Week 05, Aeschylus

Introduction to Ancient Greek Theater, Followed by Notes on Aeschylus’ The Oresteia (Updated with some corrections 2/11/08)

Books and Online Resources:

Didaskalia: Ancient Theatre Today. http://www.didaskalia.net/index.html. 3-D theatre and mask reconstructions, excellent introductory material on Greek and Roman theatre and stagecraft.

Easterling, P. E. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Kaufmann, Walter. Tragedy and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.

Ley, Graham. A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theater. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1991.

McLeish, Kenneth. A Guide to Greek Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen, 2003.

Perseus Project. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ . Electronic texts (original languages and translations), critical studies, etc. An impressive resource for classicists.

Pomeroy, Sarah et al. Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.

Religious Roots of Tragedy: The Festivals of Dionysus at Athens were called the City Dionysia, which was held in March or April, and the Lenaea, which was held in January. Though classical theater flourished mainly from 475-400 BCE, it developed earlier from choral religious ceremonies dedicated to Dionysus.

The God of Honor: Dionysus was an Olympian god, and the Greeks celebrated his rites in the dithyramb. In mythology, his followers were satyrs and mainades, or ecstatic females. We sometimes call him the god of ecstasy, and as Kenneth McLeish says, he “supervis[ed] the moment when human beings surrender to unstoppable, irrational feeling or impulse” (1-2). His agents are wine, song, and dance. Song and dance were important to Dionysian rites, and the participants apparently wore masks.

At the festivals, three tragic writers would compete and so would three or five comedic playwrights. The idea was that each tragedian would present three plays and a satyr play; sometimes the three plays were linked in a trilogy, like The Oresteia. So the audience had a great deal of play going to do during the festival seasons; the activities may have gone on for three or four days, with perhaps four or five plays per day. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival provides something like this pace.

Organization: How were the festivals organized? Well, the magistrate was chosen every year by lot—the archon. Then, dramatists would apply to the magistrate for a chorus, and if they obtained a chorus, that meant that they had been chosen as one of the three tragic playwrights. After that affair was settled, wealthy private citizens known as choregoi served as producers for each playwright. The state paid for the actors, and the choregos paid chorus’ training and costumes. So there was both state and private involvement in the production of a tragedy or comedy.

The Playwrights: Aeschylus 525-456 B.C. / Sophocles 496-406 B.C. / Euripides 485-406 B.C.
Aeschylus composed about 80 dramas, Sophocles about 120, Euripides perhaps about 90. Aristophanes probably wrote about 40 comedies. Dramatists who wrote tragedies did not compose comedies, and vice versa.

The playwright was called a didaskalos, a teacher or trainer because he trained the chorus who were to sing and dance. As drama developed, the playwright also took care of the scripts and the music. He was something like a modern director, and may at times have acted in his own plays, especially in the early stages of his career. A successful dramatist could win prizes, but generally, playwrights were able to support themselves independently by land-holdings. Sophocles, for example, was a prominent citizen—he served as a general and treasurer. Aeschylus was an esteemed soldier against the Persian Empire, and his tombstone is said to have recorded his military service, not his prowess as a playwright.

The Theater: The theater for the City Dionysia was located on the south slope of the citadel of Athens, the Acropolis. The Didaskalia Classics site offers 3-D images of a later reconstruction: http://www.didaskalia.net/studyarea/recreatingdionysus.html.

The theater had three parts:

1. Theatron: this was for seating around 14,000 spectators; it was probably at first of wood, but later it was of stone. 2. Orchestra: this was for the chorus to sing and dance in and for the actors, when their function was developed. 3. Skene: this was at first a tent-like structure that served as a scene-building, and it had a door for entrances and exits. The Oresteia requires one, though perhaps the earliest plays didn’t. Costume was important, too, because it could be used to determine factors like status, gender, and age.

The chorus remained important in drama, especially in Aeschylus. At some point, a choregos (legend says it was “Thespis,” hence actors are “thespians”) stepped forth and became the first actor, or answerer (hypocrites). So the composer was the first participant to turn choral celebration into what we call drama, with a plot and interaction between characters. Apparently Aeschylus or Sophocles added a third actor. The former’s early plays required only two actors, but even that was enough to make for interesting exchanges between the chorus and the actors and, to some extent, between the actors and each other. With three actors, of course, the possibilities for true dramatic dialogue and action are impressive.

Audience: Would have consisted mostly of male citizens—the ones who ran Athenian democracy by participating in the Assembly. There would probably have been very few, if any, slaves or women present, and perhaps some resident aliens or “metics” and visiting dignitaries. Drama was surely a male-centered affair, as was the political life of Athens. Public speaking was vital in democratic Athens—anyone who was someone in the legal/political system needed to know how to move and convince fairly large numbers of men. Theater and political life, as we shall see from Aeschylus, were in fact closely connected: the same skills were required, and the same class of people participated (male kyrioi, or heads of households who also performed military service). So while the stuff of tragedy seems almost always to have been the ancient myth cycles, the audience watching the plays would have felt themselves drawn in by the dramatists’ updating of their significance for the major concerns of the 5th-century B.C. present. And that present was, of course, the age of the great statesman Pericles (495-429 B.C.), who drove home the movement towards full Athenian democracy from 461 B.C. onwards and who at the same time furthered a disastrous course of imperial protection and aggression that had ensued from victory in the Persian Wars around 500 B.C. Greek tragedy grew to maturity in the period extending from the battles of Marathon on land in 490 B.C. and the naval engagement at Salamis in 480 B.C., on through the Second Peloponnesian War from 431-404 B.C., in which the Athenians lost to Sparta the empire they had gained during half a century of glory following the victories over Persia. Athens’ supremacy didn’t last long as such things go, but it burned brightly while it lasted, and festival drama, along with architecture, sculpture, and philosophy, was among its greatest accomplishments. So the dramas took place in one of the most exciting times in Western history—both heady and unsettling at the same time, shot through with violence, democratic and artistic flowering, victory, and great loss.

Tragic Masks: The masks tell us something about tragedy: with linen or clay masks, a single actor might play several roles, or wear several faces of the same character. (Visit Didaskalia’s interactive 3-D mask page at http://www.didaskalia.net/studyarea/visual_resources/images/masks/mask_mm/rotmask1.html.) Wilde said, “give a man a mask, and he’ll tell you the truth.” His quip should remind us that masks don’t discourage expression—as Kenneth McLeish says, they had religious significance in the theater: participants in Dionysian rites offered up their personal identity to the god, and further, he continues:

“Wearing a mask does not inhibit or restrict the portrayal of character but enhances it, allowing more, not less, fluidity and suppleness of movement; and the character created by or embodied in the mask and the actor who wears it can feel as if it has an independent identity which is liberated at the moment of performance—an unsettlingly Dionysian experience” (9).

That emphasis on what we might call expression is important especially because—Aristotle’s claims about plot being the soul of tragedy notwithstanding—not much happens in many Greek tragedies. Instead, chorus members and characters “take up an attitude” towards the few well-packaged, exciting events that take place on or off the stage. The action is important, but the characters’ words and attitudes help us, in turn, gain perspective on the action. Perhaps when Aristotle emphasizes plot so much, he’s taking for granted the great power of the Dionysian mask to support the plot in driving the audience towards catharsis. Character, he says, will reveal itself in relation to the play’s action.

Aristotle’s theory of drama—we didn’t cover this much in our class, but if you would like to read something about it, please see my Fall 2007 E491 Literary Theory blog (http://www.ajdrake.com/blogs/491_fall_07/), where (in the entry for Week 2) I cover The Poetics in some detail. In Aristotle’s view, a well constructed plot that follows probability and necessity will induce the proper tragic emotions (pity and fear or terror), with the result being “catharsis,” a medical term that may be interpreted as “purgation” (of emotion) and/or as “intellectual clarification.” I should think that the tragic emotions, once aroused, become the object of introspection; thereafter, the audience attains clarification about an issue of great importance—for instance, our relation to the gods, the nature of divine justice, etc.

Notes on Aeschylus’ The Oresteia

Background: the House of Atreus, adapted from Apollodorus’ First- or Second-Century CE compendium The Library of Greek Mythology.

Pelops married Hippodameia, a success he achieved when the lady convinced Myrtilos to murder another suitor, Oinomaos, by rigging his chariot to fall apart during a race. As he died, he cursed Pelops and his descendants. (Pelops was the son of Tantalos, who, aside from having shared ambrosia with mortals, had also tried to fool Zeus and served him a banquet containing his son Pelops as a sacrifice, thereby bringing punishment down on his head; Pelops was then brought back to life.) Well, two of Pelops’ sons are Atreus and Thyestes (though in Aeschylus’ version, they are his grandsons, fathered by Pelops’ son Pleisthenes). Atreus married Catreus’ daughter Aerope (granddaughter of Minos), but Aerope fell in love with Thyestes. Atreus had promised to sacrifice a golden lamb to Artemis, but instead killed it and locked it in a chest. Aerope gave the lamb to Thyestes, who then used it to win the kingdom of Mycenae—it seems an oracle had told the Mycenaeans that they should seek a Pelopid for their king, and Thyestes then insisted that they should choose the man who possessed a golden lamb. This was convenient, since he just happened to have stolen it from the unsuspecting Atreus. But Zeus later took Atreus’ part, which resulted in the banishment of Thyestes. One day Atreus, now king, found out that his brother had slept with Aerope, and decided to seek revenge—he invited his banished brother back to court on the pretense that reconciliation was possible, but then he snatched Thyestes’ sons Aglaos, Callileon, and Orchomenos from the altar of Zeus (god of suppliants, as Homer tells us), cut off their limbs, and served them as a meal to Thyestes. An oracle told Thyestes that if he wanted counter-revenge, he should sleep with his daughter Pelopeia. He did, and the union produced Aegisthus, who went on to kill Atreus and return the kingdom to Thyestes, ruling with him jointly in Mycenae. Agamemnon, the doomed hero of Aeschylus’ trilogy and of course the brother of Menelaus, Helen’s husband, was a son of Atreus, and he had supposedly helped to capture the adulterer Thyestes, father of Aegisthus. Agamemnon married Clytemnestra (Helen’s sister) after murdering her first husband (Tantalos, son of Thyestes). So when Aegisthus participates in the plot to murder Agamemnon, he is taking his revenge for the outrage Atreus committed against Thyestes.

The lesson that emerges from this troubled tale is that both Atreus and Thyestes are steeped in outrage, incest, and blood, and in fact their father Pelops had long since drawn a curse on himself that landed on their heads. The best thing descendants of these people could do is opt out of the House, but of course that’s not possible, so they all suffer for the sins of their fathers. Things only get worse when, at least in one version, Agamemnon listens to his priest Calchas and sacrifices his daughter Iphigeneia by Clytemnestra from military necessity—they need a fair wind to make it to Troy and pay back Priam for the dishonor his son Paris had brought to Menelaus of Sparta by stealing away with his wife Helen. So Clytemnestra has a powerful reason to despise Agamemnon, and so does Aegisthus, her lover.

