Book Talk (This Turned Out To Be Super Long) · 9:10pm Mar 2nd, 2017
So apparently today is World Book Day, at least in a particular part of the world, and hey that's good enough reason to celebrate. Happy day, fellow book lovers!
First up let me just say that this chapter of The Education of Clover the Clever is steadily approaching completion! It actually hasn't grown quite as much as I'd feared it would during the editing process, and currently sits at just short of 9.7k words. Only the final scene is still at a first draft level, and I'm hoping to get a good start fixing that tonight.
Also, this trailer for the new DuckTales cartoon has me unreasonably excited.
Now, books: I mentioned in the comments to the previous blog that I've been reading a bunch of ancient Greek and Roman literature for a class I'm taking. Today I finished the last one: Ovid's Metamorphoses. So for World Book Day I thought I'd give some brief thoughts on the classics I have now finally gotten around to reading.
Basically, it turns out that the ancient Greeks actually did invent everything.
The first book was The Odyssey. This was interesting in surprising ways. We probably all have some pretty clear ideas what this book is about even if you haven't read it: Odysseus, one of the great heroes of the Trojan War, incurs the wrath of the gods (specifically Poseidon) and spends ten years lost at sea, trying to return to his home and his family. Along the way he encounters mythical beasts, sorceresses, gods and goddesses, and all the adventure the ancient world had to offer.
Now, my bias as an old Lit Studies type is to search for some larger purpose in every text I read. Some thread of social commentary, some observation upon what it means to be human. It can be a controversial stance, in a field of genre readers with a fondness for close reading and a focus on the internal logic of the text rather than how the text connects to the world around it. And of course with a text this old, nothing can be proven. We don't even know for sure that there existed a man named Homer who wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey.
What I found most interesting was to think of The Odyssey not as a heroic adventure story, but as an attempt to describe and explain humanity and human society, as it appeared to the author or authors (and performers, for these texts were written with public recital in mind rather than for reading). On his travels, Odysseus encounters societies of every stage of development, and every degree of hospitality. Several times in the book, when he finds himself in a new place, he asks the same question: "Man of misery, whose land have I lit on now? What are they here--violent, savage, lawless? Or friendly to strangers, god-fearing men?"
Odysseus is a king in exile, stripped of all his possessions except his cunning and forceful mind, reduced to begging help from those he meets on the way, utterly dependent on the hospitality of others. One story that stood out to me was the story of the Phaeaceans, whose hospitality was legendary. They would give aid to anyone who asked, and they were blessed by Poseidon with great seamanship. Odysseus comes to them while Poseidon is far abroad, visiting his worshipers in distant Ethiopia, and the Phaeaceans of course give Odysseus all the help he needs, and carry him by sea as far as they can go, asking nothing.
Once Poseidon learns what has happened, he is furious. He goes to Zeus, and declares that this cannot stand: his own followers have betrayed his word, and given aid to Odysseus which Poseidon had forbidden, and if this injustice is not punished Poseidon will be humiliated before the gods. Zeus, the king of the gods, has one attribute that is of particular importance: he is the god of hospitality, the protector of suppliants, who is responsible for the laws that govern how humans treat strangers. But Poseidon is his brother, one of the greatest of the gods, and Zeus agrees with his request.
The Phaeaceans are cursed by their own patron as punishment for helping Odysseus. The ship that carried him is turned to stone, along with all its crew, blocking the harbor, and the entire city is encircled by mountains, cutting them off from the sea. For doing what was right, upholding the laws of Zeus to give aid to those who come to them, they were punished by Zeus himself. And the King of the Phaeaceans decreed that no stranger would ever receive help from them ever again.
Taken altogether, I think it's legitimate to see The Odyssey not just as an adventure story, but as a story about a man trying to cling to stability while the social order collapses around him.
Of course, there is enough to say about The Odyssey to last 2700 years and counting, so let's move on. The second text were three plays, proper Greek tragedies: the Theban Plays of Sophocles, Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus. These were actually very light, readable in one or two sittings, and they are too god-damned appropriate for today for texts that were written in the 5th century BC 
That might surprise you. But, those damned Greeks invented everything. They invented democracy, and the dichotomy between a free society and a tyrannical society which we are still struggling with today. And these plays are all about that, as it turns out. Which, again, is probably surprising. I'm guessing that most of you are vaguely familiar with the second of those three plays, Oedipus the King, and not at all with the first or third? That at least was the situation for me before I read them.
