Sunday, March 30, 2014

Hypsipyle and the Lemnian Crime



      Last week we heard about Ariadne, whose story concludes with Dionysus marrying her and rescuing her from abandonment on the island of Naxos. Legend has it that after the wedding, Dionysus and Ariadne honeymooned on the island of Lemnos, so let’s follow them there and discuss the local legends; it’s an intriguing place. But rather than Dionysus and Ariadne, I’d like to approach Lemnos from the perspective of another famous visitor, namely Jason.
      So imagine that you’re Jason, captaining the Argo alongside a crew of spectacular heroes, on your way out of mainland Greece and off to the outer reaches of known civilization: the far eastern shore of the Black Sea. (I don’t usually encourage people to identify with Jason, since he’s a self-absorbed sociopath, but let’s run with this for now.) Your uncle has usurped your father’s kingship and sent you on the supposedly impossible mission of obtaining the Golden Fleece from Colchis, but it’s a long trip from your hometown and you have to make plenty of rest stops along the way. You come in at the port at Lemnos, which is a good-sized island in the north Aegean, and you see people running in from all over town to meet your boat. Even the queen of the island, Hypsipyle, comes down to meet you, accompanied by a cohort of beautiful women, and invites you and your men to a banquet. You accept, though you may be a little confused to see that no men are in sight. So you’re whisked down to the banquet hall and entertained by the island’s prettiest and wittiest ladies, and Queen Hypsipyle keeps making salacious double entendres. Whenever you ask where all the men are the ladies laugh with affected casualness and say something evasive, and it becomes clear that they’re hiding something about their past--something ominous. And maybe you grow so disconcerted by the increasingly sinister vibe that you don’t even notice that all the women in sight smell terrible.
      There is a fascinating backstory, as related by Apollodorus, an absolutely insane series of mass crimes and gender warfare. Starting back at the peaceful beginning, Dionysus and Ariadne took their honeymoon on Lemnos, and in fact had four sons there, the oldest of which (Thoas) became king of the native population. It seems that everything was fine for a generation or so, and Thoas’ daughter Hypsipyle grew up to be a very brave and competent young woman. But, as is so often the case in mythology, this peaceful state couldn’t go on forever; at some point the Lemnian women decided to neglect the worship of Aphrodite. (This is always a bad idea. There are five million and two cautionary tales in mythology in which some idiot neglects the worship of a particular god and the god attacks with a curse, although personally I think this one is the most entertaining.) Aphrodite gets revenge by cursing the Lemnian women with unbearable body odor. The Lemnian men find the smell so intolerable that they refuse to get near the women for any reason. They abandon their wives and decide to redirect their sexual attentions toward women who don’t smell, i.e. foreign women imported from Thrace. In response, the Lemnian women massacre the Lemnian men, every single last one of them.
      I’m sorry to say that no one records what happened to the Thracian women; this isn’t their story and apparently we don’t care about them. One hopes they weren’t killed alongside the Lemnian men, but the Lemnian women seem so consumed with disproportionate rage (mass adultery is certainly a matter of concern, but I’m not sure mass murder is an appropriate response), I wouldn’t put it past them. Also no one records how exactly the Lemnian women killed the Lemnian men down to the last one without any difficulties or collateral damage--it would be a tricky feat to pull off.
      Anyway, I exaggerated a bit; they didn’t kill every single man on the island. Hypsipyle, that brave and competent girl, collaborator with the patriarchy and traitor to her own gender, hid her father during the massacre and smuggled him off the island afterward. Accounts diverge at this point: according to some, he was put on a boat or floated off in a chest like Danae; according to others, he was eventually found by the Lemnian women and murdered anyway. But if he did escape, he reached the island of Oenoe and took up with a water-nymph; their son eventually became king of Oenoe. It was the style of the time, for exiled kings and princes and aristocrats to wander off to distant locations and marry local princesses or nymphs and make their sons kings. It worked for Peleus, it worked for Diomedes, it worked for Perseus, it worked for Oedipus--well, maybe ‘worked’ is the wrong word in his case. But there are plenty of stories on this model.
      But back to Hypsipyle, who was now Queen of foul-smelling Lemnos and totally out of men (at least, if any others were smuggled away in closets or sent off in chests, no one mentions it), almost as big a problem as Romulus being king of a city with no women. So you can imagine, when Jason and his crew of heroes came into port, the Lemnians were extremely glad to see them and eager to create some little mini-heroes to continue their civilization. I would love to hear how they explained away their massacre of all the men on the island, and also persuaded the Argonauts to sleep with them after they admitted to mass murder, particularly in light of their (one presumes, persistent) body odor. They must have done it somehow, since Hypsipyle herself had a number of children by Jason, and the other women had children with the other heroes--but then, Jason was never one to let good judgment interfere with his plans to sleep with various women. Eventually the Argonauts tired of the baby-making free-for-all on Lemnos and sailed off into the sunset. It seems that the Lemnian women successfully repopulated their island with the heroes’ children, and totally got away with their mass murder; there is no account of their smell ever being cured, but presumably that went away when the murderers died.
      Herodotus mentions the massacre of the Lemnian men in the context of another massacre on Lemnos, this one from the historical period. According to him, Lemnos was populated by an ethnic group (the Pelasgians) that were smaller and weaker and generally inferior to the mainland Doric-infused Greeks. Meanwhile on the mainland, there was an annual festival in Athens in which young girls would be secluded at the exurban sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron. The Lemnians took advantage of this festival to kidnap the girls and force them into chattel slavery, which resulted in a cohort of half-Athenian slave children on Lemnos. This time it wasn’t the Lemnian women who were upset about the circumstances (I guess the Lemnian women didn’t object to their husbands sleeping with other women as long as they were still sleeping with them too). On the contrary, it was the slave children who were upset: Herodotus claims that these slave children naturally perceived their own superiority to the Pelasgians and held themselves apart from Lemnian society. The Lemnians grew worried about what these physically superior slave children, who bonded with each other and united into a community against the Lemnians, might do when they reached maturity. Therefore they decided to nip the problem in the bud by massacring the slave children. Again, there is no statement on what happened to the kidnapped Athenian women, now slaves--were they ever ransomed back to Athens, did they have any reaction to spending years in captivity and seeing their children murdered. Hypsipyle herself was sold into slavery when the other Lemnian women discovered the fact that she had rescued her father, and her adventures as a slave are well known since she interacted with the Seven against Thebes and was involved in the founding of the Nemean Games. But her fate as a slave is really only considered of interest because of her contact with heroes: her own story is not at issue.