Line-by-Line Comments on Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, from The Oresteia

1-44. The Watchman has been commanded by Clytemnestra to watch for the signal-fire indicating that Troy has fallen. He says that Clytemnestra maneuvers like a man, and he refers darkly at line 42 to the secrets of the House of Atreus, or, more directly, the secrets of Agamemnon’s house. At line 25, he invokes the motif of light versus darkness, greeting the daybreak as “dawn of the darkness.” This mention will come to seem ironic given that the Furies represent a dark upwelling from Hades. Another small thing worth noting is that the trilogy begins with a man on the lookout for fire-beacons as a sign of victory, and ends with references to the torches with which Athena and her helpers light the Furies’ way to their place of honor.

45-258. Here, the Chorus shows us one of its functions: simply to fill us in on things that happened before the play. But almost immediately, around line 55, they begin to complicate that task by taking up an attitude towards what they relate. Much of a Greek play can, indeed, consist in just such adopting of attitudes, whether on the part of the Chorus or of the main characters. This Aeschylan Chorus of old men judge by outcomes, and hold patriarchal values that lead them to distrust and largely discount even the strong woman Clytemnestra, who rules by proxy for Agamemnon. They invoke the gods frequently, but seem inconsistent in their statements about the relation between the divine realm and human events, desires, and predicaments. Still, what they say near the beginning of their speech here is prophetic: the Trojan War, they say, has taken on a life of its own, and there’s no way to “enchant away the rigid Fury” (78), thanks to Paris’ deep violation of Greek hospitality. Fury rages during and follows after war, as they suggest. The old men apparently resent the loss of so many kinsmen and the interruption of their normal lives during such a long, drawn-out military expedition. They lament their own situation, saying that they have been dishonored: they are the “husks” (80) of Argos, the non-heroic elders who have remained behind with women and children. On the whole, the Chorus registers the tensions that the trilogy’s individual characters and gods must work out: the status of women, the role of the Olympians, the power of the revenge cycle, and the province of law.

The elderly Chorus members claim (line 112ff) that they still have the gift of persuasion and perhaps even of prophecy: they link themselves to what the prophet Calchas had said about a sign sent by the gods, namely a pair of eagles swooping down upon a pregnant rabbit and thereby infuriating Artemis. This event may have presaged the sacrificial killing of Iphigeneia by the Greek kings, Agamemnon foremost among them. At line 150, they speak of Clytemnestra as “the architect of vengeance” in a manner that places her alongside the enraged Artemis, and fear what she may do when Agamemnon returns. Much of what the Chorus members say at this point consists in venting their frustrations about their personal situation and their anxiety about the war’s consequences. (Later on, we shall find a new and more action-oriented kind of language at work in other characters.) But they try to hold on to some degree of hope, and wish piously, “good win out in glory in the end” (125 and 160).

The Chorus next introduces the theme of the fall of royal houses (line 165ff), a pattern that began with the gods: while the male principle may reign supreme, its rule has been anything but serene since the patriarchal gods Kronos, Saturn, and Zeus fought with one another. At line 180, the Chorus claims that we may “suffer into truth” and that we shall attain “ripeness” (182) or a degree of wisdom and balance. They believe, in other words, that we learn only through suffering. The Greek passage for lines 180-84 runs τὸν φρονεῖν βροτοὺς ὁδώ- / σαντα, τὸν πάθειμάθος / θέντα κυρίως ἔχειν. / στάζει δ’ ἔν θ’ ὕπνῳ πρὸκαρδίας / μνησιπήμων πόνος : καὶ παρ ’ ἄ- / κοντας ἦλθε σωφρονεῖν. / δαιμόνων δ έπου χάρις βίαιος / σέλμα σεμνὸν ἡμένων. (It’s the same passage that Robert F. Kennedy found moving and quoted as “ Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”) From line 200-57, the Chorus goes on to detail Agamemnon’s frenzy in killing his daughter, and the bind in which he has been placed—he can either do justice to his own daughter and let down his fleet, or he can do justice to the public cause and kill his daughter. Either choice will bring consequences. Agamemnon realizes he may bring another curse upon his own house. His was not a willing sacrifice, so it was not a pure one.

258-358. Although the Chorus members say they trust the Queen, towards whom they now turn to address, they keep peppering her with doubts, and at 277, Clytemnestra says she feels they are treating her like a child and ridiculing her, and she explains how she set up the torch-signal system as a way of learning the outcome of the Trojan War: “And I ordained it all. / Torch to torch, running for their lives, / one long succession racing home my fire” (313-15). Her words are rewarded with the pronouncement, “Spoken like a man, my lady, loyal, / full of self-command” (354-56).

359-492. Clytemnestra having re-entered the palace, the Chorus praises Jupiter and the Goddess Night. Now they see the fall of Troy as justice, momentarily realigning themselves with the Queen’s view. But they continue to emphasize the pain and anguish caused by war, and by line 470, they have returned to questioning Clytemnestra’s authority, finding it impossible to accept that a woman can rule.

493-682. The Herald enters and first informs the Chorus that the war has indeed ended. He gives us the soldier’s perspective on war, with all its confusion, despair, and triumph. Agamemnon is nearby. When Clytemnestra enters at line 580, she publicly declares her loyalty to the soon-returning King; she has been, she insists, utterly faithful and pure: “in ill repute I am / as practiced as I am in dyeing bronze” (607-08).

The Herald departs after telling the Chorus (which remains after Clytemnestra returns to the palace) that Menelaus has been swept away by the sea-storms that hit the returning Greek fleet. Like Odysseus of Ithaca, Menelaus is destined to do some wandering before he makes it back home, in his case to Sparta. As for the cause of the storms, here is what Apollodorus says in his compendium of Greek myths:

“Troy is sacked … Lokrian Aias [Ajax], when he saw Kassandra clinging to the wooden statue of Athena, raped her: for this reason the wooden image gazes up to the sky … As they were about to sail off after ravishing Troy, they were held back by Kalkhas[Calchas], who told them that Athena was enraged at them because of the impious act of Aias. They were on the verge of slaying Aias when he ran to an altar, so they let him live. After all this they held an assembly, during which Agamemnon insisted they stay and sacrifice to Athena. So Diomedes, Nestor, and Menelaos all left at the same time. The first two had a good voyage, but Menelaos encountered a storm … Agamemnon left after making his sacrifice, and put in at Tenedos. Thetis came to persuade Neoptolemos to wait two days and make sacrifices, and he obeyed her. But the others left and were overtaken by storms in the region of Tenos, for Athena had begged Zeus to send a storm upon the Hellenes. Many ships sank. Athena threw a thunderbolt at the ship of Aias. As the ship fell apart, he scrambled to safety on a rock and declared that he had survived despite Athena’s designs. Then Poseidon struck the rock with his trident, splitting it in two, and Aias fell into the sea and was drowned.” Apollodorus, The Library E5.22-6.6.

683-793. The Chorus members set forth their view of the Trojan War’s cause: Helen. That view is hardly uncommon, though I wouldn’t pin it on Homer’s epics—Homer is more sophisticated than that. (Gorgias of Leontini deals the anti-Helenistas a blow in his famous “Encomium of Helen,” providing a number of argument-lines in the great lady’s favor.) But the Chorus members say also that “Only the reckless act / can breed impiety, multiplying crime on crime” (751-52). As the Norton editors point out, this view departs from the common one that too much good fortune in itself is enough to bring disaster on mere mortals.

794-841. Agamemnon completely misses the point of the Chorus’ warning about disloyalty at home. The conquering hero is tone-deaf, a politician-king too drunk with his own glory to hear what others are saying to him or, at least until the end of his address to the Chorus, to notice that Clytemnestra has been hauling out the Tyrian red carpet for his entry. He thinks the most important thing now is to establish a tribunal to hear “this cause involving men and gods” (830). He may be addressing the Chorus’ concerns as he understands them—i.e. the traitors, whoever they may be, must be tried and punished. His next words are full of unintended irony: “Wherever something calls for drastic cures / we make our noblest effort: amputate or wield / the healing iron, burn the cancer at the roots” (834-36).

842-976. Addressing first the Chorus, Clytemnestra tries to build sympathy for her loneliness and suffering during Agamemnon’s long absence at Troy. To the King himself, she explains that their son Orestes has been sent away, supposedly to keep him safe in case disaster should strike at home. Dissembling her rage at him, she overcompensates by insisting that he must enter the palace only by walking on a Tyrian crimson or purple carpet. Agamemnon distrusts this gesture and finds it excessive, declaring bluntly that his wife is trying to reverse their roles and make him out to be an effeminate dandy: “You treat me like a woman. Groveling, gaping up at me! / What am I, some barbarian peacocking out of Asia? (912-13) Agamemnon himself has already spoken like a true politician, flattering and impressing the Chorus, but now he finds his wife’s words and gestures insincere. Clytemnestra manages to bend his will to hers even as they both compete in a display of strength. The Trojan War was initiated to avenge an act of inhospitality and betrayal, and now the chief among the Greeks’ returning heroes is to be brought down by the supreme inhospitality of his own wife.

977-1031. The Chorus is terrified, and seems to hear a “dirge of the Furies” (994) promising death to Agamemnon. There may be some hint of the Atreides’ history, but it seems that as yet the exact nature of the threat is not specified. Perhaps, as the editors suggest, the Chorus fears for Agamemnon because of his “triumphant excess” in the Trojan War, wherein so many on both sides have died.

1032-1368. Cassandra the captured Trojan priestess of Apollo builds suspense while we await the outcome of Agamemnon’s somewhat unwilling entrance into the palace. Refusing the Queen’s devious invitation to enter after Agamemnon, Cassandra laments and rails wildly, retelling the curse of the House of Atreus, which she describes as “the house that hates god, / an echoing womb of guilt, kinsmen torturing kinsmen, severed heads, / slaughterhouse of heroes, soil streaming blood” (1088-91). She reinvokes the horrible banquet to which Thyestes was treated by Atreus (see above, “ Background: the House of Atreus”) , and tries in vain to make the Chorus understand that even now the slaughter is being prepared as Clytemnestra casts her “net flung out of hell” to trap Agamemnon and render him helpless for the death blow. Cassandra finely refers to herself as the “last ember” (1174) of burning Troy, and laments her city’s losses. When the Chorus members ask her how she knows so much about the shameful history of the Atreides, she explains her relationship with Apollo—the god, enraged at her last-minute refusal to have intercourse with him, burdened her with the gift of prophetic powers that would nonetheless carry no weight with those Cassandra tries to warn. She knows now that she was brought to Argos to meet her fate alongside Agamemnon, and in the end resigns herself to it, asking only in her last dirge that “when the avengers cut the assassins down / they will avenge me too” (1348-49).

