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.
Many-minded immortal Aphrodite,
Child of Zeus, plot weaver, I implore you:
Don’t with vexations and frustrations break
My heart, O queen.
Instead, come here, if ever in past times
From far off you heard, and heeded, my calls;
And quitting your father’s golden palace,
You came,
After yoking the chariot. Small birds,
Handsome, swift, bore you across the black earth.
Their fast wings whirred from the upper heavens
down through the middle air.
Quick, their arrival. Then you, blessed one,
A smile on your immortal countenance,
Asked: what is it, this time, that’s happened to me;
Why, this time, do I call;
And what does my crazed heart most desire:
“Whom, this time, must I persuade—
Go out, that is, and bring into your love?
O Sappho, who wrongs you?
Even if she’s fleeing, soon she’ll pursue.
If she’s refusing gifts, she’ll give them.
If she’s not in love, soon she’ll be in love—
Even if against her will.”
Come this time too. Release me from hard cares.
Whatever my heart wishes to see done,
Bring about. And you yourself, be my ally
In this fight.
The conventional reading of the lyric assumes that the speaker is a lover (name: Sappho) who needs Aphrodite’s help to win (or punish) a reluctant beloved. An alternative interpretation: Sappho is a singer who needs Aphrodite’s help not to win a lover but to compose a persuasive love song. This reading turns first on the summons “come here” and “come”, and then on the god’s epiphany—or rather, the unexpected sounding of the god’s voice.
The temptation is to hear in the call to Aphrodite the traditional summons of lyric hymn. There, the suppliant speaker calls on the god to perform some beneficial task. For example, Anacreon 357:
On my knees I beg you,
Come to me,
Listen to my pleasing prayer:
To Cleobulus be
A good counselor so that he accepts
My love, O Dionysus.
In Sappho 1, things are somewhat different. The call to Aphrodite more resembles an invocation to the muse, the plea to enable song making (not find a lover). We might associate this practice with epic, but of course it exists in Archaic lyric too. Alcman 27:
Come, Muse Calliope, daughter of Zeus—
Begin with lovely verses—
Put charm into our hymn—
And make our dance a graceful one.
In Alcman’s figural language, the muse is to “begin” the very song Alcman himself is beginning to sing. Hesiod says of the muses, “they breathed into me wonderous song,” (Theog. 31-32) and Alcman asks the same of his muse. And so does Sappho. But what’s distinctive about Sappho is that she makes literal what is only metaphorical in the tradition. The voice of her responsive god literally issues from her throat as she sings her song (strophes 5 and 6). This is what it means for the god to have come: it is Aphrodite who “begins” when Sappho sings, enabling her song. The struggle of song-making: That’s the fight in which she needs an ally. In the absence of the allied muse, song-making would be an exercise in “vexations and frustrations.”
Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain. (John 12:24)
Don’t they need for the koliva almonds, pomegranates, walnuts and pine kernels, hemp seeds, lentils, chickpeas and raisins? (Ptochoprodromos, II 43-45)
It was an austere center table, fit for the occasion. A small rectangular koliva on a metal tray, with the vague shape of a cross on it and adorned only with chocolate drops, a white candle and a burner bowl with incense. It didn’t resemble the mourners’ tables I remember from the Greek Orthodox villages in northern Lebanon around Koura and Akkar, with their ornate “Rahmee” (the Arabic name for Koliva in Lebanon), boiled wheat kernels covered in pistachios, pecans, almonds and raisins, decorated with powdered sugar and passed around in glass bowls in the mourners’ homes during the different stages of commemorations of the dead.
But this wasn’t just any other mourners’ home. After a devastating earthquake shook the earth in Turkey and Syria, Antioch was destroyed (it is said that about half of the buildings in modern-day Antakya collapsed, but that roughly 90% of them will have to be demolished), and on the 40th day of mourning, as per the Orthodox as well as Muslim traditions, Antiochians gathered in Istanbul, to commemorate their dead.