See you in Waco! Next week's post may come late Sunday evening.

Saturday, March 22, 2014

Ariadne, Theseus, and "Helpful Princesses"



      Ariadne is what mythology experts call a “helpful princess.” It sounds nice, but my advice is: don’t be a helpful princess. For all the help they give to various heroes, they don’t receive any gratitude in return. In fact, they’re often executed by the very heroes they help specifically because of their helpfulness. Ariadne, for her part, is not executed, but what happens might have turned out just as bad. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Ariadne is the daughter of King Minos, the best-known king of Crete, eponym of “Minoan” culture, and famously associated with the ruins at Knossos. Minos himself was one of those conquest-oriented kings who’s always looking for an excuse to expand his own kingdom and make his enemies miserable. He stringently demanded that others fulfill unreasonable obligations to him, even when he was not so keen on fulfilling his own obligations. In fact, he was once foolish enough to disappoint the god Poseidon this way: when about to perform a sacrifice, he prayed to Poseidon for a bull worthy to be sacrificed to so great a god. Instantly, the most gorgeous bull in the history of the world rose out of the sea. Then Minos decided that he didn’t feel like sacrificing the bull after all, so he just put it in with the rest of his herd. In Greek myth this is an object lesson that you shouldn’t try to fool the gods. Poseidon, irate that he hadn’t received his sacrifice, got revenge by making Minos’ wife Pasiphae fall in love with the bull. Cuckolding, bestiality, implied aspersions on Minos’ masculinity, it all blends into a hefty dose of humiliation for Minos. The wife became so infatuated with the thing that she got the famous inventor Daedalus to build a mechanical cow-suit for her so she could have sex with the bull, and in fact was impregnated by the bull, and later gave birth to a baby with a bull’s head, Asterius, more commonly known as the Minotaur.
      (“Minotaur” means “bull of Minos,” as if the creature was Minos’ own creation, or at least his possession, or at least his fault. The Minotaur apparently is named after his legal parent (his mother’s husband, that is) rather than his biological mother, Pasiphae, or his biological father, Poseidon’s sexy bull, which has no other name, although it is the titular character of a classic novel by Mary Renault.)
      (Interestingly enough, in the first century C.E. the Roman emperor Galba would claim to be descended from Minos’ wife. He even commissioned a huge decorative family tree to illustrate the line of descent--but we don’t still have the family tree, so we can’t look up the precise lineage he claimed for himself. It’s a rather puzzling claim, since it implies that Galba was NOT descended from Minos himself, and there are no genealogies that have the wife remarrying someone else. Was Galba implying that he was a descendent of the wife…and the bull?)
      Anyway, back to Ariadne. She was an ordinary human daughter of Minos and Pasiphae. After the Minotaur was born, Minos decided not to simply kill the abomination, but to keep it alive and imprison it in a giant maze called the labyrinth. I imagine he was excited about threatening everyone with his monster, like Jabba the Hutt with the Sarlacc. At this time Athens was a surprisingly weak political force and was subject to Minos’ thalassocracy (sorry, no one is allowed to write about Minos without shoehorning in that word somewhere), and as one of his conqueror-king moves, Minos demanded that Athens periodically send over a boatload of teenagers to be fed to the monster, as we’ve all heard re-imagined by Suzanne Collins. Then one year, one of the teenagers sent over was a boy by the name of Theseus. He was an extraordinary boy, as he himself would tell you. He once picked up a rock and found some shoes under it; that was