1369-1604. The deed is done, and Clytemnestra is by no means in the mood to quiet down and “lawyer up,” as they say on today’s crime shows. No, she positively exults in her bloody act: “Words, endless words I’ve said to serve the moment— / Now it makes me proud to tell the truth” (1391-92). She even struck the King a third time, she says, for good measure, and standing before the Chorus, she declares, “I revel / like the Earth when the spring rains come down, / the blessed gifts of god, and the new green spear / splits the sheath and rips to birth in glory!” (1412-13) Agamemnon, she says, is her “masterpiece of Justice” (1430), and although the feeble Chorus would banish her on the spot, she is at this moment more conquering hero than Greek woman—quite a transgressive thing to be in a patriarchal culture like that of the ancient Greeks, and not a role acceptable to the Chorus, who in spite of her heroism see her as a deceiver rather than as the bold warrior she wants to be. She has long resented and loathed Agamemnon for several reasons. There was his covetousness regarding Achilles’ prized concubine Chryseis over in Troy—now Cassandra lies dead in proxy payment for that insult. And when the Chorus invokes Helen as the cause of it all again, Clytemnestra turns on them furiously: “never turn / your wrath on her, call her / the scourge of men” (1491-92). At this point, the Queen claims to be nothing less than the Fury that follows the doomed House of Atreus: “Fleshed in the wife of this dead man, / the spirit lives within me, / our savage ancient spirit of revenge. / In return for Atreus’ brutal feast / he kills his perfect son—for every murdered child, a crowning sacrifice” (1528-32). Agamemnon was, of course, the son of Atreus, so killing him is payback on the part of Thyestes. Perhaps most heinous of Agamemnon’s outrages, however, is the fact that he sacrificed daughter Iphigeneia for the fleet’s sake on the way to Troy, as Calchas the priest directed him.

1605-1708 (end). Aegisthus, son of Thyestes, enters and reminds everyone of the dreadful banquet to which his father had been treated. Together, he and Clytemnestra somewhat ignominiously brave the feeble old Chorus, with Aegisthus even claiming he will work to civilize the rude people of Argos. The play ends with Clytemnestra’s declaration to Aegisthus, “Let them howl—they’re impotent. You and I have power now. / We will set the house in order once for all.” Which remark, of course, sounds like the mother of all premature conclusions: there simply is no way to set the House of Atreus in order—at least not here in Argos itself.

Line-by-Line Comments on Aeschylus’ The Eumenides, from The Oresteia

1-65. Pythia prays first to earth and tradition, and then she mentions Phoebus Apollo, the civilized and prophetic god. Apollo speaks for Zeus. She praises Athena, Dionysus, and Zeus. We might take this prayer as foretelling need to placate all the gods, and the Furies later. As Simon Goldhill says, relations in the divine order mirror the uncertainty and strife we see in the human realm. Right after this prayer, at line 33, Pythia appears to be shaken: she envisions first a man, Orestes, coming as suppliant to Apollo’s Oracle at Delphi. She also sees beings that she can’t identify and that must have to do with pollution. From lines 33-65, Pythia insists that Apollo must purge his own house: the gods are not exempt from the need to purify their order after their deeds have befouled it.

66-96. Apollo promises to help Orestes. Even Apollo does not name the Furies, though he calls them eternal virgins and obscenities. He counsels Orestes to go to Athena’s sanctuary. At line 85, Apollo says he’ll devise the master stroke—it seems he admits some responsibility for what has happened. Orestes wants strict justice, which Apollo knows must be tempered with compassion or at least with a sense of realism. The Furies are loathed by men and gods, so they will all have to come to terms with these creatures.

97-139. Clytemnestra rouses the Furies. She says that for those she killed, the charges of the dead will never cease. Her own Furies owe her something—a dream is calling them, she says. The Furies cry out in their sleep, “Get him.” A dream calls them, and now Clytemnestra calls them. The underworld’s shades are not phantoms—they are real and have real effects upon those they visit. At line 136, Clytemnestra insists that the charges she levels are just. As always, she does not lack for eloquence combined with a certain bluntness. Orestes having escaped, the Furies awaken.

144-75. The Furies speak, first lamenting the loss of their prey. The quarry has slipped from the nets—that’s the same reference used in reference to Clytemnestra’s killing of Agamemnon. She will set them on Orestes as hunters. Unless this happens, thinks Clytemnestra, there’s no justice. Around line 173, the Furies accuse Apollo of polluting his own shrine.

176-232. Apollo argues with the Furies, who (at line 151) have accused him of taking away their prerogatives. He sides with civility, reason, and order, employing a series of violent images to describe the Furies—they belong with wild animals and with people who act like wild animals. Apollo doesn’t accept their right to be where they are. But isn’t he denying the prerogative of the revenge cycle, which he calls unacceptable and loathsome? He says the order of Olympus will be against the Furies, but that won’t happen at the trilogy’s end. Apollo accuses the Furies of being unbalanced in their notions about justice: they privilege Clytemnestra because killing a mother is killing irreplaceable flesh and blood, and with that proposition the male god disagrees. At line 222, Apollo puts his faith in Athena. At line 230, he says that Orestes would become a terror to gods and men, a frustrated suppliant, if his killing of Clytemnestra isn’t validated. Incivility and not keeping one’s word, not observing proper relations between gods and men, are Apollo’s greatest anxieties. He has no problem with more or less “forgetting” how the Olympian order itself came to power, it seems.

233-407. Orestes prays to Athena’s statue, but his call for help isn’t answered at once. The Furies, with their references to hunting, appear to him first. Notice the reference to the Eagle of Zeus hunting the hare. At line 235, Orestes says he’s purified, his hands are clean. But he’s still an outcast, and the Furies don’t recognize his statement as valid. They have come to a holy part of the City, thirsting for blood.

253-73. The Furies speak of their kind of justice—blood for blood, not Athenian law. They invoke the might of Hades, their own realm. They don’t see this invocation as a call to perpetual anarchy: the accounts of men’s deeds are written on Hades’ tablets. Revenge, as Sir Francis Bacon says disapprovingly in an essay written around 1600, is “a kind of wild justice.” The Furies favor the argument from antiquity: their justice is binding upon men and gods, and it predates (and therefore supercedes) written law and civic institutions. Perhaps Aeschylus wants to show the persistence of tradition even in the fifth-century-BCE present. One cannot wish away the violent past or the traditional ways of dealing with it. Even settled law and order are always beset by the threat of violence, and it’s vital not to forget that fact.

287-90. Orestes invokes Athena; he wants justice without a battle. He wants a new settlement for himself and Argos.

304-06. The Furies assert their own parallel authority: they must sacrifice Orestes to their own law, unwillingly, which is corrupt sacrificial practice. (Ritual sacrifice of animals, by the way, called for getting the victim to “nod” approval of its treatment.) Just as Apollo said he would use a spell, so will they. They sing a chain-song to bind human beings, a song we must balance against the Olympian hymns at the trilogy’s end, and vice versa. The two songs must, that is, be made to harmonize.

307-407. The Furies extol the independence of their own realm, and the result is an oxymoronic hymn of fury. They pray to their Mother Night (Nyx), and call Apollo a whelp. Nobody can shake their grip, and the Fates have given them independence even from the gods. They mock the notion of a trial, standing instead upon their rights. They insist at line 363 that Zeus wouldn’t champion Orestes or Apollo. Everyone is arguing over what the gods will do. Neither do the Furies accept Orestes’ washing of his hands—see line 362, where he is still described as “streaked with blood.” At lines 372 and following, the Furies mock men’s dreams of grandeur—so much for human pretensions, aspirations and illusions; they will be swallowed up by this realm that antedates even the order of the gods. Proleiptically, the dreams of grandeur referenced by the Furies would include Athenian edifices of law and stone: the classical and golden era of art. All these ways of building up humanity will be lost when the Furies sing and dance. Their language threatens to undermine human beings’ attempts to use these artistic forms in the service of civilization. Here we are close to the territory of Friedrich Nietzsche’s early writing about the inseparable “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” elements in Greek culture—a great deal of what we call “civilization” seems to depend upon what Nietzsche labels forgetting—forgetting the necessary violence and cruelty that went into the beautiful forms and practices we deem worthiest of humanity. The Furies, at least (and in their unforgiving manner), don’t want us to forget. If they had their way, we may imagine the bad memories piling on top of earlier bad memories, the outraged cries filling the air with cacophony until all is overwhelmed. It would be our own fault since, after all, the Furies don’t commit the outrages themselves. Even so, the earth would soon become unlivable.

Apollo, by contrast, is determined to make his hymns to reason and Olympian order prevail: harmony will replace anarchy. This point connects to Aeschylus’ probable view of drama’s power—it’s an art form that urges harmony (or at least a working settlement) between man and god, an understanding between them. As always with the Greeks, aesthetics turns out to be more than mere entertainment or relief; it’s part of the strategy we have devised to maintain our place on earth and in the presence of the gods. From lines 399-403, the Furies deny any possible evolution from the wild and violent to the civilized. At line 401, they refer to their own prerogatives as law. Apollonian constructions that help the Greeks endure are not to be allowed. One possible contradiction emerges from lines 396-407: the Furies say that they have their pride, but they also admit that they have been banished to the realm beneath the earth. Nonetheless, their assertion of eternal privilege and sacrosanct status does not entirely square with the facts. It seems that change can occur, in spite of the Furies.

408-449. Athena enters, armed for combat, in defiance of what Orestes had asked. Both the Furies and Orestes start off equal in Athena’s eyes—she mixes them together. The Furies must name themselves as curses and daughters of the night. Athena is fair-minded and she will accept the facts. The Furies, meanwhile insist again that revenge never ends as far as they are concerned. Athena distinguishes between the name of justice and the act of justice; she would like to see a settlement amongst the warring parties. At lines 444 and following, a pivotal moment occurs because the Furies exhibit some interest in a settlement—this may come as a surprise considering what they claimed earlier. The point Athena makes to them is that oath-taking should never lead to injustice. As Simon Goldhill says, we are dealing in part with an argument over the purpose of language—how does it mediate between or affect the various realms?

461-65. Orestes says to Athena that he has purified himself, and then explains why he killed his mother. Apollo shares the guilt, Orestes says. He implies that he was in a bind: he had to avenge his father, or face punishment. Orestes wants to know if he has acted justly, and he wants things to end.

484-85. Even Athena will call for a full trial—humans must get involved. She acknowledges the Furies’ power. So she is in a bind, too, along with Agamemnon over Iphigenia, Clytemnestra over the murder of Iphigenia, and Orestes over both his parents. It seems that the divine realm mirrors the uncertainty of the human realm with regard to relationships.

497-99. From the interaction between men and gods will come a way to settle the problems permanently. A new justice that will involve all three realms.

506-71. The Furies sing a powerful song: if Orestes wins, they ask, what’s the point of living? Violence would overwhelm the cosmos. They say 536-41 that they want a settlement and ‘‘ measure.’’ At this point, revenge consists in measure. We will find later that Athena agrees with them, at least to an extent. The Furies see themselves as powers bringing order and measure when humans threaten anarchy. They ally themselves with a kind of justice we might not have given them credit for understanding. In essence, they counsel that fear restrains men and women from doing injustice, that fear lies at the heart of religion itself—who will respect the gods if there is no fear, if all is decided and arranged on the basis of shallow reason?

What, therefore, must happen? Humans must accept the Furies as a counterforce, and must accept them into the civic space and psyche of Athens. In being accepted, they are renamed as “the Well-Abiding” rather than the Erinyes or Furies. Are they transformed, or are people’s perceptions of them transformed? It seems to me that the latter is the case. Violent impulses and movements must always be hemmed in by the Furies’ “tide that threatens to sweep the world.” Anarchy and violence are present in the founding of civic order, and cannot be banished entirely. Rather, we need words, song, dance, law, and magic charms to contain it and yet embrace its presence and power over us. See line 517: we can only define true justice against what threatens it. Anarchy faces those who deny the Furies’ power.

585: Apollo says he’s partly responsible, and asks that the trial proceed. He has always said he trusted Athena.

