The death of King Agamemnon

πολλῶν πάροιθεν καιρίως εἰρημένων 
τἀναντί᾽ εἰπεῖν οὐκ ἐπαισχυνθήσομαι.  

Much have I said before to serve my need 
and I shall feel no shame to contradict it now.  1372-73

These are the opening words spoken by Clytemnestra as the palace doors open, and the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra move forward so the entire arena of spectators in the theater can see what's happened.

Works spoken καιρίως -- "to serve my need" in Smyth's translation -- are the specialty of the rhetorician -- words twisted to the service of one particular moment and willed intent, then discarded as mere words.

ὡς μήτε φεύγειν μήτ᾽ ἀμύνεσθαι μόρον, 
ἄπειρον ἀμφίβληστρον, ὥσπερ ἰχθύων, 
περιστιχίζω, πλοῦτον εἵματος κακόν. 

That he should not flee nor keep off the end, 
an endless net around as to fish
I threw round, fatal wealth garment.

Here I twisted Smyth's translation to track more faithfully Aeschylus's highly packed lines. Most translators "unpack" the sense to a more familiar order. Here's how Smyth actually put it:

Round him, as if to catch a haul of fish, I cast an impassable net—fatal wealth of robe—so that he should neither escape nor ward off doom

There's no claim here that mine is better. The more of Smyth I see, the more I appreciate his tenacity.

I've created a play on words that is not in the original - where mine says:

    . . . nor keep off the end, 
an endless net . . .

I wish it were there, because the word that I render as endless is apeiron, i.e., ἄπειρον -- the word used by the philosopher Anaximander to invoke the unbounded. The Infinite.*

A few lines earlier, Clytemnestra spoke of

the contest of an ancient feud, pondered by me of old,

οὐκ ἀφρόντιστος πάλαι νείκης παλαιᾶς ἦλθε  1377-78

Twice she uses πάλαι -- "ancient" -- the quarrel is ancient, as is, more literally, her "not unmindfulness" of it.

Clytemnestra weaves her much pondered words around the dead Agamemnon and his prophetess-slave. They are rich, dark, unbounded, like the deed she takes credit for. Indeed, she's so plain in her desire for all to know "I did this" that the contrast with her earlier veil of lies and misdirections can be unsettling. After what we just learned, how can we trust anything she says, including her proud "confession"?

I don't want to get into an endless debate about "did she or didn't she?" --- the point here is that by negating everything she's said up to now, and then coming straight out with unequivocal statements, Clytemnestra jolts us into an awareness, a distrust of predication that lingers even as she claims to speak the truth. This is fitting, that with the king lying dead before our eyes, the truth from now on comes wrapped in a rich, infinite garment from which there is no escape for fish or king.

No wonder the chorus wonders:

We are shocked at your tongue, how bold-mouthed you are,  

θαυμάζομέν σου γλῶσσαν, ὡς θρασύστομος

If Cassandra is doomed to speak truth that will not be taken as true (as Simon Goldhill astutely notes), Clytemnestra's marvelous mouth, after ending the prophetess's speaking, cannot be disbelieved. In speaking, she undoes the possibility of speaking truth.

*ἄπειρος (B), ον, (πεῖραρ, πέρας)

A.boundless, infinite, “σκότος” Pi.Fr. 130.8; “τὸν ὑψοῦ τόνδ᾽ ἄ. αἰθέρα” E.Fr.941; ἤπειρον εἰς ἄ. ib.998; of number, countless,“πλῆθος” Hdt.1.204; “ἀριθμὸς ἄ. πλήθει” Pl.Prm.144a; “ἄ. τὸπλῆθος” Id.R.525a, al.; “εἰς ἄ. τὴν ἀδικίαν αὐξάνειν”Id.Lg.910b; “χρόνος ἄ.” OGI383.113 (i B.C.): Comp. “-ότερος”Dam.Pr.50, Phlp.in Mete.17.15; τὸ ἄ. the Infinite, as a first principle, Arist.Ph.203a3, etc.; esp. in the system of Anaximander, D.L.2.1, etc.; but τὰ ἄπειρα individuals, opp. τὰεἴδη, Arist.Top.109b14, cf. Metaph.999a27, al.; ἄπειρος, opp. πεπερασμένος, Ph.202b31; εἰς ἄ. ἰέναι, προϊέναι, ἥκειν, etc., APo.81b33, Ph.209a25, EN1113a2, etc.; [“γῆ] ἐπ᾽ ἄπειρονἐρριζωμένη” Str.1.1.20; also, indefinite, “ὕλη” Stoic.2.86.

