Romeo and Juliet it ain't...

Normally I would leave the business of anecdotes to Fiona, since it's really more her domain than mine. But since we've only read translations so far, I can't get into the language as I would otherwise be inclined to do; I can remark on my fondness (or lack thereof) for the work of a certain translator, and guess at the extent to which the translation mirrors the original -- but as I have, you know, small Tuscan and less Greek, I'm reluctant to go too deeply into word choice or sentence structure.

And so! From the opening of the Purgatorio, I bring you an anecdote.

For whatever crazy Dante reason, Cato of Utica is charged with guarding the shores of Purgatory. At first he thinks Virgil and Dante are escapees from hell, so Virgil explains their situation, concluding,

"We do not break the Laws: this man lives yet,
and I am of that Round not ruled by Minos,
with your own Marcia, whose chaste eyes seem set

in endless prayers to you. O blessed breast
to hold her yet your own! for love of her
grant us permission to pursue our quest

across your seven kingdoms. When I go
back to her side I shall bear thanks of you
if you will let me speak your name below." (Canto I, ll. 76-84)

To which Cato replies rather brusquely:

"Marcia was so pleasing in my eyes
there on the other side," he answered then
"that all she asked, I did. Now that she lies

beyond the evil river, no word or prayer
of hers may move me. Such was the Decree
pronounced upon us when I rose from there.

But if, as you have said, a Heavenly Dame
orders your way, there is no need to flatter:
you need but ask it of me in her name." (85-93)

I'm resisting a Brady Bunch joke here because, to be honest, I never watched that show, so it'd seem like too cheap a shot. Instead, let's find out who Marcia was. Ciardi has the goods:

The story of Marcia and of Cato is an extraordinary one. She was the daughter of the consul Philippus and became Cato's second wife, bearing his three children. In 56 B.C., in an unusual transaction approved by her father, Cato released her in order that she might marry his friend Hortensius. (Hence line 87: "that all she asked I did.") After the death of Hortensius, Cato took her back.
In Il Convivio, IV, 28, Dante presents the newly widowed Marcia praying to be taken back in order that she may die the wife of Cato, and that it may be said of her that she was not cast forth from his love. Dante treats that return as an allegory of the return of the strayed soul to God (that it may die "married" to God, and that God's love for it be manifest to all time). Virgil describes Marcia as still praying to Cato. (p. 190, note to l. 78)

I sort of expect Dante to romanticize things, but it sounds like Ciardi might be airbrushing this story a little himself. According to Wikipedia, that bastion of accuracy,

Hortensius was an admirer and friend of Cato’s, and he was eager to be more closely related to Cato and his family. ...[A]n alliance with Cato seems to be the chief reason for Hortensius, nearing 60 years old, to request to be married to Cato’s daughter Porcia, who was only about 20 years old at the time. However, because Porcia was already married to M. Calpurnius Bibulus and the age difference was so great, Cato refused to give his consent. Hortensius immediately suggested that he marry Marcia instead because she had already borne Cato his heirs. Due to Hortensius' ardor, Cato acquiesced, but only on the condition that Marcia's father, L. Marcius Philippus, approve as well. With Phillipus' consent obtained, Cato divorced Marcia, thereby placing her under her father's charge. Hortensius promptly married Marcia, and she bore him an heir. After Hortensius' death in 50 BC, she also inherited much of Hortensius' considerable wealth.

At the outbreak of the civil war in 49, Marcia and her children moved back into Cato’s household. Plutarch asserts that Cato remarried Marcia after Hortensius's death, whereas Appian's histories relate that Cato merely reestablished her in his own household.

Well that's... significantly less romantic than I'd hoped. Facts are always ruining Dante's great stories. (From the way Ciardi put it, I was sort of imagining that Marcia'd married Cato out of, whatever, family reasons, duty, but then cultivated this burning and reciprocal passion for his good friend Hortensius, and Cato, let's say, pulled a Francisco d'Anconia -- oh, yeah, I went there -- and stepped aside out of love for the two of them, then remarried Marcia after Hortensius' death so she wouldn't be lonely/poor. Yeah... no.)

Additional exciting Marcia facts:

--Marie Hamilton* suggests that "during the Middle Ages... Marcia was proverbial for virtue" (362), possibly because in Lucan's Pharsalia "on the occasion of her return to Cato she asks permission to share his anxieties and sorrows" (364).

--This, then, would be why she gets a mention in Chaucer's The Legend of Good Women:

Penalopee, and Marcia Catoun
Mak of your wyfhod no comparisoun.

--Way, way more about Marcia as the figure of an obedient woman here. This article is actually super-interesting, but this post is already sort of out of control.

