The Trojan Women, by Seneca. Franklin Stage Company, August17-September 4, 2011.
My daughter Lola got an offer to play Polyxena at Franklin Stage Company this summer. We quickly agreed, and ended up taking Lola six days a week to extensive rehearsals with a company that includes professional actors and a newly minted director (Mollye Maxner) recently graduated from the North Carolina School of the Arts. The play opened three weeks ago, and we went to see it and since the opening I've probably seen it seven or eight times. It was a strange experience. I think I could have gone to see it every night for the rest of my life. I reviewed the play here:
http://www.watershedpost.com/2011/review-franklin-stage-companys-trojan-women-seneca
The play opens with the remaining Trojan women (the royalty) who are talking about what they will do and whether Troy has a chance to get back on its feet when their children are adults. These royal women are being divvied up by the top Greek generals as concubines and slaves. One will get Hector’s wife, Andromache, another will get Helen of Troy, another will get Hecuba, Priam’s wife, and still another will get Cassandra and yet another, Polyxena. The terror they feel is numbed by the fact that they’ve been through ten years of war and everyone they knew and loved is either dead or enslaved. Many don't know the story, and too bad if you don't, because if you don't know the Homeric cycle you are missing one of the great narratives. Some Christians will say: but we already have the Bible, why do we need them Greeks? It because, as my kids would say.
It's because there are already "intimations of Christianity" among the ancient Greeks, and even among the Romans. They had dimly sensed that life is a "mindless wilderness" unless there are institutions. The first and most important institution is marriage. Without that, most feel unsafe. It is the most crucial of all institutions, and without it, life is cold and dark.
The entire Homeric cycle is about the importance of marriage. When Paris chooses to elope with Helen of Troy (another man’s wife) the Trojan war begins. Many Marxists think that the cycle is about goods and getting booty, and trade routes, and this is emphasized in their writings (read Adorno's foolish take, for instance). But none of these things are as important as a person’s marriage. If you lose your business, you can start another one. Lose your marital partner, and there is devastation. Paris chooses Aphrodite over Hera, or hot love over married love, and steals a married woman, and sets off a conflagration. In doing so, he destabilizes his brother Hector’s marriage (Hector appears to be faithful to his wife, unlike most of the Greeks?), and Paris gets his brother killed, as well as his mother and father and his sisters.
The Homeric cycle begins with a marriage festival to which the goddess Eris (goddess of conflict) is not invited. All good marriages contain conflict. Unless conflict is invited into a marriage, there can be no stability. It's part of it. Eris rolls an apple between three jealous goddesses: Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena. They each reach to pick up the apple and then ask Zeus to determine the fairest. Zeus defers to Paris.
Paris chooses Aphrodite. She's hot, but only in the sense that Paris Hilton is hot. Paris Hilton is a nut. The choice of Paris gets Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia killed (for whom the Trojan Polyxena is the symmetrical endpoint), and it is Agamemnon’s betrayal of Iphigenia that gets his wife Clytemnestra to kill him in turn. Marriage is the center of society and implies a commitment to the person to whom you’re married and to the children. People who break the commitment are threatening their partner. Threaten your partner and you threaten your own life. Figure it out. Nothing makes a person more vulnerable than a promise of marriage that is dishonored. This dishonoring destroys whole societies and brings everyone to ruin, even down to the next generation, and the next. What we see are the survivors of Paris’ poor choice. And the Greeks still don't get it: they are busy bringing home concubines which will complicate their lives even further.
Only Odysseus makes it back to his wife. He has to kill the suitors, and only through strategy does he survive. But his own choice of goddess is Athena, goddess of strategy. She helps him to get back to his family, and to help his son survive.
This kingdom is about making strategic choices.
Marriage is first. Of course the economy matters, too.
But the very center of life is marriage. Homer knew this.
(For those who don't know my fascination with myth specialist Georg Bachofen, and his theory of the centrality of marriage, let me be the first to admit that my reading of the Homeric cycle is deeply indebted to him and to his book Mutterecht, which has still not been fully translated from German into English, but does exist in French. An abridged and bowdlerized version is available from Princeton UP. It was edited by a cabal of Jungian feminists in the late 1960s, and changes Bachofen's intentions and ruins his message. Far preferable to read the original if you can read German or French.)
