Antigone by Sophocles - I know / that wild and futile action makes no sense.

 ISMENE:                                               I know

 that wild and futile action makes no sense. (p. 161)

Antigone’s sister is trying to undermine the very premise of Greek drama, of literature.

Long, long ago, I read Sophocles’s Antigone (c. 441 BCE) in a class naively titled “Western Civilization,” which was required of all liberal arts undergraduates at my university.  So everybody had to read one Greek play, this one, before exiting college.  Almost everybody – not the engineers, I guess, and too bad for them.  Although I knew the Greek stories pretty well, Antigone was thus the first Greek play I ever read.

Pretty good choice for if-you-only-read-one.  Antigone, even for Sophocles, feels classical, ethically serious and dramatically balanced, the kind of play from which a literary critic will derive rules.  When I describe Euripides as a “screwball,” it is in comparison to plays like Antigone, which invite later art like William Henry Rinehart’s 1870 sculpture “Antigone Pouring a Libation over the Corpse of Her Brother Polynices,” on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In Western Civ, we turned Antigone, and every other text assigned, into an ethical debate.  Duty to the state versus duty to – what, exactly, is Antigone serving?  Religion, higher law, family, the integrity of the self.  Jean Anouilh, in his 1944 existentialist adaptation, pushes strongly towards the self, while Seamus Heaney, partly inspired to adapt the play as a protest against the American war in Iraq, in The Burial at Thebes (2004 ) is more interested in the justness of the law, in human rights (p. 76).  Antigone at times, at her least sympathetic, comes across as a religious fanatic, guilty only of what she calls “the crime of piety” (161), although she is usually more sympathetic:

ANTIGONE:  I cannot share in hatred, but love.

CREON:  Then go down there, if you must love, and love

     the dead.  No woman rules me while I live.

Creon, as usual, has a point but goes too far.  His animus against women, specifically, is mentioned several times, as is his blinding materialism.  He seems more worried about bribery than anything else – that his guards or the prophet Teresias are against him because they have been bribed.  No wonder he has so little understanding of divine law. 

Now I am wandering.  I was surprised to see that the Guard is a legitimate clown role, much like in Shakespeare.  Jean Anouilh greatly expanded the part, but a lot of it is right there in Sophocles.  Here is the guard not clowning:

We saw the girl.  She cried the sharp and shrill

cry of a bitter bird which sees the nest

bare where the young birds lay.  (173)

I have trouble, in the Greek plays, sorting through the metaphorical language, distinguishing between the clichés and the original images.  The “ship of state,” right, that shows up constantly, including in Antigone; everyone drags in that one.  But this image of bereaved animal motherhood applied to Antigone seeing her brother’s desecrated corpse, that seemed original and interestingly ironic.  Antigone has a few of these. 

Antigone begins at dawn.  How many of the plays we have read so far begin at dawn?  Agamemnon, Ajax, etc.  I have not kept track.

All of the translations here are by Elizabeth Wyckoff.  I would likely prefer to see a performance using the Heaney translation because it is easier to understand, not necessarily a virtue while reading or looking for quotations.

As perfect as the Rinehart statue is, I was tempted by another Met-owned piece, an 1893 lithograph by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec of a performance of Antigone.  And why not include it, too.

Next week, we move to Rhesus by Euripides (probably), his earliest play (probably).  It is a good choice for if-you-only-skip-one.  I remember it as a dud.  How lucky we are to have so many Euripides plays that some of them are duds.  Well, I’ll take another look at it.

Terrible kindly ones, come to your rest - The Eumenides by Aeschylus – Come, Furies, dance!

Here we see, in a representation likely dated fairly close to The Eumenides (458 BCE), Apollo protecting Orestes from a Fury, from the British Museum:

I know, I know, the wings:

PRIESTESS: Black, like the rags of soot that hang in a chimney,

Like bats, yet wingless.

Each of their faces a mess of weeping ulcers –

The eyes, the mouth, ulcers.  (Hughes, 152-3)

Another great bit from a minor character.  Again, I will mostly use the Ted Hughes translation for quotations, and Robert Fagles for one exception.

Orestes is pursued by the Furies for the murder of his mother.  He is defended by Apollo, and judged by Athena and a juror of Athenian citizens, who successfully end the cycle of bloodshed means of a move to a new mythic stage of civilization.

There is the first extant courtroom drama, the beginning of a genre, with a remarkable number of the pros and cons of the genre present from the beginning, the big con being the opaqueness, the arbitrariness, of the jury’s decision, and in a fate-driven ethos like this, close to rigged.

I particularly enjoy the moment when the prosecuting and defense attorney begin screaming insults – “Filthy witches – rubbish of creation” (180) – at each other.  I suspect this is an example of Athenian realism.  Audience members were thinking “That’s like when I was on the jury.”  The defense attorney tries to bribe the jurors; the prosecutor threatens them.  The core of the genre is ready to go.

The big mythic story is the old gods versus the new, the earth gods versus the sky gods, big primal forces versus human civilization, with, implicitly, the humans absorbing both into a new humanistic third era.  The Furies are underground creatures, “Made of darkness, clothed in darkness” (168), and when they lose their case they lament that:

The earth is overthrown.

Our laws are obsolete.

You younger gods

Who argue us out of court,

And rob us of what is ours –

You violate creation!  (187)

But, in a compromise, they end up living in an Athenian cave, transformed into The Kindly Ones (“Terrible kindly ones, / Come to your rest,” 197), which for them is a happy ending.  They like caves.  Everyone, old, new, and newer, claims to be following the law; everyone is following some law.

I wonder, as usual, but more so this time, what the Athenian audience was thinking.  Aeschylus did not invent this story.  The cave, the cult site, in which the former Furies lived was real, on the opposite side of the Acropolis from the Dionysian Theater where the Athenians were watching the Furies howl, argue, and dance.  Seeing these protective but ancient powers out in the open, casting their spells, must have been pretty strange. I’m switching to Fagles:

FURIES:     Come, Furies, dance! –

link arms for the dancing hand-in-hand,

now we long to reveal our art,

our terror, now to declare our right

    to steer the lives of men,

we all conspire, we dance!  (Fagles, 245)

Ted Hughes, I am sad to say, omits this passage.  His Furies do not dance.

Next week’s play is Antigone by Sophocles, a great among the greats, and a good choice for the person who has never read a Greek play.  I’m going to see what Seamus Heaney’s adaptation is like.

"It’s me, me; this is me being alive" - Dorothy Richardson's Backwater - words and phrases that fretted dismally at the beauty of the scene

The pointed roofs of Pointed Roofs (1915), the first volume of Pilgrimage, Dorothy Richardson’s roman fleuve, were in Hanover, abroad, and inherently rewarding for our teenage heroine Miriam, even if teaching English to German girls was not, in the end, for her.  But in the next volume Miriam is teaching again, this time in “a proper schooly school” north London suburb, a Backwater (1916), where everything is worse.

