Notes on Persuasion in Eumenides

Clytemnestra tries to awaken the sleeping Erinyes. 
Apulian red-figure bell-krater, 380–370 BC.

• The path of good speech 

• Precarious Odyssey: Apollo vs. Athena in the Oresteia 

• What are you doing? A failed scene of persuasion in Eumenides 

• There will be blood: Vengeance beforehand 

• Irresistible Athena meets Immovable Furies 

• The manner of Apollonian Justice - a brief digression 

• "The whole fashion of your form" 

• Dancing with Furies: The Persuasion of the Erinyes 

•  Voiceless Informers: A contrast of entrances in the Oresteia 

• Prosaic Peripeteia: How could Aeschylus be so undramatic?

• Clytemnestra vs. Athena: Two peripeteias in the Oresteia 

•  Regarding the Fury: Persuasion and detheatricalization in Eumenides 

Leda's children

Leda and the Swan - Francesco Melzi, from a lost work of Leonardo da Vinci

The Greek fascination with symmetrical pairs is latent in this myth of Leda giving birth to two eggs, each holding twins. One egg held the Dioscuri, Castor and Polydeuces. As with the tale of Theseus, the parentage of the Dioscuri was uncertain. It seems Castor was actually the child of Tyndareus, and therefore mortal. Polydeuces was the immortal son of Zeus.

So much for the oversimplified phrase, "point of origin."

The same goes for the other egg, which contained Helen and Clytaemnestra -- Helen, of Zeus, and Clytaemnestra, of Tyndareus. These "twin" sisters married the brothers, Menelaus and Agamemnon, sons of Atreus and Aerope. 

Aerope, daughter of Catreus and therefore granddaughter of Minos, contributed to the horrific division between Atreus and Thyestes. Indeed, traced in detail, the trajectories of Catreus and his descendants had fateful impacts not only on the Pelopids, but later down the line on Menelaos, Agamemnon and Cassandra.

Ixion and theatrics in Philoctetes

The sole independent choral ode in the Philoctetes begins with a seemingly remote mythological allusion to Ixion:

Chorus
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 a doom so repugnant as this of Philoctetes. For though he had wronged no one by force or thievery, [685] but conducted himself fairly towards the fair, he was left to perish so undeservedly. I truly marvel how—how in the world—as he listened in solitude to the breakers rushing around him, [690] he kept his hold upon a life so full of grief.

Χορός

λόγῳ μὲν ἐξήκουσ᾽, ὄπωπα δ᾽ οὐ μάλα, 

τὸν πελάταν λέκτρων ποτὲ τῶν Διὸς 

680

κατὰ δρομάδ᾽ ἄμπυκα δέσμιον ὡς ἔβαλεν παγκρατὴς Κρόνου παῖς: 

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

τοῦδ᾽ ἐχθίονι συντυχόντα 

θνατῶν, ὃς οὔτ᾽ ἔρξας τιν᾽ οὔ τι νοσφίσας, 

685

ἀλλ᾽ ἴσος ὢν ἴσοις ἀνήρ, 

ὤλλυθ᾽ ὧδ᾽ ἀναξίως. 

τόδε τοι θαῦμά μ᾽ ἔχει, 

πῶς ποτε πῶς ποτ᾽ ἀμφιπλάκτων ῥοθίων μόνος κλύων, 

690

πῶς ἄρα πανδάκρυτον οὕτω βιοτὰν κατέσχεν: 

The allusion is richly suggestive. As Jebb points out, Ixion, king of the Lapiths is the archetypal ingrate. He'd refused to give his father-in-law bridal gifts, then invited the man to his home, where he tripped him into a fiery pit. The murder was so heinous that no one would purify him. Some say he went mad, until Zeus took pity and, by purifying him, brought him to his senses.

Ixion's senses then told him to try to rape Hera, and he actually believed he'd succeeded, bragging of the feat. In fact Zeus had created a double resembling Hera, named Nephele ("Cloud"). Nephele gave birth to Centaurus, a bestial savage who mated with horses and begat the race of Centaurs.

For his overachieving, Ixion received the signal honor of being bound to a fiery wheel that spins eternally (it is said to have paused only once, when Orpheus enchanted the Underworld with his song.) Ixion, in short, tops the list of the worst mortals ever, in large measure for betraying a benefactor.

There is far too much in this tale to discuss in this brief comment. Ixion comes to the mind of the chorus as the closest analog to the plight of Philoctetes. The poor marooned man's isolation and constant pain makes him, to their imagination, similar to Ixion. This is baffling, though because Philoctetes

 had wronged no one by force or thievery, [685] but conducted himself fairly towards the fair.

