Women in Greek Drama

[PatH]

The Book Club Online is  the oldest  book club on the Internet, begun in 1996, open to everyone.  We offer cordial discussions of one book a month,  24/7 and  enjoy the company of readers from all over the world.  Everyone is welcome.

WOMEN IN GREEK DRAMA

Greek Theater at Epidauros

           Ever wonder what Greek women were doing while Socrates and Plato were spouting philosophy? Greece was a male-dominated society, but Greek drama has produced some of the strongest women characters in literature. Here we will read plays by the greatest Greek dramatists, meet some of these women, and see why their stories have lasted thousands of years.

         So don your chitons and your sandals and come to the theater above, as we watch the three greatest playwrights of antiquity strut their stuff!

Antigone--Sophocles
May 15-28
Agamemnon--Aeschylus
Iphigenia in Tauris--Euripides

Antigone Online
Agamemnon Online


Antigone

Schedule:
May 15-21 First half (Through scene with CREON, ANTIGONE, and ISMENE.
            Until "The guards escort Antigone and Ismene into the palace. Creon remains")
May 22-28 Second half

Questions for the first half:

1) Antigone and Ismene are opposites in bravery and defiance.  Why?  In which sister do you see yourself?

2) In its first appearance, what is the chorus describing in fanciful terms? Who or what is the "he" referred to?

3) What sort of ruler will Creon be?  What clues do we have?

4) Where do we see evidence for the powerlessness and low status of women?

5) Both Creon and Antigone defend their positions in terms of high ethical values. What are these values? Which do you find most compelling? Would compromise have been possible? Why or why not?

6) Fagles points out that over the millennia over which this play has been  produced, the opinion of the audience would have changed as to who was right: Antigone or Creon. Do you think that opinion would have changed over our lifetime? In different parts of the world?

7) Have you ever been in a situation where two deeply-held ethical principles were in conflict? How was it resolved?  

DLs: JoanK and PatH

[Babi]

This background told me more I had known before. Now, does anyone have any idea why Oedipus father, Laius, was out attacking a traveler on the road?  He is a king. Was he also a
bandit?

[PatH]

JoanK can correct me when she appears, as she has just read Oedipus the King, but according to Edith Hamilton, the two parties met on the road, one tried to force the other from the path, and a fight ensued.  Neither knew the names of the others.

Hamilton gives a genealogy of the royal house of Thebes.  If you go back a few generations you get Zeus and Poseidon.

[Babi]

 (sigh( To think that simple good manners could have prevented all that tragedy.    

[JoanK]

Exactly!

Well, tomorrow is the day. Is anyone having trouble telling where we stop reading? With their translation? With anything I can help with?

I'm excited!

[straudetwo]

Yes, JoanK, I'd like your help, please.

In my translation, the text of the play takes up 58 pages. It has natural divisions into First, Second, Third Stasimons, identifying the opening Odes sung by the Chorus.  I believe we are to stop at the scene that ends just before the Second Stasimon with Antigone and Ismene being show out.  Is that correct ?  
Thank you.

[PatH]

Exactly right, Traude.  We'll start talking about:

Prologue--Antigone and Ismene
Parodos--the chorus' description
Episode 1--Creon and the guard
Stasimon 1--the chorus' ode to mankind
Episode 2--Antigone, guard, Creon, Ismene, ending with the sisters being taken out

There's nothing to stop you from reading more, but as you know, it works best to discuss things one chunk at a time.

[PatH]

At last it’s time.  We’re seated in our stone seats, Antigone and Ismene are having their furtive conference in front of the palace, and the chorus troops in in their masks and height-enhancing boots and dances towards the altar and back again, as they fill us in on what has come before.

[Babi]

  Oh, dear. Stone seats?  And my poor bottom has gotten so bony. I must have my
maid bring along a cushion. 

[JoanK]

I wish my bottom were bony! I carry a natural cushion with me wherever I go.

[JoanK]

I had a friend named Ismene. Her parents named her after Antigone's sister. Other than being a strange name, what do you all think of that?

[Frybabe]

Reporting in.

I ordered the new Robert Bagg and James Scully translation from the Library on Sunday afternoon. I was able to pick it up Monday afternoon. Fast service. I am reading the General Introduction section which I am finding quite interesting. The book, The Complete Plays of Sophocles: a New Translation, also has an intro to each play. There are notes at the end of the book for each play.

