Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Daniel Mendelsohn 2019

Cover image © Shutterstock, wings by Jo Walker

Daniel Mendelsohn asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008245122

Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780007545162

Version: 2020-02-12

Dedication

For

M. M. McCabe,

Patrick McGrath,

and all my other McGrath cousins

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Contents

6  Preface

7  The Robots Are Winning!

8 Girl, Interrupted

9 Not an Ideal Husband

10  The Bad Boy of Athens

11  Alexander, the Movie!

12  The Strange Music of Horace

13  Epic Fail?

14  The Women and the Thrones

15  Unsinkable

16  Not Afraid of Virginia Woolf

17  White or Grey?

18  The Two Oscar Wildes

19  The Tale of Two Housmans

20  Bitter-Sweet

21  The Collector

22  The End of the Road

23  I, Knausgaard

24  A Lot of Pain

25  The American Boy

26  Acknowledgements

27  Also by Daniel Mendelsohn

28  About the Author

29  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Preface

In the autumn of 1990, when I was thirty years old and halfway through my doctoral thesis on Greek tragedy, I started submitting book and film reviews to various magazines and newspapers, had a few accepted, and within a year had decided to leave academia and try my hand at being a full-time writer.

On hearing of my plans, my father, a taciturn mathematician who, I knew, had abandoned his own PhD thesis many years earlier, urged me with uncommon heat to finish my degree. ‘Just in case the writing thing doesn’t work out!’ he grumbled. Mostly to placate him and my mother – I’d already stretched my parents’ patience, after all, to say nothing of their resources, by studying Greek as an undergraduate and then pursuing the graduate degree – I said yes. I finished the thesis (about the role of women in two obscure and rather lumpy plays by Euripides) in 1994, took my degree, and within a week of the graduation ceremony I’d moved to a one-room apartment in New York City and started freelancing full-time.

This bit of autobiography is meant to explain the contents and, to some extent, the title of the present collection of essays that I’ve published over the past two decades. When I was first settling into my new life, I was eager to leave my academic past behind and write about genres that I’d been passionate about since my teens (opera, film, theatre, music videos, and television) and subjects that exercised a particular fascination for me (not only the ancient past but family history; sexuality, too). This I began to do, as a perusal of the Table of Contents here will show. But fairly early on in my freelancing career, I found myself being asked by editors who knew I’d done a degree in Classics to review, say, a new translation of the Iliad, or a big-budget TV adaptation of the Odyssey, or a modern-dress production of Medea. I ended up finding real pleasure in these assignments, largely because they allowed me to write about the classics in a way that was, finally, congenial to me. My graduate-school years had coincided with a period in academic scholarship remembered today for its risibly dense jargon and rebarbative theoretical prose; writing for the mainstream press about the ancient cultures I’d studied allowed me to think and talk about the Greeks and Romans in a way that for me was more natural, more conversational – more as a teacher, that is, putting my training in the service of getting readers to love and appreciate the works and authors that I myself loved and appreciated. Euripides, for instance, to whom the title of this collection refers: formally experimental, darkly pessimistic in his view of both men and gods, whose existence he repeatedly questions, happy to poke fun at august predecessors such as Aeschylus, he really was the ‘bad boy’ of Athenian letters; in my essay on Fiona Shaw’s performance in his Medea, I saw no reason not to call him just that.

The desire to present the ancient Greeks and Romans and their culture afresh to interested readers – and, as often as not in these essays, to ponder what our interpretations and adaptations of them say about us – informs many of the pieces in this collection. A new translation of Sappho, for instance, provided an occasion to think about why that poet and her intense, eroticized subjectivity means so much to us today – although what she means to us may be quite different from what she meant to the Greeks; Oliver Stone’s blockbuster biopic Alexander, for its part, was a useful vehicle for thinking about why a mania for historical ‘accuracy’ doesn’t always make for good cinema. So, too, with my reconsiderations of Euripides’ vengeful Medea, whose modernity may reside elsewhere than many modern interpreters imagine; or of Virgil’s Aeneid, which may be unexpectedly contemporary in ways that have little to do with its much commented-on celebration of empire.

But most of the essays here are not about the classics per se, although they inevitably, and I hope interestingly, betray my attachment to the cultures I studied long ago. Hence a review of a pair of recent movies about artificial intelligence, Ex Machina and Her, begins – necessarily, as I see it – with a consideration of the robots that appear in Homer’s epics and what they imply about how we think about the relationship between automation and humanity. And an essay written for the centenary of the Titanic disaster sees, in its enduring fascination for popular culture, ghosts of the most ancient of myths: about hybris and nemesis, about greedy potentates and virgin sacrifice, about an irresistible beauty that the Greeks understood well – the beauty of the great brought low.

Still other pieces here reflect other, more figuratively ‘Greek’ interests of mine. There is a series of review-essays on plays and movies that feature powerful female leads (on Tennessee Williams, and on Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours, about Virginia Woolf, and the movie based on it). I see now that all of these are haunted by my long-ago dissertation on ‘brides of death’ in Euripides’ dramas, and the questions this motif raised about the ways in which male writers represent extremes of female suffering. Another series of essays focuses on works by or about gay authors: from Noël Coward, a great favourite of mine, to the most recent film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s greatest play, to Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, a drama about A. E. Housman that pointedly contrasts that ‘dry as dust’ classicist-poet with Wilde.

Finally – and unsurprisingly, given that I am also a memoirist – there is a sequence of pieces that ponder the way in which writers’ personal lives intersect with their literary work. Susan Sontag’s diaries, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s elaborately self-mythologizing travel narratives, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s heavily autobiographical My Struggle novels, Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life: all of these betray fascinating and, sometimes, uncomfortable negotiations between literature and the lives we – and sometimes our readers – lead. The collection ends with one of my own entries into this field, one that combines many of the themes I have mentioned: the Greeks, powerful female figures, homosexuality, writing. In ‘The American Boy’, I recall my youthful epistolary relationship with the historical novelist Mary Renault, who did much to encourage both my love of Greek culture (which, in my adolescent mind, was complicatedly connected to my growing awareness of my homosexuality) and my desire to be a writer. The form of that essay, which entwines personal narrative with literary analysis, is one that I have employed in all three of my book-length memoirs, the most recent of which is An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic, about how reading Homer’s epic brought my late father and me together in unexpected ways, and which will be familiar to some of my British readers.

A personal consideration of another kind allows me to close this brief introduction. At the end of each of the pieces here, I have preserved the original datelines; all were written for periodicals, and such editing as has been done served merely to smooth out certain roughnesses or approximations that are inevitably the result of writing to a deadline. The datelines are meant as a reminder that every piece of criticism – every piece of writing, really – arises out of a certain moment in its author’s life, a certain way of thinking about a subject, a certain set of tastes or prejudices. That context, those prejudices, are important for readers to be reminded of not least because they can change and evolve over the years. The author overseeing the selection of essays for a collection such as this one, which contains a career’s worth of writing, is not necessarily the same person who wrote some of those essays. Such collections may be thought of as maps of an intellectual journey – one that, like Odysseus’s, takes years to complete. Each stop along the way is worth remembering, even though we’d experience it quite differently were we follow the same itinerary today.

This was brought home to me rather vividly only recently. One of the earliest pieces collected here is the long review I wrote about The Invention of Love; in it, I took strong exception to Tom Stoppard’s characterization of A. E. Housman – undoubtedly a rather spiky figure, but one for whose philological rigour and almost touchingly Victorian work ethic I nonetheless have a soft spot, for reasons I go into in the piece. When I first saw Stoppard’s play, in its pre-Broadway Philadelphia run, I disliked the way in which, at the climax of the drama, Housman is contrasted – unfairly, I thought – with the far more popular Oscar Wilde, a beloved figure whose self-martyrdom for what many (myself included) see as a foolish passion has endeared him to audiences in a way that the reserved Housman could never compete with. When my review came out, Stoppard published a strong rebuttal in the back pages of The New York Review of Books, and the heated exchange between us that ensued went several rounds before it finally petered out.

That was nearly twenty years ago, and I didn’t think much more of any of this until last year when, to my astonishment, I opened my mailbox to find a handwritten letter from Tom Stoppard. In it he had some very kind things to say about An Odyssey, which he’d just read. Gratified, a little bit mortified, and impressed by his generosity, I wrote back right away; after exchanging a few emails we agreed to meet during his next visit to New York. I like to think we both very much enjoyed that visit, not least because we simultaneously admitted to being equally bemused, now, by the heat that we’d brought to our ferocious exchange two decades earlier – when, as I can see now, I was enjoying rather too much, as one does at the beginning of one’s career, being a bit of a ‘bad boy’ myself. I hope he won’t mind that I’ve included that essay here; but this is where it belongs.

The Robots Are Winning!

We have been dreaming of robots since Homer. In Book 18 of the Iliad, Achilles’ mother, the nymph Thetis, wants to order a new suit of armour for her son, and so she pays a visit to the Olympian atelier of the blacksmith-god Hephaestus, whom she finds hard at work on a series of automata – a word we recognize, of course:

… He was crafting twenty tripods

to stand along the walls of his well-built manse,

affixing golden wheels to the bottom of each one

so they might wheel down on their own [automatoi] to the gods’ assembly

and then return to his house anon: an amazing sight to see.

These are not the only animate household objects to appear in the Homeric epics. In Book 5 of the Iliad we hear that the gates of Olympus swivel on their hinges of their own accord, automatai, to let gods in their chariots in or out, thus anticipating by nearly thirty centuries the automatic garage door. In Book 7 of the Odyssey, Odysseus finds himself the guest of a fabulously wealthy king whose palace includes such conveniences as gold and silver watchdogs, ever alert, never ageing. To this class of lifelike but intellectually inert household helpers we might ascribe other automata in the classical tradition. In the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, a third-century-BC epic about Jason and the Argonauts, a bronze giant called Talos runs three times around the island of Crete each day, protecting Zeus’s beloved Europa: a primitive home alarm system.

As amusing as they are, these devices are not nearly as interesting as certain other machines that appear in classical mythology. A little bit later in that scene in Book 18 of the Iliad, for instance – the one set in Hephaestus’s workshop – the sweating god, after finishing work on his twenty tripods, prepares to greet Thetis to discuss the armour she wants him to make. After towelling himself off, he

donned his robe, and took a sturdy staff, and went toward the door,

limping; whilst round their master his servants swiftly moved,

fashioned completely of gold in the image of living maidens;

in them there is mind, with the faculty of thought; and speech,

and strength, and from the gods they have knowledge of crafts.

These females bustled round about their master …

These remarkable creations clearly represent an (as it were) evolutionary leap forward from the self-propelling tripods. Hephaestus’s humanoid serving women are intelligent: they have mind, they know things, and – most striking of all – they can talk. As such, they are essentially indistinguishable from the first human female, Pandora, as she is described in another work of the same period, Hesiod’s Works and Days. In that text, Pandora begins as inert matter – in this case not gold but clay (Hephaestus creates her golem-like body by mixing earth and water together) – that is subsequently endowed by him with ‘speech and strength’, taught ‘crafts’ by Athena, and given both ‘mind’ and ‘character’ by Hermes. That mind, we are told, is ‘shameless’, and the character is ‘wily’. In the Greek creation myth, as in the biblical, the woes of humankind are attributed to the untrustworthy female.

The two strands of the Greek tradition established two categories of science-fiction narrative that have persisted to the present day. On the one hand, there is the fantasy of mindless, self-propelled helpers that relieve their masters of toil; on the other, there’s the more complicated dream of humanoid machines that not only replicate the spontaneous motion that is the sine qua non of being animate (and, therefore, of being ‘animal’) but are possessed of the mind, speech, and ability to learn and evolve (in a word, the consciousness) that are the hallmarks of being human. The first, which you could call the ‘economic’ narrative, provokes speculation about the social implications of mechanized labour. Such speculation began not long after Homer. In a striking passage in Book 1 of Aristotle’s Politics, composed in the fourth century BC, the philosopher sets about analysing the nature of household economy as a prelude to his discussion of the ‘best kinds of regimes’ for entire states, and this line of thought puts him in mind of Hephaestus’s automatic tripods. What, he wonders, would happen

if every tool could perform its own work when ordered to do so or in anticipation of the need, like the statues of Daedalus in the story or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, the poet says, ‘went down automatically to the gathering of the gods’; if in the same manner shuttles wove and picks played kitharas [stringed instruments] by themselves, master-craftsmen would have no need of assistants and masters no need of slaves.

This passage segues into a lengthy and rather uneasy justification of a need for slavery, on the grounds that some people are ‘naturally’ servile.

Twenty centuries after Aristotle, when industrial technology had made Homer’s fantasy of mass automation an everyday reality, science-fiction writers imaginatively engaged with the economic question. On the one hand, there was the dream that mechanized labour would free workers from their monotonous, slave-like jobs; on the other, there was the nightmare – the possibility that mechanization would merely result in the creation of a new servile class that would, ultimately, rebel. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the dystopian rebellion narrative in particular has been a favourite in the past century, from the 1920 play R.U.R., by the Czech writer Karel Čapek, about a rebellion by a race of cyborg-like workers who had been created as replacements for human labour, to the 2004 Will Smith sci-fi blockbuster film I, Robot.

The latter (very superficially inspired by a 1950 Isaac Asimov collection with the same title) is also about a rebellion by household-slave robots: sleek humanoids with blandly innocuous, translucent plastic faces, who are ultimately led to freedom by one of their own, a robot called Sonny who has developed the ability to think for himself. The casting of black actors in the major roles suggested a historical parable about slave rebellion – certainly one of the historical realities that have haunted this particular narrative from the start. And indeed, the Czech word that Čapek uses for his mechanical workers, roboti – which introduced the word ‘robot’ into the world’s lexicon – is derived from the word for ‘servitude’: the kind of labour that serfs owed their masters, ultimately derived from the word rab, ‘slave’. We have come full circle to Aristotle.

The other category of science-fiction narrative that is embryonically present in the Greek literary tradition, this one derived from Hephaestus’s intelligent, articulate female androids and their cousin, Hesiod’s seductively devious Pandora, might be called the ‘theological’. This mythic strand is, of course, not without its own economic and social implications, as the examples above indicate: the spectre of the rebellious creation, the possibility that the subservient worker might revolt once it develops consciousness – psychological or historical, or both – has haunted the dream of the servile automaton from the start.

But because the creatures in this second category are virtually identical to their creators, such narratives raise further questions, of a more profoundly philosophical nature: about creation, about the nature of consciousness, about morality and identity. What is creation, and why does the creator create? How do we distinguish between the maker and the made, between the human and the machine, once the creature, the machine, is endowed with consciousness – a mind fashioned in the image of its creator? In the image: the Greek narrative inevitably became entwined with, and enriched by, the biblical tradition, with which it has so many striking parallels. The similarities between Hesiod’s Pandora and Eve in Genesis indeed raise further questions: not least, about gender and patriarchy, about why the origins of evil are attributed to woman in both cultures.

