Words and meanings

When I read a translation of a poem I often want to shorten it. The translator makes too much effort to recreate the equivalent of the original form of the verse. In a way this is the hardest bit to translate, because it is made by the nature of the poem’s original language. For me, the verse structure of a translated poem is a distraction, the shell, and I am impatient to crack it and discover the core of meaning it contains.

Haiku is a popular verse form, and many English speaking poets assay it. I can’t help feeling this is as non poetic an attempt as doing a crossword puzzle. The haiku has its formal rules, for instance, three lines of 5, 7, 5 syllables followed by 2 of 7 syllables, and with a reference to the season, something much easier to do in Japanese, where so many words have seasonal associations (says Dorothy Britton who translated my volume of Basho). Japanese speakers can appreciate the formal skill, so nonchalantly achieved, with which Basho reaches the perfection of the verse form. But technical mastery of form, no matter how wedded to poetic feeling, is not itself a value now, at least in English (at least to me). It once was when poetry was taken more seriously, and contributes not a little to the reputation of someone like Alexander Pope for instance. What I value is the intensity and conciseness of expression Basho achieves, which convey his feeling and reaction to what he sees superbly. The famous verse which runs:

Listen! A frog
Jumping into the stillness
Of an ancient pond!
(Dorothy Britton tr)

The old pond
A frog jumps in
The sound of water
(R H Blyth tr)

Lucien Stryck is more concise and seems better to me:
Old pond
leap – splash
a frog
(L Stryck tr)

There are five images in the verses, and I want to list them to express the suddenness of the event described, and the suddenness of the poet’s perception, and forget the haiku rules.

stillness
pond
frog
jump
splash

The discipline I value is the cutting away of the elaborations, generalisations, associations and second thoughts from the original perception (supposing it worth writing about), not the adapting it to a verse form, though this might on occasion be the same thing (as it is in the Japanese of Basho).

Another favourite Basho verse is translated thus:

How very noble!
One who finds no satori
in the lightning-flash

Or, in another translation:

How admirable
He who thinks not ‘Life is fleeting’
When he sees the lightning!

I want to shorten this, and say just what the poem tells me, with no distraction from the verse form.

the lightning flash!
see it!
no stale thoughts on eternity!

When confronted with Sappho’s

I have a beautiful daughter
Like a golden flower
My beloved Kleis.
I would not trade her for all Lydia nor lovely…
(Julia Dubnoff tr)

I prefer to turn it into

My lovely daughter, Kleis, a golden flower
I love her more than golden Lydia or lovely Lesbos

and sacrifice the verse form.

I realise I’m talking about adaptation rather than translation, yet consider how much ‘translated’ poetry is just that. A famous English poem is Edward Fitzgerald’s ‘rendering’ of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat:

And, as the cock crew, those who stood before
The tavern shouted – “Open then the door!
You know how little time we have to stay,
And, once departed, may return no more”.

It has moved more than one generation of English speakers, yet apparently is not accurate at all.

And Cory’s translation of Kallimachos:

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept as I remember’d, how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky

which meant a lot to earlier generations of English poetry lovers, is definitely nothing like the original, according to Peter Levi (Pelican History of Greek Literature).

To me the regular metre and rhymed line endings in these excerpts seem dreadfully clunky, and bring back boring school daze when the class recited aloud to learn by heart. They worked once, but have ceased to do so. Not that I’ve anything against rhyme: the absurd rhymes in a Bob Dylan song seem good, and rap wouldn’t be rap without rhyme (but these are not poetry either, despite what Dylan’s fans say). The verse form of a translated poem has to stay current, not waste time trying to conform to either an acceptable but dated native structure, nor recreate the original one.

If I were a poet perhaps I would appreciate the attraction of a metric discipline. Taking a poetic form from another language is even more of a challenge. Haiku are popular throughout the world, and just as in ancient Japan, many poor ones are written. But metric form is only one of the challenges a poet has. Other alternatives to guide the verse are now common, such as photography, and they provide challenges too. And there is the temptation to write a song and get a recording contract (it worked for Leonard Cohen).

I can’t help feeling that many translations of poetry from another language are not themselves poetry. That translation drives a wedge between the poem’s contents and its form. The translator must choose between literal and prose translation, or adaptation which might falsify the original poem. The verse form is a kind of container to carry the poetic drink, and perhaps to lure the teetotaller towards inebriation. I don’t know if this is poetry or not but I think not:

You ask me why I dwell in the green mountain;
I smile and make no reply, for my heart is free of care.
As the peach blossom flows downstream, and is gone into the unknown,
I have a world apart that is not among men.
(Li Po, Question and Answer, tr Robert Kotewall and Norman L Smith)

In my ignorance it does go to swell the myth of Li Po, who is said to have drowned while trying to hold the moon’s reflection in the river in a drunken embrace.

Reading a translation of poetry is like drinking water from your linked palms. You have to move quickly before the water drips away. The form of a verse structure holds me up.

To know if a poem has been well translated or not you need to know the language it is translated from, and the original work. In which case you don’t need the translation.

Wonder what this would be like in Japanese:

Cinderella, she seems so easy
It takes one to know one, she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style
And in comes Romeo, he’s moaning
You belong to me I believe
And someone says, you’re in the wrong place, my friend
You better leave
And the only sound that’s left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row

Originality

Have you ever had a moment’s inspiration, an insight that jangled the synapses between brain and mind, a patch of clarity in the fog of life, a eureka! that propelled you from your bath of normality? Only to discover that someone else has had it earlier?

It’s disappointing to discover you’ve only been copying someone else, and sometimes at least we wish we didn’t know we had. I think we must all seem geniuses inside our own universe, and childhood, when we build our world through our own discoveries, is an exciting time. We need to recover that state.

Time, education, the media, competition and mistakes of judgment can take that excitement from us. We grow up, and learn to learn for a purpose, usually for an economic purpose. Adults, all the ones I’ve come across (and I use the term loosely) seem divided into two types. Those who go on doggedly adding new information to their world view, but finding less and less to add because they never discard earlier discoveries. And those who try to develop themselves too much too soon, and create a sophisticated facade they spend too much time defending to have any time at all for discovering, no matter how enriching.

The inspiration you can call your own is worth more than that of others, even though your own inspiration might actually be that of others.

Let me illustrate this by quoting from some notebooks I kept a few years ago, in the 1990s in fact, in a time of trouble, in which I wrote down what I saw, like Leonardo.

“I was thinking about the death of someone I knew, someone who died unexpectedly. I was shocked by the news, but not grieved, it was someone I’d drifted apart from over the years. Perhaps that was why my thoughts took a philosophical turn and I considered the deaths I experience every day. I paused to consider the insects – the spiders, moths and beetles who recklessly squander their lives all around me, victims of immensity. A spider, incredibly tiny, squashed beneath the rim of a cup; moths mired in spilt olive oil or drowned in drinking water, beetles lost and finally desiccated in the midst of the carpet pile. Surely each life is precious to its possessor? Although I can never perceive life as another perceives it yet I believe, for some reason, that life, all lives, possess a common identity. The struggle of the moth in the oil is related to my dread of decline physical and mental, my sadness on hearing of the death of someone I knew.

“In my kitchen several lives are lost each week. The barrier to their significance for me is the one of scale. There is a range of size that affects me: too big (the death of suns) or too small (the moth on the bench top) and I am not affected. But see how fine this tiny moth is, with a kind of powder on its wings which sheens in the light through the window of a morning. How difficult it is to lift it without destroying it, leaving but a smudge where it had been on its mysterious business. The insects breed and die on an enormous scale. Humans are approaching the breeding habits of insects, our species, numbered in billions, may soon rival them in numbers. Perhaps we could look a bit more closely at their lives, and deaths.”

In 1942 Leonard Woolf published a book of essays written by his late wife, which included a famous one, The Death of the Moth. 50 years before I had written my meditation, Virginia Woolf had had a similar thought, and of course expressed it far more beautifully than I. Her essay is sublime, one of the many wonderful things she left behind after her own death.