----------------------------------------------------
*Chaucer's "Marcia Catoun." Modern Philology, Vol. 30, No. 4 (May, 1933), pp. 361-364. The University of Chicago Press.

"Agamemnon is the king!"

Fiona always pronounces Aeschylus "ess-keh-lus" and I had always heard "ees-keh-lus." I looked it up to see which was preferred and I found a hilarious nightmare. If you have JSTOR access, check out this article; if you don't, carry on pronouncing it whichever way you always have, because it doesn't seem to matter either way (rather like "edd-i-pus" versus "eed-i-pus). Academics always gotta be fighting about something!

Anyway. Reading The Libation Bearers (the second of the three plays that make up the Oresteia) made me wonder about the Electra complex, which I had heard was the female version of the Oedeipus complex. This seemed sort of unfair to me, because in Aeschylus' version, at least -- I haven't read the Electra plays by Sophocles or Euripedes, although now I feel like I should, but not in these dreadful old versions that you can get for free online -- Electra doesn't do anything nearly as drastic as Oedipus (I don't think that she does in anyone's version of the story).

Appropriately, it seems like the Electra complex isn't as big a thing, anyway. According to Wikipedia,

The idea is based largely on the work of Sigmund Freud, who uses the Oedipus complex as a point of reference for its elaboration. The term, however, was introduced by Carl Jung in 1913. Freud himself explicitly rejected Jung's term, because it "seeks to emphasize the analogy between the attitude of the two sexes," and continued to use the [term] feminine Oedipus attitude in his own writings.

That's very good of Freud, since it doesn't seem reasonable to saddle poor Electra with all the baggage of Oedipus -- she doesn't appear to be in love with her father at all, though she does want her mother dead (come to think of it, I always thought Freud's terminology was a bit hard on Oedipus, too, since in the story he actually goes to great lengths to avoid killing his father and marrying his mother, rather than having some messed-up complex wherein he wants to do those things, although honestly if I were Oedipus and aware of that prophecy, which he was, I think I would've married a much-younger woman and avoided killing anyone at all, just to be on the safe side, but then there would be no play, I guess).

I will grant that Electra speaks of her father and her siblings with a degree of intensity that is rather off-putting, at least to my judgmental modern taste. When she and Orestes are reunited, she says,

You light to my eyes, four loves in one!
I have to call you father, it is fate;
and I turn to you the love I gave my mother --
I despise her, she deserves it, yes,
and the love I gave my sister, sacrificed
on the cruel sword, I turn to you.
You were my faith, my brother --
you alone restore my self-respect. (ll.240-247)

Hmm... yeah. Both she and Orestes are reeeeally into Agamemnon:

ORESTES
Dear father, father of dread,
what can I do or say to reach you now?
What breath can reach from here
to the bank where you lie moored at anchor? ...

ELECTRA
Then hear me now, my father,
it is my turn, my tears are welling now,
as child by child we come
to the tomb and raise the dirge, my father. (322-25; 336-39)

Can we talk about this? One line about Iphigeneia "sacrificed/ on the cruel sword," with nary a mention of who was doing the sacrificing, and then they're both worshiping their father like he's the second coming? (Anachronism, schmanachronism.)

It's not clear to me whether Clytaemnestra's hatred of Agamemnon is a product of his having killed Iphigeneia, her desire to replace him with Aegisthus, or both. Or maybe neither. But you'd think, at least, that Orestes and Electra would feel a shade more ambivalence about the dude who killed their sister so that his ships could sail. Is that so much better than what Clytaemnestra did?

Speaking of family ties, man, I had forgotten how disturbing the description of the sacrifice is. (I wonder if it's this bad in other translations?) It's hard to blame Agamemnon for how sexual these lines sound, since they're spoken by the chorus, but I want to blame someone:

"My father, father!" -- she might pray to the winds;
no innocence moves her judges mad for war.
Her father called his henchmen on,
on with a prayer,
"Hoist her over the altar
like a yearling, give it all your strength!
She's fainting -- lift her,
sweep her robes around her,
but slip this strap in her gentle curving lips...
here, gag her hard, a sound will curse the house" --

and the bridle chokes her voice... her saffron robes
pouring over the sand
her glance like arrows showering
wounding every murderer through with pity
clear as a picture, live,
she strains to call their names...
I remember often the days with father's guests
when over the feast her voice unbroken,
pure as the hymn her loving father
bearing third libations, sang to Saving Zeus --
transfixed with joy, Atreus' offspring
throbbing out their love. (Agamemnon 227-47)

Is there any way that this scene could not have been intended to sound profoundly sexual? It's hard to think Fagles would've added all that reeking innuendo just for kicks. I wonder what the intention is there; that is, what purpose is served by making Agamemnon sound like a child molester as well as a murderer. Leigh Walton? Anyone?

