At last! A RomCom on this reading list!
Just finished Euripides’ play Alcestis. A pleasant change from its gory predecessors.
Things I can’t care about: Iambic Pentameter
Started the plays of Euripides this week (SQUEEE!) and ran into my first disapointing introduction (BOOOo!). For the most part I have been learning the nuanced history of Western Thought from the play intros.
Odysseus is Captain Hammer, but who is Dr. Horrible?
There are the classics, and then on a higher plain sits Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the place one begins when discovering Western Literature. These works are so important, so masterful, that they are almost as good as Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog. At the very least, they are worthy of comparison…maybe.
In Suffering, Truth?
"Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!"
Whether we are talking about the world debt crisis or entitlement programs, the Western world is engaged in an epic debate about fairness. On one side, we hear the general argument that it is government’s role to make life more fair. On the other side, there are cries that if the world economy collapses our governments won’t be able to pay for anything…and that will be much less fair.
Sophocles totally gets that you keep that thing you hate because you’re comfortable, he just thinks you’re lame.
You want to see Ajax performed live
Ajax was one of the bloodiest reads I have had to date. It’s no wonder it was a bloody play when performed live! I’m lucky my dad is a butcher, otherwise I would have had to leave with a weak stomach when the flayed cow and sheep guts came into view.
Michael Lutch photographer
A Happy Ending and A Happy New Year!
After this last tempestuous year, I am delighted to pick up my pen and return to the Britannica 10-year reading program. All-in-all, I am pleased with the project’s progress as I again tuck into the Great Books of Western Civilization repast.
2011 begins with Sophocles’ play Philoctetes (pronounced fil-ahk-tee-teez). This play has a HAPPY ENDING!! (WOOHOO!!) I was giving up hope of getting to read anything but murdering moms and mutilated animals.
It took three readings and a scouring of the introduction to begin to understand why “The Women of Trachis” is a great reading of Western Civilization. At first read, the play seems like a cruel cosmic joke. On second glance it appeared to be another fluff-filled tragedy with a monochromatic female lead. On third glance it became the much larger question of correct human action based on god-induced finality. The text of the play itself feels straightforward but the intro to this Greek tragedy showed nuance that is only vaguely suggested in its lines.
Quick recap of Sophocles’ “Women of Trachis” because it has been so long:
Prophecy swirls around Deianara, the wife of Heracles (think Hercules), as she waits to find out if the gods will let her husband happily retire or kill him. Hark! A messenger arrives with spoils of war and glad tidings of Heracles’ success. The new slaves are welcomed and the obvious nobility of one, a young lady of superb beauty who refuses to speak, is noted. A trusted servant tells Deianara the silent maidservant was a princess and that Heracles razed her father’s city in order to have her. Deianara takes the news in stride, noting that men will be men. She sends words of welcome and a robe to her husband who is gratefully sacrificing to the gods. On the robe is a love potion Deianara prays will win her husband’s affections back. When the servants leave, Deianara expresses a fear to the chorus that the secret love charm will harm Heracles. Suddenly, Hyllus (Deianara and Heracles’ son) rages home accusing her of attempting to kill Heracles with the robe. In her distress, she commits suicide. Hyllus realizes that she did not intend murder and remorsefully tries to explain all to the dying Heracles. When Heracles hears the tale he realizes that his imminent death was prophesied when he was a child. Heracles requests to be burned alive and forces Hyllus to build the fire and marry the princess slave.
At first this seems like a twisted cosmic joke and leaves a bit of a stomach ache. A loving wife waits for return of husband only to be thwarted by a dead perverted centaur? A valiant man thanks the gods for a happy retirement only to be murdered mid-sacrifice by the gods’ will? A happy and dutiful son witnesses the disturbing deaths of his parents and is forced to marry his dad’s mistress? Even by South Park’s standards, Sophocles has a sick sense of humor.
For the second glance on the treatment of women, please see my last post.
During a frustrated third reading, something much deeper emerged. I would not have seen it without this section of the intro.
“the events leading up to Heracles’ defeat are part of the external, inevitable pattern against which the suffering and the actions of the characters must be seen. What happens when Heracles understands this pattern, being in accord with it and yet beyond it, may be the most important part of the play. As far as the characters, or we, can see, the Gods do not care. The meaning and worth of men’s actions are what we make of them.”
A light bulb turned on; this play is about the exercise of free will on the static backdrop of decisions made by gods! Greece was wrestling with the question of the existence of their pantheon of gods and the validity of the oracles and prophecies that constantly issued from supposed prophets. In this play the gods are real and their prophecies really destroy the mythic hero Heracles and his family.
The question of how to behave in the face of a god’s will has been rising in importance in the last 2-3 years thanks in no small part to the awful programming about Nostradamus constantly played on the History Channel. Like it or not, the question of whether we are in the Christian apocalypse, about to meet our Mayan 2012 expiration date, or heading into the Islamic End Time is being asked with increasing frequency.
Sometimes more and sometimes less elegantly expressed, the main questions seem to be: Is there an inevitable pattern working itself out through the cosmos, which pattern is it, and what should a person do based on that information?
The anxiety that surrounds these issues seems to be sapping entrepreneurial gusto. “Things are preordained to fall apart so why try?” once well expressed as “Who is John Galt?” is the disturbingly lethargic question on the rise in our turbulent times.
