I passed my defense, so now I’m officially
Dr. Boeotian Sow.
(My students are going to be made aware of
this, believe me.)
Finishing my doctorate has been a painful
process, and has effected substantial changes upon me. I’ve been distressed to
find that, in my quest to familiarize myself with the sources and scholarship
relevant to my dissertation, I’ve lost my faculty with other material that I
once prided myself on knowing. (I used to know all the obscure names in
mythology and could place them on family trees by memory--but I’m afraid no one
has asked me about Hypermnestra or Lamia for a long time, and those minor
characters have all faded from my mind.) I’ve had to study a large body of
literature and extract new conclusions from it, marshalling everything in one
direction to make my dissertation a cohesive, unified work--which has unfortunately
forced me to consider ideas with a direct and single-minded attention to
whether they support my thesis or not. I’ve had to change the ways I think
about literature and history, the ways I analyze opinions; I’ve had to learn to
talk about classics in a critically productive way. And of course there are the
social effects on my life, how I’ve had to withdraw from interpersonal
interaction and retreat into my world of books and articles, how my ability to
make small talk and otherwise interact with people has atrophied from disuse. Getting
a doctorate is not something to be undertaken without knowing the potential
consequences.
The whole harrowing process recalled to me
my adventures in high school, when I was competing seriously in Latin
competitions, everything from little local meets straight up to the national
tournament. That experience was quite different from my current one; it was
stressful, sometimes overwhelmingly so, but it also had a sense of magnificence
to it. I don’t want to aggrandize myself--although I derived great pride and a
sense of accomplishment from my skill in this Latin competition, I won few
meaningful prizes at nationals, and I had an acute sense that my success in
this competition was unlikely to translate into success in any professional
endeavor after high school--nevertheless, in traveling across the country to
national tournaments, I felt a great kinship to the mythic heroes I studied. In
my quests to bring back the big prizes at nationals, I imagined myself as one
of the heroes who were assigned tasks that were meant to be impossible, yet who
were nonetheless able to succeed at them. Jason was sent to retrieve the Golden
Fleece, Bellerophon was sent to kill the Chimaera, Perseus was sent to slay
Medusa. Hercules was famously sent after a dozen impossible tasks, succeeding
with aplomb through cleverness or inventiveness or favors or force. I envied
Hercules, who could borrow the Cup of the Sun to sail across the impossibly
wide river Ocean, and bring back the cattle as assigned from the far side of
the world. There was a grandeur in Hercules’ adventures: even though he started
out fighting local monsters within walking distance of his home, his adventures
as they progressed grew more and more spectacular, so that he was traveling
farther and in more incredible ways, to seek more marvelous treasures. In my
imagination, my academic endeavors would progress like that, growing into ever
more spectacular successes with ever-growing accolades. I suppose I don’t have
to tell you that the reality of my academic career has been nothing like
Hercules’ Labors. While it has been a rewarding process for me intellectually,
the tedium of working long hours for little money, double-checking the minutia
of my quotations and references, debating with my professors whether my
argument says precisely what I mean it to say--well, it has me wondering about
Jason’s long sea voyage out to find the Golden Fleece, how many days he spent
arguing with his navigator about whether their maps agreed with each other, how
many tedious days he spent just rowing endlessly toward the next landfall, with
no events of note and probably the same tasteless gruel at every meal.
I’d like to save Jason for another day--he
has a dodgy history and I’ve been storing up all the things I want to say about
him--but Bellerophon is a different story. He was a dashing hero, evidently charming
and good-looking, but his career as a hero got off to a rocky start. The first
events of his career are all unfortunate accidents that can hardly be chalked
up to his own outstanding virtue or initiative. First he accidentally killed
someone in his hometown, and so was driven off as a murderer. He managed to
find asylum and ritual purification in another Greek town, where he became
entangled in a “Potiphar’s Wife” plot: the queen, noticing that he had the
impressive physique of an accidental murderer, fell in love with her guest and
attempted to seduce him, but he rebuffed her; in revenge, she accused him of attempting to seduce her. The king was evidently a
softhearted type and was squeamish about killing a guest, no matter what
improprieties the guest had pressed on his wife. Therefore he sent Bellerophon
off to visit a friend of his, one Iobates, with a letter asking Iobates to kill
Bellerophon on his behalf.
