Electricity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A study of early modern physics

Oedipal revolt present in Homer produced the creative tensions in Greek, and especially Athenian culture. "Both tragedy and democracy are impossible when all authority is seen as good and blind obedience to authority is considered a high virtue." In the end, Plato joined Homer's condemnation of the revolt by proposing an ideal system that would produce fathers so virtuous that revolt would be unnecessary. And the old ambiguous stories, such as Cronus' castration of his father, need not even be told any longer. What had happened in the archaic and classical periods was "not the transformation of a shame and glory culture into a guilt and conscience culture," rather transformation "into one in which shame and guilt, glory and conscience, would coexist and struggle against each other. In cultural terms, the final resolution of that conflict has yet to be accomplished." In this way Sagan addresses the current discussions that derive from E. R. Dodds. Sagan offers readings of tragedy which emphasize tyranny and justice within the family as the prototype for political values. He finds that the tragic poets do write scenes of reconciliation, but fail to convince in the way that, e.g., those of Lear and Cordelia or Joseph and his brothers do. "Something in the Greek mind seemed to withdraw when faced with the problem of making people love eaah other after they had held each other in hatred. The hatred in these plays is always believable, the love which is supposed to conquer the hatred is vague or spoiled." He finds a series of negative pronouncements about human nature in Thucydides, and finds that Euripides feebly objects to the attitudes that Thucydides exhibits. I find Sagan's readings compelling. As a student of Classical history and literature Sagan is not scholarly, in the sense that he does not acknowledge and discuss authoritative interpretations that differ from his own, but in the end that is of little moment. He has used good sources and has gone beyond them in ways that should be of use even to those who dispute his readings of individual works, so long as they admit the validity of the general approach. Is there an Oedipal complex which is collective, societal, as a result of shared values? Can the Hebrew-Christian God-the-Father compete with the Greek pantheon for parenting, and is it meaningful so to discuss civilizations? I recommend the book as an interpretive manifesto. …