Greece

  • OEDIPUS

    We have all heard of Oedipus, either as the ‘tragedy’ or the ‘complex’. Oedipus has been around in some form or another for well over 1000 years now. His beginnings are with ancient Greek poet Homer in fragments, then with Hesiod, Pindar, Aeschylus and Euripides. It is, however, with Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex (Oedipus the King) that the name became legendary. The play begins in the court of Laius and Jocasta, the King and queen of Thebes, who are having trouble conceiving. Troubled by this Laius goes to see the oracle of Apollo at Delphi. The oracle prophesises that any son born to the couple would kill his father and…

  • Leonidas I: The Unlikely King

    Not much is known about the life of Leonidas and most of what we do know today comes from the Greek researcher Herodotus of Halicarnassus. Leonidas was never expected to be king, with two older brothers and their chances of producing male heirs, no one even thought it was a possibility. Anaxandrides was a Spartan king who ruled from roughly 560 B.C. until his death in 520 B.C. During his reign, his Queen was unable to provide Anaxandrides with children and heirs for such a long period of time that the elected administrators of the Spartan constitution, called ephors, tried to convince him to set aside his Queen for another.…

  • Pegasus

    Pegasus was the beautiful white winged stallion of Greek Myths. The most well know tale of his birth is that he sprang to life from the blood of the Gorgon Medusa after she was killed by Perseus. Zeus, king of the gods, instructed him to bring lightning and thunder from Olympus. Friend of the Muses, Pegasus is the creator of Hippocrene, the fountain on Mt. Helicon. He was captured by the Greek hero Bellerophon near the fountain Peirene with the help of Athena and Poseidon. Pegasus allows the hero to ride him to defeat the monster Chimera. Zeus eventually transforms him into the constellation Pegasus and places him up in…

  • HERODOTUS

    Look, let us be straight with each other: History, as it is taught in the United States (I cannot speak for other countries) is dry as toast and boring as hell. And to be perfectly honest, most history is not taught as a means of reflecting on the past, but as a method to teach other concepts, such as how to write a paper, how to create a bibliography, how to cite your sources, etc. (I cringed when one student referred to the Celts as the SELTS, soft “C” sound. I blame basketball!) It is because of this that I didn’t really get into history until later in life when…

  • The Trojan War

    The Trojan War is probably one of the most widely known wars of all time but most of what we know about the Trojan War is based on myth. We have probably all read or at least heard of Homer’s Iliad. The Iliad tells a part of the last year of the siege of Troy. The Trojan War is mentioned in the old epic poems in the Epic Cycle, also known as the Cyclic Epics: the Cypria, Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Iliou Persis, Nostoi, and Telegony. Though these poems survive only in fragments, t [...]