31 comments:
I think Homer and other Greek tragedy authors underscored what the biblical texts affirm - i.e., the sins of the ancestors can be passed down as far as the third or fourth generation; and if one lives by the sword, one dies by the sword.
Luther would likely agree with you on the thesis that marriage is a foundational institution of society and upholds its stability and security.
Blessings,
Dim Lamp
Dim Lamp, thanks for this confirmation!
Even the Philistines in Genesis have a sense of the incontrovertible holiness of marriage. Abraham tries to pretend his wife is only his sister (so that he isn't killed), then later Isaac does the same thing with Rebekah.
26:10 -- And Abimelech said, What is this thou hast done unto us? one of the people might lightly have lien with thy wife, and thou shouldest have brought guiltiness upon us.
somehow many of the Greeks didn't understand this -- and it gets them slaughtered.
Related to marriage in ancient Israel is the collective identity of the tribes and tribal confederacy of Israel-i.e. producing offspring to fulfill the original command of God to be fruitful and multiply, to fulfill the covenant blessing, and thus to ensure that one's family name lives on within the history of the clan and tribe.
Shalom,
Dim Lamp
Is there supposed to be an element of humor that Abraham AND Isaac are willing to sell out their wives in order to remain alive? In a sense, even Adam does it. As soon as God shows up in the Garden after they've eaten the fruit of the tree of good and evil, Adam says, "The woman who thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat" (3:7).
he passes the buck to her instantaneously. Is this meant to be somewhat humorous? If humor is the discrepancy between what should be, and what is, I think it meets that test. I know there's also a tragic element to it, but it just happens so fast.
And when Abraham and Isaac sell out their wives, there's no mulling it over, no psychologizing. It happens so quickly it hits you by surprise.
A couple of things re Adam, Abraham and Isaac. First, I think is the moral-theological message, i.e. falling from grace by eating the forbidden fruit [by the way nowhere does it say that it was an apple! contrary to what many believe], we blame the other for our actions in a feeble attempt to defend ourselves in the presence of God. Sin blinds us of our wrongdoing or, worse yet, we call good what we did was, in fact, sinful in an attempt to avoid responsibility for our thoughts, words and/or actions. The nature of sin is to point our finger at others, while there are three pointing back at us. Second, there is a hint of cowardice in their actions-although, maybe that was the only option they thought they had at the time to save their own hides. At any rate, it was likely fear-driven; I don't know what I'd have done in that situation, if anything different or better. I do however agree with you that there may be a humorous side to it, although I don't think the wives thought it very humorous at the time!
Uh oh. My wife gave me an Apple for my birthday. I told her repeatedly I didn't want one, that I could get along just fine on a PC with DOS for a third of the price, but she was adamant. Another fine mess, as Ollie was always telling Stan, when most of the mess was really Ollie's work.
I'm rereading the Homeric cycle now (plus the Aeneid) because I'm teaching it starting in three weeks.
It's certainly an interesting argument you make (or build upon), Kirby--why don't you translate the books?
I would think the idea of family is more primary than marriage simply because the conflict begins because a father has tried to reclaim his daughter.
Note the similarity between this beginning and the ending--but the differences are important:
Chryses begging Agamemnon (who clearly isn't a big family guy, killing his kid and what not--and of course all the audience knows that) vs Priam begging Achilles.
There's a whole lot in the priest-to-king vs king-to-warrior dynamic along with the rejection, etc.
So while I think marriage is important in Homer, I think it's part and parcel of the importance of family.
Of course, that's my big bias because I'm pro-family, but I think I can back it up with Homer.
It's interesting, also, the argument about fidelity--I'll have to play close attention to that on these read-throughs.
Craig,
I'm a very happy mac user. If you need any help, feel free to drop me a line.
GM, good that you're rereading it. I haven't read the Aeneid. I tried to use the Samuel Butler translation years ago and nearly gagged it was so awful. I should try again. I have another version on my desk that a friend gave me, but the print is too tiny.
