Euripides: ‘The Bacchae’

 What kind of wisdom does it take to confront one of those powerful forces in life —  so powerful that it’s unavoidable and so in some sense necessity?

Death is like that. So are sex and grief. Some forces are so strong that the ancient Greeks personified them as gods.

Euripides held that extreme religious experience is like that. The Bacchae is his attempt to portray how a wise person would respond to the religious impulse that is within most human beings.

Dionysus has brought his new, ecstatic religion to Thebes. He wants people to embrace the new rites. When they resist, he drives all the women mad with religious ecstasy. All of them, including King Pentheus’ mother, Agave, go to the mountains for a frolic.

Pentheus is a boy, maybe 16 or 17. He’s appalled by the irrationality of ecstatic religion and tries to suppress it.

Dionysus appears to him in the form of a devotee of the new religion, not as a god, and tries to persuade him.

If you size this up as a fight between rational and irrational forces, it doesn’t work. As Dionysus tries to persuade him to accept the new religion, Pentheus quickly becomes unreasonable. He can’t imagine rites that violate the traditional ways. He’s so sure he’s right, so full of hubris, that he gets angry and violent. He can’t imagine being wrong, and since his imagination is limited, he can’t imagine what it’s like being in the stranger’s shoes. He feels no compassion for this stranger and throws him in jail.

The play turns when the god gives up trying to persuade Pentheus and decides to destroy him.

In Euripides’ mind, you can argue about whether it makes sense to personify forces as gods and goddesses. But only a fool would question whether those forces have power over humans.

William Arrowsmith, who translated the play, points out that Euripides contrasts sophia, the usual word for wisdom, with amathia, which is the kind of willful ignorance that we might call being unteachable.

To the ancient Greeks, wisdom began with a knowledge of oneself, which led to an understanding of one’s place in the universe. The wise person accepts that.

But wisdom has a range of meanings. Old king Cadmus, who turned the throne over to his grandson, accepted the new religion not out of conviction but because it’s the politically “wise” thing to do. Some versions of wisdom simply mean being shrewd, in a cunning, self-serving way.

People accommodate religious impulses in many ways, some wiser than others.

This is a stunning, powerful play. I marked many passages on the gods and wisdom. I like these best:

 

Far in the air of heaven,

The sons of heaven live.

But they watch the lives of men.

And what passes for wisdom is not;

unwise are those who aspire,

who outrange the limits of man.

 

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on The Bacchae is on pp. 392-404.

The Bacchae, translated by William Arrowsmith, is in Euripides IV in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 141-228. The quotation is on p. 170.

Banville on the novel

 In an interview, the novelist John Banville said: 

I don’t like fiction. I don’t like the novel. It is not a very interesting form.

 

I do like fiction but don’t like the novel as a form — although I like many books that are called novels.

I’ve made a couple of attempts to talk about it, but the notes come off as grumpy and unhelpful. 

I’m making a note of this because Banville is interesting and he sounds even grumpier.

• Source: “In Conversation with John Banville,” an interview by Chris Bibsby, is here:

https://www.newwriting.net/2011/12/in-conversation-with-john-banville/

Christopher Bigsby, professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia, has compiled a series of interviews called Writers in Conversation. This is from Vol. 3.

For more on this line of thought, see “Give me fiction, but hold the novel,” Nov. 5, 2022.

Euripides: ‘The Heracleidae’

 In myth, the goddess Hera hated Heracles, the son of her roaming husband, Zeus, by Alcmene, a princess of Mycenae.

By Hera’s machinations, Eurystheus, king of Argos, was given control of his cousin Heracles. Eurystheus ordered Heracles about, forcing him to do one labor after another.

After Heracles died, Eurystheus persecuted his children. Wherever they went, Eurystheus found them and bullied the local folks into denying a home to the refugees. Argos was the dominant Greek city in those days, and no one would stand up for the children. Finally, the refugees got to Athens.

The Athenian version of the myth is about the sacred responsibility to stand up for the weak and oppressed.

Euripides’ play starts with the two old people taking care of the kids. Iolaus was Heracles’ running buddy in the heroic past. But now he’s old. He’s almost a parody of an old man — a force only in his dreams.

