"Good," "Noble" and Occasionally "Large"

Wonderful, funny NPR article on the Iliad vs. Adele Geras' young adult novel Troy:

The Iliad is probably a better poem for never describing the size of Helen's breasts or the exact shade of Paris' hair (a "spun gold," if you believe Geras). But there is something immensely satisfying about the unabashed sentimentalism and lush prose of Geras's Troy after the cryptic sparsity of the original, in which the city falls only by implication, when its hero, Hector, dies. We never see it go down, which is both masterful and frustrating. But Troy provides us with flames, destruction and trysts among the ruins.

The novel follows various Trojan women during the siege and destruction of the city and features several love triangles, an unwanted pregnancy, and sometimes shockingly bad prose ("There's a fire burning in my body, and only you can put it out"). Xanthe and Marpessa are a pair of sisters in love with the same boy, the unsubtly named Alastor (Greek for "vengeful spirit"), and together they survive the deaths of Hector, Achilles, Priam and, eventually, the destruction of the city. 

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'Commoner than blackberries'

Quoted in HuffPo: 

It seems quite clear that the Greeks owed exceedingly little to foreign influence. Even in their decay they were a race, as Professor Bury observes, accustomed 'to take little and to give much'. They built up their civilization for themselves. We must listen with due attention to the critics who have pointed out all the remnants of savagery and superstition that they find in Greece: the slave-driver, the fetish-worshipper and the medicine-man, the trampler on women, the bloodthirsty hater of all outside his own town and party. But it is not those people that constitute Greece; those people can be found all over the historical world, commoner than blackberries. It is not anything fixed and stationary that constitutes Greece: what constitutes Greece is the movement which leads from all these to the Stoic or fifth-century 'sophist' who condemns and denies slavery, who has abolished all cruel superstitions and preaches some religion based on philosophy and humanity, who claims for women the same spiritual rights as for man, who looks on all human creatures as his brethren, and the world as 'one great City of gods and men'. It is that movement which you will not find elsewhere, any more than the statues of Pheidias or the dialogues of Plato or the poems of Aeschylus and Euripides.

- Gilbert Murray, The Legacy of Greece 

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Those glass slippers

I've become quite addicted to Once Upon a Time, the ABC show starring Ginnifer Goodwin and Jennifer Morrison (far less annoying than on House, by the way). I love the fantasy elements, and it made me curious about fairy tales in antiquity.

A bit of time with Google Scholar and this monograph have clarified a few things to me, which may be obvious to others:

1) Cinderella and Snow White are basically the same story. There are only so many ways your stepmother can mess with you. As Anderson points out in Fairytale in the Ancient World, "to anyone accustomed to reading folktales in quantity it will come as no surprise to encounter a male Cinderella, an angel as fairy godfather, a Cinderella without a slipper test, and many more such deviations." Female jealousy and infighting occur even now; they were perhaps even more common in an age of narrower female expectations and the frequent deaths of mothers and remarriage of fathers.

2) Happily ever after is an incredibly generous expectation and a modern luxury. The ancient fairy tale heroines Anderson proposes, such as Io and Psyche, make excessive housework and suspended animation seem like a vacation. Io, of course, hopes for nothing more than returning to human forms and living to bear Zeus' child. Hera inflicts household tasks of diabolical complexity on Psyche, such as sorting a enormous pile of mixed grains in a few hours' time and stealing beauty from the goddess of the underworld. It's a compelling story; if you're looking for a starter text for second year Latin, you might want to check out this simplified version.

I tend to be vaguely embarrassed at my romantic notions of the Middle Ages (fed by my historical fiction addiction), but at least in their imaginations medieval people tended to be more idealistic and more generous to their fictional heroes and heroines. I'm not sure whether we have cultural Christianity or Eleanor of Aquitaine's Court of Love to thank for that.