What were you referring to with the father trying to get his daughter back or child back? I couldn't follow. Is this in the Aeneid or in the Iliad?
Is it one of the gods you're talking about?
There is a problem with the priesthood in the Iliad. It is Calchas, Agamemnon's priest, who comes up with the notion that they have to murder Iphigenia, or rather, sacrifice her, to gain a favorable wind. He surfaces again in Seneca's play, and suggests the same thing: this time with two Trojan children -- Astyanax (son of Hector), and Polyxena, Cassandra's younger sister.
This is obviously sinister, but blood propitiation is a big thing in many primitive religions.
Christ dies on the cross for us so that we don't have to do any more of that.
In Seneca's version, Ulysses (he's called by his Roman name) sees through the sacrifice and realizes that the real reason to kill Astyanax is because they don't want to have to deal with another Hector. He explicitly says he's fighting to mop up the remnants of Troy so that his son Telemachus doesn't have to fight Astyanax in ten years' time.
So that fits your thesis that this is about family.
But family is lawfully bound together through marriage, so I don't regard these as separate issues.
There are many problems in this cycle as well as in the OT with folks going outside the covenant they establish with wives (much like the covenant that God establishes with the men). Sarah pulls in Hagar to have Ishmael although it isn't explicitly what God requested. This creates structural problems later on when Sarah realizes the redundancy and sends her former maid off to die in the desert with her son.
Which she doesn't.
But she has sinned in doing all of this, hasn't she?
The covenant should always be one to one to establish equality and fairness. However, in the fourth generation there is some nut named Lemach who takes four wives.
The Islamic peoples think of Lemach as a precedent for their taking of four wives.
Not sure about Mormons (I realized they have left polygamy but it is still secretly practiced in outlying areas of Mormonism).
Adam and Eve were one flesh, and Jesus refers to them again in Matthew as the model. They weren't such hot parents, though. One of their kids murdered the other.
Kirby,
A quick exegetical note...
Even the Philistines in Genesis have a sense of the incontrovertible holiness of marriage. Abraham tries to pretend his wife is only his sister (so that he isn't killed), then later Isaac does the same thing with Rebekah.
In ancient middle-eastern societies, there was a notion of "sister wives." According to some modern scholars, this was not a biological relationship (i.e., one did not marry one's sister), but rather a legal relationship.
This is from memory, based on a reading of E. A. Speiser's "Genesis: Introduction, Translation, and Notes), Volume 1 of the Anchor Bible, more than twenty years ago. Briefly, in ancient society, a wife was only somewhat more than chattel. Divorce was easy, moreover, there were no property rights that accrued to the wife as a result of marriage. If her husband died, she was dependent for support upon her children, if she had any, otherwise, she was dependent on her parents family (if they'd have her).
But a "sister wife" enjoyed an elevated relationship over an ordinary wife. A sister wife could indeed possess property, and inherit directly. Moreover, a man could have many wives, but only one sister wife. In effect, a becoming a "sister wife" meant not only marriage, but adoption, and seniority within the community of wives. I had the impression that this was never a common relationship.
Anyway, Speiser's thesis was that Sarah was a sister wife, and this was something that was deemed crucially important by the first generations of oral transmission, as it spoke in a deep, symbolic, and even metaphoric way of the legitimacy of the Sarah's children, sharpening the distinction between them and Haggar's illegitimate offspring. In its original context, Abraham's representation to Pharaoh that Sarah was his sister was really that she was his sister wife, and thus Abraham was not only her husband (someone who might conceivable divorce her if the Pharaoh violated her), but legally her protector (someone who was honor bound to defend her and/or retaliate if she was wronged). So the message wasn't, "she's available, and I'm here to bless any union if it's in my interest to do so," it was more along the lines of (please excuse the vulgarity, but it seems necessary to capture nuance), "fuck with her, and you're fucking with me." Only later, after the tradition and significance of sister wives had been forgotten, was another explanation woven by the oral transmitters of tradition around Abraham's stand before Pharaoh.