When Eurystheus’ army shows up to take the refugees by force, Iolaus insists on putting on armor and joining the fight. He’s barely got the strength to stand up under all that weight.

While Iolaus is funny, Alcmene, Heracles’ old mother, is surprising. In myth, the Argives were defeated, and Eurystheus was killed in battle. In Euripides, the bully is captured and dragged before Alcmene, who shocks the Athenians by demanding they execute the prisoner on the spot.

As Ralph Gladstone, the translator of this play, said: “Euripides knew that brutality brutalizes; people who have been injured or abused too long become worse than their tormenters. …” It’s a recurring theme in Euripides. 

Before the battle, the Athenians consulted oracles, which decreed that a girl must be sacrificed for the just cause to prevail. Demophon, the young king of Athens, doesn’t think it should be his daughter. He doesn’t think he has the right to ask the Athenian citizens to sacrifice one of their daughters.

Who pays the price for standing up to a bully and protecting refugees, strangers, underdogs? The ethical debate spreads into the streets.

One of Heracles’ daughters — she’s unnamed in the play but is Macaria in mythology — volunteers to die. She lectures the adults on the role of women, the nature of duty and the art of dying with dignity. Here’s what she says about the afterlife:

 

Afterward: is there

An afterward? I hope not. If there’s then

No end to all our troubles, where do we

Go on from there — since death itself, they say,

Supplies the cure for everything that ails?

 

The best lines in the play, I think.

• Source: The Heracleidae, translated by Ralph Gladstone, is in Euripides I in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 110-55. The quotation is on p. 137.

Thinking, media and the First Amendment

 When I was a young reporter, I wrote about a sweetheart deal in a town in East Texas.

If you were an important person in town, you could go to the garage that the police department ran to maintain its patrol cars and get your oil changed. Depending on your standing, you might get a flat tire fixed. If you were really somebody, you might get a new set of tires.

Some taxpayers were outraged that public money was paying for perks for insiders.

But no one was as mad as the police chief, who said I should be prosecuted. I had accounts of the expenditures, and he wanted me charged with the theft of records from the police station.

He said I was a troublemaker, belonged in jail and did not support our officers in blue. 

The newspaper’s attorney had to go to the city council meeting with me to keep me from being arrested.

I thought I had done something for the public good.

But at the corner store, the woman behind the counter looked up from the National Enquirer, with a story about a flying saucer on the cover, and recognized me. She mangled my oft-mangled name, said I was a troublemaker and belonged in jail. She said I should be ashamed of myself for not supporting our officers in blue.

I learned that given a choice about what to believe, a lot of people will make decisions without bothering to think. They will repeat what they are told. They will swallow propaganda. They will choose unreliable sources of information.

I can’t pretend to be surprised that in this election, many people swallowed the propaganda. I spent my life in Texas, a place that will give anyone a healthy skepticism about politics.

If you are dismayed by the country’s sense of direction, I have a suggestion: Exercise your rights under the First Amendment. Do it responsibly.

It’s important for thinking people to think out loud — in public.

We need people who think seriously about serious things: about vaccinations, climate science and disparities in levels of income.

We also need people who think about things that are fun: baseball, natural history, music, books, art.

Mainly, we just need people who think.

If people who like to think lose heart and go into hiding, we are going to lose what makes this country bearable, despite its faults.

Donald Trump was a horrible president and probably will be worse this time. But I do not think it’s the end of the world.

And I do not believe that the situation will improve if all the people who are capable of thinking for themselves abandon hope and crawl into a hole.

Let’s keep the lights on. Instead of searching social media for sites that terrify you, look for a few that make you think.

This whole line of thought was prompted by a blog — Michael Leddy’s Orange Crate Art. I read it because he makes me think.

• Sources and notes: Orange Crate Art is here: 

https://mleddy.blogspot.com.

I also follow Julian Girdham, an English teacher who puts out a newsletter called The Fortnightly, at https://www.juliangirdham.com/the-fortnightly.

