May 26, 2010 by tonibadnall
With apologies to Jane and Gordon for not posting in awhile…I didn’t realise I had a fan base!
Actual ‘work’ work (in the sense of research) has been on and off of late. I got a good chunk done of one paper over Christmas and some of another during the Easter break, but since then it has been non-stop marking and job applications – I hope to sneak some work in tomorrow, before the next set of exam papers come in, on the article that demands my attention most.
This discussion returns to my thesis topic of wedding songs, and looks at the 3rd Stasimon (choral ode) of Euripides’ play Iphigenia in Aulis. This song describes the marriage of mythical hero/goddess couple, Peleus and Thetis (parents of Achilles) at a moment in the play between Achilles’ decision to marry Iphigenia and save her from sacrifice, and Iphigenia’s realisation that her father Agamemnon really would rather cut her throat in exchange for fair sailing to Troy.
The epithalamial resonances in this ode are in no doubt, but my question is – how do they function here? Critics most often note the contrast between the ‘idealisation’ of the ode and the brutality of the rest of the play. My argument is that the ode isn’t that idealistic – it makes full use of the ironic/foreboding element present in the Greek wedding song to in fact tie the mythical past even more closely to the violent present.
There are linguistic and thematic parallels with Sappho’s wedding narrative of Hector and Andromache (fr. 44), but the Sapphic song can be seen to refer poignantly to the Iliad - in Hector’s death (explicitly connected with his wedding by Homer) and the recovery of his body. So the ‘idealism’ lent by the Sapphic intertext is undermined by that very intertext. Euripides, I argue, employs his own set of Homeric allusions – the foreshadowing of Thetis’ gift of arms to her son at the end of the antistrophe refers directly to that scene in Iliad 18. Even the language is the same.
The scene in the Iliad means that Achilles will re-enter the battle, kill Hector, and die trying to enter Troy. By referring to it here, Euripides predicts the hero’s glory and tragedy – a fate that will itself doom Iphigenia to death. Moreover, if the Euripidean song about Thetis’ wedding refers to Iliad 18, it is probably also meant to recall Thetis’ 1st-person narrative of that marriage in that book – not a joyous occasion blessed by the gods, but a humiliating rape inflicted upon her by those same gods.
There is certainly an ironic contrast present in this ode, but I would stress the ‘ironic’ aspect of that contrast. The Homeric, and even Sapphic, allusions undermine any picture of idealisation the ode presents us with at first glance. By using a polyvalent genre such as the epithalamium, whose double-meanings are culturally ingrained, Euripides produces a song with violent undertones that cannot be divorced from the action of his drama. It ensures Iphigenia will go to her death – a death whose glory is undermined by the rhetoric of the play and questioned by scholars. and if we question the glory of her death, must we also question that of Achilles, which is inextricably linked with it?
Tags: epithalamium, Euripides, gender, Greek literature, hymenaios, interpretation, Iphigenia, research, telos, wedding song
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March 25, 2010 by tonibadnall
What can Greek literature tell us about myth/myth tell us about literature?
Rather than preparing a lecture for this session, I asked students, in the previous lecture, to write any questions they had on this subject on an anonymous card, and hand them in at the end. In the subsequent week, I catalogued these questions into 3 categories, which we discussed in the final lecture as a round-table group (well, as ’round’ as you can get in a tiered lecture theatre).
1. What is the social significance of myth?
This made me wish I’d gone into more theory (or had time/space to go into more) over the course. We talked about how social mores and codes were transmitted through the medium of oral storytelling in pre-literate societies, and how these could then be manipulated on a literary level in later times. Myths explained some contemporary realities, such as aetiologies, and tied in with religion – although, as the Cambridge Ritualists discovered, it is not easy to tell which came first and explain the other: the myth or the ritual…
2. Variant versions
There seems to be no such thing as a ‘canon’ myth, although there are Panhellenic versions, such as Homer, and syncretized versions, such as Apollodorus. But variants existed depending on location, genre, even within the corpus of individual authors…in response to the question of ‘how many variants should we study?’, the consensus seemed to be ‘how ever many you feel you need to in order to understand a particular myth’.
3. Interpretation
We only have to look at the hero-cult seminar to see that our understanding of myths are vastly different to how a Greek would have perceived them. Reception is a fast-growing discipline within Classics, so it’s necessary to understand how and why they mean different things to us. Theory reared its head again – do we need to know about psychoanalysis to understand Oedipus? That, I’m afraid, is an open question…
Tags: Greek literature, Greek myth, interpretation, teaching
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March 25, 2010 by tonibadnall
Hero-cult
I think I am going to leave it here for the seminars on this module, as the last one was simply a revision session ahead of the exam – you can access the passages we used on the Greek Mythology page.
