![]() ![]() In the twentieth century, the Greeks’ cast of characters was resurrected by Freud and his followers as metaphors in a new post-Christian orthodoxy. ![]() ![]() This was before Christian imagery engraved into our hearts the devoted Madonna and child, and the tough but loving Father of His Son and of the rest of us. Their myths and plays were full of horrific parent-child relationships, from Zeus violently deposing Chronos, to Agamemnon slaying his only daughter, to Medea baking her boys into a pie to get back at their father, to the shocking fates of Oedipus and his immediate relatives. Many of us were raised on the treacly offerings of American television series such as Leave it to Beaver and The Partridge Family, in which fathers were strong, mothers were kind, and their offspring might be charming or goofy or even rascally, but were always healthy and, ultimately, good.Īs usual, the ancient Greeks had a clearer fix on things. The relationship between parents and children is idealised and sentimentalised in popular culture, or at least it used to be before Hollywood zeroed in on the teenage market and started to present children and childlike adults behaving badly. ![]()
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