“There’s that quote of Diogenes when he said, “Aristotle has lunch on Philip’s schedule, but Diogenes does it on his own time,” since there’s no political affair or officer, or leader to trouble the daily habits of his life.
For this reason, you will discover that few of the wisest and most thoughtful people have been buried in their own countries–and that most of them did this by choice, raising an anchor on their own and finding a new safe harbor for their lives, either leaving Athens or retreating there.”
Editor’s Note: This is the third of a four-part essay on reception of minoritized translators of Classical Epic Poetry by Imaan Ansari.
Sexism emanates from the canon itself, since the notion of “Homer” as more than one author rarely elicits the conversation that the group may include female Hellenists. Furthermore, three especially canonized texts, the Iliad, Aeneid, and Odyssey, all begin with a similar structure in translation: a discussion of a man and a muse. Of course, female characters and their presence in each story deeply impact the course that the narrative takes. For instance, Dido in the Aeneid is a powerful Queen who prolongs Aeneas’ stay in Carthage before he reaches the Western Land, Hesperia. In the Classical world, power is finite. Why does Dido and Aeneas’ relationship usher in both Dido’s downfall and not, immediately, that of Aeneas? Because Aeneas is the one who makes the decisions, and has control, when they are together.
Classicist John L. Moles cannot prove that Dido is morally culpable for having sex with Aeneas since he subjects Dido to more scrutiny and blame than he does Aeneas, and since he fails to acknowledge the ambiguity concerning whether they are married. The example encapsulates how something ambiguous within the ancient text itself is treated using a double standard. Sexism does exist in the text itself in terms of blame and the translator, Moles, perpetuates the point of view of antiquity. According to Moles, Dido commits a misdemeanor by having sex with Aeneas because she knowingly does so out of wedlock.[1]
Moles clarifies that Dido is not at fault for falling in love with Aeneas; however, he places blame on her for how she responds to that love. Moles construes the passage which follows the cave scene to be Vergil’s demonstration of a moral shift in Dido’s mentality, most probably dictated by love.[2] The line of which Dido is the subject, coniugium vocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam (Vergil, Aen. 4.172) describes, to Moles, her fatal flaw. Moles interprets the word culpa as representing Dido’s hamartia.[3] Moles explains that Dido hides the state of Aeneas’ and her relationship by calling it a marriage. Moles believes that the implications of the verb vocat, the act of attributing a name, extend to Dido’s intention to justify her sex with Aeneas by saying that they are married. Moles construes the verb that follows, praetexit, to mean that Dido consciously hides truth even though she herself knows, at some level, that they are not married. By isolating line 172, following the censored cave scene, Moles sees “shamelessness” in Dido, a trope of Greco-Roman tragedy often attributed to the woman in an “emotional entanglement.”[4] Moles aligns himself with Vergil’s word choice of nomine, here being a name that Dido imposes on her relationship with Aeneas, to say that even Vergil saw Dido and Aeneas as unmarried, and that Dido uses the label of marriage to justify sex.
Moles does not attribute equal blame to Aeneas and Dido for the misconduct in the cave (even if we grant his assumption that they are not married). He incorrectly places the entire burden of the culpa on Dido by citing the “illicit nature of her love-making with Aeneas.”[5] Although Aeneas and Dido have sex with each other in the cave, Moles refers to Aeneas as a sort of accomplice in Dido’s illicit activities. Moles makes the assumption that Dido initiated, and roped Aeneas into, sex even in his English sentence structure; the word “her” in the phrase is the English equivalent to a Latin subjective genitive, in conjunction with “love-making.” Aeneas corresponds to a Latin ablative of accompaniment, contextualizing the fact that Dido is the focus of Moles’ blame, since she governs the “love-making” out of which Aeneas stems as almost an afterthought.
Because Vergil leaves out the scene in which his audience understands that Dido and Aeneas have sex, Moles can only speculate about who is more at fault. Moles defaults to the (sexist) point of view that women are deemed “shameless” for having sex (outside of marriage), rather than questioning why women are conventionally blamed (and men are not).[6] Why should women harbor the shame within a relationship, and be regarded as shameless if they act outside of that norm, while the actions of their male counterparts are judged with less scrutiny? Moles describes Dido as “over emotional,” undermining her conversation with Anna, consideration of Sychaeus, and careful deliberation over whether to engage in the relationship in the first place.[7] By calling her “over” an acceptable threshold of emotional expression, Moles imposes a standard on Dido to which he does not hold Aeneas. Of course, this is an article considering Dido’s fatal flaw, yet Moles makes no effort to determine that of Aeneas; just as Dido is the focus of Moles’ article, she is the target of his blame.