2. in Trag., freq.of garments, etc., in which one is entangled past escape, i.e. without outlet,“ἀμφίβληστρον” A.Ag.1382; “χιτών” S.Fr.526; “ὕφασμα” E.Or.25.

3. endless, i.e. circular, ἀ. δακτύλιος a simple hoop-ring, = ἄλιθος (Poll. 7.179), Arist.Ph.207a2; cf. ἀπείρων (B) 1.3. Adv. -ρως, θρυφθῆναι into an infinite number of fragments, Id.Pr.899b16.

Jarring note, asymptote: Par. 29

The last canto before the Empyrian presents artistic as well as interpretive challenges. Paradiso 29 opens in a heightened moment, right before the pilgrim and his guide leave the Created world. And it speaks of some of the highest things, as well as several of the lowest.

If one steps back from the interpretive musings of the commentators, the canto exhibits odd choices on the level of style and narration. It deals with weighty matters, including

• how, when, and why Creation occurred;
• the first moment of the angels' existence;
• the fall of Satan and his followers, and 
• the relation of grace and merit, intellect and affect, with regard to the angels who didn't fall. 

Each of these moments could have filled its own canto (or more, if you're Milton). Instead, this extraordinary matter is stated in summary form by Beatrice in a calm, authoritative manner. The sublime opening of Genesis is elided, none of the acts of creation, pride and fall are dramatized. Dante chose to move quickly and in summary fashion through this material, instead lavishing poetic exuberance on the image of equilibrium that heads the canto - the myth of Latona and the lights in our sky.

One needs to consider the reasons for such a choice. Recall the rich creation of the beasts in Paradise Lost. Surely Dante entertained such potent options, but in the end seems to have preferred a kind of askesis -- sacrificing poetic sublimity for something else. Why, and what something?

In terms of narrative arc, a problem loomed. If he took the time and space here to dazzle us with the way it all began, there'd be precious little room for the Empyrean. Plus, a heightened account of the Creation could weaken the impact of that final climactic scene. Narrative art necessitated something modest here, though the content involves big things.

There might be another reason as well. Throughout this canto (excluding the opening image), Beatrice is the sole speaker. If one were to graph her tone, a curious change would be noticeable. The descriptions of Creation and the angels' first moments are presented in a serene mode that bears none of the emotional or intellectual excitement of human witness. Beatrice is recounting what she has been given to see in the divine vision for a long, long time. Interestingly, Dante the pilgrim, who often describes his craving for knowledge as physical need - thirst, desire, etc. -- is silent. It's as if he's reaching the capacity to take in - to see -- what Beatrice sees, and to do so calmly, deeply, completely. Speaker and auditor share the wonders of origin in dispassionate, apodictic tranquility.

Suddenly, that spell gives way. Beatrice launches into a far more engaged diatribe against, among other things, poor readers, showy, self-aggrandizing preachers, fanciful and bogus interpretive curlicues performed for the sake of local adulation, and profound acts of fraud perpetrated by porcine churchmen in the act of peddling fake indulgences, which acts exploit and encourage the ignorance of their flocks.

She ticks off vivid examples of presumptuous readers spinning elaborate explanations of events told in the Gospels:

One sayeth that the moon did backward turn,
  In the Passion of Christ, and interpose herself
  So that the sunlight reached not down below; 

And lies;                (29:97-100)

A palpable gasp runs through the commentaries at this take-down of revered teachers: Dionysus, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas. It's suggested that mente in Italian of the day might just have meant "erred." Still, it's a barb, and rather acute.