It would be cold English pianos and dreadful English children – and trams going up and down that grey road outside.  (Ch. 1, p. 198 in the collected edition)

Which is about right.  The children are not that bad.  The loss of serious German music is a disaster.

At this point, and in Backwater even more than in Pointed Roofs, Richardson’s novel is a Kunstlerroman, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, with numerous curious resemblances to Joyce’s novel, also published in 1916.  Both novels are highly, entirely interior, with some passages moving to some kind of stream of consciousness, if that is a helpful term.  Chapter II, one long party scene, or Chapter V, where Miriam tries to fall asleep, especially impressed me as being as dense as the later chapters of Joyce’s novel.

Richardson should get some of Joyce’s credit for the “epiphany,” too (all Joycean parallels are coincidental, artists working on similar problems and coming to similar conclusions).  What else is this but an epiphany:

She tried once or twice deliberately to bring back the breathless moment standing still on a stair.  Each time something of it returned.  ‘It’s me, me; this is me being alive,’ she murmured with a feeling under her like the sudden drop of a lift.  (III, 245)

There we have, I suspect, the metaphysics of Pilgrimage in a few words.  Reality that is more real, or at least better written.

Here we see Miriam, an 18 year-old schoolteacher, becoming a writer, as she watches fog move across the lawn:

Several times she glanced at the rich green, feeling that neither ‘emerald,’ ‘emerald velvet,’ nor ‘velvety emerald’ quite expressed it.  (IV, 247)

There follow more shade-and-light effects, one source of Ford Madox Ford calling Richardson an “Impressionist.”  Then a bit so good I can’t resist:

The back door, just across the little basement hall, scrooped inwards across the oilcloth, jingling its little bell, and was banged to.  The flounter-crack of a raincloak smartly shaken out was followed by a gentle scrabbling in a shoe-box, - the earliest girl, peaceful and calm, a wonderful sort of girl, coming into the empty basement quietly getting off her things, with all the rabble of the school coming along the roads behind.  (IV, 247)

Richardson’s prose provides many rewards.  Miriam, in the novel, is training her taste in fictional prose:

Miriam returned to her book.  The story of Adèle had moved on through several unassimilated pages.  ‘My child,’ she read, ‘it is important to remember’ – she glanced on, gathering a picture of a woman walking with Adèle along the magic terrace, talking – words and phrases that fretted dismally at the beauty of the scene.  Examining later chapters she found conversations, discussions, situations, arguments, ‘fusses’ – all about nothing.  She turned back to the early passage of description and caught the glow once more.  But this time it was overshadowed by the promise of those talking women.  That was all there was.  She had finished the story of Adèle.  (II, 232)

Brutal, but a good critic, with admirable taste, taste like mine.  Mostly.  “Cheese – how could people eat cheese?” (II, 238).  Someone get Miriam to Neal’s Yard, quick.

The reading theme expands near the end of the book, when Miriam sabotages her teaching, binge-reading wholesome and then trashy novels rather than working on her teacher’s certification.  But she is no teacher, and in the next novel she moves to another of the four professions allowed to women of her class at the time (teacher, governess, nurse, supreme monarch of the British empire).  A comparison with George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893), published at the time Backwater is set, would be fruitful.  The odd women in that novel learn typing and dictation so they are not trapped by draining jobs or worse husbands.  Of course, if I think of Stephen Dedalus again, I see what Miriam should be doing: going to college and reading better books.  Now I have to keep reading the Pilgrimage novels just to see what happens once she starts reading better books.

The Libation Bearers by Aeschylus - How can we hope to do what has to be done?

 

ELECTRA:  Everything dies – the dust is forgotten.

How can we hope to do what has to be done?  (Hughes, 109)

Robert Fagles calls it The Libation Bearers; Ted Hughes prefers Choephori; in either case it’s the play where the bloodthirsty chorus of female slaves howls for avenging the murder of Agamemnon that we all enjoyed so much in the previous play.

CHORUS:  Let me scream

That holy scream of joy.

Why should I smother it?

If Justice shares my hope,

If God rides the savage storm

That shakes my heart for vengeance –

Vengeance, vengeance, vengeance.  (Hughes, 111)

Will we enjoy the murder of Clytemnestra as much?

I would have guessed that this chorus, captives taken by Agamemnon over the course of the Trojan War, would not be so firmly on his side, but he is dead and his murderers and their current enslavers, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, are alive.  The chorus, as we have often seen in Aeschylus, gets a lot of good lines.

The Libation Bearers is tragedy mixed with fairy tale, with its cute brother and sister recognition scene, where Electra recognizes the presence of her brother by the shape of his footprint in the dust – remember this when we get to Euripides – and a parallel pair of curious anti-recognition scenes in the second half of the play, when first the Orestes’s mother and then his nurse fail to recognize him.  The nurse’s failure is admittedly a little more conceptual and thematic, part of the nursing theme that is itself part of the larger washing theme, corrupting blood countered by cleansing water and milk.  Agamemnon was all blood.

Not that The Libation Bearers does not have plenty of blood.

CHORUS:  But Orestes fought, he reached the summit

of bloodshed here…  (Fagles, 219)

This is more or less at the moment when Orestes kills his mother, egged on by the chorus and his best friend.  My understanding of the ethics of the play is that the killing of Aegisthus, the uncle of Orestes and an usurping tyrant, is at worst neutral, just power politics, while the killing of his mother is an abomination, one more in a long line for this family.  The most curious moment to me was just before the lines above, when Orestes hesitates and doubts:

ORESTES: Pylades, can a man kill his mother?

Can he perform anything more dreadful

Than the murder of his own mother?

What shall I do?

PYLADES:  Remember the words of Apollo.

Obey the command of the god of the oracle.

Embrace the enmity of mankind

Rather than be false to the word of heaven.  (Hughes, 134-5)

The strange thing is that these are the only lines of Pylades, who has otherwise been silently shadowing Orestes through the play.  If I think like a fantasy writer, then this creature is clearly some kind of double, Apollo, or an agent of Apollo (or of someone else?} who has taken the form of, or possessed, the friend of Orestes.  Just a few pages later, we see that “Pylades” is essentially lying: it is the Furies, not men, who begin to torment Orestes.

They are climbing out of the earth,

Out of their burrows in old blood.

Eyes like weeping ulcers,

Mouths like fetid wounds.

Their whips whistle and crack. (Hughes, 144)

In an earlier speech (Hughes, 106), Orestes says this is what Apollo told him would happen if he did not avenge his father.  Apollo is a liar.