Moles dismisses evidence which suggests that Aeneas and Dido are married by imposing his own criteria of what constitutes a “proper” marriage. The first issue with his argument is the word “proper” in and of itself, since Moles bases his definition of marriage on “Roman law and social practice.”[8] Moles uses Aristotle’s analysis of Greek tragedy to understand Vergil’s storyline and attribute a fatal flaw to Dido, but he makes the mistake of applying Roman standards to two people in Carthage, who have sex many years before Rome is established. Of course, under the assumption that the Aeneid is propaganda for the first Roman emperor, Augustus, the text may then be accepted as intentionally anachronistic.[9] There remains a disconnect between Moles’ argument and the chronology of the epic, since, although both Rome and Carthage may overlap in terms of societal norms, Moles invalidates Aeneas and Dido’s marriage with standards that do not yet preside over their kingdoms or daily lives.
Moles also makes the point that a married couple must live together and that Aeneas and Dido are “not yet cohabiting.”[10] However, once Dido enters her bedroom for the last time before committing suicide, she picks up Aeneas’ sword and stares at the bed in which they slept together. The fact that Aeneas left his belongings in Dido’s room demonstrates that he stayed with her for an extended period of time, suggesting that they are at least “more married” than Moles credits them. Moles equates Dido and Aeneas’ relationship to a one-night-stand by remarking that “they have only made love once.”[11] However, Dido’s tears upon seeing the empty bed and Aeneas’ possessions, without his presence, imply that they slept and spent time with each other beyond Moles’ assertion. Moles would actually strengthen his argument by asserting that Dido and Aeneas may have had sex more than once because under his framework, Dido would be even more culpable for repeating illicit affairs. Instead, he speculates on the events in the cave, which Vergil himself does not narrate, thus, Moles stretches Vergil’s intention for the meaning behind his text. The way in which Moles crafts this argument, to demean Dido and suggest that she exclusively exhibits a fatal flaw, demonstrates how he reduces her to a “trope” or a “token” scorned female character.
This idea of a “token” or “the only” female extends into media reception of female translators. Emily Wilson is adamant that she is not the first woman to have translated the Odyssey, so much so that one will encounter that fact in her Twitter bio.[12] Recently, Emily Wilson published her translation of the Iliad, joining Caroline Anderson, another woman to have published a translation of the epic. Emily Wilson is technically the first woman to have translated the Odyssey into English, however, this title of “the first,” tends to minimize both the contributions of women to the Classics and the interactions between women and ancient texts. For instance, Anne le Fèvre Dacier translated the Odyssey into French prose in as early as 1708, but is rarely recognized as “the first female translator or classicist” by Western media, perhaps because she did not write in English.[13]
Wilson’s activism in raising awareness for female translators extends profoundly into the Classical texts that she translates herself, namely, humanizing the enslaved women who sleep with the suitors during the Odyssey. These women are executed by Telemachus at Odysseus’ order (Homer, Od, 22.471-473). The translation of these women from Greek to English perpetuates the brutality and disdain with which they were treated. On International Women’s Day in 2018, Emily Wilson exposed the choices that best-selling male English translations of the Odyssey make about how to render the enslaved women. The wrongdoings and shortcomings of male classicists are often ignored, perhaps because of perceived male domination in the field.
Wilson turned straight to best-selling translated works by authors such as Fagles, Lombardo, and Fitzgerald, all of whom used slurs to describe these women. Wilson embraces alternative knowledge sharing in order to correct these injustices with a wider audience.[14] By choosing Twitter as her platform, she joined a movement of scholars working to demystify Classics as a field—one that younger generations and marginalized groups can, in fact, access. This mission is in keeping with Wilson’s attitude to raise awareness for issues in the Classics, such as gender inequality, in tandem with extending appreciation and involvement in Classical literature to youth. She holds herself and other translators by demonstrating that translation and identity are inextricably interwoven.
