Brian Thill

It's time once again for a regularly scheduled break from social media so that I can get various writing projects and other urgent accumulated tasks done in these dog days of summer.

In the meantime, and in solidarity: Be well!

you’re the William T. Vollmann of academia

Famine under way in Gaza, UN-backed experts say, as war death toll passes 60,000 IPC says ‘worst-case scenario of famine’ is playing out as it calls for urgent ceasefire to alleviate ‘widespread starvation’

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

over decades of reading, plot has remained the thing that interests me least of all

A colleague has to meet with the university’s Office of General Counsel who want edits to their program’s website that basically amount to deleting every instance of the word “Black”

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This Check out One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This - <b><i>NEW YORK TIMES </i>BESTSELLER&nbsp;&bull; SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 PALESTINE BOOK AWARDS&nbsp;&bull;&nbsp;From award-winning nove...

More and more this seems like the book of the year both because it's wonderful and because its message is so crystal clear. bookshop.org/p/books/one-...

I can tell you every person with a conscience is broken right now, especially Palestinians outside of gaza. We will never overcome this trauma.

"(Note: By the time I finished writing this piece, another 31 Palestinians seeking aid were killed by Israeli forces.)"

YouTube video by Ozzy Osbourne OZZY OSBOURNE - "Mama, I'm Coming Home" (Official Video)

This may not be the best Ozzy song of all time, but it is the best stripped-down and purely distilled 1990s Ozzy song of all time.

helpful genealogy chart on back of shirt (not shown)

After 3 months and 129 posts of complete immersion in every existing Greek tragedy, the epic thread has now concluded. For those of you who'd like to start at the beginning, I have in proper ancient fashion provided the final post (#129) right here. Now that you know the ending, you can begin!

Thank you!

From a good, thoughtful thread about ancient Greek tragedies

Thanks for this thread & effort—I have really enjoyed following along. Was lucky enough to vacation in Sicily a couple weeks ago and visited the theater in Siracusa where Aeschylus supposedly staged a few plays (and where the Lennon book I mentioned a while back is set). Gotta read the Oresteia now!

It's great! It's also painful in the sense that this is the *only* trilogy that has survived from antiquity. The ghosts of all those lost plays and trilogies stalk the background of the thread.

In real life, there remains the possibility of transformation, growth, and even wisdom. In these plays, such virtues only ever arrive belatedly, after the catastrophe. In these plays it is always too late to set things right. But we can learn from them; we do not have to live in them.

/END

And yet, over and over again, one can hear in these plays the opposing voices, crying out against injustice. One can see people taking a heroic stand, using their last breath to continue to make their voices of compassion and reason heard above the din of misinformation and the rush of blood.

128/

It has been illuminating, to say the least, to spend three months reading about ancient violence, divine catastrophe, petty vengeance, tyrannical bloodlust, deadly hubris, xenophobic rage, rampant misogyny, and a widespread feeling among everyday people of absolute powerlessness and doom.

127/

The epic grandeur, compressed power, and masterful, terrible clarity in Sophocles; the audacious, bewildering, maddening mercurial nature of Euripides. In the end it's impossible to say which is "better." Better and worse are false conceits, empty categories; and yet I've used them throughout.

126/

However!

There's something in the works of Euripides—not just his major works, but also a number of his "lesser" works—that just crackles in a way that the works of his peers often don't. There's more brashness, fire, strangeness in him. He would've been the one I'd most like to have known.

125/

If pressed, I would probably say that one of the reasons I hold the works of Sophocles in such high esteem is that he's usually much better at plotting, at tension, at elevated moments of terror, pity, anguish, and recognition. He's the most refined craftsman of the three, in my view.

124/

Further, when we consider that something like 18 Euripides plays survive, while only seven that Sophocles wrote, it's clear that S's batting average obliterates the competition. Two of his plays began at the top of the list and nothing, I mean nothing, toppled them at any stage.

123/

A few closing observations: if we look at my top twelve, two are from Aeschylus, five from Euripides, and five from Sophocles. So Aeschylus is my least favorite playwright of the three. And yet this body of work is unthinkable without his ORESTEIA trilogy, which I broke apart in the rankings!

122/

29. THE SUPPLIANT WOMEN
30. CHILDREN OF HERACLES
31. SEVEN AGAINST THEBES
32. THE PHOENICIAN WOMEN

These rankings are of course unassailable; they constitute an ironclad guarantee of quality and judgment. At no point was I operating in darkness or ignorance. Place your trust in my authority!

121/

14. THE WOMEN OF TRACHIS
15. ORESTES
16. LIBATION BEARERS
17. ELECTRA (Sophocles)
18. ELECTRA (Euripides)
19. ION
20. ANDROMACHE
21. HIPPOLYTUS
22. PROMETHEUS BOUND
23. MEDEA
24. IPHIGENIA AMONG THE TAURIANS
25. RHESUS
26. THE SUPPLIANT MAIDENS
27. HECUBA
28. ALCESTIS

(cont'd)

120/

THE FINAL LIST
All 32 Greek tragedies ranked, from best to worst:

1. OEDIPUS THE KING
2. ANTIGONE
3. THE BACCHAE
4. THE TROJAN WOMEN
5. IPHIGENIA IN AULIS
6. AJAX
7. PHILOCTETES
8. AGAMEMNON
9. EUMENIDES
10. OEDIPUS AT COLONUS
11. HERACLES
12. HELEN
13. THE PERSIANS

(cont'd)

119/

In what follows, then, I will supply (for anyone out there who may care) my final ranking of all thirty-two extant Greek tragedies, followed by a few summary observations and concluding thoughts. Thank you for your indulgence!

118/

Though the stories told in both AJAX and PHILOCTETES are in some sense "minor" narratives in relation to the far grander perennial subject of the Trojan War and its many aftermaths and variants, I feel that they are far more complex and quietly moving than many other more canonical tragedies.

117/

Meanwhile, PHILOCTETES (drawing on one of the strangest episodes from Greek myth) delves even further into the catastrophic destruction of men's souls and characters in the aftermath of war. Male camaraderie sours to disloyalty, betrayal. Instead of glorious death, loneliness. Miserable decay.

116/

This play also has a deeply ironic viewpoint on war, military heroism, glory in death, and trauma. As with Clytemnestra's incredible speeches in the ORESTEIA on a similar range of subjects, Ajax's endless madness and despair cut through a lot of the culture's valorization of male violence.

115/