J N Pratley Mania of Love

Annotation

Plato proclaims two kinds of mania: one arising from disease, the other from love. Clarence, a bipolar classics professor, conjoins them while on sabbatical on the mystical Greek island of Hydra. His love affair with a seductive French waitress becomes pathological when she threatens with blackmail the professor's marriage with his beloved wife. To escape her clutches, he resorts to a violent solution, justified on the ancient beliefs of the poet Archilochus and of death-life transformations by Asklepios, the father of psychiatry. The method is macabre, worthy of a Euripides tragedy, but Clarence, because of his mental condition and classical idealism, represses all memory of his heinous deed. It remains for the inspector from Athens to determine whether Clarence has moral justification or whether he has to pay for his infidelity.