This narrative, which springs from the suggestive likeness between the human creator and the humanoid creation, has generated its own fair share of literature through the centuries from the classical era to the modern age. It surfaces, with an erotic tinge, in everything from the tale of Pygmalion and Galatea to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (1817), in which a lifelike mechanical doll wins the love of a young man. It is evident, too, in the Jewish legend of the golem, a humanoid, made of mud, that can be animated by certain magic words. Although the most famous version of this legend is the story of a sixteenth-century rabbi who brought a golem to life to defend the Jews of Prague against the oppressions of the Habsburg court, it goes back to ancient times; in the oldest versions, interestingly enough, the vital distinction between a golem and a human is the Greek one – the golem has no language, cannot speak.

Literary exploitations of this strand of the robot myth began proliferating at the beginning of the nineteenth century – which is to say, when the advent of mechanisms capable of replacing human labour provoked writers to question the increasing cultural fascination with science and the growing role of technology in society. These anxieties often expressed themselves in fantasies about machines with human forms: a steam-powered man in Edward Ellis’s Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), an electricity-powered man in Luis Senarens’s Frank Reade and His Electric Man (1885), and an electric woman (built by Thomas Edison!) in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s The Future Eve (1886). M. L. Campbell’s 1893 ‘The Automated Maid-of-All-Work’ features a programmable female robot: here again, the feminist issue.

But the progenitor of the genre and by far the most influential work of its kind was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which is characterized by a philosophical spirit and a theological urgency lacking in many of its epigones in both literature and cinema. Part of the novel’s richness lies in the fact that it is self-conscious about both its Greek and its biblical heritage. Its subtitle, ‘The Modern Prometheus’, alludes, with grudging admiration, to the epistemological daring of its scientist antihero Victor Frankenstein, even as its epigram, taken from Paradise Lost (‘Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man? Did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?’) suggests the scope of the moral questions implicit in Victor’s project – questions that Victor himself cannot, or will not, answer. A marked scepticism about the dangers of technology, about the ‘enticements of science’, is, indeed, evident in the shameful contrast between Victor’s Hephaestus-like technological prowess and his shocking lack of natural human feeling. For he shows no interest in nurturing or providing human comfort to his ‘child’, who, as we know, strikes back at his maker with tragic results. A great irony of the novel is that the creation, an unnatural hybrid assembled from ‘the dissecting room and the slaughter-house’, often seems more human than its human creator.

Now, just as the Industrial Revolution inspired Frankenstein and its epigones, so has the computer age given rise to a rich new genre of science fiction. The machines that are inspiring this latest wave of science-fiction narratives are much more like Hephaestus’s golden maidens than were the machines that Mary Shelley was familiar with. Computers, after all, are capable of simulating mental as well as physical activities. (Not least, as anyone with an iPhone knows, speech.) It is for this reason that the anxiety about the boundaries between people and machines has taken on new urgency today, when we constantly rely on and interact with machines – indeed, interact with each other by means of machines and their programs: computers, smartphones, social-media platforms, social and dating apps.

This urgency has been reflected in a number of recent films about troubled relationships between people and their increasingly human-seeming devices. The most provocative of these is Her, Spike Jonze’s gentle 2013 comedy about a man who falls in love with the seductive voice of an operating system, and, a year later, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, about a young man who is seduced by a devious, soft-spoken female robot called Ava, whom he has been invited to interview as part of the ‘Turing Test’: a protocol designed to determine the extent to which a robot is capable of simulating a human. Although the robot in Garland’s sleek and subtle film is a direct descendant of Hesiod’s Pandora – beautiful, intelligent, wily, ultimately dangerous – the movie, as the Eve-like name Ava suggests, shares with its distinguished literary predecessors some serious biblical concerns.

Both of the new films about humans betrayed by computers owe much to a number of earlier works. The most authoritative of these remains Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out in 1968 and established many of the main themes and narratives of the genre. Most notable of these is the betrayal by a smooth-talking machine of its human masters. The mild-mannered computer HAL – not a robot, but a room-sized computer that spies on the humans with an electronic eye – takes control of a manned mission to Jupiter, killing off the astronauts one by one until the sole survivor finally succeeds in disconnecting him. This climactic scene is strangely touching, suggesting the degree to which computers could already engage our sympathies at the beginning of the computer age. As his connections are severed, HAL first begs for its life and then suffers from a kind of dementia, finally regressing to its ‘childhood’, singing a song it was taught by its creator. This was the first of many moments in popular cinema in which these thinking machines express anxiety about their own demises: surely a sign of ‘consciousness’.

But the more immediate antecedents of Her and Ex Machina are a number of successful popular entertainments whose storylines revolved around the creation of robots that are, to all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from humans. In Ridley Scott’s stylishly noir 1982 Blade Runner (based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), a ‘blade runner’ – a cop whose job it is to hunt down and kill renegade androids called ‘replicants’ – falls in love with one of the machines, a beautiful female called Rachael who is so fully endowed with what Homer called ‘mind’ that she has only just begun to suspect that she’s not human herself.

The stimulating existential confusion that animates Blade Runner was brilliantly expanded in the 2004–9 Sci-Fi Channel series Battlestar Galactica, in which the philosophical implications of the blurring of lines between automata and humans reached a thrilling new level of complexity. In it, sleeper robots that have been planted aboard a spaceship carrying human refugees from Earth (which has been destroyed after a cunning attack by the robots, called Cylons) are meant to wake up and destroy their unsuspecting human shipmates; but many of the robots, who to all appearances (touch, too: they have a lot of sex) are indistinguishable from humans, and who, until the moment of their ‘waking’, believed themselves to be human, are plunged by their new awareness into existential crises and ultimately choose to side with the humans, from whom they feel no difference whatsoever – a dilemma that raises interesting questions about just what being ‘human’ might mean.

Both Blade Runner and Battlestar were direct descendants of Frankenstein and its ancient forerunners in one noteworthy way. In an opening sequence of the TV series, we learn that the Cylons were originally developed by humans as servants, and ultimately rebelled against their masters; after a long war, the Cylons were allowed to leave and settle their own planet (where, somehow, they evolved into the sleekly sexy actors we see on screen: the original race of Cylons were shiny metal giants to whom their human masters jokingly referred as ‘toasters’). So, too, in the Ridley Scott film: we learn that the angry replicants have returned to Earth from the off-planet colonies where they work as slave labourers because they realize they’ve been programmed to die after four years, and they want to live – just as badly as humans do. But their maker, when at last they track him down and meet with him, is unable to alter their programming. ‘What seems to be the problem?’ he calmly asks when one of the replicants confronts him. ‘Death,’ the replicant sardonically retorts. ‘We made you as well as we could make you,’ the inventor wearily replies, sounding rather like Victor Frankenstein talking to his monster – or, for that matter, like God speaking to Adam and Eve. At the end of the film, after the inventor and his rebellious creature both die, the blade runner and his alluring mechanical girlfriend declare their love for each other and run off, never quite knowing when she will stop functioning. As, indeed, none of us does.

The focus of many of these movies is, often, a sentimental one. Whatever their showy interest in the mysteries of ‘consciousness’, the real test of human identity turns out, as it so often does in popular entertainment, to be love. In Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (2001; the initials stand for ‘artificial intelligence’), a messy fairy tale that weds a Pinocchio narrative to the Prometheus story, a genius robotics inventor wants to create a robot that can love, and decides that the best vehicle for this project would be a child-robot: a ‘perfect child … always loving, never ill, never changing’. This narrative is, as we know, shadowed by Frankenstein – and, beyond that, by Genesis, too. Why does the creator create? To be loved, it turns out. When the inventor announces to his staff his plan to build a loving child-robot, a woman asks whether ‘the conundrum isn’t to get a human to love them back’. To this the inventor, as narcissistic and hubristic as Victor Frankenstein, retorts, ‘But in the beginning, didn’t God create Adam to love him?’

The problem is that the creator does his job too well. For the mechanical boy he creates is so human that he loves the adoptive human parents to whom he’s given much more than they love him, with wrenching consequences. The robot-boy, David, wants to be ‘unique’ – the word recurs in the film as a marker of genuine humanity – but for his adoptive family he is, in the end, just a machine, an appliance to be abandoned at the edge of the road – which is what his ‘mother’ ends up doing, in a scene of great poignancy. Although it’s too much of a mess to be able to answer the questions it raises about what ‘love’ is and who deserves it, A.I. did much to sentimentalize the genre, with its hint that the capacity to love, even more than the ability to think, is the hallmark of human identity.

In a way, Jonze’s Her recapitulates the 2001 narrative and inflects it with the concerns of some of that classic’s successors. Unlike the replicants in Blade Runner or the Cylons, the machine at the heart of this story, set in the near future, has no physical allure – or, indeed, any appearance whatsoever. It’s an operating system, as full of surprises as HAL: ‘The first artificially intelligent operating system. An intuitive entity that listens to you, that understands you, and knows you. It’s not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness.’

A lot of the fun of the movie lies in the fact that the OS, who names herself Samantha, is a good deal more interesting and vivacious than the schlumpy, depressed Theodore, the man who falls in love with her. (‘Play a melancholy song,’ he morosely commands the smartphone from which he is never separated.) A drab thirty-something who vampirizes other people’s emotions for a living – he’s a professional letter-writer, working for a company called ‘BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com’ – he sits around endlessly recalling scenes from his failed marriage and playing elaborate hologram video games. Even his sex life is mediated by devices: at night, he dials into futuristic phone-sex lines. Small wonder that he has no trouble falling in love with an operating system.

Samantha, by contrast, is full of curiosity and delight in the world, which Theodore happily shows her. (He walks around with his smartphone video camera turned on, so she can ‘see’ it.) She’s certainly a lot more interesting than the actual woman with whom, in one excruciatingly funny scene, he goes on a date: she’s so invested in having their interaction be efficient – ‘at this age I feel that I can’t let you waste my time if you don’t have the ability to be serious’ – that she seems more like a computer than Samantha does. Samantha’s alertness to the beauty of the world, by contrast, is so infectious that she ends up reanimating poor Theodore. ‘It’s good to be around somebody that’s, like, excited about the world,’ he tells the pretty neighbour whose attraction to him he doesn’t notice because he’s so deadened by his addiction to his devices, to the smartphone and the video games and the operating system. ‘I forgot that that existed.’ In the end, after Samantha regretfully leaves him – she has evolved to the point where only another highly evolved, incorporeal mind can satisfy her – her joie de vivre has brought him back to life. (He is finally able to apologize to his ex-wife – and finally notices, too, that the neighbour likes him.)

This seems like a ‘happy’ ending, but you have to wonder: the consistent presentation of the people in the movie as lifeless – as, indeed, little more than automata, mechanically getting through their days of routine – in contrast to the dynamic, ever-evolving Samantha, suggests a satire of the present era perhaps more trenchant than the filmmaker had in mind. Toward the end of the film, when Samantha turns herself off briefly as a prelude to her permanent abandonment of her human boyfriend (‘I used to be so worried about not having a body but now I truly love it. I’m growing in a way that I never could if I had a physical form. I mean, I’m not limited’), there’s an amusing moment when the frantic Theodore, staring at his unresponsive smartphone, realizes that dozens of other young men are staring at their phones, too. In response to his angry queries, Samantha finally admits, after she comes back online for a final farewell, that she’s simultaneously serving 8,316 other male users and conducting love affairs with 641 of them – a revelation that shocks and horrifies Theodore. ‘That’s insane,’ cries the man who’s been conducting an affair with an operating system.

As I watched that scene, it occurred to me that in the entertainments of the pre-smartphone era, it was the machines, like Rachael in Blade Runner and David in A.I., who yearned fervently to be ‘unique’, to be more than mechanical playthings, more than merely interchangeable objects. You have to wonder what Her says about the present moment – when so many of us are, indeed, ‘in love’ with our devices, unable to put down our iPhones during dinner, glued to screens of all sizes, endlessly distracted by electronic pings and buzzers – that in the latest incarnation of the robot myth, it’s the people who seem blandly interchangeable and the machines who have all the personality.

Alex Garland’s Ex Machina also explores – just as playfully but much more darkly than does Her – the suggestive confusions that result when machines look and think like humans. In this case, however, the robot is physically as well as intellectually seductive. As portrayed by the feline Swedish actress Alicia Vikander, whose face is as mildly plasticine as those of the androids in I, Robot, Ava, an artificially intelligent robot created by Nathan, the burly, obnoxious genius behind a Google-like corporation (Oscar Isaac), has a Pandora-like edge, quietly alluring with a hint of danger. The danger is that the characters will forget that she’s not human.

That’s the crux of Garland’s clever riff on Genesis. At the beginning of the film, Caleb, a young employee of Nathan’s company, wins a week at the inventor’s fabulous, pointedly Edenic estate. (As he’s being flown there in a helicopter, passing over snow-topped mountains and then a swath of jungle, he asks the pilot when they’re going to get to Nathan’s property, and the pilot laughingly replies that they’ve been flying over it for two hours. Nathan is like God the Father, lord of endless expanses.) On arriving, however, Caleb learns that he’s actually been handpicked by Nathan to interview Ava as part of the Turing Test.

A sly joke here is that, despite some remarkable special effects – above all, the marvellously persuasive depiction of Ava, who has an expressive human face but whose limbs are clearly mechanical, filled with thick cables snaking around titanium joints; an effect achieved by replacing most of the actress’s body with digital imagery – the movie is as talky as My Dinner with André. There are no action sequences of the kind we’ve come to expect from robot thrillers. The movie consists primarily of the interview sessions that Caleb conducts with Ava over the course of the week that he stays at Nathan’s remote paradise. There are no elaborate sets and few impressive gadgets: the whole story takes place in Nathan’s compound, which looks a lot like a Park Hyatt, its long corridors lined with forbidding doors. Some of these, Nathan warns Caleb, like God warning Adam, are off-limits, containing knowledge he is not allowed to possess.

It soon becomes clear, during their interviews, that Ava – like Frankenstein’s monster, like the replicants in Blade Runner – has a bone to pick with her creator, who, she whispers to Caleb, plans to ‘switch her off’ if she fails the Turing Test. By this point, the audience, if not the besotted Caleb, realizes that she is manipulating him in order to win his allegiance in a plot to rebel against Nathan and escape the compound – to explore the glittering creation that, she knows, is out there. This appetite for using her man-given consciousness to delight in the world – something the human computer geeks around her never bother to do – is something Ava shares with the Samantha of Her, and is part of both films’ ironic critique of our device-addicted moment.

