Editor’s Note: This is the first of a four-part essay on reception of minoritized translators of Classical Epic Poetry by Imaan Ansari.
Being a translator without being an interpreter is close to impossible. The following entities are only examples of the factors affecting the decisions that a translator makes: the author of the original work, the respective audience for which this author wrote in mind, and the audience that receives the translation upon publication. No translator is completely impartial—otherwise, all translations would be the same.
When it comes to ancient literature, the progression by which translations are differently received throughout time can be understood through the prism of “Classical reception,” a phenomenon that also crafts the archetype of the accepted or ideal translator [[1]]. Perceived legitimacy has its own allure within the Classics since authority as a classicist or translator is often less affected by the content of a person’s contributions, but rather, their identity and background. Classical reception, in conjunction with perceived legitimacy, allows us to interrogate the ways in which a person’s gender or race affects their reputation as a translator. The media and institutions of higher education promote literature of the Greco-Roman or “Western” Classics, which are then overwhelmingly analyzed and translated by authors of the same backgrounds. These texts become canonized, and in turn, so do their authors, but only a few translators are met with the same respect and reverence.
Classical reception is a double-edged sword, as the reaction which a piece of literature elicits pertains to both the original and translated work. Because the Classics look far back into antiquity, the authors of well-known works, such as Homer of the Odyssey or Vergil of the Aeneid, have passed away though their works have not. Although some may see “the death of the author” as a relinquishing of control over their work, the translator very much has the integrity of the original author’s work in their mind, whether by choice or because of the pressures relating to reception [[2]]. “Faithfulness” to the text then becomes a tough pill to swallow, since what if the lessons taught in the original piece would not be well received or even inappropriate for the present day and age?[[3]]
The decisions that a translator must make concerns the reception of their translation in addition to the threshold acceptance of the original work. Trevor Ross asserts that the “stewardship of an established authority or institution” drives the loftiness of the canon forward[[4]] An elite class of literature and authors grandfather in translators who then assume a spot in the hierarchy of the many people who have interacted with ancient text. The translator always has to straddle faithfulness to the text in the larger context of faithfulness to the canon, as they are entering a conversation about texts that have stood the test of time.
In this first post, I will focus on how classicists grapple with the racism and sexism present within ancient epic and the history of translating epic. The experiences of translators influence either implicitly or explicitly the way in which they choose to render a story. Using comparative analysis and recourse to translation theory, I will discuss how a growing group of marginalized translators and translators in Classics emphasize the political valences of their craft in order to stand in solidarity against marginalization. They have shown that, while no translation is perfect, certain translation choices can perpetuate outdated dynamics. Ultimately, by exploring these dynamics, I intend to show that adopting this mindset allows translators to more effectively grapple with the multiple levels of marginalization that may be present both within the texts and in their own careers.
Image of Arshia Sattar, 2017
Arshia Sattar, translator of the Ramayana from Sanskrit to English, has spoken on the traditional and almost ritualistic aspect of translating the Classics in a recent interview [[5]]. Sattar states that one is “rarely” the first translator, but is extremely definitive with the phrase “[one] will certainly not be the last” [[6]]. The so-called “first” translator from a certain background—the first female translator of a specific work, the first translator of color of a specific work—is often met with the response of making a person or their accomplishment out to merely be a symbol. The reduction of the“first” translator into a symbol ushers in societal acceptance to undermine previous scholarship and interaction with the original work, often from the demographic that the “first” person is alleged to represent. When they are recognized, women and people of color in the field of translation are often labeled as the first person of their respective minority to have completed such a commendable task.
The industry of translation then falls into a trap of representation: that a certain individual person speaks for all who share their background, undervaluing and discouraging subsequent contributions with the fear that they do not have the stamp of validation that is “being first.” If translation is not a transaction or a competition, shouldn’t being the “first” translator in whatever respect be irrelevant? Yet, if there were no more “first” translators, the industry of translation would cater to a smaller audience due to the more conservative elements of its history in the Classics especially. Translation would not live up to the global and diverse medium on which the industry prides itself.
The act of making someone a “first” permeates into the media’s reception of translations. The earlier quote from Arshia Sattar is from an interview that solicited the contributions of three notable female translators of different classical traditions. Words Without Borders, the publication that conducted this interview, strives to represent and give voice to those that are traditionally marginalized or silenced in literary fields [[7]]. The interviewer, Alta Price, curated responses from Emily Wilson, translator of Homer’s Odyssey, and Sholeh Wolpé, translator of Sufi poet Attar’s The Conference of The Birds, in addition to Arshia Sattar. Words Without Borders works to dismantle the influence of tokenism in translation by discussing a wide variety of works and allowing many different women to share their experiences, to work against the notion of a “female translator.” Price has therefore called for a Women in Translation movement, which is driven by the fact that there should be a standard in which society should see women: the same way as everyone else [[8]].
Tokenism, “the practice of doing something only to prevent criticism and give the appearance that people are treated fairly,” deeply relates to the representation, and often lack thereof, of women and people of color in respected echelons of the Classics. In an interview conducted at Vanderbilt University on tokenism in the corporate world, a member of the panel made the statement, “Intent is important,” encapsulating the difference between an organization that circulates tokenism versus one that advocates sincerely for equal representation [[9]] Applying logic to the premise of the interview at Words Without Borders, three women were chosen, besides the fact that they represent different languages, because they each grapple with the way in which society views them, in addition to and often more so than their translations. In turn, minoritized translators are more likely to fear how they will be received than how their translation will be received. Samia Mehrez (“Translating Gender”)[[10]] and Sherry Simon (“Gender in Translation”)[[11]] are among the many female scholars who have theorized gender in translation as well, having to bear in mind the skewed expectations for a female translator within the field of Classics.
Imaan Ansari is a high school junior at Trinity School in New York City. Her parents immigrated to the US from India, so her experiences as a woman of color and as a first-generation American influence her passion for investigating and amplifying the contributions of minority groups to the Classics. Imaan has taken Latin for six years. She is also fluent in Hindi and Urdu, and aspires to study Sanskrit. At school, Imaan serves on the Student Senate, fulfilling roles such as Chair of Finance, overseeing the student budget, and Speaker, communicating the Senate’s initiatives to students, faculty, and staff. Imaan is the Editor-in-Chief of Diversion, the Modern Language magazine, and the Editor-in-Chief of Symposium, the Classics publication. She is the President of Classics Club and also leads a free peer Latin tutoring service. Outside of Classics, Imaan enjoys playing golf, as captain of the Varsity team, and has been playing violin in various orchestras for over ten years
[1] Martindale, C. (1993) Redeeming the text: Latin poetry and the hermeneutics of reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[2] Barthes, R. (1967) The birth of ‘the death of the author’ – JSTOR. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24238249 (Accessed: 14 August 2023).
[3] Irigaray, L. (2002) “On Faithfulness in Translating,” in Luce Irigaray presents international, intercultural, intergenerational dialogues around her work. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 32–41.
[4] Ross, T. (1996) “Dissolution and the making of the English literary canon,” JSTOR, Renaissance and Reformation. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43445609 (Accessed: 13 August 2023).
At the beginning of the Iliad, Agamemnon refusers to honor the ransom request of Chryses for his daughter Chryseis and this prompts the “rage of Apollo” and the plague that initiates the epic’s conflict. When Achilles calls an assembly after nine days of suffering, the poem introduces the seer Calchas:
Homer, Iliad 1.69-72
"Kalkhas the son of Thestor, the best of the bird-men readers
who knew what is, what will be, and what was before,
and lead the ships of the Achaeans to Troy
through the power of prophecy Phoibos Apollo granted him.
Κάλχας Θεστορίδης οἰωνοπόλων ὄχ' ἄριστος,
ὃς ᾔδη τά τ' ἐόντα τά τ' ἐσσόμενα πρό τ' ἐόντα,
καὶ νήεσσ' ἡγήσατ' ᾿Αχαιῶν ῎Ιλιον εἴσω
ἣν διὰ μαντοσύνην, τήν οἱ πόρε Φοῖβος ᾿Απόλλων·
The scholia to this passage suggest that Calchas led them to Troy and prophesied that it would take 10 years (a story told by Odysseus in Iliad 2). After Calchas speaks, however, Agamemnon’s aggressive response has prompted many questions:
Iliad 1.106-9
"Prophet of evils, you've never said anything good for me!
It's always dear to your thoughts to prophesy wicked things--
you never utter or complete any kind of noble word!"
μάντι κακῶν οὐ πώ ποτέ μοι τὸ κρήγυον εἶπας·
αἰεί τοι τὰ κάκ' ἐστὶ φίλα φρεσὶ μαντεύεσθαι,
ἐσθλὸν δ' οὔτέ τί πω εἶπας ἔπος οὔτ' ἐτέλεσσας·
Schol. T. ad Hom. Il. 1.106b
“The poet does not know the name Iphigenia. Since it is not known, then this is not an issue of a falsification, but [Agamemnon] is speaking his slander because of the delay of the victory.”
The D Scholia (to lines 108=109b) insist that the “younger poets” (neoteroi i.e., later accounts) tell the story of Calchas’ prophecy at Aulis. Whether or not ‘Homer’ ‘knew’ the tale is immaterial, I think, because later audiences certainly knew it and could have attributed the tension in book 1 to that event. The Homeric Iliad is perfectly capable of suppressing details that serve its own ends; and ancient scholars are equally capable of taking Homeric poetry at its face value. The question for me is how does it change our reading of the Iliad to imagine that we could be thinking about Iphigenia.
At one level, this might be too much: there’s already a sufficient thematic pattern in a leader (here, a king) at odds with an expert with unwanted knowledge (here, a prophet). Consider, for example, the similar beginning to Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos. However, it seems to me highly unlikely that audiences of the fifth century did not think of Iphigenia at the beginning of the poem. Homer “not knowing” the name Iphigenia could mean simply that; or, it could be one of many examples of Homeric poetry downplaying details that are not convenient to its plot. A clear allusion to a sacrificed daughter might change the way we think of Agamemnon when he refuses to return a daughter at the beginning of the poem.
