I am Euripides of Salamis, and I approve this message.

"The dogmatisms of each age wear out.  Statements of absolute truth grow thin, show gaps, are discarded.  The heterodoxy of one generation is the orthodoxy of the next.  The ultimate critique of pure reason is that its results do not endure.  Euripides' assaults upon the superstructure of religion were forgotten; what men remembered and came to know him for was the pitying understanding of their own suffering in a strange world of pain, 
and the courage to tear down old wrongs and never give up seeking for new things that should be good.  And generation after generation since have placed him securely with those very few great artists

'Who feel the giant agony of the world,

And more, like slaves to poor humanity, 

Labor for mortal good...'"

- "The Greek Way", Edith Hamilton, page 214

Note:  Inclusion of a particular photograph does not necessarily indicate political endorsement by the author.  Not necessarily anyway.  

The Importance of Remembering

Continuing on in Edith Hamilton's "The Greek Way", there's a paragraph on page 213 that, I feel, sums up Ms. Hamilton's purpose in writing the book.  It is my opinion that she was writing to remind mankind of the greatness that they are capable of attaining, to remind them of the obstacles they are capable of overcoming.  She was writing just before World War I broke out.  She could see the storm clouds gathering.  She wrote...

"As defeat grew ever nearer, Athens grew terrified, fierce, cruel... One thing alone to help her he (Euripides) had been fitted to do:  he could so write as to show the hideousness of cruelty and man's fierce passions, and the piteousness of suffering, weak, and wicked human beings, and move men thereby to compassion which they were learning to forget...."

Ms. Hamilton was fitted with the same command.  And I think that it is important today, as we see those storm clouds gathering again, to be reminded through history and literature of what human beings are capable of, to think instead of panic, and to stand firm on the side of independence and independent thought, to value knowledge over willful ignorance, and to always choose compassion.  

History IS Important Dammit

"In a recent survey, new college graduates listed history as the academic subject whose lessons they found of least use in their daily affairs.  In part, this reflects the show-me pragmatism os today's rising generation.  Yet as America embarks on the 1990's, people of all ages feel a disconnection with history.  Many have difficulty placing their own thoughts and actions, even their own lives, in any larger story.  As commonly remembered, history is all about Presidents and wars, depressions and scandals, patternless deeds done by people with power far beyond what the typical reader can ever hope to wield.  If history seems of little personal relevance today, then what we do today seems of equal irrelevance to our own lives (and the lives of others) tomorrow.  Without a sense of trajectory, the future becomes almost random.  So why not live for today?  What's to lose?.....

....This book presents the "history of the future" by narrating a recurring dynamic of generational behavior that seems to determine how and when we participate as individuals in social change - or social upheaval.  We say, in effect, that this dynamic repeats itself.  This is reason enough to make history important:  For if the future replays the past, so too must the past anticipate the future."

- William Strauss and Neil Howe, "Generations:  The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069" (1991)

A Mastermind Outstrips the Ages: Aeschylus

And the Furies that I feared/ were Eumenides to lead me here..."
- Band: Over the Rhine Song: Rhapsody

That line references Aeschylus's play "Eumenides" which ends with Athena re-naming the Furies "Eumenides", and thus re-purposing them as givers of mercy as opposed to justice. (Aeschylus, btw, is pronounced "es'-kuh-lus" or close to that anyway.) The three great Greek Tragedians were Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Aeschylus is recognized as the "Father of Tragedy" as a theatrical art form. He had a very colorful life as can be read about on Wikipedia among other places. His works were heavily influenced by the Persian invasion of Greece during which he fought as a soldier. His life ended with a bang; he died by the accident of a bird dropping a tortoise shell on his head.
Here's what Ms. Hamilton had to say about him in comparison to Euripides and Sophocles...

The spirit of inquiry in Aeschylus' day had moved him, too, to wonder and surmise. He was never one to acquiesce in what he found because it was there. He, too, saw war with clear eyes... (However) completely a modern mind he was not. He would never, under no circumstances, in no age, have seen mankind as chiefly pitiable... stamped upon his whole work is the conviction that human beings are capable of grandeur, and that calamity met greatly is justified. Passionate protests against the facts of life is no more to be found in him than in Sophocles, but for a totally different reason; a hero's death awakens neither pity nor indignation.
Completely unlike him in this point, Euripides is nevertheless his opinionated son... Aeschylus disregarded the current religion; Euripides directly attacked it. Again and again, he shows up the gods in accordance with the popular conception of them, as lustful, jealous, moved by meanest motives, utterly inferior to the human beings they bring disaster upon, and will have none of them.:

'Say not that there are adulterers in Heaven,
Long since my heart has known it false.
God if He be God lacks in nothing.
All these are dead unhappy tales.'

