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Sophocles, Euripides, and the Greek epic poets, historians, and tragedians explore the idea of hamartia. Such an innate character flaw, such as Oedipus’s self-regard or Jason’s obtuseness, can be repressed, but it will inevitably resurface at the most inopportune moment. *** The next step in the slow cycle of classical self-destruction is koros—a greed or overreaching ambition that is the result of hamartia. It thus deludes the apparently successful into believing there will be few consequences to their excess. Koros makes self-reflection impossible. *** The final act in a multistoried Greek tragedy is the advent of Nemesis or divine retribution....

Greek gods and those who doubted them Gregory Elder For the Daily Facts It was a bad day in the year 406 B.C. Euripides, an elderly playwright, was wandering around the palace, skulking in his gloom. For decades he had dedicated himself to the theater and written and directed more than 90 plays, performed before thousands of people. Yet for all his pains, he had won prizes for only three of his dramas, a minuscule number compared to his rivals Sophocles and Aeschylus. More than once, he had been held up to public ridicule by the tart-tongued comedian Aristophanes. In...

The Vatican Library is losing its walls. Its 89,000 historic manuscripts are being made available online for access by scholars world-wide courtesy of EMC. The library, properly known as the Vatican Apostolic Library, is located in the Vatican City and is one of the oldest libraries in the world, established formally in 1475 but thought to have functioned for a long time before that. The library's function is to be a resource for scholars researching history, law, philosophy, science and theology.The Abyss of Hell by Sandro Botticelli in the Vatican Library It stores some 89,000 manuscripts, including 8,900 incunabula, manuscripts...

Oxford University is asking for help deciphering ancient Greek texts written on fragments of papyrus found in Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of images have gone on display on a website which encourages armchair archaeologists to help catalogue and translate them. Researchers hope the collective effort will give them a unique insight into life in Egypt nearly 2,000 years ago... The collection is made up of papyri recovered in the early 20th Century from the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, the so-called "City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish". At the time the city was under Greek rule. Later the Romans settled the...

I am going to shift gears a little bit, so please bear with me. This is a strange post, but one that I think might shed a little light on mystical incense that is the Obama Administration. I need just a little breather from the bread and circuses of a media/government complex that is literally driving America toward the edge of insanity. And so, I am going to entertain myself with my own playful thoughts here. Where would I be without my humor? Honestly though, I can barely write a word. Is this writer’s block? I don’t think so. I...

Classical Greek and Roman literature is being read for the first time in 2,000 years thanks to new technology. The previously illegible texts are among a hoard of papyrus manuscripts. Scholars say the rediscovered writings will provide a fascinating new window into the ancient world. Salvaged from an ancient garbage dump in Egypt, the collection is kept at Oxford University in England. Known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, the collection includes writings by great classical Greek authors such as Homer, Sophocles, and Euripides. Using a technique called multi-spectral imaging, researchers have uncovered texts that include • parts of a lost tragedy...

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure – a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible. Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed. In the past four days alone, Oxford’s classicists have used it to make...