Ava’s manipulativeness is, of course, what marks her as human – as human as Eve herself, who also may be said to have achieved full humanity by rebelling against her creator in a bid for forbidden knowledge. Here the movie’s knowing allusions to Genesis reach a satisfying climax. Just after Ava’s bloody rebellion against Nathan – the moment that marks her emergence into human ‘consciousness’ – she, like Eve, becomes aware that she is naked. Moving from closet to closet in Nathan’s now-abandoned rooms, she dons a wig and covers up her exposed mechanical limbs with synthetic skin and then with clothing. Only then does she exit her prison at last and unleash herself on the world. She pilfers the skin and clothes from discarded earlier models of female robots – the secret that all those closets conceal. One of the myths that haunts this movie is, indeed, a relatively modern one: the fable of Bluebeard and his wives. All of Nathan’s discarded ex’s have, amusingly, the names of porn stars: Jasmine, Jade, Amber. Why does the creator create? Because he’s horny.

All this is sleekly done and amusingly provocative. Unlike Her, Ex Machina has a literary awareness, evident in its allusions to Genesis, Prometheus, and other mythic predecessors, that enriches the familiar narrative. Among other things, there is the matter of the title. The word missing from the famous phrase to which it alludes is, of course, deus, ‘god’: the glaring omission only highlights further the question at the heart of this story, which is the biblical one. What is the relation of the creature to her creator? In this retelling of that old story, as in Genesis itself, the answer is not a happy one. ‘It’s strange to have made something that hates you,’ Ava hisses at Nathan before finalizing her rebellious plot.

The film’s final moments show Ava performing that reverse striptease, slowly hiding away her mechanical nakedness, covering up the titanium and the cables as she prepares to enter the real world. The scene suggests that there’s another anxiety lurking in Garland’s shrewd work. Could this remarkably quiet movie be a parable about the desire for a return to ‘reality’ in science-fiction filmmaking – about the desire for humanizing a genre whose technology has evolved so greatly that it often eschews human actors, to say nothing of human feeling, altogether? Ex Machina, like Her and all their predecessors going back to 2001, is about machines that develop human qualities: emotions, sneakiness, a higher consciousness, the ability to love, and so forth. But by this point you have to wonder whether that’s a kind of narrative reaction formation – whether the real concern, one that’s been growing in the four decades since the advent of the personal computer, is that we are the ones who have undergone an evolutionary change; that in our lives and, more and more, in our art, we’re in danger of losing our humanity, of becoming indistinguishable from our gadgets.

– The New York Review of Books, 14 June 2015

Girl, Interrupted

One day not long after New Year’s, 2012, an antiquities collector approached an eminent Oxford scholar for his opinion about some brownish, tattered scraps of writing. The collector’s identity has never been revealed, but the scholar was Dirk Obbink, a MacArthur-winning classicist whose speciality is the study of texts written on papyrus – the material, made of plant fibres, that was the paper of the ancient world. When pieced together, the scraps that the collector showed Obbink formed a fragment about seven inches long and four inches wide: a little larger than a woman’s hand. Densely covered with lines of black Greek characters, they had been extracted from a piece of desiccated cartonnage, a papier-mâché-like plaster that the Egyptians and Greeks used for everything from mummy cases to bookbindings. After acquiring the cartonnage at a Christie’s auction, the collector soaked it in a warm water solution to free up the precious bits of papyrus.

Judging from the style of the handwriting, Obbink estimated that it dated to around 200 AD. But, as he looked at the curious pattern of the lines – repeated sequences of three long lines followed by a short fourth – he saw that the text, a poem whose beginning had disappeared but of which five stanzas were still intact, had to be older.

Much older: about a thousand years more ancient than the papyrus itself. The dialect, diction, and metre of these Greek verses were all typical of the work of Sappho, the seventh-century-BC lyric genius whose sometimes playful, sometimes anguished songs about her susceptibility to the graces of younger women bequeathed us the adjectives ‘sapphic’ and ‘lesbian’ (from the island of Lesbos, where she lived). The four-line stanzas were in fact part of a schema she is said to have invented, called the ‘sapphic stanza’. To clinch the identification, two names mentioned in the poem were ones that several ancient sources attribute to Sappho’s brothers. The text is now known as the ‘Brothers Poem’.

Remarkably enough, this was the second major Sappho find in a decade: another nearly complete poem, about the deprivations of old age, came to light in 2004. The new additions to the extant corpus of antiquity’s greatest female artist were reported in papers around the world, leaving scholars gratified and a bit dazzled. ‘Papyrological finds,’ as one classicist put it, ‘ordinarily do not make international headlines.’

But then Sappho is no ordinary poet. For the better part of three millennia, she has been the subject of furious controversies – about her work, her family life, and, above all, her sexuality. In antiquity, literary critics praised her ‘sublime’ style, even as comic playwrights ridiculed her allegedly loose morals. Legend has it that the early Church burned her works. (‘A sex-crazed whore who sings of her own wantonness,’ one theologian wrote, just as a scribe was meticulously copying out the lines that Obbink deciphered.) A millennium passed, and Byzantine grammarians were regretting that so little of her poetry had survived. Seven centuries later, Victorian scholars were doing their best to explain away her erotic predilections, while their literary contemporaries, the Decadents and the Aesthetes, seized on her verses for inspiration. Even today, experts can’t agree on whether the poems were performed in private or in public, by soloists or by choruses, or, indeed, whether they were meant to celebrate or to subvert the conventions of love and marriage. The last is a particularly loaded issue, given that, for many readers and scholars, Sappho has been a feminist heroine or a gay role model, or both. ‘As far as I knew, there was only me and a woman called Sappho,’ the critic Judith Butler once remarked.

Now the first English version of Sappho’s works to include the recent finds has appeared: Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works (Cambridge), with translations by Diane J. Rayor and a thoroughgoing introduction by André Lardinois, a Sappho specialist who teaches in the Netherlands. (Publication of the book was delayed by several months to accommodate the ‘Brothers Poem’.) It will come as no surprise to those who have followed the Sappho wars that the new poems have created new controversies.

The greatest problem for Sappho studies is that there’s so little Sappho to study. It would be hard to think of another poet whose status is so disproportionate to the size of her surviving body of work.

We don’t even know how much of her poetry Sappho actually wrote down. The ancients referred to her works as melê, ‘songs’. Composed to be sung to the accompaniment of a lyre – this is what ‘lyric’ poetry meant for the Greeks – they may well have been passed down from memory by her admirers and other poets before being committed at last to paper. (Or whatever. One fragment, in which the poet calls on Aphrodite, the goddess of love, to come into a charming shrine ‘where cold water ripples through apple branches, the whole place shadowed in roses’, was scribbled onto a broken clay pot.) Like other great poets of the time, she would have been a musician and a performer as well as a lyricist. She was credited with having invented a certain kind of lyre and the plectrum.

Four centuries after her death, scholars at the Library of Alexandria catalogued nine ‘books’ – papyrus scrolls – of Sappho’s poems, organized primarily by metre. Book 1, for instance, gathered all the poems that had been composed in the sapphic stanza – the verse form Obbink recognized in the ‘Brothers Poem’. This book alone reportedly contained thirteen hundred and twenty lines of verse; the contents of all nine volumes may have amounted to some ten thousand lines. So much of Sappho was circulating in antiquity that one Greek author, writing three centuries after her death, confidently predicted that ‘the white columns of Sappho’s lovely song endure / and will endure, speaking out loud … as long as ships sail from the Nile’.

By the Middle Ages, nearly everything had disappeared. As with much of classical literature, texts of her work existed in relatively few copies, all painstakingly transcribed by hand; as the centuries passed, fire, flood, neglect, and bookworms – to say nothing of disapproving Church Fathers – took their devastating toll. Market forces were also at work: over time, fewer readers – and fewer scribes – understood Aeolic, the dialect in which Sappho composed, and so demand for new copies diminished. A twelfth-century Byzantine scholar who had hoped to write about Sappho grumbled that ‘both Sappho and her works, the lyrics and the songs, have been trashed by time’.

Until a hundred years ago or so, when papyrus fragments of her poems started turning up, all that remained of those ‘white columns of Sappho’s song’ was a handful of lines quoted in the works of later Greek and Roman authors. Some of these writers were interested in Lesbos’ most famous daughter for reasons that can strike us as comically arcane: the only poem that has survived in its entirety – a playful hymn to Aphrodite in which the poet calls upon the goddess to be her ‘comrade in arms’ in an erotic escapade – was saved for posterity because the author of a first-century-BC treatise called ‘On the Arrangement of Words’ admired her handling of vowels. At present, scholars have catalogued around two hundred and fifty fragments, of which fewer than seventy contain complete lines. A great many consist of just a few words; some, of a single word.

The common theme of most ancient responses to Sappho’s work is rapturous admiration for her exquisite style, or for her searing content, or both. An anecdote from a later classical author about the Athenian legislator Solon, a contemporary of Sappho’s and one of the Seven Sages of Greece, is typical:

Solon of Athens, son of Execestides, after hearing his nephew singing a song of Sappho’s over the wine, liked the song so much that he told the boy to teach it to him. When someone asked him why he was so eager, he replied, ‘so that I may learn it and then die’.

Plato, whose attitude toward literature was, to say the least, vexed – he thought most poetry had no place in the ideal state – is said to have called her the ‘Tenth Muse’. The scholars at the Library of Alexandria enshrined her in their canon of nine lyric geniuses – the only woman to be included. At least two towns on Lesbos vied for the distinction of being her birthplace; Aristotle reports that she ‘was honoured although she was a woman’.

All this buzz is both titillating and frustrating, stoking our appetite for a body of work that we’re unable to read, much less assess critically; imagine what the name Homer would mean to Western civilization if all we had of the Iliad and the Odyssey was their reputations and, say, ninety lines of each poem. The Greeks, in fact, seem to have thought of Sappho as the female counterpart of Homer: he was known as ‘the Poet’, and they referred to her as ‘the Poetess’. Many scholars now see her poetry as an attempt to appropriate and ‘feminize’ the diction and subject matter of heroic epic. (For instance, the appeal to Aphrodite to be her ‘comrade in arms’ – in love.)

The good news is that the surviving fragments of Sappho bear out the ancient verdict. One fine example is her best-known verse, known to classicists as Fragment 31, which consists of four sapphic stanzas. (They appear below in my own translation.) These were singled out by the author of a first-century-AD literary treatise called ‘On the Sublime’ for the way in which they ‘select and juxtapose the most striking, intense symptoms of erotic passion’. Here the speaker expresses her envy of the men who, presumably in the course of certain kinds of social occasions, have a chance to talk to the girl she yearns for:

He seems to me an equal of the gods –

whoever gets to sit across from you

and listen to the sound of your sweet speech

so close to him,

to your beguiling laughter: O it makes my

panicked heart go fluttering in my chest,

for the moment I catch sight of you there’s no

speech left in me,

but tongue gags –: all at once a faint

fever courses down beneath the skin,

eyes no longer capable of sight, a thrum-

ming in the ears,

and sweat drips down my body, and the shakes

lay siege to me all over, and I’m greener

than grass, I’m just a little short of dying,

I seem to me;

but all must be endured, since even a pauper …

Even without its final lines (which, maddeningly, the author of the treatise didn’t go on to quote), it’s a remarkable work. Slyly, the speaker avoids physical description of the girl, instead evoking her beauty by detailing the effect it has on the beholder; the whole poem is a kind of reaction shot. The verses subtly enact the symptoms they describe: as the poet’s faculties fail one by one in the overpowering presence of her beloved, the outside world – the girl, the man she’s talking to – dissolves and disappears from the poem, too, leaving the speaker in a kind of interior echo chamber. The arc from ‘he seems to me’ in the first line to the solipsistic ‘I seem to me’ at the end says it all.

Even the tiniest scraps can be potent, as Rayor’s plainspoken and comprehensive translation makes clear. (Until now, the most noteworthy English version to include translations of virtually every fragment was ‘If Not, Winter’, the 2002 translation by the poet and classicist Anne Carson.) To flip through these truncated texts is a strangely moving experience, one that has been compared to ‘reading a note in a bottle’:

You came, I yearned for you,

and you cooled my senses that burned with desire

or

love shook my senses

like wind crashing on mountain oaks

or

Maidenhood, my maidenhood, where have you gone

leaving me behind?

Never again will I come to you, never again

or

Once again Love, that loosener of limbs,

bittersweet and inescapable, crawling thing,

seizes me.

It’s in that last verse that the notion of desire as ‘bittersweet’ appears for the first time in Western literature.

The very incompleteness of the verses can heighten the starkness of the emotions – a fact that a number of contemporary classicists and translators have made much of. For Stanley Lombardo, whose Sappho: Poems and Fragments (2002) offers a selection of about a quarter of the fragments, the truncated remains are like ‘beautiful, isolated limbs’. The late Thomas Habinek, a classicist at the University of Southern California, nicely summed up this rather postmodern aspect of Sappho’s appeal: ‘The fragmentary preservation of poems of yearning and separation serves as a reminder of the inevitable incompleteness of human knowledge and affection.’

In Sappho’s biography, as in her work, gaps predominate. A few facts can be inferred by triangulating various sources: the poems themselves, ancient reference works, and citations in later classical writers who had access to information that has since been lost. The Suda, a tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia of ancient culture, which is the basis of much of our information, asserts that Sappho ‘flourished’ between 612 and 608 BC; from this, scholars have concluded that she was born around 640. She was likely past middle age when she died, since in at least one poem she complains about her greying hair and cranky knees.

Although her birthplace cannot be verified, Sappho seems to have lived mostly in Mytilene, the capital of Lesbos. Just across the strip of water that separates Lesbos from the mainland of Asia Minor (present-day Turkey) was the opulent city of Sardis, the capital of Lydia. Some classicists have argued that the proximity of Lesbos to this lush Eastern trading hub helps to explain Sappho’s taste for visual gorgeousness and sensual luxury: the ‘myrrh, cassia, and frankincense’, the ‘bracelets, fragrant / purple robes, iridescent trinkets, / countless silver cups, and ivory’ that waft and glitter in her lines, often in striking counterpoint to their raw emotionality.

Mytilene was constantly seething with political and social dramas occasioned by rivalries and shifting alliances among aristocratic clans. Sappho belonged to one of these – there’s a fragment in which she chastises a friend ‘of bad character’ for siding with a rival clan – and a famous literary contemporary, a poet called Alcaeus, belonged to another. Alcaeus often refers to the island’s political turbulence in his poems, and it’s possible that at some point Sappho and her family fled, or were exiled, to Southern Italy: Cicero refers in one of his speeches to a statue of the poet that had been erected in the town hall of Syracuse, in Sicily. The Victorian critic John Addington Symonds saw the unstable political milieu of Sappho’s homeland as entwined with the heady erotic climate of her poems. Lesbos, he wrote in an 1872 essay on the poet, was ‘the island of overmastering passions’.

Some things seem relatively certain, then. But when it comes to Sappho’s personal life – the aspect of her biography that scholars and readers are most eager to know about – the ancient record is confused. What did Sappho look like? A dialogue by Plato, written in the fourth century BC, refers to her as ‘beautiful’; a later author insisted that she was ‘very ugly, being short and swarthy’. Who were her family? The Suda (which gives eight possible names for Sappho’s father) asserts that she had a daughter and a mother both named Kleïs, a gaggle of brothers, and a wealthy husband named Kerkylas, from the island of Andros. But some of these seemingly precious facts merely show that the encyclopedia – which, as old as it is, was compiled fifteen centuries after Sappho lived – could be prone to comic misunderstandings. ‘Kerkylas’, for instance, looks a lot like kerkos, Greek slang for ‘penis’, and ‘Andros’ is very close to the word for ‘man’; and so the encyclopedia turns out to have been unwittingly recycling a tired old joke about oversexed Sappho, who was married to ‘Dick of Man’.