[JoanK]

Great! Feel free to share anything from the notes that strikes your fancy. But don't be afraid to just jump into the play. if you don't understand something, we have all this womanpower to figure it out.

[PatH]

I read the play first, and then tried to figure out the details.  The play had tremendous impact that way--don't know if it would have more or less the other way.

[PatH]

I had trouble making sense of the chorus’ first speech; it was sort of fanciful and roundabout.  One of my translations has some notes that help.  The Dirce, or Dirke, is the river that runs by Thebes.  The attackers are from Argos, hence Argives, and have white shields.  The chorus starts personifying the whole army as a single person, “he”, and also gives it the qualities of an eagle, wheeling above the city.  The “dragon” or “sons of a dragon” refers to the Thebans, who were descended from the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus.  Thebes was renowned as the city of seven gates, and the attackers had seven leaders, one for each gate.

[Babi]

 Careful what you wish for,JOANK. Hard seats and bony bottoms are NOT a happy combinaton.
Actually, my weight now would probably be perfect, if I had any muscle tone left for
protection. 
  I kind of like the name Ismene. I'm assuming it's pronounced Is-mene', and not Is-meany.

 I made frequent recourse to the explanatory notes as well, PAT. Is it usual for the
person writing the introduction and explanatory notes to point out where the translation
does not match the original manuscripts, or lines have been attributed to a different
person?  Or the chorus? I find myself wondering how the translator felt about this.

 I was pleased to find, right up front, the reason for Antigone's actions...at least,
her explanation of them.   The source of Antigone’s decision? “I have to please the dead
far longer than I need to please the living; with them, I have to dwell for ever.”  She
holds this to be one of the “sacred laws that Heaven holds in honor.”

[JoanK]

At some point, Creon accuses her of being in love with death and the dead. Do you think he's right?

[Radioman]

Just here as an observer.  My exposure to Greek drama has been minimal and has been limited to the interpretations on the operatic stage.  So, I will sit quietly in the corner and just take notes.

[PatH]

Welcome, Don!  It's good to see you here, and since Greek drama is an operatic forerunner, you should be right at home.   I hope you'll read the play.  It's short, but powerful.

[PatH]

Is it usual for the
person writing the introduction and explanatory notes to point out where the translation
does not match the original manuscripts, or lines have been attributed to a different
person?  Or the chorus? I find myself wondering how the translator felt about this.

I don't know how the translator felt, but I'm grateful.  Through the years the arguments in this play have been used as justification for all sorts of political agendas, some opposite others, so anything that makes it clearer what the play actually says is a help.

[Frybabe]

While Aias and Philoktetes are not the plays we are studying I was struck by several paragraphs in the General Introduction of the Bagg/Scully translation dealing with the Festival of Dionysos regarding war and civic responsibility.  The authors made connections about how the plays are very much contemporary as well as ancient. They mentioned as an example Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and what appears to be the ancient equivalent. During the Festival when the two plays were presented, orphans of warriors who had been killed in battle were given a place of honor. They also mentioned how Sophocles depiction in Oedipus the King of the plague (beginning about 429BCE) "dovetailed" with Thucydides account.

There is not much mention of Antigone in the General Intro. Next up is the intro to Antigone itself, then onto the play. The authors' goal, I think, is to make the characters come alive so to speak in comparison to the older more "classical" translations which these days appear rather flat. They want their readers to "feel" the emotions and "see" the action which they feel a more modern translation will do for today's readers. My guess is that they believe that someone reading the older classical translations will struggle more with the wording and miss the emotion behind it. Well, that is my take anyway.

[JoanK]

FRY: That's very interesting about post-traumatic stress syndrom.

 "My guess is that they believe that someone reading the older classical translations will struggle more with the wording and miss the emotion behind it."

That has been my experience reading some older translations. After all, the English of a couple of centuries ago has nothing particular to do with Greek tragedy: why introduce it as a barrier.

Welcome, DON! Glad to see you. The more I think about it, the more I see the similarities between Greek drama and opera (except of course for the most important thing, the music). Any other opera lovers in the group?

