Appetitive: The British Schoolboy's Guide to Classical Myths

Since I have been trying to walk for exercise (as well as having a fairly long walk to class every day), I have been listening to a lot of audiobooks and lectures.

My newest favorite set podcasts is from iTunes and is called Myths and History of Greece and Rome. According to the preface, the set of podcasts was composed by the father of two boys who were interested in the stories of Greece and Rome than they were learning in school. He, apparently, did a bunch of background reading and wrote a book.

The set of podcasts is aimed at school children, so much of the sex and violence has been stripped from the stories. However, the stories have the added bonus of being written in that wonderful British way and are peppered by humor, understatement, and little quips to provide background for school children. I find them quite amusing, and they also include a few stories here and there that I had not heard previously, e.g. the origin of Scylla.

Enjoy!

Appetitive: Theoi

I was going to go into a long discussion about how much I love my art history textbook (Jeffrey Hurwit's The Acropolis in the Age of Pericles), but that will have to wait until tomorrow. My art history professor directed us to an amazing website called Theoi which is a source for myth in Ancient Greece and Rome. But what a source! It not only provides the myth and encyclopedia type entries, but also provides English translations (not great ones, but sufficient) of the primary source material relating to the mythology. I highly recommend it.

Reasoning: Mythology Lesson #1

I just began reading Edith Hamilton's Mythology. I have owned a copy of the book since 5th grade when I first studied mythology, but I am embarrassed to say that I had not opened it until now. I used to prefer D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths which is a wonderful, illustrated book for children. However, as a classicist and someone trying to improve my mythological background, I figured that I should read Mythology as a basic reference and a jumping off point in order to have a coherent background. I also read  The Universe, the Gods, and Men: Ancient Greek Myths, which I spoke about in a blogpost from a few weeks ago, but Jean-Pierre Vernant-- who is wonderful-- provides a limited selection of myths and tries to speak about them in some kind of chronological order lain over mythology. I have realized reading lyric and other classical poets (e.g. Pindar, Propertius) that a strong mythological background is necessary for understanding beyond and apart from good or any commentaries.

 

Mythological Interpretation of a By-gone Era

Before I began this reading, I was warned that Hamilton provided a sort of stranger perspective to the modern reader, partially because it was written in 1942. However,t his did not prepare me for her attribution of religious rationality and lack of magic to the Hellenic people. I am not in much of a position to comment on the conception of magic because I am not a historian who can define magic as a cultural phenomenon. However, there is a lot of what I personally would describe as magic in Greek mythology, but I see a large amount of overlap between what I consider in literature in mythology to be "magic" and what I consider to be "supernatural." In this particular subject, I have no expertise.

Hamilton does have certain claims that trouble me more (and that trouble comes from a little more of a basis of my education). In the middle of her introduction, Hamilton contends: "the terrifying irrational has no place in classical mythology" (Hamilton 10). Really? My first classics class in college was on Euripides' Bacchae, and the lovely, very old emeritus professor who taught my class began by radically changing my view on Dionysus. He argued that there was sort of a dual view of Dionysus, at least in Athens. In the city and among the elites there was Dionysus the wine god and essentially the god of the symposium. In the rural areas around Athens, Dionysus was a very different god. Not just the god of wine he was, as  my professor put it so fabulously, the god of liquid nature (e.g. wine, milk, honey, etc). He was the god of all growing things and the changeable world of growth: both bountiful and vengeful. Imported from the East and often depicted in Eastern dress and styling (and in many stories, followed by a band of Asiatic women) Dionysus certainly represents the changeable and irrational. So Hamilton's claim seems pretty problematic to me.

Reasoning: The Iconography of Greek Theater #9, Oliver Taplin

Oliver Taplin was a fascinating character. He looked very much like a typical British professor, but in precisely the opposite fashion to Alan Shapiro. While Alan looked like the prim British professor, Oliver was not disheveled, but certainly looked like he had taken more care of his work than himself. However, his appearance only added to the genuine British charm that he had. He had a wonderful exuberance that was contagious and filled the whole room.