CHORUS:  Where will it end? –

where will it sink to sleep and rest,

  this murderous hate, this Fury?  (226, tr. Fagles)

And curtain, although the Greeks did not have curtains. An intermission, a week long for us, and then we will get the answers to those question in The Eumenides, or The Kindly Ones, where we will say farewell to Aeschylus.

One more curious thing is that we will return to this story three more times, in Sophocles and Euripides.  So few of the plays survive, but we have four versions of this story.

The painting is Louis Jean Desprez’s “The Tomb of Agamemnon,” a study for an 18th century Swedish opera, a surprising item owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  One more Aeschylus play with an altar in the center of the stage.

Agamemnon by Aeschylus - Find some other blood-glutted / Family tree of murder

Agamemnon by Aeschylus.  What a quotable play.  Here’s a two-line summary:

CHORUS:  Where is the right and wrong

In this nightmare?  (77, tr. Ted Hughes)

War is over.  Queen Clytemnestra is thrilled that her husband Agamemnon is coming home after a decade of war, because it will finally give her the opportunity to murder him in revenge for his murder of their daughter Iphigenia, killed in a ghastly human sacrifice that, if we stick to my schedule, we will see with our own eyes sometime next fall.  How horrible; who would want to see that?  The chorus on the sacrifice of Iphigenia:

Some called it a monstrous act

But it seemed to work.

Anyway, that’s all in the past. (40)

Agamemnon’s family history is so cursed and blood-soaked that this is just usual business.  Here Clytemnestra welcomes Agamemnon home, laying out carpets dyed with “all the colours of blood”:

You have come like a spring day, opening the heart

After locked-up winter.

When Zeus treads the unripe grape

And lets the wine flood out

Then the whole house is blessed.

As it is now

When you step through your own doorway. (45)

In one of those masterpieces of Greek irony, she openly tells Agamemnon that she is about to murder him.

I had forgotten the unrelieved violence of Agamamnon.  We get not just the murder of Agamemnon, described in detail before it happens by the traumatized prophetess Cassandra, plus her murder, but also graphic descriptions of the cannibalistic murder of the sons of Thyestes, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and the sack of Troy.  These descriptions take up most of the play.  Horror literature.

Or other kinds of literature.  The quality of the little parts is so impressive.  Agamemnon is arguably the worst part in the play, the most minor.  The watchman who begins the play has some superb lines – “And then – what follows, / Better not think about it” (6) – smart man; the arrogant tyrant Aegisthus is pure ham; and the Herald briefly turns Agamemnon into war literature:

Then on the beaches it was worse. Dug in

under the enemy ramparts – deadly going.

Out of the sky, out of the marshy flats

the dews soaked us, turned the ruts we fought from

into gullies, made our gear, our scalps,

crawl with lice…

But why weep now?

It’s over for us, over for them.

The dead can rest and never rise again;

no need to call their muster.  We’re alive,

do we have to go on raking up old wounds?

Good-bye to all that.  Glad I am to say it.  (124, Fagles)

I have mostly been using the 1999 Ted Hughes translation of Agamemon, which simplifies but also clarifies the language of Aeschylus, but I could not resist Robert Fagles in this passage, with his direct invocation of Robert Graves’s combat memoir, which I doubt is in the original Greek.

Hughes is good, too.  The Chorus of old men on how the war looked to them:

The men came back

As little clay jars

Full of sharp cinders.  (26)

But the big part is Clytemnestra’s, magnificent all the way through.  She is like Prometheus or Ajax, a rebel against the gods.  Much of this blood is supposedly demanded for unknown reasons by the cruel, perhaps insane gods.  Her own grievances irrevocably revenged, she addresses “You Powers, whoever you are”:

Find some other blood-glutted

Family tree of murder –

Go and perform your strange dance

Of justice in their branches.

Leave us.

I ask for nothing,

Now the killing is over –

Only to be left in peace.  (79-80)

Imagine if Agamemnon were the only play of the trilogy that had survived.  But no, so next week we’ll see if the next generation can lift the curse in The Libation Bearers.  Good luck, kids!

I’ve illustrated this post with a 1906 “galvanoplastic” reproduction of the famous, so-called Mask of Agamemnon, owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Ajax by Sophocles - Shall I not learn place and wisdom?

We have reached our first Sophocles play, Ajax, generally thought to be “early.”  Putting it before Aeschylus’s Oresteia (458 BCE) gives me the first eighteen years of Sophocles’s long career, which should be enough.  Aside from Ajax, we are missing the first thirty-two years of Sophocles.

Things have changed.  Now there are clearly three actors, outside of the chorus, with speaking parts, while the early Aeschylus plays (probably) always used just two speaking actors.  I have been struck by the number of non-speaking parts, like the grieving Tecmessa at the end of Ajax, who only contributes to the tableau because the three actors are used for other parts.  Aristotle says that the third actor is an innovation of Sophocles.  Here it is.

The skene, the structure in the middle of the stage, is definitely there now, too.  It may have been present in the Aeschylus plays we have read, but now there is no ambiguity.  There is a structure, it has doors, actors can appear on top of it, it may well support wheeled platforms.  The sophistication or gimmickry of the stage business has moved up a notch.

I would love to have a better idea of what the Greek audience saw.  Ajax, the hero described by Homer as “gigantic,” the shield of the Greek army, a warrior second only to Achilles, has gone mad as a result of losing the armor of dead Achilles to Odysseus.  Thinking that he is taking revenge on his enemies – meaning, his Greek allies, which is crazy to begin with – he instead, in a frenzy, slaughters and tortures a herd of livestock.  The play is about the perfect soldier coming to terms with his madness and shame.  With minor changes, the play could be about a good soldier who snaps under stress.  Perhaps with no changes.

Ajax first appears, near the beginning of the play, surrounded by mutilated animals, covered with their blood.  With what detail, I wonder; how much blood?  The moment of his appearance is built up to be shocking.  The audience is warned, but here he is:

AJAX: Look at this swirling tide of grief

    And the storm of blood behind it,

    Coursing around and round me.

CHORUS:  Horrible!  (20)

But how horrible?  I have no idea.

Ajax’s madness is complicated by the fact that Athena directly intervenes in events, perhaps as punishment for Ajax’s impiety and arrogance, or what I would call his individualism and humanism.  He is fool enough to think humans govern their own affairs, or at least he governs his own.

AJAX:                Don’t you know by now

    That I owe the gods no service any more?  (29)

This way well count as a “tragic flaw.”  Madness is a central epistemological issue.  However hardheaded an empiricist I might be, I know that there are people who experience reality in different ways than I do.  However “real” reality seems, there is always, logically, doubt.  Attributing this doubt to the actions of gods is perhaps just a question of definition. I love the odd detail – Sophocles is full of such touches – that the rational, pious Odysseus, who frequently speaks with his protector Athena, can never see her, while the cursed, visionary Ajax can.