how special he was. Naturally, when princess Ariadne got an eyeful of this prime specimen and his secondhand shoes, she was swooning before he got off the boat. She secretly gave Theseus a ball of yarn, that he could use to knit himself a sweater in case he got chilly in the labyrinth (or unwind as he walked through the paths, if he wanted to catch his death), as well as a sword, which he could use to cut off the Minotaur’s head. He was so grateful to her that, after he killed the Minotaur and was sailing back to Athens, he agreed to take Ariadne with him, then intentionally abandoned her on a desert island. (Later on, he would marry Ariadne’s sister Phaedra, who had so many of her own problems that she apparently never had time to worry about how Theseus had murdered her half-brother and abandoned her sister and effectively destroyed her father’s kingship, etc., etc.) There are so many depictions of Ariadne, both in art and in literature, innocently sleeping on the beach, never suspecting that Theseus and his crew have sailed away without her.
      I can’t imagine that princesses, at least not in Minoan Knossos, get much survival training, which is why I say that abandoning her like this and condemning her to die slowly of starvation or thirst was more cruel than simply executing her. But this is the fate of helpful princesses. A helpful princess is less a character than a device to aid a hero in a quest. Helpful princesses exist to be insiders in a hostile kingdom, to fall in love with foreign heroes who come on hostile missions (such as obtaining a valuable artifact that the kingdom guards as one of its treasures, or simply conquering the place), to help the heroes from inside and in doing so to betray their own countries, to be condemned by the hero as a traitor, and usually to be executed before the hero goes home to marry a different princess. There are a few, like Medea, who manage to get the better of the situation and against all odds outmaneuver the heroes who take advantage of them, but most of them are unfortunate young women who make themselves vulnerable to the hero and are punished through that very vulnerability.
      At least Ariadne avoided that, if only through dumb luck. When she woke up and found herself abandoned on the beach, she barely had time to start crying before the god Dionysus swooped down and offered to marry her. There are six million and eight poetic accounts of Ariadne weeping on the beach, so I won’t bother to enumerate them, but we know that Dionysus was the god of wine and he always hung out with a party crowd, so Ariadne should have had a carefree and zany future to look forward to. In particular, Dionysus wasn’t one of those gods overburdened with machismo who constantly needed to remind people of his masculinity--he even did a little gender-bending--so Ariadne shouldn’t have had to worry about spousal abuse or marital rape or her husband running around raping other women, unlike the wives of some Olympian gods. I’m willing to read this as a happy ending.
      And what about Theseus? Well, when he got home he accidentally signaled to his father (who spent every day on the cliffs at the shore near Athens, anxiously awaiting the return of the sacrifice ships) that he had died in Crete, so his father threw himself over the cliff and killed himself. (Must have been congenital--Theseus also died from falling off a cliff, and so did Theseus’ son.) Theseus succeeded to the Athenian kingship, beat up the Amazons, married Ariadne’s sister, traveled to the Underworld, avoided being conscripted for the Trojan War (which is why you never hear about any famous Athenians fighting alongside Achilles in the Iliad), and tried to kidnap Helen of Troy when she was the world’s sexiest nine-year-old, but finally his kingdom was overthrown and he died ignominiously in exile by falling off a cliff. Even his snazzy shoes couldn’t save him then. In my opinion, he got what he deserved.