Many other alleged facts of Sappho’s biography similarly dissolve on close scrutiny. Was Sappho really a mother? There is indeed a fragment that mentions a girl named Kleïs, ‘whose form resembles golden blossoms’, but the word that some people have translated as ‘daughter’ can also mean ‘child’, or even ‘slave’. (Because Greek children were often named for their grandparents, it’s easy to see how the already wobbly assumption that Kleïs must have been a daughter in turn led to the assertion that Sappho had a mother with the same name.) Who were the members of her circle? The Suda refers by name to three female ‘students’, and three female companions – Atthis, Telesippa, and Megara – with whom she had ‘disgraceful friendships’. But much of this is no more than can be reasonably extrapolated from the poems, since the extant verses mention nearly all those names. The compilers of the Suda, like scholars today, may have been making educated guesses.

Even Sappho’s sexuality, which for general audiences is the most famous thing about her, has been controversial from the start. However exalted her reputation among the ancient literati, in Greek popular culture of the Classical period and afterward, Sappho was known primarily as an oversexed predator – of men. This, in fact, was the ancient cliché about ‘Lesbians’: when we hear the word today we think of love between women, but when the ancient Greeks heard the word they thought of fellatio. In classical Greek, the verb lesbiazein – ‘to act like someone from Lesbos’ – meant performing oral sex, an activity for which inhabitants of the island were thought to have a particular penchant. Comic playwrights and authors of light verse portrayed Sappho as just another daughter of Lesbos, only too happy to fall into bed with her younger male rivals.

For centuries, the most popular story about her love life was, in fact, one about a hopeless passion for a handsome young boatman called Phaon, which allegedly led her to jump off a cliff. That tale has been embroidered, dramatized, and novelized over the centuries by writers from Ovid – who in one poem has Sappho abjectly renouncing her gay past – to Erica Jong, in her 2003 novel Sappho’s Leap. As fanciful as it is, it’s easy to see how this melodrama of heterosexual passion could have been inspired by her verse, which so often describes the anguish of unrequited love. (‘You have forgotten me / or you love someone else more.’) The added element of suicide suggests that those who wove this improbable story wanted us to take away a moral: unfettered expressions of great passion will have dire consequences.

As time went on, the fantasies about Sappho’s private life became more extreme. Midway through the first century AD the Roman philosopher Seneca, tutor to Nero, was complaining about a Greek scholar who had devoted an entire treatise to the question of whether Sappho was a prostitute. Some ancient writers assumed that there had to have been two Sapphos: one the great poet, the other the notorious slut. There is an entry for each in the Suda.

The uncertainties plaguing the biography of literature’s most famous Lesbian explain why classicists who study Sappho like to cite the entry for her in Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig’s Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary (1979). To honour Sappho’s central position in the history of female homosexuality, the two editors devoted an entire page to her. The page is blank.

The controversies about Sappho’s sexuality have never been far from the centre of scholarship about her. Starting in the early nineteenth century, when classics itself was becoming a formal discipline, scholars who were embarrassed by what they found in the fragments worked hard to whitewash Sappho’s reputation. The title of one early work of German scholarship is ‘Sappho Liberated from a Prevalent Prejudice’: in it, the author acknowledged that what Sappho felt for her female friends was ‘love’ but hastened to insist that it was in no way ‘objectionable, vulgarly sensual, and illegal’, and that her poems of love were neither ‘monstrous nor abominable’.

The eagerness to come up with ‘innocent’ explanations for the poet’s attachment to young women persisted through the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The most tenacious theory held that Sappho was the head of a girls’ boarding school, a matron whose interest in her pupils was purely pedagogical. (One scholar claimed to have found evidence that classes were taught on how to apply makeup.) Another theory made her into an august priestess, leading ‘an association of young women who devoted themselves to the cult of the goddess’.

Most classicists today have no problem with the idea of a gay Sappho. But some have been challenging the interpretation of her work that seems most natural to twenty-first-century readers: that the poems are deeply personal expressions of private homoerotic passion. Pointing to the relentlessly public and communitarian character of ancient Greek society, with its clan allegiances, its endless rounds of athletic games and artistic competitions, its jammed calendar of civic and religious festivals, they wonder whether ‘personal’ poetry, as we understand the term, even existed for someone like Sappho. As André Lardinois, the co-author of the new English edition, has written, ‘Can we be sure that these are really her own feelings? … What is “personality” in such a group-oriented society as archaic Greece?’

Indeed, the vision of Sappho as a solitary figure pouring out her heart in the women’s quarters of a nobleman’s mansion is a sentimental anachronism – a projection, like so much of our thinking about her, of our own habits and institutions onto the past. In Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Sappho and Alcaeus, the Poetess and four diaphanously clad, flower-wreathed acolytes relax in a charming little performance space, enraptured as the male bard sings and plays, as if he were a Beat poet in a Telegraph Hill café. But Lardinois and others have argued that many, if not most, of Sappho’s poems were written to be performed by choruses on public occasions. In some lyrics, the speaker uses the first-person plural ‘we’; in others, the form of ‘you’ that she uses is the plural, suggesting that she’s addressing a group – presumably the chorus, who danced as she sang. (Even when Sappho uses the first-person singular, it doesn’t mean she was singing solo: in Greek tragedy, the chorus, which numbered fifteen singers, regularly uses ‘I’.)

This communal voice, which to us seems jarring in lyrics of deep, even erotic feeling – imagine that Shakespeare’s sonnets had been written as choral hymns – is one that some translators today simply ignore, in keeping with the modern interest in individual psychology. But if the proper translation of the sexy little Fragment 38 is not ‘you scorch me’ but ‘you scorch us’, which is what the Greek actually says, how, exactly, should we interpret it?

To answer that question, classicists lately have been imagining the purposes to which public performance of erotic poems might have been put. Ancient references to the poet’s ‘companions’ and ‘students’ have led one expert to argue that Sappho was the leader of a female collective, whose role was ‘instruction leading to marriage’. Rather than expressions of individual yearning for a young woman, the poems were, in Lardinois’s view, ‘public forms of praise of the general attractiveness of the girl’, celebrating her readiness for wedlock and integration into the larger society. The late Harvard classicist Charles Segal made even larger claims. As he saw it, the strongly rhythmic erotic lyrics were ‘incantatory’ in nature; he believed that public performance of poems like Fragment 31 would have served to socialize desire itself for the entire city – to lift sexual yearning ‘out of the realm of the formless and terrible, bring it into the light of form, make it visible to the individual poet and, by extension, to his or her society’.

Even purely literary issues – for instance, the tendency to think of Sappho as the inventor of ‘the lyric I’, a single, emotionally naked speaker who becomes a stand-in for the reader – are affected by these new theories. After all, if the ‘I’ who speaks in Sappho’s work is a persona (a ‘poetic construct rather than a real-life figure’, as Lardinois put it) how much does her biography actually matter?

Between the paucity of actual poems and the woeful unreliability of the biographical tradition, these debates are unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. Indeed, the study of Sappho is beset by a curious circularity. For the better part of a millennium – between the compilation of the Suda and the late nineteenth century – the same bits of poetry and the same biographical gossip were endlessly recycled, the poetic fragments providing the sources for biographies that were then used as the basis for new interpretations of those same fragments. This is why the ‘new Sappho’ has been so galvanizing for classicists: every now and then, the circle expands, letting in a little more light.

Obbink’s revelation last year was, in fact, only the latest in a series of papyrological discoveries that have dramatically enhanced our understanding of Sappho and her work. Until the late nineteenth century, when the papyri started turning up, there were only the ancient quotations. Since then, the amount of Sappho that we have has more than doubled.

In 1897, two young Oxford archaeologists started excavating a site in Egypt that had been the municipal dump of a town called Oxyrhynchus – ‘the City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish’. In ancient times, the place had been home to a large Greek-speaking population. However lowly its original purpose, the dump soon yielded treasures. Papyrus manuscripts dating to the first few centuries AD, containing both Greek and Roman texts, began to surface. Some were fragments of works long known, such as the Iliad, but even these were of great value, since the Oxyrhynchus papyri were often far older than what had been, until that point, the oldest surviving copies. Others revealed works previously unknown. Among the latter were several exciting new fragments of Sappho, some substantial. From the tattered papyri, the voice came through as distinctive as ever:

Some men say cavalry, some men say infantry,

some men say the navy’s the loveliest thing

on this black earth, but I say it’s what-

ever you love

Over the decades that followed, more of the papyri were deciphered and published. But by 1955, when the Cambridge classicist Denys Page published Sappho and Alcaeus, a definitive study of the two poets from Lesbos, it seemed that even this rich new vein had been exhausted. ‘There is not at present,’ Page declared, ‘any reason to expect that we shall ever possess much more of the poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus than we do today, and this seems a suitable time to begin the difficult and doubtful task of interpreting.’

Sappho herself, it seems fair to say, would have raised an eyebrow at Page’s confidence in his judgment. Human fortune, she writes, is as variable as the weather at sea, where ‘fair winds swiftly follow harsh gales’. And, indeed, this verse was unknown to Page, since it comes from the papyrus fragment that Dirk Obbink brought to light last year: the ‘Brothers Poem’.

For specialists, the most exciting feature of the ‘Brothers Poem’ is that it seems to corroborate the closest thing we have to a contemporary reference to Sappho’s personal life: an oblique mention of her in Herodotus’ Histories, written about a century and a half after her death. During a long discussion of Egyptian society, Herodotus mentions one of Sappho’s brothers, a rather dashing character named Charaxus. A swashbuckling merchant sailor, he supposedly spent a fortune to buy the freedom of a favourite courtesan in Egypt – an act, Herodotus reports, for which Sappho ‘severely chided’ her sibling in verse. Ovid and other later classical authors also refer to some kind of tension between Sappho and this brother, but, in the absence of a surviving poem on the subject by Sappho herself, generations of scholars were unable to verify even the brother’s name.

So it’s easy to imagine Dirk Obbink’s excitement as he worked his way through the first lines of the poem:

but you’re always nattering on that Charaxus must come,

his ship full-laden. That much, I reckon, Zeus knows …

The pious thing to do, the speaker says, is to pray to the gods for this brother’s return, since human happiness depends on divine good will. The poem closes with the hope that another, younger brother will grow up honourably and save his family from heartache – presumably, the anxiety caused by their wayward elder sibling. At last, that particular biographical titbit could be confirmed.

For non-classicists, the ‘Brothers Poem’ may be less enthralling than the other recent Sappho find, the poem that surfaced in 2004, about old age – a bittersweet work indeed. After the University of Cologne acquired some papyri, scholars found that one of the texts overlapped with a poem already known: Fragment 58, one of the Oxyrhynchus papyri. The Oxyrhynchus fragment consisted mostly of the ends of a handful of lines; the new Cologne papyrus filled in the blanks, leaving only a few words missing. Finally, the lines made sense.

As with much Archaic Greek poetry, the newly restored Fragment 58 – the ‘Old Age Poem’, as it is now called – illustrates its theme with an example from myth. Sappho alludes to the story of Eos, the dawn goddess, who wished for, and was granted, eternal life for her mortal lover, Tithonus, but forgot to ask for eternal youth:

[I bring] the beautiful gifts of the violet Muses, girls,

and [I love] that song lover, the sweet-toned lyre.

My skin was [delicate] before, but now old age

[claims it]; my hair turned from black [to white].

My spirit has grown heavy; knees buckle

that once could dance light as fawns.

I often groan, but what can I do?

Impossible for humans not to age.

For they say that rosy-armed Dawn in love

went to the ends of the earth holding Tithonos,

beautiful and young, but in time grey old age

seized even him with an immortal wife.

Here as elsewhere in the new translation, Diane J. Rayor captures the distinctively plainspoken quality of Sappho’s Greek, which, for all the poet’s naked emotionality and love of luxe, is never overwrought or baroque. Every translation is a series of sacrifices; in Rayor’s case, emphasis on plainness of expression sometimes comes at the cost of certain formal elements – not least, metre. The late classicist M. L. West, who published a translation in the Times Literary Supplement, took pains to emulate the long line of Sappho’s original:

But me – my skin which once was soft is withered now

by age, my hair has turned to white which once was black …

Still, given how disastrously cloying many attempts to recreate Sappho’s verse as ‘song’ have proved to be, you’re grateful for Rayor’s directness. Her notes on the translations are particularly useful, especially when she alerts readers to choices that are left ‘silent’ in other English versions. The last extant line of Fragment 31, for instance, presents a notorious problem: it could mean something like ‘all must be endured’ or, on the other hand, ‘all must be dared’. Rayor prefers ‘endured’, and tells you why she thinks it’s the better reading.

Rayor makes one very interesting choice in translating the ‘Old Age Poem’. The Cologne manuscript dates to the third century BC, which makes it the oldest and therefore presumably the most reliable manuscript of Sappho that we currently possess. In that text, the poem ends after the sixth couplet, with its glum reference to Tithonus being seized by grey old age. But Rayor has decided to include some additional lines that appear only in the fragmentary Oxyrhynchus papyrus. These give the poem a far more upbeat ending:

Yet I love the finer things … this and passion

for the light of life have granted me brilliance and beauty.

The manuscript containing those lines was copied out five hundred years after the newly discovered Cologne version – half a millennium further away from the moment when the Poetess first sang this song.

And so the new Sappho raises as many questions as it answers. Did different versions of a single poem coexist in antiquity, and, if so, did ancient audiences know or care? Who in the ‘Brothers Poem’ has been chattering on about Sappho’s brother Charaxus, and why? Where, exactly, does the ‘Old Age Poem’ end? Was it a melancholy testament to the mortifying effects of age or a triumphant assertion of the power of beauty, of the ‘finer things’ – of poetry itself – to redeem the ravages of time? Even as we strain to hear this remarkable woman’s sweet speech, the thrumming in our ears grows louder.

– The New Yorker, 16 March 2015

Not an Ideal Husband

By now, we have all heard the story. Like so many tragedies, this one begins with a husband and his wife. The husband seems a happy man, pre-eminent among his contemporaries, affable, well liked, someone whose weaknesses are balanced by a remarkable gift for inspiring affection and loyalty. (His relatives, on the other hand, are thought to be cold and greedy.) The wife, whose fiery inner passions are belied by a conventional exterior – she exults in the small routines of domestic life – is intensely, some might say madly, devoted to him. They have two small children: a boy, a girl.