i think we need to limit the activities of women in our society
to rebuilding the family home - from inside out
if they need entertainment
let them take up boxing kick boxing perhaps
i thought seneca was a north american aboriginal chief
or a town in NY
roman catholicism had done away with all that greek inbreeding and murder stuff but then freud decided it was the template upon which we should understand the modern human psyche - to my mind the bible characters are far more interesting and complex than those offered by the greeks - there is the same weird drama but it appears to be moving in a better direction toward what someone else wants - someone like god
i'm reading the essays of walker percy - he duly condemns the presumptions of secular science and the pretentions of the modern culture in the west - as he should
as we all should it's all bankrupt
you used to ask about what people are reading
this seems to me to be a fair blog question
what! no more poetry contests
it's the end of the world as we know it and i feel fine
jh
Don't forget, Mormons officially fight against polygamy now--those who practice it are wholly disowned.
The priest-father coming to get his daughter is in the beginning of the Iliad.
I think you can't say just marriage, though--you have to say family because at least the Homeric works are so centered around fathers and sons and mothers and sons and wives and children, etc.
I would recommend the Robert Fagles translation--it's the best for enjoyment of reading. He's not trying to be a poet, he's trying to let the poet speak in a new idiom.
Only later, after the tradition and significance of sister wives had been forgotten
Then where did the theory come from?
Or was it speculation?
GM,
Then where did the theory come from?
Or was it speculation?
It was more than speculation. The tradition of sister wives was documented in earlier semetic (specifically Sumerian/Chaldean/Akkadian) cultures. If you google for 'sumer "sister wife"' you'll get informative hits, although you'll have to convince Google that you actually meant Sumer and not summer.
Abraham came from Haran (Harran), and so came from this culture.
The evidence seems pretty solid, so long as you have an understanding of scripture that is incorporates a significant historical/critical component. If, on the other hand, if you're a "long pen," inerrant in writing and transmission kind of guy, this is going to be completely unconvincing.
I googled Speiser's book (still in print) and got this from the book flap:
"Genesis is Volume I in the Anchor Bible series of new book-by-book translations of the Old and New Testaments and Apocrypha. Ephraim Avigdor Speiser was University Professor and Chairman of the Department of Oriental Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Using authoritative evidence from archaeology, linguistics, and comparative religion, the author presents some startling conclusions about the first book of the Bible. He proves, for example, that the famous opening phrase, "In the beginning," is not true to the meaning of the first word, that the designation "Torah" for the Pentateuch is a misnomer, that the best-known stories of Genesis are grounded in pagan mythology. Speiser is an iconoclast in the tradition of Abraham; he exposes the false in order to help achieve truth. As he says in his introduction, he "is not motivated by mere pedantry...but by the hope that each new insight may bring us that much closer to the secret of the Bible's universal and enduring appeal."
I got home, and had a chance to look at Speiser.
The relevant section is on pages 91-94, and are reasonably close to the account I gave earlier. I'd make the following qualification: Speiser attributes the tradition of sister-wives specifically to Hurrian (north-western Semitic) culture, but explicitly not Akkadian (south-western Semitic) culture. Live and learn.
To become a sister wife requires two distinct contracts, and archaeology has recovered multiple copies of both. Indeed, Speiser characterizes Gen 24:53-61 as being "remarkably like a transcript of a Hurrian 'sistership' document," and cites specific published Haran contracts.
He makes the point, rather forcefully, that we have much better access to the Sumerian archives, stories, and myths today than the Hebrews had at the beginning of the 1st millennium BC as these narratives were beginning to approximate the form in which we have them today.
Amazon.com has a copy of Speiser for under 4 dollars. A new copy is almost 70 dollars, I think it said.
I'll look up sister-wives in my various bible dictionaries. Thanks for this tip, Stu.
I'm always interested in the various takes people have, and the text makes more sense like this, otherwise it's like a strange joke that Abraham and Isaac are willing to toss their wives to the first person who's interested.
Most men would far rather die than let their wives be raped.
I thought this had to be a joke, but maybe the meaning has just been reversed.
