What makes us human? Greek and Roman thinkers were preoccupied with this question. And some of their observations of animals foreshadowed recent findings in the behavioural sciences.
John William Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus, 1903.
Wikimedia Commons
The myth of Narcissus – the beautiful youth who fell in love with his own reflection – has inspired poets, artists and psychoanalysts.
Louise Glück was photographed outside her home in Cambridge, Mass., after being named the 2020 Nobel laureate in literature.
Daniel Ebersole/Nobel Prize Outreach
Stories in Greek mythology on the cycle of nature showing youth, death and rejuvenation can have lessons for us today on how grief changes over time and transforms who we are as people.
Invisible to the naked eye, the work of the wind often goes unnoticed. Yet, for millennia, this unseen force has shaped religion, trade, warfare, culture, science and more.
Surrounded by what resembles a Zoom chorus, lovers Orpheus and Eurydice descend into a digital hellscape, and later try to navigate a ‘new normal’ in their relationship.
(Nanc Price/Edmonton Opera)
Ancient Greece and Rome may have handed down the image of rosy-cheeked Cupids, but their myths about him explore the messier – sometimes scarier – sides of love.
Meet Artemis, the Greek Goddess of chastity, childbirth and the moon.
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There’s a long history in our society of period pain being played down, or just considered “normal”. But there’s plenty of evidence in the historical records that women have always experienced it.
‘The Nativity,’ circa 1406-10, by Lorenzo Monaco.
Heritage Images/Hulton Archive via Getty Images
A scholar of Greek mythology explains the naming of NASA’s missions after mythological figures and why the name Artemis is indicative of a more diverse era of space exploration.
The Goddess Athena appearing to Odysseus to reveal the Island of Ithaca by Giuseppe Bottani.
Wikimedia
A scholar of early Greek classics explains what the myth of the weapon-carrying god of love, Cupid, a child of the gods of love and war, conveys about the pleasures and dangers of desire.
A mythical creature born of a misinterpreted fossil?
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