The New Yorker presents Wilson as risking her reputation in order to give voice to a more important movement that is women’s rights in the Classics. Dan Chiasson, the contributor of this piece, points out that some of the men whom Wilson critiques cannot respond as they have since passed away. For instance, ten years prior to the publication of her Twitter thread, Robert Fagles died. Fagles, arguably but according to Chiasson, is the classicist whom Wilson most directly calls out. Returning to the scene of the hanged slave women, Wilson believes Fagles to have conflated the death of these women to a forgettable, inconsequential event; Fagles presented what Wilson calls a “childish half-rhyme” between the words “cozy… grisly” to describe the circumstances and appearances of the enslaved women.[16] The mentality of blame the victim–or, at least, disregard the victim–is exacerbated here. Wilson acknowledges the dilemma posed by the heroism and homecoming of Odysseus; certain translators take it upon themselves to regard Odysseus as the focus, protagonist, and essence of the entire Odyssey, however, such a view minimizes the presence of other characters. For example, since Odysseus requests that the enslaved women be hanged, Telemachus obliges. The personhood of these women gets lost, not only in translation, but within the scene itself.
Classical reception makes it deeply vital for translators to have the implications of their words in mind, since their audience is different from that of the original canonized work, intended to be received by, in the case of the Odyssey, a more patriarchal society. It is imperative today that translators understand the platform that they are given: to relay words of the past into the framework of the now. The social justice, inclusivity, and awareness for which Wilson campaigns and champions in translation need institutional recognition.
Imaan Ansari is a high school junior at Trinity School in New York City. Her parents immigrated to the US from India, so her experiences as a woman of color and as a first-generation American influence her passion for investigating and amplifying the contributions of minority groups to the Classics. Imaan has taken Latin for six years. She is also fluent in Hindi and Urdu, and aspires to study Sanskrit. At school, Imaan serves on the Student Senate, fulfilling roles such as Chair of Finance, overseeing the student budget, and Speaker, communicating the Senate’s initiatives to students, faculty, and staff. Imaan is the Editor-in-Chief of Diversion, the Modern Language magazine, and the Editor-in-Chief of Symposium, the Classics publication. She is the President of Classics Club and also leads a free peer Latin tutoring service. Outside of Classics, Imaan enjoys playing golf, as captain of the Varsity team, and has been playing violin in various orchestras for over ten years
“There’s that quote of Diogenes when he said, “Aristotle has lunch on Philip’s schedule, but Diogenes does when he wants to,” since there’s no political affair or officer, or leader to trouble the daily habits of his life.
For this reason, you will discover that few of the wisest and most thoughtful people have been buried in their own countries–and that most of them did this by choice, raising an anchor on their own and finding a new safe harbor for their lives, either leaving Athens or retreating there.”
“There’s that quote of Diogenes when he said, “Aristotle has lunch on Philip’s schedule, but Diogenes does when he wants to,” since there’s no political affair or officer, or leader to trouble the daily habits of his life.
For this reason, you will discover that few of the wisest and most thoughtful people have been buried in their own countries–and that most of them did this by choice, raising an anchor on their own and finding a new safe harbor for their lives, either leaving Athens or retreating there.”
“A summary of different arguments by Plutarch of Charoneia showing that learning is recollection
Do we think one thing because of another thing? Not unless it was known beforehand. This is a Platonic argument.
Do we supplement ideas that are missing things? This is also Platonic
Are children better at learning because they are nearer to the period before life when memory is preserved? This is an obvious approach.
Are different people more capable for different kinds of learning?
Have many people taught themselves entire art forms?
Do babies laugh while they’re sleeping when they don’t while they are awake? Indeed, many speak when asleep even though they have not yet otherwise.
Are some people frightened of silly things even though they are brave, like someone afraid of a weasel, or a rooster for no clear reason?
Is discovery not attainable otherwise? For no one would seek what we know nor for what we never knew previously and we couldn’t find what we do not know.
Is truth conversant with reality once forgetfulness has been removed? An argument based on diction.
Is Memory the mother of the Muses, since unclear memory is the reason for our examinations.”
COVID is so 2020. Let’s add Monkeypox and Marburg virus to the anxiety pool.
Plutarch, On Music (Moralia 1146c-d)
“The degree to which the best governed states have dedicated themselves to fine music finds ample testimony, especially in the case of Terpander who brought an end to the civil strife that was ruining the Spartans.
There’s also Thaletas of Crete who people say listened to the Delphic oracle and went Sparta and returned people to health with music, saving Sparta from the Pandemic that was gripping the land, as Pratinas claims.