Well, the three plays form a kind of family drama, starting with Oedipus and moving on to his children. They are also written out of order: Antigone is the first play Sophocles wrote of those three, but it takes place last. Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus, and when the play begins her two brothers have just killed each other in battle. One of them fought to defend Thebes: the other was attacking the city to take back his father's throne. Creon, their uncle the King, decrees that the loyal brother be given all the customary burial rites, but that the traitor's body be hung up on display, disgraced, denied the sacraments. Antigone defies the order to bury her brother, and is condemned to death.
It is the law of the gods versus the law of man: Creon, the tyrant king, starts off by praising the popular will and declaring that the most important thing is the loyalty of the people to their home, the city-state. Then he declares that the enemies of the city are as animals and do not deserve the protections of the law or of the gods. Then twice, when he receives bad news he immediately declares that it is false and that the messenger was paid off. And finally he declares that as king he does not need to concern himself with whether or not the public approves of his actions anyway.
This was written over 2400 years ago. Greeks, man.
Oedipus the King is the second play Sophocles wrote, but the first in the timeline, and tells of how Oedipus (he who bested the Sphinx and became King of Thebes and married the Queen who, unbeknownst to either of them, was his own mother) uncovers his own crimes. Thebes is suffering a terrible plague, and the augurs say that the gods are angry because the murder of the previous king has never been solved. Oedipus, sharp-sighted and daring, sets out to learn what happened and to punish the one responsible. And so he does.
In Oedipus at Colonus Oedipus is a frail old man at death's door, wandering the land as a blind beggar with his daughter Antigone, until he reaches a sacred grove by the village of Colonus, outside of Athens. This, he says, is a sign from the gods that was told to him in prophecy many years ago: here he will die, and the city that controls the land where he is buried will win a battle against his hometown, Thebes. Oedipus wants to give this victory as a gift to Athens. Creon, who originally banished Oedipus from Thebes, now wants to brings his body back to Theban soil to prevent it. Oedipus's son Polynices is making war on Thebes from Argos, and wants to bring Oedipus there. But Oedipus has cursed his hometown that exiled him, and his ungrateful son who did not support him, and means to stay exactly where he is until he dies.
Phew. Okay, I'm trying to be brief here, honestly I am.
The third text is Plato's Symposium. This is actually the most entertaining of Plato's dialogues (there's a high bar for you): at a drinking party in Athens, a collection of famous Athenians decide to pass the evening by making speeches in honor of love. Some of them are quite comical. Phaedrus, the first speaker, declares that love is the greatest motivator: the desire to be honorable and excellent in the eyes of your loved one can drive a man to do great things. Therefore an army consisting only of beautiful young men and the wise older men who love them would be the greatest army in the world, and would be unstoppable in battle. Another speech tells a myth about how the sexes were divided, which has actually been animated, sort of, in the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch. At the end of the party, after Socrates speaks, a troop of revelers come and deposit an Athenian politician, who is already too drunk to stand. He immediately proclaims his undying love of Socrates, and begins to describe in great detail how he's tried to seduce the great man, but that cruel, cruel Socrates rejected him.
After that, the texts move into Roman times. Next up is The Aeneid, a Roman national epic written in the style of Homer. Aeneas, whose mother is Venus and whose father was a king descended from Jupiter himself, was one of the great heroes of Troy in The Iliad. The Aeneid tells that when Troy fell, Aeneas led the survivors on a long voyage to find their destiny in a far-off land: to found the city of Rome, that will one day rule the entire world.
Or, to put it another way, The Aeneid is a story of refugees fleeing from their war-torn homeland in the Middle-East and seeking to build a new life for themselves in the West, where they are met with hostility and distrust from the natives before integrating and becoming the greatest Europeans the world has ever seen. This was written over 2000 years ago.
Now, while the earlier texts are so old that we have very little solid knowledge about their creation (for Homer more so than for Sophocles, but still), The Aeneid was written under Augustus Caesar, a time we know very well. So we know for instance that The Aeneid, in addition to being shameless Homer fanfiction, is shameless pro-Caesar propaganda.