The sacrifice of Iphigenia is a pivotal moment in the tale of the House of Atreus—it motivates Agamemnon’s murder and in turn the matricide of Orestes—and the Trojan War, functioning as it does as a strange sacrifice of a virgin daughter of Klytemnestra in exchange for passage for a fleet to regain the adulteress Helen, Iphigeneia’s aunt by both her father and mother. The account is famous in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and the plays Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia among the Taurians by Euripides. Its earliest accounts, however, provide some interesting variations:
Hes. Fr. 23.13-30
“Agamemnon, lord of men, because of her beauty,
Married the dark-eyed daughter of Tyndareus, Klytemnestra. She gave birth to fair-ankled Iphimede in her home And Elektra who rivaled the goddesses in beauty. But the well-greaved Achaeans butchered Iphimede on the altar of thundering, golden-arrowed Artemis on that day when they sailed with ships to Ilium in order to exact payment for fair-ankled Argive woman— they butchered a ghost. But the deer-shooting arrow-mistress easily rescued her and anointed her head with lovely ambrosia so that her flesh would be enduring— She made her immortal and ageless for all days. Now the races of men upon the earth call her Artemis of the roads, the servant of the famous arrow-mistress. Last in her home, dark-eyed Klytemnestra gave birth after being impregnated by Agamemnon to Orestes, who, once he reached maturity, paid back the murderer of his father and killed his mother as well with pitiless bronze.”
This fragment presents what is possibly the earliest account of the tale of Iphigenia and contains the major elements: the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter is tied to vengeance against Helen; the daughter is rescued by Artemis, made immortal and made her servant. [In some traditions she is either made immortal or made into a priestess of Artemis at Tauris]. Orestes kills the murderer of his father and his mother.
Note that several details are not spelled out, but assumed: namely, Agamemnon’s agency in the death of his daughter (either in angering the goddess or in arranging her sacrifice) and the murder of Agamemnon. Note as well, the name is different: here we have Iphimedê instead of Iphigeneia. Of course, the situation gets stranger: according to Pausanias (1.43.1) Artemis turned Iphigeneia into Hekate. According to Proclus (in his Chrestomathia, “useful knowledge”; 135-143), the story was told in the Kypria as follows:
“When the fleet gathered a second time at Aulis, Agamemnon struck a deer while hunting and claimed he had surpassed Artemis. The goddess, enraged, kept them from sailing by sending storms. When Kalkhas explained the origin of the goddess’s anger and called for Iphigeneia to be sacrificed to Artemis, they attempted to complete the sacrifice by sending for her with the pretext of a marriage to Achilles. But Artemis snatched her away and settled her among the Taurians and made her immortal; she put a deer in place of the girl on the altar.”
In the fifth century, the story becomes a little more consistent: Aeschylus’ account is probably the best known (Agamemnon, 229-249) but Pindar discusses it too (Pyth. 11.22-28)
“Was it the fact that Iphigeneia
was butchered far from her homeland at Euripos that incited [Klytemnestra’s] heavy-handed rage? Or did nocturnal sex, breaking her to another’s bed, lead her astray? That is most hateful and intractable in young wives—but it is impossible to hide because of other people’s tongues: Townsfolk are gossip-mongers.”
Sophokles, who also wrote an Iphigeneia (lost), has Elektra defend her father’s decision by portraying him as accidentally killing the deer and having no choice in the killing of his daughter (Elektra, 563-576).
The situation with the naming of the daughters of Agamemnon is a bit knotty. In the Iliad he declares: “I have three daughters in my well-made home / Khrysothemis, Laodikê, and Iphianassa” (τρεῖς δέ μοί εἰσι θύγατρες ἐνὶ μεγάρῳ εὐπήκτῳ / Χρυσόθεμις καὶ Λαοδίκη καὶ ᾿Ιφιάνασσα, 9.144-145) whereas the Hesiodic fragment cited above lists only two (Elektra and Iphimedê). Some scholars have assumed that Homer suppresses the sacrifice of Iphigeneia (although the events of the epic’s first book seem to rely on that tension). According to Aelian the name Elektra was a pejorative nickname for Laodikê (Varia Historia, 4.26):
“Xanthus the lyric poet—the one who was older than Stesikhoros—says that the daughter of Agamemnon Elektra did not have that name at first, but instead was Laodikê. After Agamemnon was killed and Aigisthos married Klytemnestra and was king, because she was “unbedded” (a-lektron) and was growing old as a virgin, the Argives called her Elektra because she didn’t have a husband and had no experience of a marriage bed.”
Aeschylus in his Libation-Bearers gives Agamemnon only Elektra. Sophokles and Euripides preserve Khrysothemis. Strangely, according to one scholion, the lost Kypria named both Iphigeneia and Iphianassa as Agamemnon’s daughters. West (2013, 110) concludes that in this tradition (following Homer’s Iliad, Agamemnon once had four daughters).
Fourth Style fresco depicting the Sacrifice of Iphigenia, from the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii, Naples National Archaeological Museum
Sources: Timothy Gantz. Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources. Baltimore, 1993. Bryan Hainsworth. The Iliad: A Commentary. III: books 9-12. Cambridge, 1993. R. Merkelbach and M. L. West. Hesiodea Fragmenta. Oxford, 1967. Glenn Most. Hesiod: The Shield, Catalogue of Women, Other Fragments. Cambridge, 2003. M. L. West. The Epic Cycle. Oxford, 2013.
Some reflections from a student who took Greek for the first time this summer
“The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.” –Aristotle
We’ve all experienced times throughout when education feels simply bitter, with the fruits that are promised to come not even on the horizon. In other words, any time a test rolls around or a paper is due. And yet, nearly every time, the relief of being done is a sweet enough fruit, and the realization that at least some significant learning was done is just a cherry on top. In no other area of study have I experienced feelings of bitterness towards education followed by enjoyment of its fruits in such rapid succession than in learning Ancient Greek.
As a lifelong Latin student, I admittedly thought that the first few classes, and even weeks, of my Ancient Greek course would be a breeze. Sure Latin and Greek were different languages, but they both fell under the Classics umbrella and used similar grammatical structures that are now second nature to my Latin oriented brain. However, I failed to account for a primary aspect of Greek: its alphabet. Most people, especially Classics students, know some of the Greek letters, like alpha, beta, or delta. Those in particular are familiar to English and Latin speakers, given that they closely resemble A, B, and D. It’s the rest of the alphabet that gave me, and most of my classmates, fits.
Many of the letters were completely foreign shapes that represented unfamiliar sounds. Some contracted sounds, such as ‘th’ and ‘ps’ are simply one letter, with many letters out of order from our standard English alphabet, and some letters like ‘h’ even being shown by an accent mark rather than a letter. So when we were asked to read aloud and translate Greek words, I found myself first transforming the characters into their approximate English counterparts to read them aloud, and then translating them into their English definitions. Not only is pronunciation not stressed at all in Latin, the altered alphabet made each word feel like an enormous hurdle.
However, as is Aristotle’s golden rule of education, the sweet fruits came not far behind. After a few hours of dutiful practice, both with classmates and alone, I became well acquainted with the formerly alien Ancient Greek letters. I can’t say it has become second nature, because to be frank I’m not sure if it ever will, but my fear of reading Greek words aloud has reduced dramatically. Unfortunately, that relief has been short lived, as our course has carried on to the minutiae of the language: declensions, conjugations, and articles. Yet, the immediate swing from bitterness to sweetness gives hope for further enjoyment of the Greek language.
“The happy man is the one with a healthy body, a wealthy soul and a well-educated nature” –Thales
Many philosophers throughout human history have spoken to the joy that is necessary to properly learn and live, and that the happiest people are those who are the most educated. While this notion feels at times preposterous, I find that it is especially true when students are allowed to thoroughly learn the material that interests them at their own speed.
By choosing an Ancient Greek course for the first time this summer, I have gone back to the basics of any language: vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. And while I have little memory of doing similar exercises to learn English, I can remember building the foundations of Latin nearly six years ago. However, I have now reached the Latin stage where classes and homeworks are dominated solely by translations– I have a dictionary on hand, because at this point there’s no time to study more vocab, and whenever I see an infinitive verb, I just assume that the author is using some form of indirect speech. To be frank, I don’t think I’ve seen any form of “esse” in years. This ease I feel with Latin has helped me read increasingly complex texts and perform more adept analysis, but the fundamentals of the language have certainly been a bit lost.
During my experiences with Greek this summer, however, I have made a genuine commitment to understanding each and every aspect of the sentences I translate. I, of course, want to be precise with my vocabulary translations, but rather than simply trying to get through as many sentences as possible, and half-heartedly moving on from any phrases that don’t quite make sense, I’m trying to actually figure out what I don’t quite understand. While these goals have certainly made learning Greek more time consuming than I originally anticipated, it has actually brought considerable joy to me. For the first time in years I feel less of a time crunch to get through material, and therefore increased enjoyment and fulfillment in learning the material.
I’ve often heard people discuss the extreme difficulty of the English language, and that, most of the time, it simply makes very little sense. From the spelling of our words to the grammatical structure of our sentences, English is often considered one of the hardest languages to learn. However, I don’t think that I personally understood why that was until I returned to the fundamentals of Ancient Greek.
Latin and Greek are the two foreign languages I have studied the most, and both have a calculated, almost mathematical, structure. Since the case of a noun or adjective determines what the word’s role in the sentence is, we as readers can identify each word’s job purely by looking at the ending. The same is true for verbs, as the ending tells us the person, number, tense, and mood of the verb all within a few letters at the end of the word. And while these rules, of course, have many exceptions, even those exceptions have trends that can be studied and then identified when looking at a sentence. In general, one can learn the languages by studying paradigms and grammar charts, in addition to practicing translating sentences. These paradigms are so accurate, in fact, that often personal pronouns and “to be” verbs can be omitted. The ancient Latin and Greek texts even had no spaces between words, punctuation, or capital letters; however, readers could still understand the material because of the steadfast rules of the languages.
