The British Museum Caryatid: cursed, homesick and maltreated

Recently there’s been a heated debate regarding the necessity of the British Museum to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece. At first, even though I’m a Greek classicist, I thought that the mere idea was utopic. In no way could a big and important museum return any work of art. It would set a precedent and as the majority of the artwork of important European museums is “borrowed” or “purchased” under suspicious conditions, other countries would claim their treasures.

However, a recent visit at the British Museum made me change my mind. Even though it is a quite big museum with important exhibits, it lacks sensitivity and sensibility in the way it chooses to present the artworks; and this in not only uninviting for the visitor but also dangerous for the artwork itself.

 

I witnessed a bunch of kids leaning against the lonesome Caryatid displayed there. There was no security in the room and the kids were apparently completely unaware of the fact that they were touching a 5^th century B.C. relic. The saddest part was that nobody seemed to notice.

I am certain this would have never happened in Athens. Not because we are more careful than the British, but because we wouldn’t dare damage anything related to our heritage. We know that the consequences for a Greek not caring about such issues will be severe, whereas this is not the case for others.

 While I was looking at that lonesome girl I felt so sorry for her. The women of Caryae according to Vitruvius were punished to carry the weight of the building because they betrayed Athens to the Persians.

So, the British Museum Caryatid is not only cursed. She was kidnapped and separated from her partners, carried away to a cold and gloomy country, hidden in a basement-like room, all alone, contemplating a pillar instead of the majestic view of Athens from the Acropolis.

These six young women are part of the south side of the Erechtheion, the most sacred temple of the Acropolis, dedicated to Athena, Poseidon Erechteus and Cecrops, the first king of Athens. It is believed that the “Korai” (girls) were offering libations— honorary offerings of honey and milk or water— at the tomb of the mythical king. Lord Elgin removed one of the girls in 1801 when Greece was under Ottoman rule. Now, her sisters are waiting for her, all cleaned up, in the sunny and shiny Acropolis Museum.

It is already depressing that they are waiting for her in vain, but it’s even more depressing that her “hosts” don’t treat her as they should. This would have never happened in Greece, Zeus forbids maltreating guests.

Žižek: Most people want to be passive

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek during his lecture “Replying to my Critics” describes the structure of power in the postmodern world, answering to Alain Badiou and Elisabeth Rudinesco’s idea of reinventing the master.

Firstly, he talks about participatory democracy. It really struck me when he said that “The vast majority of people want to be passive”. Protesters all over the world are trying to change a system that destroyed economies and subjugated people intentionally through financial means. Now, we are asking for a more active participation. After all, it is unfair to be allowed to give our opinion once every four or five years, isn’t it?

However, as Žižek points out, people get tired of constant participation. Even though this is necessary at the beginning of a revolution, most of us want a state that runs smoothly and does its work without disturbing us.

Slavoj Žižek

 Another problem Žižek notes, is the fact that engaged citizens don’t really know what they are asking for. We are dissatisfied with capitalism or neo-liberalism but we don’t know how we could replace these systems. And he is right. Most of us are fighting for an unknown better world, a utopia or are looking for the suitable leadership. As the philosopher aptly says: “good politicians are not the ones who listen to the people but they are the ones who tell people what to want”.

This discussion reminds me of ancient Rome, at the imperial times. The opposition merely wanted a decent emperor and it was not actively criticizing the system itself. They didn’t want to get rid of the emperor but they merely wanted an emperor of their own standards, namely a wise emperor, who lived according to the teachings of Stoicism. That is why they were called “stoic opposition” as they wanted the emperor to become a philosopher king and to rule the state without falling victim to passions or pleasures. In other words, they wanted to have a master but a moral master. And this is quite convenient to everyone, one might think.

