Oedipus the King at Classical Greek Theatre Festival

Oedipus the King, produced by The Classical Greek Theatre Festival (Westminster College, Salt Lake City); performed Saturday 14 September, O.C. Tanner Theatre, Springdale, UT.

Circumstances found my wife and me in Southern Utah on Saturday morning, unable to see the annual CGTF production in any other scheduled performance but free to arrange for a visit to Springdale and the magnificent venue of the O.C. Tanner amphitheatre. As the morning unfolded, we found ourselves wondering why in the future we would ever choose to see a CGTF production in any

Classical Greek Theatre Festival 2013 

location but here. So marvelous — and marvelously used — was this venue.

Oedipus the King stands, in its 2013 CGTF manifestation, as a straightforward and accessible interpretation of the venerable Sophoclean mainstay. Staging, costuming, message are classical. Sandra Shotwell eschews devices that other directors sometimes employ to “update” the ancient text or make it speak to some overtly modern context. Credibility accrues, rather, as the Prof. Shotwell lets this mighty tragedy speak for itself 
 A lovely moment of exquisite staging, which will not be replicated in any other performance of the CGTF OT has Oedipus turn his back on the audience and shouts his genealogy into the soaring red rocks beyond stage. When the mantic void echoes his ancestors’ names back, the effect is poignant. The lines in question are 265 – 70:

“I fight in [Laius’] defence as for my father

and I shall try all means to take the murderer

of Laius the son of Labdacus

the son of Polydorus and before him

of Cadmus and before him of Agenor.

Those who do not obey me, may the Gods

grant no crops spring from the ground they plough nor children to their women!”

                      (David Grene, trans.) 

The intellectual impulse in Oedipus drives him toward assumption of the legitimate right to act in behalf of the murdered king. We know, if we care to explore the bloodlines of the Labdacids, that Oedipus is in very fact a direct descendant of Agenor. At line 268 of this play, the Sophoclean Oedipus is some thousand lines from full awareness. Inasmuch as Oedipus does not yet perceive that Agenor’s lineage is yet viable, this pledge to bring its exterminator to justice resonates irony. No response rises from the stage; it echoes, rather, back upon Oedipus from the majestic red cliffs that soar a thousand feet above the Tanner stage. The theatricality is magical.

Pity that spectators who view this production in a modern theatre, or even at others outdoor venues, will miss the spectacular device availed by the Virgin River’s handiwork in Zion Canyon. The morning sun’s rising over the Springdale audience’s right shoulders provides the actors with a focal point for addressing Apollo on a handful of occasions during the play. This is a turn-around from the gorgeous Red Butte Gardens stage, where the morning sun rises in the spectators’ eyes leaving the actors look into a publicum that is either blinded or holding their hands in front of their faces. One gathers that the Tanner open-air venue may perhaps be among the very best situated stages for any production of a Greek tragic play.

The CGTF OT achieves a definitive success through minimalist adherence to the Sophoclean text. Marianne McDonald’s English translation drives the play. In spite of some overtly awkward acting from some actors, the play works. Because Oedipus’ agones against Tiresias and against Creon preciptate so immediately into shouting matches — more quickly, I feel, than the textual script actually warrants — I came away with the feeling that the actors were directed into an interpretive oversimplification. True, Oedipus’ character did manifest rash outrage that fateful day at the junction when Laius went down. So, maybe the King ought to shout down his interlocutor at every first sign of resistance. Diminished nuance in this aspect of the director’s choices put me off. Only in one late flashing moment does this Oedipus exhibit that intellectual heroism Sophocles wanted Oedipus to possess. When examining the shepherd, Oedipus presses toward revelation that will illuminate the extent of his hamartia.

Jocasta plays her part, particularly when downstage, with gut wrenching intensity. Sophocles’ brilliant plot structure is adequately matched by this Jocasta’s response to the revelations and her anticipation of what is coming next. If you consider the human inclination to circumvent fate to be this play’s chief caution, you will appreciate the roll and performance of this lead character especially rewarding. The off-stage scream was unnecessary; for, on-stage the actress showed the turmoil crush the queen.