591-614. The Fury leader questions Orestes, who turns to Apollo. The Fury leader is playing lawyer at this point—this “lawyering up” constitutes tacit consent to the trial, to the institution of a new kind of justice. They want to be players in this new game.

630-84. Apollo argues back, using Athena as his main exhibit in favor of the male principle. She sprang from Zeus’ head, and Zeus is the most powerful god of all. From 643 on, Apollo offers a lawyerly description of Clytemnestra’s crime. His enthusiasm, though brief, evokes her exultant language transforming the deed. At 650, the Furies remind Apollo that Zeus shackled his father Cronos. Apollo’s response is emotional, not rational—he’s really praising might as right. Still, when humans do an injustice, it’s irretrievable, while Zeus can make things right. But the Furies still want to know at lines 661-63 how Orestes could possibly fit into the civic order given what he has done. From 665-84, Apollo makes his concluding speech or “peroration” to warlike Athena, as a negation of the female principle. But Athena is still a goddess, so things are more complicated than Apollo credits. He appeals to the male principle in Athena, who was not, we recall, born of a mother—she sprang fully grown from the head of Zeus.

692-725. Athena sounds much like the Furies as she calls for the casting of lots. Neither anarchy nor tyranny should be the goal; we must never banish terror from the gates, not outright. The Areopagus will remain “swift to fury.” Notice the reference to keeping watch, which is the way the trilogy began. Athena’s act is foundational—here she inaugurates and defines the powers of the Court of the Areopagus. There seems to be a mixing together of the male and female. She mentions the Amazons who fought Duke Theseus. Notice the phallic language Fagles (our translator) employs. The Amazons sacrifice to Ares, god of war, and Athena is standing with the Amazons. As for the Areopagus, the term ties in to contemporary politics just before Aeschylus’ play was produced. In 462 BCE, a democratic, anti-Spartan reformer named Ephialtes tried to limit the still mostly aristocratic power of the Council of the Areopagus mainly to homicide cases. He was later assassinated, and in 461 BCE Pericles took over the reformist party and became the ascendant power in Athens until his death in 429 BCE. (That was a few years into the disastrous Second Peloponnesian War with Sparta that lasted from 431-404 BCE; the first one stretched out undeclared from 460-445 BCE). Perhaps Aeschylus’ audience would have seen the playwright’s own attitude as favoring the aristocratic Council; but one can’t be too sure about this thesis since in the play, as some critics have pointed out, the Court seems to have only the powers Ephialtes himself wanted it to have.

726-48. Here Apollo and the Furies argue. Both threaten each other. They’re all waiting to see how things will turn out. On the whole the Furies aren’t very good prosecutors—the new kind of law, born of compromise, will require a suppleness in administration and mediation that the zealous Furies lack. The only arrow in their quiver is the “slippery slope” argument that if their claim be denied, anarchy will prevail and the bloodletting will never cease. But the ten judges of the new Areopagus that Athena has founded on the site of an Amazon challenge to Duke Theseus will prove able to handle the complexities, the balancing and stressing act, required to keep the City going in future.

750. Athena declares in advance that she will vote for Orestes.

760. Orestes prays to Apollo for an end, one way or the other. They say much the same—either they’ll go down forever, or they’ll win. But things won’t be so clear-cut.

768-790. Freed, Orestes praises Athena, Apollo, and Zeus, promising Argos’ friendship with the Athenians. He says he will visit punishment on anyone who breaks the deal. He sounds like Athena and the Furies here.

791-899. The Furies reel and lament, repeating themselves in an elegiac passage. Athena bears with their anger, and shapes it. At first she doesn’t have much success. The Furies complain that much has been taken from them. Athena promises them a home. I don’t see that they change; rather, the perspective of gods and humans alters in their favor.

912-40. The Fury leader wants the power to bind people forever, and Athena acknowledges that they are connected with the dark soil, rooted in the earth. They will be the power that underlies the City and its institutions, and whoever denies this power will face disaster. This granted, the Furies have no reason to deny Athenians the produce of their rocky soil or render the people barren.

951-1058 (end). Athena promises clarity of relations between the realms. The Furies will have a clearly defined space and role, and will suffer no dishonor. Her Olympian hymns and promises function as something like a magic spell. In Christian terms, one thinks of Faustus summoning Mephistopheles, prince of darkness. But with the Greeks we are dealing with pre-Christian legend, so it isn’t “evil” that we see in operation in The Oresteia. The forces threatening the social space and the individual psyche are summoned in this trilogy by means of divine intervention, song, spectacle, and dance. The Furies are invited into the City, become associated with what is best in it, and are there to stay, undergirding its bright surfaces and great accomplishments. Athens can’t just banish the Furies; the City must come to terms with them, renaming them and welcoming them as guarantors of all it holds dear.

Week 04, Homer, Pindar

General Notes on Greek Culture and Homer’s The Odyssey.

One of the best short introductions I’ve ever heard concerning ancient Greek culture is the rather Nietzschean one I heard years ago from Martin Schwab of UC Irvine. He asks us to consider Fragment 42 by Sappho: “Eros seizes and shakes my very soul / Like the wind on the mountain shaking ancient oaks” (Ἔρος δαὖτ' ἐτίναξεν ἔμοι φρένας, / ἄνεμος κατ' ὄρος δρύσιν ἐμπέσων). “Eros,” the God of love, is treated as a personalized agent, not just as a physiological passion. There is constant interaction between such external agents and the human individual. The speaker can respond to what is being done to her. Eros comes from without and is a force to be reckoned with, but Sappho’s speaker can show her mettle by the way she actively embraces this power rather than shrinking from its potentially destructive effects. Similarly, in Greek tragedies, protagonists can position themselves with respect to whatever catastrophe the gods or other human beings (as well as their own mistakes) have set in motion. With a mixture of joy and anxiety, Sappho’s speaker stands on the hillside prepared to be shaken, though not uprooted. A well-rooted persona, she lets herself be shaken; she contributes to the unfolding event because she is strong enough to let herself be overcome. The Greeks admire strength, then, both in the sense of physical valor and in the sense of remaining open to the extremes of experience. Odysseus exemplifies such openness, and nowhere is this quality more evident than in the books I have chosen to assign, 9-12, in which the hero recounts his long story of adventure to the nobility and citizens of Phaeacia, where he has found dry land after the dreadful raft-wreck that he suffers upon leaving Calypso’s enchanting island. The poet’s imperative is to send Odysseus home to re-establish his sovereignty in his native kingdom of Ithaca, but these four books betray how difficult that task is: the worldly-wise, resourceful Odysseus, always the accomplished talker, seems to relish his experiences at least as much as any intended outcomes, and he warms to the polite demand that (like a good guest) he should render an account of himself to those who have graciously extended him their hospitality. I’ll move on to some observations about Books 9-12, but first, here is some further introductory material about The Odyssey as a whole:

The consensus is that around 750-720 BCE, The Odyssey (a later text than The Iliad) was written down in complete form. The earliest surviving full manuscript is that of Laurentianus, 10 th-11 th century CE, although fragments of the text exist from the 3 rd century BCE, when there were several versions in circulation, including a commonly accepted or “vulgate” edition. Our text is probably the vulgate as corrected by the Alexandrian scholars of the third century BCE and later corrupted somewhat by successive copyists.

The storylines of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey take us back another 500 years, to 1250-1225 BCE (the late Bronze Age), which some historians believe culminated in a war between the Greeks (then called Achaeans) and the inhabitants of Troy, in modern Turkey. What were these “Achaeans” like? Well, around 2000 BCE, Indo-European people entered southern Greece , and encountered an already well-developed Minoan culture. The Myceneans or Achaeans overcame and yet borrowed from Minoan culture. Then came (perhaps) the warlike sailing expedition to Troy , in which the Achaean host proved victorious. Around 1200 BCE the glorious palace-centered lifestyle of the Mycenaean civilization collapsed during a period of invasion, and a Dark Age spanning from 1150 BCE to 750 BCE set in, during time which a people called the Dorians swept down into Greece and settled. But by around 800 BCE, the population had begun to grow, and half a century after that the city-state form of governance began to take hold in Greece . That emergence coincides roughly with the date of composition for Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. So Homer’s time was one in which a so-called Dark Age had just begun to lift and a more settled and prosperous order was on the way. The way he describes Greek life perhaps owes more to his own day than to the glorious past in which his heroes lived and acted.

It is impossible to say exactly who “Homer” was. Was he in fact the glorious blind bard of tradition, or an entire series of authors? As Homer’s best modern translator Robert Fagles says, whatever the truth may be and some middling stylistic/narratival discrepancies aside, the texts we have certainly read like the products of a single master storyteller. Experts say some parts of the two epics are older than others, and of course the written texts come from a long oral tradition in which episodes may have been recounted in their own right. Perhaps what we now have is a “stitched-together” masterpiece woven by someone who knew all the stories and their interrelations.

Homer’s poetry was meant to be heard, not read. I will read some of the original to give you a sense of its rhythm and sound. I like Fagles’ translation because I find in his version the four qualities that Victorian classicist Matthew Arnold identified as Homeric: rapidity, directness of idea and diction, and nobility. It sounds great when recited aloud. Homer impels us forward with great ease, maintaining our interest—he doesn’t dawdle (unless we expect the terseness of modern newspaper articles) or become pompous or needlessly complex, and he even describes ordinary things with such appropriateness that, as Arnold might say, his descriptions don’t break the text’s overall “nobility” of expression and subject. Homer is resourceful like his hero, Odysseus—never at a loss to find the right way to respond to his subject or situation. Since the genre we are dealing with here is epic, what are its key qualities, and how does The Odyssey show them?

1. The hero is of high standing, and usually of national significance. Odysseus is king of Ithaca , a Greek island and its mainland surroundings. He’s also something of a Greek “everyman”—the type of strong, wily character that Greeks everywhere admired.

2. Homer’s subject is heroic deeds, battles, and long journeys. For example, the Iliad is about the ten-year Trojan War; the Odyssey deals with the ten-year wanderings and homecoming of Odysseus after the Trojan War and with the maturing of his son, Telemachus, into a young man worthy to take his father’s place. The story in both epics begins in medias res (in the middle of things). By the time the Odyssey begins, the ten-year Trojan War has ended with a Greek victory and Odysseus has been wandering still another ten years; he is now ready to return to Ithaca and re-establish his authority there. The poet refers as necessary to the previous twenty years’ events, and makes Odysseus recount his own wanderings to his temporary hosts in Phaeacia. (The Odyssey’s immediate action, by the way, takes place over approximately 40 days.)

3. Epic verse is elevated and heroic in tone, but not “pompous.” We often find epic similes likening human things to divine or grand things. Epic heroes are generally “godlike” rather than merely mortal in ability and lineage. The ocean that causes Odysseus so much heartache is not just any drab ocean, it’s an oinopos pontos—a “winedark sea,” the province of Poseidon and many nymphs. And when the sun sets, Homer’s verse often memorializes this everyday event by inserting a variant of the lovely stock phrase, “the sun sank, and the roads of the world grew dark” (3.557 Fagles; 497 Perseus online Greek edition: δύσετό τ' ἠέλιος σκιόωντό τε πᾶσαι ἀγυιαί.).

4. The action involves both humans and gods. In the Odyssey, humans like Odysseus, the gods on Mount Olympus , and the underworld realm of Hades all have dealings with one another.