The Boxcar







The Boxcar

Crossing the train tracks on south Prior Avenue
I saw a boxcar standing not far off
the road, blocking the only line of tracks.
So tall and stark and narrow and alone,
a silent sphinx unasking riddles too many,
it made me want to stop and write a poem--
though I rode on without composing any.
Between the ranks of soldier-elms, I would
have liked to learn, and they wanted to inspire,
I knew my bike a vehicle for poetic turns,
that I would read across the power lines’ wires. But no,
I did not stop, nor did I write a word,
did not, 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.

Judo Class



Judo Class


It’s not a matter of the force
that I might use to pull his gi.
Sophisticated weight control
will beat sheer strength consistently.
It’s not the way I lead the guy
and dance his feet around the ring,
nor yet my grim and steely eye.
It’s all in the unbalancing:
that prospect-riddled second when
he floats in his uncertainty.
I have to seize control of him
before he saves himself from me
and shift his weightless form just so
to effortlessly make the throw.

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Living among the Sabine Women: Sympathy for Tarpeia



      The legend of the Sabine Women is traditionally related with a narrative simplicity that belies how complex the whole event would be in practice. What happens is: Romulus--ancient Italian heir to a kingdom that lacked a population--was on the market for some people to be king of. He founded a site called the Asylum that is supposedly located, if you visit Rome today, in a little corner between the Musei Capitolini, the Vittorio Emmanuele monument, and the steps that lead down to the Roman Forum. The site was soon populated by a band of outlaws, bandits, and other undesirables--people who had made themselves unwelcome elsewhere--but, somehow, no women. Romulus, cunningly detecting that the lack of women might impede his kingdom’s population growth, put on his hat as a municipal planner and devised a method for finding wives for his citizens. He invited the citizens of a neighboring kingdom, the Sabines, to attend a religious festival, kind of a big church picnic--sack races, softball game, big barbeque. Except that in the middle of the biggest event, Romulus gave a signal to his men, and they all leapt up and carried off all the women in sight. (These are great glorious legends as related with pride by Roman authors. You can look them up in Livy’s history. Cicero tells the same story,  but has the grace to dismiss the mass rape as “intrepid, but a little bit boorish.”) At any rate, the Sabines go home incensed that their women have been stolen and suit up for war. Apparently this takes longer than you would think, because when the two armies finally meet on the battlefield, they are persuaded to stop fighting by the abducted women and their new sons, who dolefully march onto the battlefield to intervene. Everyone is so moved by the women’s tears that they agree to merge into one kingdom and live happily ever after.
      You can always point to those babies, which have gestated at lightning speed, as an element of pathos exaggerated to the point of ridiculousness. Ovid says that, when the babies are carried onto the battlefield, some of them address their grandfathers as ‘papa’--or at least are made to seem as if they are. Since most babies I’ve met don’t start talking (in any meaningful sense of the word) until at least six months, this would have the Sabines at home fuming for more than a year, certainly long enough when you’re waiting to avenge yourself on the bandit who kidnapped your daughter. What did the Sabines think was happening while they were gone?
      But in my mind, the more shocking element was those women, sweeping onto the battlefield in tears to beg their fathers not to kill their rapists. I’ll grant that if some guy kidnaps a woman for the specific purpose of providing himself with a wife and holds her hostage for over a year, she might very logically have a child at the end of it--that’s ordinary brutality and I don’t question it for a minute. But then for the woman--and not just one woman, but apparently every single kidnapped and raped woman--to defend her rapist’s crimes against her and her family? That is the greatest strain on my suspension of disbelief.