Kirby,
Four dollars for any of the Anchor commentaries is a steal, and Speiser's Genesis commentary (IMHO) is one of the crown jewels of the series. Heck, it's almost worthwhile considering picking up a copy for the office, too :-).
I wonder how much of an outlier Speiser is. I looked up Sister Wives and the Wiki article suggests that Speiser and the archeologists are extreme outliers in terms of interpreting the stories. I see the stories of Abraham and Isaac as being similar to the stories of Pharoah, or the later stories of Moses himself, as having fallen moments, almost absurdly so.
Here's the Wiki page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife%E2%80%93sister_narratives_in_Genesis
I think it makes more sense to have the men try to save their own skins, and to fear their neighbors more than they fear God.
I think this happens to all of us. I think in the vote on homosexual ordination the reverse was true: that those who voted for it were probably actually afraid of the homosexuals in their midst, while those who voted against it were voting out of their fear of God.
We often have mirror reversals in human enterprises.
The terror of the Greeks and Trojans mirror one another in many ways in the stories. Neither group is actually very fearful of the gods (Achilles rapes one of Apollo's vestal virgins, and is then shot through the heel with a poisoned arrow led by Apollo right into the soft spot!). Odysseus brags that he is the one who won the war. Poseidon begs to differ.
But the Greek gods were at least as tawdry as the men and women who worship them.
God of the ancient Hebrews on the other hand is quite pure and we don't see him breaking the ten commandments as all the Greek deities did.
I'm not discounting Speiser by any means, but wiki'd him and he was an Assyriologist. There's not too many of those around. I doubt if there's one in the whole county. More likely to find a mountain lion these days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephraim_Avigdor_Speiser
Kirby,
I'm not discounting Speiser by any means, but wiki'd him and he was an Assyriologist. There's not too many of those around. I doubt if there's one in the whole county. More likely to find a mountain lion these days.
Hah!! You forget that my office is one block away from the Oriental Institute. If you go to their faculty and staff page, you'll find 1 emeritus professor of Assyriology, and 4(!) active professors. So they exist. Indeed, one of them, Martha Roth, is currently Dean of Humanities at Chicago. So not only do they still exist, they still hold positions of influence in American letters. And one of them (Seri) is an Assistant Professor, so evidently the OI folks believe that Assyriology still has a future.
There's a recent NYT article that celebrates the completion of the Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriential Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD): After 90 Years, a Dictionary of an Ancient World.
Funny story. About a fifteen years ago, the University put together a big dinner at the Palmer House for its faculty. This used to be common practice, but had fallen out of favor, but this being a tradition-laden institution, they trotted it out one more time. One of my dinner companions was Robert Biggs, IIRC, now emeritus prof of Assyriology. I asked him about his work -- he was working on the dictionary. At the time, there was essentially no technology involved -- everything was on index cards. He said that they'd recently finished up a volume (I can see from the online version that it was probably Volume 18). I asked him what they would do when they finally finished it. "Retire."
As we attempt to uncover the Old Testament and then use Assyrian tablets, and other inscriptions (with all the possible errors they contain, as well as errors of interpretation) it's hard to know what's what.
I suppose at least at first I'd like to stick with fairly simple descriptions by authors whose soundness is largely recognized in the Biblical traditions.
I just don't know about Speiser.
I googled him, and still don't know whether I can trust him.
I looked up Assyriology, and found a book from 1885 called On the Uses and Abuses of Assyriology. It is written by Spencer Brown, a theologian at Union Seminary, writing in 1885.
His entire book is here:
http://www.archive.org/stream/assyriologyitsus00brow#page/n5/mode/2up
It's only 95 pages and contains some pages that help to explain how the Assyriologists were using their science to explain away the uniqueness of the OT even in 1885.
As a beginner, I always like to get an overview, but I doubt if Dim Lamp will give us his take as I doubt if he wants to join in on any fray. I think the theologians here deserve to remain above the fray.
At any rate, I'm glad Stu brought the Speiser guy up.
I usually try to check a person's credentials and background before I swallow their ideas. But I do plan to taste it and see its tendency, soonest.