In the Eastern churches, it is believed that the soul continues to wander the Earth for another 40 days after the initial death. While wandering about, the soul visits significant places from their life as well as their fresh graves. But in a situation such as Antioch’s, what kind of final rest would they find if their city has been destroyed together with their own lives? What if there’s no grave?
A natural disaster that blended with political vacuum has killed thousands, many are still missing, news of deceased people arrive constantly and millions are displaced across a dozen provinces of Turkey and Syria. Antiochians are now living in tents, have gone into exile, or simply remain in the limbo of uncertainty. It brings to mind the words American writer Susan Sontag had for the people of Sarajevo in 1993: “For they also know themselves to be terminally weak; waiting, hoping, not wanting to hope, knowing that they aren’t going to be saved. They are humiliated by their disappointment, by their fear, and by the indignities of daily life.”
Source: Twitter
This week an iconic picture began making the rounds of the Internet, a nearly destroyed house in Antioch, with a scribble on the wall that reads: If the house collapses, please call, there’s a dead body inside. Other images like that followed.
During a visit to Antakya, on February 20th, a few hours before the third major earthquake which destroyed St. Ilyas Church in Samandağ and that we survived by sheer chance, a stroll near the now heavily militarized old city of Antakya, opened our senses to the reality of Antioch’s destruction: A strong smell of putrescine, a volatile diamine that results from the breakdown of fatty acids in the putrefying tissue of dead bodies, and which our species is conditioned to be repulsed by. The number of bodies under the rubble is unknown.
Many others have been buried in unmarked mass graves, and the luckier ones, were able to retrieve the bodies of their relatives, with the help of rescue workers, often paying for additional equipment, and transporting the bodies themselves, to their resting places.
The truth is that it’s not possible to call mourning the spectacle of human cruelty that Antiochians endured over the 40 days that elapsed between February 6th and March 18th.
Anna Maria Beylunioglu and Can Terbiyeli, 40th day memorial, March 18, 2023, Istanbul.
In Istanbul, the gathering took place at the office of ISTOS, a publishing house born 12 years ago out of the initiative of members of the Istanbul Greek community to publish Greek works in Turkish and vice versa, whose nearby cafe disappeared with the pandemic and one of the last places where I sat before the lockdowns in March 2020. In fact, it was their volume “Muhacirname”, on the poetry of the Karamanlides refugees from Central Anatolia, what first inspired our work for the exhibition “After Utopia: The Birds”, now at Sadberk Hanim Museum in Istanbul.
The atmosphere that day was friendly but solemn, as mourners and friends gathered around the table with “slika” (the Antiochian name for koliva) and incense, sharing their grief and testimonies of loss. For many members of the Antiochian community in Turkey and elsewhere–there’s a significant diaspora in Europe and the Middle East, the 40 days of mourning have actually been occupied with worrying, self-organizing, raising funds, finding help, or simply avoiding death. The number 40 contains multiple meanings in the Bible: The Great Flood lasted 40 days, the Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years, prophet Elijah walked 40 days to reach Horeb.
Two women, amidst tears, shared their personal stories not only of the gruesome events of the day and the abandonment to which Antiochians were subjected, not only of grief and the loss of death, but also of the ongoing tragedy which overlaps with a disarray of facts that we already know: There are still bodies under the rubble; container houses are being talked about while there are people without tents; even those with tents are not protected from the seasonal floods and the rain.
Slika. Courtesy: The author.
But the intimate nature of their testimonies gave a new dimension to suffering: In fact, we remain at the gates and have not quite perambulated the deep terrain. As people were so overwhelmed with survival, of themselves, and others, there was no time to feel grief, it is all still on the surface. These women, dressed in black, reminded me of Aeschylus’ Suppliants, a play about ancient women refugees seeking asylum at a border, depicting not only their struggle to safety but the strife within the city that ultimately shelters them. King Pelasgus speaks:
For truly, it is to my undoing that I have come into this quarrel and yet I prefer to be unskilled rather than practiced in the lore of foretelling ill. (Aesch. Supp. 452-454)
But so far there’s no city welcoming the now-refugees of Antioch. Even though people want more than anything to return to their own city, if not to the same houses, but to the city itself, destroyed so many times and just as many rebuilt, encapsulated in the slogan “Geri Döneceğiz” (we will be back) scribbled on many buildings in the region.