5. The setting is world-wide, or even cosmic, in scale. Many of the places mentioned in The Odyssey are probably real, but some—the further west one goes—are obviously mythical.

6. The story is comic, not tragic; that is, although there may be a great deal of violence and suffering, the hero is successful in his exploits and upholds the values of his culture. In a tragedy, the story begins with the hero at the height of power, and then comes a fall that the hero deserves because of his or her “hubris,” or arrogation of inappropriate powers.

7. The poet-narrator is objective and does not interpose himself between us and the story. Homer doesn’t leap out of the poem and start telling us about himself, or even about the fictional “narrator.” In the Odyssey there are, however, some interesting references to “bards” and to weaving and singing—actions that we may take as referring to the craft and significance of poetry.

8. Epic is designed to carry out a cultural task: as Martin Schwab of UC Irvine says, an epic is a long poem that participates in and tries to affect the civilization it describes. This is certainly true of great works such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and Milton ’s Paradise Lost. Just to take the last-mentioned example, it’s clear that Milton wants to place the failure of the Puritan cause he supported against the British monarchy in the broad context of human error, both political and personal. In The Odyssey, while Homer pays tribute to Greek wanderlust and openness to experience of all kinds, he seems determined to suffuse the difficult, post-heroic era in which he and his hearers/readers live with the resourceful valor of an earlier heroic age (circa 1250 BCE). Odysseus, a worldly adventurer and warrior who has relations with gods and demigods, must return home to make order in the small-scale domestic setting of his native Ithaca.

Line-by-Line Notes on Homer’s Odyssey, Books 9-12.

Book 9

Readers of The Odyssey know that Odysseus is a resourceful character who can size up other people and situations and find a way out of a tight spot. He is self-possessed enough to know when to conceal or dissemble his intentions and identity, and when to speak and act directly. This is a man who knows when to talk and when to act; his actions, words, and thoughts (insofar as we are granted access to his thoughts) nearly always seem to be appropriate and consonant with one another. He responds with courage to the situations that fate, the gods, and his own passions confront him with. Odysseus, then, is the ideal Greek—not perfect, perhaps, but always worthy of emulation. The subject of Book 9 is the interaction between Odysseus and crew and the Cyclops Polyphemus. How does Odysseus get his men in trouble and out of it? The men would prefer to steal their dinner and run, but not their captain. He is insatiably curious—a quality for which the narrator by no means condemns him throughout The Odyssey, but one that he will have to restrain if he is to regain his old status as King of Ithaca.

12-32. At this point, Odysseus’ task as storyteller to the Phaeacians parallels that of the narrator throughout the epic: to arrange the past in such a way as to make some order emerge, to derive some lesson from it all. Words are a vehicle for expression, but they are also a medium of self-restraint (taming, containing); they help us put our experiences into order and renew our acquaintance with priorities.

33-41. Odysseus admits the great power of Circe and Calypso, but insists that they never really stole his heart since “nothing is as sweet as a man’s own country” (38). The very names of these two witches derive from the Greek for, respectively, “circle” (but the word for “hawk” is very similar) and “to cover (kalypto).

44-70. Odysseus and his men encounter the Cicones. The Greeks dally, slaughtering sheep and drinking too much, and the Cicones band together to drive Odysseus’ men to a rather ignominious retreat. The problem isn’t that they sacked the place—Odysseus actually seems proud of his decision to do so, and such action is evidently nothing new for him (piracy wasn’t a dishonorable trade, in the ancient Greeks’ view—at least not until Classical times). The problem is that they don’t know when to move on. In light of the task they must still accomplish (the homecoming), their behavior is no longer heroic, and mutiny is the logical result. Many an ancient battle was surely lost after it was won simply because the weary, ill-remunerated troops couldn’t resist stopping to plunder what they had taken by the sword.

93-117. It seems that marijuana-like “calm-down” narcotics have been around forever, to judge from this episode. According to the Wikipedia entry on the Lotophagoi (Lotos-Eaters), the plant is most likely a North African variety called “ziziphus lotus, a relative of the jujube.” According to Homer’s fanciful episode, the lotus plant induces forgetfulness—of family and homeland, heroic quests and high words, everything. It quenches desire for everything but the lotus itself, and for sleep. Odysseus hurries his men back to their ships in the face of such danger, and indeed he hurries past the tale itself as he tells it to the Phaeacians. If we want more, we will have to look to Tennyson’s modern poem, The Lotos-Eaters, where the “brother Mariners” sing in a dilatory stupor about their resentment of the gods and of the “toil” that is the lot of human beings.

118-259. Now it’s on to the main event—Odysseus’ encounter with the Cyclops Polyphemus. This giant lives a life of pastoral ease, and cares nothing for the laws of hospitality. That kind of life (or something even easier) was what the crew wanted when they came into contact with the lotus plant, but such a life isn’t for men of action. Law and labor are the mainstays of mortal life. Driven by Odysseus’ curiosity, the Greeks behave in a rather un-guestlike way towards Polyphemus, and for once the men seem wise in their preference for simply making off with some of the delicious cheeses to which they’ve been helping themselves.

260-316. Soon enough, Polyphemus returns from his herding, only to find that strangers have taken up residence in his home. The giant turns out to be no better a host than the Greeks are guests, and we find him (a son of Poseidon, apparently) mocking the power of Zeus, god of suppliants. He flatly rejects Odysseus’ attempts at civil conversation, and wants only to find out where the men’s ship is so he can destroy it.

316-411. At this juncture, Odysseus is forced to work up a clever scheme, and his best means is Polyphemus’ tree-length wooden staff, which the Greek crew must sharpen and harden by fire while the giant bolts down six men. Οὖτις ἐμοί γ ' ὄνομα : Οὖτιν δέ με κικλήσκουσι / μήτηρ ἠδὲ πατὴρ ἠδ ' ἄλλοι πάντες ἑταῖροι ’ (“Nobody is my name: Nobody—that’s what my mother, my father, and all my comrades call me.” Perseus 9.366-67), says Odysseus, making the best of a bad situation. The brute Polyphemus has little command of linguistic subtlety, so the captain’s wordplay (along some extreme but carefully timed violence) is an appropriate way to defeat this uncivilized brute.

412-528. The hideous scheme of blinding the one-eyed Polyphemus pays off, but still Odysseus and his men must do some high-quality feigning to make it out of the cave alive: they pretend to be the giant’s sheep, and the trick works.

529-630. The danger really should be past by now, but Odysseus’ recklessness nearly gets him killed along with his entire crew. He just can’t resist the opportunity to deepen Polyphemus’ psychological wound: he declares his proper name, Odysseus. This exuberance will, of course, cost him dearly, as it gives Poseidon all the more reason to be angry with him. It commonly happens in Greek literature that a character’s most admirable trait (whether exercised too strongly or not, as it is here) is what gets him or her in trouble. Odysseus’ daring is admirable, but it is also reckless. The pre-Classical Greeks aren’t much given to praising restraint for restraint’s sake or defining virtue as the mean between extremes (as Aristotle would later do), but knowing when to keep one’s name to oneself is something Odysseus really needed to do at this point, and he has failed to do it.

Book 10

17ff. Odysseus tells his war adventures to good effect, and recounts how he stayed a month with Aeolus, god of the winds. The god gives him a bag of favorable wind, but on the tenth day of sailing, Odysseus’ resentful crew open the bag, supposing that it contains riches they deserve as well as their captain. The crew are remarkably inconsistent and very much driven by their passions: this time it isn’t fear that spurs them on, it’s their resentment of an obviously superior man’s privileges.

62ff. Aeolus rebuffs Odysseus when he returns with a plea for yet a second bag of winds. As so often in ancient literature, bad luck is considered a mark of shame—an unlucky person is like someone with a deadly contagious disease, and is to be shunned. It’s hard to see how Odysseus’ crew really deserve any help at this point: they’ve been disloyal. (Of course, one might question Odysseus’ decision not to tell the crew what was in the bag—he doesn’t seem to trust them, perhaps with good reason.)

115ff. Odysseus’ scouts meet the daughter of Lestrygonian King Antiphates, but soon thereafter the Lestrygonians eat two of Odysseus’ men, and he rows away with only his own ship and crew—the rest having been destroyed by huge rocks. This is what their abuse of Aeolus’ magical gift has brought them to: they have been reduced to barely sufficient human toil.

148ff. Odysseus and his men reach Aeaea, where the goddess Circe dwells. She is the daughter of the Sun and Perse. Odysseus kills a stag to feed his men, and tries to cheer them up.

243ff. Circe, the first of the two nymphs with whom Odysseus must contend, is presented to us as an enchanting songstress and spinner of webs: Κίρκης δ ' ἔνδον ἄκουον ἀειδούσης ὀπὶ καλῇ , / ἱστὸν ἐποιχομένης μέγαν ἄμβροτον , οἷα θεάων / λεπτά τε καὶ χαρίεντα καὶ ἀγλαὰ ἔργα πέλονται . τοῖσι δὲ μύθων ἦρχε Πολίτης ὄρχαμος ἀνδρῶν , / ὅς μοι κήδιστος ἑτάρων ἦν κεδνότατός τε …. 10.221-25, Perseus. Fagles translates these lines well as “deep inside they heard her singing, lifting / her spellbinding voice as she glided back and forth / at her great immortal loom, her enchanting web / a shimmering glory only goddesses can weave” (10.242-45). This passage might be compared to the slightly fuller vignette of Calypso in 5.65-84, Fagles translation.) Circe’s name Κίρκη may be derived from the Greek noun kirkis (“circle”), which would be an appropriate connotation because she hinders Odysseus, threatening to trap him in an inappropriately comfortable , carefree “domestic” situation when he still has heroic work to do. Circe first draws the captain’s men (Eurylochus excepted) into her charmed circle, making them forget their quest to return home, and then turns them into swine. It makes sense to suppose that the pig is Circe’s choice for Odysseus’ crew because pigs, while intelligent, are traditionally represented as easily led by desire—they wallow and feed happily, oblivious to the fact that they are being fattened to satisfy their captors’ appetite.

302ff. Odysseus, with a gift of moly from Hermes to protect him (Wikipedia describes moly as “a magic herb with a black root and white blossoms”), goes forward to confront Circe and her magic spells. This herb does what it’s supposed to do, and Odysseus remains as he is. Or at least, he remains the same in outward form. Circe has another kind of magic—the power of sex—that will work on this recalcitrant man over time. In any case, the men are returned to their original form.

472ff. Eurylochus, still afraid of Circe’s tricks, resists Odysseus’ decision to bring all his men back to the goddess’ halls. But the captain gives in to luxury and his host’s voluptuousness, and his men must remind him that it’s time to go. Sometimes for the Greeks, “giving in” to the power of sexual impulses is a mark of strength (as in the Sappho poem I’ve used, or as in William Blake’s grand line from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained”), but things don’t play out that way in this instance. At 506-12, Circe claims that she is offering the men a chance to recuperate and recover their strength before setting sail again. But an entire year passes, and when the men finally convince Odysseus to depart, Circe springs the information upon him that a trip to the Underworld will be necessary.