As the story goes on, the plot seems to be
immobilized by its cast of well-meaning gentlemen who are just too gosh-darn
nice to murder anyone, and end up trying (and perpetually failing) to arrange murders
in ineffectively convoluted ways. Iobates, similarly desiring to keep his hands
clean of murder, plots to kill Bellerophon by sending him out on a quest to
kill a monster, the dreaded Chimaera. This was a three-headed monster that was
a composite of several ordinary animals; there’s a beautiful Etruscan bronze sculpture
of it on display in
Florence. Bellerophon is able to defeat the Chimaera, however, because he
has the favor of the gods and has been given the flying horse Pegasus to make
him an unbeatable warrior. At Iobates’ request (and with help from Pegasus), he
also defeats three separate armies that have been troubling the locals, and
also handily defeats a band of warriors who have been sent (by Iobates) to
ambush him. At this point Iobates finally realizes that Bellerophon may enjoy
some sort of divine favor, and so stops trying to kill him and instead marries
him to his daughter (sometimes identified as the sister of the queen who tried
to seduce Bellerophon, which could have set up some very awkward Thanksgiving
dinners), an endeavor that turns out to be much more successful. They have some
children together, and when Iobates dies Bellerophon inherits his kingdom.
The happy ending breaks down, however,
when Bellerophon overreaches the blessings that the gods have bestowed upon
him. He attempts to fly Pegasus up Mount Olympus to visit the gods at home,
which is hardly acceptable gratitude for a divine gift. The gods send a fly to
bite Pegasus, who then throws Bellerophon off. Bellerophon is condemned to the
worst possible fate for a Greek hero, which you may recall from Oedipus Rex or Medea: he is not killed, but rather forced to stay alive and endure
his failure and self-inflicted misfortune. He stands as a textbook case of hubris
and a cautionary tale to stay within mortal limits.
I’ve spoken before about modes of flight
in mythology, and how in this fantasy land we call Greek myth there are a few,
but only a few, characters who can fly--and Pegasus (and his rider Bellerophon)
are counted in that lucky company. You may ask where this flying horse came from,
since flying horses are not like satyrs or centaurs, which are quite common in Greek
myth and in fact have their own society separate from humans. There are enough
horses in Greek myth, but Pegasus is (usually) the only one that can fly.
Pegasus’ ancestry may be surprising: he is the son of Medusa, that noxious
monster who was plaguing another region and was set as the impossible quest for
Perseus. Medusa was originally a very beautiful woman (with two sisters who
were incongruously hideous) who was cursed by Athena (because Medusa had the
audacity to be raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple) to become serpent-haired
and unendurably ugly. When Perseus arrived at Medusa’s home she was pregnant
with Poseidon’s offspring, and when Perseus cut off her head the children burst
out through her neck: Pegasus the winged horse, and a giant with a golden
sword. Pegasus was famous for visiting the Muses at Mount Helicon (pictured in
the backdrop), where he struck a stone with his hoof and created a spring. But
he was most famous for teaming up with Bellerophon and flying him all over the
place--which is in my opinion quite striking and noteworthy.
I said above that the action in
Bellerophon’s story is stalled by the fact that none of the people who are
supposed to murder Bellerophon are really willing to murder him, but rest
assured that Bellerophon himself is not restrained by any such scruples. He of course
murders the warriors who have been sent to ambush him, but aside from this
reaction to preserve his own life, he also actively plots a murder of his own.
Remember the queen who accused him of trying to seduce her? When he finally
caught a break from all the people who were trying halfheartedly to murder him,
he went back to see her and invited her to test drive his flying horse--then
pushed her off at a great height. He shares an unfortunate career arc with many
Greek heroes, insofar as he goes on for a long time enjoying the favor of the
gods and triumphantly overcoming the greatest challenges the world has to
offer, only to redirect his energy, when the monsters are all slain, to
inappropriate goals, transgressing the limits of mortals, or revenging himself
upon a petty queen who didn’t even have enough influence to have one of her
enemies murdered. I suppose I was willing to admire him only at the height of
his career, I wanted to reach an incredible success like his, but not screw it
up at the end.
At any rate, I made it: I can notify my
high school self that I went to Colchis and came back with the Golden Fleece,
that I slew the Chimera in Lycia, that it wasn’t as spectacular as I might have
wished, but that I accomplished it all the same. Now to see what I can do with
this sheepskin hanging on my wall.