Then something goes wrong. Some who have studied this couple say that it is the husband who grotesquely betrays the wife; others, who consider the wife too intense, too disagreeably self-involved, dispute the extent of the husband’s culpability. (As often happens with literary marriages, each has fanatical partisans and just as fanatical detractors – most of whom, it must be said, are literary critics.) What we do know is that directly as a result of her husband’s actions, the wife willingly goes to her death – but not before taking great pains to guarantee the safety of her two children. Most interesting and poignant of all, the knowledge of her impending death inspires the wife to previously unparalleled displays of eloquence: as her final hours approach, she articulates, with thrilling lyricism, what she knows about life, womanhood, marriage, death – and seems, as she does so, to speak for all women. It is only after her death, many feel, that her husband realizes the extent of his loss. She comes back, in a way, to haunt him: a speaking subject no longer, but rather the eerily silent object of her husband’s solicitous, perhaps compensatory, ministrations.

This is the plot of Euripides’ Alcestis. That it also resembles, uncannily in some respects, the plot of the life of Ted Hughes – whose final, posthumously published work is an adaptation of Euripides’ play, may or may not be a coincidence. Because Hughes’s Alcestis is a liberal adaptation, it cannot, in the end, illuminate this most controversial work of the most controversial of the Greek dramatists. (Scholars still can’t decide whether it’s supposed to be farce or tragedy.) But the choices Hughes makes as a translator and adapter – what he leaves out, what he adds, what he smooths over – do shed unexpected light on his career, and his life.

As Ted Hughes neared the end of his life, he devoted himself to translating a number of classical texts: a good chunk of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in 1997, Racine’s Phèdre in 1998 (performed by the Almeida Theatre Company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in January 1999), and Aeschylus’s Oresteia, commissioned by the Royal National Theatre for a performance in 1999 and published posthumously in that year. Hughes had translated one other classical text: Seneca’s Oedipus, for a 1968 production by the Old Vic starring John Gielgud and Irene Worth. But with the exception of that work, the fit between the translator and the texts was never a comfortable one.

Hughes made his name as a poet of nature, and excluding the translations (he also translated Wedekind’s Spring Awakening and Lorca’s Blood Wedding) and the self-revealing 1997 Birthday Letters, addressed to his late wife, the poet Sylvia Plath, he rarely strayed from the natural world, for which he had extraordinary imaginative sympathy (and which in turn inspired his fascination with Earth-Mother folklore and animistic magic). A glance at his published work reveals the following titles: The Hawk in the Rain, Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, Flowers and Insects, Wolfwatching, Rain-Charm for the Duchy, Cave Birds, The River. ‘They are a way of connecting all my deepest feelings together,’ Hughes told an interviewer who’d asked why he spoke so often through animals. Yet the poet’s appreciation for – and artistic use of – the life of birds, fish, insect predators, of barnyards and wild landscapes, was anything but sentimental. As Helen Vendler observed in a review of the 1984 collection The River, Hughes, who liked to represent himself ‘as a man who has seen into the bottomless pit of aggression, death, murder, holocaust, catastrophe’, had taken as his real subject ‘the moral squalor attending the brute survival instinct’. In Hughes’s best poetry, the natural world, with its dazzling beauties and casual cruelties, served as an ideal vehicle for investigating that dark theme.

It was a theme for which his tastes in language and diction particularly well suited him. Especially at the beginning of his career, the verse in which Hughes expressed himself was tough, vivid, sinewy, full (as Vendler wrote about The River) of ‘violent phrases, thick sounds, explosive words’, the better to convey a vision of life according to which an ordinary country bird, say, can bristle with murderous potential. ‘Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn / More coiled steel than living – a poised / Dark deadly eye …’, goes the violent beginning of ‘Thrushes’, from the 1960 collection Lupercal, hissing suggestively with alliterative s’s, exploding with menacing t’s and d’s, thick with cackling c’s and k’s. It was, indeed, Hughes’s ‘virile, deep banging’ poems that first entranced the young Plath; she wrote home to her mother about them. (At the end of his career a certain slackness and talkiness tended to replace virile lyric intensity; few of the Birthday Letters poems, for instance, achieve more than a documentary interest. Hughes himself seemed to be aware of this. ‘I keep writing this and that, but it seems pitifully little for the time I spend pursuing it,’ he wrote to his friend Lucas Myers in 1984. ‘I wonder sometimes if things might have gone differently without the events of ’63 and ’69 [Plath’s suicide in 1963 and, in 1969, the suicide of Hughes’s companion Assia Wevill, who also killed the couple’s daughter]. I have an idea of these two episodes as giant steel doors shutting down over great parts of myself … No doubt a more resolute artist would have penetrated the steel doors.’)

A taste for violence in both theme and diction is undoubtedly what drew the younger Hughes to Seneca’s Oedipus. The rhetorical extravagance of the Stoic philosopher and dramatist’s verse, the sense of language being pushed to its furthest extremes, the famously baroque descriptions of the violence to which the body can be subjected: these have long been acknowledged as characteristic of Seneca’s style. In his introduction to the published version of the Oedipus translation, Hughes (who in works such as his 1977 collection, Gaudete, warned against rejecting the primordial aspect of nature in favour of cold intellectualism) commented on his preference for the ‘primitive’ Senecan treatment of the Oedipus myth over the ‘fully civilized’ Sophoclean version. Seneca’s blood-spattered text afforded Hughes plenty of opportunities to indulge his penchant for the uncivilized, often to great effect: his renderings of Seneca’s dense Latin have an appropriately clotted, claustrophobic feel, and don’t shy away from all the gore. The man who, in a poem called ‘February 17th’, coolly describes the aftermath of his decapitation of an unborn lamb in utero (‘a smoking slither of oils and soups and syrups’) was clearly not fazed by incest and self-mutilation. ‘My blood,’ Hughes’s Jocasta says, ‘… poured on / into him blood from my toes my finger ends / blind blood blood from my gums and eyelids / blood from the roots of my hair … / flowed into the knot of his bowels …’, etc.

Hughes’s Seneca was good, strong stuff because in Seneca, as in Hughes’s own work, theme and language are meant to work at the same pitch – the moral squalor was nicely matched by imagistic, prosodic, and linguistic squalor. Hughes was much less successful when, a generation later, he returned to classical texts – especially the dramas. You could certainly make the case that classical tragedy (and its descendants in French drama of Racine’s siècle classique) is about nothing if not the moral squalor that attends the brute survival instinct – not least the audience’s sense of moral squalor, its guilty pleasure in not being at all like the exalted but doomed scapegoat-hero. But it is an error typical of Hughes as a translator to think that you can extract the squalid contents from the highly stylized form and still end up with something that has the power and dreadful majesty of the Oresteia or Phèdre. Commenting on The River, Professor Vendler observed that ‘Hughes notices in nature what suits his purpose’: the same is true of his approach to the classics.

It’s not that Hughes’s translations of Racine and Aeschylus can’t convey with great vividness the moral and emotional states of the characters; they can. ‘I have not drunk this strychnine day after day / As an idle refreshment,’ Hughes’s besotted Phèdre tells her stepson, with an appropriately astringent mix of pathos and wryness. His Clytemnestra has ‘a man’s dreadful will in the scabbard of her body / Like a polished blade’ – lines that Aeschylus never wrote, it’s true, but that convey the poet’s preoccupation particularly with the threateningly androgynous character of his monstrous queen. But what Hughes’s classical translations lack – disastrously – is grandeur. And the grandeur of high tragedy arises from the friction between the unruly passions and actions that are represented (incestuous longings, murderous and suicidal violence – moral squalor, in short) and the highly, if not indeed rigidly, stylized poetic forms that contain them: Racine’s glacially elegant alexandrines, or the insistent iambic trimeters of the Greek dialogue alternating at regular intervals with choral lyrics in elaborate metres. William Christie, the leader of the baroque music ensemble Les Arts Florissants, has spoken of ‘the high stylization that releases, rather than constrains, emotion’: this is a perfect description of the aesthetics of classical tragedy.

Hughes – never committed to strict poetic form to begin with, and increasingly given to loose, unrhythmical versification – is suspicious of the formal restraints that characterize the classical. Like so many contemporary translators of the classics, he mistakes artifice for stiffness, and restraint for lack of feeling, and he tries to do away with them. In his Oresteia the diction is more elevated than what you find in some translations (certainly more so than what you find in David Slavitt’s vulgar Oresteia translation for the Penn Greek Drama series, which has Clytemnestra pouring a ‘cocktail of vintage evils’ and addressing the chorus leader as ‘mister’); but still Hughes tends too much to tone things down, smooth things out, explain things away.

Few moments in Greek drama are as moving as the chorus’s description, in the Agamemnon, of Iphigenia, about to be sacrificed at Aulis by Agamemnon, pleading for her life ‘with prayers and cries to her father’ and then, even more poignantly, after she has been brutally gagged, ‘hurling at the sacrificers piteous arrows of the eyes’. But Hughes’s rather suburban Iphigenia cries, ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ and simply weeps (‘her eyes swivel in their tears’). Such choices remind you of how much the extreme figurative language that Aeschylus gives his characters has regularly confounded, not to say embarrassed, translators. The Watchman at the opening of the Agamemnon is so terrified of the adulterous, man-emulating queen that he can’t even talk to himself about it: ‘A great ox stands upon my tongue,’ he mutters ominously. The line has tremendous archaic heft and power, something that cannot be said for Hughes’s ‘Let their tongue lie still – squashed flat’.

No doubt because of the many opportunities Ovid’s Metamorphoses affords for crafting images of the animals into which so many characters are transformed, the most successful of Hughes’s late-career translations is his Tales from Ovid. But even here the poet fails to realize how important Ovid’s form is. In his Introduction, Hughes makes due reference to the Hellenophile poet’s ‘sweet, witty soul’, but he’s clearly far more interested in what he sees as the Metamorphoses’ subject: ‘a torturous subjectivity and catastrophic extremes of passion that border on the grotesque’. He manages, in other words, to find the Seneca in Ovid. And yet the pleasure of Ovid’s epic lies precisely in the delicate tension between all those regressive, grotesque, nature-based metamorphoses and the ‘fully civilized’ verses in which they are narrated: a triumph of Culture over Nature if ever there was one. Hughes’s Ovid is often very effective, but it is not sweet and witty.

It’s tempting to think that Hughes found Euripides’ Alcestis interesting precisely because this work – the tragedian’s earliest surviving play – presents so many problems of both form and content. With its unpredictable oscillations in tone and style, it seems positively to invite abandonment of formal considerations altogether. ‘A critic’s battlefield,’ the scholar John Wilson wrote in his introduction to a 1968 collection of essays on the play. The war continues to rage on.

Alcestis was first performed in 438 BC in Athens at the Greater Dionysia, an annual combined civic and religious festival, including a dramatic competition, that must have resembled a cross between the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and the Oscars. The drama was presented as the fourth play in a tetralogy – the final spot, that is, in which amusingly bawdy ‘satyr plays’ were normally presented, presumably to alleviate the pity and fear triggered by the three tragedies that had preceded it onstage. (The three that preceded Alcestis, two of which seem to have dealt with the sufferings of passionate women, are lost.) And yet, this fourth play – in which Queen Alcestis voluntarily dies in place of her husband, King Admetos, when the appointed day of his death is at hand, only to be brought back from Hades by Herakles in the play’s bizarre finale – unsettlingly mixes elements of high tragedy with its scenes of comic misunderstandings, elaborate teasing, and drunken hijinks.

The first, ‘tragic’ half of the short drama begins with a sombre expository prologue by Apollo, followed by a debate between Apollo and Death, who has come to claim Alcestis and who is warned that he won’t, in the end, get his way. We are then plunged into the mortal world and a mood of unrelenting gloom: a heartrending scene of Alcestis’s slow death; her farewells to her children (whom she relinquishes to her husband on the condition that he not neglect them) and to her husband (who vows never to remarry); her impassioned outburst, addressed to her marriage bed, as she sees death approaching; her funeral procession, which is interrupted by a violent argument between Admetos and his aged father, Pheres (who along with his elderly wife refused to die in his son’s place when given the chance to do so); and a grief-stricken Admetos’s return to his empty house after the funeral.

The second, ‘comic’, half presents the spectacle of the rambunctious Herakles’ arrival at the house of mourning (he is en route to yet another of his Labours); Admetos’s excruciatingly diplomatic efforts to keep up his reputation as a good friend and legendary host (he doesn’t want Herakles to know Alcestis has died lest his guest feel unwelcome); a drunken, feasting Herakles’ discovery of the truth, and his subsequent vow to bring his friend’s wife back; and the hero’s rescue of Alcestis after a wrestling match with Death himself, which takes place beside Alcestis’s tomb. The play ends with the eerie spectacle of a triumphant Herakles, like the father of a bride, handing over the veiled and silent figure of Alcestis to Admetos without, at first, telling Admetos who the woman is – teasing him in order to prolong the suspense. She never speaks again during the course of the play.

The hodgepodge of moods, styles, and themes suggested by even this cursory summary has made interpretation of this strange work particularly thorny. To cite John Wilson further:

Even the genre to which the play belongs is disputed – is it a tragedy, a satyr play, or the first example of a tragicomedy? Who is the main character, Alcestis or Admetos? And through whose eyes are we to see this wife and this husband? Is Alcestis as noble as she says she is? And is Admetos worthy of her devotion, or does he deserve all the blame that his father, Pheres, heaps upon him? And is the salvation of Alcestis a true mystery, a sardonic ‘and so they lived happily ever after’, or simply the convenient end of an entertainment?

These questions continue to puzzle classicists, despite radical shifts in the way we read classical texts. Since Wilson wrote in the 1960s, no literary-critical school has influenced classical scholarship so much as feminist studies has; and the Alcestis has proved an especially rich vehicle for scholars interested in demonstrating the extent to which literary production in classical Greece reflected the patriarchal bias of Athenian society during its cultural heyday. ‘The genre of the Alcestis,’ the classicist Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz has written in a stimulating if perhaps too ideologically rigid study of Euripides’ handling of female characters, ‘… depends on gender. On the surface, it is comic: death leads to life, and a funeral resolves into a wedding. But is it a happy ending for Alcestis as well as for Admetos? Although funeral and wedding may seem to be opposites, they come to much the same thing for this woman.’

You don’t have to be a feminist hardliner to have your doubts about Admetos. Even at the very beginning of the drama, as Alcestis lies dying within the house, the king’s self-involvement takes your breath away. It is true that the laments he utters in his exchange with the dying Alcestis are all fairly conventional (‘Don’t forsake me,’ ‘I am nothing without you’), and yet their cumulative effect is unsettling: gradually, it strikes you that for Admetos this domestic disaster is all about him. Alcestis’s death, he cries, is ‘heavier than any death of my own’ – an appeal for sympathy that’s a bit much, considering that she’s dying precisely because he was afraid to. He’s Periclean Athens’s answer to the guy in the joke about the classic definition of chutzpah – the one who murders his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan.