Costuming bows to the archaic. Each chorus member is robbed in earth-toned sackcloth and each leans upon a crook, which is used as a percussive tool from eisodos right through the entire play. There are no masks. When a new character is required by the text, a chorus member changes costume subtly and emerges to stand opposite Oedipus. Before the play has ended, each on of these players has taken a shot at Oedipus’ blind preference for human intellect over blind belief in mantike. The director’s clever circulation of faces deftly implicates the chorus in the disclosure of the play’s action while economizing the production’s cost. Stage properties are minimalist. The oboeist’s upholstered chair and a meagerly stylized skene are the only fixtures on the stage. The doorframe’s rhomboid geometry suggests that the entrances and exits from the House of Labdacus can never be squared with outright propriety.

The decision to include a gifted auletes — well, obeist — in the company is a major plus. CGTF productions have rarely, if ever, been so well endowed with such lovely musical accompaniment. The effect is unobtrusively essential. That feeling one often perceives in less subtle productions, some atonal accompaniment articulating the on-stage proceeding or other, is neither pursued nor inflicted upon this elegant production. One comes away from this production wishing that all Greek tragic performances could accomplish this production’s musical grace. The choral odes are chanted by a well rehearsed troupe, to be sure. The rhythmic effect of McDonald’s translation is less lyric, though, and will certainly seem “other” to most in the audience.

In all, again, the 2013 production of the CGTF Oedipus the King is well worth the ticket price. A pre-play lecture by the affable Professor James Svendsen really adds to the value. Now as adjunct professor at Westminster College after his distinguished career at the University of Utah, Prof. Svendsen continues as dramaturge for the CGTF and seems fit for another full run through the Greek tragic canon.

Looking forward with unaccustomed anticipation to 2014.


—  RTM

 

Clack's Diana now not so hard to get ... ?

E.J. Clark, "Diana"

Hunting for the nude Diana in London’s Green Park used to be harder than it is now. The refurbishment of the three-line Underground station there has relocated John Clack’s bronze Diana from its original seclusion in a lovely clearing approximately 300 yards west into, now, the park’s busiest corner on the verge of Piccadilly and adjacent to the Ritz. During my recent pilgrimage visit, scores of bustling passers-by disgorged from the Piccadilly and Victoria and the Jubilee Lines while I glimpsed the goddess perched high over their heads. The bronze dog with her is the key to understanding the sculpture.
    Nobody catches a glimpse of the divine huntress with impunity. Actaeon learned that lesson the hardest way possible. Metamorphosed by the enraged goddess into his own quarry, the stag Actaeon was ravaged by his own hunting dogs. This punishment was Actaeon’s just dessert for having stumbled upon Diana bathing naked among her nymphs. Stern retribution for a chance encounter. Was it accidental? Was it premeditated? The infamous execution, in Ovid’s telling, stirred Diana’s peers to dispute the harshness of her judgment.
   The modest goddess in typical iconography shows no more skin than a shapely lower leg. The mistress of the hunt must hike her skirt a bit to allow for swiftness and free movement. And artists from the archaic through the classical periods preserve the standard garb that covers the virginal goddess’ privacy as chastely as she would herself. A browse through the LIMC reveals nothing more than a shapely calf or an occasional thigh. Even the classical depictions of Actaeon’s indiscretion show Diana covering up and gazing sternly upon the unwitting victim. Not all modern depictions of the

von Gleichen, "Diana the Huntress"