“…It was useless to try to do anything. One could only watch the extraordinary efforts made by those tiny legs against an oncoming doom which could, had it chosen, have submerged an entire city, not merely a city, but masses of human beings; nothing, I knew, had any chance against death. Nevertheless after a pause of exhaustion the legs fluttered again. It was superb this last protest, and so frantic that he succeeded at last in righting himself. One’s sympathies, of course, were all on the side of life. Also, when there was nobody to care or to know, this gigantic effort on the part of an insignificant little moth, against a power of such magnitude, to retain what no one else valued or desired to keep, moved one strangely. Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange. The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed. O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.”

Originality is over rated. As King Solomon put it, there is nothing new under the sun, and that had probably been said before too. But we have been taught that originality is a value in itself; it more than represents the value of being genuine. To copy something is to be dishonest, we’re told, and in many spheres the copyright police are vigilantly watching us. This is true, though not in a very significant way. What the law cannot understand is that it’s the way we copy that’s important.

What this whole attitude overlooks is the dual nature of what I could call, for lack of a precise term, reality. There is absolute reality, all that which is, and we can’t endure to come into contact with this for long if at all; and there is relative reality, the stuff of our lives, our selection from the big picture that makes us us. In both types of reality things happen for the first time, and things are repeated. There are things that are original, and there are copies. And the job of living involves, not in being original, but in the integration of what happens to us into a meaningful whole. Our job is to gain integrity. It’s how we do this that makes us individuals. It’s the way we copy that makes us creative, that makes us original.

In my particular universe it happened that my moth died in 1995, and Virginia Woolf’s moth died in 2006, even though in other people’s universe Woolf’s essay had been around since 1942. I was not original, but still my moth taught me something I hadn’t known. And as a result of that meditation I absorbed the lesson of Virginia’s moth more movingly and more precisely that I would have done otherwise. My universe was enriched by not one, but two, moths. I did the job of integration.

If you’re walking somewhere you’ve never been before, just make sure you’re not following anyone else, even if somebody else has been that way before you. Then Columbus ain’t got nothing on you at all.

This job of integration is made harder by the pervasive influence of communication media. Communication media is not necessarily information media and it often inhibits rather than liberates. It gives us models of what reality is, could be, should be, and we struggle to act on its barrage of suggestions. We are educated, not in school and college, but by images so real we take them for reality, images in advertisements, on TV, in movies. And to our confusion we are told that being influenced by this unending barrage of pseudo reality all around us is wrong. The censors and the thought police are watching us. Men with guns fuel the movie industry, shops sell us guns as our democratic right so we can live like cowboys, but if someone steps into the street and fires a gun the scandal is enough to sell a million newspapers.

In other words, before we can integrate new experience into our very own original reality, we now have the unprecedented job of distinguishing the actual reality of that reality. But it’s not impossible.

It’s worthwhile remembering that the impossible is just something that has not been done before. At least by you. It’s like a new pair of shoes.

You can change reality, as Tom Robbins said, by the way you perceive it. “One has not only an ability to perceive the world, but an ability to alter one’s perception of it; more simply, one can change things by the manner in which one looks at them.” – Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.

It happens in the blink of an eye. Blink. Disaster. Blink. Funny disaster. Blink. Absurd. Blink. Look, the iris in the back garden is in bloom.

Let’s not try to be original in what we think or do, but in the way we copy or integrate experiences and insights into the fabric of our lives so as to change us. The self we create should be as comprehensive as possible, contain as many contradictions as we can bear. That way we’ll live longer. And death, when it comes, will find us right side up.

The novel as essay: Charmian Clift’s writings

George Johnston and Charmian Clift both wanted to write great novels. But they lived in Australia in the 1950s, and all they could achieve in that rather parochial society was some occasional journalism. So they became bohemians, and lived lives like two characters in a novel, which in Clift’s case at least interfered with her creative output. They lived together, and when Johnston divorced his wife, they married. Although they loved each other, this turned out to be a mistake. Johnston won a literary prize, the couple went to England to try to build on his reputation, and found only poverty. They moved to Greece, where it was easier to be poor, wrote books, drank too much, said too many bitter things to one another. Eventually Johnston won another prize for his novel My Brother Jack and returned to Australia. Clift followed, but all she could find was more journalism. She felt eclipsed by her husband’s fame, suffered his growing dislike with increasing pain, and finally she committed suicide.

Ironically enough, in the 40 years since her death Clift has been seen as one of the great masters of the essay, and her work compares favourably in my view with that of Virginia Woolf, Charles Lamb or George Orwell in this genre. Her two books on her life with Johnston in Greece are still popular. Only her origin as an Australian writer from Kiama on the NSW south coast holds her back from gaining her true stature. I’d estimate her the greatest master of the English essay in the last 50 years. Johnston’s autobiographical trilogy beginning with My Brother Jack has entered the pantheon of Australian literary classics, but it’s probable it is read now mainly by university students ‘doing’ auslit. Then again most great literature gets archived in a similar way.

I’ve never read My Brother Jack and I don’t need to know what it’s like growing up in a provincial, insular, restrictive environment where culture is mistrusted and barren materialistic values prevail. Both Johnston and Clift were oppressed by their background in Melbourne and Kiama respectively, and the books on Greece that Clift wrote express the joy of escape. The alcohol abuse and infidelity that were destroying their marriage at the time are not in evidence in these books, nor in anything she wrote until her suicide note.

When she accepted the assignment to write a weekly essay for the Herald in Melbourne and the Sydney Morning Herald in Sydney Clift was probably thinking of the regular income. Writing an essay a week though is hard work, harder work than most office workers know. There were 240 of them 1964-1969. They paint a portrait of Australia in the sixties, when the Beatles were a cause and multiculturalism starting to be a buzz word and Australians first began to wake from their long isolation from the rest of the world. Clift was relegated to the women’s section of the newspaper, and her essays were published along with recipes and knitting patterns for baby clothes. In those days in Australia, ‘women’ were kept separate, even the bars were sexually segregated. So Australian women were the first to realise that a major writer was writing just for them. Clift became a legend. I’ve talked to women who were young in those days who have revealed just how much Clift’s essays meant to them, how liberating, how hopeful the reading of them made them feel.

These essays, under 2,000 words each, are on a great diversity of topics: life in Greece, drinking customs, discrimination against women, nicknames, television, fashion, pop music. Clift writes with great charm, self depreciatory humour and lack of pretension and very much like the talented novelist she was. She sketches in characters and places deftly and concisely, and her observations are light hearted and extremely penetrating and accurate. Most of the essays are very personal, based on her own experiences and recounting her adventures in literature, family life and travel. Again and again she is able to widen the discussion so that she is talking about her society in terms that relate to any society, the people she meets in terms that make them interesting to any student of human nature. Her subjects might appear to be Australian cultural mores of the 60s, but they are much wider than that, and her essays can be read with pleasure and profit by people of all ages and many cultures.

Clift’s essays are probably her most popular work, but that very popularity has made it look as though they are the objects of indiscriminatory enthusiasm. Clift has been adopted by feminists who blame Johnston for her oppression and lack of success rather than looking at other sources of her alcoholism. The literary mandarins don’t accept the essay as a fashionable genre and are too busy writing their own essays on post-structuralism in the post modern novel to appreciate Clift’s essays. Almost everything I’ve read on Clift is a little, ever so subtly, condescending. After all, she wrote essays. For women. In newspapers. And committed suicide. And her writing exposes cultural snobbery like this.