His final rejection, 'If gods do evil then they are not gods,' is essentially a rejection of man's creating God in his own image, a practice that was to hold the world completely for centuries after him an is today more common than not. So can a mastermind outstrip the ages. Of certainties he had few:

'For who knows if the thing that we call death
Is life, and our life dying - who can know?
Save only that all we beneath the sun
Are sick and suffering, and those gone before
Not sick, not troubled with evil.'

- "The Greek Way", pg. 212, 213

Aristotle said that Aeschylus, after having been initiated into the ultra-secretive Eluesinian Mysteries kind of pissed all over the sect by placing clues about their rites in his most famous play, "Prometheus Bound". It almost got him killed.

There is nothing secret that will not be revealed. There is nothing kept secret that will not come to light.
- Luke 8:17

Indeed.

Ancient Television

Set your Tivos....

My PBS affiliate, WKOP, will be showing an episode of "Secrets of Archaeology" in which they look at ancient Rome on Tuesday, 9/9 at 12:30 pm. Maybe yours will too.

The History Channel will show "Lost Treasures of Pompeii" at 7 am on Friday, 9/14.

And that's about it for now.

Dylan, Euripides And The Modern Mind

No one is free. Even the birds are chained to the sky.
- Bob Dylan

No one is truly free. They are a slave to wealth, fortune, the law, or other people restraining them from acting according to their will.
- Euripides

Bob Dylan and Euripides. Both remarkable people. Euripides was the original "ahead of his time" kind of guy, a playwright. I didn't have too much to say about him until tonight, when I was watching Jeopardy, and they mentioned that Bob Dylan had won a Pulitzer Prize last year for his contributions to society. I thought that was funny because during the time in which Dylan was doing all that contributing to society - i.e. the sixties - I doubt you would find anyone over the age of thirty who thought that what he was doing was prize worthy much less contributing to the betterment of society. But now he gets a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize. Euripides was kind of the same way. Not so popular when he was alive; now we see him as being "enlightened". But I think that, like Dylan, Euripides wasn't so much enlightened as he was just honest. Sophocles said that while he portrayed men as they ought to be, Euripides portrayed men as they really were. And - revolutionary - women too. Edith Hamilton referred to Euripides as having the "modern mind". Her description is applicable to any revolutionary...and any teenager worth their salt.

Always those in the vanguard of their time find in Euripides an expression of their own spirit. He is the great exponent of the forever recurring modern mind.

This spirit, always in the world and always the same, is primarily a destructive spirit, critical not creative... The modern minds in each generation are the critics who preserve us from a petrifying world.... The established order is always wrong to them.... They behold first and foremost that most sorrowful thing on earth, injustice, and they are driven by it to a passion of revolt. Convention, so often a mask for injustice, they will have none of, in their pursuit of justice at any cost they tear away the veils that hide hateful things; they call into question all pleasant and comfortable things.... They will never accept defeat.
- "The Greek Way", pg. 206, 207

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.
- Bob Dylan

Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.
- Euripides

The Idea of Tragedy

Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

I think it's no coincidence that Fitzgerald and Hamilton, contemporaries of one another, should both write about tragedy.  The times in which they lived saw so much of it.  Edith Hamilton often revisits the idea of the hero suffering nobly throughout her work.  Here is the first thing that I read from her about it.

Why is the death of the ordinary man a wretched, chilling thing which we turn from, while the death of the hero, always tragic, warms us with a sense of quickened life?  Answer this question and the enigma of tragic pleasure is solved.  "Never let me hear that brave blood has been shed in vain," said Sir Walter Scott.  "It sends an imperious challenge down through all the generations."  So the end of a tragedy challenges us.  The great soul in pain and in death transform pain and death.  Through it we catch a glimpse of the Stoic Emperor's Dear City of God, of a deeper ad more ultimate reality than that in which our lives our lived.

- "The Greek Way", pg. 178

   I didn't like her term "tragic pleasure".  I think I associate things with the word "pleasure" that are too much the opposite of "tragedy" so that to hear "tragic pleasure" is an oxymoron.  But the chapter from which this quote was taken did help me to understand a little about why people seem to love those tear-jerker movies so much.  Unless there's alot of action, I don't watch dramas, and I avoid any of those "women" films  at all costs.  I can't relate.  Life inspires enough tears on its own, why go looking for more?  And I especially don't understand the appeal of the victim movies.  Here is a social injustice;  there's nothing you can do about it;  ain't it a shame?  But this chapter shed some light on it.  My deeply religious parents would probably hypothesize that the tragic death of the hero in any story is, at a spiritual level, recognized by the spirit as being an echo of the death of Christ, the ultimate hero, the ultimate tragedy.  I don't know about that, but it is one theory to think about.  I think that there is certainly something in us that recognizes - at a fundamental level - the ancient archetype of the death of the one to save the many, and the heroism inherent when that death is approached by the victim voluntarily.  At any rate, I think that it is all too morbid to spend to much time on.  I don't have the stomach for this stuff.  When are we going to talk about Menander?