Sophocles was a firm believer in prophecy and spent “The Women of Trachis” focusing on the actions of people before and after they realize they are caught in a preordained web by their capricious gods. Deianara hopes for her husband’s safe return, tries to allure him with a love charm, and is trapped into fulfilling the prophecy of his demise. In her realization that her choices were the instrument of the gods to destroy what she wanted, she makes the decision to end her life instead of existing in a world pre-destined to not include her beloved husband. Heracles fights the poisoned robe until he realizes this death is the fulfillment of prophecy and then hastily picks the manner and speed of death.
There is something equally relieving and disturbing that humans have been eloquently grappling with the ideas of free will and static background for at least 3000 years. There seems to be no simple answer save one: In America we have something good so lets fight for it whether it is the end of time or not!
My gender is insulted by Sophocles’ “The Women of Trachis”
The central mistake made by the female protagonist in “The Women of Trachis” makes our entire gender look bad. Deianira mistakenly kills her husband and then commits suicide because she took a love potion from a dying centaur who was murdered by her husband for trying to rape her. The remarkable part of her mistake is that it went unremarked by the chorus. At no point in this whole tragedy is the sheer lunacy of taking a love potion from one’s attempted rapist pointed out. The whole reading left me feeling outraged by the complacent acceptance of female mental inferiority that pervaded ancient Greece – and I have already read The Odyssey and been reminded over and over again that the perfect wife waits meekly crying at home while her husband gallivants with a sexy nymph.
Deianira was not a notably stupid person. Her good sense seems to be emphasized for most of the play. She chastely awaits the return of her husband, reacts graciously when presented with her husband’s mistress, and cares for her family. In terms of the competence expected of women during that time period, nothing seems to be lacking. So why is her mistake taken in stride?
The play begins at the end of a patient wait for her husband Heracles (think Greek Hercules) to return home. This particular year of waiting – she had many – was critical to their future because a prophecy predicted that EITHER Heracles would come home and enjoy a peaceful life OR he would die. Deianira is deeply in love with her penultimate mythic hero hubby and fervently hopes for a long peaceful life together with their children.
Heracles sends the spoils of war ahead of him as he intends to give sacrifices to the gods. Included in the spoils are maidservants from the newly sacked city of Oechalia. Deianara welcomes the women honorably, promises fair treatment, and is struck by the radiant beauty of one girl of obviously noble birth.
A servant takes Deianara aside and explains that the fetching maidservant is the princess of Oechalia and was Heracles motive for destroying the city. He is hopelessly besotted and plans to frolic with her in the house he shares with his wife.
All things considered, Deianira handles this news like a champion of sense:
“Speak, and you will find that I am not a spiteful woman
Nor one who does not know how it is with man—
We cannot always enjoy a constant happiness.”
Further emphasizing her tact and grace, she sends a robe to Heracles that she lovingly created for his return and offers heartfelt words of welcome. It is with the execution of this gift that she makes her mistake. A long time ago, a centaur was helping her ford a river when he got a little…”handsy”. Heracles shot him with a special arrow tipped with the eternal poison of the Hydra.
In the words of Deianara:
“I have had hidden in a copper urn
For many years the gift of a centaur, long ago
While I was still a child, I took it from the wounds
Of the hairy-chested Nessus as he lay dying
He used to ferry people, for a fee, across
the deep flood of the Evenus, in his arms
with no oars to drive him over nor ships’ sails.
I too was carried on his shoulders when my father
sent me to follow Heracles for the first time
as his wife. When I was halfway across
his hands touched me lustfully. I cried out and at once
the son of Zeus turned around, raised his hands,
and shot a feathered arrow through his chest; into
his lungs it hissed. The beast spoke his last words to me
as he died, “Daughter of old Oeneus,
if you listen to me, you shall have great profit
from my ferrying, since you are the last I have brought across.
If you take in your hands this blood, clotted in
my wounds, wherever it is black with the bile
of the Hydra, the monstrous serpent of Lerna, in which
he dipped his arrows, you will have a charm over
the heart of Heracles, so he will never look
at another woman and love her more than you.”…
I followed all the instructions he gave me while he still lived
And dipped this robe in the charm. Now it is done.”
Who accepts a present from a foiled rapist?
Because this is a Greek tragedy, someone had to commit an earth shattering mistake. Up until this play, the egregious error has been talked over and lamented by the chorus. Oedipus’s marriage, Agamemnon’s hubris, Ajax’s pride, etc.
No one points out that accepting Hydra poisoned blood as a love charm was stupid. The closest the chorus gets to censuring such an obviously foolish decision:
“She, poor woman, knew nothing of this
but, seeing great injury for her home
from a new marriage swiftly approaching,
Applied her remedy.”
Wow. Why didn’t they expect better of her? Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon and the Chorus goes on for pages! Antigone dares to ceremonially bury her brother and is sentenced to death for disobedience! Why was it not shocking for a woman to take a love charm from an assailant?
Senator Al Franken has the last word today on Sophocles, “Mistakes are part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it’s a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.” Her mistake was fatal – her suicide will be discussed in next post. The lesson we should take is to never trust a centaur or a woman’s good sense.
On a side note, the philandering and perpetually absent Heracles wasn’t such a bad deal for this girl…she almost got raped by a creepy bullheaded river god.
“for my suitor was the river Achelous,
Who used to come to ask my father for my hand,
Taking three forms – first clearly a bull, and then
A serpent with shimmering coils, then a man’s body
But a bull’s face, and from his clump of beard
Whole torrents of water splashed like a fountain…
In my unhappiness I constantly prayed for death
Before I should ever come to HIS marriage bed.”
::shiver::
Theme Music Friday: Korn
Happy Friday!