This was quite a difficult topic for students to get their heads round. Quite simply, our conception of ‘hero’ is rather different from that of the ancient Greeks. A hero, in Greek thought, was an individual who lived in the pre-historical ‘heroic’ age – up till the end of the Trojan War. To us, ‘hero’ implies Superman, or a war-veteran, or a fireman who saves kittens from a burning building (or even some depictions of Heracles) – someone who has done something special, above and beyond the call of duty, something ‘heroic’.
It was difficult then, to reconcile this notion with the heroes under question: Heracles, Oedipus, and Neoptolemus. All were figures of the heroic age, all were worshipped in cult, but all were very ambivalent characters. Heracles is a particularly good (or bad) example – he is a uniquely transgressive figure, and as such is worshipped as both god and hero. Yet there seems to be no mention of a heroon for him – plenty of shrines, but no real centre of ‘hero’ cult. Oedipus is similarly transgressive, and his cult centre is at Athens, where he came, a suffering old man, at the end of his life. Neoptolemus is most famous for his bad behaviour during the Trojan War – throwing Astyanax off the walls, murdering Priam, installing Andromache as his concubine and parading her in front of his wife…there is even ambiguity as to his death; whether he went to Delphi to challenge Apollo or to propitiate him.
My students were puzzled by the question ‘why are these figures worshipped?’ They were not ‘good guys’, but were intrinsically flawed individuals. And so a lot of ensuing discussion focused on the role of heroes in Greek literature, society and religion; trying to strip away our 21st-century cultural colouring and address the issue of what it means to be a ‘hero’ in the ancient Greek world.
Tags: Greek gods, Greek literature, Greek myth, Heracles, hero-cult, Neoptolemus, Oedipus, teaching, transgression
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March 25, 2010 by tonibadnall
At last, the final write-ups of these lectures…
The Greek word Nostos means ‘return’. In the ancient world, these nostoi formed a cycle of post-homeric epic poems about the homeward journeys of the heroes from Troy. Of this tradition, only the Odyssey really remains, and scattered references elsewhere, such as Agamemnon’s murder upon his homecoming, and Menelaus’ wanderings through Egypt before returning to Sparta with Helen.
When I was an undergraduate studying the Odyssey, I fell in love with this tradition. Nostos implies a return to something, a homecoming, and these myths focus a lot on exploring what ‘home’ means to a Greek. There are very visceral feelings associated with the oikos, as Odysseus’ reaction to his wife’s suitors shows, or Cassandra’s triumphant pronouncements in the Trojan Women that the Greeks had done as much damage to their own country, by leaving it empty of husbands and fathers for ten years, as they had to Troy by destroying it outright. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata echoes these feelings in the more ‘immediate’ context of the Peloponnesian war.
The struggle to come home, the constant determination to get back to one’s house and the people at the centre of it, is what really draws me to these myths. They place an importance on emotional bonds within the family that you don’t often see valorised elsewhere. So while there is hubris, divine wrath, shipwreck, and intra-familal violence, there are also some happy endings, and the poems that pick up from the end of the Odyssey, such as the Telegony, demonstrate once again that Homer is not the be-all and end-all of Greek myth.
Tags: Greek literature, Greek myth, Nostoi, oikos, teaching, Trojan War
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December 8, 2009 by tonibadnall
This lecture was slightly truncated due to the need to perform a SET/SEM review – a student evaluation of the module. I’ve yet to process the results, but most of the criticism seems at first glance to be constructive.
We looked at the remained of the Trojan myth, from the end of the Iliad to the departure of the Greeks for home at the end of the war. This gave an opportunity to work with some lesser-known texts, namely the fragments of the Epic Cycle, which often get mentioned in various scholarly works, but don’t often get studied. Major points of interest were the death of Achilles and the contest for his arms, the Trojan horse and the sack, and the assignment of the captives.
What came out most in the course of this was the hubris of the victors. Rape, arson and pillage are about par for the course in the sack of a city, but the Greeks were responsible for several outrages against the gods – Neoptolemus’ murder of Priam at the altar of Zeus and Ajax’s rape of Cassandra in the temple of Athena – that were inexcusable even by their victory. This transgression is continued by the infanticide of Astyanax and the sacrifice of Polyxena, and the resulting wrath of the gods, particularly Athena, sets the scene for the Nostoi, or ‘return stories’.