These immovable, easily explainable rules seem to be what’s missing from English. Most of the reasoning behind why certain words look the way they do or function in a particular manner is because that’s just the way it works (in word order). There’s not a easy declension or case system for all English nouns and adjectives, verbs don’t share common endings that allow one to identify their syntax, and spelling feels, at times, completely arbitrary. We have so many words that are spelled the same with different meanings or have the same pronunciation with different meanings that we categorize them: homographs and homophones. While not everyone has a mathematically-oriented brain, the calculated approach Latin and Greek take to grammar certainly makes them easier to wrap our heads around, in addition to highlighting the outright confusing nature of English.
Having now completed my Introductory Greek summer course, I am able to reflect on the most impactful aspects that I took away from the class. While learning a new language always provides a new window into how we think about various dialects, grammar, and vocabulary, I find that learning a Classical language gives an additional perspective that modern languages cannot supply. By learning a dead language, I, and all Classics students, are forced to examine how life was when Ancient Greek was the common denominator. I briefly took a Spanish course in middle school, and I recall the translation passages consisting of dialogue between people getting food at a market, or walking down a city street; however, the Greek passages consist of philosophical debates between philosophers of the time, or strenuous journeys across dangerous seas in triremes. In uncovering these events that are so foreign to the modern eye, I am truly taking a history course along with a language course. This multifaceted learning experience certainly gives me genuine interest and enjoyment in translating large volumes of text.
In addition, as I made my way through the unique, and admittedly odd, stories, I was forced to make somewhat of a human connection with the characters. For example, many of our passages involved a character who lived his life as Homer would, and frequently quoted the great poet. While his antics were at times confusing, I would always become a little more alert and absorbed in the text when he, and his Homeric philosophies, appeared in the passages. These little nuances, that can really be found only in the texts of Classical, dead languages, showcase the human interest that learning Ancient Greek provides. Looking forward, such connections to the text has greatly heightened my fascination with the Classics as a whole, and encouraged me to dive deeper into the field.
My name is Matthew Abati, and I am a rising high school senior at Milton Academy just outside of Boston. I have been a Classics lover since middle school and am very excited to share some of my thoughts on the Classics here on Sententiae Antiquae! When I’m not in school, I love to read all types of books and play all types of sports.
I first read “Oedipus the King” in the original more than 25 years ago when I had to grapple with Freud’s concept of the “Oedipal conflict”.
According to Freud, every boy between the ages of 1 and 7 wants to have a sexual relationship with his mother and therefore wants to get rid of his father. This is the “positive” Oedipus complex. Likewise, every boy wants to have a sexual relationship with his father and therefore wants to get rid of his mother (“negative” Oedipus complex). The same applies to girls by analogy.
Reading the Sophocles play made me realize how much Freud is turning reality into its opposite: at the end of the play, Oedipus wants to kill his mother – in honor of his father, whose death he wants to atone for on the basis of Apollo’s revelation. If Jocasta had not committed suicide beforehand, he would have murdered her. He wants to carry out this matricide with the same justification that is used to justify and demand other matricides in Greek mythology: because the mothers are responsible for the death of their respective fathers.
Over time I have studied all the great Sophocles pieces that have survived. In a discussion of such texts, I would like to bring a psychologist’s reasonable, non-Freudian perspective. As a psychologist, I pay attention to whether there are contradictions between what someone says and what he does. In general, I’m more trained to pay attention to the “action messages” of the actors instead of just listening to what they say. Or I pay attention to what someone does not say, although it should actually be addressed. I may question whether the emotions or insights presented are really real. Perhaps they are only pretended and played. Maybe I come across completely illogical points of view – and then try to be particularly attentive here and to interpret them meaningfully. Sometimes I’m probably more willing to judge certain statements as “outrageous” and rather to pillory them. All in all, in this job I have learned to pay attention to contradictions, to take them seriously and to try to resolve them. Having worked with dream interpretation, I am familiar with symbolism and allegory.
I want to briefly tie this to the great “Antigone”. It is probably the oldest, most impressive plea for a democratic society. That’s why it’s still relevant today. These values are fully represented by Antigone (and Haimon). Creon – that is important to recognize from my point of view! – embodies exactly the opposite: an arbitrary, brutal, unreasonable, godless, unjust dictatorship. From the beginning he successfully reduced the council of elders to the role of a vicarious agent. Through his brutality, he has the majority of the population and his henchmen firmly under control.
Here is an example for each of the features mentioned above:
Contradiction between what someone says and does: Creon praises the council of elders for having served so well for three generations of rulers – but it is clear that his decision not to bury Polynices presents this body with a fait accompli. He never dreamed of discussing this with his “council” in advance. The Athenians of that time must have experienced this as an immediate affront: a decision is not even discussed with a few select advisors – it is made by Creon all by himself. This corresponds to the state model of absolutism: “L’État, c’est moi.”
Noting what someone is NOT saying: When Creon talks about what happened at the end, he laments that he killed his son, but that he explicitly did this to Antigone and that he ordered Polynices to be punished completely inappropriately as well, he says NOT A SINGLE word about it.
Feigning insight: Obviously the play itself is about acting as if in a theater. For example, Creon ends up pretending to show remorse and heed the advice that was given to him. Free Antigone and bury Polynices. But Creon reverses the order! What an infamy! He excludes from the funeral the person who stood up for it from the beginning and would have been most worthy to officiate this ceremony! Whether he just wanted to increase the likelihood of Antigone’s death by delaying her liberation through a very elaborate burial, or even quickly instructed his bodyguard to break into Antigone’s dungeon during the burial and kill her, but make it look like suicide, that remains open to me. In any case, at this point he PROVES that he is in no way interested in the divine revelations.
Making sense of illogical points of view: Antigone claims that she would never have broken a burial law for her children or a husband. From my point of view, this emphasizes the special meaning of a – symbolically meant – “sibling” relationship, i.e. an obligation that Athens has towards a community that originates from its own “motherland” – i.e. towards Sparta. Comparatively fewer obligations to colonies (“children”) or other distant allies (“husband”).
There are a number of other things I would like to draw your attention to. Also, for example, that from my point of view Sophocles is a deeply democratic-minded author who brings allegories to the stage in all of his plays that confront his compatriots with political events that happened not too long ago.
About Klaus: Born in 1960, I studied psychology at the University of Saarbrücken (Diploma, 1988). Since 1993 I worked in my own psychotherapeutic practice (katathymic-imaginative psychotherapy, behavioral therapy, NLP, hypnosis and psych-analysis according to Josef Breuer). Since 1995 I have been researching the history of psychoanalysis and therefore came to study especially the stories of Narcissus and Oedipus, which were incorporated into Freud’s theory. I look at those ancient tales from a completely new perspective. In 2012 I published Sigmund Freud’s long-lost letters to the writer Wilhelm Jensen. Since 2022 I’m living in Costa Rica.
. . . [Diomedes] hurled his long-shadowed spear
at Hector’s head and did not miss: he hit
his helmet’s tip. But bronze deflected bronze
from fair skin: the spear failed on Hector’s headpiece
(three layers, cone shaped, Phoebus Apollo’s gift).
Hector scurried back and blended with the pack,
fell to his knee and stayed there, thick hand bracing
the ground. Black night blanketed his eyes.
But while Tydeus’s son tracked his spear’s woosh
to where it fell far beyond the first fighters,
Hector revived, scuttered into his car,
and off he drove, into the crush of men.
He’d given black fate the slip.
11.355-356. “[F]ell to his knee and stayed there . . . Black night blanketed his eyes” (στῆ δὲ γνὺξ ἐριπὼν . . . ἀμφὶ δὲ ὄσσε κελαινὴ νὺξ ἐκάλυψεν):
The controversy in the scholia:
One scholiast says of Homer and these verses:
“The blind one is fond of lies, and he is the perfect liar. For first, Hector was not wounded, as he himself says, and then there’s the scurrying [ἀνέδραμε] of a man who has his strength (11.354). Isn’t an account of why he fell to his knees and died of something insignificant missing?
This scholiast and others, as well as the poem’s ancient editors, were vexed by the formular indication of Hector’s death (“black night blanketed his eyes”) when Hector obviously survived Diomedes’ spear.
The scholia explains the seemingly inappropriate use of the formula in 11.355-356 by offering that it was improperly transferred from the 5.309-310 account of Aeneas (Schol. A. 356a. and T. 356c).
An alternative theory:
In Book 5, Apollo’s actions saved Aeneas following a boulder’s blow to the warrior’s hip (5.343-346).
In Book 11, Apollo’s action saved Hector from a spear’s assault: he had gifted Hector a spear-stopping helmet.
The Cambridge Commentary says that the ascription of the helmet to Apollo is only an idiom for the gear’s strength and good construction.
I’m not sure that’s right. It seems to me the helmet is in fact a metonym for Apollo’s intervention. That is to say, it is through the helmet that Apollo saved Hector. I’m building on what an insightful scholiast says:
“He [Hector] would have died, were it not for the divinity of the helmet” ( . . . άπέθανεν αν, εί μή διά την θειότητα τοϋ so κράνους [Schol. T. 353b]).
It is divinity itself, not good metalworking, which saved Hector. The divinity is an emanation from Apollo.
In both the Aeneas and Hector episodes, (1) it is Diomedes who attempts a kill, (2) he only just fails, and that’s thanks to (3) Apollo’s intervention. Perhaps we can say that the formular verses “[he] fell to his knee and stayed there . . . black night blanketed his eyes” belong to a larger formula whose elements are Diomedes, a warrior’s near death at his hand, and Apollo’s saving intervention.
In the ancient city of Pompeii, the ruins are adorned with various lines from Vergil’s Aeneid, revealing an anomaly: a misspelling and the absence of word separation. While modern readers may find this puzzling, ancient Latin readers, depending on their education and social class, would have immediately noticed the misspelling and intuitively separated the words in their pronunciation of the famous line “Arma virumque cano.” This graffiti in Pompeii, summarized by classical scholar James Franklin in his article “Vergil at Pompeii: A Teacher’s Aid,” offers valuable insights into the connection between writing and reading practices. It highlights the ways in which different scripts and writing techniques shaped the technologies of reading.
