Orphans and Stepchildren, and the Cult of Heredity

      Even though you probably learned about Athens as the birthplace of democracy back in junior high social studies, in truth democracy came on the scene fairly late in Greek history, and there are plenty of myths about the kings of Athens. These kings-and-queens stories, recorded in the democratic era, tend to show contemporary tensions (for example, regarding the place of aristocracy in a democratic society, or about the meaning of being Athenian rather than foreign, or about parent-child relationships and how whippersnappers should revere their elders) played out allegorically by mythic characters. One great example is the story of Xuthus and Creusa.

      In Euripides’ tragedy Ion (this is an orphan-centered story about an atom that has tragically lost one of its electrons. Wait, what?), Creusa is an Athenian princess, whom Xuthus married to become king of Athens. Unfortunately, they’ve been unable to have any children together. They need children to carry on their royal line, so they go to an oracle to ask how they can have children. There’s never any question that the king might choose a successor on the basis of merit; rather than find the best successor available, he’s determined to choose one who is as genetically similar to himself as possible. There’s a certain level of irony to this, since Xuthus himself is hardly a carbon copy of the previous king; he’s not even Athenian, and his legitimacy as king depends on the fact that he married a princess with no brothers.

      Although oracles are notorious for being cryptic and misleading, here the oracle gives a refreshingly simple answer to the query. The oracle orders Xuthus to walk out of the temple and greet the first person he meets as his son. Note that the oracle doesn’t say that this person is his son, just that Xuthus should accept him as his son. Which is a pretty safe answer for the oracle to give, probably; if a king comes in to an oracle demanding a son, and the oracle advises him to adopt the first random dude he meets on the street--well, it’s not like most people would turn down the chance to be king, right? Xuthus cheerfully follows the instructions, and the random dude, after some initial confusion, consents to be adopted by this distinguished stranger.

      There is something laughable about Xuthus being so delusionally desperate to have a genetically-related son that he will accept any improbable story that yields him one. The random dude, whose name is Ion, is an orphan and so not in a position to correct Xuthus when he rolls in claiming to be his dad. But Ion, unlike Xuthus, harbors a healthy degree of curiosity and skepticism about this claim that they’re related. He asks Xuthus probing questions like, ‘So who was my mother?’ and ‘What do you mean, you don’t know who my mother is?’ and ‘How did you father a child without even realizing it?’ and ‘Isn’t that incredibly irresponsible behavior for a king?’ and ‘What am I doing living here, if you live in another city?’ to which Xuthus replies with an extremely weak ‘Gee, I dunno, I guess I visited this place and got drunk and got some girl pregnant and then left town and totally forgot about all the floozies I might have slept with on the road.’ He is uninterested in tracking down the boy’s mother or confirming the story in any way. He got what he wanted: one son, full grown! And now he seems nervous about facing any suspicions that might poke holes in the oracle’s unlikely story.

      Such suspicions would be fully justified, since the oracle actually is misleading Xuthus: Ion isn’t his son in any genetic sense. Xuthus is not terribly bright and a lot of things get by him; he has no idea that his wife Creusa was raped by Apollo before they were married, and she secretly gave birth to a child. She had to abandon the child to avoid being outcast from her family, but Apollo took care of the child and in fact had it brought up in this same oracular shrine, ready to be adopted by Xuthus when he had trouble having his own children. Ion is actually his stepchild or his adopted child, but Xuthus is so fixated on his idea of having his own child that he’s willing to fabricate memories for himself to account for a son he doesn’t remember siring.

      Creusa is even worse. She discovers that Ion is really her son, and is overjoyed to recover him after so long a separation. Before she learns that, though, she believes Xuthus’ story that Ion is the product of his drunken indiscretions, and immediately becomes the wicked stepmother, going so far as to attempt to poison her supposed stepson. When she learns that he is really her son and not her husband’s, she abandons all plans to kill him and welcomes him gladly. In short, she knows next to nothing about this stranger, but she is making life-or-death decisions about him based on information about who had sex with whom before he was born. She doesn’t care what sort of person he is, whether he would be a good ruler, or whether he has a personality she wants to deal with at breakfast every morning; her decisions are based not on his own qualities or actions, but on who his ancestors are.