Philoctetes is at once like and totally unlike Ixion. In fact, we've just seen his total joy and gratitude upon being told that he will be going home aboard Neoptolemus's ship. No, if anyone here is betraying a trust, of course it's Neoptolemus at the behest of Odysseus. Philoctetes is being seduced by a beautiful lie, much as Ixion fell for the beguiling shape of Nephele.

Just as Dante put those who defrauded kinsmen and benefactors at the bottom of the Infernal pit, the Greeks saw this kind of fraud as beyond remediation. Essentially someone who has received grace or kindness, some good work and will, is perpetrating a calculated crime towards the benefactor - calculated because it requires the fabrication of a complex, coherent lie, coupled with bottomless ill-will.

The wit of the Ixion story lies in the cleverness (sophos) of how Zeus turned the tables, producing a mock-Hera, a similitude. He defrauds the fraudster (and, some say, enjoyed the embraces of Dia, Ixion's wife) and punishes him by making sure that everyone will see him coming from miles away.

So the tale of Ixion is of doubling down on a double-dealer, a tale of disguise and reverse theatrics in pursuit of the truth. The Philoctetes is also about role reversals, reaching layers where those playing roles might no longer be able to tell when role ends and reality begins.

Ixion is as much about how the gods win as it is about the turpitude of the mortal lout. Their power to play with appearances gives them a strategic edge in any game. Yet the containment of Ixion within his burning wheel doesn't provide closure. His deranged rape of a cloud produced a race of man-beasts that are forever ruining marriages, including that of Heracles.

Consider the long view, i.e. Zeus's: The bow of Heracles that Philoctetes carries has been pointing at Paris forever. It's cradled in the arms of the loneliest cripple on earth. And there is no way that arrow, cocked and loaded, is not going to kill its fated target. The wonder of the story is how; the how lies in wonder.

Living end: Heracles' Fate in Women of Trachis

λείπου μηδὲ σύ, παρθέν᾽, ἀπ᾽ οἴκων, 

μεγάλους μὲν ἰδοῦσα νέους θανάτους, 

πολλὰ δὲ πήματα καὶ καινοπαθῆ,

κοὐδὲν τούτων ὅ τι μὴ Ζεύς.

And you, maiden, do not be left at the house. 

You have seen immense, shocking death, 

with sorrows great in number and strange. 

And in all of them there is nothing that is not Zeus.

The entrance of Heracles in Women of Trachis is an image of the supine hero at his most  weak, vulnerable moment. We never see him in his prime. Imagine an American superhero in a film that presents only the moment of his impotent, agonizing death. The sole reason we remember our heroes (or go to the box office) - their immortal deeds and abilities - is absent. Imagine Superman reduced to an unrecognizable hulk, crying out in frustrated, mystified anger. Helpless, then dead.

As his flesh is being eaten away, Heracles evokes his former role, struck by the seemingly intimate absurdity of how he was brought down:

Not spearmen on the battlefield, nor the Giants' earth-born army, nor the might of savage beasts, [1060] not Hellas, nor the land of the barbarian, nor any land which I came to purify has ever done this to me. No, a woman, a weak woman, born not to the strength of man, all alone has brought me down without a stroke of the sword!

His helplessness tempts us to write Heracles off as a has-been, no longer capable of acting, of doing anything worthwhile for or in the world to which he had so long labored to bring vital order.

The word he chooses has more than order in it. He says καθαίρων ἱκόμην - "I came to purify." καθαίρων carries the root sense of "cleanse," but connotes a purging act that carries an ethical, and thus sacred, mode of action. He had a job to do, as the son of Zeus. His career, all of it, was Zeus, and now this unintelligible turn defies understanding -- why does his Father allow this?

It would be very 20th Century of us to adopt the approved smartass attitude. Hyllus speaks with seeming anger of the lack of compassion of the gods. But the story of Heracles deliberately addresses that apparent inference, that glib assumption that the existence of incomprehensible suffering is a sure sign that we humans are essentially alone. (One might ask a confirmed atheist if that conviction requires god to not exist, or simply to not care about us.)

Heracles would of course be a great hero if we only remembered him for his accomplishments of strength and cunning, but he would not be a tragic hero. Sophocles is adding another dimension - one which he clearly feels is necessary for his Athenian audience to understand, ponder, and remember.

Why does he want us to ponder this dimension of the strongest human being's career? Throughout the play we have been hearing (from Deianira, mostly) that one bears an innocence, and ignorance, of the suffering of others until one experiences it for oneself. That would suggest that the gods might not have much understanding of mortal slings and arrows.

Labors of Heracles, 3rd c. CE

But Heracles is that nearly immortal being who, at the last, is consumed by an extraordinary experience of mortality. But why, if the gods do not understand or care about what we suffer, would Zeus have prophesied in advance all that's happening to his beloved son?