553ff. Circe gives specific directions to Odysseus on how to reach Hades: he must enact the proper rituals to enter this third of the three realms and wrest from it the knowledge he needs. Odysseus must go to Persephone’s sacred grove and to the “House of Death,” which seems to represent Hades itself, or the entrance point to that realm. At a certain sacred spot, Odysseus must pour libations of milk, honey, wine, and water, sprinkle barley, and vow to sacrifice to the dead generally and to Tiresias specifically when he returns home to Ithaca. The book ends on a sour note when the foolish Elpenor, besotted with wine, falls off the roof of Circe’s palace to his death.

Book 11

What attitude will Odysseus adopt towards the trip he must make to Hades and towards the shades he meets when he arrives there? The conclusion of this episode is chilling, and repays consideration: the shades crowd around Odysseus, terrifying even his stout spirit. One way to view Book 11 is to say that it shows Odysseus trying to gain the knowledge he needs and to maintain perspective in the midst of what threatens to overwhelm him. His trip to the Underworld is a severe trial as well as an opportunity to learn and satisfy his heroic curiosity. We recall that the three realms ( Olympus , Earth, and Hades) must remain distinct but in communication with one another. Those communications aren’t always easy—a point that Aeschylus reinforces later in The Oresteia. Hades has powers and prerogatives of its own—its presiding god is, after all, one of Zeus’ siblings, along with Poseidon and Hera.

65ff: The dead are commanded by Odysseus, but they in turn exert a strong influence upon him; they have their own demands to make. Even the drunkard Elpenor, who fell off the roof of Circe’s palace, implores Odysseus to observe the proper cremation and burial rites. A Greek owed this to the dead; it helped to put a cap on a person’s life, and made his transition to the Underworld go smoothly. But Tiresias makes a prophecy about Odysseus extending beyond the epic. How is Odysseus to take this? Does it round off his own life?

95ff: Gender is a main theme in Book 11: Odysseus’ mother Anticleia is dear to him, but he won’t speak to her until he fulfills his main mission, which is to get the knowledge and guidance he needs from Tiresias. Anticleia reinforces Odysseus’ desire to return home—in this way, like many of the dead, she participates as well as communicates with those still in the land of the living. And her account of what it’s like to live in Hades makes the affairs of the living seem all the more attractive. Hades isn’t really a place you want to dwell in or upon, so it must be that what we do on earth is of the greatest importance.

After Anticleia, Persephone sends Odysseus a catalog of famous royal wives and daughters. Of course Odysseus’ goal is to get home to Penelope, and even Agamemnon later admits that she, at least, is trustworthy, but even so this book shows some real concern for maintaining proper boundaries around the action proper to the male and female gender. The Greeks like strong women and can admire a transgressor like the still living Clytemnestra, but at the same time she must be taken down for her “male” actions because they are not permissible for a woman. (A point I draw from Martin Schwab of UC Irvine.) So the women Odysseus meets both in Hades and elsewhere represent a threat to his success—in the epic’s second half, it isn’t Penelope, much as he may test her, who causes the trouble; it’s those strumpets the palace maids, carrying on with the suitors.

413ff: Odysseus’ character and strength are plain to Arete and Alcinous. It seems that Odysseus’ strong character and clarity of mind lend authority to his fine tales. In that way his skill bespeaks or unfolds his heroic character. It isn’t only that he can spin a good story—any crafty beggar can do that, Alcinous implies. Odysseus exudes a sense of the close connection between action and words. Later in Greek history, Aristotle will say that the goal or end of life is action, and that by our actions we are happy or miserable. I suppose Homer would agree with that.

430ff: To drive home this point about action, I should say again that Odysseus sees his tales as steeling himself to grief and containing it within its proper boundaries. Grief should be a spur to action; it should be felt deeply, but it shouldn’t destroy the strong person who suffers its effects. The Sappho poem I quoted earlier is worth reiterating: “Eros seizes and shakes my very soul / Like the wind on the mountain / Shaking ancient oaks.” If the persona is well rooted, it may allow itself to be shaken by passion. Well, the Greeks liked to talk about these experiences, and it makes sense to say that telling and hearing tales of sorrow and hardship are themselves experiences. Engagement with words is experience and action, at least when someone like Odysseus is doing the talking. This way of taking language as experience is something that separates the men from the boys in Homer. It is a way of remaining open to experience. Another way to put this is that a Greek like Odysseus won’t fully separate art (i.e. tale-telling) from the other things that happen in life. Art is life experience; it is, as Kenneth Burke says, “equipment for living.”

431ff: Odysseus recounts Agamemnon’s anger and lamentation; there’s unfinished business in Argos . Where is Orestes? Odysseus doesn’t know. Here we have a shade calling for retribution from Hades. Orestes must avenge his father, whatever the cost in further retribution by the Furies. Agamemnon is angry at women—he starts sounding a bit like Hamlet at one point. But he isn’t saying that Penelope will rebel and join the Bad Girls’ Club. His concern probably is that not maintaining gender boundaries, not keeping genders within their proper sphere, will bring disaster to any kingdom. Gender is a principle that regulates action, it seems. (Consider the modern existentialist version of feminism as we may find it in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, where the author explains that men define themselves as “authentic” and active beings, while they define women as “inessential others” upon whose inessentiality men may prove themselves.) As mentioned earlier, a strong and active woman is admirable to Greek audiences, but she is also an object of fear and may well be subjected to punishment as a transgressor.

553ff: Achilles sets Odysseus right about Hades. It’s a shadowy place, not to be considered a place to rule perpetually with the same happiness and glory as on earth. Earth is the place to be. Achilles longs to hear how his son is doing. A child offers a more satisfying chance at immortality than Hades. Never mind what Satan says in Paradise Lost— it is not “better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.”

617ff: Great Ajax , like the other shades, “takes up an attitude” towards the living. Achilles did that too, in setting Odysseus right about the merits of the afterlife.

648ff: Odysseus’ desire to see more heroes comes to the fore. Heracles honors him with a comparison to himself—so much hard labor, a man of pain. It reminds me of how Dante makes Virgil honor him in Inferno.

End: the realms must remain distinct. Odysseus’ invasive interaction with Hades’ spirits threatens to overwhelm him, making him fear loss of command even in his own proper realm, earth. Interacting with the Powers is necessary and heroic, but it is dangerous, too. The intercommunication between realms does not mean that there’s an easy fit between them or that their respective prerogatives and claims upon us have all been settled to everyone’s satisfaction. Aeschylus will certainly point that out to us. When we get to him, ask yourself, “what is the place of the human in his drama?”

Book 12

Odysseus returns to Circe's island after his visit to Hades. This book separates the men from the boys; the crew is destroyed due to its atasthalia, reckless disregard for the gods. Book 12 is a fulcrum; Odysseus’ negotiating to return home has involved negotiating with actors in all three realms. His crew fails him at the end of the process, eating the Sun’s cattle, and only he has come through the trials.

22ff: The book shows concern for controlling the flow of information, for delineating what is proper to a hero and what constitutes mere recklessness. How to respond to experience? The crew is heedless, but Odysseus’ daring is generally more permeated with presence of mind and, sometimes, even with forethought (a quality he shares with that other great figure, Prometheus).

27ff: Circe’s attitude towards the men. Is she honest with them? The she-goddess treats Odysseus’ crew the way Agamemnon has said women should be treated: she tells them only part of the story, taking Odysseus aside to tell him all about the Sirens and about Scylla and Charybdis.

57ff: Odysseus will be allowed the maximum openness to experience because he is best prepared to “be shaken,” in the manner of the Sappho poem I quoted above. His desire is admirable, even if he must be restrained by his fellows, who are not his equals. Some people’s desires are stronger than others, and those desires will have their way—this is a point in the text where the strength of Odysseus’ desire is truly a mark of his excellence.

62ff: Scylla and Charybdis threaten catastrophe. It’s Odysseus’ choice and responsibility to take the consequences. And it’s a chance to measure up to his father Laertes, one of the Argonauts with Jason. They negotiated their way through the same trial. Odysseus keeps the knowledge of one of the killers to himself.

200ff: Here we meet the Sirens (a female noun, seiren). How much does Odysseus get to hear? More than we do? Or the same? Are they, in fact, saying anything that can be understood? Odysseus seems to be responding to a call, but I don’t believe he gets the actual knowledge, which is most likely forbidden to mortals, try though they may to discern it. These enchantresses take Odysseus to the limits of human endurance by their offer of omniscience. He braves them as a man, but in respect to the gods all is feminized. Even Odysseus can’t hear the whole story; he only hears the call to go beyond his limits.

243ff: Odysseus keeps the knowledge of Scylla to himself; he must restrain his crew from giving in to their weakness. We see a pattern of testing emerge: how much knowledge can a man take? Book 12 is a time of testing limits. And Odysseus’ retelling of this episode (along with everything else he tells them) to the Phaeacians also tests his limits of endurance—he must relive the painful experience of losing his crew to Scylla.

320ff: Eurylochus pleads weakness; the men are unheroic, and Odysseus makes them swear an oath. They are reckless because they don’t keep this oath when supplies run out. The belly is their god. But that’s not the case with Odysseus. The breaking of an oath threatens to confound the relationship between the realms; Helios complains to Zeus and says he will blaze in Hades, so Zeus has to promise he will strike Odysseus’ ship with lightning.

455: The ship is stripped bare (here the clothing/nakedness theme occurs again, as it did in the meeting between Odysseus and Princess Nausicaa at the beginning of Book 6), and it’s on to Ogygia, where Calypso abides. Odysseus says that he wouldn’t care to repeat that tale, which of course concludes with his landing on Phaeacian shores—it has been told, and told well. It’s time for him to make his way to Ithaca , with the aid of his hosts. In the grand sweep of The Odyssey, the hero hasn’t arrived at the end of his troubles and tests, but he will have reached a vital stage since from now until Book 24, his efforts will be made on his own kingdom’s rocky soil, not on the high seas or in exotic foreign lands.

Pindar Notes

Pindarus (circa 522-443 BCE), the Theban poet whose body of work has partly been lost to time (except for the epinikia or “victory odes”) writes not so much private-tending lyric as public, formal verse meant to commemorate events dear to the Greeks’ heart: victories by young aristocrats in sporting competition. For Greek men in particular, sports seem to have functioned as an analog to another key concern—prowess on the battlefield. It instilled self-discipline in young men, but also taught them how to work together to achieve a common goal (depending on the type of competition, of course). Pindar himself was an aristocrat, a member of the fabled Aegidae clan. His poetry is learned stuff, probably not intended for the common folk.

Attitude Pindar adopts towards youth – well, probably similar to that in some modern poems, such as Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young.” There’s some melancholy in these poems—the joy of victory can be connected to the illustrious past of the gods and one’s ancestors (a big part of what gives meaning to individuals’ lives in ancient cultures), and projected into an indefinite-seeming future, but there’s also a strong undercurrent on the uncertainties of life and its impermanence.