Clift needs a champion from outside Australia (and I hope not a post-post-structualist). She needs to be looked at as a writer, not as a beautiful woman who received a lot of sexual attention and lived a life that shocked conservative people, not as a person whose resources were finally crushed by lack of appreciation, not as the wife and collaborator of another writer. Misrepresentation in her life led to Clift’s self-destruction; misrepresentation after her death has resulted in the kind of attention that can shift the emphasis away from what she achieved and the words she wrote. Charmian Clift ended up writing a four volume novel with herself as the central character: she didn’t know this, and until others recognise the achievement she won’t be fully appreciated. In the meantime I’ll go on reading her essays and celebrating her as a great writer, though that means nothing to her now.
Novels
1949 High Valley (George Johnston and Charmian Clift)
1953 The Big Chariot (George Johnston and Charmian Clift)
1956 The Sponge Divers (George Johnston and Charmian Clift)
1960 Walk to the Paradise Gardens
1964 Honour’s Mimic

Short Stories
1984 Strong Man from Piraeus (George Johnston and Charmian Clift)

Life in Greece
1958 Mermaid Singing
1959 Peel Me a Lotus

Essays
1965 Images in Aspic
1970 The World of Charmian Clift
1990 Trouble in Lotus Land
1991 Being Alone With Oneself

Biography and critical study
1994 Suzanne Chick Searching For Charmian
2002 Nadia Wheatley The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift
2004 Max Brown Charmian and George: The Marriage of George Johnston & Charmian Clift
1991 Graham Rochford From novelist to essayist http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/1655683?lookfor=balgowlah&offset=152&max=1657
1994 Susan J Carson Seeking a life in the literary position http://eprints.qut.edu.au/21031/

The uneasy queen: Jean Arthur

Who’s the greatest film actress of all time? Silly question, but fans will know what I mean. My choice is Gladys Greene. Like millions of people all over the world, I fall in love with her every time I see one of her films.

Her stage name was Jean Arthur. Between 1935 and 1943 she had one of the most successful careers artistically Hollywood has ever seen. She starred in:
• The Whole Town’s Talking (1935, John Ford) with Edward G Robinson;
• Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936, Frank Capra) with Gary Cooper;
• The Ex Mrs Bradford (1936, Stephen Roberts) with William Powell;
• History is Made at Night (1937, Frank Borzage) with Charles Boyer;
• Easy Living (1937, Mitchell Leisen) with Edward Arnold;
• You Can’t Take It With You (1938, Frank Capra) with James Stewart;
• Only Angels Have Wings (1939, Howard Hawks) with Cary Grant;
• Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939, Frank Capra) with James Stewart;
• Too Many Husbands (1940, Wesley Ruggles) with Fred MacMurray;
• The Talk of the Town (1942, George Stevens) with Cary Grant;
• and The More the Merrier (1943, George Stevens) with Joel McCrea.
There were 58 other films, from 1923 onwards, and she bowed out with Shane (1953, George Stevens). There are better films than any one of these listed, but taken as a whole, no other actor in Hollywood before or since can match this achievement.

She was luminously beautiful (OK, they know how to do that in Hollywood), had the sexiest (and funniest, and endearing) voice in cinema, almost perfect comic timing, and most importantly, she knew how to make her characters real, no matter how absurd the situation they were in. George Stevens thought she was “one of the greatest comediennes the screen has ever seen”.

But Jean Arthur had problems. Hollywood had given her too many poor roles in rotten films and it had undermined her confidence. She thought she couldn’t act and suffered terribly before and after a shoot, throwing up each time the cameras were about to roll (so did Laurence Olivier, reputedly). She fled Hollywood for Broadway, but had the same problems there, and backed out of several productions at the last moment (one was Born Yesterday and her withdrawal gave Judy Holiday her chance).

She hated the star system, and the hoopla that Hollywood built up around stars’ lives, and refused to co-operate. She wouldn’t give interviews, and guarded her privacy so jealously that few people knew anything about her until an ex lawyer, John Oller, wrote a biography in 2004, called The Actress Nobody Knew.

In an era when the options for a young actress were bit parts or the casting couch, Jean Arthur was fiercely independent. She worked for Columbia, and feuded with Harry Cohn (most people did). She was suspended more than once. But she fought determinedly for better roles, going to other studios when necessary, and slowly succeeded. Virtually all her films of the late 30s are great, and the dozen mentioned above among the greatest. Then her contract expired and she retired.

Her colleagues were divided about her. Some thought her shyness and defensiveness, which erupted in bad temper or was shown by coldness and aloofness, was offensive. Others (Cary Grant was one) realised the extent that she suffered while making a film, and were more sympathetic. Capra loved her because she was always good on camera. And the public thought she was wonderful.

If I had to pick the quintessential Jean Arthur film I’d waver between Mr Deeds Goes to Town and Too Many Husbands, but the later one is less familiar so I’d prefer it. Jean Arthur ends up with two husbands, Fred MacMurray and Melvyn Douglas, in this satire directed by Wesley Ruggles based on a Somerset Maugham story. When the men start competing for her affection she realises it’s not a bad situation after all. Features three great actors at the top of their game. Available at http://www.amazon.com/Screwball-Comedy-Husbands-Sister-Wouldnt/dp/B0024FAG1C/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1254408639&sr=8-1.

To put her in context, look at other great Hollywood actresses of the golden age. Barbara Stanwyck had a greater range and was a better actress, Carole Lombard a much more exuberant comedian, Irene Dunne came late to comedy and bought pathos to her comedic roles, and Jean Harlow was cut off before she was able to show what she could really do. Jean Arthur could trade wisecracks with her leading men as well as any of the above, but when she made her commitment to them she was heartbreakingly convincing. She was a wholly admirable combination of vulnerability and strength, and that was Gladys Greene.

The shadow of your scorn: Archilochus

The ancient Greeks thought Archilochus (spoken something like arkíll o’kos) was one of their greatest poets. The three they most admired were Homer, Archilochus and Sappho, in that order. The poetry of Archilochus (and of Sappho) hasn’t survived, except for a few fragments. Yet if we want to have a clearer picture of classical culture some attempt to assess their most esteemed writers is necessary.

Archilochus was said by later scholars to have lived in the mid seventh century BC. He was a native of Paros, an island right in the centre of the Aegean Sea.

Other details survive, concerning his parents, his love affairs and his profession, that of a soldier. These stories, like all autobiographical stories of ancient writers, have to be treated with caution. They may in some cases be true, but we have no way of knowing. They derive from Byzantine compilers who drew on Alexandrian scholars’ editions of works by celebrated writers. In some cases at least the source of information is the huge corpus of fourth century comedy (most of which also hasn’t survived). The comic writers obviously would take lines of a poem out of context, put opinions in the mouth of famous writers the opposite of the ones they were known for, invent scurrilous abuse of respectable people (just as Aristophanes did for Socrates), all to raise a laugh. The audience, after all, knew the works of the writers lampooned and could take things in context. We don’t, and have to be careful we don’t take a joke as a fact. All these sources of information are much later than the lifetime of poets like Archilochus.

The other source of information on ancient writers commonly used (by modern writers as well as ancient ones) is statements made in their poetry. Sappho writes of feeling desire for a woman: so she must have been a lesbian. Archilochus writes of throwing away his shield: so he must have been a soldier. Before we assume every personal statement in an ancient poem is autobiographical we need to know something about the context in which these works were written.

The poems of Archilochus and Sappho might have been at first spoken, not written, works. In the seventh century BC the Greek alphabet was still evolving. There were in effect two Greek alphabets. Writing was changing direction, from the right to from the left. The various dialects, Ionian in which Archilochus wrote, Aeolian the language of Sappho, and others, were in the process of being standardised. Writing, which had been used for legal and commercial purposes, had only started to be used for recording the poetry which up to that time had been recited and passed on by bards.

This is the period when scholars believe Homer lived, and the Homeric poems first written down, and if so he must have either transcribed a recitation or compiled from memory the poems that make up the Iliad and the Odyssey. His younger contemporary Archilochus might have done the same. Both poets lived in a transitional age, when the poets turned from oral composition and performance and began to write their compositions. Some, at least, of the works of Archilochus, if we had them, might have turned out to be traditional. This process was still going on a generation later, in the time of Sappho.

These last two poets were lyric poets, unlike Homer, who was an epic poet. Because we still have a lyric form in poetry, and because lyric uses a personal tone of voice, we can easily interpret them in 21st century terms. This might make the poems more relevant, but might not be an accurate way to imagine how they were first composed or performed.