But this sort of learned misreading bothers Beatrice less than the "fables" (favole) spewed forth from the pulpits, filling the preachers' flocks with wind:

Now men go forth with jests and drolleries
  To preach, and if but well the people laugh,
  The hood puffs out, and nothing more is asked.

But in the cowl there nestles such a bird,
  That, if the common people were to see it,
  They would perceive what pardons they confide in, 

For which so great on earth has grown the folly,
  That, without proof of any testimony,
  To each indulgence they would flock together. 

By this Saint Anthony his pig doth fatten,
  And many others, who are worse than pigs,
  Paying in money without mark of coinage.

Beatrice here is working up a lather -- the endless varieties of deforming the Word, using it to get laughs, or nice meals, or money -- exercise her in a way that seems out of place. Consider the context: We're nearly at the edge of time and space, and instead of looking back with some cumulative, totalizing gaze -- as we saw the pilgrim do twice, in cantos 22 and 27 -- we get a sardonic lambasting of hypocritical scumbags. It feels jarring.

Dante (the poet) never seems anything but sure-handed. One can look at virtually any scene, any tercet in the entire Commedia and find a mature artist who knows exactly what's called for at every metric step. Yet here, as the pilgrim is about to exit the created world, that masterful balance seems to be jolted. We've dashed through some of the biggest questions of existence, then excoriated a bunch of Boccaccian scoundrels at nearly the last instant before the pilgrim is ripped Marsyas-like from the sheath of his muscles, tendons, and skin.

Within the larger movement of the narrative, something seems off. Where is the reassuring sense of closure, the triumphal achievement, the anticipatory excitement that one might expect here at the asymptotic edge? Has Dante finally missed a beat?

Or, is this disequilibrium, this apparent loss of total control -- both on the part of Dante's serene mediatrix, and of the text itself -- precisely the right thing? Nothing is more obvious in terms of tone and style than that this canto began with the most exquisitely balanced series of binary oppositions -- a polished classical vision of a totally symmetrical system in the moment of ineluctable eclipse. But we're leaving that, and doing so in jangled, heated discord. What if that apparent dislocation of tone and control, from a certain angle, is entirely the point?

One thing seems clear: the magnificent picture of equilibrium that opens this canto is not the model Beatrice follows. She herself calls her tirade a digression, pulls up short, and returns us to a contemplative moment that deserves more attention than it perhaps has received. She turns us from the fat fraudulent friars to consider the relation of "the act of conception" to love and sweetness:

 Onde, però che a l'atto che concepe segue
l'affetto, d'amar la dolcezza 
diversamente in essa ferve e tepe.  

Vedi l'eccelso omai e la larghezza 
de l'etterno valor, poscia che tanti 
speculi fatti s'ha in che si spezza,
uno manendo in sé come davanti.” 

Hence, inasmuch as on the act conceptive
  The affection followeth, of love the sweetness
  Therein diversely fervid is or tepid. 

The height behold now and the amplitude
  Of the eternal power, since it hath made
  Itself so many mirrors, where 'tis broken,
One in itself remaining as before."     (29:139-145)

Another post will consider the resonance of this last image in light of the extraordinary gamut run by this canto, its tranquility and febrile censoriousness, and ponder whether that seeming lapse in decorum and control might serve an unexpected artistic purpose.

The torque of Pride

When Dante crosses the threshold into Purgatory proper and hears the door swing shut, he speaks of the one thing that could never be excused - looking back:

Poi fummo dentro al soglio de la porta
che 'l mal amor de l'anime disusa,
perché fa parer dritta la via torta,

sonando la senti' esser richiusa;
e s'io avesse li occhi vòlti ad essa,
qual fora stata al fallo degna scusa? 

When we had crossed the threshold of the door
Which the perverted love of souls disuses,
Because it makes the crooked way seem straight, 

Re-echoing I heard it closed again;
And if I had turned back mine eyes upon it,
What for my failing had been fit excuse?   (Purg. 10.1-6)

No possible excuse for someone who has been advised not to look back, no matter how strong the temptation. Dante, the new Orpheus, passes the threshold safely and successfully. This is only one of several thresholds, however - instead of assuring the safe return of his Eurydice to mortal life, obeying the order to not look back gives Dante hope of seeing his Beatrice at some future moment, when he is fit to experience her transhumanized form.

