The Weekly · Issue No. 7 · Sunday, 20 September 2026
Issue No. 7
This week's five run from Troy in heavy metal to the succession wars of Westeros and the Mahabharat, by way of Plato and Aristotle on whether justice pays, and Jung and Bergman on the masks we don't take off. The issue closes with a story: a satire of football as religion.
This week The Astyanax passed 30 published writers and 1,000 reads. Thank you for reading them.
Submissions for our first print issue, The Astyanax Quarterly, close on 31 October.
Hector Hallett, Founder & Editor-in-Chief
Literature · Fiction
Second and TenA satire of football as religion, and of the absurdity and danger of zealotry.
Dale Hinnsworth
Literature · Essay
The Messy Yet Parallel Succession Claims in House of the Dragon and MahabharatThe Dance of the Dragons and the Kurukshetra War have more similarities than you would imagine
Adit Chandrachud
Philosophy · Essay
The Eudaimonist Reconciliation of Pragmatic and Ideal in Plato and AristotleThrasymachus argued that injustice pays. Plato and Aristotle answered him, and Aristotle answered him better.
Max John Antoni Juszkiewicz
Classics · Essay
Blood and Fire: Troy in Heavy MetalMetal has spent forty years plundering the Iliad for battle rage and glory. Listen to Blind Guardian's Cassandra, though, and the epic starts telling a different story.
Vlada Kampane
Philosophy · Essay
Jung, Bergman, and the Mask That Never Comes OffJung called the persona the mask we wear to meet the world, and warned against forgetting it's a mask. In an age when the audience never leaves the room, that warning is harder to follow than ever.
Esteban Werner