Homer too says that the Greeks stopped a plague with music, for he says that “sons of the Achaeans propitiated the god with song and dance all day long / singing the noble paean and praising the / far-shooter who took pleasure in hearing the song.”
I’ll leave those verses as the final words in my argument about music, good teacher, since you started this discussion by quoting them to us. In truth, music’s first and finest labor is to give thanks back to the gods, and after that comes a cleansing of the soul, sure tone, and sustained harmony.”
When Russia invaded Ukraine—the day after my son’s birthday in Ukraine but on his actual birthday in Seattle (because of the time difference we had time for dinner but before the cake and the candles the news had come)—I was teaching one of my bread and butter classes, the Epic Tradition. I pack too much into the ten weeks of this course: we read the Gilgamesh, the Iliad, Táin Bó Cúailnge, and the Odyssey, all in their entirety, and then, at the end, R.K. Narayan’s very short retellings of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, supplemented by quotations from academic translations.
When the war started, we had reached the Mahabharata part of the course. Teaching the Mahabharata, in any form, at the beginning of this war is one of those teaching experiences I will not easily forget. The Mahabharata is many (many) things, but the main plot line is about the conflict between two sets of cousins—our heroes, the Pandavas, and our villains, the Kauravas—a conflict that ends in a cosmic and cataclysmic war. It all begins with delightfully complex lines of causality. The older prince is disqualified from ruling because he is blind, so the younger one becomes the king instead.
After a while, he resigns and then dies, so the older one becomes king after all. Whose son should inherit the kingdom? Yudhishthira, the eldest of the Pandavas, is born before Duryodhana, the eldest of the Kauravas—but Duryodhana’s mother becomes pregnant first. And so on. But as the action unfolds, the complexity, though it never disappears, becomes somehow less of a brainteaser and more of a background against which emerges something much starker, more tragic, more black-and-white. With an excessive, thought-experiment-like consistency Yudhishthira tries to avoid the war. What if I never contradict anyone? (Admittedly, he fails in that, but who wouldn’t?) What if I always completely obey my uncle’s orders? What if we accept half of the kingdom, the infertile lands? They do divide the kingdom, but it doesn’t help. At one point, he asks for just five villages, one for each of his brothers (To call Kauravas’ bluff or in earnest? What would he do if they agreed? We don’t get to find out).
But the war is not to be avoided, of course, as we all have known from the beginning. As in the Greek Epic Cycle, the war is caused by powers beyond mere humans, by the fundamental forces of the universe. It has to happen because the Earth is too burdened and she is shrugging off her load. And so Duryodhana says, in essence, “as long as the Pandavas have anything, I cannot live” and the war begins. Our heroes kill not only their cousins, but their grandfather and their teachers. The most brilliant of the Pandava children, Abhimanyu, is killed shortly after his wedding. Draupadi, the wife of the five Pandavas (yes, polyandry) loses all of her sons. In the end, the victory is won, but in the Mahabharata the moment when “the good prevails” feels terribly bitter and empty and full of grief.
And so here I was, trudging to class with my slides summarizing the battle books of the epic. I would wake up in the morning hoping that all that happened the day before was a bad dream, that it couldn’t be, or if it could then at least not to that extent—surely the awful, relentless cruelty of it was only a nightmare? But no, this was our new reality. I would feel as though, by the time I’d showered, my energy was spent. But what can you do? You go to class and pull up your slides. You read:
A loud wail went up in all the houses of the Kurus. The whole city, including the children, was riven with grief. Women whose lords had been killed were now in the gaze of common men—women whom not even the hosts of the Gods had ever seen! Having set their lovely tresses free to fly and taken off their ornaments, those women, clad only in simple shifts, ran to and fro helplessly. They emerged from houses that looked like snow-capped mountains, like does leaving secluded mountain valleys when the leader of their herd has been killed. Several groups of distraught women in the throes of grief ran about as if they were in the girls’ yard; and holding onto each others’ arms, they wept for their sons, brothers, and fathers—it was as if they were acting out the destruction of the world at the end of an Age. (Mahabharata 11.9.8, translated by James L. Fitzgerald)
I vividly remember the extreme fatigue of those first days. Was it just the cognitive effort of taking it in? Remarkable, if so.