“Cevlik mama”. Courtesy: The author.
I myself thought of spray painting it on the ruins of our small house in the village of Çevlik, which completely collapsed, after I saw it on February 11th, on my way to the earthquake region. My heart sank for the first time. I spent a few minutes wandering about, unable to cry, calling out loud the nickname of our kitty friend, “Çevlik mama”, the most ferocious and loyal feral cat, who visited our doorstep every morning. We still haven’t found her, but we will continue searching for her, with the hope that somehow she has survived. But this is only a small metaphor for the unspeakable destruction (and hope).
The Istanbul gathering was organized by the platform Nehna, founded only over a year ago, with the mission to publish materials related to the history of Antiochian Christians but that overnight turned into a self-organizing and activism front after the earthquake, as well as a media face for Antioch, in particular the charismatic Anna Maria Beylunioğlu, an academic based in Istanbul, and the Stanford history PhD candidate Emre Can Dağlioğlu.
But they’re not the entirety of the team; Ketrin Köpru was present at the memorial in Istanbul even though she’s more often in Samandağ coordinating resources, as well as Mișel Uyar in Iskenderun, and others such as Can Terbiyeli and Ferit Tekbaș. And there’re so many other people involved in the relief efforts for Antioch I couldn’t possibly list them all or what they do. Sometimes I feel as if the memorial was also a celebration of the life of those courageous people who against all odds have continued working for this beleaguered region.
A young psychologist, Barıș Yapar, himself an earthquake refugee, spoke at the gathering about the reactions to life-changing natural disasters that go through different phases–heroism, honeymoon, disillusionment and restoration. But he hastened to add that in a situation such as this when relief is not stable, people can’t create a sustainable way to cope with their trauma and instead, go through all the different phases at the same time.
Laki Vingas, a prominent lay leader of the Greek community in Istanbul was also present there, offering not only words of support for the Antiochian community but also the preparedness of Istanbul’s Greek establishment to support them in the reconstruction. Although differing in language and some traditions, the small community of Antiochians and Greeks shares the same faith and fate, and belongs to the same ecclesiastical jurisdiction in Turkey due to political geography.
A striking testimony was that of Ibrahim Usta, a rather known face in the Old City of Antakya, for being one of the city’s most famous humuscu, a traditional humus maker, of which there are so few left. If you had been to his place, near the Bade winehouse and both the Greek Orthodox and Protestant churches (all of them now in ruins), you would taste this humble paste made of chickpeas or beans, and taste the whole of Antakya–it was more than just food, it was an ancient foam made out of silk. He spoke vividly about the earthquake day, the fear, the destruction, but more than anything, the loneliness, the abandonment that hovered over Antioch like a thick fog.
The slika on the table was plain and only slightly sugared, fit for such an occasion, where mourning has not even begun, let alone ended. Perhaps one day they will serve a lavish koliva adorned with almonds, pomegranates, walnuts and raisins, as the Byzantines did, and richly covered in fine powdered sugar, once Antioch has risen again and the mourning has been concluded.
Thinking about food and the history of slika/koliva, makes me reflect on the long journey of Antioch and its people into the ancient past of Cilicia and the Eastern Mediterranean. Anna Maria Beylunioğlu, herself a researcher on the histories of minority cuisines in the region, writes that there are different versions on the origin of slika (also called hadig by Armenians and danik by Kurds): “It is a tradition carried from Central Asia, based on shamanic beliefs. It is said that it became widespread in Anatolia in the 3rd or 4th century.”
