Today, our guest, classicist Hilary Mackie from Rice University,
asks us to quiet our fear of engulfment with stories. The
University of Houston presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them. Our fears about traveling have recently been
heightened in unfamiliar ways, but those fears in themselves are
nothing new. Ships and the sea terrified the ancient Greeks. But
death at sea was not what they feared. The sea was a risk more
threatening than death: that you could die not leaving any
trace, or even anyone to tell the tale of how you died. Death by
drowning meant you got no glory. You simply disappeared; friends
and loved ones lacked even the comfort of In her book on death
in Greek art, Emily Vermeule describes the Greeks' fear that the
sea would eat them: hide them from view by swallowing them down,
devouring them. The metaphor is everywhere in Homer's Odyssey --
the poem that tells how Odysseus faced the dangers of the sea on
his way home