The Less Spectacular Sister

      Maybe when you were in high school you read Sophocles’ Antigone. The drama, for a large part, is grounded in conflicts that may arise within a family, and how other members of the family (who are not directly involved) need to cautiously navigate these tensions. In the play, the famous king Oedipus has been removed from his throne, leaving his two sons as potential heirs. The brothers are unable to agree on who should inherit the crown, to the extent that they go to war over the matter and in fact kill each other in single combat. When the new king (no relation) forbids the burial of the brother he considers a usurper, Oedipus’ daughters Antigone and Ismene are left in the difficult position of being unable to complete their family obligations in the form of burial rites, and they disagree over how to handle the issue. Antigone takes the bolder course, which is why the play is named after her: she buries her brother illegally, openly declares the fact, and challenges the new king to punish her. (He does punish her, as it turns out, not with mere execution but by burial alive.)

      But I don’t want to talk about Antigone today (if you want to know more about her, ask any high school English teacher). I’m more interested in Ismene. Of the two sisters, she’s the more compliant, or the more risk-averse. She’s in a very difficult situation: all the members of her family are bold and rash and committed to disastrous courses of action, but Ismene never wanted to get into any trouble. She never herself would have started an internecine war or angrily defied the king’s orders in the name of justice. In a way she’s cast as the ideal, conventional Greek woman, someone who would spent most of her time at home and not form strong opinions. She would have been better suited for a non-royal family; no doubt she would have been happier if she could have spent her life surrounded by people who don’t need to kill each other to make a point.

      Unfortunately for her, she’s been born into a royal family full of strong personalities, and she suffers for it. At the beginning of Antigone, Antigone asks Ismene to collaborate with her in burying their brother. When Ismene tells Antigone, in cautious terms, that Antigone is courting a death wish, Antigone says ‘Fine, I’ll do it without you.’ Later Antigone returns, she’s apprehended, she admits to everything, she’s condemned to death. Ismene’s future looks pretty bleak at this point. She’s stigmatized from the start as a child of incest (her parents are Oedipus and Jocasta), and therefore unable to contract the marriage she might have expected. By now, most of her family is either dead (her brothers, Jocasta) or disgraced (Oedipus), and now her last sibling has been condemned to execution. In despair, Ismene offers to be executed alongside Antigone, but, because of their earlier disagreement, Antigone rejects this offer and says that Ismene is unworthy to die at her side. Antigone considers it virtuous to have honored religious observances even in the face of the king’s prohibition, and thinks Ismene a coward for failing to do so. In the end, Antigone dies alone, and Ismene will live the rest of her life in poverty and disgrace.

      Ismene in this play represents an interesting character type that recurs frequently in literature with strong willed women. Although Greek culture prescribed that women should be modest, retiring, obedient, and so forth, classical literature often features women who reject these ideals and demand a more active role in life. Antigone presents herself as a champion of religious right, bravely defying a sacrilegious king. Ismene doesn’t like defiance. She exists as a mouthpiece of conventional opinions, to create a contrast with Antigone’s unconventionality. In my opinion, it’s not until she offers to die with Antigone that she comes into her own as a personality, and even then her attempt at solidarity is coldly rejected.

      Ismene’s not the only woman in myth who pales in comparison to a more famous sister. Classical literature is full of conventional-minded sisters who serve to provide context for how outlandish their sisters’ ideas are. In the Aeneid, Dido is famous for her frenzied, all-consuming love for Aeneas, but when she discusses the matter with her sister, her sister only speaks of how sensible and mutually beneficial it would be to marry Aeneas, entirely missing the fact that Dido was practically drooling on Aeneas’ chest when they ate dinner together. Later, when Dido despairs of her failed love affair and decides to commit suicide, she feeds her sister a plausible story about wanting to destroy everything that will remind her of her ex-lover, and her sister never guesses that Dido means to destroy herself too. She doesn’t even have the imagination to realize how unconventional and problematic her sister’s desires are.