 Žižek doesn’t mention the Romans and I suspect he doesn't agree with them. Badiou and Rudinesco want to revive the idea of the master but they don’t mention the Romans either. The see the master as a construct of modernity. “The master is the one that allows the individual to become subject”, Badiou writes. The crisis of the master is the crisis of the subject, they said but the master has now been replaced by many “small bosses”, according to Rudinesco.

 Without a master we cannot have emancipation, because the subject is only developed through fidelity to the master. This is the paradox of the philosophers: the need of totalitarianism to avoid fascism and achieve emancipation.

 There is an element of truth though to these, Žižek points out. We no longer have a patriarchal master figure of authority in today’s type of subjectivity. Even totalitarian leaders like Hitler and Stalin are not patriarchal master figures, philosophers of the early 1930s and 40s noticed. The post-oedipal postmodern subjectivity of constantly reconstructing the self fits into modern relations of domination. Modern authority is not hierarchic. On the contrary, it is faceless and multitudinal. And oppression can be even worse even if we don’t have a master, the Slovenian philosopher claims.

The Romans made things much easier. Of course they didn’t have our preoccupations or a world as complex as ours. Besides, the vast majority of the people didn’t even have the right to an opinion. But this discussion makes me feel that the idea of the good master, with some important alterations, lives on. Average people would be satisfied with one master that is kind and just, right?

Talking about totalitarian regimes whose masters are not versions of the patriarchal master but are mother figures, the philosopher gives the example of North Korea. The totalitarian authority in North Korea is a mother. The propaganda they have is strictly focused on the female and the leader/ party is the mother of the people.

“You can question the symbolic order of the Father, but can you question the Mother? In a patriarchal structure you can challenge the authority of the master. That is why I say the Left should reinvent the master. We have to talk of emancipatory politics as a politics that challenges the structure of the master as well as the polymorphous decentralized power that we witness today,” Žižek concludes. And he is right. The Romans cannot, unfortunately, offer us a solution. They didn’t have one for themselves either.

No matter how convenient masters may be, they don’t offer any solution to real problems. We have to be able to imagine a society without a master neither as one boss nor as a polymorphous structure of authority. And, we have to bear in mind that this rejection of direct democracy does not mean that we surrender to hegemonic structures. As the Slovenian philosopher says, there is nothing conservative if a person wants to remain passive. Leftists want people to participate more and more, and this according to Žižek, has to change. The revolution that is really difficult to make is the one that changes people’s everyday lives. And here is when we need to react violently, Žižek says. Not by using force per se but by uprooting the system and changing our everyday lives drastically.

Oresteia: Choephoroi- Eumenides

The ongoing 18th International Festival of Ancient Greek Drama has brought to Cyprus many noteworthy artists.

To me the most striking performance so far was the one of Choephoroi and Eumenides by La Fondazione Instituto Nazionale Del Dramma Antico-INDA from Italy.

The gruesome story of Orestes came to life in front of us in a strikingly perfect way.

The production was aware of new trends in criticism about the play and they were not afraid to show how they understood Aeschylus as modern people.

For most of us the story of Orestes is quite simple: a young man is ordered by a god to murder his mother to avenge his father’s murder. The story aims to show how the Areopagus council was formed and how it is supposed to be interlinked with the history of Athens.

Indeed, Athena in Eumenides founds the court of Areopagus which became responsible for serious cases of homicide.

However, matricide is not any case of homicide.

That is what the Furies say. That is what we all think.

At the core of the story lies a much deeper narrative. The Oresteia is all about the replacement of the older matrilineal system of property by a new patriarchal system of ownership of goods and women.

Apollo and Athena, the representatives of the Olympians, side with the father claiming that the mother is unimportant. 

Apollo clearly states that the mother is merely a vessel for the father’s seed, an opinion expressed by Pythagoras.

Aeschylus merges the scientific knowledge of his time with the old myth of Athena being born from her father’s head to explain female subordination.

According to scholarly research,[1] the first inhabitants of Europe had different gender dynamics from modern societies but were not matriarchal. They were peaceful people who worshiped the mother- fertility and opted for creating life instead of destroying it without any gender imposing itself upon the other.

