Kathleen Jennings

Studying history is like:

Wow what an awful guy, tell me more

my son. he had every disease.

meditations on the odyssey

You with your precious eyes —

The gods differ from mortals here not because they are above the law but because they possess the insight to avoid breaking it. This marks the difference between gods and mortals perhaps more deeply than death itself: the gods never find themselves in the position of Oedipus, suddenly and unimaginably guilty. They are able to avoid actions whose consequences they cannot control; mortals risk such consequences in their every action. And perhaps it is even a kindness that transgression and death go hand in hand, that those who cannot die need not sin: for one who has broken the law which even the gods fear, the best thing is to die quickly.

-incest, cannibalism, and the rise of the house of atreus, michael kinnucan

So the ubiquitous counsel of the chorus concerning the hero—look what fortune has done here, she used to be on top of the world, don’t count on happiness, don’t believe anyone happy until he is dead—says more than it seems to. In the last analysis, what can one say of mere mortals? A human is just too partial, too speckled and subject and already-half-gone, for anything to be really true or false of him. Is he happy, is she sad? Maybe, a bit, for a time, but really—who can say, who can even care? That’s how it is for humans, unless and until they are tragic. The tragic hero is complete. You can call him unhappy (miserable, utterly broken) even before he is dead. For an instant he is something like divine. And then he dies, because there’s nothing left to do. The center of every tragedy is the image of a human being who has already died but keeps talking, someone whose face is a mask. Antigone says this explicitly—she is already dead; Oedipus acts it out in gouging out his eyes.

-the gods show up, michael kinnucan

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Couthon...

“There is little evidence for what Saint-Just really thought during the early weeks of the Convention, so there is now no way of knowing whether he hesitated or not between factions, or what factors inclined him to make up his mind. We only know that he chose Robespierre, unequivocally, and for the rest of his life. His choice was all the more striking since, out of the twelve deputies from the Aisne, he was the only one to align himself with the Montagnards.”

- Marisa Linton, The Man of Virtue: The Role of Antiquity in the Political Trajectory of L. A. Saint-Just 

Black Sails Season 2 + Saint Just, Organt 

brutus 🤝 antony 🤝 cassius 🤝 casca 🤝 decim......

thoughts on death and marriage and girls

(sophocles, antigone 891-4, c. 441 bce; ovid, metamorphoses x.1-7, 8 ce; phrasikleia kore inscription, 550-530 bce; euripides, iphigenia in aulis 1502-3, 405 bce)

inspired by @regenderate and @risissecupido and also joan breton connelly and nicole loraux