Although, speaking of scenes that sound closer to PG-13 than you'd think would be necessary, let's go back to Electra one more time. Here she is at Agamemnon's grave:

What kindness, what prayer can touch my father?
Shall I say I bring him love for love, a woman's
love for husband? My mother, love from her?
I've no taste for that, no words to say
as I run the honeyed oil on father's tomb. (The Libation Bearers 87-91)

Well, shit. Maybe Jung was onto something after all.

wait until you're older, dear, and maybe you'll be glad that you're a girl

So I finally gave up on the introduction to the Oresteia. It was making me want to die. I'm all for introductions, and I'm all for criticism, but this begins as an introduction and then goes on to describe each scene in each play and make a lot of lyrical statements about matricide and when I start to wish that Metro had an in-train magazine so I could read that instead, you know something has gone terribly wrong.

But before I abandoned it (over 60 pages in! I tried, oh god. I'll go back and finish it later, after I've been able to, you know, enjoy the play), I saw that Fagles and the other one were referencing all those other Greek myths where women kill their husbands, as you would if you were writing about Clytemnestra. And there are some great ones:

The women of Lemnos make an appearance in the Argonautika — the Argonauts land on their island and get a whole lot of sex because there are no men on the island. The deal is that the women forgot to pay homage to Aphrodite, and she cursed them with "an evil smell." So their husbands wouldn't have sex with them, and went to get new women. When they came back, the wives killed them all. (Except one, who hid her father fromthe other women inside a chest!) Aeschylus also talks about them in The Libation Bearers, thus:

First at the head of legendary crime stands Lemnos.
People shudder and moan, and can't forget —
each new horror that comes
we call the hells of Lemnos.
Loathed by the gods for guilt,
cast off by man, disgraced, their line dies out. (614-619)

Definitely. Killing your husband for being an adulterer is way worse than killing your daughter so that the winds will change and your ship can leave. No question.

Also, the Argonauts came and thewomen got lots of sex and had more kids! So their line didn't exactly die out, did it, Aeschylus? Eh? Eh? Wanna fight?

The other story is one that Aeschylus dramatized in The Suppliants, but that I first saw as Big Love (no relation), an adaptation by Charles Mee. Basically, fifty brides, all sisters, are on their way to Egypt to marry their cousins (as decreed by their father) but they don't want to. So they escape! To Argos! Where they ask the King for help, but he demurs until he can ask his people. And the people say 'yea' and the women are saved. That's the play we have. Apparently they've reconstructed the rest of the trilogy, and in it the Argive king is killed and the daughters are forced to marry, except then they all kill their husbands. Except one, whose new husband respected her wish to not have sex. Hey guys, respecting women is awesome! And life-saving. Hint hint. Anyway, all the other women are absolved, and eventually Hypermnestra's husband kills her father for being responsible for the deaths of all his brothers. And they start a dynasty.

So the point of that is maybe to make me feel better that Clytemnestra gets such a raw goddamned deal in this story.

well... it is, and it's not

I am at the MLA, and I practically just got here and it is already blowing my tiny little mind and I haven't even started work yet, and it's super late and I need to go to bed. But. I also finished the Odyssey on the plane on the way over, and I have a few things I want to mention before bed. Because I am bad at stuff.

I can't fully get behind this idea of the Odyssey as just a romp, just a romance. It nags at me. I mentioned already that Tiresias, when Odysseus visited him among the dead, was very clear about the additional hardships Odysseus would endure if his men slaughtered Helios' cattle. Let's look at this passage for a minute. It's long, but important:

Leave the beasts unharmed, your mind set on home,
and you all may still reach Ithaca--bent with hardship,
true--but harm them in any way, and I can see it now:
your ship destroyed, your men destroyed as well.
And even if you escape, you'll come home late
and come a broken man--all shipmates lost,
alone in a stranger's ship--
and you will find a world of pain at home,
crude, arrogant men devouring all your goods,
courting your noble wife, offering gifts to win her.
No doubt you will pay them back in blood when you come home!
But once you have killed those suitors in your halls--
by stealth or in open fight with slashing bronze--
go forth once more, you must...
carry your well-planed oar until you come
to a race of people who know nothing of the sea,
whose food is never seasoned with salt, strangers all
to ships with their crimson prows and long slim oars,
wings that make ships fly. And here is your sign--
unmistakable, clear, so clear you cannot miss it:
When another traveler falls in with you and calls
that weight across your shoulder a fan to winnow grain,
then plant your bladed, balanced oar in the earth
and sacrifice fine bests to the lord god of the sea,
Poseidon--a ram, a bull and a ramping wild boar--
then journey home and render noble offerings up
to the deathless gods who rule the vaulting skies,
to all the gods in order.
And at last your own death will steal upon you...
a gentle, painless death, far from the sea it comes
to take you down, borne down with the years in ripe old age
with all your people there in blessed peace around you. (11.125-156)

