by Judy Jones
Attention, please: While you don’t really have to read both (or either) the Iliad and the Odyssey, you’d be advised to at least have an opinion as to which you like better; some people will even treat your preference as a short-form personality inventory. Which is precisely why we’ve prepared the following chart, Iliad on the left, Odyssey on the right:
But don’t cast your ballot now; better to read a passage or two in each, decide which speaks to what’s going down at the moment for you. (Try Priam’s speech to Hector, Iliad, Book XXII, lines 25–76; with the Odyssey you’re better off skimming till you find something you like.) Then take sides. And one more thing: Hit a dull or a bumpy spot—in the Iliad, the Odyssey, or anyplace else where for the most part you’ve been getting a smooth ride—and you can invoke the favorite formula of academics and book reviewers everywhere, coined by the Roman poet Horace in the first century b.c.: “Even Homer nods.” HERO WORSHIP
Of the four great Greek heroes in the days before the Trojan War—before, that is, Agamemnon and Achilles and the Iliad—one poses no problem. That’s Hercules. The other three are at least as worthy but, scanted by Hollywood, they’re short on fan clubs. Here, then, is the rundown on Perseus, Theseus, and Prometheus.
Perseus first, whose father was Zeus—making him a demigod as well as a mere hero—and the one who slew Medusa, she of the snakes-for-hair and the petrifying (literally) countenance; he also rescued Andromeda from the sea monster. With Perseus, we’re in what reads like a fairy tale (complete with winged sandals, magic sack, a cap that makes its wearer invisible, and so on). We’re also in what could pass for a matriarchy: From his boyhood on, women loom large in Perseus’ story, beginning with his mother, Danaë (whom Zeus had gotten pregnant by covering her in a, you should pardon the expression, golden shower), continuing through the three Gray Women (whom Perseus tricked into revealing vital information by stealing the single eye they shared), the three Gorgons (of whom Medusa was one), and Andromeda (who wouldn’t have been sea-monster bait if her mother, Cassiopeia, hadn’t bragged in front of a god about her own beauty). Scholars compare Perseus to Saint George, who likewise slew a dragon and rescued a princess.
Theseus is in every way more difficult; the great Athenian hero, celebrated not only in myth but in three plays by Euripides and one by Sophocles, he has a legend that doesn’t quit. Or, as the Athenians themselves used to say, awestruck by the sheer number of his exploits and enterprises, “Nothing without Theseus.” Unlike Perseus, Theseus was pure mortal; his father was King Aegeus of Athens, after whom the Aegean Sea would be named. His best-known early adventure was slaying the Minotaur (the half-bull, half-man monster who lived in the labyrinth on Crete) with the help of the princess Ariadne and her ball of thread; his best-known late one had him dealing with his wife Phaedra’s infatuation with his son by a previous marriage, Hippolytus. In between there range an ongoing friendship with Hercules, an encounter with Medea, a war with the Amazons, the slaying of Procrustes (with the one-size-fits-all guest-room bed), the forgiving of Oedipus, and much, much more. Quasi-legendary, quasi-historical, Theseus is also an intellect, a man of conscience and compassion, and a father to his people—more King Arthur than just another knight.
The most difficult (and the most senior) of all is Prometheus. Son of one of the Titans, the first wave of rulers in prehistoric Greece, predating Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, and the rest of the Olympians, not to mention the mortals, by at least a generation, Prometheus (literally, “foresight”) helped Zeus overthrow their shared ancestors. In gratitude, the new gods delegated Prometheus to create man out of clay. Not knowing when to stop, Prometheus then stole fire from the sun, with the help of which he was able to breathe wisdom (plus a little of what we now call style) into his new creation. Not surprisingly, Zeus saw the fire business as a combination of disloyalty and audacity. Prometheus was chained to a rock, where an eagle pecked daily at his liver, until Hercules finally set him free.
