The Classics Thread

I'm doing a bunch of grunt work to beef up my grad school application (hoping to get into a classics program), which entails boning up on my ancient Greek and learning latin, as well as reading classics in translation. I've been enjoying myself immensely. I just got done going through some miscellaneous mythology stuff, like Hesiod's two surviving works (which would be "Theogony" and Works and Days"), chunks of Metamorphoses and the like. Right now I'm on the Homeric epics (halfway through Iliad right now). What's amazing about these stories is not only how they've influenced our culture and art, but just how well the original works hold up. Hesiod's poems and the Homeric Hymns, for their brevity, are still works of astonishing depth and power. The same goes (without saying) for the Homeric epics. Rereading these works has been an endless pleasure.

Anyway, with all of stuff involving the ancient Greeks and Romans taking over movies and video games in the next year (mainly with Clash of the Titans and God of War 3 coming out), I was thinking that we could use a thread to discuss the real thing.

Ovid's Metamorphoses is really great, and I think it might be a turning point in world literature in terms of how it portrays the human condition. For how good they are, and for how much excellent character work done in them, The Iliad and The Odyssey are about some pretty grand and sweeping stuff, and it's all painted with a broad but magnificent brush.

Ovid does a really great job of zeroing in on smaller sorts of feelings throughout his episodes. For a work that can be as satirical as it is, Metamorphoses does a really a really good job of capturing honest and real emotions, and is at turns witty, serious, and melancholy, all captured with a hand that can be extremely fine.

And this is all gleaned from reading chunks of it to augment my knowledge of myth while concentrating on some other books. I can't wait to read that whole book.

EDIT: Oh, and for the history fans out there. Livy and Tacitus are must reads. Livy is just so fun, and he's looking at Roman history in the same terms that a lot of us look at America (the importance of freedom and the Republic, the virtues of free men). If you like Livy, a good bonus read is Machiavelli's "Discourses on Livy," which offers some good readings of Livy's histories and is also an interesting work in that it stands in opposition to "The Prince" in a lot of ways. Tacitus can be kind of boring, but his subject is just so interesting. Also great: Plutarch and Thucydides.

I was going through one of those Teaching Company lecture series, this one on Classic Myth. I kept a document where I answered very many of the questions given in the booklet that comes with the tapes (or files, in my case). I was browsing my text file that had my answers in it and came across this brief interpretation of Dionysos (which was written having read Euripides' Bacchae, that scene in Metamorphoses where Dionysos wrecks that ship, and a limited knowledge of Greek Dionysean Rite. Anyway, here it is (along with the question from the booklet). Just thought I'd throw it out and see if anyone wanted to bite.

Can you think of any explanation (other than the ones I suggested) for Dionysos's "difference" from the other Greek gods? Why is this god a latecomer whose worship is often resisted?

I think that this is because Dionysos is another impoverished god, in that he is not typically associated with Olympus, but rather with the wild. There is something of the forest in him, and he brings madness, and along with that madness, freedom. It is the freedom that he brings that sets him at odds with the Greek religious structure, and I think that it is telling that the biggest vehicle for his worship was channeled into the tragedy festivals, entertainments where the audience was only passive. Dionysos was tamed in this way, I suppose, by taking away the active parts of his worship. His status as an "impoverished god" is also compelling, and makes for a good contrast with Hermes' status. Hermes was a god of commerce and of the transfer of property. It was through him that the unlanded could become landed. The man who most fulfilled Hermes' aspect is the slave who earns his freedom, along with property and a wife.

Dionysos is very different from this. Instead of seeking to increase his property, the acolyte of Dionysos seeks to leave society altogether and say goodbye to his former inhibitions. What is most telling is the effect Dionysos has on his female followers in relation to his male followers. They become equal in worshipping him, and this tearing away of gender conventions would have represented something very troubling for the ancient Greeks. From what I have seen so far, Dionysos' hermaphroditic nature is embodied by his representation of untamed growth. In Hesiod, we had the male divine forces as what brought order to creation, as what invested the feminine with the ability to create something ordered and whole. Dionysos seems to hold both of these within himself. His ivy and his grapes are indicative of his creative nature, which is whole within himself. He does not need a mediator to bring forth his growth, or rather the outgrowth of his soul, his creation. What is more, he creates with abandon, and this power is the source of his freedom, a type of ivresse.

Drunkenness is very compelling here, as in Bacchae it seems that the followers of Dionysos have accepted this freedom as long as his rites last in Thebes. Pentheus is addicted to a certain type of political orderliness, which he internalizes on his own soul. As a result, he reacts to the presence of the Bacchic cult with hatred, and yet eroticizes it at the same time. When Dionysos asks Pentheus if he would like to see the drunken women, he says that he would desire it (using the word eros) very much. Yet, this is no simple sexual fetishization of women who have abandoned themselves and their old social stations, but rather the freedom represented by the Bacchic rites.

Pentheus' rejection of Dionysos is, in turn, a rejection of a certain kind of freedom. His death can be seen as a just one because he would have ruled badly, and not simply because he failed to honor a capricious god, but because he failed to honor the freedom that that god brings. It is also telling that the good king and the holy man (Cadmus and Tiresias) submit to the rites, to the dangerous sexual leveling that one would not expect from heroic Greek figures. They are not too severely punished because they seek to know themselves, to know their place in nature. I think that what this is pointing to is a Greek conception of male and female as naturally equal, despite the patriarchal social order. The rites of Dionysos are, in effect, an appeal to remember that nature in order to enrich the social fabric.

This is frightening to the typical man of society, though. He must give up all that he as assumed to be natural, but in reality is what has been constructed by prior human history, in exchange for what he has been taught is savage, or what is truly natural. He must abandon his assumptions in these arenas, and these form the bed rock of the self that he has constructed throughout his life. This could account for the resistance to Dionysos, as he is a god that levels the society, and reveals the freedom of man by stripping man to his barest roots and vines, and reveals how an individual is alienated from his truest self.

This reveals something about Pentheus, actually. In Bacchae, Pentheus is not undone by Dionysos so much as he is undone by his refusal of his own natural self, which he has made this alien and eroticized thing. Dionysos gives him the opportunity to accept this aspect of himself, but Pentheus rejects it, and it is through this rejection that he can no longer live, and that which birthed him tears him to shred for this affront of refusal.

Translated this from the Latin tonight. Kind of picked it at random, but I'd be lying if I said that I haven't totally been there. Anyway, here's Catullus 8. Please forgive any errors (I did take some slight liberties):

 

"Miserable Catullus, stop playing the fool,

And see that what is lost, you have lost.

Suns used to shine from you who blazed,

When you would often go where the girl took you,

No lover will ever be loved as much by us.

Truly, suns shined from you who blazed.

 

Now, now she doesn't want you; and you, powerless,

Must stop wanting her; and do not follow she who flees,

Do not live in misery, but endure with a firm mind,

Harden yourself. Goodbye, my girl, now Catullus

Hardens, and he needs you no more, asks after you

No more, you being unwilling; but you will suffer,

When you ask for no one.

 

Woe to you, wicked one! What a life waits for you!

Who will visit you now? Whose beauty will you have seen?

Now, who will you love? Whose will you be said to be?

Who will you kiss? Whose lips will you bite?

 

And you, Catullus, resolved, harden yourself."