British Museum to revisit Troy this fall

The legend of Troy has endured for thousands of years – an epic tale of conflict, passion and tragedy. Tread the line between myth and reality in our major autumn show. #Troy Myth and Reality opens 21 November.

On this Athenian drinking cup Achilles sits withdrawn and angry inside his tent,
heavily wrapped in his cloak, as two heralds lead away his prize, the enslaved woman Briseis. 

Encountering myth and naturalism in Philoctetes

This is long and in part goes back over lines already discussed, but from a different angle, trying to clarify something. Feel free to ignore.

In his fine essay on the Philoctetes in The Wound and the Bow, Edmund Wilson notes how isolating the three main characters on a lonely island helps Sophocles get away from the "barbarities, anomalies and absurdities" of the old myths.

"The people of the Philoctetes seem to us more familiar than they do in most of the other Greek tragedies," he writes. The thought echoes that of H.D.F. Kitto who found the language of the play more naturalistic, more consonant with the familiar notes of humans suffering rage, hope, pain and despair. (Greek Tragedy.)

The bleak Lemnian setting amplifies our attention to the words spoken, the nuances of the dialogue. Nonetheless it's not as if Sophocles chooses to do away with the old myths -- he's working with the givens of a highly specific story that features prophecies of old, not unlike the ancient tablet Heracles uses to foresee his future in Women of Trachis.

Wilson seems to find that Sophocles' late work exemplifies a movement toward greater realism accompanied by a downplaying of mythic matters -- as if the playwright were moving towards some sort of 20th century stylistic mode. But is that in fact the case? It might be best to begin by simply observing the co-presence of these two very distinct elements: a direct pathos of human emotion on one hand, and elements taken from high story: a fabulous war of heroes, a sacred bow, a fateful set of conditions that must be met in order for the Greeks to conquer Troy, on the other.

Sophocles succeeds in integrating the naturalistic style with these fraught props -- not an easy task. But he did choose to tell this story, and these ingredients, while mostly in the background, are essential to it.

Why this story? For one thing, it offers something very important to the playwright -- a dramatic discrepancy between agent and effect. As we saw in the Antigone, the plot pivots on a surprise triggered by an immense gap between the proximate cause of the central action and its ultimate effect. A handful of dust sprinkled by a young girl upon her brother's corpse leads inexorably to the obliteration of the house of Creon. Similarly Women of Trachis presents us with the strongest man who ever lived, portrayed in his feeblest moment. Yet in that moment he manages to be an agent of major change while orchestrating his own last rites.

The spectacle of frail human means coupled with fiery gumption and impact beyond the individual fascinated Sophocles. In Philoctetes' story he found yet again a tale that put the bow of Heracles - this mythic agency of historical change - in the arms of a sick, abandoned man who is likened to a stumbling child without a nurse. This joining at the hip of the very small and frail with something very big and powerful forms a pattern in the plays of Sophocles, and the pattern requires for its potency the material of "the old myths" just as much as it does the vocal texture and realism of human vulnerability.

The bow of Heracles never misses its intended target, and its arrows, dipped in Hydra bile, always kill. That is, there is nothing contingent or iffy about this bow - it executes with no element of chance - it is pure necessity. Yet the fact that Philoctetes has the bow appears purely a matter of chance, doesn't it? He happened to encounter the hero building his own funeral pyre. This chance encounter is described in the choral ode that begins with Axion's tale, where the chorus goes on to say,

I have heard a rumor, but never seen with my eyes, how the man who once approached the bed of Zeus was bound upon a [680] swift wheel by the almighty son of Cronus. But of no other mortal do I know, either by hearsay or by sight, that has encountered (συντυγχάνω) a doom so repugnant as this of Philoctetes.

Philoctetes happened to meet Heracles and his own repugnant doom at the same moment - the verb συντυγχάνω contains the word τῠ́χη, chance, fortune, personified as Τυχη, or Fortuna. Philoctetes does what Heracles asks - sets the pyre ablaze, and receives the bow that cannot miss its mark. The tension of the story, however, lies in how not just the arrows, but the bow itself went astray, thanks to the misfortune of Chryse's serpent's bite. That seemingly chance encounter puts the bow and repellent Philoctetes so far outside the theater of war, the calculus of any military strategy, as to be nearly obliterated.

