Geometries of desire: Anne Carson, Women of Trachis

A slender volume by a close reader. Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet culls superb lines from the entire corpus of Greek literature on the subject of Eros, and ponders them with the mind of a poet and the knowledge of a teacher of ancient Greek. She speaks of the divided soul, of love as lack, and is particularly suggestive when it comes to staged erotic triangles.

In Sophocles' Women of Trachis, triangles proliferate:


                           Achelous                           Heracles                          Hyllus



                                                  Deianira                             Iole



                                                                    Nessus