One way of understanding a constitutive difference between the canticles, then, could be one's relation to hope:

Inferno:       hope forever lost.
Purgatorio:  hope actively propelling one ahead
Paradiso:     hope substantiated

This small scheme will be subject, of course, to our reading of the Paradiso, which is about to begin. I want to bring up one other thing about the Purgatorio as we get to that new threshold, and it's contained in the snippet quoted above.

che 'l mal amor de l'anime disusa, 

perché fa parer dritta la via torta,

 the threshold (soglia) . . .

that souls' bad love disuses
because it makes the crooked path seem straight.

Entering the terrace of Pride, the poet lays down an apparent law of the human condition: when we desire wrongly, that causes us to see as direct what is in fact crooked, or indirect.

The narrator here posits a turning, or torque, of the soul by which what it sees, and how it sees - cognition - is skewed by what (and how) it wants. Where Plato's soul just needed to be turned around and ascend to see the Good in order to want it, this offers a more Augustinian view. One cannot see straight until one's love (will) has turned toward the Good. The will is what is bound, imprisoned, and the terraces of penitence are about liberating it from its false and deviant loves.

The complex path of discipline, edification, and challenge that the pilgrim goes through before Virgil can "crown and mitre" him as a freely willing self over himself should be kept in view as one enters Paradise.

It's a path with its own complications. I'll just briefly point to one. In the same canto (10) of Purgatorio, before they encounter the Proud souls bearing their pedestals, Dante and Virgil see three narratives depicted on the terrace wall, famously described as visibile parlare: The three tales are the Annunciation, the story of Uzzah and David and Michal, and the tale of Trajan and the widow.

Contemporary commentators including Robert Hollander and Nicola Fosca have noted some complications of the tales -- for example, that the angel's appearing to Mary, which bears the hope of salvation to everyone born after Christ, carries a sense of doom to Virgil, the poet of the 4th Eclogue, whose prophecy of a savior to be born did not save him from Limbo.

Hollander also wonders whether the Proud souls, crushed under the weight of their stones, can even see these storied walls - are the walls inclined so one can see from a very low angle, he and others ask.

Another point that seems relevant is that the first sin, the one upon which all other sins feed, requires those carrying their pedestals to read from their low and oblique angle, over and over again, three tales that, in a very real sense, defy easy understanding. One might quite easily see an image of the Annunciation, but does that mean that one in fact understands it? What would "understanding" mean here?

And if the Annunciation is problematic, the tale of Uzzah poses its own difficulties. Here's a guy leading the oxen that are bearing the Ark of the covenant, and the Ark totters, seeming about to fall. He reaches out his hand - one can easily presume it's an automatic reflex - and is struck dead for presuming to do something he was not tasked to do. Is this readily comprehensible? Or must one go round the mountain several thousand times before it begins to make sense? This is of course about the automatonic nature of our drives, desires, and thoughts - these things we are persuaded we simply control.

The tale of Trajan also runs counter to common sense (as does, of course, the spectacle of David) and all military protocol.

If we gloss over these tales (as I'm doing here), it could be at our peril. If we presume we have read them aright, we might be submitting our qualifications for spending a good amount of time on this very terrace.

Why point this up with emphasis? Let's remember that these works, Dante avers, are produced by an Artist that surpasses Polycletus and Nature itself - making the question of distinguishing real from fake, fact from fiction, a real, not a rhetorical, question. And let's remember that the basic element of Pride is in fact to think something is straight that is not. The torque of Pride and the torque of simplistic reading are not, in this canto, unrelated. In a very real sense, Dante has engaged the full web of rhetoric, the textual deviousness of tropes, mimesis, figuration and narration, in his analysis of Pride. To sin is to be trapped in trope. The presumption of reading -- in the sense of some unmeditated, direct apprehension of a text -- puts one fairly far along the path of error.

One can hope that the challenges of Paradise, however daunting, leave us less prone to tie ourselves in knots.

