The school was lovely and the teachers welcoming, though the occasion not what I’d expected. Usually talks get given to an after-school Classics club; this was essentially a teacher training day for staff from local schools and my slot seemed to be the plenary lecture (gulp!). Suddenly my 12-certificate, toned-down schoolgirl version of what I work on seemed inadequate – there was an extempore ramping up of the bloody, violent elements of the Iphigenia story, and a few jokes about olisboi thrown in, but nothing (hopefully) that would see me lynched by a mob of angry parents, given that some students were in the audience. It seemed to go down well, however.

Ancient marriage is a difficult subject for a 1-hour talk – there is such a diversity of practice, and also such differing perspectives depending on the source. I usually stick to the Classical evidence with a bit of Sappho and some vase-painting, and leave the question time to explore the nuances of such a fundamental social and personal ritual.

Seaford (1981, 2006) sees the play as predicated upon initiation into the Dionysiac mystery cults, of which we do have evidence for the classical period – though of these, our only Athenian evidence comes from Aristophanes’ Frogs, where a chorus of Eleusinian initiates pays homage to the god as Iacchus.

Like Maenadism, these cults seemed to be viewed with suspicion and hostility – the story of the initiation of king Scylas of Scythia in Herodotus 4.79 is akin to that of Pentheus, whose death is seen as a failed initiation: a rite of passage never completed, in which the symbolic death of the initiate pending rebirth to a better state of life becomes actual slaughter as he refuses to accept the divine light and truth promised by Dionysus. In mystic cult, the sparagmos myth articulates the death of Dionysus (as the son of Zeus and Persephone) at the hands of the Titans.

This mythology never features in the Bacchae, so we should be wary of drawing analogies too strongly, or translating, as does Seaford (1996), every instance of teletai as ‘initiation rites’. From the Frogs through the Orphic Gold Leaves and Plutarch’s discussion of his own Dionysiac faith, initiation into this cult posits a blessed life after death – an eschatological element that Euripides seems to ignore. Perhaps it is better to see the ‘initiation’ as does Segal (1997), in terms of general ephebic initiation, in which Pentheus fails to separate himself from the female sphere and achieve his identity as an adult male.

Or, perhaps, to work outwards from this supposition – that the Bacchae, as do many tragedies, articulates the problems of incorporating any marginal group into the community, and the tensions and problems inherent in society’s rhetoric of incorporation.

One of Euripides’ last plays, detailing the opposition of the Theban king Pentheus to Dionysus’ establishment of his rites in the city, the play is unmistakably ‘Dionysiac’, made more so by the meta-theatricality of its performance in the Theatre of Dionysus during the City Dionysia festival. But how far is it actually connected with, or does it reflect, the realities of his cult in the ancient world? Whether you follow Seaford in pinning your colours to the flag of initiatory ritual, or Dodds, Henrichs and Bremmer in trying to make sense of the play through the lens of (or even by reconstructing) Maenadic cult, the question remains: how far does the play inform our understanding of Dionysiac ritual, and vice-versa? How far is it “to do with Dionysus”, how far does it reflect general cultural concerns about women’s cults and place in society, and how far is it just good drama?

The first lecture focused on Maenadic ritual, reading the Bacchae against several Hellenistic inscriptions and documentary evidence in Plutarch, Pausanias and Diodorus Siculus. Where there were crossovers, a terminology of Maenadism could be established: their rites were called orgia and hiera, tended to be biannual, took place outside the city in the mountains, used ritual implements such as the thyrsus, and featured dancing and ritual invocations such as “Euoi!”, that celebrated the god as epiphanic and present in manic possession. Maenadic cult took place in many areas of the Greek world, including Magnesia, Miletus, and Attica/Delphi, but its spiritual home was Thebes where the daughters of Cadmus were held up as paradigmatic Maenads.

There were, however, fundamental differences. Our evidence points to a civic-sponsored ritual, to the existence of thiasoi (bands) that included men, and to the eating of raw flesh (omophagion) being a toned-down mimicry of the Maenadic sparagmos in the Bacchae. The myth exaggerates and explains the ritual: it gives a more extreme version of events – the dramatic and threatening aspects of which are then further highlighted by the playwright. It warns against the rejection by the city of a cult which, in ‘real time’, had become an accepted and beneficial part of the civic framework.

Things have changed remarkably since my last post. I have swapped the cherry-blossom-drenched campus of Nottingham for the dreaming spires of Oxford, and am now ensconced in Corpus Christi on another year-long contract. It’s a different world here – not a work environment I’m unhappy with, but a different system (perhaps that should be ‘tradition’) for doing things that requires re-adjustment. But the students are all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and the facilities are excellent, so things are ticking along.

Differences in infrastructure – the terms are only 8 weeks long here – mean that a lot of teaching is packed into a very short space of time. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for research except in the holidays, but I’ve managed to get some stuff done. For a start, Iphigenia went off to CQ a few months back and the readers’ reports are due any day now. The Monty Python chapter finally came out, so well done to Drs Ryan and Langerwerf for their efforts in editing that volume. I’m trying to rewrite the intro for my book, and will be giving a talk in a couple of weeks on some of the methodological issues that are facing me regarding the epithalamium, which will hopefully help me get my thoughts in order about it.

(I will also be giving an outreach talk at King’s School, Worcester, this term, on marriage and marriage songs in the Greek world. I’ve helped out on a few Widening Participation projects in the past, but this will be by first time as the star turn. It’s a good step.)

In and around this, I’m now working on the second draft of an article on gendered linguistics in Lesbian lyric poetry. This arose out of work I did right at the beginning of my thesis, when I was looking at the wedding song as a ‘female’ speech genre. In the end I cut this material, as later research suggested the opposite (see previous posts).

I did, however, later use these findings for a paper at ‘Mars and Venus’, a conference on gendered speech in ancient literature (Nottingham, 2008), and am now revising the paper as a journal article.

There are problems with this approach: 1) whereas sociolinguistic researchers are usually able to draw from a large body of spoken and transcribed data, the poems of Sappho that I am working with are short, fragmentary, non-conversational lyric. Is this a valid methodology to use? I’ll get on to that… 2) Gendered linguistics have been successfully applied to dramatic texts in the past, but even these constitute a representation by male playwrights as to how they thought women spoke (or should speak). Can we access women’s speech in the ancient world any more than we can access real female experience for that period?

I would argue that yes, this is a valid approach. Building on the work of scholars who have applied this method to Athenian drama, it is possible to draw certain conclusions: even if all we can say is that female-authored lyric from archaic Lesbos did not hold to the same conventions of expression as (dramatically-represented) women in classical Athens – or indeed to many common conceptions of gendered utterance.

Even negative conclusions beg some very interesting questions: is this a result of genre, or is Sappho deliberately making a point that her words are as good as any male poet’s (mascula, Horace Ep. 1.19.28 calls her)?

But more than this, there are some positive concurrences – instances where Sappho adheres to gender stereotypes, almost as though she were deliberately constructing a feminine poetic identity. And what are these instances? Believe it or not, her wedding poems – poems composed for occasions in which male and female are very clearly delineated in order to be united, and which perhaps therefore call for an explicit display of gender difference in their commemorative songs.

The editing continues…

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?

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…

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.

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.

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’.

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.