The Pompeii graffiti are among the most famous examples of everyday ancient Latin script.[2] However, they vary in readability and may have been created for different reasons, including the scribbling of bored schoolboys or as commentary on social situations and advertisements for local plays or productions. Interestingly, similar to the texts of that time, the Pompeii graffiti lacked spaces between words, indicating a more significant trend in spacing and lettering in ancient Latin and other languages.
Source: “Vergil at Pompeii.”
Another more ambiguous example would be this inscription, where the words are separated. The original author of this engraving knew that if the words were not distinct, then the average Roman might have confused the phrase. Even in the caption down at the bottom, the editor had to place in commas and other markers to help the English readers decipher what was written. If read without the word breaks, this small piece of poetry would have a lot more ambiguity surrounding it. “Age” and “Nate” are combined in the second line, this combination could be misconstrued as the Latin word for “advocate,” which is a different word and not what it is supposed to mean.
The absence of spaces in ancient script is a characteristic not exclusive to Latin but also found in other ancient languages, including Greek. Among the various intriguing patterns of Greek script, one that stands out is known as “boustrophedon.” The term “boustrophedon” originates from the Greek words “bous,” meaning “ox,” and “strephein,” meaning “to turn.” Thus, it translates to “turning as an ox in plowing,” a fitting name for the complex and multi-directional nature of this script.
Boustrophedon was employed during certain time periods in ancient Greece, adding a unique and fascinating dimension to the reading experience. In the early periods of Greek history, precisely during the Geometric Period (circa 9th to 8th century BCE) and the Archaic Period (circa 7th to 6th century BCE), boustrophedon script was commonly used for inscriptions on various materials, such as stone stelae and pottery.
When encountering a boustrophedon text, readers would follow a pattern reminiscent of an ox plowing a field. They began reading from the left, progressing from left to right until the end of the line. At that point, instead of continuing from left to right on the next line as one would do in modern scripts, they turned around, just like an ox at the end of a row, and read from right to left on the next line. This alternating back-and-forth directionality provided a unique challenge to readers, requiring them to adapt to a different mode of reading.
Early on, Greek and Latin scripts lacked spaces or any indication to separate words, placing the burden on the reader to determine word boundaries. Beginning in the 600-700 CE, monks in northern Europe introduced spaces into the Latin texts they were studying, mirroring the spaces we see in modern books, to enhance reading speed.
Similarly, in the written form of Akkadian, distinct glyphs separated words, resembling the hieroglyphics of ancient Egyptian. Outlined boxes provided further spacing by delineated separate sentences. However, these different methods of separation present a challenge for modern researchers trying to translate these ancient texts. Without cultural context or other indications, researchers had to resort to trial and error to determine the reading direction. Eventually, it was established that Akkadian written in cuneiform should be read from left to right.
Paul Saenger, in his monograph Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, explores the writing and reading practices of ancient languages, with a focus on Latin. He traces the gradual separation of words and their connection to evolving reading practices. Saenger describes how ancient Roman scholars such as Livy (d. 17 CE)[4] used “Scriptura Continua,” a form of writing without punctuation marks, diacritics, or distinguished letter cases. Scriptura Continua created a more dramatic and theatrical reading experience but also slowed down the reading process and made comprehension difficult. Over time, Scriptura Continua gave way to the current reading system, which allows for silent reading at a faster pace. Saenger emphasizes that the absence of spaces between words in ancient texts required readers to exert more effort and engage in more eye movements to ensure accurate word separation.
In modern curriculum, Latin is taught with spaces between words, as this is what contemporary readers are accustomed to. However, it is worth noting that aristocratic students who read Latin in ancient times would have encountered texts without word spacing. They were expected to decipher the different words as part of their curriculum.
While the addition of spaces in ancient scripts has undoubtedly made reading easier, it raises the question: What might be lost when spaces are inserted? The breaking up of Scriptura Continua potentially obscures certain nuances in the text. For instance, certain lines in the Aeneid, consisting entirely of diphthongs and long syllables, were meant to be read slowly and dramatically, evoking strong and intense emotions for the reader or speaker.
When reading texts with spaces or in translation, there is always a degree of nuance lost from the original language. Much like a perfect translation does not exist, developments in script and how one reads marks a departure from the original text, making its essence nearly impossible to capture.
In conclusion, the graffiti in Pompeii and the study of ancient scripts shed light on the interplay between writing and reading practices. The absence of spaces between words in ancient Latin and other languages, such as Greek and Akkadian, required readers to possess a deep understanding of the language and context to decipher and interpret the text accurately. The gradual introduction of word spacing in Latin and the current reading system has undoubtedly made reading more efficient and accessible. However, the insertion of spaces may also obscure certain nuances and the original dramatic impact intended by the ancient authors.
Understanding the historical development of script and reading practices enhances our appreciation of ancient texts and the challenges faced by ancient readers. It reminds us that language is a dynamic and evolving system shaped by cultural and societal factors and that the conventions and norms of our time influence the way we read and interpret texts.
Hunter MacArthur is a junior at St. Sebastian’s in Needham. He can be reached at huntermac999@gmail.com
Sources
[1] James L. Franklin Jr., “Vergil at Pompeii: A Teacher’s Aid,” The Classical Journal 92(2): 1996-7, pp. 175-184. See also Kristina Milnor, Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
[2] Kristina Milnor, Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Tell me now, Olympus-dwelling Muses,
who first confronted Agamemnon,
an actual Trojan or famed ally?
Iphidamas, Antinor’s son, bold and burly
and reared in rich-soiled Thrace, mother of flocks.
Cisses raised him as a child in his halls,
the father of his mother, sweet-cheeked Theano.
When the splendid youth reached maturity,
to keep him there Cisses offered him his daughter.
He wed, but quit his bridal chamber when news came
of the Achaeans. Twelve ships went with him.
He left the balanced ships at Percote
and made his way on foot to Ilium.
This is who confronted Atreus’s son, Agamemnon.
11.227: . . . μετὰ κλέος ἵκετʼ Ἀχαιῶν (“when news came of the Achaeans”)
Is the preposition μετὰ temporal (“after,” “when”), as I have translated it, or is it purposive (“in pursuit of”)?
How you interpret μετὰ dictates how you interpret κλέος:
Temporal μετὰ should mean that κλέος is “news” (“he left when news came . . .”).
But purposive μετὰ should mean that κλέος is “glory” (“he went in pursuit of glory”).
The temptation to translate μετὰ κλέος as “in pursuit of glory” is understandable: preoccupation with glory is, after all, central to the epic, and men die in their quest for it.
In this particular passage, however, I believe the understandable temptation leads to error.
[2] What have the translators said?
There are those who interpret μετὰ in this passage as temporal: for example, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Fagles, Edward McCorie, and more recently Caroline Alexander.
There are those who interpret it as purposive: for example, E.V. Rieu, Richard Lattimore, Peter Green, and more recently Stephen Mitchell and Barry Powell.
Then there’s Stanley Lombardo who manages to treat μετὰ as both temporal and purposive: “[he] went chasing after glory when he heard/The Achaeans were coming.”
This might be the place to point out that Iliad.13.363-366 (and perhaps others too) show the sketch of Iphidamas to be essentially formular. And for our purposes, what matters most is the reappearance of μετὰ κλέος in this later passage:
For he killed Orthryoneus who was there from Cabesus.
He’d recently come, after news [μετὰ κλέος] of the war.
He had begged Priam for his finest daughter,
Cassandra, and without a bride-price.
Are the translators consistent in their handling of μετὰ κλέος across the two passages? Some are, some aren’t.
I’ll only point out that Powell who treats the prepositional phrase as temporal in Iliad 11 treats it as purposive in Iliad 13. And Lombardo who would have it both ways in Iliad 11 interprets the phrase as unambiguously purposive in Iliad 13.
Judging from the split among translators, just what μετὰ κλέος means in 11.227 is controversial.
[3] The Scholia: Modest support for purposive μετὰ?
A single scholiast glosses μετὰ κλέος ἵκετʼ Ἀχαιῶν in a way which implies a stance on whether μετὰ is here temporal or purposive. The scholion reads:
“For this man’s undoing, there came the glory of the Greeks”
The word I’m rendering as “glory” is δόξα (“glory,” “splendor,” “repute”). The word I’m rendering as “there came” is “έγίνετο” (“it came into being,” “there was,” etc).
I find it plausible that the scholiast is treating δόξα and κλέος as synonyms, and έγίνετο and ἵκετʼ (“it came,” 3rd person aorist of ἱκέσθαι) as synonyms too.
As such, I take the phrase “there came the glory of the Greeks” (δόξα τών ‘Ελλήνων έγίνετο) to mean something like “an opportunity came to win glory from the Greeks” (τών ‘Ελλήνων as an objective genitive). There’s the purposive preposition at work.
Let me admit that this interpretation of the scholion might be strained, and this scholiast, like the others who commented on the line, does not help us.
[4] A hint from the Hexameter: μετὰ is temporal.
I’m going to suggest that Iliad.11.21-22, which tells why Cinyras gifted Agamemnon an elaborate corslet, supports interpreting μετὰ κλέος in 11.227 temporally.
The Cinyras passage (11.21-22) reads:
For he heard, from far-off Cyprus, the big news [μέγα κλέος]:
Achaeans were about to sail to Troy in their ships.
Cinyras acted when he heard “μέγα κλέος,” “the big news,” just as Iphidamas acted “μετὰ κλέος,” “after the news.” That’s the common theme.
Now the prosody. μέγα κλέος and μετὰ κλέος are structurally identical: In both passages, the phrases come directly after the caesura (the word break in the third dactylic foot). The first syllable of both μέγα and μετὰ contributes the final syllable of the third foot (short); and their second syllable contributes the long syllable which combines with the long first syllable of κλέος to form the fourth foot.
Simply put: Verses 11.21 and 11.227 have a common theme which is reinforced by common prosody. And the common theme is that of men acting on news.
