Embattled: How Ancient Greek Myths Empower Us to Resist Tyranny

An incisive exploration of the way Greek myths empower us to defeat tyranny.

As tyrannical passions increasingly plague twenty-first-century politics, tales told in ancient Greek epics and tragedies provide a vital antidote. Democracy as a concept did not exist until the Greeks coined the term and tried the experiment, but the idea can be traced to stories that the ancient Greeks told and retold. From the eighth through the fifth centuries BCE, Homeric epics and Athenian tragedies exposed t...