      The most ridiculous part, I would say, is that once Creusa learns that she is Ion’s mother, she realizes that her life will be much easier if Xuthus never learns the truth--that she was an unwed teenage mother before their marriage--and is allowed to persist in his happy delusion that Ion is his son. Unlike most Greek tragedies, this one ends not in a torrent of blood, but with everyone making up and going home, the king secure in his willful ignorance. Because Ion is Creusa’s son, descended from the royal line of Athens, we’re supposed to presume that he will be a good king ever after, that he will have an innate talent for kingship and administration and justice--but the rash actions of Creusa, and the stolidity of the contemporary king, hardly inspire confidence on that account.

"Good" Medea

      Let’s not beat around the bush: I talk a lot of smack about Jason. I’ve read the major classical texts that talk about him, I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s an irredeemable jerk, and I don’t care who knows it. Now, many of the classical texts that talk about Jason are set up as a conflict (yeah, an India-Pakistan level conflict) between Jason and Medea. Naturally you might assume that I’m on Medea’s side in these conflicts. Well, the truth is that Medea, while much smarter and more competent than Jason and less likely to engage in casually dickish behavior, is a pretty terrible person also--particularly in Euripides’ play, which is the most popular version in America today. She kills her children, first of all, and it’s hard to convey the blackhearted ruthlessness required to kill a small, feeble person who trusts you. And she doesn’t kill them because of any grievance she has against them, any actions they’ve undertaken or words they’ve spoken. She does it because their deaths will make Jason sad, and she feels fully justified in cutting off their lives in service of her revenge. Also, she kills her brother (who might be still a child or might be a full-grown  adult, depending on whose version you’re reading), tears up his body, and scatters the pieces in the Black Sea to make it more difficult for her father to perform a burial. When she meets a man who caused problems for Jason in the past (this is when she still likes Jason), she tricks his loving daughters into dismembering him and boiling up the pieces in a stewpot. And, on a smaller scale, she lies when it suits her, she forces people to make promises that they won’t want to keep, she attempts to kill some people without managing to pull it off, she cheats on her taxes, she likes Coldplay, you get the idea. I admire her strength of character and her ability to get things done, but it’s not like I want her working in my office. Or marrying my brother.

      The funny thing about Euripides, though, is that, while he is the earliest literary source we have on Medea, you can find traces of stories about Medea that predate Euripides. And if you look into those, it becomes obvious that Euripides really bent over backwards to make Medea into the most unsympathetic character possible (anyone else reminded of "Wicked"? ("Who can say if I've been changed for the better?")) while in the earlier sources, she looks more misunderstood than evil. For starters, if you know Euripides’ version, you probably know all about what happens when Jason and Medea arrive in Corinth: Jason is honored as a world-traveled hero and master of the seas, while Medea is despised as a filthy foreigner. The local king offers Jason the chance to marry his daughter and become the next king, pointedly ignoring the fact that Jason already had a wife. But in another version, the story plays out differently: when Medea arrives in Corinth, the locals recognize her as the rightful heir to the throne--in fact, she came to town specifically because they invited her. (There’s a complicated explanation for why this is the case, but you’ll have to look it up separately--I’m not going to draw out all the minutia here.) So Medea herself is the princess Jason married to become king of Corinth. Moreover, she didn’t kill the children--she was trying to make them immortal (something like the story of dipping Achilles in the river Styx) by hiding them in Hera’s temple. This doesn’t work, unfortunately, but before Medea can bring the children home, Jason gets tired of his children disappearing and returns to his hometown. Rather than stay on as queen in her own right, unfettered by her worthless husband, Medea abandons the city--which doesn’t speak well of her commitment to her ancestral privilege. You’ll notice that no one has killed the children yet. But there is a further alternative version that, after Medea is rejected by Jason, she’s driven out of the city. Her children stay in Hera’s temple, where they think they’ll be safe. The Corinthians, still irate at Medea, discover the children and stone them to death--again, not for any crime they’ve committed, but to punish someone else indirectly.