Tags: Greek gods, Greek literature, Greek myth, human sacrifice, teaching, Trojan War
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December 8, 2009 by tonibadnall
Incest
Greek myth (and perhaps even more so Roman, if we read Ovid) was full of intra-familial unions. This deserves comment, as the incest taboo is one of the most fundamental in just about any society. Even before the genetic problems of such intercourse became common knowledge, children of incest appear to have been considered in some way transgressive. This seems to have been one of the areas by which myth demonstrated, by means of negative exempla, the norms of human behaviour.
One group looked at father/daughter incest, and the myth of Thyestes and Pelopia. In some sources, Thyestes raped his daughter, unaware of who she was. In others, he received an oracle that he could avenge himself on his brother Atreus if he got a son (Aegisthus) on her, and another (in Hyginus) suggests she consented to this out of a sense of duty. Even so, the story ends with her killing herself when her son’s parentage is discovered, suggesting that not even the will of the gods can override the shame of such an act.
The second group looked at mother/son unions, and the myth of Oedipus is the obvious paradigm for this. Do we believe in Freud’s Oedipus complex? And why is there so much more ancient literature on this myth than other tales of incest? Have we sanctified and valorised the mother-son bond as a result of Western Catholicism? There are interesting parallels in the primordial myths, not only of Greece, but also of other cultures – mother/son intercourse tends to be the preserve of the early gods – Oedipus seems in that respect to transgress into the divine sphere.
The last group examined brother/sister incest, with the myth of the Aeolids. The Odyssey suggests the children of Aeolus were all happily married to each other; later versions highlight Macareus and Canace’s illicit affair, Aeolus’ wrath, and her suicide. What is allowable in the world of the ‘apologoi’ is less so in other genres. But again, cf. Zeus and Hera, a model picked up by the Ptolemies in Hellenistic Egypt. Mortals should not emulate the gods – where they do so, however unwittingly, it leads to death and the subversion, rather than continuation, of the oikos.
Tags: gender, Greek gods, Greek literature, Greek myth, incest, mythological theory, Oedipus, taboo, teaching
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December 8, 2009 by tonibadnall
Ok, I know it’s been a long time since I posted, even on my teaching pages. The first semester of an academic job is…a bit busy. And given no-one had commented on these posts, I had (wrongly) assumed students weren’t using it. This proved a bit of a misconception, as the recent SET/SEM review of this module came back with the result that students found this blog a helpful resource, and regretted there wasn’t more discussion here. Only 1 thing to say to that, guys – someone has to make the first comment! If you don’t, no-one else will, and it only takes 1 person to start a discussion…
Lecture 7 kicked off the myth of the Trojan War, tracing its events from the ‘plan of Zeus’ and the marriage of Thetis to the death of Hector at the end of the Iliad. That’s a lot of material, and the need to get through it all exposed one of the weaknesses of this module. Next time, less narrative, more detailed discussion. The build-up to the war is perhaps the most interesting aspect – you get a real sense of the heroic age hurtling towards Armageddon as Zeus decides to depopulate the earth and make his daughter famous.
The lecture looked at the Judgement of Paris and Helen’s role in the affair – was she a passive token of exchange, or an active seducee? Several representations of Helen were looked at, as lascivious adulteress, innocent victim, and regretful sinner. In many versions (Aeschylus and Euripides especially) she is connected linguistically or by imagery to Iphigenia, so the sacrifice at the heart of the embarkation also played a major role in the discussion. The conflict of the Iliad could probably have done with a lecture of its own, as there is a lot there which is hugely influential on the later tradition.
What does all this mean? Well, some major points did come out, which perhaps should have been elaborated more. The massive East vs. West conflict is important, especially in fifth-century depictions, and is still relevant to the modern day. There is a sense that combining the two spheres is disastrous, and this also holds true on another level – the myth functions to separate the spheres of gods and mortals. It is the end of the age of the demigods, for good or ill. The next lectures will aim to build on that sense of ‘closure’.
Tags: Greek gods, Greek literature, Greek myth, taboo, teaching, Trojan War
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November 12, 2009 by tonibadnall
One of the bloodiest chapters in Greek mythology, this myth cycle seems to be all about taboos and what happens when you violate them: cannibalism, incest, violence, sexual transgression. Parallels can be drawn with the House of Labdacus in the Theban Cycle – no wonder Froma Zeitlin though Argos and Thebes functioned as ‘other’ places set against Athens on the tragic stage.
