ABSTRACT
As numerous contributors to this book have emphasized, ancient Greek culture was obsessed with vision as the primary sensory means of accessing the world. Such “ocularcentrism” was encoded in the Greek language itself: the most common word for “I know”, oida, is a perfect form from the verbal root id-, which means “to see”. Likewise, the expression “to look upon the light” was a euphemism for simply being alive, in the same way that (as Jeremy Tanner and Susanne Turner have already noted in this book) the underworld was characterized by darkness and obscurity – a place where one could no longer see or be seen. 1 In Greek linguistic and cultural parlance, to know is to have seen, to live is to look and to die is to be overcome by darkness.