hunting goddess adhere to this modest attire, of course. A 5-minute walk across Hyde Park Corner leads to another bronze, fully nude, Feodora von Gleichen’s Diana the Huntress. After Saint-Gaudens disrobed Diana so infamously as weathervane atop Madison Square Garden (1891, 1894), there was no getting her back under wraps. Yet, much as Manship's 1921 Diana, also Clack’s Diana's appearance in the altogether connects his Green Park bronze to the Actaeon myth.
   Clack’s Diana group depicts an energetic intensity as the goddess unleashes the hound’s pent up potential energy. The cord in the her right hand restrained til just now all that canine force that springs now up and away from the lunging dog; her left hand must have been holding the collar. The exquisite release creates a torque that from some angles just conceals the goddess’s nude torso. Her nudity is more conspicuous because that dog is springing free.
   The Constance Fund awarded its prize to James Clack for this sculpture in 1954. The bronze was made originally as a drinking fountain for dogs — presumably on leads — that would drink from the three receptacles at its base while on walks in Green Park. The mistress of wild animals, whom the Greeks identified as the potnia theron, offering refreshment to dogs in a metropolitan greenspace was to be right at home. For over half a century the dog fountain offered its mid-park watering hole at a place along the Piccadilly side of Green Park. Though centered in London’s megalopolis a clearing in its former greenspace was just remote enough that Clack’s Diana seemed to tempt only the infrequent humans who stumbled upon her there, midway between the Hard Rock Café and the throngs at Buckingham Palace. A chaste Olympian might be more likely be caught au naturale in a place like that. I like to think that Clack’s sculpture maximized the effect of its original location. Diana on a dog fountain. The relative seclusion of a spot in Green Park. An unwitting passerby. Divine retaliation answers the intruder.
   For the 2012 Olympics, the sculpture was reassigned to the busiest footpath within the park. Transferring Diana to the Green Park Station sort of ruins the artist’s original conceit. Even though the maps at the park’s main entrances still show Clack’s tripedal bronze where it stood since 1950’s, a wholly unmythological installation now functions as the Constance Fund's fountainhead: The Watering Holes drinking fountain by Robin Monotti Architects and Mark Titman has replaced Clack’s Diana. And over by the Tube station, Clack’s canine drinking fountains at Diana’s base will likely never serve thirsty dogs again. The bustle of passengers will now always violate that one-time isolation that disarmed (and disrobed) the wary goddess in the quieter copse where the unwary once might go to gaze upon her.
    So, don’t fail to be aware of Clack’s Diana. But … be careful that your gaze doesn’t offend the vengeful goddess.

OGCMA0232NOTArtemis_Clack, a mastery image
OGCMA0231Artemis_Manship
OGCMA0230Artemis_vonGleichen
OGCMA0229Artemis_Saint-Gaudens

Medea + Achilles: sometimes life imitates art

Achilles and Medea are married partners in the underworld realms of Elysium according to archaic Greek poets Ibycus and Simonides. This seems amazing to me. It's not exactly a match made in Heaven. But maybe it's not the marriage from Hell, either.

Pitt in Troy (2004) and Caldwell in Medea (1984).
She won one of her four Tony Awards for this compelling portrayal.

The Hellenistic scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica 4.805ff. preserves the attributed detail that were otherwise lost.

 ὅτι δὲ Ἀχιλλεὺς εἰς τὸ Ἠλύσιον πεδίον παραγενόμενος ἔγημε Μήδειαν πρῶτος Ἴβυκος εἴρηκε, μεθ᾿ ὃν Σιμωνίδης ["Ibycus and following him Simonides first said that Achilles reached the Plain of Elysium and took Medea to wife" Schol. in Ap. Rhod. 4.814-15a p. 293 Wendel = Ibyc. frg 291 Campbell and Simonid. fr. 558 Campbell]

This long forgotten pairing is not cataloged in Newman & Newman, Genealogical Chart of Greek Mythology and shows up only in an occasional footnote.

Since Homer produced Achilles from the gloom for the interview with Odysseus, Achilles himself is no surprise inhabitant of any other poet's conception of the netherworld. But after what Medea did to her sons and her brother and her father... It's hard to fathom a worldview that puts her among the blessed company of Elysium. The only way I can reconcile this oddity is to figure that when Simonides and Ibycus wrote, Medea had not yet fallen into the disrepute she now so infamously shoulders.

Euripides may not have been the first mythographer to project Medea, the sorceress turned infanticide, in such appallingly terrible shades. His play of 431 BC that now narrates for the ages the activities of the world's most terrifying mother may have itself been a novelty. She may not always have been so despicable. Euripides may have bent public opinion against her.

Hesiod's Theogony seems to find something appealing about Medea, the slender-ankled (ἐύσφυρος, 960; no comment from West) daughter whom Idyia conceived of Aetes when she was "overpowered with longing by golden Aphrodite". Line Hesiod (ca. 725 BC) up beside Ibycus and Simonides as poets apparently attracted to Medea.

So, where does such a woman end up in the afterlife?
Everlasting marriage to Achilles seems pretty pleasant as a reward. Even if the Achilles role is not played by Brad Pitt, it would certainly seem that archaic poets' notion of Achilles was pretty positive. Yoking Medea to such a hero seems like a big positive.