Epic poets celebrated the ancestors’ deeds, lyric poets spoke in their own voice. Lyric poets had a variety of metres, and of tones, they could use. Epic poets used the hexametre and the grand and majestic manner. But the personal touch wasn’t what made lyric poetry ‘lyric’: it was the metre and the accompaniment of the lyre.

Lyric poetry, like the alphabet, was going through changes. In the 19th century it ended up with works like Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ or ‘To a Skylark’, but in the seventh century BC things were different.

We don’t actually know how seventh century lyric was presented (though a poet writing his heart out in his garret is an unlikely scenario for ancient times), but scholars suggest an evolution from religious ceremony, to secular song, to spoken poem, and finally to written form.

Ancient religion, like ancient lyric, was different to its modern forms. It was part of public life, in which every citizen participated, and might range from devotion to the family or city ancestors to participation in great annual celebrations for one of the gods. Lyric poetry began as something like hymn, as tragedy was closer to oratorio than what we think of as drama. Music, dance and song were combined in the performance. The poems of Archilochus, Sappho and Homer were performed for centuries all over the Greek world, in Sicily, Italy, the islands, and the Black Sea, by professional rhapsodes.

We have a much better idea about how fifth century drama was presented. It was part of a ‘national’ (an anachronistic term hard to avoid) ceremony and festival in honour of Dionysios and (in Athens) Athena. Established poets had the reputation that prophets had in ancient Judea (nothing to do with foretelling the future of course). Associated with the tragedies were satyr plays, earthy mockery of gods and satirical parodies of human failings. The same poet wrote and presented three tragedies and one satyr play at each festival. The satyr play gives us an idea as to how Archilochus might have presented his work, and how he might have been appreciated, in his earlier time.

Archilochus was thought by ancient critics to be an innovator, as was Thespis. He introduced new metres, which may mean only that he introduced an existing metre into lyric (metres originally meaning a dance step or measure). He also introduced his own voice, at least some of the time. We don’t know if the surviving fragments are personal or dramatic, part of some proto-satyr masque in honour of a god. It appears though that Archilochus was a devoteé of the god Dionysios, just as it appears Sappho was involved in worship of Aphrodite.

So lyric originally meant accompanied by a lyre, danced and sung in honour of a god, and featured a personal, contemporary note in the poetry, though this could at times have been in a dramatic structure (dramatic in that the singer might have been impersonating a mythological character.

One further consideration needs to be born in mind before looking at the fragments of Archilochus’ poetry. He may have come on, as it were, after an epic recitation, and his tone meant to contrast as much as possible with epic dignity.

My enemy has my shield, I threw it against a bush and ran away;
Let it go, it’s only a shield, not worth a life: I’ll get another shield.

I know how to love those
who love me, how to hate.
My enemies I overwhelm
with abuse. The ant bites!
(trans. Guy Davenport)

I shall no more heal a wound by weeping
than make it worse by pursuing joys
(J M Edmonds)

Archilochus represents the anti-heroic and the dilemmas of real life. He talks about cowardice, fear, old age, poverty, ridicules his enemies, cons a girl into having sex, gets drunk, admits that life is hard, that death comes at the end, that people are untrustworthy. It tells us something about the ancient Greeks that they appreciated this ‘tell it like it is’ approach. But there is more to his poetry. Also admired was Archilochus’ energy. His lines were forceful, incisive. If he mocked you, you felt the lash. “Hasten on, Wayfarer,” was written on Archilochos’ tomb, “lest you stir up the hornets.”

All the more pity he and Sappho are both represented mainly by single words quoted by ancient grammarians. There appear to have been more grammarians than poetry lovers in Greek culture eventually, and that’s the real reason Archilochus’ poetry hasn’t survived.

Photograph: Thalia, the Muse of Comedy, with Poet Reading from a Scroll, detail, Phyrgian marble relief, Roman, 180-200 CE, columnar sarcophagus (background removed) from the “Gardens of Pomey,” Rome (Photographic Credit Barbara McManus, 2001), by courtesy of the VRoma Project.

Sappho’s invisible poetry

The literature of ancient Greece was the foundation of modern Western culture, yet we don’t know much about it, aside from the fragments which have survived into modern times. We know the scholars in Alexandria in the second century edited and annotated the works of many writers of earlier times, and the Byzantines preserved digests of some of this material. But very often the 10th century Byzantine scholar known as Suidas gives details about ancient authors which are merely derived from their works.

We don’t know whether Aeschylus had a nickname, if poets wrote drafts or spoke their words until they had them right, if Homer was an actor, an editor or an original composer, whether farmers from the outskirts fell asleep during a recitation of Pindar like a 19th century tycoon during the Ring cycle.

We do know that writers and scholars of classical times in the fifth and fourth centuries BC thought the three greatest poets of Greece were Homer, Archilochus and Sappho. We know that (according to Gibbon) there was an edition of the complete poems of Sappho in 10th century Constantinople. We know Sappho was an aristocrat from the island of Lesbos in the northeast Aegean Sea who lived about 600 BC and who may have been involved in some of the political warfare between rival parties occurring in her lifetime. The two stories which have survived, from much later periods than her own, were that she was passionately involved with young women in her society, and that she committed suicide when abandoned by her husband. These are both considered by many to be derived from satyrical references in fourth century comedy.

The edition of Sappho’s poems did not survive the sack of Constantinople by the Venetians, and we have only one poem of hers, and fragments of others quoted by later grammarians to illustrate dialect variations or unusual constructions.

Somehow Sappho’s reputation has survived into modern times. She has come to stand for the fragility of human culture, for the destruction that awaits us all and all of our creations. Her poetry haunts us, and reminds us, in the words of Thomas Lodge in plaguestruck London:

Brightness falls from the air
Queens have died young and fair.

Is there any way in which Sappho could be one of the greatest poets? Some things can be recovered which give us a clearer picture about her and her work.

She was a lyric poet, with quite different metres and subject matter than Homer, who wrote, or recited, in the epic form of poetry, the hexameter. Lyric poetry has come to mean the expression of personal emotion in poetry (largely because of Sappho) but at first it referred to a particular metre, and to an accompaniment on the lyre. We don’t really know whether Sappho’s poems were sung, chanted or recited, or whether she composed the music and played the lyre herself (we don’t even know this for the fifth century tragedians). This is because ancient music has not survived at all, in any form. We have lost both the colour from ancient building facades and statues and the sounds and music of ancient times.

The most obvious characteristic of Sappho’s poetry is the simplicity and directness of her expression (which has been imitated in the form of modern ‘lyric’ poetry). All the more reason to be aware that in her society, like all ancient societies, public life was much more extensive than it has since become. It was considered to be the mark of a pious and loyal citizen to participate in the many seasonal, religious and political ceremonies, rituals and festivities that filled the year. Much of Sappho’s work is likely to have been written for performance on these occasions, and is more closely related to drama than the lyric poetry we know from later times. In other words it is antecedent to both those later forms.

Sappho’s poems were probably performed at public ceremonies, some of which were marriage feasts. It may be that some of her compositions were dramatic ones written for the bridegroom to recite, just as the Jewish Song of Solomon might have been, and that this may have been the origin of her later reputation as a ‘lesbian’. It’s worth remarking that in Sappho’s world there was no sanction against homosexuality, and there is no actual advocacy or descriptions of homosexuality in her poems. What the poems express often is the emotion of longing and desire. Prominent in the fragments are invocations to Aphrodite, which might indicate performance at her festivals. What we don’t know is the identity of the ‘I’ who often speaks in her poetry. Is it Sappho telling us how she feels? Is she celebrating the power of the goddess? Is she speaking for a character from a mythological story?