In setting out to articulate what I had intended not as an assault on the Aeneid tout court, but rather, on its primacy of place in the Latin classroom canon, I did not realize how many readers would raise their weary, pro-Maronian dukes to defend the poem. Indeed, in light of general trends in both culture and criticism, I was surprised to see that antiquity’s most full-throttle defense of both monarchy and empire should have such staunch partisans rushing to its aid.
Perhaps I ought to begin this refinement of my critical stance with a little bit of what we do here on the blog – that is, with a little bit of quoting from antiquity. Indeed, I will start by citing the earliest assault on the poem, launched by none other than Vergil himself:
He arranged it with Varius, before departing from Italy, that if anything happened to him, Varius would burn the Aeneid; but Varius said that he wouldn’t do it. Therefore, when Vergil had begun to despair of his health, he ceaselessly demanded the manuscripts, intending to burn them himself.
Egerat cum Vario, priusquam Italia decederet, ut siquid sibi accidisset, Aeneida combureret; at is facturum se pernegarat; igitur in extrema valetudine assidue scrinia desideravit, crematurus ipse. [Donatus, Vita Vergiliana]
Say what you will about the pettiness of my complaints – they amount to little more than critical carping in reaction the excessive praised heaped upon the Aeneid in comparatively recent years. But Vergil wanted it effaced from the earth entirely.
The Aeneid had the supreme good fortune to become immediately canonical, assigned in schools as the equivalent of a “modern classic” in those early imperial days. Well, what else were kids going to study? Livius Andronicus? Ennius? Cicero’s de Consulatu suo? The Aeneid is a marked aesthetic improvement over all of these, but one must also bear in mind that Augustus’ imprimatur must have counted for something. One would not be surprised to find that any monarch’s pet poetic project had received substantial attention, especially when free and outspoken critical judgment became a dangerous luxury. It’s hard to overlook the fact that the Aeneid’s ringing endorsement of Roman empire and the (prophetically foreshadowed) personal lineage/divine right of the Julio-Claudians had something to do with its inclusion in the school curriculum at such an early date.
Why do we have all of Vergil but just a few insignificant scraps of Cornelius Gallus? Their relations to power may have some small part in this. Naturally, they objection arises: what about Ovid? Was he not on the outs? I’d venture to suggest that his survival in the face not only of imperial hostility but also of his manifest unsuitability to Christian sentiment is a testament to his tremendous aesthetic and literary merits.
Outside of Vergil’s instructions to burn the poem, there was indeed a tradition of criticism of the Aeneid in antiquity. In my previous post, I relied on citation of my own students’ testimony, but Servius cites the existence of a “Vergiliomastix” (Scourge of Vergil), and Donatus mentions that a certain Carvilius Pictor wrote an “Aeneidomastix” (Scourge of the Aeneid), adding that “Vergil was never lacking in haters” (obtrectatores Vergilio numquam defuerunt). Of course, it’s also true that Augustine thought that he had wasted his time being compelled to learn the Aeneid.
When we reflect on Dante’s worship of Vergil, we ought to consider how much (or rather, how little) of ancient literature was entirely unknown to him. The rediscovery of Lucretius had to wait more than another century; one manuscript of Catullus was languishing away in Verona; anything he knew of Greek literature was solely in translation. Though we think of him as steeped in the classics, there was simply less available to Dante than there is now to anyone interested in it. Petrarch was a better classicist than Dante, and regretted that he was never able to read Homer in the original – how might their assessment of the Aeneid changed if they had been more familiar with its source material? (One might also note that Petrarch staked his poetic fame on his Africa, modeled heavily on the Aeneid – but this is almost entirely unread today because, from Lucan and Statius onward, imitation of the Aeneid was an aesthetic dead end. His Canzoniere is the text to read because it has far more liveliness than stale historical epic. This was just as true in the 1st century.)
All periods have their literary fashions. The Middle Ages loved Ovid, the 18th century loved Horace, etc. etc. I will re-emphasize this point: I regard Vergil’s treatment of Polyphemus in Book III of the Aeneid as one of the most affecting scenes in all of ancient literature. But one does not hype an album up as their “favorite album ever” on the basis of one good song, or even a few stellar tracks. I grant the aesthetic excellence of parts of the Aeneid, but I deny its excellence as a whole.
To return to the theme of empire: readings which suggest that Vergil meant to criticize Augustus or imperialism are little more than idle fantasies spun out of our own modern distaste for empire and our reading of a long tradition of subversive work which post-dates the Aeneid. This is just a secular/political version of what Augustine and Dante did in attempting to read Vergil as a proto-Christian allegorist. It constitutes a refusal to take Vergil on his own terms.
Is it really to be believed that this work, which Augustus eagerly oversaw the progress of, contained even veiled criticism of his political program and philosophical sensibilities? Donatus notes that Augustus sent Vergil letters begging for some updates or selections as the poem was being written. Perhaps Augustus, Maecenas, the rest of the inner circle had attained PhD level capacity in missing the point? Maybe a highly literate audience, which was entirely steeped in the poetic traditions which Vergil drew upon and which was on familiar terms with the poet himself missed this subliminal messaging which went unnoticed until readers 2,000 years later gleaned what they hadn’t? I submit that all anti-imperialist readings of the Aeneid stem from a refusal to read the poem on its own terms, within its own context, for what it is: a piece of work that was paid for by a political machine. One can suppose that Augustus was so eager to read new selections because he really enjoyed the poetry, or one can admit that hearing one’s own lineage and achievements placed within a divine and historically ordained teleology might have been eminently gratifying. If you want irony and subversion, cast your eye to Ovid; Vergil no more criticized the Augustan establishment than he predicted the birth of Christ.
Despite the title of these posts, I did not mean to become the modern Aeneidomastix. For the past eight years, I have taught the Aeneid as half of the AP Latin curriculum and I have seen the effect it has on me and my class. Perhaps I was insufficiently clear in my last post: I do NOT mean to suggest that the Aeneid is not worth reading, but I think that it has been undeservedly canonized by its primacy of place in the last few iterations of the AP syllabus, and I am convinced that it is a terrible text for high school Latin students. By way of an English parallel: I love Dickens, but I regard it as a crime against literature that a high school student is most likely to be forced (yes, forced) to read either Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, or Great Expectations. It’s no wonder that they hate reading. When we select a text for teaching, we ought to pick something that really crackles – something endowed with real literary merit that will still afford the student genuine aesthetic pleasure.
Perhaps these criticisms have met with such resistance because so many members of the profession entered Latin literature by passing through the Vergilian antechamber; a kind of natural selection was at work, whereby everyone who hated the Aeneid simply dropped out of the game. (This is certainly what happened with a number of my own students.) I am against the Aeneid mandate, against its lofty canonization, but not against the poem itself; one ought not to be pressed to read it until they are already fully sold on the idea of Latin literature. Vergil may have served as Dante’s guide through Hell and Purgatory, but he couldn’t accompany him to Paradise.
Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this. The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural.
Karis Nemik, Andor, episode 12
If you spend a little time learning about Greek myth and ancient epic, you’ll encounter the Epic Cycle, a term for a group of poems around that told the story of the Trojan War from the very beginning (the wedding of Peleus and Thetis?) to the very end (Odysseus’ return home and its aftermath). Recent years have seen dozens of articles and books on the topic. As a Homerist, I have had to engage with this scholarship a great deal.
And my central problem is this: I think the Epic Cycle, as we talk about it, is a scholarly fiction.
***
I have been catching up with the Disney series Andor over the past few weeks and find myself agreeing deeply with a general opinion of its excellence–the plot is exciting, the characters are moving, and the themes of the rebellion both advance those of the original movie and complicate them. The rebels here are conflicted–some are aggrieved, some are true believers, and some are more venal. Together, they dramatize the cost of resistance and the seductive dangers of that complacency that makes us all complicit in oppression.
But watching Andor and enjoying it–after also cheering for The Mandalorian, Obi-Wan, and the Book of Boba–has made me think repeatedly about the relationship between canon and fixity and what it means to be an audience to an expanding universe. As a Homerist who comes from the end of Gen X (I was born in 1978), watching the explosion of the Star Wars universe has made me think a lot about the epic cycle and secondary narratives.
Hephaistos Polishing Achilles’ Shield – THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES. Caskey-Beazley, Attic Vase Paintings (MFA), no. 082.
The making of a canon
It is impossible for my children to imagine what Star Wars meant when I was their age. One of my first memories is seeing The Empire Strikes Back in a drive-in theater with my parents and being terrified by Darth Vader. Anyone who can remember prior to 1999 knew of Star Wars as an unfinished but finished trilogy: there were always rumors that George Lucas would return to a galaxy far away and long ago, seeded especially by the numbering of the first movie as IV, but for a decade or so it seemed like it would never happen.
To be a fan of Star Wars prior to the return of the movies was to rewatch VHS cassettes and read authorized novels and wait for random viewings of the super strange Ewok adventures, The Battle for Endor and Caravan for Courage. Part of what made Star Wars moving was its boundedness and the promise of more. As a child, I would weep at the end of Return of the Jedi because I didn’t want it to end. As an adult, I have written about our uncomfortable relationship with narrative closure, how we want it to come but we also dread it because it is the end of a world and is, in some way, an echo of our own deaths.
Episodes and Universes
There are two ways of thinking about entries or episodes in a narrative universe. For Star Wars what became canon were the movies–but the more episodes added to the list, the less stable the canon became. There’s a danger of surplus narrative and how we refer to the whole changes two. I think people mean two different things when they talk about the epic cycle. One is general, expansive: the cycle refers to the full range of narratives associated with the Trojan War. The other is an imagined canon of episodes.
So, the classic Trojan Cycle described by Proclus include the Cypria, Aithiopis, Little Iliad, Iliou Persis (Sack of Troy), Nostoi (also called, according to some, The Return of the Atreids [ἡ τῶν Ἀτρειδῶν κάθοδος], and the Telegony. We have only a handful of fragments for most of these poems Some scholars have also suggested different ‘cycles’ which would focus around heroes (a cycle of epics about Herakles, for example, the Calydonian Boar Hunt or the Argo) or centering around cities other than Troy (where a Theban cycle might include the Oidipodeia, Thebais, Epigonoi, and perhaps even the Alkmeonis). This is the one I don’t think is real.