I was born and grew up in Moscow, but my mother is from Ukraine. She grew up in Dnipro, a big city on Dnepr river, where, as a child, I spent many summer months with my grandparents. They were long, childhood summers— playing with a few local friends in the neighborhood playground, running around in the streets filled with cottonwood fluff, buying ice cream on the nearby leafy boulevard, staring forever at the swallows feeding chicks in their clay nests under cornices.
I remember using a magnet to gather pins from the carpet in my grandmother’s room, where she sewed elaborate dresses for clients (illegally, naturally, under Soviet law) and watching her bake, whipping egg whites by hand for what seemed like hours in front of the tv. I remember my grandfather repairing the clock, the tv, the sewing machine, tending, daily, his window-boxes of petunias and snapdragons. I remember the upheaval of the canning days (tomatoes, cucumbers, dill, shot glasses of vinegar, strictly following detailed instructions in an old notebook my grandmother called her “Talmud”). I remember reading all there was to read in the house, gorging on cherries and sprawling on the couch, through the afternoons.
The images of war are always shocking, but I have to admit that they are much more shocking when the building, the streets, the people, look and sound so achingly familiar. On the BBC news site a woman, tears and despair and rage in her voice, described how she went into the bathroom in her apartment to help her small child and came out to one of those pictures in which the outer walls are gone and the now naked domestic things—cupboards and couches and children’s cribs—hang askance over the void. I felt as if I’d heard her before, knew her somehow. In another video Ukrainian women howl over their dead son and grandson, their voices both familiar in their inflexions and alien in their beyond-human grief. I would wake up suddenly in the middle of the night, sit up in bed and feel as if my head were an empty echoing cupola reverberating with those voices, those animal howls, and nothing else. The next day I would stand in front of my class and read:
The earth seems to be crammed with fallen heads, hands, and every sort of limb mixed with every other and put into heaps. And thrilling with horror upon seeing headless bodies and bodiless heads, the women, unaccustomed to these things, are bewildered. After joining a head to a body they stare at it blankly, and then they are pained to realize, “This is not his,” but do not see another one in that place. And these over here, joining arms, thighs, feet, and other pieces cut off by arrows, are overwhelmed by the misery of it and faint over and over again. Some of the Bharata women see other decapitated bodies which the birds and beasts have eaten and which they fail to recognize as their husbands. Some beat their heads with their hands when they lay eyes upon their brothers, fathers, sons, and husbands killed by the enemy, swords still in their hands, earrings still on their ears. (Mahabharata 11.81.16, translated by James L. Fitzgerald)
Well, I didn’t read this, actually—I pointed to the slide, briefly, and left it at that.
The students had to write short responses to the readings of the day. “My perspective on the matter is that Duryodhana and Yudhisthira’s conflict is a personal one and that involving soldiers and going to war over it is pointless. However, I understand that my perspective is warped because in modern times the leader of the government is not an all-ruling monarch, and perhaps it was more important in older days to consider who was in charge of the country” an excellent student wrote in response to a question about the war in the Mahabharata and whether Yudhishthira should have fought it. “In modern times the leader of the government is not an all-ruling monarch”…. “Not so in Russia,” I thought “not so in the country of my birth. Not so in the world you live in, even if you think that you live in a different, better, more reasonable, safer world. You think you live in a “modern” world. You think that you do. But you do not.” This I did say in class, in different words, to a hushed and surprised room.
One of the worst things about the beginning of the war was the expectation that we would all lose hope, a particular kind of hope. The hope that a country can emerge from the warped reality of the Soviet Union and not slide back, not be sucked back, as Russia inevitably is, into the same black hole. That something else is possible. I’ve always been very pessimistic about Russia, even in the early nineties, when many had visions of a different future for it. I just didn’t see it (and still do not). But Ukraine was different, it had a chance. Now, I thought as the war began, Russia would take that chance away. It would never change itself and it wouldn’t let Ukraine do that either: the hope would be lost as the world stood by.
Of course, that did not happen. The Ukrainians stood up and compelled the reluctant West to act. It felt as if, speaking from shelled and threatened Kiev, Zelenski shifted something big in the world. Types of weapons became household words around the dinner table in my family. Russia choked, and the prospect of its swallowing Ukraine whole evaporated. People started talking about Russia’s defeat. I cheer every Ukrainian success and register, with some surprise, how much I want Russia to lose—not just to stop, but to lose. I listen to the Ukrainian political commentator and presidential advisor Oleksiy Arestovych as he speaks (with admiration) of Western values and envisages Ukraine as a frontline defender of these values, calling on all of us to remember what they are.