Several things here: First, note that Prometheus pursues and receives fire (a.k.a. inspiration), and is hence a poet; that he has flown in the face of the tyranny of established power, and is hence a rebel; and that his predicament prefigures the Crucifixion, and he is hence a martyr and proto-Christ-figure. Various ages have made various big deals of all this, most notably Aeschylus in the trilogy Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, and Prometheus the Fire Bringer; and, in the Romantic Age, Goethe, who saw Prometheus as a symbol of man’s creativeness and independence of spirit, and Shelley, who wrote Prometheus Unbound, part psychodrama, part political allegory, and all anti-establishment hullabaloo. (In it, Prometheus, like Lucifer in Paradise Lost, is a rebel with a cause, and Jupiter/Zeus, like Milton’s God, is literal-minded and overbearing.) So what are you to make of your cousin’s new fiancé when she describes him as “Promethean”? Well, either he’s artistic or he’s martyred or he’s mad as hell; on the other hand, knowing your cousin, he may just wear nail polish.
A word about Hercules: Sure, he’s strong. Also simple, blundering, brash, and big. But he’s not just about strangling snakes, killing lions, diverting rivers through stables, and spelling Atlas for a while. He also has a great midcareer mad scene, is known to dress up in drag, and eventually commits suicide. TWO GUYS FROM DELPHI
Of the myriad gods and goddesses who habitually messed with the Greeks’ heads, only two are still worth getting steamed up about. Apollo, tagged “the most Greek of all the gods,” was the god of light, inventor of medicine, master musician, number-one archer, ideal of manly beauty, and symbol of all that was cool, civilized, and rational in Greek life. Like the young JFK, he had a flashy pedigree (son of Zeus and Leto; twin brother of Artemis), wielded enormous political power, had numerous love affairs, and was widely admired for his ability to dispense impartial justice and play a mean game of touch football (or its ancient Greek equivalent) with equal panache. He was definitely a representative of the Establishment, but then, being the law-and-order candidate was no social handicap during the Golden Age, and Delphi, the seat of his oracle, was both a religious shrine and the political power center of Greece.
Dionysus, by contrast, was an arriviste among Greek gods. Although he was fathered by Zeus, his mother, Semele, was a mortal, and no one was ever really sure where he’d spent his presumably wild youth before he arrived on the Greek mainland and started raising hell. While Apollo passed his time inculcating high moral principle and urging moderation in all things, Dionysus and his followers roamed the hills celebrating sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. (Actually, as far as we know, the Greeks weren’t into hash, coke, or acid at the time, but Dionysus was the god of wine, a substance that, being new to the populace, amounted to the same thing.) Before long, Dionysus had amassed enormous popular appeal and a huge following of bored Greek housewives who were delighted at the chance to slip away from their looms for a night of dancing, shrieking, and ripping small animals to shreds with their teeth. The point, for these Dionysian groupies, was enthousiasmos, a state of transcendent ecstasy in which possession was nine-tenths of the fun. Interestingly, the conservative male power structure (we know, we know) was prepared to tolerate these periodic lapses from wifely virtue; instead of banning the Dionysian revels, it simply co-opted them. Dionysus was given his own place of honor at Delphi, time-sharing with Apollo on an alternating six-month basis, and the celebrations became official state occasions. Since Dionysus doubled as the god of drama, these rites turned into theatrical events at which plays were presented as offerings to the god—and there you have the beginnings of theater as we know it.
It may have seemed an unlikely partnership even at the time, but the Apollo/Dionysus alliance worked tolerably well for the Greeks. Having made Dionysus an official element of state religion, they were in a position to regulate his behavior, making him less threatening and more socially acceptable as Greek life became more conservative and rationalistic.
In a way, the rivalry between the two gods didn’t really start until the nineteenth c
entury, when Nietzsche, in his Birth of Tragedy, contrasted what he saw as the primitive, creative, emotional “Dionysian” state of being, where life is dominated by music, dance, and lyricism, with the formal, analytical, coldly rational, and ultimately static “Apollonian” state, in which art and originality are squelched. Later, Spengler picked up on this notion in The Decline of the West, where he theorized that the uninhibited Dionysian element was the mark of a culture on the rise, the overcivilized Apollonian one the beginning of the end. In the Sixties and early Seventies, these characterizations fueled a lot of radical theater and caused a great many people to take off their clothes in public; eventually, however, the Dionysian element began to lose its rough edges once again, and everybody put his or her clothes back on and went to work on Wall Street.