The Indo-Europeans, the new settlers, brought with them male gods, male superiority and a warlike aggressive political life.

As it usually happens, the Oresteia is the story told by the victors.

The Furies, the representatives of this older pantheon, are described as monsters with serpentine hair: crazy, destructive women.

The snake as the symbol of the feminine traces its origins back to the worship of the mother as a symbol of knowledge and divination.

That is why there was a snake at Delphi, Python. Apollo conquered Delphi when he slew Python.

This conflict between the sexes and different religious and societal systems lies at the heart of the trilogy.

The deeper meaning of the text was beautifully addressed by the performance.

I really enjoyed the ending. In Aeschylus’s text the Furies are persuaded by Athena to become benevolent, Eumenides. Some scholars suggest that Athena bribes them with honours to prevent the destruction their wrath would bring upon Athens.

It could be assumed that Athena indeed bribes them. And their last victorious speech could be ironic. They had lost because they were disrespected and offended on many occasions.

So, the reading of INDA coincides with this assumption. The Furies are still offended, they are not persuaded.

I loved how they did not wear the red robes the Athenians offered them and how they leapt forward towards the audience. It was also very striking when the central image of the mother and fertility collapsed as they ignored the call of Athena.

INDA interpreted Aeschylus in a sensitive and careful way and managed to emphasize the basic conflict of the play in a clear and profound way.

It is our turn now to think how we will recreate our world and undo the evil of this disturbing gender dynamics. 

Eisler, the writer of the Chalice and the Blade believes that the world before male domination was a utopia, the world of the chalice of life. She even suggests that we could regress to that world and keep our technology and centuries of advancement. 

What do you think?

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[1] Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman (New York: Harvest) 1976; Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade (San Francisco: Harper Collins) 1988.

Heraclitus on life and change

Heraclitus (c.536-470 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher from Ephesus. He is one of the most important pre-Socratic philosophers who tried to understand our world and the beginnings of the Being.

For Heraclitus, life started with fire. This seemingly simplistic phrase could definitely raise some eyebrows-- at least of the people who don’t know what the ancient Greek philosophers did for humanity.

But fire is the best element to denote the beginnings of the world because it is an element of constant motion. It signifies fluidity, change, the eternal force that unites the opposites.

Heraclitus believed that opposites were fundamentally part of a whole. Reality for him was an eternal flow and change, a mutual collision of everything. Opposites for Heraclitus are the governing principle of all things. The philosopher from Ephesus was the first to question binaries and he affected extensively the work of modern philosophers such as Hegel and Nietzsche.

So, fire indicates constant motion, fluidity. It is no coincidence that he also said that the only constant thing in life is change. What Heraclitus didn’t give us, in all his wisdom, was a solution to the problems change causes.

It is a violent force of the universe that changes everything, even us. That is why in an extract he names war as the father of all things: collisions of opposite forces that are deep down the same shape the world.

How are we to deal with this constant motion? How do we accept change? At least that’s what a friend once asked me when I quoted Heraclitus saying that you cannot step in the same river twice.

There is no simple answer to this. The only thing I could think of is to make peace with the fact that the world is built that way. Change is constant and we have to learn how to adapt. Otherwise, we will be broken. Or even worse fossilized.

Ο δειλός Σπαρτιάτης

Έτσι πάντα θα με θυμούνται, ως τον μοναδικό Σπαρτιάτη που δείλιασε, τον μοναδικό που πληγώθηκε στην πλάτη. Εγώ από μικρός είχα άλλες ανησυχίες. Μάλιστα, θυμάμαι, μια φορά ρώτησα τη μάνα μου τι χρησιμότητα έχει ο πόλεμος. Βέβαια, εκείνη τα χρειάστηκε. Δεν ήξερε τι να μ’ απαντήσει βλέπετε. Το είπε στον πατέρα που πάντα είχε απαντήσεις για όλα και με κανόνισε.