Oe thing that comes out is the building cycle of transgressions as the myth progresses through its generations – you have Tantalus’ serving of Pelops at the banquet of the gods, and any retaliation of Pelops against his father instead seems displaced onto his father-in-law, Oenomaus, in his fatal chariot race. It’s in the next generation, though, that things get really interesting – and really grisly. Pelops’ own sons, Atreus and Thyestes, turn first on their brother Chrysippus, then on each other. Agamemnon and Menelaus, the heroes of the Trojan War, and Aegisthus, the cousin who brings Agamemnon down, are begotten amidst treachery (the golden lamb), adultery, infanticide and cannibalism of Atreus against Thyestes’ sons, and incest in the pursuit of vengeance.
If this is the background against which the Trojan War is set, is it any wonder that Helen ran off with Paris? That Clytemnestra took up with Aegisthus when Agamemnon, who she claims in Euripides (IA) killed her husband and child and raped her, sacrificed their daughter at Aulis?
Nobody seems right or wrong in this myth – even Orestes, who is told to avenge his father on his mother, doesn’t exactly come up smelling of roses (epsecially in later, Euripidean versions). Eloping with his cousin Hermione after killing her husband, he is eventually killed by a snakebite and the line wiped out by the Heraclids. As in the Theban Cycle, the ancestral curse on the household eventually expunges itself in the destruction of the House.
Tags: ancestral guilt, Euripides, Greek literature, Greek myth, House of Atreus, human sacrifice, taboo, teaching, transgression
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November 5, 2009 by tonibadnall
Human Sacrifice
In the second of our ‘thematic’ seminars, we looked at myths of human sacrifice in Greek literature. This was again divided into 3 elements, on which each group of students had to make a presentation: the issue of virgin sacrifice (studying Iphigenia, Polyxena, and Macaria); ‘customary’ sacrifice (e.g. the sacrifice of Greeks by the Taurians); and masculine self-sacrifice (Menoeceus). As a theoretical basis, students were encouraged to use Burkert’s Homo Necans, though in my session at least, few took on board his analysis for anything other than a description of Greek sacrificial ritual against which to compare the sacrifice of human beings.
By far the most interesting discussion came from comparing the first and the last issues – particularly in the idea of consent. What does it mean to sacrifice yourself, rather than to be sacrificed? Comparisons with soldiers in battle can be made, particularly in the case of Menoeceus, but also with Iphigenia in Euripides’ IA (but not, interestingly, IT) and Macaria. Representation of the sacrificial virgin similarly changes over time, from Iphigenia trussed up like an animal in Aeschylus, to her willing death at the end of Euripides’ career, bringing her into line with his other extant sacrificial virgins of both sexes.
But this still leaves Iphigenia in the IT, and her sacrifice of Greek sailors in ‘revenge’ for the Greeks’ sacrifice of her…and it is interesting that in Herodotus, the goddess to whom these Greeks are sacrificed is said to be Iphigenia herself…
An interesting argument was had towards the end on the relative ‘value’ of sacrificial victims, particularly Iphigenia vs. Polyxena. Some students seemed to think that Polyxena could be easily killed because she was a slave, whereas Iphigenia’s sacrifice had value because she was a princess. But I wonder, does this not defeat the object of sacrifice in the first place? It is not a ‘sacrifice’ unless something meaningful is given up…this opened the door for discussion of Polyxena’s ‘meaning’, both to her own people and to the Greeks, and the status and value of other victims.
Tags: Burkert, Euripides, Greek literature, Greek myth, Herodotus, human sacrifice, mythological theory, teaching
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November 5, 2009 by tonibadnall
This lecture continued our exploration of the House of Labdacus, from the death of Oedipus to the sack of Thebes by the Epigonoi. I wanted to start to do more with this course this week, moving away from a straightforward narrative and identification of themes to a more detailed explanation of the representation of the myth in various texts, and to think about why it might have been manipulated in these ways – but without just giving the answers to the students (never an easy task!).
Yet even on its most superficial reading, the myth still makes some interesting points. For example, in the epic Thebaid, Oedipus curses his sons because they, like he, violated some sort of taboo – this contrasts markedly with the expression of the curse in tragedy, which seems to occur simply because they mistreated him, and may show the hero as remaining the transgressive character he appears in Sophocles’ OT.
The violation of taboos and the transgression of social norms seems to lie at the heart of this myth – even taking aside the violation of divine imperative, crossing of gender boundaries, parricide and incest of the last lecture, we see the cycle continuing in curses, treason against one’s fatherland, fratricide, desecration of the dead, violation of the will of the gods and the demands of the state, multiple suicides, vengeance, and matricide in the second half of the myth. If myths are, as Csapo (2005) states, representative of social ideologies, norms of behaviour must be defined in this myth through the exploration of their extreme opposites.
Tags: Greek literature, Greek myth, mythological theory, Oedipus, taboo, teaching, Thebes
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