One of the best books on Sappho I’ve read is by Arthur Weigall. Sappho of Lesbos was written in 1932 and has long been out of print, but it contains the most vivid evocation of the island of Lesbos I’ve ever read, and I’ve never forgotten it. There are two choices if you want to read Sappho’s poems: you can read the original words or their translation as the fragments they are, and occasionally appreciate an adjective or even a metaphor, or part of a narrative; or you can read ‘reconstructions’ of the poems, in which fragments have been put together, gaps filled, and an attempt made to recreate the effect of the original poem. Both are helpful, but it must be remembered that neither are Sappho. Her works have been irrecoverably lost. Of interest are modern musical reconstructions of Sappho. Both Eleftheria Arvanitaki and Angelique Ionatos (Sappho of Mytilene) have sung Sappho’s lyrics.

So though it’s easy to answer the first question about Sappho, ‘was she a lesbian, did she make love with other women?’ with a ‘we don’t know, and don’t have enough information about her to find out, but it’s unlikely’, how do we answer the next question, ‘was she a great poet?’

Poetry is difficult to translate, many would say impossible. While it is just possible to appreciate the power of Catullus’ ‘Odi et amo’ without knowing Latin, what can the non Greek speaker make of ‘Ποικιλόθρον᾽ ὰθάνατ᾽ ᾽Αφροδιτα’? The first problem is that each language uses different means to create music, in Greek it’s the measure, or length, of the vowels, in English it’s the emphasis placed upon them, or the beat. So translators can’t reproduce the metres of Sappho’s lyrics because their language won’t let them. They have to try and recreate a similar effect using other means, such as rhyme. This usually distorts the meaning of the words translated and lessens their impact.

My lovely daughter, Kleis, a golden flower
I love her more than golden Lydia or lovely Lesbos

I have a child, a lovely one,
In beauty like the golden sun,
Or like sweet flowers of earliest bloom;
And Claïs is her name, for whom
I Lydia’s treasures, were they mine,
Would glad resign.
(J. H. Merivale)

A lovely little girl is ours,
Kleïs the beloved,
Kleïs is her name,
Whose beauty is as the golden flowers.
(Frederick Tennyson)

I have a beautiful daughter
Like a golden flower
My beloved Kleis.
I would not trade her for all Lydia nor lovely…
(Julia Dubnoff)

They’re all different, but none of them are Sappho, and none of them is poetry. They do give us an idea of what she meant in these few lines, and what’s good about her poetry. We don’t know if they are personal, about her own child (the traditional interpretation) or written for a birth celebration, or the dedication by the parents of their child to a deity and sung by the parents at the ceremony.

What we can say is that the surviving fragments show Sappho to have had a genius in the use of metaphor, that this concrete imagery is as vivid as Keats’. That her pictures are mostly of simple natural objects, fruit and flowers, and the feelings she speaks of are simple direct ones we all have and recognise (none of Catullus’ ‘I lovehate you’). She had the rare ability to express a strong emotion through words whose music makes us feel it. Our first impulse when writing is to overelaborate, and we achieve the complex easily. The simple is much harder work. Sappho writes invisible poetry. Almost all her work has vanished, yet we can still hear it, and that makes her unique among poets, among writers.

the apple branches sway above the stream
their gentle sounds bring slumber…

Cool murmur of water through apple-wood
Troughs without number
The whole orchard fills, while the leaves
Lend their music to slumber.
(H de Vere Stacpoole)

Sappho’s poems are available at http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/sappho/ in several translations (and in Greek), with links to sources of further information.

So far from home: Richard Francis Burton

Richard Francis Burton lived from 1821 to 1890, and for almost all of that time he seems to have been driven by a furious energy which prompted him to both explore other cultures, from the gypsies in his youth to the Persians in his old age, and to rebel against the hypocrisies and complacencies of the Victorian age. As a result he had a dual career as a scholar and explorer, and as a fighter, pursued by the enmity and petty spite of those he had offended.

A list of Burton’s achievements can lead, such is their number, to lack of consideration of the man’s character, which was a very unusual mix of intransigence and sensitivity.

Burton knew 29 languages and a dozen dialects. He published 30 books and translated or edited another 20. He was considered one of the best swordsmen in Europe, travelled in and explored Central Africa, Arabia, Iceland, America, Brazil, India, Turkey, Persia, was interested in astrology, palmistry, spiritualism, botany, archaeology, anthropology and erotica. He was a poet and a translator, an inventor, had a fascination with mining, especially for precious minerals. His knowledge was encyclopedic and undisciplined.

He served under Lord Lucan in the Crimea; travelled in disguise to Mecca; discovered Lake Tanganyika; interviewed Brigham Young; travelled with the Tichborn Claimant; was a friend of Arthur Evans, Ouida and Swinburne; admired by Schliemann and Stanley; corresponded with Gordon. Despite an unsavoury reputation and official disapproval Burton had many friends, fruit of his many languages and interests, his travels and his strong opinions.

As a student Burton rebelled against university authority and was expelled. As a soldier in the Crimea he was punished for refusing to obey orders (given the level of incompetency the Army displayed in that war he should have been promoted). In India he was regarded with distrust for going ‘native’: he disliked the stiff-necked arrogance of Imperial rule. His reputation accumulated in these spheres allowed the incompetent and treacherous Speke to rob him of the credit of his African exploration. And he spent the second half of his career in minor diplomatic employment because nobody in the Administration knew what to do with him.

Burton’s emotional life seems to have had the same contrasts as his career. On more than one occasion, hearing of the death of a friend, Burton, who cultivated the reputation of a bravo, cried uncontrollably. The death of Speke, with whom he was debating in a most bitter spirit of enmity (on both sides) left him devastated. On another occasion he fainted on hearing the news of a friend’s death. His wife Isabel decided when she first met him that she would marry him and spend her life with him, and she did. Her story is one of great devotion, almost idolising Burton. She maintained this till the day of her death, a remarkable achievement. She was in her way as remarkable and as eccentric a person as her husband. In spite of her Roman Catholicism – a very strong belief – she gave unquestioning loyalty to the sceptic Burton. She obeyed his orders unhesitatingly, even when ordered to ignore an earthquake. This devotion is his best testimonial.

Burton had no children, concealed his tremendous sensitivity and tenderness, formed strong emotional ties with his few men friends, and created what became a platonic relationship with his wife Isabel. Inevitably there has been discussion of his possible homosexuality, but the only evidence is slander from men who disliked him. In any case (as I hope homosexual people would agree) homosexuality is not an explanation for a man’s character (unless you are a follower of Freud, in which case you could have a field day, though I suspect your conclusions would be more about Freud than Burton).

He was a supporter of Darwin. On one voyage he was talking to a Catholic archbishop. Said the archbishop, on seeing some monkeys:
“Well Burton, there go some of your ancestors”.
“At least my lord I have made some progress. But what of your lordship who is I understand descended from the angels”.

A student of religions (Mecca, Salt Lake City, Rome) and an atheist, Burton expressed his faith in his one book of poetry the Kasidah.

All faith is false, all faith is true
Truth is the shattered mirror shown
In myriad bits; while each believes
His little bit the whole to own.

Again:
There is no God, no man-made God;
A bigger, stronger, crueller man;
Black phantom of our baby-fears’
Ere thought, the life of Life, began.

Burton was undisciplined. He wrote too much, and left too much in. He held strong opinions and would not modify them for anybody. He kept no law but his own. He was distrusted and cultivated his fearsome reputation. There was no place for him. He was aware of his gifts, his potential and his failure, perhaps unendurably. “With every talent but the talent to use them”. Distrusted by his age, driven by a furious energy and with a discounted and hidden sensitivity. Half way to being a great man of action and a great man of literature, he was neither – or both. A very rarely gifted man, as Isabel saw.

Burton’s copious writings are available at http://burtoniana.org/ as free downloads, along with rare illustrations and an informative commentary. As a writer Burton was prolix in the Victorian style and his enormous learning on many subjects overflowed into digressions and asides as well as the main body of the texts. Almost the best part of any book by Burton are his footnotes, which lead the reader on a fascinating journey sometimes far from the subject in hand, very much like his namesake Robert Burton.

I find his celebrated translation of the Thousand Nights and One Night so energetic and flowing that it removes my quibbles about the archaic vocabulary Burton employed.