I tend to move around. At times, I’ve read psychologist Paul Bloom’s blog, Small Potatoes, at  

https://smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net

Recently, I’ve been going through the site of the poet Kim Stafford, which is here:

https://www.kimstaffordpoet.com

Many friends say I’m making a mistake by avoiding other social media. Good thinking — and bad — can occur anywhere. Perhaps it’s my imagination, but I find more of the good stuff on blogs and personal websites.

If you have a site you’d recommend, leave a comment or email me at hebertaylor3@gmail.com. I might follow this up.

Asides

 I repeat myself: Greek tragedy is filled with wonderful lines that don’t have much to do with the theme of the play. They are just surprising asides.

I quoted a few lines from Euripides on Election Day. One character hoped that reason would prevail, while another doubted it would. Those lines seemed relevant on Election Day — and in the aftermath. In Euripides’ play, the Greeks chose disaster over reason.

Often lines from those ancient plays seem like timely advice on matters before us now.

I had a list of chores to do. As badly as I wanted to do them, I had to take a nap first. I thought of old Iolaus, wanting to fight his enemies but being so old he could hardly lift a sword. His attendant tried not to laugh.

 

Attendant

If only you could do what you dream.

 

Iolaus

Hurry! I can’t afford to miss the fight.

 

Attendant

You are the dawdler, though you think it’s I.

 

On Veterans Day, when those who once wore uniforms sometimes become insufferable, I thought of how Antigone, viewing the Argive army from the walls of Thebes, was amazed that her old pedagogue could identify soldiers by their togs. He replied:

 

I know them by their harness.

 

If old people spoke of their time in “harness,” rather than their service in “uniform,” the country might get more truthful war and sea stories.

I hear some lines from the Greek dramatic poets in my father’s voice. My father, an old newspaperman who became a teacher, used to read items in the paper, smile wanly, and say:

 

Spoken with more truth than kindness …

 

It took me a long time to realize he was quoting Euripides.

• Sources: The quotation on old age is from The Heracleidae, translated by Ralph Gladston, in Euripides I in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, p. 144.

The quotation on uniforms is from The Phoenician Women, translated by Elizabeth Wyckoff, in Euripides V, p. 77.

The quotation my father liked is in Orestes, translated by William Arrowsmith, in Euripides IV, p. 118.

Sounds of the house

Since I do not live alone, I sometimes hear classical music coming from the piano or R&B coming from the stereo. It’s the Wise Woman at work.

The other day, when the news seemed bleak, I heard, over the television, her voice:

 

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise.

 

It’s the opening stanza of Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise.”

• Source: The full poem is here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46446/still-i-rise

Sarah Orne Jewett: ‘Deephaven’

 I can’t seem to call Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven a novel, though just about everyone else does.

Maybe it’s just my ear, but “novel” seems to imply at least the promise of a page-turning plot. Deephaven doesn’t have that. This isn’t a complaint. I usually prefer books whose authors are after something else.

I marveled at Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. It’s fiction, but if it had a plot, I missed it.

I loved W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. But if you read fiction for suspenseful plots, you’d be disappointed. Sebald said he tried to write prose fiction. The novel, he said, was alien to him.

Willa Cather said Death Comes for the Archbishop was not a novel.

I think Deephaven belongs in this crowd. Reading it was a bit like subscribing to a small town’s weekly newspaper. You learn the characters, the personalities, the philosophies of the residents. You learn to appreciate the local characters — the stalwart citizens, the eccentrics, the lunatics.

The two young women at the heart of this story are from Boston, and Deephaven, Maine, is a small town that was left behind economically when President Jefferson declared an embargo in 1807. It would have been easy for young women from Boston to have found Deephaven dull. Instead, they found it an adventure.

People in Deephaven found their lives interesting, but assumed that life in the even smaller community of East Parish was dull.

When the young women went to see what East Parish was like, they paid a social call on a woman who was insane. The visit wasn’t dull. 

• Sources and notes: Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven was published in Boston by James S. Osgood and Company in 1877. Project Gutenberg published it in 2005 here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15985/15985-h/15985-h.htm.

For more on this line of thought, see “Give me fiction, but hold the novel,” Nov. 5, 2022.