ABSTRACT
Distinguishing the nature of good and evil is essential to all narrative forms. Narrating wrongdoing is as primal as humanity itself. Paleolithic humans recited didactic tales, probably around a campfire, that taught lessons about good and evil. Within recorded history, the Hebrew Bible laid out God’s essential righteous truths by chronicling His retribution against the iniquitous violators of those truths. In a like fashion, the ancient Greeks wrote plays and poems driven by the supposition that drama—chronicling, in a public setting, an engaging narrative—recites tales of tension and conflict, and hence, transgression and retribution. Tales of deviance and its punishment have served as morality lessons for many thousands of years; they continue to do so today.