Such hope. Western values…. In some ways, in appealing to those values, the Ukrainians remind me of Black people in the US who took the “Declaration of Independence” seriously when their white compatriots would not: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” —so let’s act that way. Ukraine too is calling on the West to walk the walk. But there is also a way in which Russia actually embodies, if not Western values exactly, then something else very centrally Western: the colonial worldview. Also, the concomitant notion of some “destined” way the world has to be. The Russian state is profoundly, quintessentially, colonial and does not have any other ways of being. It is even internally colonial, colonial towards Russians who live in places that have been Russian for as long as this word made sense. The treatment of indigenous peoples amounts to an attempted erasure. And now the worse version of that worldview is used to rationalize the aggression against Ukraine. What a perfect expression of colonialism—to tell a people that they do not exist. The whole world should hope that Russia is defeated, and decisively so. There is no other way of stopping it—or changing it.
But if it is defeated—how much will change? I have my doubts. And in the meanwhile, the Mahabharata is still on my mind, long after my course has ended. I wonder why that is so. Because of a war between cousins? Perhaps, although in many ways the cousin part actually does not resonate all that much with Ukraine. In the Mahabharata, there are long negotiations and attempts to avert the war, expressions of friendship and affection across the divide, hesitations on everyone’s part—except for Duryodhana, that is. The war begins in a ritual-like way, with mutual respect among most of the opponents. The invasion of Ukraine, by contrast, was a shock not only to the Ukrainians, but also, initially, to the Russian troops who were told that they would do military exercises near the border and then go home—but crossed the border instead. Nor was there any polite and honorable fighting to start with: Russian soldiers seem to have entered this war pre-brutalized, pre-decomposed, ready for genocide.
India, Kangra, circa 1800 Depicting a battle scene with the central figures on horse-drawn chariots with bows and arrows, with numerous figures on horseback and elephants engaging, supported by foot soldiers above and below, the noblemen depicted wearing crowns and with individualized facial features, many identified with inscriptions
And so, no, it is something else, not the superficial similarly of a “war between cousins.” It is the way the war in the Mahabharata is simultaneously completely useless, senseless, and—you would think—easily avoidable, and yet also somehow inevitable. It has to happen because the Earth is burdened—and it isn’t hard to arrange. No matter how many wise and sensible and peace-loving people are involved, one Duryodhana at the right time and in the right place is apparently all it takes, and by the time the war begins the causes are piled up sky-high: disputed lands, mistreatment of Draupadi, the divine machinations. How can you be a Yudhishthira if you share a world with Duryodhanas? Is there any way— apart from fighting a catastrophic war you never wanted? Not in the Mahabharata.
Now, as I write this, new rows of freshly dug graves stand ready in Dnipro at the edge of a growing cemetery filled with flowers and flags and freshly poured earth. It is strange to see it on the BBC website and know that this exists in a city of my childhood, the one with acacia trees along boulevards, and walnut trees whose green fruit stains your fingers brown, and a busy market, and the skins of sunflower seeds always mixed in with the dust.
The city, also, where my great grandparents lie in a mass grave, killed by the Nazis in a mass execution of the Jews of Dnipro on October 13, 1941. I hope for Ukraine’s resounding victory fervently. Will the West really walk the walk? Will there be enough help for a victory? And after this victory, I hope Ukraine gets a chance to play its new role in the world, to live its new life, bereft though it will be of all those already lost and still to be lost in this war.
Except: will Ukraine have the time for this new life? How much CO2 is emitted when a tank battalion is destroyed? Or in the process of transporting hundreds of howitzers? Or when you burn and level an entire city? Or when you rebuild it? Will the Earth’s patience hold long enough for any new order to emerge? Will she hold out a little longer, for Ukraine?
As the war stretches indefinitely, I cannot get the Mahabharata out of my head. This war is so clear, so black and white. Ukraine’s is the just fight. They didn’t ask for it, they didn’t have a choice, this was brought upon them because of one man’s delusion and one country’s murderous system of statehood. What choice do they have but to fight? What choice do we all have but to hope that this war will be “the end of an Age” only in some good sense and not in any terrible one?