Στην εφηβεία ήταν χειρότερα. Πάντα στην πάλη μόνη μου έγνοια ήταν μη χτυπήσω κανέναν. Κι όλοι οι μεγάλοι με κατσάδιαζαν. «Δε θα πάθει και τίποτα αν φάει και καμιά μπουνιά,» μου ‘λεγαν δυσανασχετώντας. Τους ήταν αδύνατον να πιστέψουν πόσο μ’επηρέαζε ο πόνος τ’ αλλουνού.

Κάποιες φορές ονειρευόμουν πως ο Ασκληπιός μου’χε δώσει το χάρισμα της θεραπείας και δήθεν μπορούσα να γιατρέψω όλα τα κακά του κόσμου- εχτός από το θάνατο φυσικά.  Όπως όλοι ξέρουν, ένα τέτοιο δώροδε θα’χε καλή κατάληξη: θα προκαλούσε το φθόνο των θεών, θ’άδειαζε τον κάτω κόσμο και θα μ’ έβρισκε κάποια ανείπωτη καταστροφή για να επανέλθει η ισορροπία του κόσμου.

        

Τελοσπάντων, παρόλο που δεν είχα αυτό το χάρισμα, ανέκαθεν με θεωρούσαν ιδιόμορφο. Είτε γιατί υπερασπιζόμουν ένα σπουργίτι με σπασμένο φτερό που το’χαν κάνει παιχνίδι, είτε γιατί μόρφαζα κάθε φορά που κάποιος μου ορμούσε, ήμουν μια περιθωριακή προσωπικότητα, μια παραφωνία. «Έλα, μην κλείνεις τα μάτια!» φώναζε έξω φρενών ο παιδονόμος.

Η φοβερότερη όμως δοκιμασία για μένα ήταν η Κρυπτεία, ο πόλεμος εναντίον των Ειλώτων. Η καρδιά μου πήγαινε να σπάσει όταν με επέλεξαν να συμμετάσχω. Δεν καταλάβαινα γιατί με επέλεξαν. Ούτε όμως καταλάβαινα το σκοπό αυτού του θεσμού.

Γιατί να τους σκοτώσουμε; Τι μας είχαν κάνει τελοσπάντων οι Είλωτες; Δεν τολμούσα να ζητήσω να μου ξεκαθαρίσουν κάποιες πτυχές του θέματος που μου δημιουργούσαν απορίες. Όλο γενικότητες μας έλεγαν και περίμεναν να τις πιστέψουμε. Οι διαταγές ήταν πάνω απ’όλα.

Είχα πάψει να ρωτώ γιατί. Κάθε φορά που ρωτούσα γιατί μ’ έβρισκε σκληρή τιμωρία. Δε θα μπορούσα ούτε να κρυφτώ. Έπρεπε να σκοτώσω έναν Είλωτα και μάλιστα ένα γενναίο Είλωτα και τέρμα. Έτσι με είχαν διατάξει.

Μα εγώ δεν ήθελα να βλάψω κανένα. Κι ο αντίπαλος πάντα νοιώθει το δισταγμό. Μου το είχαν διδάξει αυτό εξαρχής. Αν διστάσεις χάνεις το παιχνίδι. Μα, δε μ’ένοιαζε και τόσο το παιχνίδι. Απέφευγα όσους μπορούσα, χτυπούσα χωρίς να σκοτώνω, πλήγωνα ελαφρά όσους δεν μπορούσα να ξεφορτωθώ.

