Hi all, I think it is worth considering the ancient "goat song" in this current crisis.
The goat song started out as a dance people did in ancient Greece when sacrificing a goat in order to get the gods' help in a crisis. They danced together and sang words together to help the group "get on the same page." Another aspect was to do the goat-song-dance for the grape harvest, when things were good, more like comedy in that the characters in such settings would survive and laugh rather than die. The main crises in ancient times were plague, and its political sibling, tyranny. These were the topics of the goat-song: Classical Greek τραγῳδία, contracted from trag(o)-aoidiā = "goat song", which comes from tragos = "he-goat" and aeidein = "to sing" (cf. "ode"). Here is one interpretation we might want to consider somewhat: "Anyway, arising from an improvisatory beginning (both tragedy and comedy—tragedy from the leaders of the dithyramb, and comedy from the leaders of the phallic processions which even now continue as a custom in many of our cities), [tragedy] grew little by little, as [the poets] developed whatever [new part] of it had appeared; and, passing through many changes, tragedy came to a halt, since it had attained its own nature." — Poetics IV, 1449a 10–15[18] Cycles don't come to halts, nor do paths, nor do networks. "It is well-known that the 'Age of Pericles' was also the Golden Age of Greek tragedy, whose evolution we can follow from Aeschylus' Persians in 471 BC to Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, staged in 401. It is less well-known that this is also the Golden Age of Greek medicine. The Greek doctor Hippocrates, who was born in 460 BC and died around 370 BC, originated from the island of Cos and came from a family of Aesclepiads. If we may believe Plato, his younger contemporary, by the end of the fifth century his fame as a doctor was already similar to that of Polyctetes of Argos or Phidias of Athens as sculptors." https://brill.com/view/book/9789004232549/B9789004232549-s005.xml All best, Max
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