Ajax has a magnificent speech in the exact center of the play that is a monument of literary irony.  The hero is planning his suicide, but telling his family and followers the opposite.

Strangely the long and countless drift of time

Brings all things forth from darkness into light

That covers them once more. Nothing so marvelous

That man can say it surely will not be –

Strong oath and iron intent come crashing down. (31-2)

What a beginning.  Every line has two meanings.

I must give way, as all dread strengths give way…

Shall not I learn place and wisdom? (32)

In death, Ajax means, but his audience hears something else.  And when he leaves, the chorus of the sailors who follow him “shudder and thrill with joy” (32).  That won’t last.

The story of the death of Ajax was for a time a popular subject for vase painting.  I’ve borrowed a remarkable example from the Getty, a shallow wine cup, which shows Tecmessa covering Ajax’s body in the bowl.  The sides of the cup show two other scenes from the story, including the voting for the armor of Achilles that launches the tragedy.  Another irony is that armor ends up at the bottom of the Mediterranean.  Nobody gets it.  All a waste, like the entire Trojan War.

I’ve stuck to the John Moore translation (University of Chicago Press), but I also read the Helen Golder and Richard Pevear version (Oxford) which was punchier and had better annotation.

Next we return to Aeschylus for Agamemnon, the beginning of the Oresteia.  If you haven’t read it, don’t miss this one.  I have the ubiquitous Robert Fagles translation at hand, but I also plan to read the Ted Hughes version.

I. B. Singer's Satan in Goray and Mori Ōgai's The Wild Geese - as though space had shrunken

Another edition of a Wuthering Expectations staple: “Get these books back to the library.”

***

Satan in Goray, Isaac Bashevis Singer (1933), his first novel, about a wave of mid-17th century Jewish millenarianism in what is now southeastern Poland.  It is a book of extraordinary violence and cruelty.  Maybe not as openly violent as Red Cavalry or the stories of Lamed Shapiro, but up there.  The world view is at least as bleak.  The Jews of Goray are recovering from a nightmarish round of the usual warfare of the time, so are susceptible to the promise of a Messiah.  All tradition, all reason, is abandoned.  Why not chop up your own house and use it as firewood?  Soon we will be in Jerusalem!

Although Singer describes strange, magical events in a way that makes it hard to distinguish between the “facts” of the story and legend, it is all plausible, as a description of religious hysteria of the time and various other hysterias we know all too well.  The visionary central female character is exactly the person who accuses day care workers of witchcraft.

Singer’s older brother, as I saw in Yoshe Kalb (1932) and The Brothers Ashkenazi (1936), is as strong in novelistic sociology, but I. B. is superior in language and invention.  He is rich in metaphor, like a great fantasy writer.  It is Rosh Hashanah – surely the Messiah is coming today:

The sky, which all summer long had been as blue as the curtain of the Torah Ark, and somewhat broader and higher than usual, contracted.  Now the town seemed enclosed in a dark canvas tent.  The hills, which had been green and evocative of the holy land, disappeared, wiped off the face of the earth.  The smoke, reluctant to leave the chimneys, spread over the houses, as though space had shrunken.  (p. 180, tr. Jacob Sloan)

The landscape, the sky is full of meaning.  Of course the Messiah does not come, leaving sixty pages for things to get even worse.

***

The Wild Geese, Mori Ōgai (1911-3), a little novel by a writer often mentioned alongside Sōseki Natsume as a founder of modern Japanese fiction, a subject about which I know very little.  This particular book seemed awfully minor. 

Small-time loan shark Suezō, sick of his wife, buys a pretty young mistress, Otama.  Here’s Donald Keene in Dawn to the West (1984), the “Fiction” volume: “Otama in the course of the novel develops from a trustful, innocent girl into a woman who discovers how to use the man who is using her; Suezō, though a moneylender, is portrayed with surprising sympathy, especially in the scenes with this harridan of a wife” (369).  I would say yes about Otama, and her development is by far the most interesting thing in the book; no no no about the repellent Suezō, who is wrong about everything, ethically and otherwise, and is fortunately abandoned around the middle of the book, which I will again note is only 107 pages long in the Tuttle edition, so I did not suffer too much, or, really, at all.

Mori’s prose, at least as translated by Kingo Ochiai and Sanford Goldstein, is plain and distant.  I don’t see anything I’m dying to quote.  The last ten pages take a curious, digressive structural turn (the narrator is nominally the author, telling a story from his medical student days):

In a European book of children's stories, there is a tale about a peg.  I can’t remember it well, but it was about a farmer’s son who got into a series of difficulties on his journey because the peg in his cartwheel kept coming out.  In the story I’m telling now, a mackerel boiled in bean paste had the same effect as that peg.  (107)

The last pages of the story certainly surprised me, even if I was not surprised when the symbolic geese in the title finally appeared.

This one gets slotted into Dolce Bellezza’s ongoing Japanese literature event.

Prometheus Bound by let's-call-him Aeschylus - This is what you get / for loving humankind.

This week’s play is Prometheus Bound, by Aeschylus, or maybe not – A Common Reader here reviews a book arguing the “not” case – and first written and performed nobody knows when.  The translator of the Penguin version, Philip Vellacott, wants the play to be late, even posthumously performed, in order for Aeschylus’s ideas about Zeus, to “develop” in a particular way, as if the ideas of writers have to move in a straight line.  No one knows.

But the play is in fact about Zeus, the specific mythical figure but also the concept of godhood.  We are way, way back in the mythological timeline, at the moment Zeus and his siblings have overthrown their parents, the Titans.  Prometheus has been sentenced by Zeus to imprisonment and torture on a Scythian mountaintop, where the play opens with embodiments of Power and Violence dragging Prometheus onto the stage.  Says Power:

He must submit

      To the tyranny of Zeus

And like it, too.

He’ll learn.  (29, tr. Scully and Herrington)

Or, in Vellacott, “Till he be taught to accept the sovereignty of Zeus” (20).  I read the Oxford translation by poet James Scully and classicist C. J. Herington as well as Vellacott’s version; this bit sure shows the difference.

Power?  Violence?  Which gods are these?  Violence does not even have any lines.  How do I even know she is there?  Hephaistos the blacksmith – there’s a god I know – addresses them by name.  Greek plays did not have stage directions, but in Prometheus Bound detailed directions often appear in the dialogue, as during Hephaistos’s violent binding of Prometheus to the rock, under the orders of Power:

POWER: Now, hard as you can, hammer the shackles INto him!

