Sunday, July 27, 2014

Untitled

I had to send the missive incomplete
and leave you unaware of what I meant
again, for Muses never come to call
when you'd want or expect them to, instead arrive
at times least opportune, under deadlines
for other things,
                    or do not come at all.

[Still on the road, back with more mythology next week.]

                                      

Saturday, July 19, 2014

Eternal City



Pictures of Rome
still do it to me,
piazzas in Prati with fontanelle,
or Saint Peter’s dome,
obelisks patiently waiting
until Judgment Day,
or crowded train platforms near Piramide,
or peals of church bells, lonely and fading.
I might still be idling in Montemartini
or at Ponte Sisto, watching the moon rise.
I get lost in the image; I meet some surprise
too awful to pass over lightly.
So easier, in the end, to spin dreams out of air,
then to try to explain my experience there.



[I'm posting this earlier than usual because I'm about to leave town for a conference. Enjoy!]

Monday, July 14, 2014

Mr. Hindsight



      The Trojan War: It’s the greatest epic of the ancient world. The most beautiful woman in the world is kidnapped from her husband’s palace in Sparta. The vengeful Greek states assemble an enormous combined army in attempt to recapture her, and, after an interminable siege, they finally breach the defenses with their infamous Horse and ransack the city. Any Trojans who resist are killed, and those who surrender are enslaved, but that’s not the sum of the Trojan population: some Trojans are able to surreptitiously escape the carnage. These few people assemble in a sanctuary some distance from the city, and organize themselves into a refugee coalition to seek a new home elsewhere, led by the venerable hero Anchises.
      Not Aeneas, of course, because when Troy fell and the refugees set out, Aeneas’ father was still alive, was still respected as an elder, and still had authority over his son. This is the backstory to the Aeneid, but even though Aeneas got to be the eponymous hero of the epic, he’s still second banana when the action opens, and he’s stuck in that position until his father dies some considerable time later. So who is this Anchises, this non-eponymous hero who will lead the refugees out of Troy?
      If you’ve read about Anchises in the Aeneid, you may know him as a mystic whose primary role is interpreting omens. When the Trojan refugees flee the smoking ruins of their city, Anchises is the wise old man; in the Trojans’ extensive journey to find a new home, Anchises looks for signs from the gods and oversees the journey with a managerial eye. He leaves most of the work that is strenuous or otherwise difficult to Aeneas, his robust son in the prime of his life. After Anchises dies, Aeneas takes over this leadership role with very little success--Aeneas is not so talented at interpreting omens, and he often misinterprets messages from the gods. He has some degree of notoriety (at least in Latin 4 classes) as a whiny and defeatist hero, who takes the most optimistic interpretation possible from omens and wishes for his own death when those interpretations don’t pan out. After much difficulty and several false starts, Aeneas finally manages to lead the refugees to Italy and found a new society.
      Even though Aeneas is the one who sets the new society down in Italy, Anchises is more iconic in the escape from Troy. You can always recognize him on a vase or sculpture because he’s being carried by someone else: Anchises was crippled and was unable to flee Troy under his own power. One point that is never mentioned in the Aeneid is how exactly Anchises came to be crippled, although there is an established explanation for it, and it reveals a very different side of Anchises’ personality. Apparently Anchises took his sweet time becoming the elderly sage of the Aeneid, and had some youthful indiscretions buried in his past, hidden from the respectable portrait of him presented by Vergil.