“Know, O thou ifret, that in days of yore and in ages long gone before, a King called Yunan reigned over the city of Fars of the land of the Roum. He was a powerful ruler and a wealthy, who had armies and guards and allies of all nations of men; but his body was afflicted with a leprosy which leeches and men of science failed to heal…At last there came to his city a mighty healer of men and one well stricken in years, the sage Duban hight…”

The footnotes, as so often, are just as interesting:

“In the east men respect manly virtues, not the hysterical, philanthropic, pseudo-humanitarianism of modern government which is really cruellest of all…(government in eastern countries) is a despotism tempered by assassination. And under no other rule is a man socially freer and his condition contrasts strangely with the grinding social tyranny which characterises every mode of democracy or constitutionalism ie political equality…there are indeed only two efficacious forms of punishment all the world over, corporal for the poor and fines for the rich, the latter being the severer form.”

“The more I study religions the more I am certain that man never worshipped anything but himself.”

No man before him says Farwell had taken such a scientific interest in the subject of sex. As he travelled and explored, Burton kept notes on everything (each journey resulted in a book) and his notes included information on local sexual practices, comparative length of penuses, details of sexual mutilation, and a host of topics that horrified his staid Victorian contemporaries. And did he write ‘A History of Farting’?

Burton by Byron Farwell (what a great name, especially for a Burton biographer) is still the best biography, though first published in 1963. Burton’s sex life, his breadth of interests and accomplishments, his sensitivity, Darwinism, the Kasidah, the misfit are all aspects covered in the book that intrigued me. It’s more convincing than Fawn Brodie’s book of 1967, The Devil Drives, which first sparked my interest many years ago, which now seems too pat with Freudian interpretations. An interesting account of one of his journeys is Sind Revisited by Christopher Ondaatje (1996). William Harrison’s Burton and Speke (1982) is a novel on the two men I found fascinating, and better than the movie made from it.

Burton was one of the great outsiders. His interests ranged far beyond any one person’s ability to comprehend them, as did Leonardo’s. His empathy gave him an insight into other cultures which was quite opposed to the values of the age of imperialism in which he lived and made him an outcast (as it did Kipling despite all his patriotic verse). From his youth this Irishman who was bought up in France and fascinated with gypsies was always looking for his place. He never found it.

Heroes: what they do for us

Cultural heroes come and go but the qualities they stand for often remain the same. Just as ancient societies purged themselves of contamination by discharging it upon the body of a scapegoat driven from the community (an act itself the genesis for a cultural hero, Jesus) our heroes often stand for qualities we admire but find hard to achieve in our own lives. By discharging these ideals on cultural heroes and driving them to our imaginative realm we give them some kind of ability to endure.

Think of a cultural hero. Too late, I’ve thought of one first: Sherlock Holmes. The value we celebrate here is reasoning power. We, like all humans, respect the ability to reason, yet we know our ability to do so is impaired by strong, primitive emotions that interfere with the reasoning process. So we like Sherlock. He’s single, which we should be in order to think clearly, but can’t manage to be. He doesn’t do much except play the violin and take cocaine, and occasionally fire pistol shots at the living room wall (he never misses either). And collect information. All those newspapers and the clippings from them! How he would have loved the internet! Sherlock was always very clear about how he worked. He observed. He both looked and saw. And then he deduced from his observations. Nothing hard about that, surely. But as Dr. Watson makes obvious, we can’t do it. Not a chance. Mood swings, pressure of work, interruptions, kids, too much to drink, indigestion, that new thriller we just have to finish, our spouse feels neglected, the resentment we feel at unfair comments from friends, family or colleagues… on it goes. So we like Sherlock. He shows us that deducive reasoning is possible, and we need to know that (even research scientists who of course are too busy competing with one another to exercise the skill). At least we’re not such duffers as Dr. Watson, so there is hope.

Cultural heroes also tell us something about our times. Take Tarzan. Pretty clearly he represents the ability to stay in tune with one’s environment. A basic survival skill. This is even clearer if we look at Tarzan’s source, Mowgli. For thousands of years humans have been spectacularly successful at adapting to their environment, staying alive as the Bee Gees would say (even though these insist in singing against a strong breeze and risk catching a cold). Then yesterday we invented the Industrial Revolution and lost the plot. For a while the First World made itself feel better by lecturing the Third World about the dangers of deforestation and industrial pollution (the First World are experts on both these problems, having invented them). But the bigger our cities, the more artificial our food, the less we came in touch with natural phenomenon like sunrise and sunset, the more we needed a hero who could do it for us. Mowgli wasn’t quite right; he was a character in a children’s book invented by a writer we dismissed as an offensive imperialist (and poor Rudyard’s the greatest short story writer who’s ever lived!). When Tarzan came along he really took off. A kind of all purpose natural man, a Superman without the threat of kryptonite. But Tarzan’s retired now, gone back to find the last remaining bit of jungle and commiserate with the last few gorillas. No Jane to rescue, just tractors and logging saws which drown out his warcry. Have we given up on rejoining our environment or is it that Arnold Schwarzenegger can’t swing from a vine?

Another cultural hero who has had his time and wandered off is Charlie Chaplin. During the Great Depression he represented resilience. He took the blows we all suffered in life, but no matter how hard they were, eventually he would shrug his shoulders, twirl his cane and clump off with his outsize boots, and every now and then give a jump for joy at how good life was despite it all. We needed to know that. We always will of course, and there’s many a figure to take his place, but none so universally accepted. Perhaps this is because the problems we face are so radically different from society to society now that no one figure can seem relevant to all. Or maybe it’s just that there has never been so universal a medium as silent film.

Some cultural heroes are one trick ponies. Gilgamesh was a demi god who went looking for the plant of immortality. He speaks for every person who’s ever lived (and died). Bilbo Baggins takes a stand against injustice threatening his world, just as his predecessor St George took on the Dragon. He speaks for everyone who regrets the passing of the good values in our society. Marilyn Monroe stands for the hope that sexual allure can co-exist with innocence, something we’ve never been very sure about because we feel so damn guilty about sex.

And there are what you might call negative cultural heroes. To enter into the spirit of this investigation you have to stop your identification with the hero for a moment. It would be great to be a Dirty Harry for a while, and take out all those idiots who insist on cutting lanes without an indicator flash. “Go on”, you say as you pull level, “make my day”. But aside from this vicarious satisfaction, it looks like Dirty Harry helps us deal with the sheer frustration of living in a high speed, ugly and extremely selfish urban environment. I guess things are even more desperate for you if you’re a standin for Charles Bronson or Bruce Willis.

This is a great argument to use if you get criticised for watching too many action movies. When the girls get home after watching Thelma and Louise they can be very assertive. “It’s cool” you explain, “watching guys with seven foot pistols blow holes in each other helps keep me sane”.

This brings up the interesting question of female heroes. Not heroines, they’re for men. They exist, but don’t serve a purpose for most women because they’ve been created by men. What woman needs another sexy blonde goddess with large breasts to live up to? One could almost imagine that women don’t need heroes, until you read the novels of Jane Austen and realise that the psychoplay occurs on a more modest, feminine dimension. Jane’s heroines don’t need a sword, they can kill with a word. I’m a man, and so too modest to speak about a woman’s fantasy life, except to deplore mere copies of what men come up with, like Xena.

I’m talking, if you hadn’t realised it, about mythology, and also about religion, of which myth is a part. The indications are that myth (and religion) are therapeutic and necessary for the normal functioning of the mind (like dreams). That is why everyone is religious, even atheists. But people think they know too much about religion. They confuse knowledge and faith. Somehow conveying the joy of your faith turns into a heated and sometimes violent argument as to whether there are seven million or eight million angels able to stand on the end of a needle. Looking at our heroes is a lot simpler than that.

So already we have discovered there are heroes who stand for qualities we admire but don’t exercise enough (Casanova, anyone?); heroes who help us cope with life outside the Garden of Eden in all its frustration. And there are heroes who exorcise qualities we have but wish we didn’t (how about Adolf Hitler – no, let’s not go there).

This calls for a list. Heroes, and what they really do for us.

