Ariadne's clew

[truepenny]

In the same entry which I mentioned in my previous post Teresa Nielsen Hayden wants to know, what's up with Daedalus and thread?

I can't answer that one, but it did start me off on a chain of associations that ended up somewhere interesting (at least to me), so I'm going to inflict it on y'all.

So, Daedalus. (And I want you people to appreciate the fact that I'm using standard English transliteration, instead of my preferred method which would make him Daidalos.) An artificer, who is associated not only with thread, but with one of the most famous cautionary tales regarding hubris, that quintessential booby-trap of Greek thought. The story of Icarus is all about hubris and its rewards. Daedalus is constantly being hoist by his own petards, constantly so entranced by his own cleverness that he brings about his own destruction, as in the story of the conch shell. And the other thread with which Daedalus is associated, the thread which defeats his labyrinth, was of course Ariadne's, who herself does not reap joy and fulfillment from her cleverness, as she is abandoned by Theseus on an island somewhere between Crete and Athens. (Somehow, I'm not sure Dionysus counts as a net gain in this scenario.)

The other character in Greek mythology who has this flaw of excessive self-esteem due to cleverness is Arachne. The weaver. (This far, I've got a tenuous connection with TNH's original question about thread, but the next link in the chain is going to lose it.) Arachne, like Daedalus, is so pleased with her own cleverness that she forgets to keep her head down, forgets to be polite to the gods. (This is also the mistake made by Marsyas the satyr.) Weaving, like Daedalus's various artifices, is a human technology which the Greeks seem to have felt threatened to impinge on the (metaphorical) precincts of the gods. It isn't humanity's place to go about being too clever. (Sisyphus is also punished for being a smartass.) It makes the gods jealous.

Which leads me to my final link in the chain: Prometheus. Who is punished for all eternity because he gave fire to humans. Now, there are all kinds of ways to read "fire" in that myth, but even on the most literal level, Prometheus's gift enables human beings to develop metal-working technology and kiln-fired pottery, lets them cook their food instead of eating it raw ... lets them, in other words, begin to be clever. (And if you read "fire" more metaphorically--creativity, curiosity, etc.--then its effects are even more obviously the first step along the road that leads us to Daedalus and Arachne.)

Odysseus was the cleverest among the Greeks at Troy, but never the happiest. And the other leaders tended to look at him just slightly askance. Cleverness was suspect in the culture which produced Greek mythology, and extremely clever people in the myths always come to grief and always deserve it.

Which still doesn't explain the thread thing. Although there's another thread connection, now that I think about it, with the Fates: Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos, who spin, measure, and cut the threads of life. So that, too, has ominous associations and the taint of Forces Beyond Humanity's Comprehension.

(I keep having to remind myself that no matter how much I love the Dalemark Quartet, the things Diana Wynne Jones does with weaving and godhood cannot actually by cited in support of an argument about ancient Greece.)

Spinning and weaving are mysteries in Greek mythology--probably not Mysteries in the Eleusinian sense, but definitely things, like Daedalus's mechanical marvels (the labyrinth, the wings, the cow in which Pasiphae hides to slake her lust for the bull) and Odysseus's Trojan Horse, which are ever so slightly god-like. And the last thing you want, as a human being trapped in Greek mythology, is to be like the gods.

Comments

Re: Medea

[alecto23.livejournal.com]

I am sure you already know this, but I think it bears pointing out that there is evidence for Medea having been unfairly tarred and feathered by Euripides (paid by Corinth to absolve their leading lights of too much of the blame) in much the same way that Richard III was tarred by Shakespeare (I've always wondered if he just believed the sainted Thomas More or if he knew the truth and decided wisely to hold his tongue in favour of a ripping good story and his head; Elizabeth would surely not have approved).

Oh that this too, too sullied story would melt...

Re: Medea

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

There was a hero-cult in Corinth for Medea's children. And, IIRC, in the Corinthian version of the story, the children weren't killed by Medea herself but by the good citizens of Corinth. (Does anyone else know of/remember this? Am I totally making shit up here?) The existence of that cult, and the particular relationship it had with Corinth's corporate identity, makes it seem unlikely to me that they would subsidize an alternate version. But I am so not a classicist any longer, and really should shut up about it now. Moving on to Richard III ...

The farther away from a historical, quasi-historical, or mythological event, the less safe I think it becomes to talk about "the truth." The truth may indeed be out there, but it's never quite what we think it is. Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time is a remarkably convincing bit of special pleading, but there are documented facts which she gets wrong. (I researched this a little for an undergraduate medieval English history course; I don't remember the details, but I do remember the conclusion I reluctantly came to.) Ultimately Tey's most telling point is one that works both ways: if Richard III is no worse than Henry VII (true), then Henry VII is no worse than Richard III.