When I was researching the perplexing details of Medea's eternal reward recently, I bumped into a real-life oddity. It turns out that two important Italian papyrologists named Medea Norsa and Achille Vogliano corresponded in the 1930's. My friend Francesca Longo Auricchio wrote a useful article documenting the correspondence in Papyrologica Miscellenea. Without suggesting that any amorous interaction existed between those two scholars, I do admit amusement over the literary potential.

Ovid's Heroides are literary fantasies that offer should-have-been correspondence between partners such as Dido and Aeneas or Acontius and Cydippe, a letter from Penelope to Odysseus or Sappho to Phaon. Invented correspondence between Medea and Achilles would have been a precious conceit by the Roman master of erotic poetry. Maybe the practical side of Ovid's realism intervened: Medea, after all, has got to be a neat generation older than Achilles. Achilles is the offspring of a union formed during the voyage of the Argo, when the ship and crew were on their way to Colchis. Medea is going to be at least 15 years older than Achilles. ... Details, details. Maybe somebody needs to write this poem: a pair of epistles ala Ovid's Heroides between Achilles and Medea.

Düsseldorpheus, 1585

Johann Wilhelm, the Duke of Jülich, Kleve and Berg married at Düsseldorf on 16 June 1585 the countess Markgräfin Jacobe von Baden. The celebration was epic. Well, mythological at least.

On the third day of the event, a huge artificial mountain with two peaks was constructed. Upon each peak a musician representing the mythological musicians Amphion and Orpheus sat, playing. Amphion had applied his musical gifts to the building of the legendary walls of Thebes, charming the walls into place with his music and never lifting a hand. (Ovid Met. 6.146-312; 'most postclassical treatments of [Amphion] in the arts celebrate the power of Amphion's music.' Reid. Cf. Hor. Ars 391ff. Orpheus and Amphion are the first poets to teach mankind.) Orpheus' representative at the Renaissance hochzeit played on the false hilltop among a throng of wild animals assembled for the show.

A woodcut published two years later in Cologne shows the scene.

The allegorical purpose of the scene had something to do with invoking the muses, "in the form of Orpheus and Amphion," as sponsors for the newlyweds. Guests were told by placards posted around the scene how the mythological allusions had anything to do with the wedding. I well might have needed some help in the explication, too!

Orpheus gets top billing in lots of weddings, especially after 1600, when the wedding of Maria de' Medici and Henry IV of France witnessed the premier of Peri's Euridice — a watershed event in the history of opera that joined the forces of Caccini and Rinuccini at Florence's Palazzo Pitti and that is still being talked about. Throughout the 17th Century, Orpheus charmed the nethergods into relinquishing Eurydice in no fewer than 30 operas premiered from Vienna to Wolfenbüttel and from London to Madrid.

And further, Vienna and Graz had witnessed a similar mise en scene in 1571, when an artificial hill was erected — apparently like a parade float, in today's conception, pulled by four white drafthorses — and upon this mobile hilltop sat Eurydice and Orpheus along with representations of the inhabitants of the Underworld who were charmed by Ovid's Orpheus (i.e. Ixion and Tityos, and Tantalus, etc.).

So, particularly in light of that precedent, it is especially remarkable to me that Orpheus is there at the Düsseldorf wedding at the dawn before the 17th Century singing an entirely different tune.

Near contemporaries include Edmund Spenser, whose Faerie Queen (1596) includes Orpheus' music calming strife among the Argonauts (FQ 4.2.1), likely a role similar to that conceived in the company of Amphion at Düsseldorf.

The mythological pastiche is nicely explicated and brilliantly contextualized by E.-B. Krems, "Das Drama des Sehens und der Musik: zur Darstellung des Orpheus-Mythos in bildender Kunst und Oper der frühen Neuzeit," Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 36 (2009) 269 - 300. I owe all my knowledge of the Düsseldorf Orpheus/Amphion to her article, pp. 269 - 71.

OGCMA0785NOTOrpheus_Düsseldorf

Orphic Finality: vous n'avez encore rien vu

A celebrated film maker of advanced years produces a film adaptation of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, and observers quickly surmise that this is the director's "final film." How do they know that it's not merely the "most recent"? He's still working, after all.

