STORIES FOR OUR MOMENT
Greek Tragedies : A Slow Reading Journey
The most timeless stories are also the most timely. Greek tragedies by Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles remain profoundly relevant today as they explore timeless tensions that still define our human experience: the conflict between tradition and innovation, reason and passion, individualism and collective responsibility, and the delicate balance between order and chaos.
These ancient works provide a mirror to examine our contemporary struggles with authority, identity, and the consequences of hubris, while offering cathartic experiences that help us process our own societal traumas and personal challenges.
Through characters who make devastating choices when faced with impossible dilemmas, Greek tragedy illuminates the complexities of moral decision-making in a world where competing values and obligations continue to pull us in different directions, making these millennia-old stories surprisingly effective frameworks for understanding our rapidly changing modern landscape.
“Stories for Our Moment” offers a shorter-run slow reading experience for those who might not be ready for the longer term commitment of our regular pathways, but who would enjoy the benefits that comes from slow reading together with serious readers.
Euripides’ Bacchae: A Slow Reading Journey
Fall 2025: Mondays, September 8 – Sep 22, 2025
Experience the transformative power of unhurried engagement with ancient tragedy
What emerges when we resist the modern impulse toward speed and efficiency? This three-seminar slow reading experience invites you to dwell within Euripides’ final masterpiece—a play that explores the explosive tensions between tradition and innovation, rationality and ecstasy, civilization and nature. Together, we’ll move at a contemplative pace through the text, allowing its complexities and contradictions to fully reveal themselves.
Our Approach:
Walking Pace (Monday, September 8 – Monday, September 22)
Beginning with the play’s opening lines, we’ll read together and proceed deliberately, paying close attention to language, imagery, and dramatic structure.
Rather than rushing to cover the entire work, we’ll prioritize depth over breadth, allowing conversations to unfold organically. We’ll explore the text’s resonance with contemporary struggles between established orders and transformative forces, between restraint and liberation.
While you’ll read the entire play before our first meeting, our in-seminar exploration will move at its own natural rhythm. The conversation moves at its own pace, and has a spontaneity that elicits questions and insights we can’t get in any other way.
Participants are encouraged to draw connections to later parts of the text, enriching our discussion with insights from throughout the work. By the conclusion of our third session, we may not have reached the play’s end—but you will have developed a more profound relationship with this ancient masterpiece than traditional reading approaches allow.
Pathway Structure:
* Weekly Monday seminars at 2:00 PM EST
* Complete reading of the play required before first session
* Line-by-line exploration beginning with the prologue
* Freedom to reference any part of the text during discussions
* Reading materials and translation recommendations provided upon registration
Why Experience Slow Reading of The Bacchae?
In our accelerated world, we rarely permit ourselves the luxury of lingering with a text, especially one as complex as Euripides’ exploration of what happens when the rational confronts the ecstatic. This intentionally unhurried approach creates space for deeper insights, personal connections, and community dialogue about timeless themes that continue to shape our contemporary experience.
By the end of our time together, you won’t simply have “covered” The Bacchae—you will have developed a more intimate relationship with its language, characters, and ideas than ever before.
Why Study The Bacchae Now?
As societies worldwide grapple with accelerating change and cultural polarization, this 2,400-year-old tragedy speaks directly to our moment. The Bacchae dramatizes with brutal clarity what happens when societies cannot integrate new ideas, when traditions become rigid, and when the irrational forces in human nature are denied rather than acknowledged.
Whether you’re interested in Greek tragedy, cultural conflicts, psychological insights, or political philosophy, The Bacchae offers profound perspectives on the perennial tension between freedom and order that continues to shape our world.
Tutors: Briana Saussy + Roxana Zirakzadeh – founders of Symposium San Francisco
Tuition: $100 (Free for subscribers)
Prerequisites: None—all levels of familiarity with Greek literature welcome
Registration: [link]
“Nothing is what it seems to be.” — Euripides, The Bacchae
Join us in discovering how slowing down transforms not just our reading experience, but our understanding of the eternal tensions between order and chaos that continue to define our moment.