Shakespeare is following Tudor propaganda in Henry VI 1, 2, and 3, as well as Richard III. It's not Thomas More's fault; there was an entire apparatus of historical revisionism at work, known now as the Tudor Myth. Henry VII and his son and grandchildren desperately wanted legitimation as rulers of England; why else would Henry VII marry Elizabeth of York--Edward IV's daughter, Richard III's niece? And that project of legitimation (to slip into shameless academic jargon for a moment) produced this idea of Richard III as the enemy, which has persisted long past the Tudors themselves (i.e., Cockney rhyming slang). Shakespeare was writing over 100 years after Richard's death (Bosworth, 1483); Richard's personality was lost, but the Tudor Myth was alive and thriving. And the government of Shakespeare's day was extremely sensitive to historical parallels (like the typological readings of the Bible that were so insanely popular). This is, after all, the era in which the Earl of Essex scheduled his stupid little rebellion in conjunction with a performance of Richard II. Shakespeare was lucky he didn't lose his own head over that. So writing anything that defamed the Tudors (especially Elizabeth's own grandfather) would have been a suicidally stupid move. It would infallibly have been read as having treasonous intent. The Tudors were not nice people, any more than the Plantagenets were.

I could go into Shakespeare's presentation of history, historical forces, symbolism, and allegory in the H6 cycle, but this has gotten long enough already. I'll just stop here.

Re: Medea

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Euripides?

On what evidence?

Considering everything, considering that this is the man who gave the Athenians Troades right after Melos, do you really think it plausible?

Re: Medea

[alecto23.livejournal.com]

Evidence may have been too strong a statement, as it implies I know the first thing of what I'm talking about from a well-researched and scholarly point of view. I don't, I just know how to remember snatches of things I've read someplace. At least I remembered where I found it: Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths: Vol. 2. London: Penguin, 1960.

[Medea does Glauce in, Zeus falls for Medea, who repulses him, earning her Hera's respect.]
"Hera was grateful. 'I will make your children immortal,' said she, 'if you lay them on the sacrificial altar in my temple.' Medea did so; and then fled...[some bits about fleeing and the names of Medea's children by Jason, apparently only one of her daughter's names is recorded]...all of whom [either sons or all children, it's unclear due to sentence construction] the Corinthians, enraged by the murder of Glauce and Creon, seized and stoned to death. For this crime they have ever since made expiation: seven girls and seven boys, wearing black garments and with their heads shaven, spend a whole year in the temple of Hera on the Heights, where the murder was committed. [3] By order of the Delphic Oracle, the dead children's corpses were buried in the temple, their souls, however, became immortal, as Hera had promised. There are those who charge Jason with condoning this murder, but explain that he was vexed beyond endurance by Medea's ambition on behalf of his children.
Other again, misled by the dramatist Euripides, whom the Corinthians bribed with fifteen talents of silver to absolve them of guilt, pretend that Medea killed two of her own children; [5] and that the remainder perished in the palace which she had set on fire [...]
[3] Apollodorus: i. 9. 28; Pausanias: ii, 3. 6; Aelian: Varia Historia v.21; Scholiast on Euripides's Medea 9 and 264; Philostratus: Herotea xx. 24.
[5] Scholiast on Euripides: loc. cit.; Hyginus: Fabula 25; Euripides: Medea 1271; Servius on Virgil's Eclogue viii. 47." [254-5]

Graves himself writes on the matter: "Whether Medea, Jason or the Corinthians sacrificed the children became an important question only later, when Medea had ceased to be identified with Ino, Melicertes's mother, and human sacrifice denoted barbarism. Since any drama which won a prize at the Athenian festival in honour of Dionysus at once acquired religious authority, it is very probable that the Corinthians recompensed Euripides well for his generous manipulation of the now discreditable myth." [256]

I must confess that my knowledge of Euripides's oeuvre does not extend to Troades, so I can't comment on the likelihood.

Re: Medea

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Robert Graves outright makes things up. He actually admits to this in The White Goddess, he goes with what feels poetically right to him. It's an admirable skill in a novelist but an abominable sin in a scholar. Nothing he says can be trusted, I'd check out of the window if he told me it was snowing.

His "very probably" almost certainly doesn't reflect anything real, it does surprise me that, as a poet, and having read Medea he would think that. It seems an unkind and unnecessary smear.

I don't believe Euripides was for sale, or that he'd take bribes from the Corinthians, I have no problem believing he picked the version of the story he liked best for what he wanted to say, knowing there were several versions, that's what they did with myth, and I have no problem with believing that there were politics in Corinth behind which versions were acceptable at any given time. Indeed politics in Corinth may well have made it that the Medea story Euripides tells was the well-known one already, as well as the one that suited his dramatic purposes.

But I do not believe, without very good evidence, that the man with the courage to write the plays he did when he did would have taken a bribe from Corinth to tell a story from a particular angle. I don't think it's like Richard III, but more like Macbeth, which is someone's propaganda story against the real history, but not Shakespeare's.

Re: Medea

[alecto23.livejournal.com]

Well thanks for the elucidation re: Robert Graves. I had heard him spoken of disparagingly before and now I know why. It's the problem when you read things off your own bat without contextualisation: despite having learned the hard way in library studies to triangulate, triangulate, triangulate, it's not necessarily second nature to apply this to memory.

I don't know anything about Euripides as a person. Perhaps his integrity was unimpeachable, perhaps not. I think your comments about the variations on story are pretty much what I find interesting about the whole affair. I still think of Richard III as propaganda, but I reckon that's because it's the story that appeals to me most. Which goes right back in to something I mused about earlier in my journal, about the truth of stories and how a good story is somehow more true than the truth, whatever that was. Not that that makes sense. I may post about it further.