That's not even what I would call ominous. That is just very straightforward. (And it leaves little room for Odysseus' men not to slaughter the cattle of the sun, since he's been given such explicit instructions for how to deal with the fallout. After he's done with that little Calypso detour, of course. Plus some other stuff.) Odysseus, "man of twists and turns"--as Fagles likes to translate his epithet--has a lot more twists and turns coming up. I mean, look how long it took him to get home from Troy--and that was a journey with a fairly clear endpoint, whereas this is more like "come home when Poseidon is done being pissed at you."

And you don't get to forget this bit. Almost as soon as he's reunited with Penelope, even before they head to bed, Odysseus repeats this news to her pretty much word for word (he is just going outside, and may be some time). "And so," Penelope replies, "...if the gods will really grant a happier old age,/there's hope we'll escape our trials at last" (23.326-28). I mean... I wouldn't hold my breath. This is Odysseus, after all. God only knows how many ways he can find to screw up this business of finally making peace with Poseidon; how many other gods he'll inadvertently anger along the way.

And the phrasing, at least here in Fagles, is such that it's left open whether he'll make it home again any time before this "ripe old age" and "painless death." You can interpret it optimistically or... not. The way I'm reading these lines, it seems entirely possible that Odysseus has another ten-year journey coming up. And he just got home.

It reminds me a bit of the Iliad, actually--Hector is dead, and there's a lull in the fighting, but the war isn't over and Troy isn't going to fall for a while yet. What's more, we know that Achilles will die before that happens. Like Odysseus, he has two potential fates laid out for him, but for Achilles it's more of a Sophie's choice. Mind you, this is all from memory, but my recollection is that his mother, Thetis, tells Achilles that he can either remain out of the fighting and reach a peaceful and prosperous old age, or head back in and die young but glorious. Since Achilles ends up going back into battle--and killing Hector--to avenge Patroclus, we know for sure that he isn't long for this world. As Clare said, the Iliad ends with this sense that nothing is really going to be okay, but I'm not positive that the Odyssey is so different.

----

I'm also dying to talk about models of female sexuality in the Odyssey. You have your controlling seductresses, of course, Circe and Calypso, who--as Odysseus is always at great pains to point out--never win the man's heart. You have Penelope walking this impossible boundary, trying to placate everyone and never pleasing anyone: Telemachus constantly berating her, suitors hounding her; crying for Odysseus day and night (after twenty years?!)... and she can never win. After killing all the suitors, Odysseus conspires with Telemachus to make it seem as though a wedding is taking place so that the neighbors will be distracted and no one will realize yet what has actually happened:

And whoever heard the strains outside would say,
"A miracle--someone's married the queen at last!"

"One of her hundred suitors."
"That callous woman,
too faithless to keep her lord and master's house
to the bitter end--"
"Till he came sailing home." (23.165-69)

So apparently that is what the neighbors would have thought of Penelope, had she dared to remarry after twenty years alone. Good thing she didn't, eh?

And then, god help us, there is Clytemnestra, who "...brands with a foul name the breed of womankind,/ even the honest ones to come! (24.222-23). So says the ghost of Agamemnon, immediately after remarking that "[t]he fame of [Penelope's] great virtue will never die (24.216).

Evidently women can all be blamed for Clytemnestra's evil, but only Penelope can take credit for her own virtue.

And THEN if I were actually writing properly about this rather than hastily summarizing a few thoughts, I would talk about the maids, and how Telemachus kills a dozen of them basically just for sleeping with the suitors. They have brought disgrace upon the house of Odysseus, you see, what with the whole "being sluts" thing. Says Odysseus to his son:

"And once you've put the entire house in order,
march the women out of the great hall--between
the roundhouse and the courtyard's strong stockade--
and hack them with your swords, slash out all their lives--
blot out of their minds the joys of love they relished
under the suitors' bodies, rutting on the sly!" (22.465-70)

Man, and that is just the beginning of it. Telemachus, of course, decides that death by sword is too good for whores, and ends up hanging them in a super grisly little scene. The revulsion with which the two men respond to the spectre of female desire is searing in its vitriol, unpleasant to read.

And now I have to go to bed. Damn it.