                Watch it now.  The Boss checks everything out.

HEPHAISTOS:  I can’t tell which is worse: your looks or your loud mouth.

The possibilities for staging Prometheus Bound are so interesting.  A 2013 outdoor production at the Getty used a five-ton wheel as the mountaintop.  Characters are constantly flying onto the stage, in winged chariots, or in one case on “a winged four-footed creature” (Vellacott, 29).  Were characters lowered on decorated cranes, or was it all left to the imagination of the audience?  This play seems visually richer than the others we have read, even keeping in mind, however poorly, the masks and costumes and dancing.

There’s another thing we know nothing about, the dancing, the music.  At least the masks and costumes are depicted in art.  At one point, another victim of Zeus appears on stage, Io who was turned into a cow (her mask clearly has horns) and raped by Zeus, then hunted and tortured by jealous Hera.  Aeschylus told Io’s story in The Suppliants, while that story is retold in Prometheus Bound.  Her scene ends with the return of her torments:

spirally wheeld

by madness, madness

stormblasted I’m

blown off course

my tongue my tiller

it’s unhinged, flappy

words words thrash

dashed O at doom

mud churning up

breaking in waves

                               (IO charges off)  (73, Scully & Herington)

I assume that is pretty free.  But if I imagine it as song, along with Io’s maddened, terrified cow dance, it could be shocking to see.

Or ridiculous.  I was surprised by all of the humor in Prometheus Bound, as in Hephaistos’s response to Power up above.  The scene with the blustering Ocean, the character who rides the winged beast, is essentially comic.  The argument between Prometheus and Hermes near the end of the play is comic.  Prometheus gives Io a long prophecy because “I’ve more spare time than I could wish for” (69, Scully).  The play begins with a torture scene and ends with another, possibly mental, that leads perfectly into Percy Shelley’s Romantic sequel, but in between there is quite a lot of comedy, audible in both versions I read.

This is what you get

for loving humankind.  (30, Scully and Herington)

Is that comic or tragic?

Next, for a change, is a Sophocles play, Ajax, thought to be an early one which just by probability puts it before the Oresteia.  With a subject from the Trojan War and a cast of famous heroes and themes of human folly and divine fate, Ajax may look more like my stereotype of a Greek play.  It’s another good one.

Benjamin Labatut's physics fantasy A Terrible Verdure - The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions

 I.

Benjamin Labatut’s Bolaño-Sebaldian 2020 novel-like object, Un verdor terrible (A Terrible Verdure, although Adrian Nathan West’s English translation is titled When We Cease to Understand the World) has been getting a lot of attention.  It is a fantasy novel where major twentieth-century scientists and mathematicians are mystics who make their discoveries through glimpses of the reality behind the veil.  Several, but not all, of the figures Labatut writes about were, in fact, mystics, although the relation, in what I call the real world, between their work and their mysticism is not so clear. 

In fantasy fiction, metaphors are made literal.  In A Terrible Verdure, high-cognition scientists are not just like mystics, but are mystics.  What do we get from this particular physics fantasy?

One thing is that the “genius poet” problem is solved.  Nabokov somewhere says that the hardest character to make convincing is the poet of genius, because the author has to actually be a poet of genius to provide the evidence that the character is such a thing.  Just asserting genius does not work.  The same is true for physicists and mathematicians.  By using real figures – primarily Fritz Haber, Karl Schwarzchild, Alexander Grothendieck, Erwin Schrödinger, and Werner Heisenberg – Labatut can use, or at least name, their actual contributions, while inventing much of the story around them.  Schrödinger, for example, comes up with the wave equation at the base of quantum mechanics (non-fiction) while reenacting sexy scenes from the contemporary novel The Magic Mountain (fiction).

Labatut turns everything mathematical into metaphor, and what else is he supposed to do?  “I understand about as much physics as you can without understanding mathematics” he says in an interview in Physics Today.  At least the physics problems suggest something in the material world; the chapter on Alexander Grothendieck is especially abstract, since his specialty was pure mathematics, so abstract that even the names of the fields barely mean anything.  In my own study of mathematics, I tapped out at real analysis, already getting too abstract for me, so poking around in Grothendieck’s actual work was amusingly pointless.

The speaker here is a Chilean mathematician who, inspired by Grothendieck’s retreat, afraid that math is destroying the world, retired long ago to cultivate his garden:

We know how to use it [quantum mechanics], it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it.  The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions.  It’s as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.  (187)

Which words are doing all the work?  “[A]ctually,” “true”?  In another sense, lots of people understand quantum mechanics, thousands of people.  “You [physicists, but also anyone] need to let the book do what it’s trying to do, which is going to be harder if you’re a physicist,” Labatut says in the Physics Today interview, which I think is right, but the other side is that non-physicists should be clear about what the book is not doing.

II.

In the old days, a novel like this would have likely been about the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear war, but Labatut barely gestures in that direction.  His recurring catastrophe is environmental, not the familiar one of climate change, but rather a disaster of superabundance caused by artificial nitrogen fixing, the great discovery of chemist Fritz Haber, who was also the father of modern chemical warfare, an irony that has been explored many times.

Haber is the eventual subject of the first chapter, “Prussian Blue,” which is a direct imitation of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995).  The first paragraph covers German soldiers hopped up on Pervitin, which moves us to post-war suicides, and thus to cyanide, discovered as a by product of the invention of the chemical pigment Prussian Blue, which brings us to silkworm cultivation, and so on to Haber and his life and work.  Just like a Saturn chapter, except shorter and simpler.  The silkworms are taken directly from Sebald, and I mean directly:

The Reich Association of Silkworm Breeders in Berlin, a constituent group within the Reich Federation of German Breeders of Small Animals, which in turn was affiliated to the Reich Agricultural Commission, saw its task as increasing production in every existing workshop, advertising silk cultivation in the press, in the cinema and on radio, establishing model rearing units for educational purposes, organizing advisory bodies at local, district and regional level to support all silk-growers, providing mulberry trees, and planting them by the millions on unutilized land, in residential areas and cemeteries, by roadsides, on railway embankments and along the Reich’s autobahns. (293, Sebald, tr. Michael Hulse)

Labatut compresses the first seventy-three words into two:

The Nazis planted millions of such trees in abandoned fields and residential quarters, in schoolyards and cemeteries, in the grounds of hospitals and sanatoria, and on both sides of the highways that criss-crossed the new Germany. (16, Labatut)

This is the only time I noticed the literal rewriting of a Sebald sentence (“sanatoria” is added to foreshadow the Schrödinger chapter), but now I wonder if there are more, and plenty of other bits are dropped in, like the herring on the last page.  I don’t exactly want to say that Sebald’s sentences and maze of connections are better than Labatut’s, but they are clearly more complex.