Homer's books are stuffed full of prophecies, and so is The Aeneid. But while Homer's prophecies all refer to things that happen later in Homer's own texts, the prophecies in The Aeneid are all about the splendor and glory of Rome to come, leading up to the pinnacle of history that is the reign of Augustus. Aeneas himself... kinda gets short-changed in his own epic 
He's not a very interesting character, being defined chiefly by his pietas, his devotion to duty. Also he's a big mama's boy: his mother Venus is constantly looking over his shoulder and making sure things are going according to the gods' plan. But his journey very much echoes Odysseus's journey: Aeneas too visits the island of the Cyclops (where he takes on board a Greek who had been a sailor on Odysseus's ship, but had been left behind when they fled the island), and navigates the two terrors of Scylla and Charybdis. And while Odysseus had incurred the enmity of Poseidon, Aeneas has incurred the enmity of Juno, or Hera, who is probably the single most vindictive, spiteful, grudge-harboring deity in the entire classical pantheon.
Well, I suppose you'd always be pissed too, if you were married to Zeus.
But here's a fun fact: Virgil was still writing The Aeneid when he died, rather suddenly, of an illness he contracted while traveling. And on his death-bed he instructed his executors to burn the unfinished manuscript. They didn't: Augustus Caesar himself ordered them not to.
As a result, The Aeneid ends very suddenly, and on a very pessimistic note. Rome has not yet been founded, and the peace that has been prophesied to form between the refugee Trojans and the native Latins has not come about. The final scene of the book shows the duel between Aeneas and the Latin prince Turnus, who has been blocking every effort to make peace for the entire second half of the book. Juno has finally relented, and withdrawn her blessing from Turnus, and Aeneas wounds him. Turnus, unable to continue fighting, surrenders and asks that his body be given proper funeral rites. Aeneas is about to relent, when he sees that Turnus is wearing the belt he took as a trophy from one of Aeneas' slain warriors. Filled once again with rage, Aeneas delivers a spiteful one-liner and kills Turnus on his knees. And that's the end of The Aeneid 
As I say, most likely the reason it ends this way is because Virgil wasn't done yet. But part of me really wants to think that maybe, after ten years working on the book, he had lost faith in the entire enterprise and decided he really didn't want to be remembered as Caesar's propagandist. The entire last third of the book is really dour and grim in tone compared to the first half. Towards the end, the narrator laments all this terrible bloodshed, and questions if this can really be what the gods wanted:
What god could now unfold for me
So many bitter deaths, which poet could tell
Of all the captains who met their many dooms
Driven over the plain now by Turnus,
Now by the Trojan hero? Did it please you,
Jupiter, that nations destined to live
In everlasting peace should clash so harshly?
And then there's the final book, which I finished only earlier today: Ovid's Metamorphoses.
After all that heavy stuff from all those other books, you'd be forgiven for thinking this would be the lightest one. This is a collection of stories from mythology, many of them very light-hearted, many of them very very short. This too was written under the reign of Augustus Caesar, and this too has elements of propaganda to it.
There is no overarching narrative to speak of, though it does very vaguely move forward in time. It starts with the gods partying and falling in love with mortals, but eventually moves on to the Trojan War, to the stories of Odysseus and Aeneas, and ends with the assassination and subsequent deification of Julius Caesar, and the promise that Augustus will be even greater than Julius was. But mostly it's about gods and other supernatural beings falling in love with mortals, mortals who generally want nothing to do with the gods who are pursuing them. With good reason: nothing good ever seems to come out of being pursued by a god. You tend to get raped, cursed, transformed into animals or trees or flowers, and generally have a pretty sucky existence from then on.
The title highlights the central device: possibly every single story features someone transforming into something else, from Io transforming into a cow, to Narcissus transforming into a flower, to Julius Caesar transforming into a god. It's love and transformations. It is very tempting to think that this was Ovid's fetish fuel. And the Romans loved it.
A final thought. Apart from the gods and the famous heroes, there is one minor character who pops up in the strangest places: Tiresias, the Blind Seer of Thebes. Tiresias is a prophet, and in The Odyssey he is a shade in the land of the dead. Not just any shade, but the wisest of all the shades, able to think and remember after his death when everyone else, even Achilles, is a mindless ghost. Odysseus seeks Tiresias out to ask him for advice, and it seems that already then the audience were expected to know who he was.