      But then, we’re within the realm of mythology. Maybe every single woman fell in love with her kidnapper and all of those babies were the product of consensual sex. (By the way, we can safely assume that all of these women are no older than fifteen or sixteen: one of the canonical details about the Sabine Rape, which is crucial to its legitimacy within the Roman patriarchal structures, was that all of the women kidnapped were unmarried virgins. Certainly no one was kidnapping another man’s wife!) Maybe every one of those “marriages” turned out perfectly peachy, and there was never any need to worry about these bandits and lowlifes, who were unwanted in society in general, and who were considered so undesirable that they had to abduct wives by force, raping and abusing the women they kidnapped. The women were devoted to them! Or was there another motivation?
      There is a more obscure source, a Greek historian whose work is now only preserved in fragments, that actually explains this apparent devotion, although this aspect of the story is omitted from the native Roman sources. According to this legend, Romulus gathered the Sabine Women and proposed a lottery: for the first woman to bear a Roman child, he would present a golden pendant--for her son. The prospect of this prize presumably motivated the women to cooperate with their captors in the endeavor of advancing the Roman state. If you find the idea of these women consenting to sex in captivity for the sake of some measly trinket tawdry and degrading, perhaps you would prefer the upstanding Roman version found in Livy. There Romulus, addressing the Sabine Women, makes no promises of monetary compensation for sex and childbearing, but simply informs the women that it will be an honor for them to bear Roman boys and sends them home.
      Even after all that, the person I felt worst for in the middle of this was Tarpeia. She is one of the more popular characters in the saga of Romulus, in the sense that her story is told by several Roman authors across a number of genres. She certainly was not well-liked; in fact, her name is used as a byword for deceit and treason. In the few initial skirmishes before the Romans and Sabines met on the battlefield, Tarpeia famously betrayed Rome from inside its walls. Maybe she fell in love with the Sabine general, maybe she did it merely for financial gain; in any case, she secretly made a deal with the Sabines: she would unbolt the gate and let them in if they would give them what they wore on their arms--i.e., their golden bracelets. When she did let them in, they decided that they despised her treachery so much that they would punish her for it, but apparently not so much that they would forebear to take advantage of it. Unbuckling their shields from their arms, they hurled them at her and crushed her to death under their weight. They then rushed into the city, invading as planned.
      Now, we can debate later whether Tarpeia’s demand for golden bracelets is any more base or tawdry than the Sabine Women’s willingness to have sex in exchange for a golden pendant, but I only want to ask: where did Tarpeia come from? Because we’ve already established that only men showed up at the Asylum willingly. If Tarpeia is old enough to be bargaining with the invaders, she must be one of the kidnapped women. Moreover, she is the only one of the kidnapped women who, to my mind, has a normal, relatable, defensible reaction to being kidnapped and raped: she hates it! She has no sympathy for her captors! She feels that she owes no loyalty to Rome and decides, quite intrepidly and independent-mindedly, to work against the city from the inside. It’s atrocious to condemn Tarpeia as the metonym for treason, when she had no voluntary affiliation with Rome in the first place, and even more atrocious for her own countrymen to kill her in exchange for her help. Tarpeia’s story is certainly a tragedy, but not because she betrays her countrymen; rather, because her countrymen betray her.