The larger a canon is, the less effective it is in exerting authority. I think that the original Star Wars trilogy exerted a centripetal force on its audiences, pulling them together to a narrative center. As the universe expands–or as the canon multiples–its force is more centrifugal, moving audiences into clusters. This is one way I think comparing a modern entertainment ‘universe’ to Trojan War narratives is useful: the Iliad and the Odyssey were panhellenic texts that persisted in applying aesthetic pressures on other traditions and their audiences. But the narrative world of the Trojan War included countless other stories and spanned many different kinds of genres.
Often when we talk about the authority of the Homeric poems, we are talking about the cultural position they occupied in Archaic and Classical Greece as performance narratives connected to political power. This authority transformed as they moved into fixed texts and aesthetic objects for Hellenistic readers and later. Over time, they became quasi-sacred. But other stories set in the Trojan War world existed prior to our epics and kept on spinning out from a notional but fictive center: local, epichoric traditions preceded the Iliad and Odyssey and persisted well into the Christian era. The discrete episodes filled out the Universe and allowed audiences to live within them: the static nature of the canonized object is mitigated by the fluidity of ongoing traditions.
This comes clear often in accounts of ritual and local practices, like those observed by Pausanias who puts Penelope’s grave in the Peloponnese, not far from that of Aeneas’ father Anchises. What’s different, I think, about ancient Trojan War narratives is that these local or epichoric narratives developed prior to the canonized epics and continued long after. As Irad Malkin has shown in The Returns of Odysseus, as Greeks spread across the Mediterranean, they took their stories with them, adapting their myths of people like Odysseus to accommodate their new realities.
When I first watched the Mandalorian, I was simultaneously charmed and critical: prior to the new movies, you could not imagine two characters with more commercial potential than a Boba Fett analog and a baby Yoda. People my age loved Boba Fett because his action figure looked so cool. (I used to sleep with Boba as a toddler, I confess.) These characters are also tangential to the canonized storyline, they allow the space to create a new story while also still drawing on the nostalgia and cache of the center. This is part of the thrill and peril of expanding narrative traditions: the cameo of a main character in a peripheral story can be fun, but when the canon limits overmuch, the story becomes campy and over allusive (which explains, in part I think, why Rogue One works well but Solo does not).
The cultural forces of capitalism that produced the Mandalorian are, of course, different from those that perpetuated Trojan War narratives in Archaic and Classical Greece, but they remain somewhat analogous cultural forces. Both rely on audience interest and respond to changing cultural trends.
Audiences and Change
When we talk about the market forces that influence the expansion of the Star Wars universe, we are talking in part about audiences. Discussions of the epic cycle–and Homer in general–too often forget that ancient performers responded to their audiences as well. Audiences exist through time and time creates different kinds of audiences. When we talk about interpreting or making sense of cultural objects, we emphasize the intention of creators because it is so difficult to talk about the multiplicity of audiences. But I have been thinking about audiences as palimpsest. A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been cleaned and repurposed for a new text, and yet the old text can often be seen underneath it. Christos Tsagalis has used it productively as a metaphor for how oral traditions work. Yet this model is still about the object and not the people who view it. We change as individuals over time and our relationship to a text or cultural object changes from one generation to another.
I took dates to the rerelease of the original three movies in high school. When The Phantom Menace was released, I was there on the first weekend with roommates and my future wife (who purchased Star Wars legos while waiting to see the movie and assembled them during the film). And despite the exhilaration of the opening chyron and the music, I left disappointed. The second trilogy is cluttered, confused and confusing, and tries too hard to fill in the blanks of the later/earlier films. The second trilogy is both shaped and trapped by nostalgia.
Part of the problem is the difference between a backstory that is unexplained and a forced explanation. The “clone wars” as referenced in Star Wars are nebulous and strange: we know they were in the past and bad. When we get to them in the later trilogy, they lose the menace and strangeness. What was a detail in service of another narrative fails in certain ways when it is fleshed out because it does not and cannot exist on its own terms.
The later Star Wars films have a secondariness in that they both serve to fill out a preexisting story and they also attempt to establish intertexts and references to the earlier films that prevent them from truly being their own. This is part of the challenge of judging narratives that develop in the shadow of a canon: we love them because they continue the larger story, but also begrudge them for not being the originals they imitate. Indeed, when authors like Jasper Griffin critique the poems of the epic cycle–without actually having access to them–for their fantastic content or their derivative nature, they are judging them by aesthetic standards, by rules, that they can never actually attain.
But changing some of the boundaries creates new space: consider the effectiveness of different kinds of Trojan War narratives on the tragic stage. Similarly, the later film Rogue One and the television series inhabit a familiar and attractive world but have their own stories to tell. They are compelling because they do not rely on their audiences fully knowing the original trilogy, but merely being familiar with the general ‘rules’ and characteristics of the Star Wars universe. They are free to respond to contemporary concerns and to establish new narratives. Further, with the television shows especially, they benefit from different generic boundaries: the pacing of episodic television lends itself to different kinds of stories from a 120 minutes space opera.
What I am trying to say, I guess, is that the process of canonization limits narratives that try to do the same thing as the canonized object but provides space for those that forge into new genres or plots. In addition, the further from the canon that narratives go, the more space they have to respond to changing audiences. Once Lucas released Star Wars into the world as a billion dollar intellectual property, others were able to escape the canonicity, to use the familiar world to tell new stories.
Mykonos vase (Archaeological Museum of Mykonos, Inv. 2240). Decorated pithos found at Mykonos, Greece depicting one of the earliest known renditions of the Trojan Horse
Homer and Trojan War Narratives
The relationship between the later narratives of the Star Wars universe and the original trilogy has made me think a lot about the relationship between the Iliad and the Odyssey and Trojan War narratives. This analogy fails at a certain point because the Homeric epics likely had many different versions of their own narratives and were engaged with and responding to epic performance of all kinds (and not just Trojan War and heroic poems). But the main point I take with me is the willingness of audiences to engage in the expansion of narrative worlds and how narratives in the expanded Trojan War universe change based on new genres and new audiences.
One of the things I regularly emphasize about the limits of our own ability to understand ancient epic because we know so little about what ancient audiences knew or how they experienced epic. Think here of the difference between someone like me for whom Star Wars was canonical and my children who love Grogu and have always known who Luke Skywalker’s father was. They don’t labor under the same aesthetic weight either: they do not judge Phantom Menace by the standard of Star Wars because they don’t remember a time before when these films did not co-exist. The difference between the expanded Star Wars universe material and the second trilogy is that between inhabiting/exploring a world and concretizing/freezing it.
When it comes to the cultural position of the Homeric epics, we make the mistake of assuming the Iliad and the Odyssey always had the same monumental status as they gained by the end of the 5th century BCE. I have had exchanges recently with the Assyriologist Seth Sanders who has been somewhat perplexed by Classicists’ tendency to see “cycles” in ancient near eastern literature. He has remarked on how the development of fixed–or ‘charismatic texts’–occludes the varied and continuing nature of oral traditions and living narrative mythscapes. As a comparison, he points out the possibility that some texts from the Hebrew bible were transmitted as “monuments”. In calling it this, he notes he is adapting the art historian Alous Reigl’s notion of monumentality as a dialogic dynamic between a cultural artifact and an audience for whom that object defines something of their community’s past or authoritative identity.
The impulse to tell the whole story is a feature of post-canonization. Audiences yearned for more Star Wars and eventually got them. But the narrative satiety that resulted was disappointing until the limits set by the canon could be exceeded. As the Iliad and the Odyssey became canon, the Trojan War mythscape moved to another genre with different boundaries (tragedy) and different narrative traditions. There was no cycle telling the later tale until scholars of a post-canonized period felt the need for it.
The Fictive Epic Cycle
Imagine a future scholar of narrative, say in 3023, trying to make sense of the Star Wars universe. The collapse of time might very well lead them to believe that the nine movies of three trilogies were always part of an authoritative cycle. But the content and contemporary responses to the later movies would likely perplex them. The collection of stories about the Trojan War are from a much longer period in time than the mere forty years that spans the release of the Star Wars movies. We know less about the alleged poems origins than we do about their contents, but they are not centered in the same cultural space and time.
But to step back for a moment: what is the epic cycle? The ‘Epic Cycle’ most often refers to the Trojan War poems recorded by Proclus (2nd or 4th Century ce) in his Chrestomathia (appended to the Venetus A manuscript; 10th Century ce, Codex Marcianus Graecus 822) and summarized by the later Photius (9th Century ce, Patriarch). The limited fragments of these poems are conventionally dated to the 7th through 6th centuries bce. The phrase Epic Cycle refers both to the mythical events spanning from creation to the end of the race of heroes and in the same way as Proclus, in isolating a specific group of poems that tell the story of the Trojan War. There are many similarities between Proclus’ summary and the work of the mythographer Apollodorus; but there is not a one-to-one correspondence between the events of the Trojan War myths and the poems of the cycle.
Rudolf Pfeiffer suggested that kuklos meant everything that was composed by Homer, everything that was attributed to a heroic world set in the story of the Trojan War. Gregory Nagy suggests that there’s some relationship between the etymology of the name Homeros as “one who fits things together” and that the kuklos points to the whole. Marco Fantuzzi and Christos Tsagalis expand on this idea in their introduction to their 2015 handbook by suggesting that the term is “historically ambiguous” referring to the entirety of the sky, a ring composition, or anything that repeats and returns.
The dual notion of totality and repetition, I think, makes the or a kuklos an attractive concept but an impossibility in actuality. It is both a metonym and a metaphor. This reading works well if we consider kuklos as indicating potential entirety or completion rather than an actual one. In the world of performance, the terms kuklos and Homeros may rightly become signals of authority: to be Homeros is to be a singer who has the skills to bring the potential of the kuklos into reality; to assert that a story or song is part of the kuklos is to authorize it ex post facto as part of the tradition. It is both a nodding to a canon and an alteration of it.
