Extreme Reaction

I am reading this book with the amazingly long winded title of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. By "reading" I mean that I have borrowed a copy from the Spy School library and have skimmed it slightly. I've not read enough to give you a summary of its thesis (if you want that, check out a Freaky Trigger post on the book that piqued my interest, together with recollections of someone telling me about the book some years ago). I mention it here just so I can recount an anecdote from it - the story of Phrynicus, who wrote the first tragedy performed in Athens (possibly the first non-comic play performed anywhere in the world). It was about the recent sack of Miletus by the Persians, and was so upsetting to the audience that Athens shut down for a week, and the Athenians ran Phrynicus out of town and burned all copies of his manuscript. Everyone's a critic.