The action of displacing or misplacing the bow is what creates the dramatic tension of the story. (Think of the story as a bowstring being pulled back.) When the Greeks are reminded that Philoctetes and his bow are necessary to victory, they go to recover him, fully aware that they have alienated him completely.

The choral ode actually recounts three meetings. The first is that of Philoctetes and Heracles. The second is the fortune of "coming to meet" Neoptolemus -

But now, after those troubles, he will attain happiness and heartiness in the end [720] because of his meeting (ὑπαντήσας) with this son of a noble race,

ὑπαντήσας connotes an intentional encounter - one "comes to meet" another person - the emphasis is on an intentional act, not a chance meeting.

The third encounter is that of Heracles' apparent apotheosis:

in that very land where, above Oeta's heights, the hero of the brazen shield approached [πλάθω approached, drew near] the gods, illuminated by his father's divine fire.

ἵν᾽ ὁ χάλκασπις ἀνὴρ θεοῖς πλάθει πατρὸς θείῳ πυρὶ παμφαής, Οἴτας ὑπὲρ ὄχθων.

This encounter, if that's the word, is not framed as complete; it takes place outside human space and time. Heracles "drew near" something that humans may not approach. The passage has been remarked on for the fact that Heracles is described as the man with the brazen shield - not the familiar iconography of the lion's skin, bow and club. Heracles seems a bit more like any soldier, any man, requiring a shield to be safe.

With παμφαής - all-radiant, all-brilliant - we onlookers encounter a dilemma. Are we witnessing through the chorus's words transcendental light, or the quite literal fire set by Philoctetes to consume the agonized flesh of Heracles? Is this the fated, necessary, divine illumination of mythic transcendence (not unlike Ixion's eternal wheel of fire), or the natural searing combustion of Oeta's trees? Hard to tell, since this light, all-brilliant, blinds the human eye.

The three encounters of the ode cover the range of possible ways meetings can occur: one appears random, yet sets up the tale we are watching; one seems intentional, and the third, bathed in light, really doesn't appear - if an encounter with the gods does take place, it occurs beyond our ability to see it for ourselves.

And here might lie a clue as to why we might not be correct in seeing Sophocles' "naturalism" as in some way a retreat, or turning away, from myth. Certainly the play's expressive pathos seems more in line with modernity. But instead of resulting from a diminution or demystification of mythic power, it stands in strong tension to it. The chorus begins:

λόγῳ μὲν ἐξήκουσ᾽, ὄπωπα δ᾽ οὐ μάλα, 

I have heard a tale, but never saw with my very eyes,

A moment later it repeats the opposition:

ἄλλον δ᾽ οὔτιν᾽ ἔγωγ᾽ οἶδα κλύων οὐδ᾽ ἐσιδὼν μοίρᾳ 

But of no other mortal do I know, either by hearing or by sight, a doom . . .

Our eyes can take us to the furthest edge of nature. But all of that "realism" gathers force by being set against what we have heard -- the ancient tales of humanity's encounters with the gods. Whether random, intended, or inscrutable, the aural realm of myth with all its "barbarities, anomalies and absurdities" is what gives the sharply observed style of Sophocles' naturalism its curiously modern force and sense.

Heracles still at work

The BBC brings us yet another Heracles. A show in which the images allegorize the achievements of the Russian strongman.

He grapples with the hydra of Western sanctions:

Here, Putin is destroying the coarse "oligarch beasts":

Here he's riding a Crimean ox that's broken away to return to mother Russia:

The participating artists preferred to remain anonymous. More here: The 12 Labours of... Putin.

[Added]: Happy Birthday Mr. Putin

Songs and Letters: Pindar and Ovid

I've come away from our reading of Pindar's Olympian I and Ovid's Heroides I with a stronger and clearer sense of major differences between the Greek ode and the Latin elegiac verse.

The differences run the gamut from choice of theme and tone to formal features such as meter and the level of diction. 

The Ode addresses a god, hero, or man (or all three) in heightened speech, language under the pressure of the Muse. It concerns high exploits, great achievements, along with matters of public conduct, statecraft, and ethics, all couched within a kind of explosion of mythological reference, shifts of thought, time and place so highly charged one sort of has to hang on to the poet's speeding chariot for dear life, and hope to enjoy the ride. 