Tiresias is also in Antigone and Oedipus the King, as the soothsayer to the King of Thebes, giving advice to Oedipus and Creon which they are too foolish to heed. Finally, he is in one of the stories in Metamorphoses, where he is called upon to settle a dispute between Jupiter and Juno themselves.
So here's my thought: Tiresias might be the very first example of the Wizard Mentor archetype in Western literature, a guy who was known to the audience and used by several authors well over a thousand years before Merlin was born. And as such, a distant ancestor of Star Swirl the Bearded.
Now, I'm fudging a little bit. I say Western literature, and we do consider that the ancient Greeks began the European literary tradition. But of course it's not the very first written story we know. And the very first written story we know wasn't all that far away from the Mediterranean: The Epic of Gilgamesh, which also happens to feature a wizened old man, touched by supernatural forces, who has learned wisdom beyond the reach of mortal men and who gives guidance and advice to the very first epic hero of all. His name is Utnapishtim, whose story is better known under the name of Noah in the Old Testament.
So, Tiresias might not be the very first one of all. But in Europe? Maybe. And maybe the Blind Seer of Thebes is due for a comeback.
Okay. Phew. I'm finished. I really didn't mean to talk for so long. Happy World Book Day, everyone. How about you? Have you read any good books lately?
I don't know about unreasonable... that's some smart and snappy writing, there!
N.B.
Great summaries and thoughts! Makes me want to read Metamorphoses again. You're right about Tiresias, he really doesn't get as much credit as an archetype as he should.
Right now, I'm finishing up The Discovery of France by Graham Robb, which is utterly fascinating! It's non-fiction and subtitled A Historical Geography. It's full of incredible information and details that are so bizarre and unexpected that someone *cough* could steal them wholesale to "invent" a fantasy land and cultures that would be hailed as wildly imaginative.
One of my favorite bits (there are hundreds of favorite bits) is detailed information on how packs of dogs were trained to complex behaviors to smuggle goods under the noses of the excise men. And the stilt-men of Landes who could run at the speed of a trotting horse! And... well, like I said, hundreds!
The Greek gods were incredible (censored)s, which I knew when I started on There goes the neighborhood, but when I began *researching* the background, I almost threw in the towel. There's a certain suspension of disbelief needed when writing about candy-colored talking equines, after all, with horns and magic wings.
Then you read about how Zeus and his siblings were born, and how they conducted their reproduction process afterwards (Hint: Enthusiastically)
I am once again humbled at the ability of the Disney corp. for their ability to make a G rated animated cartoon out of Hercules. I swear, they could make a G rated cartoon out of Behind The Green Door or Debbie Does Dallas.
Society and technology may shift, but human nature only changes as fast as the hardware. Our brains are now as they were then; is it any surprise that the stories of the ancients still ring true?
As for books, I'm currently in the middle of two: Neil Gaiman's recently published collection of Norse mythology—much of which I already knew, actually—and Princesses Behaving Badly, by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie. It's a nonfiction compilation of notable young female royalty throughout history, evocatively arranged in chapters entitled Warriors, Usurpers, Schemers, Survivors, Partiers, Floozies, and Madwomen.
And having written out all of that, I can't help but think that a ponyfic with that title and those chapter titles would be amazing. Especially if it's in the aftermath of the entire Mane Six ascending.
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The average American is not extremely well read.
4442046
Damn. I want to read that story.
I read Gaiman's Norse Mythology myself, between The Aeneid and Metamorphoses. And yeah, as I have read a lot of norse mythology on my own, and he set out to be true to the sources, there isn't much new in it. But it's still a great retelling.
4442022
It's probably for the best that they left out the bit where Hercules, in a frenzy, kills his own wife and children.
4441980
I always want to read more nonfiction. I mean, I always want to read more, period. But I especially wish I had time to read more nonfiction. I have a stack of books about things like period architecture, videogame design, and trees standing in my bookshelves, and they've been there for years and years and I've looked at them and found fascinating facts ferreted furtively fwithin, but haven't been able to sit down and read them properly.
4442299
Those who do learn from history are doomed to watch everybody else repeat it. Keyword here: DOOMED
4442468
My secret is a weekly three and a half hour commute combined with audiobooks!
4442046
Awesome! I'm ordering that book from the library right now!
4442046 I too want to read this, except have it only be about the Tetarchy!