Appetitive: The Restoration of the Parthenon

This is a PBS special on the restoration of the Parthenon. Although the narration is a little melodramatic in places, it shows some incredible features of the restoration of the Parthenon and of the architectural structure of the Parthenon itself.






Unfortunately, there are some commercials in this, but it's pretty cool that PBS put the special on youtube.

The final (for now) installment of "Dates in the Platonic Corpus" will be up soon.

Appetitive: Herodotus and Ancient Temples

So I checked my twitter this morning and reaffirmed my reason for having a twitter (no matter how stupid Cerinthus and his parents think it is).

First, I happened upon (through Marathon 2500's twitter) an online version of Herodotus with facing Greek on sacred-texts.com. Unlike the Perseus version, this does not have a built in dictionary, but it is a clean format for browsing the English and Greek.

Second, I came upon a Huffington Post slideshow of Ancient Greek and Roman temples in Europe and the Middle East. The pictures are not fabulous (many of Cerinthus' pictures are better), but they show a number of temples in France and the Middle East that I had not seen before.

Acropolis, from Cerinthus' photos

This is not Cerinthus' best photo, but I thought I would include something of the pictures that he took and there are a few thousand of them so I thought I would just pick one I liked. More on Plato coming soon.

Reasoning: The Iconography of Greek Theater #3, Ralf Krumeich

My mom took this picture in the gardens.

Ralf Krumeich spoke first, after Mary Louise Hart's introduction. I had not heard of him, because it appears that he writes only in German, but he is Privatdozent (which I assume is like a professor) of classical archaeology in at the Universitat Bonn and writes on archaeology, satyr plays, and the relationship between classical monuments in Athens and Delos as conceived by different cultures in the Hellenistic and Imperial periods.

Krumeich was a fascinating character. He was immediately likable and charismatic. His English was fabulous, although heavily accented. It made me realize how differently the Germans pronounce Greek names like Atreus (he said "aahh-traus"). He was perfectly understandable, and oddly enough when he was answering questions his English was better and more fluid than when he was reading his presentation. I want to be able to do that in German, someday.

Ralf Krumeich's ideas were also rich and well-explicated. He created a system for categorizing pottery and its relationship to theater and mythology:

1. Images which explicitly show Athenians (or those from South Italy or Sicily) in or around the performance of a tragedy/satyr play/comedy.
2. Mythological images which can be connected with theatrical performance through visual tropes such as masks, costumes, aulos players, etc.
3. Myths where a character or characters are portrayed in theatrical costume. One of the main features that places a pot in this category is the lack of masks, as well as only some rather than all of the characters in theatrical dress.

He explained that a large portion of evidence about theater is tainted because it blurs these barriers. Most of the evidence that he problematized is scholars using pieces of pottery from the last two categories in order to make suppositions about the plot or staging of plays which remain only as fragments or titles.

From this information and these categories, he draws two interrelated conclusions. First,Theater, including rehearsals, and those who participated in theater (actors and dancers) have a social and religious significance which made them common themes. But second, although there are many images which incorporate the iconic tropes of theater, most of them are mythological paintings with a gesture toward theatrical performance and its cultural significance in the mythic narrative rather than any specific portrayal of theater or a theatrical performance.

I thought the paper provided valuable insights on the missteps of scholarship in equating art too closely with potential instances of theater. It also seemed to me that the three-level categorization was clear and useful. Overall, Ralf gave a great talk, accompanied by a wide variety of pictures of the different types of potter of which he spoke.

Spirited: Euripides and the Gods

The first time I saw Euripides' Orestes I though the actor playing Apollo, jarringly dressed in gold with a red and golden sun headdress,  had forgotten his lines. When I got home after words, I Googled the play and found out that it was not the acting, but rather the writing of play that had caused me such surprise and confusion. As I found out through further reading, the Orestes is only one of many of Eurpides' di ex machina that for an audience member may feel like something that came out of nowhere. [1]

For the most part [2], Euripides seems to use these incredible entrances of the Gods to force the play back into the mold of the traditional mythology, e.g. Orestes, Electra, and Bacchae [3]. However, I think the most notable and fascinating of these is the deus ex machina in the Medea.

There is a extremely vast array of incredible scholarship on the Medea, with which I shall not try to compete. If you have not read the Medea, read it right now. You can read in HTML or download a free version from Project Gutenberg. Although I don't know anything about this translation, you will be happy you read the Medea [4]. I will only reference the end, which is probably my favorite part of the Medea [5].

The mythology of Medea (pre-Euripides) so far as we know involved Medea leaving Jason and going to Athens to marry the king where she would try to dispose of his son Theseus while Jason dies by being hit from a falling timber from the Argo. There is, according to my wonderful Greek Tragedy professor, little or no evidence for the trope of Medea killing her children before Euripides' version. So, Euripides had a difficult task in front of him: how could he create an incredibly tragic story (the slaughter of her own children) and still provide for Medea's escape. At the end of the play, Medea arrives in the chariot of Helios (her grandfather) and explains that she is on her way to Athens. The audience might ask, "how can the gods condone such an action?" There are two instructive passages:

Medea: "Long would be the answer which I might have made to / these words of yours, if Zeus the father did not know / how I have treated you and what you did to me." (Medea lines 1351-1353)

and

Chorus: "Zeus in Olympus is the overseer / of many doings. Many things the gods / achieve beyond our judgement. What we through / is not confirmed and what we thought not god / contrives. And so happens in this story." (Medea lines 1415-1419)

So in these two passages it is clear that Zeus condones Medea's action and is happy to let her punish Jason for his misdeeds. However, the chorus is at a loss that the gods would condone such an action. Medea, now acting as a being partially between humans and gods demonstrates certain godly characteristics: a desire for revenge above all else, arrogance, and vanity. The gods here do not seem moral, but rather amoral human like beings with power far beyond the reach of humans that provides a system frightening because of the lack of standards in the system.

