Ranking Sophocles Plays In Order Of How Real Ghosts Are In Them

get out of touch and obsessed with functionally and materially useless niche fields and topics of interest enough and you too can develop the coveted "loser's superiority complex"

everyone tagging my last post with helen and hector: valid but thats also such a lukewarm take. where the nestor fans at

WHAT a way to begin your book on performance and identity in the ancient world

me before making yet another unintelligible post about my current hyperfixations

Centaur Watching Fish by Arnold Böcklin (1878).

I love love love Böcklin’s mythical pieces, they have this sense of realism, and often even sensitivity.

The House of Ancient Hunt, Pompeii.

Photography by Luigi Spina

The Foundation of the World

People do not wish to know that the whole of human culture is based on the mythic process of conjuring away man's violence by endlessly projecting it upon new victims. All cultures and all religions are built on this foundation, which they then conceal, just as the tomb is built around the dead body that it conceals. Murder calls for the tomb and the tomb is but the prolongation and perpetuation of murder. The tomb-religion amounts to nothing more or less than the becoming visible of the foundations, of religion and culture, of their only reason for existence.

Violence and the Sacred, René Girard (1972), quoted in The Girard Reader, James G. Williams ed. (2000)

Ides of March 2025 is going to be a fucking blast because it will have been 2069 years since Caesar's death day

Tartarus © Aurelio Monge