Beylunioğlu also notes that the recipe was known to the 12th Byzantine poet Ptochoprodromos, whose recipe is quoted above. But recipes vary greatly from place to place, even within the Antakya-Iskenderun-Mersin Arabic-speaking Orthodox continuum. She relates a funny tale about how Mersin’s Christians describe Samandağ’s slika as “the work of the poor”, and Mersin’s nut-rich slika fillings are likened by Antiochians to a “cookie”.
But I think the story goes much further back: Κόλλυβα is the plural form of the rarely used singular κόλλυβο, derived from the Classical Greek κόλλυβος, a small coin or gold weight. In the Hellenistic world, with Antioch as its capital, the neuter plural form took the meaning of small pies made of boiled wheat. This is from where the ritual sense of koliva derives.
The Charonion monument, Antakya. Courtesy: The author.
It also overlaps with an even older past: For the Ancient Greeks, the beginning of spring was the Athenian festival of Anthesteria, held for three days in the month of Anthesterion (February-March), as a rite of passage from winter to spring, from death to life. During the third day of the festival, Greeks prepared panspermia, a multigrain soup based on boiled wheat, offered to Hermes Chthonius and the dead. The god is associated with the underworld, and a psychopomp who helps guide the souls of the deceased into the afterlife, just like Antioch’s famous Charonion. I guess this is the first predecessor of koliva, which evolved into its current form around the 4th century.
Theodore Balsamon, a 12th century Eastern Orthodox patriarch of Antioch, maintains that the practice of koliva as a ritual food originated with Athanasius the Great, the 20th pope of Alexandria, during the reign of Julian the Apostate, in the 4th century; he is known for the destruction of a Christian shrine in the site of the former temple of Apollo in Harbiye, which is today still used for divination practices by Arab Alawites.
This unbreakable thread connecting present-day Antioch to its many pasts is one of the reasons for the incessant mourning of its people, for whom this past is buried deep inside themselves, even if the destructions of Antioch have erased a lot of the archaeological evidence of its many lives. The preparation of slika, with the long cooking hours of the blessed wheat, and the nine basic ingredients, representing the nine ranks of angels looking over human affairs, symbolizes this deep past.
But slika is not only a tradition among Orthodox Christians; it is also used by Arab Alawites and other communities, to mark not only death but also birth, the toothing of children, or the life of saints. The social dimension of food contains our history as a whole, an idea I’m borrowing from Beylunioğlu. Alongside the slika, the informal memorial gathering in Istanbul–one without prayers, was punctuated by the smell of frankincense. The smell could immediately transport one not only to churches in Mersin, Samandağ or Beirut, but to more familiar spaces, such as a Levantine grandmother’s house, where incense was burnt in a censer, religiously every Sunday after mass. The burning, pungent smell that terrified everyone during childhood, felt now so warm, so inviting; an embassy from a lost world.
Botanist Yelda Güzel writes that most of the frankincense used in recent years comes from the resin of the Boswellia and Commiphora trees of Yemeni origin, and resin from logwood. She tells us however that the oldest frankincense is without a doubt the one present in the local flora of Antioch: Mahaleb bark, rosary tree, Antiochian sage, and zahter.
Courtesy: Susan Kiryaman, Yeniden Samandag.
In the afternoon of March 18th, marking the 40 days, Antiochians in Istanbul were not the only ones burning frankincense. Women of Samandağ took to the streets in large numbers, in a procession of public mourning for their dead, their destroyed city and their interrupted life–indeed an unprecedented event, holding the traditional Reyhan and frankincense that mark births, children’s first baths, weddings and funerals, and chanting aloud in Arabic, “Ma rohna, nehna hon” (we haven’t died, we’re still here). Although the event went poorly noticed, it was a rare moment of acting in concert, visceral, sad, grievous, but also full of power and resistance to this new reality.
The Reyhan also has an ancient history of its own: Although it is often called basil or sweet basil, it has nothing to do with Ocimum basillicum. Reyhan is actually the ancient myrtle, a plant sacred to the goddess Aphrodite as a symbol of love, and wreaths made from laurel, ivy and myrtle were awarded to athletes and soldiers; Hellenistic myrtle wreaths made of gold have been found in graves. There are countless mentions of the plant in classical literature, from Homer and Plato to Euripides and Aristophanes, from Polybius and Strabo to Hippocrates and Arataeus.