I am only partly convinced that kuklos functioned in this way in performance traditions in Greece; I am certain, however, that it became something completely different in the hands of literate and literary scholars. There is a wider discussion of kuklika poems and kuklikoi poets among Hellenistic scholars (starting with Aristarchus of Samothrace, 3rd-2nd Centuries bce). But evidence for both the term kuklos and the practice of separating the kuklikoi poems from the Iliad and the Odyssey is often traced back to Aristotle who makes a few enigmatic references to Kuklos poetry (Elench. 171a10 7-11) and who also distinguishes Homeric epics from other poems by other poets based on assessments of quality (Poetics 1459a37). The poems (and poets) who appear in these scholarly traditions, however, do not align with Proclus’ summary. Scholars have explained this away by saying there were other cycles, e.g., those around Thebes, Herakles, or other topics.
Here is my summary of the principles to keep in mind.
There is no evidence of a series of epic poems that told the whole story of the Trojan War from the same performance tradition and period of the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey
All of our evidence comes from Aristotle and later. The evidence is from literary scholars treating the Iliad and the Odyssey as texts.
There is evidence of long narrative poems about other traditions (e.g. Thebais)
Our emphasis on the Epic Cycle is skewed by the gravity of Homer: We have more extensive fragments from Panyassis and Aristeas than we have for anything from the epic cycle
There is significant evidence of Trojan War narratives in other genres: lyric, elegiac, iconographic contemporaneous to or even prior to the epics we possess
The Epic Cycle is an initial creation of Hellenistic scholars trying to provide narrative and aesthetic frameworks for the Iliad and the Odyssey. This initial creation has been concretized by subsequent Classical scholarship, a process intensified by some of the scholarship of the past decade.
The positivistic assumption of the epic cycle as a stable set of texts and plots reasserts textual and literary aesthetics on a system that was much more fluid and dynamic (leading to a range of interpretive problems)
And, from this, a secondary list of things we can say about the epic cycle:
Everything we know about the epic cycle is subordinate to the Iliad and the Odyssey as canonized, monumentalized epics.
This subordination occurred either as part of trying to tell the whole story of The Trojan War or as evidence of the aesthetic superiority of the Iliad and the Odyssey
The fragments and their summaries were selected to facilitate point #2 and are likely secondary or tertiary selections rather than excerpts taken from whole poems at the hands of Hellenistic editors.
The privileging of Trojan War narratives as part of these efforts has suppressed the extent and importance of non-Trojan War epics: e.g. Thebais, Oedipodea, Heraklea.
The Riddle of the Sphinx: An Attic red-figure lekythos | NGV
There are many moments while watching a show like Andor that invite audiences to think about its relationship to various narrative authorities–to the shape of the empire in the original trilogy to the future events of Rogue One. But it succeeds in part because its narrative is different enough. Successful expansions of narrative universes allow traditional narratives to respond to contemporary concerns, the way that Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos turns an ancient myth to an opportunity to reflect on plague and politics in contemporary Athens. Authoritative narratives exert a special gravity on their audiences; but audiences push back too: they make these stories into vehicles for their own lives. When the stories become too inflexible, they adapt them or make new ones.
The expanding Star wars universe allows this now too, and sometimes with discomfort. One of the subplots of Mandalorian Season 3 troubled me: the presentation of the New Republic’s amnesty program and the betrayal of Dr. Pershing by Elia Kane suggests that while the attempts of the New Republic to be progressive and inclusive are more just than the fascism of the Empire (and its descendants), they remain coercive and subject to the baser impulses of human nature.
This ‘both-sides’ approach to the struggle against fascism in an imaginary universe is a reflex of our own contemporary experiences and conversations. Such a thematic reflection would likely be lost on future audiences as they treat the Star Wars narratives as part of a canonized cycle of tales. In much the same way, Trojan War stories developed in particular times and places, in responses to their audience’s experiences and needs. Subsequent scholars imposed an order and created a systemized series of tales that never truly existed, to respond to their own needs for stability and closure.
Some things cited and some things to read
Alwine, A. T., ‘‘The Non-Homeric Cyclops in the Homeric Odyssey’’, GRBS 49 (2009) 323-333.
Arft, J., and J. M. Foley. 2015. “The Epic Cycle and Oral Tradition.” In Fantuzzi and Tsagalis, 78–95.
Barker, E.T.E. 2008. “ ‘Momos Advises Zeus’: The Changing Representations of Cypria Fragment One.” In Greece, Rome and the Near East, ed. E. Cingano and L. Milano, 33–73. Padova.
Barker, E. T. E., and J. P. Christensen. 2006. “Flight Club: The New Archilochus
Fragment and its Resonance with Homeric Epic.” Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici 57:19–43.
———. 2008. “Oedipus of Many Pains: Strategies of Contest in Homeric Poetry.”
Malcolm Davies. The Greek Epic Cycle. London: Bristol, 1989.
Fantuzzi, M., and C. Tsagalis, eds. 2014. The Greek Epic Cycle and its Ancient Reception: A Companion. Cambridge.
Margalit Finkelberg. The Cypria, the Iliad, and the Problem of Multiformity in Oral and Written Tradition, ‹‹CP›› 95, 2000, pp. 1-11.
Lulli, L. 2014. “Local Epics and Epic Cycles: The Anomalous Case of a Submerged Genre.” In Submerged Literature in Ancient Greek Culture, ed. G. Colesanti and Giordano, 76–90. Berlin and Boston.
L. Huxley. Greek Epic Poetry from Eumelos to Panyassis, Cambridge 1969.
Richard Martin. Telemachus and the Last Hero Song, ‹‹Colby Quarterly›› 29, 1993, pp. 222-240.
Jasper Griffin. “The epic cycle and the uniqueness of Homer.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 97 (1977) 39-53.
Ingrid Holmberg “The Creation of the Ancient Greek Epic Cycle”
Malkin, I., The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity, Berkeley 1998.
Marks, J., ‘‘Alternative Odysseys: The Case of Thoas and Odysseus’’, TAPhA 133.2 (2003) 209-226.
Gregory Nagy. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek poetry. Baltimore 1999.
Nagy, G., “Oral Traditions, Written Texts, and Questions of Authorship”, in: M. Fantuzzi / C. Tsagalis (eds.), Cambridge Companion to the Greek Epic Cycle, Cambridge 2015, 59-77.
Nelson, T. J., ‘‘Intertextual Agōnes in Archaic Greek Epic: Penelope vs. the Catalogue of Women’’, YAGE 5.1 (2021) 25-57.
Rutherford, I., “The Catalogue of Women within the Greek Epic Tradition: Allusion, Intertextuality and Traditional Referentiality”, in: O. Anderson / D. T. T. Haug (eds.), Relative Chronology of Early Greek Epic Poetry, Cambridge 2012, 152-167.
Albert Severyns. Le cycle épique dans l’école d’Aristarque. Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1928.
Albert Severyns. Recherches sur la Chrestomathie de Proclos. Paris: Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres, Liége, 1938.
Giampiero Scafoglio. La questione ciclica, ‹‹RPh››78, 2004, pp. 289-310.
Laura Slatkin. The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad. Berkeley 1991.
Michael Squire. The Iliad in a Nutshell: Visualizing Epic on the Tabulae Iliacae. Oxford: 2011.
Tsagalis, C., Early Greek Epic Fragments I: Antiquarian and Genealogical Epic, Berlin / Boston 2017.
Marco Fantuzzi and Christos Tsagalis. “Introduction: Kyklos, Epic Cycle, and Cyclic Poetry.” In M. Fantuzzi and C. Tsagalis (eds.). ACompanion to the Greek Epic Cycle and Its Fortune in the Ancient World. (Brill, 2014).
Martin L. West. The Epic Cycle: A Commentary on the Lost Troy Epics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
People are much more closely related to pigs than we knew before. A surprisingly convergent evolution of humans and pigs lies behind recent medical advances in organ transplantation. These show that pig organs are viable in humans and can extend life. The first successful application of this procedure, called xenotransplantation, occurred in 2021, but the first xenotransplant into a human with a chance of survival occurred in 2022 and it extended the patient’s life by two months.
It may be surprising that xenotransplantation using pig organs is a major breakthrough happening now in the 2020s, which should save the lives of thousands of people experiencing organ failure in the next decade. We have heard more news about organs grown from a patient’s own stem cells or about bioartificial organs—the 3-D printing of transplantation medicine.
Maybe there is something less appealing about xenotransplantation since there are fewer dazzling technological advances involved in it. Pig-to-human transplants turn off people who are committed, for a variety of reasons, to the radical separation of human beings from other animals or who regard xenotransplantation as taboo.
Xenotransplantation works because of the convergent evolution of humans and pigs, which is another area of recent scientific advancement. Some scholars are advocating for a new classification of pigs, bringing them closer to primates in taxonomy. The underlying similarity between the species means that gene therapy can be applied to pigs, altering the organs so that human bodies won’t reject them as long as the patient adheres to a regimen of potent anti-rejection immunosuppressive drugs.
In recent years there has been a sustained movement encouraging people to extend their sense of humanity and human rights to other great apes, at least, and further to primates in general. Convergent evolution with pigs raises the question whether this sense of rights and dignity could or should be extended to swine, also.
Figure 1: Pig-Man by the author’s nine-year-old daughter.
The convergent evolution seems clearer the longer you think about it. By nature, humans and pigs are similar in many superficial and fundamental ways. Among the superficial, there is notable variety in skin pigmentation and hair coverage. Among the more significant, the omnivorous diet, relatively high intelligence, aggression, and the maximal size of a well-fed adult all point to obvious similarities. I wonder if and for how long humans have perceived the close relationship between the species.
In ancient cultures extending from India to Britain, including Syria-Palestine, horses are considered closer in nature to human beings than any other animal. In traditional stories, horses sometimes speak and have heroic genealogies like humans do, and in rituals they sometimes take the place of humans or are honoured in human-style burials. Scholars have referred to this as a human-horse ontological overlap. Looking at the body of traditional stories, can we find evidence of a human-pig ontological overlap and how precisely are pigs configured in their relationship to humanity? Could myths involving humans and pigs demonstrate a human intuition of the convergent evolution of the species?