Notes on Pindar, Selected Odes

Isthmian 3-4 (56-61)

The third ode begins by stressing the need to avoid personal aggrandizement because of one’s wealth or athletic accomplishments. Pindar is, of course, an aristocrat, so his “don’t overplay it” ethos is especially strong, but loyalty to one’s clan and city seems to be prominent in Greek culture generally: a sense of civic pride and duty pervades it. In the fourth ode, Pindar again emphasizes the “lack of loud-mouthed insolence” of Melissos and his ancestors. They are what we would call “gentlemen,” and their deeds speak for them. But that’s where Pindar comes in since, he, as an artist, also “speaks for” such men as Melissos the excellent chariot-racer and fellow Theban: these “sons of Kleonymos” are aided by special winds or forces amongst the many such winds that “drive all men” ( ἄλλοτε δ' ἀλλοῖος οὖρος / πάντας ἀνθρώπους ἐπαίσσων ἐλαύνει,” which Bowra translates as “Many are the different winds / That rush down and drive all men.”) These special winds are paralleled, it appears, by the breath of men as they praise Melissos and his predecessors. Their accomplishments have significance beyond anything that Melissos aims at, pointing to the highest achievement of which humanity is capable and reinforcing a sense of life’s purposiveness, of the need to test the limits of our strength. Melissos’ family has been reduced by loss in war lately, but the poet invokes the spirit of seasonal rebirth: the man’s victories herald the continued flourishing of his stock. The accomplishments of these men, as sung by previous poets, are the organic soil from which Pindar’s poetry develops, and to this poetry Pindar attributes something of immortality: such speech is “undying” (4.44). For those who strive, even the silence is pregnant; for those who fail to strive, says Pindar, “silences that know them not” (35) will be the only reward. There’s no attempt to exaggerate the build of Melissos, who is described as rather a short, stocky fellow 4.53); instead, his deeds are connected to those of the great Herakles, who now enjoys a blissful afterlife amongst the gods.

Olympian 2 (80-85)

This poem, with its allusions to gods and mythical figures, and to the triumphant overcoming of heavy sorrows by great actions, promotes the ever-potent aristocratic principle. A noble family of long standing, it seems, bears within itself always the seeds of its own renovation. Characteristic of Pindar is his enlistment of the sweeping elements to figure the unpredictability and diversity of human life’s outcomes: “Many are the streams that come to men, / Now with the heart’s delight, and now with sorrow” (35-36). This ode seems to refer to Theron the addressee’s own beliefs that there’s an afterlife with a moral structure – not a notion much emphasized in ancient times. Pindar also has it in for some rival poets who may be praised Theron badly or fulsomely, rather than appropriately as he does.

Nemean 3 (101-05)

This is one of the odes that closely links the composition of songs with the athletic competitions—the best reward a victor can have, says Pindar, is not some monetary prize, it’s the song that crowns his victory. As in this one, that song will generally pay homage to the victor’s family and connect him to the stories of gods and local heroes. It’s easy to see that the Greeks are a rather competitive people: Pindar says there are appropriate trials of strength for nearly every stage of a man’s life, and excellence is to be honored in them all. There is plenty of commercialism in ancient Greece , with its thriving artisans and busy harbor towns, but evidently the games revolve around a different and more spiritual kind of economy: they are about personal, local, and regional honor, not about wealth. I like his comment at 40-41, too—as the notes say, Pindar insists that a trainer (trainers and “coaches” were apparently much in demand even back then) can only teach someone the basics—excellence in trials of strength and skill must come from within. I recall seeing an interview with basketball great Bill Russell, the center who played for the Celtics all through the 1960’s, and in it he insisted that great athletes are never “dumb jocks”—they may or may not be book-learned, but they are almost invariably intelligent people with much foresight and self-discipline, and high expectations of excellence that come from one’s own personal reserves of strength and character. Pindar would surely agree. (Or as Oscar Wilde might say, “Education is a fine thing, but it’s well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.”)

Pythian 2 (146-51)

This is a guardedly expressive poem that doesn’t so much celebrate the victor Syracusan King Hieron’s accomplishment as get in a few under-the-radar digs at him for choosing another poet to craft his victory ode. Apparently there was no small amount of competition amongst poets, and Pindar doesn’t always get the better of his competition. He has a certain noble haughtiness about him, and doesn’t like being upstaged by men he considers inferior.

Olympian 7 (164-69)

Here the poet describes his song as being like a wine-pledge, something that intoxicates and unites, something that knits people together. Much of this poem, as the Penguin editors point out, emphasizes how what seems to be an accident or an error may yet be turned to good account, if we or some benevolent power shape it that way. I like the final line, ἐν δὲ μιᾷ μοίρᾳ χρόνου / ἄλλοτ' ἀλλοῖαι διαιθύσσοισιν αὖραι , which Bowra translates as “In a single moment of time / Many are the winds which blow this way and that.” Pindar uses the winds as a natural, or even supernatural, force that gives energy, purpose, and direction to human life, he treats it as something allied with fate and that action of the gods. Life is shot through with energy, opportunity, and uncertainty, and valor in sport is one way of seizing opportunities and steeling oneself to bear adversity.

Isthmian 7 (224-26)

This is a poignant poem in that, as the Penguin editor says, the victor Strepsiades’ uncle (who shares his name) has been killed in a battle against an Athenian army. Pindar reminds himself to live one day at a time, and not try to peer too far into the ways of the gods.

Week 03, Bible's Genesis, Job

Notes on Genesis.

Genesis 1-3: The Beginning, the Fall

How powerful the spoken word is in the scriptures! God “speaks” the world into existence, and apparently without any need for raw materials with which to create. His words are acts—no separation between the two, as there is for us. God is somewhat anthropomorphized in Genesis—at times, he sounds like a powerful patriarch who takes issue with the beings he has created. He does not like it when his creatures try to rival him—eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil can only lead to eating from the tree of life, and then Adam and Eve might “be as we are.” God begins to regret that he has made the world at all, so sinful are the human beings he made in his image—this is odd in light of later Christian doctrine that God is omniscient and omnipotent; how could such a perfect and transcendent deity “regret” anything? But the Hebrew Bible writers are dealing with God in a dramatic fashion—they have Milton’s task of making pure transcendence and inscrutability talk to us in ways that we can appreciate. What kind of answers or explanations does Genesis give to the huge questions it raises? Well, they are sometimes provocative, and always majestic. Adam and Eve are told to “be fruitful and multiply” (57), and the creation should contain all that it can—”plenitude” and diversity are two great laws of the universe. But why should that be the case? Why should there be something rather than nothing, light instead of darkness, sound and not silence? There really are no answers to such questions—God has simply bid that it should be so, according to Genesis.

The text says that God has made Adam in his image, and there are two overlapping stories of humanity’s creation, it seems: the fuller one in Genesis 2 (pp. 57-58) explains that God first makes Adam from the dust (the name Adam is derived from the Hebrew word for “red clay,” as scholars point out) by breathing life into him. Then God puts Adam to sleep and creates Eve from one of his ribs, to serve (along with the rest of the creation) as a fitting companion for him. A law of hierarchy, as yet gentle enough, binds all creatures from the beginning. God has made mankind in his image, but since he is perfection itself, anything he creates must be less perfect than he is. Apparently to reinforce this principle for Adam and Eve, God plants the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and next to this tree he plants the Tree of Life. The first couple have dominion over everything around them, but not over these two trees. This is simply an interdiction—God does not explain to Adam and Eve why he has made such an interdiction, except to tell them that they will “die” if they disobey. How are we to gloss this act on God’s part? Perhaps we may extrapolate by supposing that God is something like the greatest of romantic poets: the creation is his perpetual poem, and natural process is his “expression.” He has generously given Adam and Eve a chance to help advance the beauty and dignity of his work—they are to tend his garden and take pleasure in the work they do as a way of worshiping him. If, as seems reasonable, they are to draw nearer to the perfect being who has made them in his image, their ascent must be gradual, not sudden. They must not try to usurp God’s place in the hierarchy of the universe by seeking to attain forbidden knowledge. (Incidentally, the text doesn’t say that God has interdicted them from eating of the Tree of Life, though I think it must be implied based on what he says on page 59.) But the serpent, that slippery character “more subtil than any beast of the field” (58), tempts Eve, convincing her that God’s motive is jealousy and stinginess: eat the fruit of the forbidden tree, he says, and “your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods.” This imputation that God is withholding something good from her simply to preserve his own prerogatives, to maintain a distinction between himself and his creation, is very powerful. The text explains that Eve succumbs to the fruit’s apparent deliciousness and its supposed wisdom-giving properties, and completes the Fall by giving Adam some as well. Perhaps there is nothing wrong with innocent curiosity, but that isn’t what Eve shows at the moment of choice: her desire to learn is obviously not accompanied by respect and wonder—it is fundamentally selfish and envious, and flows from what one of my former professors in Renaissance literature calls (in reference to Milton’s retelling of Genesis) a “sense of injured merit” not unlike that of Milton’s Satan himself.

The immediate effect of the fall is described somewhat enigmatically: “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (58). As I understand this passage, what was previously the innocent principle of generation—the means whereby all creatures would “be fruitful and multiply,” has become for Adam and Eve something shameful, something to be covered up. Their pride has caused them, in effect, to take God’s generosity for selfishness, and now they construe sexuality the same way, since their understanding has become deranged and darkened. Their being seems shamefully “carnal” to them now, and spirit is no longer at peace with matter and its principle of physical generation. From this point forwards, as God’s stern pronouncements in Genesis 3 make clear, Adam and Eve’s relationship to each other, to their fellow creatures, to the earth itself, and to God will involve difficulty and sorrow: Adam will labor to bring forth his sustenance from an alien, harsh land, and he will “rule over” Eve, who will give birth in pain. And of course, to borrow a line from Milton, they have brought “death into the world.” No longer will they converse pleasantly with God or labor joyfully in his garden amongst their fellow creatures. The laws of life now (as subsequent books in the Bible show) are fearful obedience, painful effort in the face of necessity, cruelty, dishonesty, envy, and misunderstanding with regard to one’s fellows, and dispersion over the earth’s surface: alienation, distortion, derangement.

Genesis 4: The First Murder.

Adam and Eve are the first sinners, but the pattern of sin, which follows an arc of pride, envy, and selfishness, begins with Cain and Abel, their offspring. God doesn’t accept Cain’s offering, presumably because Cain didn’t make it in the right spirit—it makes sense to suppose he offered his gift to God only because he had to, not because he wanted to. As the Bhagavad-Gita later says, one must “act in the spirit of worship” and not be obsessed with getting something from one’s action. Cain hasn’t acted in this selfless or charitable spirit. Then, envious of his brother’s favor with God, Cain kills him without warning and impudently responds to God’s outraged questioning, “am I my brother’s keeper?” As a consequence of his deed, Cain will feel still more deeply than Adam and Eve a sense of alienation from his fellow beings and from the land: “a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth” (60). But as a consolation to Cain, who fears that now he will be marked for death as an outlaw, God preserves his life by declaring that “whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” Apparently, then, one human being may not use the wrongs done by another to justify further wrongdoing. As God’s phrase from Deuteronomy goes, “ To me belongeth vengeance and recompence” (32:35).

Genesis 6-9: The Flood.

Noah earns God’s remembrance because of his goodness, and is spared from general destruction in the Flood. In Genesis 9, God sets his “bow in the cloud,” he says, as a “token of a covenant between me and the earth” (63). The covenant amounts to a promise that God will never again destroy the earth by flood. Why does he make this concession? Well, in Genesis 8 God had accepted Noah’s burnt offerings and decided that since “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth” (pg. 62), there is no point in destroying such wayward children altogether. To me, it seems as if we are to understand from this declaration that God finds it appropriate to be merciful with human weakness, and to show pity for the world that weakness has deranged—the covenant, after all, is not only for human beings; it is for “every living creature of all flesh” (63). But there is genuine sternness in these chapters of Genesis, too: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God made he man” (62). Then, too, God’s description in Genesis 9 of what “dominion” over the animals means is revealing: “the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth.” Evidently, within the limits prescribed by God, there is to be much harshness, much strict justice between man and man, and men will rule the animal kingdom by fear and brute force.