YOU SAY YOUR FATHER SACRIFICED YOUR SISTER, YOUR MOTHER AMBUSHED YOUR FATHER,
YOU SLAUGHTERED YOUR MOTHER,
AND NOW YOU’VE GONE BLIND AND ARE
BEING CHASED AROUND THE COUNTRYSIDE BY THREE
BLOOD-SOAKED WOMEN WITH SNAKES FOR HAIR?
IS THAT WHAT’S BOTHERING YOU, BUNKY?
Not every civilization has the taste for tragedy that the ancient Greeks had. Not only did they invent the genre, but many critics insist that, in all of Western literature, there have been only four truly great tragic poets, three of whom wrote within fifty years of one another in Periclean Athens, a city whose population, not counting slaves (who didn’t have much time to write poetry), was roughly equal to that of present-day Dogpatch. Although this traffic jam of talent has never been adequately explained, it probably stemmed from the Greeks’ need to blow off steam (see “Catharsis,” page 263) after trying to behave rationally all day instead of sacrificing virgins and praying to rocks the way their ancestors had. In fact, it was part of the function of tragedy to help the man in the street make sense of a lot of decidedly irrational gods and goddesses—who were holdovers, for the most part, from more primitive times—while purporting to pay homage to them.
In the absence of public television, it was also up to the tragic poets to combine enlightenment with entertainment. Aeschylus and Sophocles pulled this off with great success; Euripides, on the other hand, was a box-office flop. Nevertheless, given the right translation, all three still have the power, not necessarily to make you cry (if that’s all you’re after, you can make do with Terms of Endearment), but to inspire the “pity and awe” that Aristotle considered hallmarks of any tragedy worth the price of admission. Reading the three in sequence will also give you a bird’s-eye view of mankind jockeying for its current position at the center of the universe.
Aeschylus (525–456 b.c.): The granddaddy of Greek tragedy, Aeschylus (ES-kulus) was the first playwright to get some real action going by putting two actors on stage at the same time, instead of making audiences listen to one man rapping interminably with a chorus (and, of course, the Greek chorus didn’t do high kicks; it just talked). In fact, action was Aeschylus’ strong suit. He was a master of the bold stroke—the stirring speech, the grand gesture, the relentless buildup of tension followed by the inevitable thwack of the ax. If he is a little heavy on febrile metaphor (“Behold the orphaned children of the eagle father, now that he has died in the binding coils of the deadly viper, and the young he left behind are worn with hunger of starvation, not full grown to bring their shelter slain food, as their father did”) and a little light on verisimilitude (Electra recognizes her long-lost brother, Orestes, by the fact that their footprints match), he is still the tragic poet best equipped to make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. Armed with the charge-forth morality of the war hero (which, in fact, he was, having participated in the Athenian victory over Persia), he never wastes time questioning the motivation of the gods, who seem to get their kicks from making mankind cry uncle, or of his characters, none of whom is notable for thinking things through when there’s a suicidal act of courage to commit before breakfast. Nietzsche, one of history’s three or four most prominent definers of tragedy, saw Aeschylus’ plays as the pinnacle of the form, an expression of the “reaffirmation of the will to live in the face of death.” Certainly, his plays are page-turners, and the vision of Clytemnestra boasting that not only has she just slaughtered her husband, the king, but that if she were the teensiest bit less circumspect, she’d drink a toast with his blood, does provide a refreshing alternative to all those Married … with Children reruns.