Pindar never used the same meter twice; he mixed dialects and brought past and present into his Odes -- and though they seem not to obey any rule, they are in fact intricate mirroring tripartite structures of strophes, antistrophes and epodes. And whatever else an ode deals with, it performs the power of voice: poetic creation, rhythm, and utterance:

Golden lyre, rightful joint possession of Apollo and the violet-haired Muses, to which the dance-step listens, the beginning of splendid festivity; and singers obey your notes, whenever, with your quivering strings, you prepare to strike up chorus-leading preludes. [5] You quench even the warlike thunderbolt of everlasting fire. And the eagle sleeps on the scepter of Zeus, relaxing his swift wings on either side, the king of birds; and you pour down a dark mist over his curved head, a sweet seal on his eyelids. Slumbering, he ripples his liquid back, [10] under the spell of your pulsing notes. Even powerful Ares, setting aside the rough spear-point, warms his heart in repose; your shafts charm the minds even of the gods, by virtue of the skill of Leto's son and the deep-bosomed Muses. Pythian I.

Muse playing

In contrast to this high athleticism of the voice in the ode, Ovid's Heroides are letters -- composed, subtle arguments from one who loves to one who is loved. The meter of choice is the elegiac couplet.

Wikipedia:

Each couplet consist of a hexameter verse followed by a pentameter verse. The following is a graphic representation of its scansion. Note that - is a long syllable, u a short syllable, and U is either one long syllable or two short syllables:

- U | - U | - U | - U | - u u | - -

- U | - U | - || - u u | - u u | -

The form was felt by the ancients to contrast the rising action of the first verse with a falling quality in the second. The sentiment is summarized in a line from Ovid's Amores I.1.27: 

"Let my work rise in six steps, fall back in five."

Sex mihi surgat opus numeris, in quinque residat 

The effect is illustrated by Coleridge as:

In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column

In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.

Dido and Aeneas - Thomas Jones

So Dido in the seventh of Ovid's Heroides opens her letter to Aeneas:

Accipe, Dardanide, moriturae carmen Elissae;
     quae legis a nobis ultima verba legi.
Sic ubi fata vocant, udis abiectus in herbis
     ad vada Maeandri concinit albus olor.

Dardanian, receive this song of dying Elissa:
what you read are the last words written by me.
At fate’s call, the white swan, despondent on the grass,
sings, like this, to the waters of Maeander.

Though a queen is writing, this is not public oratory or song, but personal speech imprinted with one woman's emotion, personal history, passionate temperament, and pride of place.

We will want to explore in more detail how each of these forms - ode and epistle - use myth and prior poetry to build meaning. As Penelope used the Iliad, Odyssey and Pindar for her letter, what better text for Dido/Elissa than the epic of Rome?  How does the heroic world of the Greeks and Romans, Trojans and Carthaginians fare when viewed through the lens of Ovid's Heroides?

A few links:

Complete Virgil in English, translated by the irrepressible Tony Kline.
Aeneid - English and Latin (Perseus)
Aeneid Book IV in English (Kline)

Dark wedding: Allusion in Antigone

It was a mere 2,455 years ago (or more) that Antigone had its premier. It's a testament to the formidable problem Sophocles has posed that the other day we consumed nearly our entire time in a lively discussion centering on the question of the political wisdom of Creon.

What's especially curious is that the question of state authority came up as we happened to be reading this famous, strange exchange between Antigone and the chorus that begins with the daughter of Oedipus comparing herself to Niobe:

[823] I have heard with my own ears how our Phrygian guest, the daughter of Tantalus, perished [825] in so much suffering on steep Sipylus—how, like clinging ivy, the sprouting stone subdued her. And the rains, as men tell, do not leave her melting form, nor does the snow, [830] but beneath her weeping brow she dampens her collar. Most like hers is the god-sent fate that leads me to my rest.

The chorus offers the consolation of fame:

[834] Yet she [Niobe] was a goddess, as you know, and the offspring of gods, [835] while we are mortals and mortal-born. Still it is a great thing for a woman who has died to have it said of her that she shared the lot of the godlike in her life, and afterwards, in death.

This provokes Antigone:

[839] Ah, you mock me! In the name of our fathers' gods, [840] why do you not wait to abuse me until after I have gone, and not to my face, O my city, and you, her wealthy citizens? Ah, spring of Dirce, and you holy ground of Thebes whose chariots are many, [845] you, at least, will bear me witness how unwept by loved ones, and by what laws I go to the rock-closed prison of my unheard-of tomb! Ah, misery! [850] I have no home among men or with the shades, no home with the living or with the dead.