Once again, it is Arab Alawites in particular who have kept these traditions alive, after they were long forgotten in the region. The mournful chants of Samandağ resembled the defiant final speech of Antigone to the chorus that decreed her death, amidst great injustice, in a city forbidding to honor the dead with a burial. The abandonment of Samandağ to its own fate, without regard for the living or the unburied dead, after many years of purposeful oblivion and neglect:
Ah, you mock me! In the name of our father’s gods, why do you not wait to abuse me until after I have gone, and not to my face, O my city, and you, her wealthy citizens? Ah, spring of Dirce, and you holy ground of Thebes whose chariots are many, you, at least, will bear me witness how unwept by loved ones, and by what laws I go to the rock-closed prison of my unheard-of tomb! Ah, misery! I have no home among men or with the shades, no home with the living or with the dead. (Soph. Ant. 839-850)
It’s quite an interesting plot twist that Antigone, the niece of king Creon, who in turn sentenced her to death over her disobedience of the law, claims the political subject of the stranger, by calling herself μέτοικος, technically a resident alien. According to Andrés Hénao, Antigone distinguishes here political membership from citizenship and challenges the inequality of her position, albeit by tragic means. In this sense, according to Hénao and his theatrical experiment with Palestinian women in Jenin, she performs a counter-politics in which she, as a member of a royal household, identifies with the defeated, which in our world today could identify with refugees, immigrants and undocumented people.
Women of Samandag. Courtesy: Afet icin Feminist Dayanisma.
It seems to me an apt metaphor for the women of Samandağ, who not only have been treated as foreigners in their own land–dark humor about Antiochians being foreigners is a daily bread in the community, but who have also become strangers in an expanded sense: “The stranger, having lost his home and political status, is the equivalent to the loss of a juridical-political space of recognition and cannot find another one.”
This stranger is already outside the place called home, but yet there’s no place outside of it. Every place where the stranger arrives, is already somebody else’s home, and the paradox is that one cannot belong to a world he inhabits, with a right at least as equal as others to do so, because belonging to that world is only guaranteed by already belonging to a previously established political community, secured by a home and citizenship. The crisis of homelessness exemplified by these women, and embodied in the millions of displaced persons from the earthquake region is in fact not just a problem of aid policy or bureaucratic administration, but a political question of the first order. A people without a home, paradoxically, cannot be visible in the public realm.
In the tradition, the boiled wheat of slika represents both the earth and the body of the deceased, as a symbol of hope and resurrection. So there’s in fact a kind of return. According to St. John, a grain of wheat must first fall to the ground and die before it can return to bear life. This innocent metaphor, transcending across the different cultures coexisting in this geography, has survived into our own time because the tradition shaped the ritual aspect of wheat, as much as wheat, a basic staple in the Mediterranean basin, shaped the traditions of the place.
But wheat is not only about the hope of resurrection: How is the wheat that fell to the ground going to rise into life if there are no earthly homes to harvest it? We need Antioch to rise for an eighth time, after its seven destructions and reconstructions, as As Mișel Orduluoğlu has written for Nehna, in a moving tribute in honor of the 40 days:
“Antakya, this city which was destroyed seven times and rebuilt seven times. The Queen of the East, who had covered her head with a black scarf seven times, and the seven times she got up and lowered her scarf around her neck, and put back her magnificent crown: Once a woman of this land has taken it off her head, it is as if to signal that it is her duty to keep the memory of those who are no longer here by wearing it again. The mosaics were scattered seven times, the stones as well, but they were seven times re-arranged, while preserving the place of the lost stones. […] Now for the eighth time, Antakya has fallen, and this city has draped her black scarf on her head for the eighth time, the Queen of the East, for the eighth time the stones of the mosaic were scattered […]. Now we will put the queen’s crown on her head again, but this time more magnificently, we will arrange the stones of the mosaic again, but this time it will be stronger and the voice of the brothers will rise again, this time louder.”