Someone with a copy of Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996) could, I suspect, enjoy a similar, or perhaps quite different, exercise.  See that Physics Today interview.

I enjoyed When We Cease to Understand the World quite a lot. But part of that pleasure was recognition, part was flattery, and part was because it was all kind of easy.

The Suppliants by Aeschylus - This is the prelude to suffering and slavery.

That is almost literally what The Suppliants or The Suppliant Women (463 BCE) is, the prelude to what is likely a more tragic, more interesting pair of plays that we have lost.

The fifty daughters of Danaus, rejecting a forced marriage with their fifty male cousins, have fled Egypt for refuge in Greece, in Argos, the home of their distant relative Io, who was turned into a cow and raped by Zeus in the form of a bull.  (I love how everyone in the play just takes all of that for granted).  The Argives have a dilemma – reject the Danaids and break taboos of hospitality and religious sanctuary, or protect them and risk war with the Egyptians.  “I have entered this dispute to my own ruin,” worries the Argive king (67).  The Greeks make the latter choice, pretty clearly the ethically correct one, and the suppliant women are saved.  Hooray!  Curtain.

I don’t know how long the intermission was between plays in the Athenian theater.  Presumably long enough for some fish cakes, some wine, some discussion of the play.

Last week, in Seven Against Thebes, we saw the women of Thebes deliver a long, powerful song about their terrible fate if an army sacks their city.  In The Egyptians, the play that follows The Suppliants, it is likely that the Argives lose their bet, the city is sacked, or almost sacked, and the Danaids are forced to marry their cousins.  The play would end just before, or just after, forty-nine of the fifty brides simultaneously murder their husbands in bed.  This is what I take as the more interesting part of the story.

Anybody’s guess what happens in the third play.  One tradition is that the Danaids spend eternity in Hell futilely carrying water in leaky vases, as depicted in René Jules Lalique’s 1926 glass vase, this particular one now in the Dallas Museum of Art.  But more likely there is a reconciliation of some kind, like we will later see in The Eumenides.

I wonder if – no, I am certain that – there has been a production of the play in Greece where the Danaids are portrayed as Syrian refugees.  It would not take much tinkering.  The Danaids constantly emphasize – or the Philip Vellacott translation emphasizes – that the women are rejecting male violence:

And grant that we, descendants of Io his holy bride,

May escape the embrace of man,

And keep our virginity unconquered.  (58, repeated in a kind of chorus)

They are being pursued not by lust or gain but, they sing, “the male pride of the violent sons of Aegyptus” (55), and when an Egyptian character threatens war he hopes that “the male cause gain the victory and rule” (82).  A director does not have to wander too far from this text.

What else is in here?  This is the third play in a row with an altar in the center of the stage.  We’ll break the streak with the next one. 

The massive irony of the great-great-etc. granddaughters of one of Zeus’s many rapes appealing to Zeus for protection from rape is never addressed in the text that I could see, unless the curious arguments of the women’s maids at the very end are obliquely bringing it up.

How many people are on stage, anyway?  How big is this chorus?  All fifty women, plus their fifty maids?  Or more likely only twelve (plus maids).  Who knows.

One song of the chorus is especially beautiful, although horrible, the one where the suppliants imagine the peace of a sublime death:

Could I but find a seat in the blue air

Where drifting rain-clouds turn to snow,

Some smooth summit where even goats cannot climb,

A place beyond sight, aloof,

A dizzy crag, vulture-haunted,

To witness my plunge into the abyss,

To escape a forced marriage my heart refuses! (78)

The Suppliants is my least favorite Aeschylus play, but there is still plenty in it for a good rummage.  I wonder why it was preserved?  But I wonder that with most of the plays.

Next week we read Prometheus Bound, another first in a trilogy, and another strange one.  The date is unknown, and even the authorship of Aeschylus is an open question.  Talk about interesting.

The title quotation is on p. 77 of the Vellacott Penguin.

 

Miriam found the word - Dorothy Richardson's Pointed Roofs

I first heard of the British novelist Dorothy Richardson, author of the thirteen volume Pilgrimage series, in Ford Madox Ford’s eccentric, exuberant literary history The March of Literature (1938), where he declares her the greatest living English writer, more or less, hoping that:

every one of my readers will at the earliest reasonable opportunity procure himself a copy of Miss Richardson’s Pointed Roofs, a beautiful book which, published in 1915, was drowned under the reverberations of the late war…  (848)

Richardson is “less willfully elaborate and much more verbally beautiful” than Proust.  We will just ignore the sentence on the same page where Ford “make[s] the same plea for the French novels of M. René Béhaine… the greatest of French living writers.”

I mean, greatest, whatever, but this sounded good, and the earliest reasonable opportunity turned out to be earlier this month, helped by a Twitter-driven readalong of all thirteen novels which can be found at the poundtag #PilgrimageTogether.

The subject is fictionalized autobiography, which in this first book means 17 year-old Miriam goes to a German girls’ boarding school, nominally to teach English.  It’s a genuine “study abroad” novel, a favorite genre of mine.  She stays for a year - rather less, really - and learns a lot.  Some things are awful compared to England, others the greatest thing in the world.  The mentality is authentically teenaged.

The setting provides some linguistic fun – I will link to examples provided by Languagehat – that I presume I lose when Miriam returns to England in the second volume.  Otherwise the language is the kind of precise, sensory prose that I associate with Flaubert and his descendants.  Lots of description, especially of hair and clothes, lots of unfussy but original and useful metaphor – “A great plaque of sunlight lay across the breakfast-table” (Ch. 4).  Or how about this one, for applause:

Gertrude Goldring, the Australian, was making noises with her hands like inflated paper bags being popped.  (Ch. 3)

I was surprised at how easy the prose was, for the most part, as in the first lines:

Miriam left the gaslit hall and went slowly upstairs. The March twilight lay upon the landings, but the staircase was almost dark. The top landing was quite dark and silent. There was no one about. It would be quiet in her room. She could sit by the fire and be quiet and think things over until Eve and Harriett came back with the parcels.

But there is a real innovation here; Richardson never bothers to tell me exactly who Eve and Harriett are.  They are Miriam’s sisters, and since I am able to figure this out there is no need to say so directly.  Trollope – you name it – would say “Eve, her oldest sister…” and so on.  Richardson is not as generous with information.  She trusts that I am paying attention.

The stream of consciousness passages are also innovations.  They are typographically distinct, with the ellipses signaling the shift:

Late at night, seated wide-awake opposite her sleeping companion, rushing towards the German city, she began to think.