Helen: the journey from Sparta to Troy

The story of Helen of Troy can probably never be unravelled. It has both a political and a religious dimension, and has been passed down through a series of literary creations which haven’t had anything like an historical or religious purpose. Some clues have survived that make a glimpse into ancient times possible though, and that is worth the effort.

What follows is inspired by reading Bettany Hughes Helen of Troy: goddess, princess, whore (2005), and seeing her documentary of the same name (also 2005). At times I’ve gone off at a tangent, and she would probably think some of my conclusions were not scholarly, which they aren’t. I recommend anyone interested to find her book. It contains some stimulating reading.

History
The time is before the Trojan War, which ancient scholars calculated must have begun 1184 BC. There is archaeological evidence that the site of Troy was destroyed in what could have been a war in about 1250 BC.

The players were, firstly, the Hittites, whose 400 year old empire covered most of Anatolia and Asia Minor. About 1300 BC the Hittite emperor Muwatallis clashed with the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II at Kadesh in Syria. The conflict of these two super powers of the day weakened both, and Hittite power seems to have vanished after 1200 BC. As Hittite power weakened, it’s network of alliances with client kingdoms weakened also. One of these kingdoms was that of Troy, located in a key trading position at the mouth of the Dardanelles and extremely wealthy as a result. The Trojans were a Turkish people of Indo-European descent, whose language, culture and way of life was very similar to another Indo-European group of peoples, whom Homer calls the Achaeans, who settled in the Greek peninsula and islands.

At that period there was no Greece, and hence no Greeks. Each group of tribes that moved into the area saw themselves as a separate people with their own traditions. Most of the groups we know about settled in the northern Peloponnesus, in what became the classical poleis of Achaea, Peloponnesus and Argos. The culture these people evolved is similar to that of the ancient Celts, whose Irish hero, Finn MacCool, is celebrated in the Fianna cycle. The highest value in these cultures is success in battle, and the display and celebration of that success in rich apparel and bardic song. They were not effective as empire builders, and Homer’s poems reveal the amount of discord and rivalry there was between clan leaders. But they were good scavengers. One of the earliest groups to invade the Balkan peninsula took advantage of the earthquake that created the island of Thera and destroyed the Minoan hegemony in the Aegean in 1450 BC to pick off the major Minoan centres of power, including the cultic centre, Knossos. Now, 200 years later, they were a culture in decline themselves, but they saw an opportunity to raid the weakening outposts of the Hittites, including Troy.

Before the Trojan War there was trade, political negotiation, perhaps the hiring of mercenaries, between the Hittite power, its ally Troy, and Achaean poleis. To understand how this proceeded, some explanation of the way Achaean society was organised is necessary.

Society
Political power and property was inherited through the female line. Aristocratic and royal males held and exercised political and military power, but they had to marry it to become legitimate. Female aristocrats and royalty, on the other hand, held a lot of religious power, and at one time might have held supreme power through their religious role. So in Mycenae, Aegisthos was disinherited of the kingdom when Clytemnestra married Agamemnon (and nursed a grudge accordingly). Succession was determined by clan precedence, not by geographical power base. In Sparta, the queen heiress Helen was betrothed to a Hittite prince according to a story told by Herodotus. This may have been the Paris/Alexander of Homer’s story. In terms of the mores of that society, this represented a claim by the Hittites of political power over mainland Greece. Not an attempt at conquest, but a request for favourable alignment in the politics of the day. As Hittite power began to wane, a rival candidate put himself forward, Menelaus of Mycenae. His brother Agamemnon had done very well for himself by marrying Clytemnestra and becoming king of Mycenae. Now Menelaus attempted the same consolidation by marrying Clytemnesta’s sister Helen. It was a blow in the face to the still dominant Hittite power, and guaranteed a fight, something the Achaeans would have looked forward to.

It is Homer who describes Helen as the most beautiful woman in the world. Perhaps he was exaggerating. Helen would still have been fought over had she had a big nose and frizzy hair. Helen’s story was one of political negotiation before it became a love story. In this respect it is relevant to remember that the story would have been passed down in song, as the deeds of the heroes were remembered. Over time, as invasion of Dorian tribes from the north followed one another, the language would have changed, and these songs would have been sung in an archaic language which eventually not many would have fully understood, leaving scope for Homer and his predecessors to elaborate creatively.

Religion
Helen’s function was not just that of a pawn exchanged between competing states. To understand her role more fully you have to look at the role of religion in ancient society, and the first thing to notice is that there is no clear delineation of boundaries as we are used to today. Because the gods are all around, ritual formed an integral part of public and private life. A religious ceremony might involve, therefore, state gods (such as a dramatic festival), city gods (the worship of a city founder), family gods (worship of ancestors), and a host of rituals we would regard as superstitious (oracles, auguries, charms, magic, dream divination).

The family of Tyndareus king of Sparta was human, but Tyndaeus’ wife Leda was visited by Zeus, the king of the Olympian gods. Later mythographers blithely recount how Zeus took the form of a swan, and Leda afterwards laid two eggs, though why intercourse with a swan would have changed her reproductive system is not explained. One egg contained divine progeny, one mortal. In this way Leda’s daughter Helen was a goddess, not a human being, and as a goddess she was worshipped in Sparta through classical times. This story is quite different to Homer’s, in which a human queen is seduced and abducted by Paris of Troy.

The two stories are not quite so contradictory once we realise they have been recast and retold in very different cultures over the centuries, with no awareness in later times of how earlier societies functioned. The Achaeans lived in the 13th century BC. Their way of life was interpreted by an 8th century poet, Homer, based on material in traditional songs in an archaic language. And Homer in turn was interpreted by scholars of the 2nd century who codified his references and explained them as well as they could. There was plenty of opportunity for misunderstanding.

In Homer, all the cast are gods, because they are all ancestors, and this uniformity of status helps to explain why some nominal gods, such as Aphrodite, are treated as human beings, while others, who are human, such as Achilles, are treated as gods, as determined by the dramatic structure of each scene depicted (Homer is the founder of ancient Greek drama).

In ancient Sparta Helen was queen, but she was also priestess. Much of her power was expressed through ritual which interceded with the gods. Here the swan, strangely enough, reappears. The swan in ancient mythology sang a beautiful song just before it died (swansong). The word swan is associated with singing in several cultures, including that of the Celts. Throughout Greek mythology there are echoes of a rite involving the underworld, the gaining of mystic knowledge from the gods, and the singing of that wisdom. Think of Orpheus, the Pythoness of Delphi – and Helen of Troy. It is probable that the priestess Helen in archaic Sparta made sacrifice, retreated to an isolated, closed place that was ritually pure, and when she emerged, sung her wisdom to those who could interpret it. This mystical kind of religion lasted throughout Greek culture, predated it, and in the form of the Eleusian Mysteries, influenced the emerging rituals of early Christianity.

Another kind of rite widespread in ancient societies but repudiated by later ones was sexual in nature. The queen priestess spoke with god, and she prayed for fertility in field and in womenfolk. Her role here involved public sexual intercourse with a male representing the god. This rite was gradually dropped from Greek religion, though it lasted till classical times in Corinth, but was much more prevalent in Syria and probably Troy. Although Helen might have practised ritual intercourse as part of her role as priestess, it is unlikely to have been with a visiting prince such as Paris. But conflation of two unfamiliar roles of Helen’s, sexual and political, might have resulted in the love story told in later times.

The story
Helen had many suitors, but the most important were Paris and Menelaos. These represented, respectively, the peace party and the war party. Under consideration was whether to conciliate the still enormous power of the Hittites by an alliance with the royal house of Priam of Troy. Tyndareus of Sparta inclined to this approach, as did Helen. Troy represented not just the political power of the Hittites. It also meant riches, sophisticated civilization and lucrative trade for the relatively backward Achaeans. But the Atriadae of Mycenae thought otherwise. Agamemnon and Menelaos thought the Hittite fruit was ready for the plucking. They appealed to the warlike traditions of their people. At a clan meeting in which alliance with Sparta was also attempted, they carried the day. The war party had precedence.