The Mosaic of Briseis Farewell, Hatay Archaeological Museum. Courtesy: the author.
A fragment of the mosaic of Briseis’ Farewell, excavated in 1935 under a house in Antakya and on display at the Hatay Archaeological Museum (it was surprisingly missing the last time we visited last summer), can tell you the story of Antioch. Only two figures are left from the panel: Patroclus holding Briseis’ hand. Her story in the Iliad sets the mood of the Trojan War and the events of the Odyssey. A legend says that after the death of Achilles, Briseis sank into great grief as she began preparing him for the afterlife.
But this is not the farewell depicted in the Antakya mosaic. It is actually about the speech she gave after the death of Patroclus who was always protecting her. Though she was herself enslaved, and Achilles never actually married her, she remained by his side, and the always gentle Patroclus, comforted her, even though it was something below his status as a hero. Briseis, in the farewell song of the mosaic, is depicted as golden like Aphrodite herself. Briseis is Antakya and Patroclus the countless dead Antiochians lost under the rubble.
Patroclos, you were the dearest to wretched me and
I left you alive when I went from your dwelling.
And now I find you here dead, leader of the armies,
When I return. Troubles are always wrestling me from
troubles. (Hom. Il. 19:287-290)
τώ σ᾽ ἄμοτον κλαίω τεθνηότα μείλιχον αἰεί.
So now I weep for you, dead and gentle forever. (Hom. Il. 19.300)
At the end of the memorial gathering, the last pot of the bitter Antiochian coffee was poured, and the plastic cups with the remaining slika were removed from the table as people took their leave in small groups, and then it was just the intoxicating noises and sights of Istanbul again, a city apparently immortal, where life continues no matter what. This indifference is key to its survival. The conversations about Antioch continued into the night, often mixing fantasy and reality; the desire to build a new home in place of the old, and what this home would look like, the shelves, the windows, the gardens, contrasted with the deteriorating sanitary conditions, the political volatility of the country, the uncertain food security, the fear of permanent displacement, and above all, the boundless cruelty that envelops everything. I keep thinking about the symbolism of the fine powdered sugar on the outer layer of the koliva: An uplifting sweet welcome into paradise. If only…
But something that the botanist Güzel said still gives me hope: “The ancient traditions of our destroyed city have survived for centuries. If they have managed to reach our own time in spite of all the destruction of the city in history, we are also trying to rebuild them and get them back on their feet. It means we have hope, our myrtle and our incense are still in our mountains after all…”
In my mind, whenever I see the images of the women of Samandağ with their myrtle branches and incense censers, chanting that they’re still alive, I see not only the enormous grief, but also the promise of a very blessed, very ancient land, and the light blue waters surrounding Kara Magara, in the southernmost tip of Antioch, just a few hundred meters from the Syrian border–deep, pristine, translucent. All of that will still be there somehow, glowing under the scorching sun, forever.
In times like this I remember the words of an Orthodox monk and poet, Silouan the Athonite from Mt. Athos: “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.”
Arie Amaya-Akkermans is a writer and art critic based in Izmir. He’s also tweeting about classics, archaeology, heritage, contemporary art and Turkey/Greece. Follow Arie on twitter (@byzantinologue) for updates and new articles as they come out.
Skimming through the Wall Street Journal at school the other day, an article about the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine caught my eye. It did not talk about military progress or strategic victories, but rather, it raised alarmist concerns about the education system in occupied Ukraine. Russian forces were coercing Ukrainian teachers to teach a new curriculum in Russian that laundered the reputation of Russia and its leading figures. In other words, revisionist history.