He is a professor emeritus at Magdalen College, University of Oxford and he has written a plethora of incredible books and articles, including The Stagecraft of Aeschylus which I read about half of for my class on the Agamemnon and was fortunate enough to receive as a birthday gift this year. Two books he edited which I would love to read are The Pronomos Vase and its Context and Pots & Plays: Interactions between Tragedy and Greek Vase-painting of the Fourth Century B.C..

Taplin opened his talk by explaining that he would be considering three questions.

1. What was the importance of traveling players in Ancient Greece?
2. How did those traveling players influence art?
3. Did traveling players manage to reach a non-Greek audience [1]?

Taplin started with the first question. He explained that scholarship has, for centuries, analyzed the unique Athenianness of theater. According to Taplin, this ignores a portion of the extant evidence that we have for theater. According to Taplin, the earliest evidence that we have for re-performance of plays comes from Herodotus, who explained that one of the penalties on Phrynikos for his play The Sack of Miletus [2] was that it was banned from re-performance.

Beside this, Aeschylus spent time a Heiron's court in Syracuse, both before he wrote the Oresteia [3] and during the end of his life (in fact, he died there [4]). Hieron, the tyrant of Syracuse at the time, commissioned a play at the founding of Aetna, The Women of Aetna [5]. Euripides died in Macedonia and may have written the Bacchae there [6].

Furthermore, vases containing theatrical imagery have been found in burials at Phanagoria, Cyrene, Korinth, Olbia, and Ruvo. In the non-Greek areas, scholars often dismiss the pots and assume that people just liked the pictures. Taplin, and especially Carpenter, seek to challenge this assumption.

According to Taplin, between Hieron and Alexander the Great, there was an increase in the theater outside of the festival of Dionysus at Athens. First, there were rural Dionysias in the outer demes [7]. These were serious cult events in the 5th century. In Republic 475d, Socrates disparages those theater-goers who do not miss any Dionysian in the cities or villages. Demosthenes, according to Taplin, also criticizes Aischenes for going to the lesser theater competitions. Furthermore, actors came from all over the Mediterranean, not just from Athens. Taplin cites Aristedemus from Metapontion as an example [8]. By 440, there were at least five regular theatrical festivals, and there is some evidence for 14 all together, although many of these were not held in traditional stone theaters.

Furthermore, Plato provides evidence of dramatic competition in outside of Athens. In Laws 659b-c, Plato disparages the demos-centric way that the judges decide competitions in Italy and Sicily (i.e. judges were swayed by public opinion). This provides evidence that there was some kind of theatrical competition that took place in these areas. Taplin argues that the actors in these competitions were probably from traveling troupes, and that these performers would respond to invitations to various festivals. He hypothesizes that there would be three actors, with a possible fourth actors playing the chorus. In the third century, according to Taplin, choruses would travel with the bands, but probably not before that. He notes, in reference to Kowalzig, that the Dithyramb was part of Hellenic culture, and it makes sense that choruses of all types would be part of civic coherence not just in Athens, but also Magna Graeca.

Taplin claims that the vases from Syracuse, Lukania, and other places in the Greek world serve as material evidence of traveling troupes [9]. Tombs in around Magna Graeca contain vases with theatrical imagery that appear to be made outside of Athens.

At the end, Taplin addressed Carpenter's case for Greek plays in the Italic areas of Apulia. Taplin agreed with Carpenter, saying that 10% of the dramatically related vases in Italy come from Ruvo. However, Taplin believed that the Pronomos Vase must have been bought on the secondhand market and brought back to Ruvo, possibly by someone who got to see the theatrical competition in Athens and bought it as a keepsake.