Tough sell: The agon of rhetoric in the Philoctetes

One reason that the Philoctetes is an extraordinary work -- a classic -- is that it takes on one of the most difficult confrontations imaginable, between the isolated, socially and physically wounded Philoctetes, and Odysseus, the fully networked lieutenant and executor of the will of the generals, and of the general will.

These characters move through an intense and fascinating duel -- Odysseus's task is to convince Philoctetes to return willingly to the Trojan War. Odysseus has a tantalizing story of restoration of honor, health, and eventually the prize of glory -- everything a Greek Prince could ask for. But a man who's been abandoned for nine and a half years no longer dreams. Philoctetes's dearest wish is to kill Odysseus with the bow of Heracles, which never misses, and is always lethal. It's going to be a tough sell.

Sophocles has designed the play to amplify the profound dichotomy between the two older characters, with Neoptolemos serving as a kind of bridge between them. If we look more closely at the features of both the archer and the captain, we'll see why Odysseus has his work cut out for him.

In his singular isolation, Philoctetes has been nearly reduced to an inhuman creature -- not unlike the Cyclops Polyphemus whose episode the play richly echoes (see νήπιος: Philoctetes and Polyphemus). He speaks out of a neglected, asocial existence with such lyric power that he might well be the archetypal voice of the outcast, the existential loner, the underground man, the forlorn self persuaded by Nietzsche's potent argument that "God is dead."

In part, Philoctetes can lay claim to being an outcast as his lameness and abandonment so closely replicate that of the first outcast on Lemnos, the fire god Hephaestus.

Philoctetes

O Lemnos, and you all-conquering flame kindled by Hephaestus, will you indeed endure it that this man should take me from your domain by force?

While there are no women in the play, a consciousness of the absence of womanly nature is pervasive. Hephaestus was sent away, or thrown down, from Olympus to land on Lemnos because he displeased Hera, his mother. Unlike the other gods, he was ugly, comical, lame. The cruelty of the mother here, seconded through the play's allusions to Cybele, underscore the pathos of a child experiencing a harsh nature, a world without a mother's tenderness.

Philoctetes speaks with a heart-driven immediacy -- his world is this small rocky place where his pain and hunger drive him to use the bow of a hero to eke out a life:

Philoctetes 

Hollow in the caverned rock, now hot, now frosty, how true it seems, then, that I was sadly fated never to leave you! [1085] No, you will witness my death, too. Ah, ah, me! Sad dwelling, so long filled with the pain welling from my flesh, what will be my daily portion hereafter? [1090] Where, from what provision, shall I, unhappy, find any hope of sustenance? Above my head the tremulous doves will go on their way through the whistling wind. I can stop their flight no more.

Φιλοκτήτης

ὦ κοίλας πέτρας γύαλον 
θερμὸν καὶ παγετῶδες, ὥς σ᾽ οὐκ ἔμελλον ἄρ᾽, ὦ τάλας, 
λείψειν οὐδέποτ᾽, ἀλλά μοι καὶ θνῄσκοντι συνείσει. 
ὤμοι μοί μοι. 
ὦ πληρέστατον αὔλιον 
λύπας τᾶς ἀπ᾽ ἐμοῦ τάλαν, 
τίπτ᾽ αὖ μοι τὸ κατ᾽ ἆμαρ 
1090ἔσται; τοῦ ποτε τεύξομαι 
σιτονόμου μέλεος πόθεν ἐλπίδος; 
πέλειαι δ᾽ ἄνω 
πτωκάδες ὀξυτόνου διὰ πνεύματος 
ἐλῶσιν: οὐκέτ᾽ ἴσχω.

No one else in the play speaks with such poetic power. When Philoctetes addresses nature, he speaks out of a profound loss of human companionship and of hope of any divine succor. He has formed bonds with birds, rocks and waves akin to those of an child, or an animal. His speech is highly figural, rhythmical, sonorous, and emotively addresses Being as "you," as he does at the close:

Philoctetes 

Farewell, chamber that shared my watches. Farewell, [1455] nymphs of stream and meadow, and you, strong pounding of the sea-lashed cape, where often in the cavern's inmost recess my head was wetted by the south wind's blasts, and where many times the Hermaean mount sent an echo [1460] to my sad groans in the gale of my sorrow! But now, clear springs and Lycian fount, I am leaving you, leaving you at last, though such a hope had never buoyed me! Farewell, sea-wrapped Lemnos, [1465] and send me off with sailing fair to my heart's content . . .