The passage has left commentators scratching their heads, and there isn't time now to examine it in detail. Let's note that this is a rare case of a character in tragedy making a literary allusion. Usually the great names of myth are found in the choral odes, where one expects a certain elevated speech. It's not often that a character likens herself to a mythic being.

What's more, the allusion falls on deaf ears. The chorus dwells on the unlikeness, on the fact that Niobe was a demigod, the daughter of Tantalus, then offers Antigone the promise of fame. Antigone, however, apparently sees an utterly different point of congruence between herself and Niobe -- the homelessness of their fates.

Ovid's memorable tale of Niobe depicts a fecund woman who ends orphaning herself, living on as one who is neither dead nor alive, neither tomb nor entombed, an anomaly outside of the binaries of death/life, external/internal.

In Niobe, myth captures an extraordinary fate. The bearer of the seed of Oedipus likens her fate to Niobe's, and apparently the chorus misunderstands the ground of likeness. Of course the very notion of "seed" is a vexed matter in Thebes. Creon himself is a descendant of the original spartoi.

What's clear is that Antigone was destined to be the bearer of the seed of the royal house, but instead, her marriage to the son of Creon turns into a tomb.

At stake, in part, is the weight of this allusion, and perhaps of all allusions in Sophocles. How are they to be read? Antigone calls herself the new Niobe, but what happens is extraordinary: her marriage bed reverses nature. The embrace of bride and groom yields no children, but strangely gives birth to an altered Creon - bereft of children, and therefore of hope of grandchildren, he is rejected by his last son, abandoned to life by Eurydice, and ends in a petrified state that can truly be characterized as a living tomb.

If the chorus fails to "read" Antigone's allusion correctly, it's worth asking how well we manage to read allusions to other myths woven into the odes. The next choral ode will bring three dark tales to light, posing interpretive questions that have bothered commentators for 2455 years.

Sophocles' language seems basic, yet it works at the dark foundations of order, where terror is found, and a profound apprehension that conjoins simplicity and enormity. At this crucial moment in the play, the chorus's inability to read Antigone is foregrounded, and our reading must grapple with doubts as to the capacity of their witness.

No wonder our discussions are lively.

Eros, sophrosyne, myth and the Hippolytus

This group has completed its collective reading of the Hippolytus, so I'll post a few afterthoughts rather than continue with close readings of specific passages. As we turn to the Antigone of Sophocles, it might be worth a moment to look at the "raw material" of myth seized on by the Greek playwrights for their works.

For one thing, the material is hardly raw. The figures of Oedipus, Antigone, Hippolytus, Orestes, Philoctetes, Heracles, Dionysus, the Olympians and so many more are the legacy of a tradition formed, refined and elaborated over hundreds of years. Their stories involve families, cities, fabulous creatures, gods and nature, and situate themselves within a larger tapestry that could exfoliate into variations and permutations upon the tales already woven. Unlike, say, Old Testament stories that provoked infinite layers of commentary and interpretive creativity, but usually not literary variants or emulations, the Greek myths fueled and informed fresh literary and artistic works by generations of men at diverse historical moments.

Each moment found its form: for Pindar and Bacchylides, it was primarily the ode; for Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, it was tragic drama; for Homer and Virgil, it was the epic; for Ovid, the old myths offered a shared language of figures, literary modes and structures -- a lens for thinking about culture, storytelling, history and literature with sophisticated panache.

Any particular myth came already bound within a much larger given body of tales -- elaborate genealogies of gods, cities, nature and men. Some were complex skeins tracing sacred blessings and curses down through generations of a family.

As we leave (close readers never say "finish") the Hippolytus and begin the Antigone it's noteworthy how the core myths are generative. They pose dense porcupine problems, labyrinthine knots. Unlike the detective tales of Law and Order or Sherlock Holmes, they resist resolving into neat sums through logical agility or dogged scientific lab work. The audience leaves with no sense of mastery, no comfort of closure; instead, if anything, it's experienced a kind of intimate acquaintance with intolerable tensions.