Endnotes

1. This is the same subject, on a larger scale, as Carpenter's talk. Near the end, Taplin directly responded to Carpenter, and he agreed with everything except Carpenter's discussion of the Pronomos Vase.
2. See this in Herodotus' Histories section 6.21. However, I think it's important to note that there is no indication in this that the plays would be re-performed outside of Athens, but also no indication that they would only be reprised in Athens. For context, Phrynikos' play, the Sack of Miletus (not extant), was the last play that depicted an real, current, tragic event (with the possible exception of the Persians because I am not sure of the comparative dates and also because the Persians was slightly different in tone and perspective). It was a play about the devastating Sack of Miletus and, according to Herodotus, the entire audience burst into tears. For causing such a disturbance, Phryikos was fined and the play was banned from ever being performed again.
3. There are some fascinating similarities in the description of fire/gold in Pindar's Olympian I and the opening speech of the Agamemnon, but I will save this discussion for another time.
4. The story of Aeschylus' death has functioned somewhat as an urban myth and has even invaded modern popular culture. I have heard two versions of the story. Both are premised on Aeschylus being bald. The first version says that as Aeschylus was walking along the beach in Sicily, an eagle mistook his bald head for a tortoise and dropped a rock on it to break it open. The second version, which I believe is at some point retold by Dr. Donald "Ducky" Mallard on NCIS, is that an eagle, carrying a turtle, mistakes Aeschylus' head for a rock and drops the turtle on it to crack open the shell. Whether he died in one of these ways or not, it makes for a great story.
5. All that remains is a fragment.
6. There is a wonderful moment about this in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, but I cannot seem to find it. If anyone knows where it is, comment or email me.
7. A deme is much like a village that is part of the polis.
8. I am not sure about the spelling on either of these names.
9. A vase depicting the Medea shows the version of the story in which Medea slaughters her children. According to Taplin (citing Mastronarde), this was not a version of the myth in popular culture until Euripides' version.

Reasoning/Appetitive: Mythology for the Masses

One of my weak-points in my background is general Greek mythology. Although I did work with mythology in 5th grade and again in 9th, as well as discussing mythology significantly in my classes on Pindar, the Agamemnon, Greek tragedy, and Latin love elegy, I still felt a little behind in my mythological background (partially because a few of my friends and classmates were so well informed). So I decided that during my year(s) off, I would work on my mythological background. Yesterday, I finished the first book to move toward becoming a "mythite" [1], Jean-Pierre Vernant's
The Universe, the Gods, and Men: Ancient Greek Myth.

 

I found the collection of mythology told by Vernant to be extremely charming. Apparently, Vernant told these stories to his grandson when his grandson was young; he enjoyed recounting the mythology that he spent his academic life analyzing. Twenty-five years later, when on vacation on the same island where he told the stories to his grandson, he told the stories to some of his friends, who made him promise to write them down (Vernant xii). Thus, The Universe, the Gods, and Men: Ancient Greek Myths Told by Jean-Pierre Vernant, was born

I chose this to be my first mythology book of the year because I thought it would be enjoyable. I fell in love with Jean-Pierre Vernant's writing when I read his essay "Feminine Figures of Death" (JSTOR) my freshman year in college. The essay distinguishes between thanatos (θάνατος) (the clean, quick, masculine death) and ker (κήρ)(the disgusting, destructive, feminine death). Anyway, I enjoyed his writing and decided to read his retelling of the mythology.

Vernant has a distinctly Herodotean style. He tells the story in a meandering fashion and vaguely chronological order. He discusses each of the myths, indicating when there were alternative versions of the stories, and sometimes providing brief glimpses of analysis. Overall, the book is very charming and I recommend it as a very quick and enjoyable read [2].

Endnotes

1. Mythite was the term my archaeology teacher in high school called the students who were interested in mythology and joined a mythology club for a short period of time. Tyring to clean my room, I found some of the old notes from this class and it seemed that back then I had a greater mythological background than I do now, but even then I did not have significant training in the obscure that is required for poetry such as that of Propertius.
2. I almost think it would be a good set of stories for children, although Vernant mostly employs euphemism, there is a lot of sexual content in the stories. On the other hand, this is the nature of Greek mythology.

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.