After the immediate feeling of shock subsided, I remembered that revising history has been the tried-and-true method to building an empire.[1]
Throughout history, there are several examples of exalted historians manipulating the tales they are telling in service of an empire. One such case would be the famed Byzantine historian Procopius (d. 565 ce). Procopius chronicled the reign of Justinian I (d. 565 ce) and his wife Theodora (d. 548 ce). His official histories of Justinian I’s rule have been extolled for millennia as the peak of historical recording since the Roman Empire.[2]
Several centuries later, a dusty tome was found hidden behind a fake wall in the Vatican Library. Procopius’ Anecdota, informally referred to as the Secret Histories, tells a tale not of the good emperor that he extols in his official histories, but rather of a demon disguised as a man, seeking the total destruction of his empire: “That Justinian was not a man, but a demon, as I have said, in human form, one might prove by considering the enormity of the evils he brought upon mankind.”[3]
In contrast to the vitriolic tone of Procopius’ Anecdota, the official histories are more formally penned and glorify Justinian I.[4] For example, at the conclusion of Procopius’s historical text Buildings he ends with connecting the emperor to a demi-god; “They swell with pride and smile upon the Emperor, offering him honours as though to a demi-god, after his magnificent achievements.”[5] During the time of the official histories’ writing, the Byzantine Empire was waging several wars on the periphery of their borders. Two of these wars were the subjects for Procopius’ histories, aptly titled Histories of the Wars. In them, Procopius talks at length about the campaigns underway in continental Italy and the posturing happening at the Persian border. The important conflict for us to look at is the war between the Ostrogoths and the Byzantines in Sicily and southern Italy. This campaign was meant to be Justinian’s crowning achievement, reuniting the Eastern and Western halves of the Roman Empire. In this campaign, the famed Byzantine general Belisarius was constantly winning battle after battle for Justinian, and making tremendous gains in terms of territory in Italy. As such, the Histories of the Wars rightly lauds both Belisarius for his military prowess and Justinian for his statesmanship.
The official histories are just that, official histories. As Procopious’ later works evinced, Justinian was not only losing his military campaigns but was also unfit to rule. “As for seizing property and murdering men, he never got his fill of them, but after plundering numerous homes of affluent men he kept seeking new ones, straightway pouring out the proceeds of his earlier robbery in making presents to sundry barbarians or in erecting senseless buildings.”[6]
“Official histories” like Procopius’ serve to launder the reputation of whatever empire that employs them. They have been endorsed by the state and are propped up as the government-approved history of the empire. This is quite similar to what Russia is trying to do in Ukraine, albeit not in the same manner. Instead of trying to moderate the histories that get written into a book, Russia is trying to instead manipulate the history that will be taught in schools. Russia is not the only country who has attempted to massage the details of their history. An example of this in very recent U.S. history would be the 1776 project begun by former President Donald Trump. The 1776 project was aimed to provide American children with a “patriotic education,” ostensibly defending the link between America’s founding and the legacy of slavery, while also likening modern-day progressivism to fascism.[7]
It is interesting to note that official histories are often written when things go wrong. Empires tend to fixate on knowledge production and legacy the most when the seams are unraveling beneath them. The change in curriculum comes at a time when Putin is losing his grip in Ukraine; he is trying to force Russian identity into Ukraine, in an effort to try and justify its continued presence in Ukraine. This is an echo of what occurred in the Byzantine Empire under Justinian’s reign. Justinian urged Procopius to write about all the battles he was winning in Italy when, in reality, his armies were being annihilated in the fields and his captured territories being reconquered.
Procopius’ writings help to better understand the present in the sense that they offer a word of warning about the ways in which empires will go about revising history. The state-sponsored history in Russian-occupied Ukraine, the official histories written by Procopius, and the 1776 project in the United States (among many other examples) are echoes of one another, with each shedding light on the ways in which nations alter their history to better suit their needs.
[7] Michael Crowley and Jennifer Schuessler, “Trump’s 1776 Commission Critiques Liberalism in a Report Denied by Historians,” The New York Times, Jan 18, 2021.
Hunter MacArthur is a junior at St. Sebastian’s in Needham. He can be reached at huntermac999@gmail.com