      Is it a bad role, to be the less spectacular sister? Well, much of it depends on whose sister you are. Ismene was left destitute and futureless, but there are better possibilities. Medea had her own adventures--as a princess of Colchis, she betrayed her family, ran off with a visiting hero, and went on a tour of all the exotic sights of the world before she settled into a series of powerful roles (both condoned and condemned) in Greece. Meanwhile in Colchis, her sister Chalciope served as Medea’s confidante until Medea left town, at which point Chalciope was forgotten. Presumably she lived an ordinary life with marriage, children, and very little power. The core of it is that the sister’s fate is far overshadowed by the heroine’s, and most of the audience doesn’t worry about the sister’s future when so little is at stake. While the heroines shine out with their impossible desires and brash plans, the sisters embody the life that the heroines are simply unable to lead: a quiet marriage, with lots of time spent on domestic work. They often signify female success, in a highly restrictive sense, and not the sort of success that a daring heroine like Medea or Antigone would ever want.

A too-prolonged winter

I understand, dear Winter.

We’re all afraid to die.

But I think we’ve been buried under glaciers long enough.

Developments

Hello again! I'm sorry to have been absent for a while, but there have been developments in my professional life: I got a job! And I'm quite excited about it and, significantly, I expect it is going to put some pressure on my schedule this spring. For this reason, I am officially changing my update frequency from "weekly" to "when possible." I look forward to talking more mythology and poetry with you as the year goes on.

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It was grandma who told me

that Heaven is great and wide

and full of power and sway,

but still very far away.

A Story for January

      What with the new year and the beginning of January, it seems an appropriate time to discuss Janus. I’m not really sure how famous Janus is today; I suppose most people are familiar with him as the Roman god with two faces that point forward and backward, but I don’t think most people know any of the stories associated with him. Of course, the popular understanding of classical mythology leans toward the Greek side (as made famous in the Roman work Ovid’s Metamorphoses), and Janus is one of the distinctly Roman gods who has no obvious equivalent in Greek myth, so you could point to that as a reason why the Janus stories are not commonly known. Nevertheless, there’s more to Janus than his status as the two-faced god.

      Specifically, buried in Janus’ mythology is the story of a vaguely defined young woman named Carna. Carna apparently gets a lot of street harassment. It is an unfortunately common incident in her life that she’ll be minding her own business, and some jackass will catcall her and suggest that they hook up on the spot. Now everyone who’s been the victim of street harassment knows that it’s often very hard to decline such invitations without escalating the situation. Say anything aggressive, and you may get a much more aggressive response. Say something neutral, and you may still get an aggressive response. Say nothing and you may still get an aggressive response. Pretend to be nice and you’re likely to be dragged into an unending conversation about why you don’t want to sleep with them, why you won’t give them your number, why don’t you want to just visit their apartment, why can’t they drop by your place another day, and if you run out of polite excuses they’re likely to break out that aggressive response anyway. Carna has devised a response to these advances that, although it’s not something I would try out in real life, apparently works for her: when someone propositions her, she says, “Well, not right here. But lead the way to a more private place, and I’ll follow.” When her admirers are hurrying to a more private place, they’re so excited by her apparent enthusiasm that they don’t notice when she slips away.

      For obvious reasons, this doesn’t work when she tries it on Janus. Janus notices her slipping away, grabs her, and forces her to have sex as she promised. On top of this violation, he provides her with the extremely insulting reward of making her the goddess of hinges (stand in awe of the mighty hinge!), thus eternally subordinating her to himself (he’s the god of doorways, remember) and guaranteeing his perpetual sexual access to her. Although this promotion to divinity is ostensibly a reward, I feel terribly sorry for her--all she wanted to do was deflect some street harassment and go on with her own plans without having to cater to the sexual demands of random passers by, and instead she was forced into service as someone’s concubine.

      What’s worse is how Ovid reports the incident in such an insulting way. He flat-out calls her an idiot (“stulta!”) and heavily implies that Carna was, as they say in moronic victim-blaming discourse, “asking for it.” After all, she agreed to have sex with Janus. She made a practice of agreeing to have sex with men on the street! She gave some sort of affirmative consent, and it’s not Janus’ fault that she said this with no intention of carrying it out, it’s not Janus’ fault that she had found it was the least dangerous way to respond to street harassment.

      Affirmative consent is a great idea. I’m glad it passed in California last year and I hope that in the coming year other places follow suit. But there’s still much more to be done in the way of eliminating sexual objectification and convincing street harassers that the people they harass may have other purposes in life aside from someone’s sexual gratification. The idea that so many people today daily face the same obstacle that Carna faced in ancient myth gives me little hope that this problem will be resolved anytime soon.

      So, happy new year. For my resolution, I’ll be thinking about Janus, trying to prevent rapes like the one he committed, and trying to fight the victim-blaming culture that crashed down on Carna.

The Ostensibly Impossible Quest

      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.