“Turoknêstis: a cheesegrater. A type of knife. There is also a proverb: “I will not position myself like a lioness on a cheese-grater”* This means “in the way a lioness would”, and it is a shameful and whorish sexual position.
A cheese-grater is a knife. On the hilts of some kitchen knives lionesses used to be carved out of ivory, in a squatting position, so that their feet might not be broken off as they might be if they were made standing up. So, the speaker is saying I will not position myself like a prostitute awaiting a man, the way a lioness is positioned on a cheese-grater.”
Question: What does RGTO read when it’s not reading Greek Tragedy?
Answer: PLAUTUS
ARGUMENTUM
Jupiter turns himself into an Amphityron
While the real one wars against the Tele-boys
and takes his wife Alcmene for his own use.
So Mercury puts on the face of the absent Sosia,
his slave and Alcmena falls for these tricks!
When the real Amphitryon and Sosa return,
they are both mocked in wonderful ways.
This makes a fight for the real husband and wife,
until Zeus makes his sound with thunder and lighning
and copes to the adultery himself.”
In faciem uersus Amphitruonis Iuppiter,
dum bellum gereret cum Telobois hostibus,
Alcmenam uxorem cepit usurariam.
Mercurius formam Sosiae serui gerit
apsentis; his Alcmena decipitur dolis.
postquam rediere ueri Amphitruo et Sosia,
uterque deluduntur [dolis] in mirum modum.
hinc iurgium, tumultus uxori et uiro,
donec cum tonitru uoce missa ex aethere
adulterum se Iuppiter confessus est.
Today, Reading Greek Tragedy Online arrives in new territory: ROMAN COMEDY.
To be fair, the story of the Amphitruo is not entirely new. It tells of the night Herakles–well, in this case, Hercules, eheu–was born. It is perfect for the stage: filled with doubles, jokes, misrecognition, and gods sharing the stage with comic slaves. It is everything Roman audiences would have loved.
But how will it translate to the smallest of screens? Tune in to find out.
Cast and Crew
Jasmine Bracey
Paul O’Mahony
Rene Thornton Jr.
Translator and Special Guest: Toph Marshall
Amazing People
Artistic Director: Paul O’Mahony (Out of Chaos Theatre) Host and Faculty Consultant: Joel Christensen (Brandeis University) Producers: Keith DeStone (Center for Hellenic Studies), Hélène Emeriaud, Janet Ozsolak, and Sarah Scott (Kosmos Society) Director of Outreach: Amy Pistone (Gonzaga University) Poster Illustration Artist: John Koelle
if you can’t make it in person, catch the live stream at 6 PM EDT
Sophocles, Elektra 1070-1074
“Tell them that their home is already plagued,
and that the strife among their children
is no longer balanced out
by the fact that they all love life.”
“Do not send me from this land in dishonor,
but as a master of my wealth and the captain of my house.
I have said enough now. Old man, it is your task
to go and safeguard this need.
And the two of us will go: for it is the perfect moment
and the perfect moment is man’s greatest guide in every deed.”
Each week during the pandemic, we selected scenes from a play, actors and experts from around the world, and put them all together for 90 minutes or so to see what will happen. This process was therapeutic for us; and it helped us think about how tragedy may have had similar functions in the ancient world as well.
This year and last we have been experimenting with new formats, appearing twice in person for hybrid events. This performance of Sophocles’ Electra, using Ann Carson’s translation, is sponsored by UIC, Loyola College, and the Center for Hellenic Studies.
Sophocles, Elektra 91-95
“This hateful bed in our painful house
shares the pains of all my nights
how much I mourn for my wretched father…”
At this in-person and online event, we return to one of many plays set around the House of Atreus, Sophokles’ Elektra. This story follows Orestes’ return home to murder his mother (and her lover Aegisthus) for the killing of his father Agamemnon. For fans of tragedy, the tale is famous from our only full trilogy from ancient Athens, Aeschylus’ Oresteia. But it was legendary—and perhaps even paradigmatic—Homer’s Odyssey as well, where Orestes is held up repeatedly as a model of youthful initiative to Telemachus and Clytemnestra’s betrayal of her husband appears as a constant threat to Odysseus’ homecoming.