Perhaps we need to look past the spectacle of violent pain to examine how Heracles handles it. At first he is loudly complaining and vengeful, seeking to kill Deianira. But he moves on to other tasks, which he makes Hyllus swear to perform before telling him what they are. They are not trivial: Enabling the death of his father, and marrying his father's new chosen queen. It is the allegedly Oedipal desire of all sons that the father here is imposing upon his beloved son.

It would be consistent with the thinking of the hero to make this demand upon Hyllus only if he saw in it a reflection of his own response to his father's imposed word. For he now understands that his fate was foretold by his father; his fate "is" Zeus - and this, as unintelligible as it is, he now sees summoning him to duty.

He has broken the world he was supposed to cleanse:

• broken his first family with Megara and her children; 
• broken his marriage to Deianira, and 
• broken the world of Eurytus, killing his son and raping his daughter. 

The temptation to curse Zeus and die might be quite powerful. Or to order Hyllus to kill Iole and all her people. Or, to seize the throne of Trachis. But this is not what Heracles does. Instead, he makes a last stab at mending things. Hyllus must marry Iole - an unthinkable thing for all - the request causes Hyllus to doubt his father's sanity (which in turn awakens Heracles' torment). Yet in one stroke, it gives both children status as heirs of Heracles, gives legal protected status to those children of the next generation he cares most about, and creates a protective dynastic order. It is an act that might seem baffling or strange to all, but in its effects, it authors a remnant saved from a broken world.

Asking his own son to prepare his pyre and to set it ablaze - this too suggests a duty that is unthinkable. Hyllus agrees to prepare the pyre, but not to light it, and Heracles agrees. That task will fall to Philoctetes. The entire series of commands up to the blaze is like the charm of Nessus, only here, perhaps, a countercharm.

The question of whether Heracles "knows" that his fate is to undergo apotheosis is undecidable - the play offers no indication (other than the negative -- Heracles promises to come back from "below" to curse Hyllus of that possibility, which is no assurance of anything).

Heracles steels his "tough soul" to undergo death. Only the actual experience of death will decide whether Hyllus is a polluting murderer (as the boy himself believes (1028-29)), or a healing physician, as Heracles claims. Death swallows infinite pain, but is this all the healing one can hope for? It is our fate to not know our fate until it has happened to us - as Deianira says at the very beginning of the play:

λόγος μέν ἐστ᾽ ἀρχαῖος ἀνθρώπων φανείς, 

ὡς οὐκ ἂν αἰῶν᾽ ἐκμάθοις βροτῶν, πρὶν ἂν 

θάνῃ τις, οὔτ᾽ εἰ χρηστὸς οὔτ᾽ εἴ τῳ κακός: 

There is an ancient word people tell

that none can judge the life of any man

for good or bad until that man is dead;

The fate of Heracles demonstrates that ancient word (λόγος) with the deadbolt force of a syllogism. No one knew better than Deianira how powerless we are to know, before our end, our end. Heracles orders his own death believing he is fulfilling a foretold fate, as the son of the highest god, but not knowing what that fate might be. It is left to Hyllus to offer, as the only true thing that can be said, the hypothesis that all these ancient words did not lack sense.

The first word of the play is "λόγος"; the last is "Ζεύς." If the alpha and omega of the Women of Trachis are one, if the play trues its circle, then Heracles and Hyllus are dutiful in believing they are on sacred ground. Are they obeying the cathartic will of Zeus, or collaborating in a primal act of patricide? If the former, the career of Heracles ends with a final heroic purgation. If not, it's the most polluting act of murderous nihilism. Heracles is borne off alive. Until his end, can one say?

There is nothing here that is not Zeus.

Displaced fire: Heroides 16 in light of myth

"Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop." - H.L. Mencken

One choice Ovid had to make in Heroides 16 and 17 was how to have Paris's immediate challenge -- the seduction of Helen -- resonate within the overarching story in which the lovers play so key a role.

The poet weaves the larger mythical structure within fine details of Paris and Helen's letters. When Paris ponders whether he should speak, he speaks of fire:

Eloquar, an flammae non est opus indice notae,

     Et plus quam vellem iam meus extat amor?

Ille quidem lateat malim, dum tempora dentur

     Laetitiae mixtos non habitura metus,

Sed male dissimulo; quis enim celaverit ignem,

     Lumine qui semper proditur ipse suo?Si tamen expectas, vocem quoque rebus ut addam — 

     Uror! habes animi nuntia verba mei. 

