesting tidbit I discovered from the Zoom session: Aristophanes wrote a parody of this play, of all of Euripides’ plays about women, just a year later. I really hve to look into Aristophanes. But that’s beyond my current objective of understanding mythology.

All of these plays, the ones I haven’t mentioned, have revelations and interpretations and histories that make them interesting study; these just happen to be the ones I found most interesting. I again recommend Joel Christensen’s series, which addresses all of the plays, some more than once; the playlist is linked below.

This concludes my January 2026 study of Greek history and mythology. I plan to pick up with Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War later this year. But for February, I’ll be returning to contemporary fiction, beginning with  Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant’s Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, a delightful cornucopia of literary analysis of various works.

Resources:

• Blog post on Books of Titans by Erik Rostad on his suggestion for how to approach reading Greek tragedy
• Blog Post at Senteniae Antiquae by Prof. Joel Christensen of Brandeis University on the Reading Greek Tragedy Online project
• Complete playlist of the Reading Greek Tragedy Online project by the Center for Hellenic Studies
• Playlist, Philosophy of Tragedy lectures by Prof. Michael Davis of Sarah Lawrence College (the first one contains the quotes referenced above)
• Video from PBS giving an overview of the history of Greek tragedy
• Video of a performance of Euripides’ Medea
• My comments on the short story “Unfathomably Deep” by Sophie Madeline Dess, which makes strong use of Medea

Happy New Year! This is the time of year I usually start reading Pushcart. I have the 2026 volume on my Next Read Table (the TBR shelf got overloaded so I had to expand) but I’m going to do things a little differently this year.

I mentioned in my BASS 2025 wrap-up post that I felt silly about reading the same three books (four, sort of) over the last three months. It’s unusual that I would be reading other books along with BASS, so it’s not surprising I got bogged down. But it’s left me a little frustrated, feeling the need to finish the books I started before moving on to Pushcart. So I’m kicking off the year with In-Between Reading: The Big Books Phase. Because these aren’t week-long reads. They’re more like month-long reads.

My first goal is to finish Herodotus. I’m close – halfway through the ninth and final book – so that feels like the place to start.

Next, I want to read Sinykin/Winant’s Close Reading For the Twenty-First Century. I’ve been carrying this as my transit book, which means short, distracted reading sessions, not the way to read this book. And yet it’s been exciting and inspirational to read. I even made some clumsy applications of some of the basic ideas in my BASS read. But I want to sit down with it, and with some of the essays and books and articles it refers to. Just from my casual first pass, it seems worth spending time with.

I think I’ll then turn to Helen DeWitt’s latest novel, Your Name Here. I’ve been hearing it’s a complicated read, so it’s not going to be a six-day book.

I also have Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid on the agenda, inspired by Richard Powers’ The Gold Bug Variations and helped along by discovering a lecture series on MIT’s open courseware platform.

I haven’t forgotten about ancient Greece; Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War is waiting for me. I debated scheduling this right after Herodotus, but I think I want some distance between them, since they have very different styles. Herodotus is what I imagine being on the bus with the Merry Pranksters might have been like; Thucydides is more like sitting in on Professor Kingsfield’s Contract Law class. I’ll probably follow this up with a tour of the major plays, or I may throw them in when I finish Herodotus.

Then there’s Richard Cohen’s Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past, which sent me down this ancient Greek rabbit hole in the first place. I’ve put this on hold; just the first chapter has given me a year’s worth of reading, since it doesn’t seem all that useful to just read ten pages about various historians and call it a day. It’s because it’s such an interesting book that I want to pause for now. Maybe I’ll do the chapter on Rome next year. And chapter three the next year, assuming there is a next year.

This means my blogging pace is going to slow down. Some of these are Big Books – 600 to 800 pages – and some contain multitudes. It’s going to take me a while, say, a month at least, for each work. There are reasons for that. It isn’t the reading; it’s the understanding. It’s the retention. For some, it might be creating flash cards in Cerego. Or finding and reading the books and articles mentioned in a book. Or going through a series of lectures on the material. Or something else besides just reading the book.

I hope to get to Pushcart by late summer, so I’ll be free for BASS by October, assuming it’s published then. All of this is subject to change. But I find it helpful to have a plan, however tenuous, and to commit to it publicly, however unread by eyes other than my own.

Hey, why am I still blathering, I’ve got reading to do.