At times, Euripides' gods can be human seeming, almost comic (e.g. the Herecles of the Alcestis or the Apollo of the Orestes). They appear to be governed neither by the strict but uncomfortable hierarchical system of Aeschylus' gods nor by the extreme and frightening moral code displayed by Sophocles' gods (see my previous blogpost for elaboration). In Euripides, they almost seem human, but vein and powerful humans, living for revenge, who are interfering and conniving and have no sense of accountability. This makes them dangerous, unpredictable, and sometimes cruel, which seems to be a fair assessment of nature and the living conditions under which Hellenes of this period found themselves (and certainly a decent picture of the conditions of the Greek past).

Endnotes

1. This image comes from http://baatheatrehistory.blogspot.com/
2. Bear in mind, I have only read six (plus excerpts) of the seventeen surviving Euripides plays:  Bacchae, Electra, Medea, Orestes, Suppliant Women, and Trojan Women (as well as excerpts from Hecuba, Andromache, and Helen) plus Eurpidies' pro-satyr play, Alcestis, which was performed in place of a satyr play.. I also have read the Cyclops, the only surviving satyr play by Euripides (and the only complete extant satyr play).
3. In the Bacchae, I speak specifically of the weird story about what is going to happen to Cadmus, which Dionysus relates (Bacchae lines 1329-1339).
4. There was an amusing anecdote related in my Greek tragedy class one day. We read the Medea a few weeks before the end of the term and a number of the students in the class-- shockingly-- had never read it before. Our lovely professor asked us each for a reaction to the play or a favorite part at the beginning of the class. The reaction to the text was extremely positive, although people differed in their support of different characters and their personal favorite portions. By far the best reaction came from one of my favorite students in the class who had a particularly colloquial and perhaps somewhat frat-boy like vernacular which clashed magnificently against his thorough classics education and his insights that seemed divine in their origin given that they were unexpected because of this contrast and because they were usually shockingly accurate. He said something along these lines: "I am so glad that I finally read the Medea. Whenever my dad did something that would piss of my mother-- like leaving the top of the peanut butter jar-- and she found it he would say to us 'run kids, it's Medea.' I never knew what that meant." I believe that the professor responded something along the lines of "that's a fascinating insight into your parents."
5. The greatest version of the Medea was a production put on in New York in the 1980s in the original Greek. It seems that primarily academic institutions (among them Williams College, UCLA, and Reed College) own versions of this rare and fabulous film. If you get a chance, watch it. It is breathtaking and it demonstrates the power and persuasion of Medea with a force and clarity that could never be rivaled in English. There are English subtitles if your Greek is lacking, but they only gloss the most important points, so it's easy to follow along it the Greek with a little help if you're interested in practicing your auditory understanding.

Reasoning: A Grand Narrative Approach to Greek History #1

I just finished re-reading Jean-Pierre Vernant's The Origins of Greek Thought, which entertained me during my recent jury duty.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed it, the book did not have quite the same impact as the first time I read it. I believe that this is because my most recent book before this was Early Greece, which is a much more current and detailed account of Greek History than The Origins of Greek Thought. Unfortunately, not only am I out of the loop on the current understandings of archaeology and I have no idea how to tell what is out of date and what is not. Is there some kind of community somewhere?

Apparently I have some modernist tendencies that college (and two wonderful literary theory classes) did not strangle out of me, because I still like the grand narrative approach to history. However, I think that Vernant's narrative leaves out a lot of details (from what I've gleaned from Murray) about the development of Greek politics.

One of the problems that I notice with Vernant's narrative is that he constructs a development from Mycenean kingship (which Vernant refers to as devine-kingship) to isonomia (an alternate term for democracy that is less aggressive than and predates democracy). His narrative seems to go straight from Mycenean kingship to aristocracy of the basileus (in the Homeric use of the term as a lord, opposed to wanax, the high king) class. However, Vernant seems to place too little emphasis on the age of tyrants in the city states. For example, Peisistratos's reforms in Athens (such as, among many others, the changes to the Panathenia and the invention of the Greater Dionysia (Murray 270-272)) which created some of the civic institutions that would later become a forum for dialogue and democracy. Also, some of Sparta's power, as well as the hoplite-class-lead constitutions coming about through Sparta's removal of tyrants from power (Murray 263). To be fair, Vernant does provide a chapter on the sages (Chapter Five, The Crisis of the City: The Earliest Sages) some of whom were tyrants, but it places its emphasis too early and does not account adequately for the later tyrants, like the Peisistratidai.

Furthermore, Vernant blurs the distinction between the concept of equality in the citizens as homoioi (equals) in the hoplite state and the citizen equals in isonomia that appears so radically important in Murray's assessment of the development of Athens into a democracy (Murray 265-284). Murray explains that after Kleomenes dethroned the Peisistratidai, Kleisthenes' reforms were so radically different from the eunomia (good order) that the Spartans intended to impose, Kleomenes and a small band of Spartans attacked Athens for a second time, and were repulsed by the Athenians (Murray 265).

It feels a little strange, to me, criticizing Vernant's book. Ever since, my freshman year in college when I read Feminine Figures of Death (which is available on jstor for anyone whose school/library/etc has access), I have adored Vernant and his writing. However, The Origins of Greek Thought was written in 1962, so I do have almost 50 years of scholarship and archaeology on him.