OGCMA0797NOTOrpheusEurydice_Resnais

Alain Resnais' Vous N'avez Encore Rien Vu (2012 = You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet) adapts two Anouilh plays, particularly Eurydice. The film competed for but did not with the 2012 Cannes Palme d'Or, and will be released in American art-house theatres in June 2013. My friend Will Brockliss saw that it was showing at the University of Wisconsin student union and drew my attention to it. I hope to know more about it.

Leslie Nesselson's review at rogerebert.com insightfully scrutinizes the critics' hasty assignment of the term "final film" to Resnais' most recent narrative. She wryly notes that Resnais is working on his next film already. Though significantly advanced in years, Resnais may or may not have left his Orphic film as his last piece. If she's right, and Resnais produces something further beyond this Orpheus, then we won't ultimately be able to note how Orpheus narratives seem to cap artists' collected ouevres.

The imbd.com summary of Vous N'avez Encore Rien Vu:

From beyond the grave, celebrated playwright Antoine d'Anthac gathers together all his friends who have appeared over the years in his play "Eurydice." These actors watch a recording of the work performed by a young acting company, La Compagnie de la Colombe. Do love, life, death and love after death still have any place on a theater stage? It's up to them to decide. And the surprises have only just begun...

The fictious playwright in this premise clearly has that Orphic role of immortal artist. Presumably, in an autobiographical claim, Resnais is making himself an Orpheus. His use of the Eurydice myth is clearly a smoking-gun reference that pins the narrative to mythological shorthand. When I see the film, I'll be watching with great interest for value the new narrative can add to the familiar myth. Nesselson has convinced me that there's much about Resnais' allusiveness I will not be able to appreciate — like his intertextual references to his entire cinematic corpus. But I hope to be able to appreciate the director's adaptation of the myth itself.

This post is obviously a place-holder in which I hope merely to indicate awareness of a mythological narrative that seems likely to warrant further and deeper investigation. Comments are welcome.

M

It all began with the Argo

The Argonautica was the fore-runner to all western literature. It was the heroic event that happened before the Trojan War. Two of classical literature's greatest works start with reference to the Argo's sailing, the beginning of the end. Events on board the ship started a process that resulted in the end Troy. Jason's assembly of a dream-team crew and their journey to distant Colchis  introduced acquisitiveness and greed to Greece. Long before Agamemnon launched a thousand ships for Helen; and before Paris took her away, the sailing of the Argo pitted West and East in the first international act of aggression. For the son of Achilles is, of course, the famous offspring of Thetis and the argonaut Peleus. Had the Argo never sailed, no Marriage of Peleus and Thetis, no Apple of Discord,  no Judgement of Paris, no Rape of Helen, no Achilles, no Fall of Priam, no Trojan Women... The sailing of the Argo really started it all.

So, before a long flight I rented on iTunes and watched Ben Affleck's highly successful film wondering whether there would be a moment where the screenplay would admit that it was working with the ominous mythological usage. Would there be an allusion to the classical myth?

The situation was laid. For the 1979 storming of the US embassy in Tehran created a real East/West conflict. Stealth, chutzpah, brawn, amazing teammates... In short, all the things that famously allowed Jason to walk into far-away Colchis and ask for the return of Golden Fleece — expecting to get it! — were the essential plot elements of Tony Mendez' brilliant sleight of hand that sprung a clutch of American diplomats from the beneath the noses of their revolutionary captors. The CIA's mission in this high-stakes heist could fairly pass as a sort of Argonautica. And I was sort of hoping to see a moment where somebody said something like "we're gonna storm Tehran, Mr. President, and return from the East with the booty they wrongly possess, Sir." And Jimmy Carter or some cabinet member was going to say something like, "That'd be just like Jason waltzing in and demanding Phrixus' Golden Fleece."

I read the imdb blurb. It looked promissing. I really only know this narrative from the film at this point. I must read Mendez' book. In the cinematic version the screenwriters do tip their hand. They make two mythological allusions and sharply foreground the reference to the classical voyage of the Argo in such a way that the reference is clear and overt.