Meanwhile, tonight are the Republican debates! I'm rooting for Michelle Bachman! She seems like a complete nut!
I want a religious nut for president!
Stu, I loved your links! We've come a long way, baby! from writing on stone, that is.
The mind reels.
I did read Gilgamesh years and years ago. I think it's a Sumerian text. I can no longer recall the differences between Hittites and Sumerians and Akkadians. I only recall that they used horses and chariots in battle.
Gilgamesh is a pretty good novel, even today.
Kirby,
I want a religious nut for president!
With two fundies and two Mormons in the race, it seems inevitable that at least one will make the finals. Of course, if I'm to take your previous writings at anything like face value (cough!), I'd conclude that you believe you already have a religious nut for President. So why aren't you happier?
Corso used to compare Kerouac to Gilgamesh, and Neal Cassidy to Enkidu (the wild man). That's why I read it. Corso said it was the first novel.
I don't know if that's still true, or could be considered true.
It has a lovely ending. Gilgamesh goes down into the underworld to bring his friend back but he blows it. It's something like the Orpheus story in which he tries to bring back Euridice but looks back at the last moment.
I forget the details. I was only 19 when I read it. It's a somewhat wooden text, at least in the translation I read it in.
I wouldn't want to plow through that twice. Corso made us read it for a class at Naropa, and then he never even spoke about it. He decided to talk about Shakespeare, instead.
Apparently the people of Troy spoke a Hittite language known as Luwian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luwian
There are arguments about this. I even read a book last summer by a retired Italian metallurgian whose private theory is that Troy was located in Finland. That book had no scholarly vetting, and was based on the passage about the giant Laestrygonians who lived in a land of eternal daylight (the Italian guy thought this must have meant Scandinavia).
I doubt if anyone takes this position seriously in academia, but you never know. Scholarship begins with mad guesses.
Kirby,
I did read Gilgamesh years and years ago. I think it's a Sumerian text.
Right, and taken by many as a precursor to the Noah story, which it resembles in many respects. Indeed, these days, there's a fraction of the historical/critical side that believes that Gilgamesh story contains a memory of a significant historical event: the flooding of the Black Sea.
Corso said it was the first novel.
"The Context of Scripture," a compendium of ancient texts related to the Bible, claims that Gilgamesh borrowed from earlier sources. I'm sure that Corso's thinking was based on the "history begins in Sumer" line, and a lack of knowledge of other Sumerian literature.
Stu,
I did't say that I doubted if there was a single Assyriologist in the country, but in the COUNTY. I assume all the biggest universities have four or five. There is by the way a marvelous autobiography by Robert Biggs, here:
http://www.jaas.org/edocs/v19n1/Biggs-Biography-final.pdf
It's wonderfully clear and well done. He's been all over the world, and had many adventures, originating from his Danish family up in Washington state farmland.
He reminds us that there are Assyrian Christians (left over from Jonah's excursion to Mosul). MAny of those have had to leave in the last ten years. The population was almost a million twenty years ago. Now they're down to about 200,000 last time I checked. I used to subscribe to their newsletter. They approved of W's intervention originally, but it didn't work out too well for them.
Sumerian is weird. It's not related to any other known language. Also, they are the only nonSemitic people in that area. Corso had a friend who believed they were from another planet.Some other friend, not a poet.
Gilgamesh was like Homer's work built on other oral literature, apparently. You can wiki anything these days.
I remember reading (and it "feels right" you know) that the two oldest stories are that of Gilgamesh and Job.
The Flood happened somewhere--I think the sheer instance of Noah/Deucalion/Utnapishtim is evidence enough of that--now whether it's the flooding of the Black Sea or the flooding of the basin that became the Red Sea is up for argument--and while I like Professor Eco's assertion that God dumped water from one day to the next, I think "the whole earth covered in water" might be a bit much--but I would certainly believe "water everywhere" like in that great old Blues song.
I think taking historical knives to the Bible has to be done with respect and without an agenda (as much as that's possible) because otherwise you end up cutting just because you can.
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