Below the hope lies horror at the stark insanity of this war, any war, now, when daily we hear of new climate disasters, droughts and starvation and devastating floods, when you need only to open your eyes to see “the end of an Age”—of our age— rolling our way. The Earth must be burdened with us. So very burdened.
Olga Levaniouk is a Professor of Classics at the University of Washington and the author of Eve of the Festival: Making Myth in Odyssey 19 (2011). Her work has focused on Homer, laments and wedding songs, and the comparative study of myth and culture. Her latest article (“Seeking Agariste,” 2022) is an example of a comparative analysis involving ancient Greece and modern India.
“There’s that quote of Diogenes when he said, “Aristotle has lunch on Philip’s schedule, but Diogenes does when he wants to,” since there’s no political affair or officer, or leader to trouble the daily habits of his life.
For this reason, you will discover that few of the wisest and most thoughtful people have been buried in their own countries–and that most of them did this by choice, raising an anchor on their own and finding a new safe harbor for their lives, either leaving Athens or retreating there.”
Plutarch Consolation to Apollonius [Moralia, 115a-c]
“There is also the saying you know has been passed around the mouth of many humans over the years.” “what is that?” he asked. The other one, interrupted, “that it is best of all not to exist and then second it is better to die than to live. This has been demonstrated by many examples from the divine.
For certainly they say this concerning Midas after the hunt when he caught Silenus and was asking him and finding out from him what is best for mortals and what should be most preferred. But Silenus was willing to say nothing, but remained stubbornly silent.
After he tried nearly every kind of approach, he persuaded him to provide some answer—so compelled, he said, “brief-lived offspring of a laboring god and harsh fate, why do you force me to tell you what it is better not to know? A life lived in ignorance of your most intimate griefs is the least painful.
But for humans it is not at all possible to have the best thing of all or to have any share of the best nature—since the best thing for all men and women is not to be born. But the second best thing after this and the first available to mortals, is to die as soon as possible after being born.” It is clear that he said this because the way that exists in death is better than the one in life.”
The passage floats around some. Stobaeus (4.52.22) attributes it to Alcidamas’ Mousaion but the most widely cited source is Theognis. It is listed without attribution by the paroemiographer Michael Apostolos, with the explanation that this is a proverb “[attributed] to people living in misfortune” (ἐπὶ τῶν δυστυχῶς βιούντων, 3.85.3)
Theognis, 425-428
“First, it is best for mortals to not be born. Not to see the rays of the piercing sun
If born, to pass through Hades’ gates as soon as possible. And to lie with a great pile of earth heaped above you.”
The Loeb note to this passage suggest that Theognis is merely adding to the hexameter lines, since the pentameter lines add nothing. But I think this is problematic. Consider the similar doublet to the first 2 lines above in Bacchylides.
Bacchylides 5.159–161
“And answering him, he said:
“It is best for mortals not to be born
Nor to see the sun.”
Note how Bacchylides acknowledges the proverbial–or at least ‘other’–status of these lines by putting it into the mouths of one of his characters. Notice the stability of the infinitive construction μὴ φῦναι with the mobility of the dative θνατοῖσι and the lexical variations of θνατοῖσι instead of ἐπιχθονίοισιν and φέριστον instead of ἄριστον.
Sophocles, Oedipus Colonos 1225–1227
“Not being born conquers
every argument. But, then, if someone does emerge,
to return where you came from as fast as possible
is second best by far.”
Sextus Empiricus (Outlines of Pyrrhonism 3.230–231) compares the Theognis passage to this fragment from Euripides (fr. 449)
“We should have a gathering to mourn
Someone when they are born, when they come to so many evils
And when someone has died and found a break from evils,
We should be happy and bless them as we carry them from their homes.”
Note the different superlative at the beginning of the phrase and the singular βροτῷ. Based on the flexibility of the expression and the riffing on it, I would suggest that this is a broadly dispersed cultural idea that has proverbial status at a very early period. Note how Euripides, in another fragment, toys with the more broadly used phrase:
Euripides, fr. 908
“Not existing is better for mortals than being born.”
Τὸ μὴ γενέσθαι κρεῖσσον ἢ φῦναι βροτοῖς.