The film unfolds the process whereby Mendez (Ben Affleck) comes upon the notion of forming a mock film production company which pretends to be earnest in the creation of the world's worst "Star Wars rip-off". Once he hatches the it-just-might-work hair-brained idea of sending a filmcrew to Tehran, in fact Mendez assembles a little dream-team as Jason did. Jason packed the Argo with all the great heroes from the generations before Troy. The film's script show Mendez et co. plowing through mountains of dreadful scripts, looking for that stinker, they happen upon and reject one called "The Horses of Achilles". This is rejected as having to do with the Trojan War, even if Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) thinks it sounds like a western. This overt reference to classical myth, though, is preceded in the film by the appearance of the masterful makeup artist, John Chambers (John Goodman) enters the film on the set of a weird-out sci-fi film at the moment that some shapely "lab assistant" is tending to some operation upon a freakish and virile minotaur. You definitely get the sense that these Hollywood producers are more interested in applying classical myth to sci-fi than George Lucas cared to allow. And they want to tell you they could, if they wanted to.

Once Mendez and Siegel and Goodman hatch the plan to produce their film "Argo", they undertake the shameless (faux) promotion of the film. They schedule a big script reading, complete with press coverage. At the reading, a journalist presses the brash Siegel with questions about the Argonautica. Is this script related to the classical myth? Is there a Jason? Does anybody watching know about the Argo? I consider this overt special pleading. Such moments foreground the smoking gun. The moment in the film, though, is played for yucks, when the producer says something really rude to the journalis, something along the lines of "Ar, Go Jump in the Lake." (Only he doesn't really say anything about a lake. It's line that is repeated many times through the film's remainder. I think it's supposed to be funny.)

The screenwriters in that moment reveal that, indeed, they do know something about the classical myth. They want the viewer to know that they know. But, alas, I have to conclude in the end that we were not on the same wavelength. All that code I want to bring to an allusion to Jason's voyage — acquisition, primal violation of human society, the introduction of deceit into the world, etc. — seems to have been lost on them. They did clearly work it in on purpose; but they missed so many opportunities to ...   OK, I guess I need to just write it myself.

On the big question — does the mythological allusion qualify as a "smoking gun"? — the answer is yes. Ergo = OGCMA0617NOTJasonArgonauts_Affleck.
    In case anybody cares, I intend to assign the usage to Affleck, the director, especially because he crafted the smoking-gun scene with the journalist. If Tony Mendez' autobiographical book, The Master of Disguise, uses the mythological allusion, then I'll distinguish between the book and film by listing the book as ...0617NOTJasonArgonauts_Mendez.

To weigh the idea of how the Argo initiates human malady, consider these two instances.

Medea's nurse foreshadows the deepest domestic tragedy ahead when she begins the prologue with the Argo. "If only the Argo's hull had never flown through the deep-blue Symplegades and penetrated the land of Colchis! If only the pine on the slopes of Pelion had never been cut and felled! If only the hands of heroes who went after the golden fleece for Pelias had never seized the oar!" (Eur. Med. 1-6)

Εἴθ’ ὤφελ’ Ἀργοῦς μὴ διαπτάσθαι σκάφος
Κόλχων ἐς αἶαν κυανέας Συμπληγάδας,
μηδ’ ἐν νάπαισι Πηλίου πεσεῖν ποτε
τμηθεῖσα πεύκη, μηδ’ ἐρετμῶσαι χέρας
ἀνδρῶν ἀριστέων οἳ τὸ πάγχρυσον δέρος
Πελίαι μετῆλον.

The Medea by Euripides holds few surprises for 21st-century audiences, because we know the horrifying story. The Nurse foreshadows the tale's tragic end by allusion at the play's outset to the sailing of the Argo, the beginning of "it all."

Catullus 64 begins at the same spot of human history. Pelion's deforestation, plans to steal another nation's treasure, and the sweeping of the sea. "Once the pines begotten upon Pelion's summit, they say, sailed through Neptune's watery waves to the surge of Phasis and Aeetes' lands. Chosen youth, the stock of Argive loins, seeking to steer away the Colchians' golden fleece, dared to hasten the salty sealanes in their ship as they swept the blue deep plane with fir fronds." (Cat. 64.1-7)

Peliaco quondam prognatae vertice pinus
dicuntur liquidas Neptuni nasse per undas
Phasidos ad fluctus et fines Aeeteos,
cum lecti iuvenes, Argivae robora pubis,
auratam optantes Colchis avertere pellem
ausi sunt vada salsa cita decurrere puppi,
caerula verrentes abiegnis aequora palmis.