Μα να, κάποιος βρέθηκε και με μαχαίρωσε στην πλάτη. Κανείς δεν τον είχε δει. Μπορεί και  να’ταν και δικός μας. Πάντοτε είχα την υποψία ότι σε κάποια φάση θα ‘βρισκαν τρόπο να με ξεφορτωθούν. Εξάλλου τι θα’καναν μ’ ένα δειλό Σπαρτιάτη;

Έμεινα ξαπλωμένος χάμω κοιτώντας το γαλήνιο γαλάζιο τ’ ουρανού. Ωραία ήταν. Ώστε έτσ’ ειν’ο θάνατος; Μου κοβόταν η ανάσα. Με κοίταζαν με περιφρόνηση μουρμουρίζοντας. Μα δε μ’ ένοιαζε. Το μόνο που μ’ενδιέφερε τώρα ήταν η ηρεμία του στερεώματος. Η κίνηση των συννέφων. Η φορά της αύρας. Οι αχτίδες του τέλους. Φωτάκια, μυριάδες φωτάκια και μετά έρεβος.   

MT

Ovid and some ideas about life

Ovid by Luca Signorelli

“Quid mihi cum facili” says the Roman poet Ovid in the 19^th elegy of the second book of his work Amores which translates: “Why would I bother with the easy one?” Ovid here talks about his lover’s husband and insists that he keeps his loved one locked making his courtship difficult. Now, a logical person would definitely object to this mentality. Is Ovid serious? Why would anyone say that?

The poet-lover was supposedly locked out
The famous topos of the exclusus amator 

Well, Ovid is partly serious: he is never completely serious; it’s simply not his style. The entire poem talks about the necessity of difficulties in a clandestine love affair which inspires poetry, simply because 1^st century BC Roman elegy, the genre of the Amores, had a certain set of conventions. One of them is that the domina, the loved one, is fickle and does not always respond to the poet-lover’s expressions of admiration. The poet-lover then crying records his hardships, argues with doorsteps and talks to the winds remembering myths and stories.

Ovid was the last famous and noteworthy Roman elegist. And this is not a coincidence, we Classicists think: Ovid in his entire work reworks all the conventions of the genre by ridiculing them and finally deconstructing them. This is a quite recent discovery of scholars even though it is quite evident at some parts of his work that he cannot be serious. Now, we are sure that for the most part he is not serious.

His witty work has troubled us very much but I guess this must have been 

Callimachus

one of his goals. Ovid and the other elegists followed the artistic doctrines of Hellenistic poet Callimachus. They chose to compose short works—at least shorter than the epic poems of Homer and Vergil—which were very carefully worked like jewels. They used to call their work “labor limae”, the labor of the file. The poetic process according to the Callimachean ideal and also antiquity’s ideas in general had to be laborious and difficult. Exactly as Ovid says in elegy 2.19, the love affair and therefore the poetic work have to be difficult. That is why the aforementioned elegy is a covert programmatic poem.

The elegies, these small jewels were very difficult to compose not only because they were art but also because they had to be original. Their originality is not obvious to a modern audience but we must have in mind that during that time writers were trying to imitate older works, especially the Homeric epics. The elegists were not. On the contrary they were creating a new tradition following Hellenistic ideas.

Callimachus, of course, pointed out that imitating Homer was quite impossible as he was the first poet and therefore his work was insuperable. Aspiring authors, nevertheless, would flood the libraries of the great kingdoms of the ancient world which held manuscripts of all the works known until then trying to imitate them or copy sections. That was the time Classical philology was born, but we’ll talk about that another time. 

So, as we were saying,  Roman elegists—for various reasons— preferred to have it the difficult way just like Hercules chose the difficult path of Virtue. I cannot help but wonder: is this the only way to succeed? Well, I guess, it must be if the Classics say so.

Hercules at the Crossroads by Annibale Carracci

However, others have demonstrated an easy, primrose path to success reminding us that there are some detours. Of course, if you are willing to take the detour you might end up having trouble or even worse suffer remorse. And let’s not forget that these are probably the people who created financial bubbles and economic collapses of entire countries leading a lot of people to impoverishment.

Then, I suggest that we might have to refresh our Classics and follow their advice to avoid easy choices.