No Greek character could be farther from this mode of speaking than the hero of the Odyssey. Here he's describing himself after Philoctetes has spurned the request to join Odysseus and Neoptolemus who will return to battle:

Odysseus 

I could say much in answer to his claims, if time allowed; but now I can say one thing only. What kind of man the occasion demands, that kind of man am I. [1050] And accordingly, where the judgment at hand is of just and good men, you could find no man more pious than me. 

Never at a loss for words, Odysseus's facility makes him the ideal broker/facilitator. He fluidly goes with whatever role is required of him, rapidly appraises every situation and devises clever solutions to problems most men would find daunting. He continues:

Victory, however, is my inborn desire in every field—save with regard to you. To you, in this case, I will gladly give way. Yes, release him, and lay not another finger upon him. [1055] Let him stay here. We have no further need of you, now that we have these weapons. For Teucer is there among our forces, well-skilled in this craft, as am I, and I believe that I can master this bow in no way worse than you, and point it with no worse a hand. [1060] So what need is there of you? Farewell! Enjoy your strolls on Lemnos! We must be going. And perhaps your onetime prize will bring me the honor which ought to have been your own.

He not only poses as a "winner," but denies the uniqueness of Philoctetes, the actual need of him. If this stubborn man won't do it, we'll find another who can. Of course, he's bluffing -- they do need the actual, one and only Philoctetes. This is the calculating mind of the strategist, pretending that identities are fungible, and individuals matter little as men become pawns on a field of action.

It is entirely in keeping with his plan -- to persuade Philoctetes that he must come back with them -- that Odysseus here speaks with pointed cruelty, but still, it's devastating:

. . . what need is there of you? Farewell! Enjoy your strolls on Lemnos! We must be going. 

No wonder in later times Odysseus was often characterized as heartless and false. But he's about more than mere trickery. Ask him and he'll tell you: His larger task is that of the politician who is trying to hold together a social order that's coming apart at the seams. This too is part of who he is, at a level above that of the strategist and broker.

Let's remember it was Odysseus who captured Helenus and gained the intelligence of how to defeat Troy. For all his machinations, Odysseus is not a traitor to the Greeks as Helenus was to his family and his people. He is tasked with reintegrating the most alienated Greek warrior (more even than Achilles!) for the larger good.

If we put these elements together, we have something like this:

1. The task of persuading Philoctetes is the action of the play. 
2. It is complicated by the fact that Odysseus was the perpetrator of the original abandonment of Philoctetes.
3. Yet Odysseus is the most capable man for the job.
4. The outcome of the Trojan War, and, possibly, of the Greek world, hangs on whether Philoctetes can be turned around to return and fight for those who threw him away.

In a word, what Sophocles has staged is a duel with everything at stake. If Philoctetes is the immovable object, the power of Odysseus's rhetorical and theatrical skills is the irresistible force. When we look more closely at the play's structure, we'll find the stratagems to persuade Philoctetes are scrupulously explored from every angle.

Over and over, variants of the word for persuasion (πείθω) include power, trust, truth and even obedience. Here's Neoptolemus:

What can I do, then if my pleading lacks power [δυνησόμεσθα] to persuade [πείσειν] you of anything that I say? [1395]

τί δῆτ᾽ ἂν ἡμεῖς δρῷμεν, εἰ σέ γ᾽ ἐν λόγοις  

πείσειν δυνησόμεσθα μηδὲν ὧν λέγω;  

Without the use of force, doing and saying are all that Odysseus and Neoptolemus have to work with, aren't they?

The duel of Odysseus and Philoctetes is the agon of truth and lie, of rhetoric and reality. It yields this playwright's mature meditation on the powers and limitations of words, deeds, trust, knowledge and illusion. We'll look at how this plays out in another post.