Aphrodite

The same antagonisms operative at the opening of Hippolytus are there at the close. Even as the characters turn in agonized perplexity asking why certain destinies have come to them, the audience is spared any such questioning. We get the god's eye view of the matter at the very beginning with Aphrodite's prologue. There's no suspense about what will happen, no mystery as to why it's happening. All the "hooks" and plot devices constitutive of much modern storytelling are tossed aside. What motivates us to stay with such a story? Why go to the theater?

Let's suggest that one way of looking at the Hippolytus is as a struggle between eros and sophrosyne -- an oversimplification for the sake of argument. We might at first think about this rather abstractly, and rather limitedly, as the eternal agon of passion and reason, the power of desire versus the ability of the self to know and govern its realm -- all of which it most certainly is. What the play does, in virtually every line, every turn of plot, every speech and response, is offer deeper, richer, more comprehensive and more granular perspectives upon that inherent conflict. Drawn along by the action, we gather the implications of the mythos, and grapple with its complications.

Perhaps we acquire a more complex sense of the nature of love and the astonishing range of its effects. The shaft that leaps from eros' bow to Phaedra's heart to Theseus's pain and rage to the entangled death of the future hero-king is intensified and enriched through the prism of each character's acts and interactions.

Artemis

Perhaps we gather a deeper sense of the strategies of self-possession available to us -- from the curious rapture of Hippolytus to the devious authority of Phaedra to the "laid back" approach of the Nurse.  Are these viable solutions or illusory accommodations? Nothing is quite what we would decree as the ideal for our prim and proper world. Turn to the virginal opponent of eros and you find an arrow coming the other way. No simple, clear, coherent solution to the war of eros and sophrosyne stands readily at hand.

The play doesn't ignore the realm of the polis. At the moment he covers his son's face, Theseus says:

ὦ κλείν᾽ Ἀθῆναι Παλλάδος θ᾽ ὁρίσματα,
1460οἵου στερήσεσθ᾽ ἀνδρός.

Glorious Athens, Pallas' realm,
what a man you have been bereft of!

The line grows in power if we remember that this was the father who had seen his son first as a bookish self-indulgent child, then as a fiendishly deceitful rapist, but never as a man -- a man worthy of the admiration of Theseus, the greatest Athenian hero. The scene gains more yet if we happen to catch, only here, the shadow of Athena in the bottomless awareness of the loss to Athens in the untimely, undeserved, incommensurable death of this man.

==========

Shortly before dying, Hippolytus calls on Zeus:

Ζεῦ Ζεῦ, τάδ᾽ ὁρᾷς;
ὅδ᾽ ὁ σεμνὸς ἐγὼ καὶ θεοσέπτωρ,
1365ὅδ᾽ ὁ σωφροσύνῃ πάντας ὑπερσχών,
προῦπτον ἐς Ἅιδην στείχω, κατ᾽ ἄκρας
ὀλέσας βίοτον, μόχθους δ᾽ ἄλλως
τῆς εὐσεβίας
εἰς ἀνθρώπους ἐπόνησα.

Zeus, Zeus, do you mark this? Here am I, the holy and god-revering one, the man who surpassed all men in σωφροσύνῃ [self-control, temperance], seeing plainly ahead my course to Hades. My life is utterly destroyed; useless have been my hard labors of piety towards men.

He calls upon Zeus, but he might as well address us, the audience, we are on the level of the gods even as we see ourselves in the dying hero. The death he now foresees is the death Aphrodite foretold to us at the beginning. Theater as theoria. The strangeness of a day in which the lives of three great ones (μεγάλων) are lost and a nascent civilization careens off course under the serene sky and eye of Zeus doesn't get less enigmatic, but rather more, on closer scrutiny. Deeper insight into the struggle of eros and sophrosyne provides no practical nostrum with which we could build an optimistic program (e.g., the "power of positive thinking") for a better tomorrow.

This mode of myth is unlike what's meant when we say "myth" today --  a story that we think some deluded folks believe, but which others, namely we sage ones, know to be untrue. We have the closure and managerial composure to rest assured we know better.

When a noted historian recently was asked what he thought was the "most damaging myth in America today," his response was, "the idea of American exceptionalism."

Unlike the tale of, say, Thebes, exceptionalism yields little upon reflection; it's an idle phantasm at the farthest remove from myth. Myths don't pretend to solve our problems -- they are our problems, knots torn from the world's heart, made incandescently palpable to a certain ungrasping contemplation.