Yeats on the Classical World

Yeats said that the classical world was fundamentally tragic, with the Oedipus myth as the founding myth — the man kills his father and marries his mother. Yeats would have been better off pointing to the myth of Zeus, for that truly is the founding myth of the Olympian order, and it too involves the slaughter of the father by the son — Kronos by Zeus. Christianity is founded on the event of the Son’s utter obedience and submission to the Father, His willingness to allow the Father to slay him . The opposition of classical and Christian civilizations grows from those two stories.