The story of Orestes is, like the end of the Odyssey, about the cycle of vengeance and the dangerous narrative pull of the call to revenge. In Aeschylus’ Eumenides, Orestes ends up in Athens where he is judged by a jury for his mother’s murder: his story pits the orders of one god (Apollo) against he claims of others (the Furies) and the loyalty of a son to mother or father. The story of the Elektra is a prolonged rumination on the choices made before that crises. This version of the tale is often dated to the end of Sophocles’ life, during the middle of the Peloponnesian War. It features Orestes returning with Pylades in disguise to announce his death. The title character, Electra, has been mourning her father’s murder and longing for her brother’s return. Once she finds out about Orestes’ true identity, the play turns to the murder, but prior to that ever delayed moment of recognition, the audiences witnesses Orestes’ hesitation and Electra’s sorrow.
“No noble person wants
to ruin their good reputation by living badly
namelessly, my child.
So you have accepted for yourself
a life of fame and constant sorrow,
making a weapon from a noble cure–
with one strike you win two prizes
to be called a child excellent and wise.”
“My love–I am hearing a voice
I never hoped to hear,
but still I kept my eagerness quiet.
I heard with no cry in response.
But now, I have you. You are clear as day,
holding the dearest vision before me,
something I never could forget in any troubles.”
“Citizens, this elder pride of Argives,
I will feel not shame at revealing
my spousal love to you. In time, human fear
turns to dust. I will tell you of my own
miserable live, not something I learned from others,
all that time when this man was below the city of Troy.”
This week we trturn to the first play of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the Agamemnon. How famous is the story of Orestes and his father? So famous that it is the story Zeus contemplates at the beginning of the Homeric Odyssey as he looks down in frustration on the man who murdered Agamemnon. Atreus’ son, Agamemnon, appears in the middle of the epic (book 11) and at its end, complaining at each point bitterly about his disloyal wife, Klytemnestra, and praising the vengeance meted out by his son Orestes.
The story of the family of Agamemnon, however, extends before the Trojan War and then after until the death of Achilles’ son Neoptolemos. it starts back with Tantalos and Pelops in Asia Minor before it moves to the Peloponnese through sacrilegious meals, infanticide and fraternal war, all themes highlighted in the main cause of Klytemnestra’s rage, the killing of their daughter Iphigenia at Aulis.
If this story sounds familiar, it is because it is! In this series, we have heard variations of this tale from Sophocles and Euripides, contemplating both its beginnings and its ends. Indeed, ancient audiences would have been as familiar with the story as Zeus at the beginning of the Odyssey, shaking their heads and wondering how this version will play out.
This play begins with Agamemnon’s return home, but focuses on Klytemnestra’s anger and her power. It features some of the most challenging and memorable choral odes extant from the ancient world. It has a raving, yet lucid Kassandra. And at the core of the play, a murderous king’s bloody return home.
Aeschylus, Agamemnon 914-917
“Child of Leda, guardian of my home,
“You have spoken aptly to my absence,
Since you have gone on at length. But proper praise
Ought to be a prize won from different sources.”
“Whoever pronounced a name
So thoroughly true?
Wasn’t it someone we’d not see
Guiding the tongue with luck
From a foreknowledge of fate?
Who named the spear-bride,
Struggled-over woman
Helen?
For, appropriately,
That ship-killer [hele-nas], man-killer [hel-andros]
City-killer [hele-ptolis], sailed
From her fine-spun, curtains
On the breath of great Zephyr
and many-manned bands
Of shield-bearers followed
The vanished journey struck
By the oars to the banks
Of leafy Simois
Artistic Director: Paul O’Mahony (Out of Chaos Theatre) Director of Outreach: Amy Pistone (Gonzaga University) Executive Producer: Allie Marbry (Center for Hellenic Studies) Producers: Keith DeStone (Center for Hellenic Studies), Hélène Emeriaud, Janet Ozsolak, and Sarah Scott (Kosmos Society) Poster Artist: John Koelle Poster Designer: Allie Marbry (Center for Hellenic Studies)
Aristophanes, Assemblywomen 176-183
“[Zeus] puts mortals on
The journey of comprehension.
And made this the powerful law:
We learn by suffering.
Pain-recalling trouble trickles
Through the heart in sleep—
And wisdom comes just so
To the unwilling.
The gods seated on their sacred seats
Bestow a hard grace I think.”