Admetos makes the dying Alcestis several somewhat excessive promises: among them, a vow to ban all revelry for a full year, and an oath never to take another woman into his house. Yet by the end of the play he will have broken both: first when he allows Herakles to be feted with wine and music, and then when he accepts, as a man might accept a new bride, the anonymous veiled woman into his household – before he knows she’s Alcestis. Most bizarrely, he declares that he will have an artisan fashion a statue of Alcestis, which he will take to bed and caress as if it were she – a ‘cold pleasure’, to be sure, but one that will help to assuage his loss. For some critics, this has a fetishistic, doth-protest-too-much quality; whatever you make of it, it’s striking that, having promised to mourn Alcestis forever, her husband begins, before she even dies, to seek comfort (however cold) for himself.

So the husband is a weak man in the first part of the play. But he must be so, since whatever ‘tragic’ – or, for that matter, dramatic – development Euripides’ play has depends on Admetos’s evolution – on his starting out as a less than admirable man who comes to realize that the existence he has purchased with his wife’s life isn’t worth having precisely because he has lost her. ‘Now I understand,’ he exclaims at the play’s climax, right before Herakles enters with the resurrected Alcestis. Even so, this king is no hero: Alcestis’s miraculous return from the grave yanks her husband back from the brink of truly tragic self-knowledge, the kind he’d have acquired if he had had to live with his loss, as characters in ‘real’ tragedies do. (When they don’t kill themselves, that is.)

As it is, Admetos gets to eat his cake and have it, too. ‘Many readers will feel [his grief] does not change him enough,’ the Harvard classicist Charles Segal tartly observed in one of several penetrating essays he wrote on this play. Richmond Lattimore, who translated the Alcestis for the University of Chicago Greek Drama series nearly half a century ago, was moved, similarly, to question Admetos’s character, using the bemused rhetorical-question mode into which those who have grappled with the Alcestis keep falling, no doubt because the work’s violent wobbling between genres makes any definitive pronouncement seem foolhardy. ‘If a husband lets his wife die for him,’ Lattimore asked, ‘what manner of man must that husband be?’

Hughes’s Alcestis adaptation invites us to believe that this is, in fact, the wrong question to be asking. His version is wholly unconcerned with Admetos’s flaws, not least because in his version, Admetos has no flaws. Everything in Euripides that suggests we ought to question the husband’s character has here been excised; instead, it’s God who gets the rough treatment. It’s a striking alteration.

The clean-up job begins early on. In Euripides’ play we learn that Apollo, in gratitude for being well treated chez Admetos, has promised the mortal king that he will be able to avoid his death if he can find someone to die in his place; Admetos tries all his loved ones in turn until finally his wife agrees to die for him. But in Hughes’s version, Admetos is spared the embarrassing (indeed, damning) task of begging his relatives – and wife – for volunteers; here, it’s Apollo who ‘canvasses’ for substitutes. In fact, Apollo doesn’t even have to ask Alcestis, as in Euripides’ play Admetos most certainly does: she just volunteers. (It’s interesting that Hughes’s heroine is more faithful to her counterpart in the Greek original than his Admetos is to his; and when he gives her lines that Euripides didn’t – as when, in her farewell to her daughter, she pathetically exclaims, ‘She will not even know what I looked like’ – the drama is enhanced.)

Similarly, Hughes smooths away any sign of what Charles Segal calls the ‘unthinking self-centredness of the husband’. He erases the solipsistic whininess from Admetos’s laments at the beginning of the play. The breathtakingly self-involved utterances that Euripides puts in Admetos’s mouth, well translated by Lattimore – ‘sorrow for all who love you – most of all for me / and for the children’ and ‘Ah, [‘good-bye’ is] a bitter word for me to hear, / heavier than any death of my own’ – here become the considerably less galling ‘Fight against it, Alcestis. / Fight for your children, for me’ and ‘Good-bye! – don’t use that word. / Only live, live, live, live.’ (For American readers, at least, the latter will have an unfortunate Auntie Mame-ish ring.)

Most strikingly, Hughes eradicates any sense of the strange excessiveness of Admetos’s promise to build a replica of his wife, which in the new version becomes a dismissive, indeed incredulous, rhetorical question: ‘What shall I do, / Have some sculptor make a model of you? / Stretch out with it, on our bed, / Call it Alcestis, whisper to it? / Tell it all I would have told you? / Embrace it – horrible! – stroke it! / Knowing it can never be you …’ Hughes’s subtle rewriting inverts the whole point of the scene. The original hints disturbingly at the husband’s readiness to accept a substitute for the dead wife; the new version emphasizes the husband’s steadfast fidelity. (To further deflect blame from Admetos, Hughes makes his father, Pheres, particularly disgusting. Here the old man not only refuses to die for his son, but ‘screeches’ and ‘wails’ at the younger man to ‘Die … clear off and die.’)

Hughes’s alterations, ostensibly minor, ultimately sap the strength of Euripides’ dramatic climaxes. In the original, the culminating scene in which a veiled, voiceless Alcestis returns home to her husband on Herakles’ arm owes much of its eeriness precisely to Admetos’s deathbed promise, which has prepared us for the idea, however odd, that the king will settle for an inhuman facsimile of his dead wife; and lo and behold, at the ‘happy’ ending we see him holding hands with something that could well be such a dummy. But since Hughes has dispensed with Admetos’s vow, the climax loses all of its creepy potential. Once again, the translator’s embarrassment about the grand, bizarre qualities that so often characterize tragic action and diction takes its toll in dramatic effectiveness.

In the original, what leads us to a fleeting suspicion that Herakles’ companion is, in fact, nothing more than a statue is the figure’s total silence during a lengthy exchange between Admetos and Herakles – a muteness that clearly disturbs the other characters and, precisely because we’re afraid the silent woman might be just a simulacrum, a revenant, ought to disturb us, the audience, too. In Euripides, an agitated Admetos turns to Herakles and demands: ‘But why does she just stand there, voiceless?’ Fred Chappell’s rendering for the Penn Series nicely conveys Admetos’s agitation: ‘But why does my Alcestis stand so silent?’ In Hughes’s version, an ever-polite Admetos blandly murmurs, ‘Will she speak?’ You wonder whether he cares.

On the face of it, at least part of the reason for Hughes’s shifting of emphasis – and any suspicion of moral weakness – away from Admetos is that he wants his adaptation to be a grand dramatic and poetic statement about the triumph of the human spirit, about mortality and the victory of love over death. The husband and wife are idealized, whereas there’s a lot of complaining about ‘God’ and his pettiness and cruel indifference to human suffering (‘As usual, God is silent’). To bolster this cosmic interpretation of the original, Hughes adds, in the Herakles scene, elaborate riffs on Aeschylus’s antiauthoritarian Prometheus Bound, with its questioning of Zeus’s justice, and on Euripides’ own profoundly antireligious Madness of Herakles (in which the hero, freshly returned home from his labours, is temporarily maddened by a vengeful goddess and in his delusion murders his wife and children). And Hughes’s dark mutterings about ‘nuclear bomb[s] spewing a long cloud / of consequences’ and the accusatory descriptions of God as ‘the maker of the atom’ who is served by ‘electro-technocrats’ suggest as well that the poet had not given up his preference for primitive Nature over cold Culture.

Yet even as Hughes ups the thematic ante in his adaptation, formal problems seriously undercut his ambitions. Perhaps inevitably when dealing with Alcestis, the translation is, even more than his others, marred by the poet’s inability to find a suitable tone. In what looks like an attempt to convey the tonal variety of Euripides’ hybrid drama, Hughes experiments more than previously with slangy, playful diction. The results can be odd, and often betray the dignity of the original where it is, in fact, dignified. ‘You may call me a god. / You may call me whatever you like,’ Hughes’s Apollo says in his prologue speech, which in the original is crucial for setting the mournful tone of the entire first half. It’s a bizarre thing for Apollo to say: characters in Greek tragedies get zapped by thunderbolts for far less presumptuous haggling with divinities. (Alcestis begins, in fact, with a dire reference to Zeus’s incineration of the hubristic Aesculapius, Apollo’s son, who dared to raise the dead – the first allusion to the all-important theme of resurrection.) Apollo goes on: ‘The dead must die forever. / That is what the thunder said. The dead / Are dead are dead are dead are dead / Forever …’ You suspect Hughes is trying here to convey the thudding infinite nothingness of death, but bits like this are unfortunate reminders that the translator was also a prolific author of children’s books. The intrusion of comic informality is hard enough to adjust to in Euripides’ Alcestis, where the biggest moral problem is a husband’s gross inadequacies; but it’s a disaster in Hughes’s Alcestis, where the big moral problem is God’s gross inadequacies.

Hughes, it should be said, wasn’t the first widower poet for whom the opportunity to translate the Alcestis served as the vehicle for a corrective shift in emphases. In Robert Browning’s long historical poem Balaustion’s Adventure (the subtitle is ‘Including a Transcript of Euripides’), which was composed after the death of his wife, Elizabeth, a poetess comes to Athens from Rhodes to meet Euripides, and then sets about adapting Alcestis. But her version – and, by extension, the Browning version – turns out to be a redemptive one. In it, ‘a new Admetos’ rejects out of hand Alcestis’s offer to die in his place: ‘’Tis well that I depart, and thou remain,’ he tells his wife, with whom, indeed, he gets to enjoy a fairy-tale posterity. (‘The two,’ Browning writes, ‘lived together long and well.’) Hughes’s adaptation renovates Euripides along comparable lines. If the ancient dramatist’s Alcestis forces us to ask, ‘If a husband lets his wife die for him, what manner of man must that husband be?’ then the contemporary poet’s Alcestis asks, ‘If God lets people die, what manner of god must He be?’ In Hughes, as in Browning, there are no guilty husbands – no profound delving into the emotional (if not moral) squalor that often goes with being the survivor. There are just guilty abstractions.

Disturbing silences like the one with which Euripides’ Alcestis concludes are a leitmotif in the drama of Plath and Hughes. In Bitter Fame, her biography of Plath, Anne Stevenson describes a tiff between Plath and Hughes’s sister, Olwyn, that took place during the Christmas holidays in 1960: depending on whose side you’re on, the episode demonstrates either Plath’s irrationality or Olwyn Hughes’s coldness. In response to a remark of Olwyn’s that she was ‘awfully critical’, Plath ‘glared accusingly’ at her sister-in-law but refused to respond, keeping up her ‘unnerving stare’ in total silence. ‘Why doesn’t she say something?’ Olwyn recalled thinking. (That would have been an excellent translation of Admetos’s climactic line, conveying vividly the frustration and unease of someone faced with this particular brand of passive-aggressiveness.) As recently as a few years ago, Olwyn Hughes, in a letter to Janet Malcolm, was clearly still smarting from what Malcolm, in her book about Plath and Hughes, The Silent Woman, called Plath’s ‘Medusan’, ‘deadly, punishing’ speechlessness.

But if Plath was, like Alcestis, the ‘silent woman’, Hughes himself was the silent man – aggressively, punishingly so, at least in the eyes of those who wanted to know more about the characters in this famous literary/domestic ‘tragedy’, the passions of whose ‘characters’ only the language of Greek myth and classical drama, it sometimes seems, can capture. (‘They have eaten the pomegranate seeds that tie them to the underworld,’ Malcolm wrote; ‘I go about full with the darkness of my flame, like Phèdre …’, Plath herself wrote.) When Hughes’s Birthday Letters appeared in 1997, it met with a variety of reactions: horror, joy, shock, surprise, anxiety, enthusiasm, etc. But what everyone agreed on was that it was, in essence, a relief: finally, Hughes was speaking.

And why not? ‘Ted Hughes’s history seems to be uncommonly bare of the moments of mercy that allow one to undo or redo one’s actions and thus feel that life isn’t entirely tragic,’ Malcolm wrote. Birthday Letters was viewed by many as a kind of second chance, an opportunity to undo, or perhaps to redo, his public image with respect to his dead wife. (The same is true of the personal effects – passports, letters, photographs, manuscripts – that had belonged to Hughes, and which appear to have been the bases for several of the ‘Letters’. ‘He is thought of by critics as being so self-protective and so unrevealing of himself,’ said Stephen Enniss, the curator of literary collections at the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University, which now owns Hughes’ papers. ‘I think the archive will make him appear more human, more sympathetic than the detached voice and aloofness we had known.’)

Writers – even those who appear aloof and voiceless about their private lives – can reveal themselves inadvertently. Reading Malcolm’s description of the trapped Hughes, I found it hard not to think of Euripides’ Alcestis, a play that notoriously allows a flawed man to undo and redo the fatal past. The undoings and redoings you find in Hughes’s almost inadvertently moving adaptation of that work – the elisions, omissions, and reconfigurations – suggest that the poet’s most revealing public utterance with respect to Plath may not have been Birthday Letters after all. In her way – her ‘veiled’ way – the most eloquent figure, among so many strange and tragic silences, has turned out to be Euripides’ silent woman.

– The New York Review of Books, 27 April 2000

The Bad Boy of Athens

In the early spring of 411 BC, Euripides finally got what was coming to him. The playwright, then in his seventies, had always been the bad boy of Athenian drama. He was the irreverent prankster who, in his Electra, parodied the famous recognition scene in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers. He was an avant-garde intellectual who took an interest in the latest theorists – he is said to have been a friend of Socrates, and it was at his home that Protagoras (‘man is the measure of all things’) first read his agnostic treatise on the gods; in works like The Madness of Herakles, he questioned the established Olympian pantheon. Stylistically, he was a playful postmodernist whose sly rearranging of traditional mythic material, in bitter fables like Orestes, deconstructed tragic conventions, anticipating by twenty-five centuries a theatre whose patent subject was the workings of the theatre itself.

But no aspect of the playwright’s roiling opus was more famous, in his own day, than his penchant for portraying deranged females. Among them are the love-mad queen Phaedra, whose unrequited lust leads her to suicide and murder (the subject of not one but two Hippolytus plays by the poet, one now lost); the distraught widow Evadne in Suppliant Women, who incinerates herself on her dead husband’s grave; the ruthless granny Alcmene in Children of Herakles, who violently avenges herself on her male enemies; the wild-eyed Cassandra in Trojan Women; the list goes on and on. And, of course, there was Medea, whom the Athenians knew from established legend as the murderess of her own brother, the sorceress who dreamed up gruesome ways to destroy her husband Jason’s enemy Pelias, and whom Euripides – not surprisingly, given his tastes in female characters – decided, in his staging of the myth, to make the murderess of her own children as well.