      In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, for example, Anchises is a young hero in the prime of his life. His primary attribute is his physical beauty. Aphrodite is the heroine of this episode, for certain definitions of “heroine” (the real purpose of the story is to humiliate her). The other gods have gotten fed up with the goddess of love embarrassing them by making them fall in love with degenerate mortals, so Zeus causes Aphrodite herself to fall in love with a mortal, hoping that she’ll be too ashamed of her entanglement to keep humiliating the other gods. For the target of her infatuation, Zeus chooses Anchises, who is remarkably handsome for a lowly mortal. Aphrodite, falling in love as directed, disguises herself as a virgin princess and immediately goes to Anchises’ place to seduce him.
      There are some clues here in the Hymn that Anchises isn’t the most diligent youth in Phrygia. First of all, when Aphrodite goes down to seduce him, she’s able to catch him alone because he’s lounging around his home while everyone else in his community is off working. Second of all, Aphrodite introduces herself with the most tortured set of excuses possible, and Anchises doesn’t bother to question them. ‘I’m a princess, from, uh…Crete! And I was performing a dance when Hermes kidnapped me and brought me here because…the gods decreed that I was supposed to be your wife! And I speak your language perfectly because…I had a nurse from your homeland!’ It’s a pretty flimsy story (try it out the next time you want to seduce someone, I dare you), but all Anchises cares about is that there’s a super-sexy virgin on his doorstep who is apparently eager to marry him--marriage, of course, being code for sex. He stops asking questions and they go straight to bed.
      Once they’ve sated themselves sexually, Anchises’ hindsight kicks in--not because he reconsiders Aphrodite’s weak cover story, but because she reveals herself as a goddess. This idea apparently terrifies Anchises, who thought that he was taking advantage of an isolated, unprotected girl--he had no idea he was contending with a powerful woman who had the power to defend herself! Greek men, at least in mythology, are generally wary of falling under the influence of more powerful women (Eos, the dawn goddess, is something of a bogey for attractive young men, and there were so many stories of her abducting and sexually exploiting them), and Aphrodite panics Anchises by the mere fact of being a goddess. He expresses his terror of being “unmanned” by his encounter with Aphrodite, but she warns him that he won’t be harmed unless he goes around bragging that he slept with a goddess. After that the Hymn comes to an end and the biography of Anchises is pretty sparse until you come to the Aeneid, in which Anchises is old, with a grown-up son, and, crucially, withered legs, which implies that Anchises let his ego get the better of him, that he bragged about his adventures after all with no thought for the consequences. That foresight that he’s famous for in the Aeneid, it took him quite a while to develop it. It is fitting that, when Aeneas is hauling Anchises out of Troy (you can see this illustrated on plenty of Greek vases, and you can also read about it in the Aeneid itself), Anchises is recognizable not only because he’s being carried, but because he’s always looking backwards. Hindsight is his forte.
      Fortunately for Aeneas, Anchises drops dead before the Aeneid opens, and he only appears in flashbacks narrated second-hand. Aeneas is able to seize the reins as the primary hero, which is good for his future as a recipient of hero cult, but possibly not so good for his followers, who have to accept his whiny defeatism in place of leadership. Anchises did eventually develop enough foresight to interpret omens and chart the course of the refugees, but only after he had made enough mistakes to build up a store of hindsight for reference.