If then in Sophocles the play is concentrated in the figures themselves, and in Euripides is to be retrieved from flashes of poetry and questions far flung and unanswered, Aeschylus makes these little dramas (the Agamemnon has 1663 lines; Lear about 2600) tremendous by stretching every phrase to the utmost, by sending them floating forth in metaphors, by bidding them rise up and stalk eyeless and majestic through the scene. To understand him it is not so necessary to understand Greek as to understand poetry. It is necessary to take that dangerous leap through the air without the support of words which Shakespeare also asks of us. For words, when opposed to such a blast of meaning, must give out, must be blown astray, and only by collecting in companies convey the meaning which each one separately is too weak to express. Connecting them in a rapid flight of the mind we know instantly and instinctively what they mean, but could not decant that meaning afresh into any other words. There is an ambiguity which is the mark of the highest poetry; we cannot know exactly what it means. Take this from the Agamemnon for instance–
ὀμμάτων δ’ ἐν ἀχηνίαις
ἔρρει πᾶσ’ ᾿Αφροδίτα.
The meaning is just on the far side of language. It is the meaning which in moments of astonishing excitement and stress we perceive in our minds without words; it is the meaning that Dostoevsky (hampered as he was by prose and as we are by translation) leads us to by some astonishing run up the scale of emotions and points at but cannot indicate; the meaning that Shakespeare succeeds in snaring.
Aeschylus thus will not give, as Sophocles gives, the very words that people might have spoken, only so arranged that they have in some mysterious way a general force, a symbolic power, nor like Euripides will he combine incongruities and thus enlarge his little space, as a small room is enlarged by mirrors in odd corners. By the bold and running use of metaphor he will amplify and give us, not the thing itself, but the reverberation and reflection which, taken into his mind, the thing has made; close enough to the original to illustrate it, remote enough to heighten, enlarge, and make splendid.
Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 37-39
“This house itself, if it found a voice,
Would be able to speak most clearly. I am talking
Willingly to those who know and forget for those who know nothing.”
The “Children of Herakles”, was performed around 430 BCE, just as the Athenians were beginning their 3 decade war against the Spartans. It may not be Euripides’ most famous play, but it has just about everything you’d ask for in a tragedy: theme of Xenia, suppliancy, noble bloodlines, battle, human sacrifice, gender, a war scene described in a messenger speech, revenge.
Like any good tragedy, it focuses on the choices human beings make outside of their fate and divine meddling. But its end is troubling, perhaps reflecting the world outside of the play, where violence is far from distant and death for many is certain. For while this is the year that Athens repels a Spartan invasion and attacks the Peloponnese, it is also the first year of the famous plague. This play, so focused on the descendants of Herakles and the end of feuds, seems so precariously set at the beginnings of things.
Euripides, Heracleidae 427-430
“Children, we are like sailors who have fled
A savage storm’s blows to touch the land
With their hand only to be pounded back
From the shore to the sea by the winds again.”
Demophon/Eurystheus: Tim Delap
Makaria: Tabatha Gayle
Kopreas: Paul O’Mahony
Iolaos: René Thornton Jr
Alcmene: Gabriella Weltman
Special Guest: Katherine Lu Hsu
Euripides, Heracleidae, Medea 863-866
“…with his current fortune
He announces for all mortals a clear thing to learn,
Do not envy someone who seems to be lucky
Before you see them die. For each day is its own fortune.”
Artistic Director: Paul O’Mahony (Out of Chaos Theatre) Director of Outreach: Amy Pistone (Gonzaga University) Producers: Keith DeStone (Center for Hellenic Studies), Hélène Emeriaud, Janet Ozsolak, and Sarah Scott (Kosmos Society) Poster Artist: John Koelle Poster Designer: Allie Marbry (Center for Hellenic Studies)
Euripides, Heracleidae 1016-1017
“Although I don’t long for death,
I wouldn’t be annoyed at leaving life behind.”
“For a long time now this has been my belief
One man is born just those near him
While another’s heart lusts after profit
And he is useless to the city, a heavy burden to bear,
The ‘best’ to himself…”
I am going to take a break and take a seat right here
And talk through how I will tell them things they believe, even the smarter ones.
“You seem wholly right and righteous to pray to the gods
But if you will only consider in what way
I risked so many things going where you ordered
How I took on sufferings away from this safety
And faced danger after danger to earn divine kleos,
Entering the enemy’s camp to learn clearly and well
To return unharmed to report back all the secrets
to the glorious Achaeans And the dear son of Atreus…”
Philokleon: A lot really.
First how Lamia was farting when they captured her
Or then how Kardopion and his mother…
Bd. Don’t give me myths! But stories about human concerns
The kinds of things we talk about the most, especially at home.
Ph. Oh, I really know stories for home too,
Like this: ‘once there was a mouse and a weasel…”
Bd. Oh, what a childish fool! As Theogenes said
To the shit-collector while he was mocking these things.
You’re about to talk about mice and weasels to men?