The most famous example of humans becoming pigs comes from the Homeric Odyssey, usually dated to the beginning of the seventh century BCE. Odysseus, lost with his henchmen in an unknown world, visits the island Aiaia, ruled over by the goddess Circe. She is a deadly goddess, who uses her powers, in the form of drugs, to harm people. The adventure on Circe’s island is one of a series where Odysseus and his men encounter threats to their safe return to Ithaca. The threat here is not immediate death, but rather the insult of being turned into pigs, who are food animals, and being trapped forever on Aiaia, awaiting some future feast where they would be cooked and served.
The transformation is because of Circe’s divine power not because of an underlying homology between humans and pigs. It highlights the appropriateness of pork as human food and the horror of being transformed into a dietary staple. Pork is characteristic of ancient Greek foodways and the heroic diet of the Odyssey is an idealization of Late Bronze Age Mycenaean food culture, such as is depicted on this boar-hunting fresco from Tiryns and in numerous Mycenaean texts that mention pigs.
Figure 2: Detail of terracotta calyx-krater, ca. 440 BCE, showing Odysseus moving to attack Circe while his companions undergo transformation into pigs and other animals, and reach out to him in despair. Metropolitan Museum of Art 41.83. Public Domain.
Significant for us is that the text of the Odyssey contemplates the pig-man, as the vase-painting above also does. These works imagine a hybrid pig-human being and a shared nature between humans and pigs. The vase painter, working at least two hundred years later than the date of the Odyssey, innovates in the tradition of this story by having Circe transform men into pigs and horses.
Reading the Odyssey, we are horrified and disturbed by the detail that, once transformed, Odysseus’s companions retain their human intelligence and so can perceive their grim fate, rather than dying, intellectually, in the transformation (Od. 10.237-243).
Now, when she gave and they drank the cocktail, straightaway
she struck them with her magic wand and penned them up in the pigsty.
Then they took on the faces, voice, hair, and skin of pigs!
Their minds remained sound, however, as they had been before.
Thus were these men confined as they squealed,
and Circe tossed them acorn nuts and cherry fruit to eat,
such things as pigs are always eating, after rooting the ground.
A period of several hours elapses during which Circe becomes favorable towards Odysseus and we learn that the human nature of the pig-men is recoverable. Hinting at the importance of pork as food, Odysseus will not eat what Circe serves him until she restores the men to their humanity. When they are transformed back into men they grieve the trauma of their lives as pigs but they are younger, taller, more handsome and healthier than they were before. This is a typical way that Homeric epic communicates divine favour for mortals but it is a revealing detail for our present concerns.
Figure 3: Wall painting fragments with a representation of a wild boar hunt. From the later Tiryns palace. National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Photo by I, Sailko. Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.
Odysseus asks that the pigs have their humanity restored, but upon becoming men again their humanity is improved by the standards of the text, which values youth, height, and good looks as indices of well-being (Od. 10.388-396).
[…] Circe stepped out of the palace
carrying her magic wand in her hand, and opened the doors
of the pigsty. She drove them out, in the appearance of fatted boars.
They then stood in front of her while she, approaching
one by one, anointed each with some other drug.
They shed the bristles from their limbs that the baneful
drug had caused earlier, which the goddess Circe gave them.
They turned back into men, younger than they had been before,
more handsome by far, and taller in appearance.
A human magically becomes a pig but full humanity, even improved human life, is possible after the ordeal. Through the intervention of magic drugs, human nature can become pig nature. Someone can be both pig (outside) and human (inside) and then their humanity can be enhanced after the porcine experience. The story reminds us of xenotransplantation since it promises improved health for some patients by bringing pig nature closer to human nature through gene therapy, and by compelling human nature to accommodate pig nature through anti-rejection drugs.
In the Odyssey the pig-man is an icon of the horror of losing one’s humanity and identity only to become food for men. Pork is very good food for humans that restores their strength but this connection between the species is idealized as one-sided, while failure and death are equated with becoming a pig. There is an unusual silver lining in this adventure, where the crew’s encounter with a deadly threat and with dehumanizing transformation leads ultimately to their improved condition through the magical and mundane interventions of Circe. In addition to the improved humanity of the crew, she hosts and feasts Odysseus and his men for a year before sending them on their way, at Odysseus’s request. Some good things come from this adventure but the audience’s overall impression is one of narrow escape from humiliating death, like in so many other stories in the Odyssey.
The Biblical story of the Gerasene demoniac, whose fullest and earliest account comes from the Gospel of Mark, ordinarily dated to the late first century CE, contains a contemplation of the relationship between the human mind and the porcine mind. The demons—minor deities in league with Satan—who call themselves ‘Legion’ in the story are causing great suffering to the man they possess. Jesus threatens to cast the demons out and they plead with him to be cast, rather, into a nearby herd of swine, and Jesus complies (Mark 5:11-13).
(11) Now there happened to be a great herd of swine feeding on the hillside; (12) and the impure spirits called out to Jesus and said: “Send us into the swine so that we may enter them.” (13) So, he acceded to their request. And the impure spirits, leaving the man, entered into the swine, and the herd of about 2000 rushed down the steep hill into the sea, and they were drowned in the sea.
Jesus magically removes the demons from the man’s mind, freeing him from a horrific mental illness. He then places the demons in the minds of the pigs, who promptly commit suicide by running into the sea.
This well-known story suggests something new about the human-pig overlap. The minds of humans and pigs are similar enough to allow pigs to be possessed by demons the way humans are. One might think that there are Biblical stories about demons possessing all kinds of animals, but there aren’t. What do the demons want? It seems they want to torment the man to death, that is, until he commits suicide. Jesus saves the man from this fate. When Legion takes up residence in the herd of swine, the demons easily produce their desired result, which is death. Can the death of pigs satisfy the demons’ desire for death, presumably including the consignment of beings to their master, Satan? Apparently so. They want the pigs’ death as some kind of consolation prize. Does this mean pigs have souls that the demons can exploit for their purposes? Here we have come to an ontological overlap between the species. The story suggests that the metaphysical nature of humans and pigs is similar. We and they can similarly suffer possession by demons.
Ancient Celtic peoples have some positive associations between humans and pigs. Pigs were the most sought-after festive food in Celtic society, as many Iron Age middens of ritually butchered pig bones demonstrate (Aldhouse-Green 199). The Druids who oversaw these rituals were sometimes called ‘swine.’ The idea linking the priests and pigs is their shared dedication to oak trees. Acorns are a preferred food among pigs and the Druids considered oaks sacred and powerful. The diet of pigs rendered them sacred also, and it is this nature, the holy eater of acorns, that the priests invoke in their ‘swine’ titles. The connection between the species seems to be that, in religious devotion, some humans become more like pigs in a positive way. Pigs are religious, like humans, because they love oak trees.
Another pig-man worthy of attention is the spirit Zhu Bajie, ‘The Eight Precepts Pig,’ of Chinese and Taiwanese religion. He is a spirit honoured in this pantheon, but especially by people who practice trades thought to be morally dubious and on the margins of society, such as prostitution and gambling. He accepts offerings of liquor, flowers, food (but never pork), and displays of nudity in front of his statue.
While he is the patron god of vices and those who profit from them, he also appears in mainstream contexts where people risk over-consumption. An illustration of the mainstream recognition of Zhu Bajie is a nursery rhyme that warns children about over-eating.
豬 掙 大,
狗 掙 壞,
人 仔 掙 成 豬 八 戒!
Stuffed pigs get fat,
Stuffed dogs go bad,
Stuffed little kids become Mr. Horny Hog (Zhu Bajie)!
The tales of Zhu Bajie associate part of human nature with pigs. Human compulsion, addiction, lust, and fun-seeking are linked with the voraciousness of pigs, and personified by Zhu Bajie. Humans and pigs are not the same, but in our compulsive drive for pleasure, the human and the pig unite. Zhu Bajie’s pig-human hybridity is not the result of a temporary transformation, as in the ancient Greek story, but rather is the essence and appearance of Zhu Bajie. He’s a permanent pig-man.
This spirit features prominently as a dynamic, well-rounded, humanized character in the 16th-century Taiwanese novel Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en, which has been adapted for film several times in the last twenty years. These have popularized Zhu Bajie beyond Taiwan and China, especially through toys associated with the films.
Figure 4: Custom made Zhu Bajie Lego toy by Loot A Brick, Singapore, reprinted with permission from Loot A Brick.
Some of the stories we’ve reviewed here are negative, frightening imaginings of the shared nature of humans and pigs, while others are affirmative, associating necessary aspects of human life, such as our drives for food or sex, with a piggish nature. The ones involving transformation or transference suggest an easy transit from human to pig and back again, while Zhu Bajie and the acorn-eating pigs of the Druids reveal a positive assessment of the shared habits of humans and pigs. All these stories lead us to a greater understanding of our real shared nature, our actual convergent evolution, which permits pigs to be viable organ donors to human patients.
Many cultures in the past seem to have recognized the kinship of people and pigs. The ancient Greek and Biblical stories are designed to create sympathy for the human victims and antipathy towards the magical figures who attack them—Circe and the demons. The Celtic and Chinese stories posit human sympathy and identity with the pig, as part of our nature. Maybe these ancient stories can prompt us to extend our modern sympathies to pigs, as those who can suffer like us, can desire like us, and who have suffered in the service of humanity for millennia. Now, the fact that we share so much of our nature with pigs is serving and saving us yet again, in an unexpected way.
Bibliography
Aldhouse-Green, M. Caesar’s Druids: Story of an Ancient Priesthood, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010.
Humanities Instructor, University Transfer, Portage College, Lac la Biche, Canada (kevin.solez@portagecollege.ca)
Ms. Sydney Yuen, M.A., provided the text and translation of the Zhu Bajie nursery rhyme.
Kevin Solez composed this essay in honour of the seventy-seventh birthday of his father, Dr. Kim Solez, M.D., Professor of Pathology at the University of Alberta and co-founder of the Banff Classification of Kidney Transplant Pathology.
