Posts Tagged ‘Euripides’

It’s all about the Mysteries? Bacchae lecture 2

June 3, 2011

The danger of basing any analysis of the Bacchae on the assumption that it deals with the tensions inherent in Maenadism is that we have no evidence, barring the trieretic trip of the women of Attica to Mount Parnassus, of Maenadic cult at Athens in the period of Euripides’ composing. If there are cultic allusions in the play, and we know Euripides was fond of these, are they to be found in any other Dionysiac rituals?

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.

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Sneaky sneaky research

May 26, 2010

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?

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Greek myth 6: The House of Atreus

November 12, 2009

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.

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Greek Mythology – seminar 2

November 5, 2009

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.

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