But Helen had enormous power. She spoke for the gods. We don’t know the name of her god, but Homer assumed it was Aphrodite, whom in his time was one of the most powerful gods. And the gods told her to negotiate with Paris. It is likely her party went to Troy to do so. In her absence the militant party stirred up disaffection and spread stories of seduction and rape. Had Helen been present she could have toppled Agamemnon by persuading her sister Clytemnestra to repudiate him, something Clytemnestra did do eventually, as she saw her husband responsible not only for the death of her sister Helen but of her daughter Iphigeneia. The vote for war gave Agamemnon leadership of a loose federation of states hungry for plunder. It also forced Sparta onto the war side. Tyndareus might want to wait for Helen’s return from Troy, but once war was declared, Menelaos either had to ally himself with his brother or lose his kingdom, as he was king only while married to Helen. The choice was whether to stay neutral until Helen’s return, and suffer depredations from the other states of the war party, or join the war party, go in pursuit of Helen, and wipe out the dishonour her alleged seduction by Paris had caused him by killing her. This is the course he followed.

Interpretation
The next people to invade the Balkan peninsula from the north were the Dorians of about 1000 BC. Although we group all these tribes together as Indo-European, it must not be forgotten this is a term of linguistics: the existence of a common stock has been deduced from similarity in grammar roots within what traces of each language has survived. The Dorians would have seen the Achaeans as foreigners, just as the Achaeans saw the aboriginal stock they displaced, whom they called Pelagians, as foreigners. They found a society in ruins, who knew as much about their glorious past as monks in medieval France knew about Republican Rome, even though both groups preserved traditions and literature from earlier times.

Many things about the Achaeans needed explaining. The Dorians confined their women to the home; the Achaeans gave them freedom and religious power. Kings in Dorian society were war leaders; in Achaean society they were legitimised by marriage to the priestess queen. The language the people spoke was hard to understand, and the traditional songs would have needed an interpreter. The role of Helen would have been incomprehensible to the Dorians.

One thing they did understand was ancestor worship. The Dorians found prestige by claiming members of the Achaeans as ancestors. It helped that these Achaeans were physically different, tall, blue eyed with light brown hair which sometimes was golden brown or red. They were Steppe people in origin (cousins to Conan the Barbarian) and their height and colouring were remembered in classical depictions of the gods. To cement this claim of ancestry their bards got busy with the ancient tales they heard, in the incomprehensible language of the old people. The songs they sung were of course not history, but designed to honour the tribal leaders of the day by remembering the exploits of the alleged ancestors Herakles, Odysseus and Agamemnon. In the process the reputation of the queens priestesses, such as Leda and her daughter Helen, took a nose dive. But they acquired a new kind of reputation.

The Iliad can be regarded as the story of two gods, Helen and Achilles. Helen, through whom the power of Aphrodite worked to bewitch Paris, and Achilles, the agent of retribution. The power of the goddess has become the allure of the prostitute, just as it has in the Garden of Eden, where the Mistress of snakes, the queen priestess Eve, tempts Adam with the fruit and brings about the Fall of Man.

“…as Helen in all her radiance climbed the steps
to the bedroom under the high, vaulting roof.”

Paris: “Never has longing for you overwhelmed me so,
no, not even then, I tell you, that first time
when I swept you up from the lovely hills of Lacedaemon…”
(Fagles, Illiad, 3, 492-3, 518-20)

Goddess, princess, whore: Helen of Troy

I found Bettany Hughes very beautiful and couldn’t take my eyes off her in this program as she explored sources of information about Helen of Troy, a reaction that seems very appropriate given Helen’s reputation. Hughes has done a previous program on Sparta which rehabilitates them somewhat and is rumored as making another one on Socrates.

This 2005 PBS broadcast runs for two hours and covers a lot of ground. Hughes states she is interested in exploring how a Bronze Age Queen such as Helen might have lived. Her premise is that there was really a Helen and that the story of the part she played in the Trojan War is based on fact. This approach, which ignores Helen’s mythological roles, enables Hughes to restrict herself to the archaeological record, where the life of the Bronze Age elite of Greece has left some trace.

The written record is not too helpful. Homer contents himself with calling Helen the most beautiful woman without giving further details, knowing his audience will fill in the blanks themselves. But, examining Homer closely, it is possible to see how many details he writes about were of an earlier time than his own and reflect the passing down of an oral tradition from as early as the 12th century BC, the time of the War. Just as Michael Wood did in In Search of the Trojan War, Hughes finds experts who can reconstruct Bronze Age weaponry from Homer’s descriptions. It seems there is a lot of recoverable detail about how people lived in those times. But all this is supporting detail and doesn’t help much where Helen is concerned.

Hughes drives from Mycenae to Sparta, crosses the Aegean to Troy, travels up the Hellespont to Istanbul for a taste of what Troy might have seemed like in its heyday, then travels east to explore the Hittites, the dominant political power of the Bronze Age in western Asia. While filling in a lot of social and political detail, Hughes is not able to fully demonstrate one of her major points, the relative freedom and access to power accorded to women in many societies of that time. There’s really not enough evidence to make more than conjectures.

There is another aspect to Helen that Hughes does not really explore, as her search is for a historical figure. Helen is a daughter of Zeus, king of the Greek gods. She and her sister Clytemnestra were hatched from an egg, even though her mother, Leda, was of human form (though divine). Her brothers were the gods Castor and Pollux. Both Helen and Clytemnestra were to prove fatal to the Greek forces through their involvement with the brothers Agamemnon, leader of the Greek army and married to Clytemnestra, and Menelaus, married to Helen.

The Greeks often gave divine honors to their ancestors. If the involvement of Zeus and Aphrodite in Helen’s tale are seen as part of this process, then the bloody feud of the Atridae, detailed in Aeschylus’ Oresteia and which was an indirect cause of the Trojan War, as well as the story of the Seven against Thebes and of Oedipus, of Perseus, of Jason and Medea and of the Trojan War itself can be read as history, with the very large qualification that the stories, based on fact but created to gain tribal and clan renown, were passed on as part of songs in honor of the ancestors and in rituals enacted at family shrines. In this process the ancestors became heroes, the heroes became gods and children of gods. Five hundred years after these Bronze Age societies had passed away a gifted poet named Homer, who definitely did not ascribe to the religious beliefs of the age he depicted, recreated one such story: so tale became legend, became ritual, became ceremonial song and then became one of the world’s greatest poems. Finding the historical elements in this is not an easy job.

Had Hughes wished to she could have looked at Bronze Age rituals that evidently did give status and authority to women and which can be seen on the surviving frescoes from Minoan Crete, thought to be the parent civilisation to that of Mycenean Greece. Women were bare breasted, their femininity was honored, they predominated in ceremonies below ground to invoke the snake goddess who gave wisdom and the bull god who gave life (I can’t help thinking of the Canaanite Eve who might have been once such a priestess/goddess). Medea could have been another such figure, as was the Pythoness who gave way to Apollo at Delphi.

The trouble with looking at the past is that other societies had vastly different ways of looking at things than we do. We notice skin color, many ancient societies didn’t (which Roman Emperors were black?) We like facts, ancient societies didn’t think facts were nearly as important as clan honour. We separate concepts such as patriotism and religion, the Greeks didn’t. Nobody’s going to find a biography of Helen or a history of the Trojan War surviving on clay tablets because nobody in the Bronze Age had thought of such things.

From the remains we have: a few battered artifacts, an excavated city’s outline, deductions from a few lines of poetry, historians such as Hughes try to interpret a vanished way of life. The lack of evidence means there can be more than one such interpretation, and none conclusive. This is the fascination of the past.

One sad fact Hughes is able to confirm is that the scale of things was much smaller than we imagine. Smaller cities, smaller populations, fewer soldiers and ships, raids more common than battles, deaths (despite Homer’s gruesome descriptions) more often among the peasantry than the nobility. “The face that launched a thousand ships” was said of Helen almost 3000 years after her time, the tale having grown with the telling.