“Crete rising out of the waves; Pasiphaë, cruelly fated to lust after a bull, and privily covered; the hybrid fruit of that monstrous union—the Minotaur, a memento of her unnatural love.” Virgil, Aeneid (trans. Day-Lewis) As all good legends must, the mythic cycle of Knossos takes place in a palace rife with treachery. Many of…
Tag: Ancient
The Birthplace of Legend
The island of Crete is the birthplace of millennia of mythology. As the stepping stone between Africa and Europe, European civilization began on the narrow island, both literally and mythologically. According to legend, the first inhabitants on the island sprang from Zeus’ coupling with Europa, who gave the continent her name. Looking to the archaeological…
The Bronze Age Pompeii
Situated squarely between mainland Greece, Turkey, and Crete, the Cycladic Islands sat at the heart of the Bronze Age Mediterranean world. The spiral-shaped volcanic island of Thera (now Santorini)—the southernmost of the Cycladic Islands and the closest to Crete—was home to the city of Akrotiri, comfortably nestled atop a rocky cliff face. Akrotiri was a…
Poetry: Ashes and an Arrow
A Brief Disclaimer For the sake of literary analysis, I’m going to discuss Achilles here as if he is one single character. In reality, there are hundreds of Achilles (Achilleses?), as each depiction takes pieces of others, and adds their own additions; all influenced by the author’s own culture and biases. For a deeper dive…
Tracing the Myth of Achilles
Written by Carrinna Muncy “Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath of great Achilles, son of Peleus.” This is the first line of Homer’s Iliad, which sets the tone of the epic. The Iliad is a story of Achilles’s rage and the consequences of it, but Achilles’s story extends far beyond Homer’s epic. So, where does…
A Crash Course on Ancient Delaware
What comes to mind when you think of prehistoric civilizations in North America? The Aztec pyramids in Mexico? Or maybe the cities carved into stone cliff faces in Colorado? While those are stunning examples of pre-modern architecture (in the most literal sense of the term), there is one region of the continent that is often…