The legacy and models of Greek and Roman antiquity have permeated Western culture, articulating, if elusively, the essence of being human. The “classics” offered archetypal representations of the human condition – its passions, its potential for heroism and baseness, its social and political nature, and its historical consciousness. The twentieth century revealed its affinity for the classical past in Freud's Oedipus complex, Jean Anouilh's resurrection of the myth of Antigone as a figure of resistance, Toni Morrison's reworking of the figure of Medea in Beloved, Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, and beyond. The persisting influence of ancient culture in the contemporary world is all the more striking because of the precipitous decline in the knowledge of ancient languages even among the best-educated. Today, a passing remark that the entire world of thought is either Plato or Aristotle will predictably draw blank stares in the classrooms of elite colleges and universities; among any two hundred random college students, as few as five may have heard of Oedipus. The Ancients' philosophies of history or practice and acceptance of slavery have largely vanished from general knowledge – even if many of their representations of human nature persist in culture, often unrecognized. Such was not the case in the slaveholding South.