      In other words, if you ignore Euripides and his followers, there is a notable alternative tradition in which Medea is honored as a genuine Greek princess, who is not a shameful burden on Jason but rather the key to his power. Moreover, her intentions toward her children are entirely benevolent, and her failures toward them are refusing to recognize the limits of her magic, and allowing them to fall victim to the violence of other people. Euripides, as you may know, lived in classical Athens, a society notoriously full of diehard misogynists, so it’s little surprise that Medea should be revised into a cautionary tale about the dangers of powerful and intelligent women to their opportunistic and ineffective husbands. I’d encourage everyone to go read (or re-read) Euripides’ play and pay attention to Medea’s aggressive feminism--understanding how this aggression was intended to terrify the audience with the prospect of active women, and how a well-intentioned magician who wanted to make her children immortal has been deliberately twisted into a bogeyman for this purpose.

Objectified Women, Woman-ified Objects

      If you were looking for the ideal parable to illustrate the sexual objectification of women, you don’t have to look any farther than Pygmalion’s statue. The most famous version of her story is in Ovid’s Metamorphoses; I was assigned to read it in high school and remember being appalled at this little morality fable. The story, in brief, goes like this. There’s this guy named Pygmalion. And his hometown is full of sluts! Prostitutes, adulteresses, women who have sex outside of marriage! Pygmalion, who has no qualms about judging women solely on the basis of their sexual history, determines that none of these strumpets are worthy of marrying him, and self-righteously adopts a bachelor lifestyle. (I bet he was one of those guys who liked to smugly remind people that he didn’t own a TV.)

      Anyway, all the sluts get their comeuppance when Venus turns them into stone as punishment for their promiscuity, but Pygmalion still doesn’t have a girlfriend--which is the important thing, right? So, in a move that probably made sense when he was drunk and lonely one Saturday night, he decides to build his own girlfriend! That is, he makes an ivory statue of the ideal woman. (As a side note, I have to wonder how big the chest was on this idealized woman. In my experience, men--particularly men who spend an unseemly amount of time thinking about breasts but don’t actually interact with breasts on a regular basis--tend to exaggerate the chest when they depict women, and meanwhile betray their limited understanding of how breasts work.) Okay, well, some lonely guy can’t find a girlfriend in real life, so he settles for an artistic representation of his perfect woman instead--it’s a little sad, maybe, but not particularly strange, maybe not even uncommon. But then Pygmalion gets weirder. He starts buying presents and clothes for the statue. He lays it down on a soft couch and tries to make it comfortable. He talks to it and kisses it and pretends it’s a real woman. In short, he has officially gone off the rails.

      But what counts is that Venus feels bad for him--Venus, the goddess of unrestrained sexuality, someone you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be impressed by this lonesome loser pining away after a paragon, but apparently she is. So one day Pygmalion is enjoying a quiet evening at home with his statue, making out with it as usual, when he realizes that his statue has become a real woman! And not the kind of woman with personality or agency, but his ideal woman: a perfectly passive non-person who will acquiesce to all his whims. Ovid’s story makes clear that Pygmalion pretty much rips her clothes off the second she achieves consciousness, without any concern for her consent. I’ve often wondered what that would have been like for her--she’s essentially just been born, she probably has no understanding of the world around her; all she knows is that this guy is tearing off her clothes and climbing on top of her. It sounds like the most awful sort of rape story. But I don’t think Ovid ever bothered to consider the story from the statue-woman’s point of view; he sympathized with Pygmalion, for whom the whole point of this statue is that he finally has a sexual object who he knows for a fact hasn’t been whoring around with other men.

      Ovid doesn’t say anything about the aftermath of the story except that the statue had a child nine months later. The statue-woman takes no action in the narrative; she is only significant as the recipient of Pygmalion’s sexual attention and the incubator of his children. In fact, she doesn’t even have a name: she’s frequently referred to as Galatea, but that name was invented in the renaissance when Ovid was popular and people wanted to make it easier to talk about this story. Personally, I wonder whether Pygmalion would have ever bothered to give his submissive helpmeet a name, or whether he would have gone on referring to her as “you” and “my wife” forever. Still, I like to imagine what might have happened if Pygmalion hadn’t gotten the woman he ordered, if the statue had turned into a real woman, personality and all, who had opinions about who she wanted to sleep with--and the list didn’t include losers who think statues make good sex toys. A guy as smug and entitled as Pygmalion deserved a surprise like that--although I wouldn’t say that she necessarily deserved him.

ETA: Mark Kalesniko’s graphic novel Mail Order Bride may be the story I was looking for, of a Pygmalion who seeks out a docile and limited wife only to find that she has a personality after all.