It was a fool's errand.... To undertake to go to the German school and teach ... to be going there ... with nothing to give. The moment would come when there would be a class sitting round a table waiting for her to speak. She imagined one of the rooms at the old school, full of scornful girls.... How was English taught? How did you begin? English grammar ... (Ch, 2, and it goes on for a while)

Later, soon but later, Joyce and Woolf will realize that they can cut the “she began to think” business, and perhaps a lot more.

I have a strong taste for this kind of prose, “impressionist,” to use Ford’s term.  So good:

There was a large ostrich feather fastened by a gleaming buckle against the side of her silky beaver hat. It swept, Miriam found the word during the Psalms, back over her hair.  (Ch. 5)

I will read at least a couple more novels in the series (they are all pretty short), but I am puzzled about the metaphysics of the book.  What is the novel behind the novel?  I am not sure.  The collected edition begins with a four-page 1938 literary history that is so wrong I now think of it as a purposeful obfuscation, but I will save that idea until I have read a little more.

Maybe the novels are just fictional autobiography turned into fiction, written as well as possible, with an unusual feminine ethos.  Nothing wrong with that.  The sorts of elaborate patterning I associate with Flaubert are, if they exist here at all, still invisible to me.  So I will keep reading.

Thanks to #PilgrimageTogether for the push.

Akutagawa's Rashōmon and 17 Other Stories - I sensed the agency of the finger of destiny and felt compelled to read that passage

The book in front of me is Rashōmon and 17 Other Stories by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, the cute 2006 Penguin with the manga cover and Murakami Haruki introduction, translated by Jay Rubin.  I’m trying to stick to the Japanese convention where the family name comes first, but I make no promises about consistency. 

I’d never read Akutagawa before. 

I liked it a lot, enough that I immediately started another, earlier collection, Rashomon and Other Stories (Liveright, 1952, tr. Takashi Kojima), to fill in some gaps.  Murakami insisted on a story called “Yam Gruel,” not in the book he introduced.  He was right, “Yam Gruel” is good, from the title on.    Apparently yam gruel was a Heian delicacy, as unlikely as that sounds.

Akutagawa only wrote for twelve years before, physically and mentally ill, killing himself in 1927 when he was 35.  With such a short life, I was not expecting his writing to have phases, but they are pretty clear.  He had some big hits right away, famous stories like “In a Bamboo Grove” and “Hell Screen,” modernized versions of grotesque old tales, generally set, like those two, in the decadent end of the Heian period.  He also has a set of 17th and 18th century stories, often about Christian martyrs.  The attraction is clearly to the martyrdom, the tortures, another form of grotesquerie.  Many of these stories are horror stories, really, “Hell Screen” most obviously, where a lunatic painter commissioned to depict Hell tortures his assistants and worse in the name of realism:

And the kinds of torture were as numberless as the sinners themselves – flogging with an iron scourge, crushing under a gigantic rock, pecking by a monstrous bird, grinding in the jaws of a poisonous serpent…  (51, ellipses in original)

But the painter can only paint what he has seen, so the story fills in how he saw some of those horrors.  And worse.  I can see how this 1918 story, and others like it, made Akutagawa a star.

I could almost see the literal, experiential painter as some kind of parody of Naturalism, which leads to phase three (phase two is a crisis in the early 1920s).  Late in his life – what turns out to be late – Akutagawa turns to autobiographical writing, whether as fiction or memoir or unusual fragments.  The Penguin collection gives a third of its pages to “Akutagawa’s Own Story” in six varied texts, a chronicle of the author’s anguish and fear, aside from the interesting details about Tokyo and its literary scene, including the complex integration of European literature, especially French and Russian, by a generation of Japanese writers.

Bringing to mind the paper rose petals on the street, however, I decided to buy Conversations with Anatole France a d The Collected Letters of Prosper Mérimée.  (223)

But as the writer’s mental health fails he shifts from his early French influences to Dostoevsky and Strindberg.  In a curious scene, the author picks up Crime and Punishment but finds himself reading The Brothers Karamazov:

The bindery had accidentally included pages from the wrong book.  That I had, in turn, accidentally opened the book to those misbound pages: I sensed the agency of the finger of destiny and felt compelled to read that passage.  Before I had read a single page, however, my entire body began to tremble.  It was the scene in which the devil torments Ivan.  Ivan, Strindberg, and Maupassant – and, here in this room, me… (231, ellipses in original)

Another kind of horror literature, that of incipient schizophrenia.

Dolce Bellezza’s Japanese Literature Challenge, running through March, is in its 15th year!  That is impressive.  I had better go register this piece.

 

Seven Against Thebes in three big scenes - I fear shipwreck, I fear unspeakable things

I fear shipwreck, I fear unspeakable things,

the city’s destruction, the foul death of two kings. (54)

That is the chorus of women in Seven Against Thebes, getting it right as usual.  Aeschylus wrote a Theban trilogy in 467 BCE, of which only this last play survived.  Perhaps the Sophocles play kicked the Aeschylus Oedipus out of the anthologies.  Now there’s a tragedy.

The two sons of Oedipus, enacting the long-running family curse, are at war, with Eteokles defending Thebes from the besieging army of his brother.  I will pick out three great scenes in the play, one of which is also simultaneously the most tedious surviving scene in Greek tragedy (that I remember, at least).

First, there is the chorus’s terrified pre-threnody, when they imagine the sack and looting of the city, especially, vividly, the rape, murder and enslavement of themselves.

Perhaps a dark deliverance may occur

                   in that foul bridal, the untamed

violence of the battle-grounded bed.

                   and there may come to her

                   a species of relief

an end to tidal groans, weeping, and grief. (36)

In other words, the women will be lucky if they die quickly.  This scene was first performed in front of an audience that, fifteen years earlier, had abandoned Athens to the Persian invaders.  The particular suffering of women during war is a major theme of Greek tragedy, so we’ll see this again.

A second great scene comes when Eteokles willfully chooses direct combat with his brother, violating religious taboos and ensuring his destruction.  The chorus tries to dissuade him, but in a long, nihilistic argument he justifies his fratricidal, suicidal decision by the meaninglessness of all things:

ETEOKLES:  Somehow, for a long time,

we have ceased to be a concern of the gods.

Our death is the only sacrifice they would value.

Why any longer lick

at the bone hand of man-harvesting Fate?  (51)

The result is that both brothers win Thebes, exactly “as much land / as the dead may need” (53). I can see how this caught the attention of twentieth century existentialists.  I often think of the essence of Greek tragedy as an exploration of fate and divine capriciousness, but here the anti-hero chooses his doom with open eyes.

