"What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us About Grief" by Teju Cole

Sometimes, art precedes life. The word “landscape,” for instance, originally meant a painting, and only later also the land itself. In a similar way, “tragedy” originated onstage, as a dramatic form, before acquiring the more general meaning of a devastating or unfortunate situation. What we now think of as Greek tragedy is a relatively small corpus from the fifth century B.C., fewer than three dozen plays from the hundreds that were produced over the course of that century. Among the tragedians, there are extant works from only three: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

You can read more from The New York Times here.