Posts Tagged ‘Greek myth’

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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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To the Mountain!

May 4, 2011

It’s a new term here in Oxford, and the fact that I’d only given 4 lectures out of my Faculty stint of 12 caught up with me this week – I have 4 to do on Euripides’ Bacchae, and 4 on Greek Literature of the 5th Century BC. This Monday saw me (despite a hideous computer virus that caused me to lose several hours’ worth of work) starting the Bacchae course with a lecture on Greek Maenads.

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.

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Greek myth 10: Round Table

March 25, 2010

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…

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Greek Mythology: seminar 4

March 25, 2010

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.

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Greek myth 9: Nostoi

March 25, 2010

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.

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Greek myth 8: The Trojan Cycle 2

December 8, 2009

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’.

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Greek Mythology – seminar 3

December 8, 2009

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.

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Greek Myth 7: The Trojan Cycle 1

December 8, 2009

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’.

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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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