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A Professor's 'Secret Plan'

This isn't strictly classics-related, but I had an email exchange yesterday that reminded me of this classic West Wing clip, where Josh makes a sarcastic comment in a press briefing that gets taken seriously:

In my upper-level classics in translation course one of their assignments is to compare any modern work (film or literature) to any ancient work we've read. I've put in place (I hope) safeguards to prevent frivolous or shallow papers, but the choice of topic is supposed to be wide open.

Nevertheless, I get emails like the one yesterday, asking if 17th century literature is okay, if 20th century literature is okay, if movies are acceptable, and on and on. Students are looking for secret limits or criteria that are. not. there.

These emails reflect the frequent, and unfortunate, assumption that professors have a secret plan to mess with their students. To throw in test questions unrelated to the material and then rub our hands together with glee. To assign paper with wide-open topics so we can trap people into choosing the one secretly forbidden topic.

It doesn't really bother me, and by no means is it a constant problem. Just another fascinating and odd little bit of student psychology. Pin It

Would you have a beer with Agamemnon?

As I mentioned last time, I've been re-reading The Lonely American and thinking about the American myth of virtuous independence that the authors criticize. 

Rather than focusing on myths detrimental to ancient life, as originally planned, I've decided to follow up with a post on ancient (elite) people and social connections.

Now, I love the Greeks. But it seems to me that the elite Greeks were either overly dependent on family connections, or quarrelsome and backstabbing within their social group.

For example, Agamemnon, as far as I can recall, has no close friends apart from his brother, for whom he harbors an almost smothering affection. Witness his total freakout when Menelaus is slightly wounded in _Iliad_ book 4:

When King Agamemnon saw the blood flowing from the wound he was afraid, and so was brave Menelaus himself till he saw that the barbs of the arrow and the thread that bound the arrow-head to the shaft were still outside the wound. Then he took heart, but Agamemnon heaved a deep sigh as he held Menelaus's hand in his own, and his comrades made moan in concert. "Dear brother," he cried, "I have been the death of you in pledging this covenant and letting you come forward as our champion. ….how, Menelaus, shall I mourn you, if it be your lot now to die? I should return to Argos as a by-word, for the Achaeans will at once go home. We shall leave Priam and the Trojans the glory of still keeping Helen, and the earth will rot your bones as you lie here at Troy with your purpose not fulfilled. Then shall some braggart Trojan leap upon your tomb and say, 'Ever thus may Agamemnon wreak his vengeance; he brought his army in vain; he is gone home to his own land with empty ships, and has left Menelaus behind him.' Thus will one of them say, and may the earth then swallow me."

The symposium ("drinking-together") immediately springs to mind as an example of a later, civilized friendship circle. But there's more to it than intellectual companionship and good times. David Konstan identifies several proverbs that hint at strife and betrayal in the symposium: "He who does not betray a man who is his friend has great honor among mortals and gods, in my judgment"; "If only it were possible to know without being deceived about each man who is a friend what he is like, cutting open his chest, looking into his heart, and locking it up again" (45).

I think the Romans may have done better, but I may be getting that impression simply because Cicero writes so eloquently and frequently about the joys of friendship. That's another post.

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A Facade of Busyness

The Lonely American is a favorite nonfiction book of mine, in large part because it makes intelligent use of myth. Olds and Schwartz begin by deconstructing the myths surrounding independence and productivity in American culture, and return to that theme throughout the book.

"Productivity is a virtue in America. Busyness itself is a virtue in America. And because busyness is virtuous, it has "legs." When necessity recedes, the busyness does not stop. It continues not only because it is a habit but because it is a "good" habit. And since busyness is a public virtue, a boast as well as a complaint, since people want to be seen as virtuous even in those moments when their virtues are flagging, they sometimes present a facade of busyness to the world whether they are being productive or not." (14-15)

I"m always trying to get my myth students to look at the relevance of Greek myths in ancient life (however reluctant they sometimes are). So I'm wondering what myths had a consistently negative effect on life in the ancient world. I'm going to do a little reading in De Officiis and Works and Days, and post an update.

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