Perhaps you have noticed the rhymes and strong metaphors in the above passages.  They are all from the Anthony Hecht and Helen H. Bacon translation (Oxford, 1973), part of a series which teamed a poet and a classicist to create new translations.  Hecht, a great poet, really lets it rip sometimes.  I read Philip Vellacott’s 1961 Penguin translation, too, which is readable and tamer.  An unusually wild bit of Vellacott:

And Tydeus, mad with lust for battle, like a snake

Shrieking at noon…  (99)

And Hecht and Bacon:

But Tydeus, raving and gluttonous for battle,

bellows like a chimera in noonday clangor. (37)

Translators do what they gotta do.  What relationship any of this has with the Greek text I do not know, although that is what the classicist side of the team is for.  Bacon, though, is a classicist with a theory.  The middle third of the play is a Homeric catalogue of champions, seven on each side (there is a spatial “seven” theme that interacts with a temporal “three” theme), with special emphasis on the meaning of the devices on the enemy champions’ shields.  Only one of the defending champions’ shield devices is specifically described, but Bacon’s idea is first, that of course Aeschylus does not need to describe the shields when the audience can simply see them, and second, that there are enough clues in the text that she can guess what the shield emblems are supposed to be.  The climax of the scene is not just when Eteokles embraces his doom by choosing himself as combatant against his own brother, but when he reveals his shield emblem.  The audience, which has been following along carefully, gasps in horror!  He has picked anger (Fury), rather than love (Aphrodite)!

What do I know about any of this, but the whole scene makes a lot more sense in the Hecht and Bacon version than in Vellacott.  Something is happening on stage that is part of the spectacle, not the text.

I hope anyone reading along has enjoyed Seven Against Thebes.  I guess I think it does require a little more forceful imaginative sympathy than most of the other Greek plays, a little more of an attempt to imagine the Greek perspective.

Next is The Suppliants or The Suppliant Women, four years later (463 BCE), just in time to confound all generalizations.  The protagonist is the chorus!  And the play is not a tragedy!

The Persians by Aeschylus - soon new disaster gushes forth

That little tag (l. 814, p. 145) about disaster could be from many Greek tragedies, but it is specifically from The Persians by Aeschylus (472 BCE), his first extant play, and therefore the first extant Greek play, and therefore the first extant play, which amazes me every time I think about it.

The Persians is likely not the first in many other ways, although as with any aspect of this subject, who knows, but it is pretty close.  The cult of Dionysus had only been in Athens for a hundred years or so, and the interactions between a chorus and a single actor performing some kind of dramatic story (meaning, a play) younger than that.  The Theater of Dionysus had only been in use for about twenty-five years, which is likely about how long Aeschylus had been writing and directing plays.  Greek tragedy was already a mature theatrical tradition when Aeschylus wrote The Persians, with a number of older playwrights, experiments, and so many lost plays.

Side note: my plan is to write about various aspects of Greek plays as I write about specific ones.  I won’t say anything you won’t read in the introductory material to whichever editions you are reading, but it is all part of how I organize my thoughts about the plays, and about literature generally.  Why did anyone write this kind of thing?  Who was the audience?  What did the performance of the play look like?  How did it sound?  Basic stuff.

How many Greek tragedies were directly* about recent events, for example?  The Persians is the only example we have.  It is the tragedy of Xerxes, king of Persia, specifically his decisive defeat by a much smaller force of Greeks, primarily Athenian, in the naval battle of Salamis just eight years before the performance of the play.  It’s the victory that kicked off the Athenian Golden Age and created the power vacuum in the Aegean that led to an empire run by a democratic government of a once-minor city-state.  Unlikely events.

My understanding of human nature suggests that a play or epic poem or song about a great victory would be celebratory, perhaps even boastful, but this play is about the suffering of the Persians in defeat, and not of ordinary people but of the Emperor:

XERXES: Weep and howl.

CHORUS:  We weep and howl. (ll. 1060-1, p. 151)

The great showpiece scene features a messenger giving a long description of the battle, the great defeat, and the subsequent disastrous retreat, while the mother of Xerxes and the Persian elders react in horror and grief.  “Yet I must now unfold the whole disastrous truth” (l. 53, 130), the messenger says:

Sirs, I was there; what I have told I saw myself;

I can recount each detail of the great defeat.  (ll. 63-4, 151)

And what gets me is that a large part of the audience, and the actors, and likely the playwright, the 15,000 free male citizens of Athens, were also there, at Salamis, or adjunct to it, and many others had fought in other battles against the Persians.  Even the youngest would remember the events, only eight years before, when a massive Persian force was on the edge of conquering Athens.  Obviously, the tragedy of the Persians is the negative image of the triumph of the Athenians, but The Persians appears more like a radical act of sympathy.  “Why is the groaning earth rutted and scarred” (l. 71, p. 141) asks the ghost of King Darius, a universal question, perhaps, or at least a good one for the rulers of a new empire to ask.

Or I am misreading the tone completely, and The Persians is about gloating and humiliating the justly punished enemies of God-favored Athens.

I read the Philip Vellacott translation in the old Penguin Classics edition, so line and page numbers come from there.

Next up is Seven Against Thebes (467 BCE), the third play in an otherwise lost trilogy about Oedipus and Thebes.  I’m going to switch to the Anthony Hecht and Helen H. Bacon translation because the edition has more notes, and boy does this play need them. While The Persians is a great place to kick off a trip through the Greek plays, Seven Against Thebes is a poor follow-up, in that it is likely the most arcane, alien play we will read.  Who was the audience; what did it look like – I will need these questions more than ever.

I hope everyone enjoyed The Persians.  It is awfully interesting.

The vase, roughly contemporary to The Persians, is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  It shows Athena holding the stern of a warship, and likely commemorates an Athenian naval victory.

* A number of later plays are indirectly about recent events, but we’ll get to that.

Plans

I had planned to chatter here more in advance of the Greek play event, but circumstances have intervened.  That is sufficiently vague and passive-voiced.  I am tapping this out on my phone.

Still, onward.  The schedule for reading the Greek plays, beginning with "The Persians," is two posts down and also off to the right.  The more I think about it, the more that play seems like a good place to start - typical in some useful ways but really quite odd, like all of the early Aeschylus plays.

The Greek plays risk swallowing my reading, since they are so interesting in many directions, and have led to a lot of great criticism and scholarship and artistic responses.  But with effort I will resist the temptation.

Last year my concentration was poor - life events - and I read fewer and easier books than usual, and read more randomly, although my Education continued, and now I think I will be able to get back to my push through the major works of the 1930s.

Plus I continue to work on reading in French, which has gone well enough that I am also working on reading in Portuguese, starting from a low, low level.  I think I have learned some skills for this sort of thing. Or I will give it up as too difficult. Who knows.

Aeschylus, in a little over a week - exciting!  My impression is that quite a number of people are reading along, in one way or another.  I should learn a lot, which is how I measure these things.