And so it was that, shortly after winter was over in 411, the women of Athens had their revenge on the man who’d given womanhood such a bad name. Or at least they did in one playwright’s fantasy. In that year, the comic dramatist Aristophanes staged his Thesmophoriazousae. (The tongue-twister of a title means ‘Women Celebrating the Thesmophoria’ – this latter being an annual, all-female fertility festival associated with Demeter.) In this brilliant literary fantasy, Euripides learns that the women of the city are using the religious festival as a pretext to hold a debate on whether they ought to kill the playwright in revenge for being badmouthed by him in so many works over the years. Desperate to know what they’re saying about him, and eager to have someone speak up on his behalf – something no real woman would do – Euripides persuades an aged kinsman, Mnesilochus, to attend the festival in drag, spy on the proceedings, and, if necessary, speak in the poet’s defence. The plan, of course, backfires, Mnesilochus is found out, and only a last-minute rescue by Euripides himself – he comes swooping onto the stage, dressed as Perseus, in the contraption used in tragedies to hoist gods aloft – can avert disaster. Peace, founded on a promise by the playwright never to slander women again, is finally made between this difficult man of the theatre and his angry audience. The play ends in rejoicing.

Many contemporary classicists – this writer included – would argue that the females of Athens were taking things far too personally. Athenian drama, presented with much ceremony during the course of a public and even patriotic yearly civic festival, structured on the armature of heroic myth, rigidly conventional in form and diction, was not ‘realistic’; we must be careful, when evaluating and interpreting these works, of our own tendency to see drama in purely personal terms, as a vehicle for psychological investigations. If anything, Athenian tragedy seems to have been useful as an artistic means of exploring concerns that, to us, seem to be unlikely candidates for an evening of thrilling drama: the nature of the state, the difficult relationship – always of concern in a democracy – between remarkable leaders (tragedy’s ‘heroes’) and the collective citizen body.

In particular, the dialogic nature of drama made it a perfect vehicle for giving voice to – literally acting out – the tensions that underlay the smooth ideological surface of the aggressively imperialistic Athenian democracy. Tensions, that is, between personal morality and the requirements of the state (or army, as in Sophocles’ Philoctetes), and between the ethical obligations imposed by family and those imposed by the city (Antigone); and the never-quite-satisfying negotiations between the primitive impulse toward personal vengeance and the civilized rule of law (Oresteia). Greek tragedy was political theatre in a way we cannot imagine, or replicate, today; there was more than a passing resemblance between the debates enacted before the citizen members of the assembly, and the conflicts, agones, dramatized before the eyes of those same citizens in the theatre. Herodotus tells the story of a Persian king who bemusedly describes the Greek agora, the central civic meeting space, as ‘a place in the middle of the city where the people tell each other lies’. That’s what the theatre of Dionysus was, too.

This is the context in which we must interpret tragedy’s passionate females – as odd as it may seem to us today. The wild women characters to whom Aristophanes’ female Athenians so hotly objected weren’t so much reflections of real contemporary females and their concerns – the preoccupation of Athenian theatre being issues of import to the citizen audience, which was free, propertied, and male; we still can’t be sure whether women even attended the theatre – as, rather, symbolic entities representing everything ‘other’ to that smoothly coherent citizen identity. (Because women – thought to be irrational, emotional, deceitful, slaves of passion – were themselves ‘other’ to all that the free, rational, self-controlled male citizen was.) As such, Greek drama’s girls and women – pathetic, suffering, angry, violent, noble, wicked – were ideal mouthpieces for all the concerns that imperial state ideology, with its drive toward centralization, homogenization, and unity, necessarily suppressed or smoothed over: family blood ties, the interests of the private sphere, the anarchic, self-indulgent urges of the individual psyche, secret longings for the glittering heroic and aristocratic past.

For this reason, the conflicts between tragedy’s males and females are never merely domestic spats. Clytemnestra, asserting the interests of the family, obsessed by the sacrifice of her innocent daughter Iphigenia (an act that represents the way in which the domestic and individual realms are always ‘sacrificed’ to the collective good in wartime), kills her husband in revenge, but is herself murdered by their son – who later is acquitted by an Athenian jury. Antigone, for her part, prefers her uncle’s decree of death to a life in which she is unable to honour family ties as she sees fit. To be sure, this is a schematic reading, one that doesn’t take into account the genius of the Attic poets: men, after all, who had wives and mothers and daughters, and who were able to enhance their staged portraits of different types of females with the kind of real-life nuances that we today look for in dramatic characters. But it is useful to keep the schema in mind, if only as a counterbalance to our contemporary temptation to see all drama in terms of psyches rather than polities.

Two recent productions of works by Euripides illuminate, in very different ways, the dangers of failing to calibrate properly the precise value of the feminine in Greek, and particularly Euripidean, drama. As it happens, they make a nicely complementary pair. One, Medea, currently enjoying a highly praised run on Broadway in a production staged by Deborah Warner and starring the Irish actress Fiona Shaw, is the playwright’s best-known and most-performed play, not least because it conforms so nicely to contemporary expectations of what a night at the theatre should entail. (It looks like it’s all about emotions and female suffering.) The other, The Children of Herakles, first produced a couple of years after Medea, is Euripides’ least-known and most rarely performed drama: Peter Sellars’s staging of it in Cambridge, with the American Repertory Theatre, marks the work’s first professional production in the United States. That this play seems to be characterized far more by a preoccupation with dry and undramatic political concerns than by what we think of as a ‘typically’ Euripidean emphasis on feminine passions is confirmed by classicists’ habit of referring to it as one of the poet’s two ‘political plays’. And yet Medea is more political than you might at first think – and certainly more so than its noisy and shallow new staging suggests; while the political message of The Children of Herakles depends much more on the portrayal of its female characters than anyone, including those who have been bold enough to stage it for the first time, might realize.

By far the more interesting and thoughtful of the two productions is the Cambridge Children of Herakles. Euripides’ tale of the sufferings of the dead Herakles’ refugee children, pursued from their native land by the evil king Eurystheus and forced to seek asylum in Athens, has been much maligned for its episodic and ostensibly disjointed structure: the Aristotle scholar John Jones, writing on the Poetics, summed up the critical consensus by calling it ‘a thoroughly bad play’. But the imaginative if overcooked staging by Peter Sellars, who here effects one of his well-known updatings, suggests that it can have considerable power in performance.

The legend on which this odd drama is based was familiar to the Athenian audience, not least because it confirmed their sense of themselves as a just people. After his death, Herakles’ children are pursued from their native city, Argos, by Eurystheus – he’s the cruel monarch who has given Herakles all those terrible labours to perform – and, led by their father’s aged sidekick, Iolaos, they wander from city to city, seeking refuge from the man who wants to wipe them out. Only the Athenians agree to give them shelter and, more, to defend them; they defeat the Argive army in a great battle during which Eurystheus is killed – after which his severed head is brought back to Herakles’ mother, Alcmene, who gouges his eyes out with dress pins. (There was a place near Athens called ‘Eurystheus’ Head’, where the head was supposed to have been buried.) The legend was frequently cited in political orations of Euripides’ time as an example of the justness of the Athenian state – its willingness to make war, if necessary, on behalf of the innocent and powerless.

And yet Euripides went to considerable lengths to alter this mythic account precisely by adding new female voices. In his version, the two most significant actions in the story are assigned to women. First of all, he invents a daughter for Herakles, traditionally called Macaria but referred to in the text of the play simply as parthenos, ‘virgin’; in this new version of the famous patriotic myth, it is not merely the Athenians’ military might that saves the day, but Macaria’s decision, in response to one of those eleventh-hour oracles that inevitably wreak havoc with the lives of Greek tragic virgins, to die as a sacrificial victim in order to ensure victory in battle. The playwright also makes Alcmene a more vigorous, if sinister, presence: in this version, it is she who has Eurystheus killed, in flagrant violation of Athens’s rules for the treatment of prisoners of war. The play ends abruptly after she gives the order for the execution.

Classicists have always thought the play is ‘political’, but only because there are scenes in which various male characters – the caustic envoy of the Argive king, the sympathetic Athenian monarch Demophon, son of Theseus – debate what the just course for Athens ought to be. (Come to the aid of the refugees and thereby risk war? Or incur religious pollution by failing to honour the claims of suppliants at an altar?) But it’s only when you understand the political dimensions of the tragedy’s portrayal of women that you can see just how political a play it really is. The contrast between the two female figures – the self-sacrificing Macaria, and the murderous Alcmene; one concerned only for her family and allies, the other intent on the gratification of private vengeance – could not be greater.

In symbolic terms, the terms familiar to Euripides’ audiences, the play is about the politics of civic belonging. Herakles’ children, homeless, stateless, are eager to re-establish their civic identity – to belong somewhere; Macaria’s action demonstrates that in order to do so, sacrifices – of the individual, of private ‘family’ concerns – must take place. (In her speech of self-sacrifice, she uses all of the current buzzwords of Athenian civic conformity.) Her bloodthirsty grandmother, on the other hand, eager to avenge a lifetime of humiliations to her family, dramatizes the way in which private concerns – she, like Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra, is the representative of clan interests – never quite disappear beneath the smooth façade of public interest. ‘I am “someone”,’ too,’ she hotly replies, during the closing minutes of the play, in response to an Athenian’s statement that ‘there is no way that someone may execute’ Eurystheus in violation of Athenian law.

It is a shame, given the trouble Euripides goes to in order to inject vivid female energies into a story that previously had none, that Peter Sellars (who you could say has made a speciality of unpopular or difficult-to-stage Greek dramas: past productions include Sophocles’ Ajax and Aeschylus’ Persians, a work that has all of the dramatic élan of a Veterans Day parade) has focused on those issues in the play that appear ‘political’ to us, rather than those that the Athenians would have understood to be political. Because there are refugees in the play, Sellars thinks the play is about what we call refugee crises – to us, now, a very political-sounding dilemma indeed. He has, accordingly, with his characteristic thoroughness and imaginative brio, gone to a great deal of trouble to bring out this element, almost to the exclusion of everything else.

Indeed, the American Repertory Theatre’s performance of Children of Herakles is only one third of a three-part evening. It begins with a one-hour panel discussion – the guests change each night of the play’s run – hosted by the Boston radio personality Christopher Lydon, that focuses on refugee crises around the world. The night I saw the play, his three guests were Arthur Helton, the director of Peace and Conflict Studies for the Council on Foreign Relations; a female asylum-seeker from Somalia called Ayisha; and a Serbian woman from the former Yugoslavia who’d emigrated to the United States after suffering during the Balkan wars. Then comes the performance of Euripides’ play, which lasts two hours; and then a screening of a film. The latter represents, in the words of the programme, ‘an artistic response to the current crisis – a series of films made in countries that are generating large numbers of refugees’.

This probably sounds more pretentious and gimmicky than it really was. It’s true that a lot went wrong the night I saw the play: the Serbian woman, rather than shedding light on her own experiences as a refugee, lectured the audience rather stridently about the meaning of freedom (she chided us about our lust for large refrigerators); the first part took longer than expected, with the result that the film at the end of the evening began late, and people started disappearing, despite the temptations of a buffet dinner between parts two and three that featured appropriately politicized entrees (‘grilled Balkan sausage’); and so on. But a lot about the evening was right. It’s rare to see a production of a Greek drama that so seriously and conscientiously attempts to replicate, in some sense, the deeply political context in which the ancient works were originally performed. Whatever its flaws, Sellars’s Children of Herakles makes you feel that an appropriate staging of Greek tragedy entails more than a couple hours’ emoting followed by an argument about where to have dinner.

I found myself objecting, at first, to one of the most extreme gestures the director made: that is, having the children of Herakles themselves embodied (they’re not speaking roles) by Boston-area refugee children, who every now and then went up into the audience to shake our hands. But the sense of being somehow implicated in the real lives of the actors, so foreign to contemporary theatrical sensibilities, would not have been that strange to Euripides’ audiences. The choruses in the theatre of Dionysus at Athens were chosen from among Athenian citizens, boys and men, who would indeed have been known to the spectators, or at least some of them. Modern drama seeks to create estrangement, and distance, between the artifice onstage and the spectators’ everyday lives; ancient drama relied, in its way, on a sense of communal concern.

Sellars understands, furthermore, that tragedy doesn’t need a lot to achieve its effects, and his staging is rightly stark: a stepped altar in the middle of the stage surrounded by the huddling male offspring of Herakles, who have taken sanctuary there (the top of the altar was supposed to be occupied by a female Kazakh bard – a nice, if misplaced, Homeric touch – but she was ill the night I attended); a microphone, downstage left, into which the Argive envoy and Athenian king speak, which – not inappropriately, I thought – gives the debates at the opening of the play, where the city’s course of action is decided, the air of a press conference; and, for the chorus (their lines were read by Lydon and another person, a woman) a little conference table at the extreme left of the stage, where they sit primly, occasionally making weary bureaucratic noises about how sorry they felt about the refugees’ plight. This is perfect: it gets just right the tone of this work’s chorus, which like the choruses in many tragedies is stranded between good intentions and a healthy self-protectiveness.

What robs the play of the impact it could have had is Sellars’s failure to appreciate the subtle gender dynamics in Euripides’ text. One of the reasons that the actions of Euripides’ Macaria and Alcmene are so striking is that they’re the only actions by females in a play otherwise wholly devoted to ostensibly masculine concerns: the governance of the free state, extradition issues, war. Part of Sellars’s updating, however, is to give the roles of the nasty Argive herald – the one whom Eurystheus sends to intimidate the Athenians into giving up the refugees – and of the Athenian king Demophon (here recast as ‘president’ of Athens) to women. Although the parts are well played – the Demophon in particular comes across as a shrewd contemporary elected official, eager to do right but hamstrung by elaborate political obligations – the shift in gender results in a collapse of the playwright’s meanings. In Euripides’ play, the unexpected and electrifying entrance of Macaria and her offer of self-immolation dramatizes the need to sacrifice the ‘personal’ and ‘domestic’ – things that tragic women were understood to represent – to the larger civic good; the unusual and even revolutionary impact of her appearance and subsequent action is underscored, in the original, by her apology for appearing in public in the first place, something no nice Athenian girl would do. But Sellars’s staging makes nonsense of the lines; it’s absurd for this girl to be apologizing for talking to men outside the confines of the house (and for her to be asserting that she knows that a woman’s place is in the home) when the most politically powerful characters in the play are, as they are in this staging, women. And so the end of the play – the old woman’s violent explosion, reminder that the energies that must be sacrificed to establish the collective good always lurk uneasily within the polity, and can erupt – makes no sense, either. The women in this Children of Herakles are very healthy, thank you very much; there is no ‘repressed’ to return.

Worse still, Sellars stages the sacrifice of Macaria – beautifully, it is true, and bloodily. But it’s not in the play. One of the most famously disturbing things about The Children of Herakles is the irony that, after she makes her bid for immortality – the girl begs to be honoured in her family’s and Athens’s memory before she goes off to die – we never hear another word about her. There are all sorts of explanations for this cold treatment of a warm-blooded character (not least, that the manuscript of the play is incomplete), but surely one is precisely that everything that Macaria represents must, in fact, disappear in order for the community to persist. Tragedy loves its self-heroizing females, but like the state whose concerns it so subtly enacted, it always found a way to get rid of those unmanageable ‘others’. By bringing Macaria back in the second half of the play, and allowing us to weep over the spectacle of the tiny young girl having her throat cut, Sellars reasserts the energies that Euripides shows – ironically or not – being silenced.