Genesis 11: The Origin of Languages.

In this chapter, human beings again try to rival God; they obey their own desires and set themselves up as proprietors of a divided or rival empire, as evidenced by the building of the Tower of Babel. Here, God discerns that the best way to punish such impiousness is to “confound” the builders’ speech, making it impossible for them to join easily in such nefarious enterprises as raising a building almost to the heavens. The Tower is the first skyscraper. An already self-limited human capacity for learning and understanding will be further limited by the diversification of signifying systems and by physical dispersal across the earth. As the Bible stresses again and again, human language is a fallen instrument, and, in the language of King James I’s day, human combination is apt to be taken as “murmuring against the king”: society breeds an arrogant presumption of self-sufficiency and autonomy far beyond what simple exercise of free will dictates.

Genesis 22: Abraham and Isaac.

God puts Abraham’s faith to the test in this chapter, requiring him to offering his beloved son Isaac as a sacrifice. On the one hand, Genesis 22 reinforces the painful lesson that after the fall, everything is forfeit to God and man can find security in little or nothing: Abraham must be willing to sacrifice even his own son to prove his faith in the Lord. But again, because Abraham is willing to act—because he acts in the right spirit, however troubling the command is to him—he finds mercy in God’s sight. What has not been withheld will be returned manyfold: God promises Abraham, “I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the seashore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed…” (64). It’s easy to see why Christian tradition has read this chapter typologically, with Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, his “lamb,” serving as a prefiguration of God’s willingness to send “his only begotten son” to atone for mankind’s sins.

Genesis 25, 27: Jacob and Esau.

It seems that God’s providential design justifies considerable “trickery,” as we might call it, amongst the descendants of Adam and Eve: the human order of things must be rearranged sometimes to suit God’s plan. If God requires it, the youngest son must use deceit to take on the powers of the eldest son. Jacob (his mother Rebekah’s favorite) tricks his elder brother Esau into giving up his birthright for some “red pottage” (65). And what Esau has, as the text puts the case, “despised,” Jacob will now secure by tricking old father Isaac (son of Abraham) into bestowing the blessing of the first-born upon him. The plan comes off well, and the blessing, which involves exercising dominion over brethren and even nations, is duly given. This blessing, once given, cannot be retracted, so we can understand Isaac’s feelings about what has happened. But to Esau, too, Isaac offers comfort: he will serve his younger brother, but the servitude will not last forever. In Genesis, Jacob and Esau are reconciled. Jacob’s twelve sons (Asher, Benjamin, Dan, Gad, Issachar, Joseph, Judah, Levi, Naphtali, Reuben, Simeon, Zebulun) will become the twelve tribes of Israel, while Esau’s descendants are said to be the founders of the Kingdom of Edom, a kingdom with which, later on, Kings Saul and then David will clash. See Wikipedia’s entry on the Twelve Tribes and the Edomites. Jacob himself has much service to do—he ends up serving Laban for fourteen years to gain the hand of Rachel, and six years for his stock of cattle. He is renamed “ Israel” after wrestling with an angel in Genesis 32, and is of course the father of Joseph, hero of our next selection.

Genesis 37, 39-46: The Story of Joseph.

Joseph is Jacob/Israel’s son by Rachel, and is possessed not only of a “coat of many colors” given to him by his now elderly father but also the gift of prophetic dreams and the interpretation thereof. One of those dreams gets him in dire trouble with his brothers, since in it, Joseph says, “the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me” (pg. 67, Genesis 37). Only Reuben’s fearful counsel keeps them from killing him outright, and they sell him to the Ishmaelites, who in turn bring him to Egypt , where Pharaoh’s servant Potiphar buys him. Joseph’s powers of interpretation result in his being rescued from the prison where he was sent thanks to the scheming of Potiphar’s wife (whose sexual advances he refused), and Pharaoh is so impressed with Joseph that he makes him all but a co-ruler. As almost always seems to be the case, a gift that places someone in close contact with the divine comes at great risk and cost: insight must be “paid for,” so to speak. When Joseph’s brethren are sent by their father to seek out some wheat (“corn”) during years of famine, the now powerful dweller in Egypt first pays them back for their cruel treatment of him, but then reconciles with them, showing remarkable generosity and inviting them all, along with the youngest son Benjamin and old Israel (Jacob) to come to Egypt and live there. Israel has been promised by God that his children will constitute “a great nation,” and with this faith he enters Egypt. He will live and die there, and so will Joseph. The departure from Egypt and from the clutches of Pharaoh, of course, will only occur when Moses comes to maturity; the story of Moses is told in Exodus.

Notes on Job.

77-78. From the outset, we are told that Job is a “perfect and upright” man, yet God will use this good man to demonstrate to a scoffing Satan the perfection of his order and the loving obedience of his servants. (Satan is not the devil of the New Testament; rather, he is an accusing or adversarial angel amongst God’s council; see the Wikipedia entry on Satan.) Satan sees a fine chance to show that God is mistaken: “Doth Job fear God for nought?” he asks, meaning evidently that Job only obeys and loves God because as yet he has no reason to do otherwise. He has a good, rich life—what is there to be afraid of? Satan’s claim is that once Job suffers a genuine setback in his fortunes, he will hold God in contempt and curse him to his face. But Job responds eloquently to both the first phase (loss of kindred and goods) and the second phase (loss of bodily soundness) of his trial. Satan has lost his wager, but the text has much more to do than prove Satan’s incorrectness.

79. Job’s wife tempts him to “curse God and die,” and his friends, after keeping a seven-day vigil with him, beset him with additional foolish advice. In essence, their counsel follows from the notion that one’s earthly fortunes can be linked directly to the morality or immorality of one’s conduct. In other words, life is a matter of reward and punishment, and nothing else. How does Job process what has happened to him? He prays for death, the great leveler of men and silencer of troubles. This “death” doesn’t seem to entail an afterlife; Job simply wishes to cease existing altogether, and thereby to find peace. He knows in his heart that he is not guilty of what his accusers say he is: “I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.” He never took his good fortune for granted or puffed himself up with pride on account of it. He is not a self-aggrandizer, a miser, or anything of the sort. So far as he is able to discern, he has been genuinely righteous and has never ceased to praise God for his blessings, and he won’t be so hypocritical as to pretend that he understands why he is suffering now. (The knowledge of God’s wager is denied to him—it is known only to us, the readers. But of course, the notion of a wager that causes such suffering is hardly a sufficient justification by any reasonable human standards. We would not easily pardon another human being if he or she did to us what God has allowed Satan to do to Job.)

80-81. Eliphaz picks up on Job’s refusal to accept the charge of iniquity, and urges him to embrace his troubles as the “correction” necessary to purify him. But Job again prays for death instead, pointing out that Eliphaz’s logic is a “pit” into which he will not fall. There is no correspondence between earthly prosperity and moral rectitude, and his own anguished soul tells him that such explanations are brutally insufficient and cruel.

82-83. Because Job’s “days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and are spent without hope” (82 top), he will not keep silent. He will take this one brief chance to voice his anguish and uncertainty. His complaint is not petty: Job demands to know why an infinitely magnificent and powerful God would bother raining trouble and confusion down on a poor servant like Job. What is the point of such contention between God and man? Contention implies the acknowledgment of a relationship, however unequal. We notice, too, that on these pages Job pleads neither perfection nor the virtue of patience: “If I justify myself, mine own mouth shall condemn me: if I say, I am perfect, it shall also prove me perverse…. If I say, I will forget my complaint … I know that thou wilt not hold me innocent” (83). His one need is that God should enter into a conversation with him, should declare himself and explain why he has done such things to a mere mortal: “I will say unto God, Do not condemn me; shew me wherefore thou contendest with me” (83.10).

84-87. Job insists on attending to the problem of his relationship with a divinity with whom he can find no commensurateness, no manner of accommodation or understanding. This “desire to reason with God” (85.13) does not stem from stupidity or arrogance. To his friends he says, “I have understanding as well as you” (85.12). He understands the basis of their explanation, and he knows that God will do as God wills. But by this point in the text, Job’s conversation is turned away from his friends and towards God, to whom again he addresses questions such as “why do you insist on troubling me? what have I done?” His desire is that God should declare himself and enter into dialog with him. Job’s spiritual turmoil (caused by suffering and by uncertainty about the great question, “Why?”) is intolerable, so the dialog for which he asks is a necessity for him.

88-91. Job searches his heart—has he in fact done something wrong, or even something right in the wrong spirit? No, he is unable to accuse himself honestly. With one further plea that God will “remember” him and speak with him, “The words of Job are ended” (89). He will not accuse God of unrighteousness or curse him, but neither will he condemn himself. At last, God declares himself from what me may presume is the perfect calm within the chaos of a deafening whirlwind, telling Job, “Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me” (89.38). What follows is more a series of clarifying questions than a full conversation. All of the questions God poses declare and demonstrate his own sublimity. It is from such language that William Blake probably borrowed when he wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “When thou seest an Eagle, thou seest a portion of Genius; lift up thy head!” Like Krishna in The Bhagavad-Gita, the God of the Hebrews deigns to “put on his terrors” for a time. He made Leviathan (on whose subsequent career see Revelations) and Behemoth, and he is behind the tremendous power of all natural processes on earth and all celestial forces in heaven. This “Unmoved Mover,” as Christian theologians (following Aristotle’s older terminology) will call him, seems annoyed with Job, who “darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge” (89.38).

92-93. Job’s best response is to say, “Therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.” He has seen God, at least to some penultimate degree, and the vision leads him to declare, “I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (92.42). Divine and human understanding are not commensurate: apparently, that is what dialog with God teaches us. But “that” turns out to be enough: Job prays for his misguided friends, and God decides to reward him and restore him to great wealth and status. Job’s soul-searching and then his conversation with God have demonstrated a necessary spiritual process: the man may not have been able to understand God fully, but nobody can do that anyhow. He has at least refrained from presuming or cursing, and his questions are not hypocritical or timid, but honest. It seems that God appreciates Job’s honest questioning. Ultimately, the text seems to identify a need for mystery and wonder, and for prayer, as the essence of religiosity. The system of reward and punishment one can find elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures (Deuteronomy, for example) seems less important than these things. On the whole, Job promotes the principle of a divine order than transcends anything possible to conceive in human terms, not the principle of a divine order that somehow corresponds with human ways of understanding order. The great value of the first-mentioned principle, of course, is that it draws humanity out of itself, and sets it on a course towards greater spiritual effort and understanding; it preaches self-transcendence, and perhaps even something like what in Eastern philosophy (Hinduism and Buddhism in particular) we might call “creative self-annihilation.” There is some difference to be noted, in that Job’s offering up of his old self restores him to an even more rooted sense of personhood, so to speak. With regard to the Eastern texts it might be more correct to suppose that the annihilation of self is meant to rid us permanently of such notions as “personhood” altogether.