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Time and Continuity Problems



      When I die and I get to meet Vergil in Dante’s Castle of Limbo, or in the Elysian Fields (alongside Musaeus, but without any fixed address), or wherever he hangs out in the afterlife, the first question I’m going to ask (after the formalities of “o de li altri poeti onore e lume,” etc.) is what on earth is going on with the ages of the younger-generation heroes at Troy. I’ve always been mystified, for example, at how Ascanius (well, Cupid disguised as Ascanius) in the Aeneid is cuddling in Dido’s lap like a three-year-old, or how Ascanius has to hold hands with his father when they’re fleeing from Troy as if otherwise he’d toddle off on his own--and yet, not so long afterward, he’s leading the teenage boys in equestrian show drills and taking charge during a fiery crisis and killing enemy soldiers. His age, as communicated by social cues, seems unbridgeably inconsistent throughout the epic--and don’t try to tell me that Ascanius’ development into manhood is an essential part of the epic’s dramatic arc, because his span of development far overreaches the span of time covered in the Aeneid. It’s distractingly unrealistic.
      A similar problem is presented by another character in the Aeneid: Neoptolemus, aka Pyrrhus. He’s the son of Achilles and tends to dominate the bloodshed and butchery in the Aeneid’s destruction of Troy. He ransacks the private bedrooms of the Trojan royal family and even kills the King of Troy, old Priam himself, all of which would be shocking enough on its own. To truly appreciate its significance, however, we have to go all the way back through Neoptolemus’ origin story, and how Achilles came to have a son.
      You may have certain preconceived ideas about Achilles. He’s spotlighted in the first line of the Iliad (“Sing of the wrath, Goddess, the baneful wrath of Achilles”) and has had guaranteed fame throughout western literary history for that reason. We all know that his mother dipped him in the Styx and made him (mostly) immortal, that he was exceptionally close to his best friend Patroclus, that he was eventually killed by an arrow to the heel administered by the archer god Apollo, but not before--as depicted in the Iliad, that great bulwark of western literature--he could complete his spiritual journey from irate selfishness to mature reconciliation with the man whose son he killed. A decade ago he was depicted on the silver screen as a buff 40-year-old with a fake-looking dye job and some oddly progressive ideas about how to treat slaves. (Huh, Brad Pitt was 40 when Troy was released, who knew.) But the Achilles of the Iliad wouldn’t have been a 40-year-old. In fact, when the Greeks were mustering an army for the Trojan War, Achilles was skirting the low end of acceptably conscriptable age (possibly in his mid-teens), and his mother made great effort to keep him from going to war. She was so intent on preventing his conscription that she dressed him as a girl and hid him among a bunch of princesses on the island of Scyros. The disguise didn’t take--Odysseus was sent over and quickly tricked Achilles into unveiling himself--and the Greeks sailed off for Troy. But Achilles had taken full advantage of the time he spent sharing a bedroom with a princess, and when he sailed away, his former roommate was left pregnant with Neoptolemus.
      So the Greeks spend a long time besieging Troy, and when they finally use the wooden horse ruse to break in, Neoptolemus is charging in with the rest of them and heartlessly butchering the Trojan royal family (even after Priam’s sentimental discussion with Achilles on the nature of fatherhood and family at the end of the Iliad). Wait, how long did that siege last?
      It is a well known tradition that the Greeks spent ten years besieging Troy. Neoptolemus is conceived just a short while before the siege begins, so when the Greeks break the siege, Neoptolemus ought to be nine years old. (‘Neoptolemus,’ as it happens, means ‘young soldier.’) Yet there he is, in the Aeneid, killing people left and right. So this--in my hypothetical afterlife meeting with Vergil--is where I start hassling Vergil about why he has a nine-year-old (who is more or less green in terms of combat experience) fighting alongside grown-up, experienced soldiers who have been involved in this conflict for ten years. Vergil could have, with some effort, established an alternate chronology that made his Neoptolemus older than ten, but he didn’t do it. I’ll say it again: distractingly unrealistic.
      Neoptolemus has a reputation for being bloodthirsty and generally nasty, and not just because of his part in the Trojan slaughter. When the battle died down, he performed a human sacrifice (not generally approved of in Greek culture) over Achilles’ grave. He was awarded Priam’s wife as a slave, which probably didn’t foster a peaceful home life for them, since she had watched him kill her husband. By all accounts Neoptolemus was pretty terrifying to live with, although he did manage to get three children out of her. But here we reach the question of Neoptolemus’ marriages and offspring, which is another contested point in the Neoptolemus mythology (but at least I can’t blame Vergil this time, because he never wrote about any of this). According to some, he was married to Hermione, the daughter of Helen and Menelaus, but on the other hand, some say that that this Hermione was actually married to Orestes (oh, you know--the guy from the Oresteia, who murders his mother Clytemnestra and then goes insane). The two traditions have been somewhat clumsily grafted together with the story that Hermione was married to Orestes first, but her father Menelaus demanded they divorce after Orestes went insane, at which point she could be married to Neoptolemus. There is, however, a more interesting tradition, in which Hermione was not so happy to be married to this nasty Neoptolemus and arranged an end to her marriage. The story goes that Neoptolemus, enraged that Apollo had killed his father, went to Apollo’s sanctuary at Delphi and tried to steal some treasures and even burn the sanctuary down. In Euripides’ play Andromache, however, Neoptolemus never did these things--Hermione just spread a rumor that he planned to, and on that account Neoptolemus was murdered by the locals at Delphi.
      It is intriguing to see a bride objecting so forcefully to an undesirable husband, since brides in Greek mythology are generally pretty docile and passive (prizes rather than characters). It would be interesting to read more about Hermione--Homer uses her as a background character in the Odyssey, and Sappho makes scattered references to her, but Sappho’s poems are all so fragmentary it’s hard to tell what sort of portrait she’s creating of Hermione, if any--unfortunately, not much ancient literature seems to concern itself with her. It is also intriguing to see this character who seems like he should be glorified as a young hero--Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, killer of Priam, hero of the Trojan War!--made into such an appalling villain. He seems to have inherited his father’s bloodthirsty selfishness but never developed a sense of social responsibility via losing his best friend in battle and meeting the parent of an enemy he killed. He’s never appealing as a character, and it may be safe to say that any age discrepancies are among the least objectionable things about him.

Monday, July 7, 2014