Ph. What kinds of stories should I tell?
Bd. Ennobling ones
Like how you went on a delegation with Androkles and Kleisthenes
Ph. But I never went on any delegation anywhere.
Except Paros, I guess, but I only got two obols for it.”
“Who can get a doctor for me and which one?
Who is an expert in the art of assholes?
Is it Amunôn? Perhaps he will decline.
Have someone call Antisthenes by any means.
For this man knows why an asshole wants
To shit thanks to the groaning.
Queen Eleithuia, don’t you ignore me
When I am breaking but all stopped up,
Don’t let me be the comic chamberpot!”
“There are many wonders and none
is more awe-inspiring than humanity.
This thing that crosses the sea
as it whorls under a stormy wind
finding a path on enveloping waves.
It wears down imperishable Earth, too,
the oldest of the gods, a tireless deity,
as the plows trace lives from year to year
drawn by the race of horses….”
In our third season of the series, we are returning to plays we have performed before from different angles. We started a few weeks ago with a live, in-person performance at Harvard.
Sophocles, Antigone 737
“The state which belongs to one man is no state at all.”
πόλις γὰρ οὐκ ἔσθ᾽ ἥτις ἀνδρός ἐσθ᾽ ἑνός.
This week we return to Sophocles’ Antigone, arguably one of the most famous plays from antiquity. Alongside Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos and Euripides’ Bacchae, Antigone is one of the most re-interpreted and translated plays in the last generation. Our performance will be bilingual in Modern Greek and English.
Sophocles, Antigone 1056
“The race of tyrants loves shameful profit.”
τὸ δ᾽ ἐκ τυράννων αἰσχροκέρδειαν φιλεῖ.
Translations
Sophocles, Antigone 141-145
“The seven leaders appointed to their seven gates
dedicated their bronze arms
to Zeus who turns the battle
except for only those two born
of a singer mother and father
who faced each other’s spears
each with a share of victory and death.”
Artistic Director: Paul O’Mahony (Out of Chaos Theatre) Director of Outreach: Amy Pistone (Gonzaga University) Executive Producer: Allie Marbry(Center for Hellenic Studies) Producers: Keith DeStone (Center for Hellenic Studies), Hélène Emeriaud, Janet Ozsolak, and Sarah Scott (Kosmos Society) Poster Artist: John Koelle Poster Designer: Allie Marbry (Center for Hellenic Studies)
Sophocles, Antigone 72–77
“It is noble for me to do this and then die.
I will lie with him because I belong to him, with him,
Once I have completed my sacred crimes. There’s more time
When I must please those below than those here,
Since I will lie there forever. You? Go head,
Dishonor what the gods honor if it seems right.”
“Stop speaking before you fill me with rage!
And you’re revealed as a fool as well as an old man.
You speak of unendurable things, claiming that the gods
Have some plan for this corpse.
Did they do it to honor him so greatly for his fine work,
Concealing him, the man who came here
To burn their temples and their statutes,
To ruin their land and their laws?
Do you see the gods honoring evil people?”
Kalonikê: But what if our husbands leave us?
Lysistrata: To use Pherecrates’ term: flay the flayed dog.
Kalonikê: These words of nonsense are just counterfeit [sex].
“The word of Pherecrates: if our husbands despise us, then it is necessary to use dildos and to flog the flogged shaft. Pherecrates said this in a drama where the proverb is applied to those who are suffering something else in addition to what they have suffered.
Olisbos: Genitals made from leather which the Milesian women used to use as tribades(!) and shameful people do. Widowed women also use them. Aristophanes writes “I did not see an eight-fingered dildo*/ which might be our leathered aid.”** This second part is drawn from the proverb “fig-wood aid” applied to weak people.
“Courtesanizers: The women who are called ‘rubbers’” [or ‘grinders’? i.e. Lesbians] Ἑταιρίστριαι: αἱ καλούμεναι τριβάδες. See also Hesychius s.v. dietaristriai: “Women who rub themselves against girls in intercourse the way men do. For example, tribades.”
The Lexicographer Photius repeats only the following definition:
Olisboi: Leather dicks
῎Ολισβοι: δερμάτινα αἰδοῖα.
The Scholia to Aristophanes’ Lysistrata 109-110 basically presents the same information:
Olisbon: A leather penis. And that is for the Milesian women. He is joking that they use dildos. The next part, “leathery aid” plays upon the proverb “fig-tree aid”, used for the weak. He has changed it to “leathery” because dildos are made of leather. They are leather-made penises which widowed women use.”
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