Epicurus (Diogenes Laertius, 10.127) thinks that anyone who believes this and says it is a fool since “if he says it because he believes it, how is it he does not just stop living? For this is ready for him to do, if it is completely believed by him.” (εἰ μὲν γὰρ πεποιθὼς τοῦτό φησι, πῶς οὐκ ἀπέρχεται τοῦ ζῆν; ἐν ἑτοίμῳ γὰρ αὐτῷ τοῦτ᾿ ἔστιν, εἴπερ ἦν βεβουλευμένον αὐτῷ βεβαίως).
And there is, of course, the Ancient Near Eastern context to consider!
"happier than either are those who have not yet come into being and have never witnessed the miseries that go on under the sun."– Ecc 4:3
Late in 2021, I had the great honor of being asked to preside over the wedding of a former student and friend, Zach as he married his long time partner, Molly. In the midst of COVID19 still and all the chaos in the world, it was a moment of respite and celebration and a sign that life continues on. Here’s the better part of it to mark a commercial holiday with all the meaning that we make of it.
Welcome friends, family, and all of you who gather today to celebrate Molly and Zack. After nearly two years of uncertainty and fear, there are few things more life affirming and hopeful than this–two people confirming their love for each other and asking their community to stand with them to recognize that in a shifting and unsettled world, this is something to count on.
As a sage once said, how did we get here? When Zach first asked me before the Pandemic to officiate I said yes without hesitation–not because I have any authority or experience in doing so, but because I can think of an honor no greater than this, to stand here and help Molly and Zach speak into existence something they made for themselves, something to shape, define and comfort them for the rest of their lives.
As is the custom with these things, I am in a position to offer some reflection and advice to the soon to be wed couple on what marriage means. Three short stories; three things to think about: politics, passion, and age.
I was Zach’s teacher in the Department of Brandeis University in the Department of Classical Studies. I used to joke to Zach that the nicest thing said about marriage in all of classical literature comes in Homer’s Odyssey when Odysseus, naked and bedraggled, gives a blessing to the young princess Nausikaa
“May the gods grant as much as you desire in your thoughts,
A husband and home, and may they give you fine likemindness,
For nothing is better and stronger than this
When two people who are likeminded in their thoughts share a home,
A man and a wife—this brings many pains for their enemies
And joys to their friends. And the gods listen to them especially”
Doesn’t this sound great! The lesson here, it’s a political one, the promise of the married couple working as a team to achieve their goals and punish all those who oppose them. But there’s a limit too-a close reading shows that homophrosyne, likemindedness, means having shared aims and plans, but it really looks externally, to surviving the world outside the home.
If the Odyssey tells us about the politics of marriage, and dominating your neighbors, another famous story is about passion. Ovid’s Metamorphoses gives us the Babylonian Pyramus and Thisbe. Two young lovers, forbidden to be with each other, housed right next door. When they sneak out to meet, Thisbe runs from a lioness and leaves her veil behind only to have Pyramus arrive to see what he thinks is a predator with a bloody grin. The two end up taking their own lives in sorrow and inspiring tales like Romeo and Juliet.
Pyramus and Thisbe, House of Dionysus
This story is in a way an warning allegory about passion and excess–it reflects the kind of love that burns bright and then fades. The frantic love of youth is a memory. It inflames, but is hard to sustain.
The one story from the ancient world that has always seemed to me to understand love the most is Baucis and Philemon, also told by Ovid. They were an aging couple in a wicked city and when the gods came to test them, they were the only ones who offered strangers hospitality. In thanks, Hermes and Zeus turned their home into a temple and when they died, they turned into two trees, rooted near each other, and over time they grew so intertwined that you couldn’t tell where one started and the other ended but you could still clearly see the wood and character of each tree.
Jan van den Hoecke, “Peasants Philemon and Baucis visited by Jupiter and Mercury.”
This too is an allegory for love: the way people grow together and change, shaping and shaped in turn, creating a life and story that is so intertwined that you cannot remember where one starts and the other ends. As I have learned in spending more than half my life with my partner, few gifts are more comforting and sustaining, to be part of something bigger while still yet becoming yourself. Passion inspires us to love; life requires us to team up and face the daily struggle, age and the passage of time brings this great, unexpected gift: becoming more than yourself by loving someone else.
May you bring joy to your friends and eliminate your enemies, may you feel the passion of youth for as long as it burns, and may you grow so close and strong together that no power on earth can move you apart.
I am presiding over another wedding this spring (!) and will have to come up with new stories to tell.
Emily Wilson and her newly published translation of Homer’s Iliad. 
