Tag Archives: Euripides

Through Lit, We Learn Compassion

By Robin Bates | Published: January 8, 2019

Tuesday My brother Sam, an enthusiastic Unitarian Universalist, gave me Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life for Christmas, and I was pleased that the author sees literature playing a major role. In today’s post I share how she draws on the ancient Greeks. Armstrong writes, “All faiths insist that compassion is the test […]

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Kavanaugh-Pentheus vs. Angry Women

By Robin Bates | Published: September 28, 2018

Euripides’s “Bacchae” gives us good insights into Kavanaugh’s alcohol consumption and his relation with women.

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Bolton’s Preventive War, Greek Style

By Robin Bates | Published: March 27, 2018

Incoming national security advisor John Bolton favors preventive war. Euripides describes an egregious act of prevention in the killing of Hector’s child in “The Trojan Women.”

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Euripides’s Attack on Authoritarianism

By Robin Bates | Published: December 6, 2017

It’s possible to read “The Bacchae” as a critique of the autocrats who hijacked Athenian democracy and were running Athens into the ground.

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Nature Lit Has Healed for Centuries

By Robin Bates | Published: December 5, 2017

For years my Intro to Lit class has had a nature theme.

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Handmaid’s Emmy, A Sign of Its Urgency

By Robin Bates | Published: September 19, 2017

The Emmys signaled that “Handmaid’s Tale” is as relevant as ever as America’s misogyny deepens. So is Euripides’s “The Bacchae.”

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Anger in Ancient Greek Works

By Robin Bates | Published: September 13, 2017

A new book looks at how the ancient Greeks approached the issue of anger in works such as “Iliad,” “Ajax,” and “Hecuba.

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Calling Out Trump’s Assault on Nature

By Robin Bates | Published: April 7, 2017

Look to Euripides’s “The Bacchae” if you want to know how a divine seer would call out Donald Trump for his assault on the environment. Teiresias says that Pentheus is “possessed by madness so perverse, no drug can cure.”

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Climate Change, Fairies Fighting

By Robin Bates | Published: March 6, 2017

Some of the extreme climate events we are currently experiencing are described in “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” where they are the result of fairy infighting

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