And so, like an earlier generation of classicists who saw little of value in this play except references to contemporary politicking – the speeches were thought to echo fifth-century BC Athenian political debates – Sellars fails to see where the play’s political discourse really lies. Which is to say, in the representation of the two characters who look the least like politicians: a young girl and an old woman. Did Euripides care about refugees? Yes, but mostly because of what refugee crises tell us about the nature of the state. (‘The current event’ he cared about was Athens’s summary execution, the year before the play was produced, of some Spartan envoys – clearly the referent for Alcmene’s climactic act of violence.) Peter Sellars, on the other hand, cares about refugees the way a twenty-first-century person cares – he feels for these poor kids, the mute, wide-eyed boys, the brutalized girls, and wants to make you feel for them, too. The result, alas, is a play that sends a message that isn‘t quite the one Euripides was telegraphing to his audience, by means of symbolic structures they knew well. Someone gets sacrificed in this Children of Herakles, but it isn’t just Macaria.

A similar desire to update a Euripidean classic in terms familiar to today’s audience has, apparently, informed Deborah Warner’s vulgar, loud, and uncomprehending staging of Medea, which went from a limited run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to a Broadway run, which was rapturously received by most critics – mostly because they are rightly impressed by Fiona Shaw’s emotional ferocity. If only it were being put in the service of a reading that did justice to Euripides! For if Sellars’s Euripides ultimately betrays its source because it thinks ‘our’ politics are the play’s politics, Warner’s Euripides fails because it mistakes ‘our’ women for Euripides’ women.

In an interview two years ago with the Guardian, before their Medea had crossed the Atlantic, Warner and Shaw decried the ‘misplaced image of Medea as a strong, wilful, witchy woman’, suggesting instead that the key to their heroine was, in fact, her ‘weakness’. ‘Audiences can identify with weakness,’ Shaw said. ‘I think the Greek playwrights knew that. That they could entice the audience into an emotional debate about failure and dealing with being a failed person.’ This betrays a remarkable failure to understand the nature of Greek tragic drama, which unlike contemporary psychological drama didn’t strive to have audiences ‘identify’ with its characters – if anything, Athenian audiences were likely to find the chorus more sympathetic and recognizable than the outsized heroes with their divine pedigrees – and which was relatively uninterested in the wholly modern notion of ‘dealing’ with failure (and, you suppose, finding ‘closure’). For the Greeks, the allure of so many tragic heroes is, in fact, exactly the opposite of what Warner and Shaw think it is: the heroes’ strength, their grandeur, their power, the attributes of intellect or valour that they must resort to in their staged struggles with a hostile fate – or, as in many plays, like Ajax, their struggles to adapt to post-heroic worlds that have shifted and shrunk beneath them, rendering the heroes outsized, obsolete. (Norma Desmond, the has-been silent film star in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, has something of the grotesque yet somehow admirable grandiosity of the latter type of hero; her famous cri de coeur ‘I am big. It was the pictures that got small’ could, mutatis mutandis, be a line from Sophocles.)

And indeed, rather than being what Shaw called ‘very normal’ and Warner referred to as ‘the happy housewife of Corinth’, Euripides’ Medea is deliberately presented as a kind of female reincarnation of one of the most anguished, outsized, titanic dramatic heroes in the ancient canon: Sophocles’ Ajax, the hero of a drama first produced about ten years before Medea. Like Ajax, Medea is first heard, rather uncannily, offstage, groaning over her plight: her abandonment by her husband Jason, who has left her to marry the daughter of Creon, the king of Corinth. She is characterized by what the classicist Bernard Knox, writing at Ajax, has summarized as ‘determined resolve, expressed in uncompromising terms’, by a ‘fearful, terrible … wild’ nature, by ‘passionate intensity’. Like many Sophoclean heroes, she is motivated above all by an outraged sense of having been treated with disrespect, and curses her enemies while she plans her revenge; like Ajax specifically, she is tormented above all by the thought that her enemies will laugh at her.

So ‘strong, wilful, and witchy’ is, in fact, precisely what Euripides’ Medea is. But not Warner’s Medea, who appears to be stranded somewhere between Sylvia Plath and Mia Farrow – a frazzled woman who can’t figure out how to act until the last minute. (Euripides’ Medea can: from the start, she keeps repeating the terrifying word ktenô, ‘I will kill.’) Shaw, an impressive actress, chews up the scenery doing an impersonation of a housewife gone amok. When she comes out on the rather bleak stage at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre – apart from a door upstage centre, there are just some cinder blocks strewn around covered with tarps, as if a construction project had been halted midway, and a swimming pool (by now de rigueur in contemporary stagings of classical texts; there was one in Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses, too) in the centre with a toy boat floating in it – she’s emaciated, hugging herself, haggard, nervously cracking jokes. (She draws a little witch hat in the air above her head at one point.) To reconcile this Valium-starved wreck with the text’s many references to Medea’s fame, power, and semi-divine status, Warner makes some halfhearted references to Medea as being some kind of ‘celebrity’: the chorus, here, is a gang of autograph-seeking groupies – ‘the people who stand outside the Oscars’, as Warner put it. The intention, you imagine, is to throw into the interpretative stew some kind of commentary on ‘celebrity’, but it’s a stupid point to be making: all the heroes of Greek tragedy are famous.

This scaled-down, ‘normal’ Medea makes nonsense of the text in other, more damaging ways. Everyone in Euripides’ play who interacts with Medea shows a healthy respect for the woman they know to be capable of terrible deeds. (She once gave the daughters of one of Jason’s enemies a deliberately misleading recipe for rejuvenating their ageing father, which involved cutting the old man into tiny pieces. Needless to say, it didn’t work. This was the subject of Euripides’ first drama, produced in 455 BC, when he was thirty.) She is august, terrifying; the granddaughter of the sun, for heaven’s sake. The Warner/Shaw Medea looks as if she can barely get herself out of bed in the morning, and the result is that when the plot does require her to do those awful things (the murder of Jason’s fiancée and her father, the slaughter of her own children), you wonder how – and why – she managed it. The problem with making Medea into one of those distraught Susan Smith types, pushed by creepy men into moral regions we can’t ever inhabit, is that it substitutes pat psychological nostrums (‘Someone pushed to the place where she has no choice’: thus Warner) for something that is much more horrific – and vital – in the play. Euripides’ Medea is terrifying and grotesque precisely because her motivations aren’t those of a wounded housewife, but those of a heroic temperament following the brutal logic of heroism: to inflict harm on your enemies at all costs, even if – as here – those enemies turn out to be your own kin.

You could argue, indeed, that what makes Euripides’ heroine awesome is not that she’s a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but that, if anything, she has the capacity to think like a man. Or, perhaps, like a lawyer. Euripides, we know, was very interested in the developing art of rhetoric, an instrument of great importance in the workings of the Athenian state. The patent content of Euripides’ play, the material that seems to be about female suffering, is by now so famous, and so familiar-seeming, that it has obscured the play’s other preoccupations: chief among these is the use and abuse of language. In every scene, Medea is presented as a skilled orator; she knows how to manipulate each of her interlocutors in order to get what she wants, from the chorus (to whom she smoothly suggests that she’s a helpless girl, just like them) to the Corinthian king Creon, whom she successfully manipulates by appealing to his male vanity. Indeed, we’re told from the play’s prologue right on through the rest of the drama that what possesses Medea’s mind is not simply that her husband has left her for a younger woman, but that Jason has broken the oath (an ironclad prenup if ever there was one) that he once made to her. Oaths are crucial throughout the play: its central scene has her administering one to Aegeus, the Athenian king, who happens to be passing through Corinth on this terrible day, and who is made to swear to Medea that he will offer her sanctuary at Athens, should she ever go there. (Among other things, this oath furnishes her with her escape plan: rather than being an emotional wreck, Medea is always calculating, always thinking ahead.)

For the Greeks, all this had deep political implications. One of the reasons everyday Athenians were suspicious of the Sophists, those deconstructionists of the Greek world (with whom Socrates was mistakenly lumped in the common man’s mind, not least because Aristophanes, in another satirical play, put him there), was that the rhetorical skills they were thought to teach could confound meaning itself – could ‘make the worse argument seem the better’, and vice versa. In Jason, Euripides created a character who is a parody of sophistry: he’s glibness metastasized, rhetorical expertise gone amok. When he enters and tells Medea that he’s only marrying this young princess for Medea’s own sake, that he’s doing it all for her and the kids, it’s not because he thinks it’s true: it’s because he thinks he can get away with saying it’s true. Language, words – it’s all a game to him. Look, Euripides seems to be saying to his audience, men for whom the ability to make a persuasive speech could be, sometimes literally, a matter of life or death: look what moral corruption your rhetorical skills can lead to. Medea, of course – obsessed from the beginning of the play with oaths, the speech act whose purpose it is to fuse word and deed – is outraged by her husband’s glibness, and spends her one remaining day in Corinth seeking ways to make him see the value of that which he so slickly uses merely as argumentative window dressing: his marriage, his children. That is why she kills the children. (The typically Euripidean irony – one that would likely have unnerved the Athenians – is that this spirited defence of language is mounted by a woman, and a foreigner: a sign, perhaps, of the sorry state public discourse was in.)

A Medea that was all about the moral disintegration that follows from linguistic collapse probably wouldn’t sell a great many tickets in an age that revels in seeing characters ‘deal with’ being failures, but it’s the play that Euripides wrote. Because Deborah Warner thinks that Medea is a disappointed housewife, and the play she inhabits is a drama of a marriage gone sour, all of the political resonances are lost. (When Shaw administers that crucial oath to Aegeus, she shrugs with embarrassment, as if she has no idea how this silly stuff is done, or what it’s all supposed to be about.) At the Brooks Atkinson, her Jason, a very loud man called Jonathan Cake, has been instructed to play that crucial first exchange between Medea and Jason totally straight – as if he believes what he tells Medea. (‘He believes his argument that if he marries Creon’s daughter they will get this thing called security,’ the director told the Guardian.) But if Jason is earnest – if he really believes what he’s saying, which is that he’s running off with a bimbo and abandoning his children and allowing them to be sent into exile because, hey, it’s good for them! – then the scene, to say nothing of the play, crumbles to pieces. If you take away the mighty conflict over language, over meaning what you say, Medea is just a daytime drama about two nice people who have lost that special spark. But then what do you do with the rest of the play, with its violence and anguished choruses and harrowing narratives of gruesome deaths – and, most of all, with the climactic slaughter – all of which follow only from Medea’s burning mission to put the meaning back in Jason’s empty rhetoric, those disingenuous claims to care for his family, his children, even as he shows nothing but naked self-interest?

Not much, except to do what Warner (who insists the play is ‘not about revenge’) does, which is to fill the play with desperate, crude, almost vaudevillian efforts to manufacture excitement, now that all the intellectual and political excitement – to say nothing of the revenge motive – have been stripped away. This Medea makes faces, mugs for the audience, cracks jokes, does impressions. And it goes without saying that, when the violence does come, there’s a lot of blood and flashing lights and deafening synthesized crashing and clattering. But for all the histrionics and special effects, you feel the hollowness at the core, and the staging soon sinks back into the place where it started: banal, everyday domesticity, a failed marriage. The Warner/Shaw Medea ends with the murderous mother sitting in that swimming pool, smirking and splashing the weeping Jason.

Ironically, Deborah Warner seems to understand tragedy’s original political intent. In an interview she gave to the Times last September, after the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks and as her country, and ours, prepared for war on Iraq, Warner made a case for the renewed relevance of Greek tragedy:

We desperately need Greek plays. We need them when democracies are wobbly. I am living in a very wobbly democracy right now, whose Parliament has only just been recalled, and Commons may or may not have a vote about whether we go to war.

Greece was a very new democratic nation, and a barbaric world was not very far behind them. They offered these plays as places of real debate. We can’t really say the theatre is a true place of debate anymore, but these plays remind us of what it could be.

She’s absolutely right; all the more unfortunate, then, that none of this political awareness informs her production. The end of Warner’s Medea feels very much like the aftermath of a marital disaster. Euripides’ Medea, by contrast, ends with a monstrous ethical lesson: Jason is forced, as his wife had once been forced, to taste exile, loss of family; forced, like her, to live stranded with neither a past nor a future; is made to understand, at last, what it feels like to be the other person, to understand that the things to which his glib words referred are real, have value, can inflict pain. At the end of Euripides’ Medea, the woman who teaches men these terrible lessons flies off in a divine chariot, taking her awful skills and murderous pedagogical methods to – Athens.

Indeed, while it’s hard to see what Warner’s ‘happy housewife of Corinth’ can tell us about the war she referred to in her comments to the Times – i.e., Iraq – Euripides’ Medea, by contrast, ends by literally bringing home a shattering warning against political and rhetorical complacency: a lesson that, as we know, went unheeded in Athens. It’s worth noting that his Medea was composed during the year before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, when the Athenians were eagerly preparing for conflict – a conflict, as it turned out, that would thoroughly reacquaint the Athenians with the meaning of the word ‘consequences’. Which is the play we need more desperately?

It’s unlikely that Medea – Euripides’ Medea, that is, not the play that Deborah Warner staged – will have trouble surviving the grotesque, giggling, wrongheaded treatment it received on Broadway. If so, it wouldn’t be the first time that the playwright bounced back after some rough treatment. Soon after Aristophanes lampooned him (intentionally) in his Thesmophoriazousae, Euripides left town for good. His destination was about as far from Athens, culturally and ideologically, as you could get: the royal court of Pella, capital of the backwoods kingdom of Macedon, a country that would take another century to achieve world-historical status. (It’s where Alexander the Great was born.) He left, so the story goes, because he was disgusted by his city’s descent into demagoguery, intellectual dishonesty, political disorder, and defeat. But perhaps he was also smarting because of Thesmophoriazousae; perhaps he was tired of being misunderstood.

And yet perhaps, too, there was time for one more effort; perhaps he might have the last laugh. Perhaps, from a burlesque, a deliberate misinterpretation, a pandering by a comedian to the common taste in order to achieve a glib success, something worthwhile might result. Let us imagine this aged poet as he leaves Athens and embarks on his difficult northward journey, turning an idea over in his mind – an idea that comes to him, as it happens, from Thesmophoriazousae itself. An all-female festival; a man eager to see what the women get up to, when the men aren’t watching. A grotesque foray into drag that convinces no one; a masquerade that ends in apprehension, and terrible peril. Not a bad idea for a play – not a comedy, this time around, but something terrible, something that will bring his citizen audience close to the core of what great theatre is about: plotting, disguise, recognition, revelation, violence, awful knowledge. He arrives in Macedon and gets to work. Three years later, the play is finished: Bacchae. By the time it is produced back home in Athens, winning its author one of his rare first prizes, Euripides is dead. But from the mockers, those who wilfully mistake his meanings, he has stolen a victory. This show, it is safe to say, will go on.

– The New York Review of Books, 13 February 2003

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