Shall I then speak out? Or is it unnecessary to point to a flame that betrays itself? Hasn't my love already stood out more than I would wish? I'd prefer it to lie latent till time permits sheer joy unmixed with fear. But I dissemble poorly; for who can conceal a flame betrayed by its own light? If you nonetheless expect that I add voice to acts -- I am burning. You now have the words that herald my heart.

Paris has no choice. To ask whether he should speak, he must speak. In voicing his question and its implications, he gives away the store. Not surprising that eloquar, the root of "eloquence," can be read here as a rhetorical question.

This eliding of the confession of love with the act of loving is consonant with the elisions we looked at earlier, involving space, time, giving, and self. Not all articulation works that way. I can say "I am going to the gas station" many times over, but it doesn't get me there. Saying "I love you," however, does what it says. The delicate relation of speech to action here makes it essential that we explore Paris's statement in relation to the larger mythic structure in which it plays an essential part.

For the author of this letter, passion and love are embodied in flammae. The paradox of fire is that it cannot be concealed, since it produces light, the very thing that enables things to appear. If I burn, you will necessarily see it, he says, even if I wish to keep my love hidden. Paris burning is the thing, the rebus; "I burn" are verba added to the unspoken. To say "I burn" is to "shed light" -- the light of language, of pointing (indice) -- upon light. Saying "I burn" makes patent and explicit what was latent, implicit. Indeed the very word for latent, lateat, lies hidden within the word laetitiae, the explicit consummated delight of Paris and Helen. Ovid, like Freud, loved puns.

Fire is of course a key motif that runs throughout the mythic tapestry behind this tale. Pardon the compression here, but it's necessary:

Dido's swan and Zeus's eagle

[A few changes and additions come toward the end of this.]

The last time I looked, Perseus's bi-lingual edition of the Heroides was not accessible, but it now is.

The English translations (by R. Ehwald from 1907) begin here with Penelope, with notes and Latin to the right. If you wish to have the Latin on the left, start here. Dido's letter to Aeneas is in English here on Perseus, and Margaret has found another translation of the letter by Prof. Miceal F. Vaughan.

The Perseus edition (as well as the Loeb) reject the first two lines because, as the notes indicate, they do not appear in the "best editions:"

Accipe, Dardanide, moriturae carmen Elissae;
quae legis a nobis ultima verba legis.

Dardanian, receive this song of dying Elissa:
what you read are the last words written by me. 

Without the first couplet, this would be the first of the Heroides not to identify either the sender or the addressee at the outset. The letter might seem to open abruptly:

Sic ubi fata vocant, udis abiectus in herbis
ad vada Maeandri concinit albus olor.

At fate’s call, the white swan, despondent on the grass,
sings, like this, to the waters of Maeander.

In either case, what we can say is that Dido invokes the swan and the river Maeander. (Interestingly, Dido means "to wander," as does Maeander). A little Googling makes it clear that this will be an elegy, a song of a dying singer, and that the swan of the Maeander, by tradition, was none other than Homer. The poet of epic song is here invoked by a character who, in seeking to persuade Aeneas to end his epic quest, would, if successful, put an end to the epic of Rome.

It is consistent with other key moments in Ovid's work that the course of history is determined by words, persuasion, a speech act. The fate of Augustus' empire hinges on which death Dido/Elissa's song ends in: that of the singer, or of the Aenead.

We can contrast Dido's bird with the eagle of Pythian I:

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 under the spell of your pulsing notes.[10]

The eagle is charmed thanks to the persuasion [πείθονται] of the notes of the golden lyre.

If Dido's song will end in her death due to its failure to persuade Aeneas to remain in Carthage, Pindar's eagle, normally vigilant on Zeus's scepter, is lulled to sweet sleep thanks to music. The poet of grand feats of mortal excellence attributes a power to music that lulls even the god of war:

Even powerful Ares, setting aside the rough spear-point, warms his heart in repose;

The power of the Muses to overcome all is Pindar's claim. The failure of compelling arguments -- the promise of her love, of royal power, of the end of questing -- is the matter of Dido's song.

Nec nova Carthago, nec te crescentia tangunt
Moenia nec sceptro tradita summa tuo?

Neither my new-built Carthage and her rising walls have power to detain you; nor the supreme rule, which you are in vain urged to accept.

With Ovidian concision, she summarizes the boundless futurity of the quest in four words:

Facta fugis, facienda petis;

You flee what’s done, you seek what is to do:

Dido contends with the faint, far-off promise of Rome, which she counters with the much more richly realized promise of Carthage. The domus, the enclosed domestic world, is already here, she tells the man looking to the open sea.

Ultimately -- beyond the distant birth of Rome -- the failure of Dido's song awakens a martial conflict that ends -- can only end -- in the annihilation of an empire.

Some background on Dido here and here might be helpful.