Before it's all over, Catullus 64 will have led its reader through intensely personal heart-ache — the appalling desertion of Ariadne on the shore —  through an ambiguous prophecy regarding Achilles' tragic fate, and then to a epilogue on overall human degeneracy.

Between Catullus and Euripides a ghostland of literary aftifacts walk like the undead. Apollonius of Rhodes conceived the Argonautica in the spirit of learned Alexandrianism, losing details of his agenda on first-time readers everytime the new-age epic is read. Latin literature's Golden Age masterpieces could not have been conceived without Apollonius, nor without the work of Ennius. His Medea Exul opens with a stunning reappropriation of Euripides' prologue:

Utinam ne in nemore Pelio securibus
caesa accidisset abiegna ad terram trabes,
neve inde navis incohandi exordium
coepisset, quae nunc nominatur nomine
Argo, quia Argivi in ea delecti viri
vecti petebant pellem inauratam arietis
Colchis, imperio regis Peliae, per dolum.
Nam nunquam era errans mea domo ecferret pedem
Medea, animo aegra, amore saevo saucia.

Deforestation, overseas acquisition, deceit. Intercultural love affairs. Without these, Medea might now be happy. This nurse sees it this way. Interesting is that Ennius turns the events into a different order.  But, this is getting way out of hand. Maybe more on another day.....


M

1049NOTTroyFallHorse_Moser

The Brussels Business took me in by its usage of the Trojan Horse. I may be the only person on the planet who would fall for this ruse. But, on the search for interesting classical mythological usages,

you know, I rented the film via iTunes to take on a long flight last week. Then I watched it. (This is more than I can yet say for Argo, which I must watch in the eight days or forefeit my $3.25 rental fee.)

The Brussels Business is a moderately(-plus) interesting documentary that unveils the growing culture of lobbyism that surrounds and pervades the European Parliament in Brussels. Directors are M. Lietaert and F. Moser, two Austrians, I gather from other credits given. While I liked the film, I must say that a viewer like me could have dealt with a less dramatic build-up to the revelation that lobbyists are actively working the backscenes of the EU. A very articulate film lays it all out. A pair of activitsts from the Corporate European Observatory, Olivier Hoedeman and Erik Wesselius, are the principal talking heads, but several lobbyists and politicians and commissioners join in the spinning of the tale. You get the feeling throughout that you would very much like to have dinner with Hoedeman especially. And I feel like I'd like to pat the back of Siim Kallas, the VP of the European Commission, who undertook a three-year uphill struggle to limit the secretive dealings of lobbyists in Brussels. Part of me, however, wanted to ask the participants whether they were actually surprised that there are lobbyists in Brussels. The musical buildups want you to feel surprised.

I think the film could have been half as long and really gripped my interest. As it was, I turned it off a couple of times; but felt drawn back to make it to the end.

Big question for MythMatters: What's the usage?
   About 2/3 through the film — I couldn't rewind because I was a cheap-skate iTunes renter! — the film introduces the usage of the Trojan Horse. It comes about by their citation of a speech delivered in 1945 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a televised speech delivered from the Oval Office in which FDR disclosed legislation that would curb the activities of Washington lobbyists. He had seen through their insidious plans and was warning the American people to join forces against the threat.
  Moser/Leitaert see the lobbyists' siege on Brussels in much the same light.
Whatever it is, I fear lobbyists even when they bring gifts.

That last, of course, is the great line from Vergil's Laocoon in Aeneid 2:
           Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos, et dona ferentis.
The line is sometimes turned into something like "I fear the Greeks bearing gifts." Don't forget, though, to get that wonderful adverbial "et" when you render the Latin into English: "even when they bring gifts!"

Good to see that myth still matters.

I won't say I grappled with the taxonomy of this usage. I was a bit torn as to whether I should assign the usage to Moser/Lietaert or whether I should dig further and get the name of the poster's designer. It's a lovely image. That ominous horse rising over the European Parliament and the besieged town of Brussels. In the end I baled. Perhaps, indeed, the reference should go to FDR. However, I'll snag the YouTube of the Oval Office Speech and give that a separate entry sometime soon. Argo, though, must come next.

Ciao da Napoli.
M