What do Greek gods, pagan rites, cubist paintings, and novels that broke the rules have in common? More than you might think.

“On or about December 1910,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “human character changed.” And yet the artists of that new century kept reaching back for the oldest stories on earth. Join librarians Flannery, our classicist, and Tara, our modernist, for an illustrated lecture in two voices. Homer’s Odyssey becomes a day in Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Stravinsky’s ballet about a pagan human sacrifice starts a riot in Paris. Oedipus opens the door to Freud’s unconscious. Picasso turns the Minotaur into a figure of desire and violence, and Martha Graham dances Medea and Jocasta into the modern body. Meanwhile, in Fascist Italy, Mussolini pressed ancient Rome into uniform.

We’ll trace myth, epic, and tragedy into the newest work of the twentieth century, and ask why a generation whose motto was “make it new,” kept reaching for the oldest things it could find. Whose past did they think they were taking?