Sophocles (c. 496–c. 406 b.c.): The biggest box-office success of the three tragedians, Sophocles was also the most innovative (he put yet a third actor on stage, thereby thickening the plot considerably; wrote the first self-contained tragedies—as opposed to the trilogies, the Greek version of the miniseries, that audiences were accustomed to; and even came up with the idea of using painted sets), as well as the most craftsmanlike. Although he, too, based his plays on traditional myths, he wasn’t opposed to tinkering with the conventions a bit in order to make the stories more believable: There are no matching footprints in his version of the Electra-Orestes reunion; Orestes simply tells Electra who he is. Sophocles is also considered by far the best poet of the lot, an artist who was more interested in perfecting the form than in proving a point. Not that he didn’t have a point to prove; as the undisputed champion of the status quo, he virtually defined the poetic tradition of Apollonian classicism (see “Two Guys from Delphi,” page 258). When his heroes come to grief, it’s because they’ve failed—albeit through no fault of their own—to follow one of Apollo’s two favorite maxims: “Know thyself” and “Nothing to excess.” Still, by ascribing his protagonists’ inevitable downfall to some fatal flaw of character (see “Hamartia,” on the next page) rather than to a fit of pique on the part of some Idi Amin–like deity, Sophocles scored a subtle point for man as more than a spear-carrier in the shaping of his own destiny. Whether Greek audiences grooved on this new power position or just appreciated solid workmanship, they awarded Sophocles a score of first prizes—and never anything less than a second—at the annual Dionysian festival at which all Greek tragedies made their debut. Aristotle proclaimed Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex the most perfect of all tragedies; modern critics call his work Greek drama at its most rational, most balanced, and, as some like to point out, most middle-aged.
Euripides (480 or 485–406 b.c.): Last born of the trio, Euripides had the misfortune to come of age as the sun began to set on Athenian democracy. While the older generation was still holding pep rallies for the glory that was supposed to be Greece, he started taking potshots at the gods, the established order, and the growing Athenian penchant for power-tripping. Partly because of his vehement antiauthoritarianism, and partly because of his willingness to get so upset over individual human suffering, Euripides is considered the most modern of the tragedians. Psychologically, he was certainly ahead of his time. His characters seem more neurotic than heroic; they’re continously aware of the fact that they’re in pain and they never let us forget it, either. Unfortunately, this didn’t play as well in the fifth century b.c. as it does nowadays. Euripides ended up a bitter recluse, having won only five first prizes at the Dionysian festivals. In fairness to his audiences, it must be said that he really wasn’t the playwright his predecessors were; his plots tend to drift, his pace to drag, and his protagonists to exit the stage more often than not via a deus ex machina, literally carried off to meet their destinies by gods and goddesses who suddenly flew in on invisible wires. A couple of millennia later, however, Euripides was to become the ancient-Greek-poet-of-choice for a whole roster of Sixties protest groups, who used his Trojan Women to underscore the horror of napalming babies in Vietnam, and his Medea to explain why they were burning their bras. SPEAK ANCIENT GREEK LIKE A NATIVE:
TAKE THIS SIMPLE QUIZ
How Is Greek Tragedy Different from the Six O’Clock News?
In Greek tragedy, whenever a construction crane crushes a hapless shopper or a successful politician butchers his next of kin, you’ll generally find, in lieu of
a camera crew, the following elements:
HAMARTIA: Usually translated as “fatal flaw” (or “error” or “shortcoming”), it’s what, according to Aristotle, it takes to be a tragic hero. Sometimes hamartia can verge on vice; sometimes it can seem a misstep no more shameful than choosing the wrong door on a game show. In either case, it functions like a renegade gene, biding its time until the moment is right to bring some otherwise healthy individual to his or her knees. Hamartia is a necessary component of tragedy because, Aristotle reasoned, there is no point in witnessing the destruction of a man who is thoroughly virtuous, on the one hand, or thoroughly corrupt, on the other.
HUBRIS: Everybody’s favorite example of hamartia. It adds up to arrogance or pride, although it can start out as an essentially harmless character trait taken to extremes, or, according to some critics, as merely a hero’s attempt to express too much in the way of human vitality and choice, thereby violating the social—or the cosmic—order.
NEMESIS: What’s going to get a hero whose hubris starts showing. Originally, Nemesis was a quasi-goddess who epitomized righteous anger at a breach of the rules and who liked to mete out punishments. Subsequently, a hero’s highly specific, individual, and thoroughly inevitable undoing.