[straudetwo]

So many thoughts are coming to the fore, and I'm not sure just where to start since in this play we are actually joining in medias res, as it were. So I'll first by greet the Radioman of S&F most warmly and welcome him to our gathering.

Next I'd like to answer Babi's question about translators and their métier because translating and interpreting has been my calling and my life's work. Yes, it happens that translators compare their work with that of predecessors, not necessarily for new insights, but for new interpretations.  It is an ongoing search for perfection, for le mot juste, as the French call it - simply the finest, the most appropriate term imaginable.   In every new version a translator takes into account what has preceded through the ages, and justifies his difference of opinion, if he so wishes.

to be continued


 

[JoanK]

STRAUDE: great to have a translater in our midst. You can make us more aware of the problems, pitfalls, and glories for both translator and reader.

Is everyone busy reading prefaces and prologues? Do me a favor: skip them, and read the play first. The brief summary of the plot of the other two plays, posted in Post 76 is useful, but you don't even really need that. The play is fairly self-explanitory. After reading the play, if you want to read the preface, and contribute whatever you find interesting, it will mean more to us then.

One thing that Greek drama seems to have in common with opera is that it repeats a lot. So if you don't catch something the first time it goes by, if it's important to the plot, it will be mentioned again.

The only part that is hard to understand is the long poem that the chorus says near he beginning. As Pat said above, it's just a fanciful description of the war that just ended, comparing the invading army (the Argaves) to an Eagle, and the defending Thebans to a dragon. If you don't like that part, just skip it. We're reading this for our enjoyment, and should read it however is fun for us.

[ginny]

What a wonderful job you've done so far, JoanK and Pat, in setting up the background and explaining events.  I'm not sure my translation from an Internet book is up to the mark, but I've read till Antigone exits.  It's a strange translation by Storr? Very Shakespearean.

There's no introduction or any notes.   Antigone is really getting popular, it's coming out as a new movie or opera or musical, can't remember which, but it's already several operas, isn't it, by various composers?

I'm finding it very interesting. Here's Creon's Guard saying don't kill the messenger and Colin Powell saying in Newsweek that the leader MUST be told, one gets the feeling Creon is not the most sympathetic ruler ever--- is there any background on him before this?

His reasons for not abating his decision are interesting---people will think he's a girly man if he is swayed by her, And several other rationalizations.  (I am on the iPad and can't consult the text at the same time).  He seems to think (why?) that he is upholding the "right" since Polyneices was an adversary? Yet he's the one breaking the "code" of honorable burial. Remember Troy and Achilles dragging Hector around?

If you didn't give the body the necessary obsequies and send off, the person would not be happy in the afterworld forever.  It was a serious thing.

I keep wondering why he's doing this against all odds, against his son...I mean, the threat is dead. Is he afraid and trying to hold his new power by force?  

I liked this question:  6) Fagles points out that over the millennia over which this play has been  produced, the opinion of the audience would have changed as to who was right: Antigone or Creon. Do you think that opinion would have changed over our lifetime? In different parts of the world?

Does he say which time period would have which opinion?

I think maybe today Creon would be thought wrong, a new dictator trying to hold on by force no matter what, and Antigone was awfully brave to try to do the right thing and see to a proper burial for her brother.  After all, what made her brother thus  dishonored this pariah other than Creon?

But given the ancients and their regard for proper burial of the dead I don't see them thinking Creon was right, either...When would people have seen him right and her wrong? Anybody know enough about ensuing history to say?

I'm not sure either that what is motivating Creon is all that noble, or do you see him differently? It's amazing the psychological little slips he makes.  

Super interesting choice!

(Is the  Chorus giving us any useful clues here?)

[PatH]

If anyone doesn't care for the translation they are reading, there are many out there.  My Public Library had 3 or 4 different ones.  I'm working from 2--Fagles and Kitto, both extremely readable.

[BarbStAubrey]

Ok trying to get the picture of what this was all about - looks like there are two powerful kingdoms if you will for want of a better description - Thebes and Argos  - King Oedipus of Thebes left twin sons, Eteocles and Polyneices, who agreed to reign for alternate years, but after the first year Eteocles refused to step down. Polyneices took refuge at the court of Argos, which raised an army for him.

And so, "our good Creon" must be aligned with Eteocles and Thebes. The two sisters may be seeing the burying of family from an intimate family viewpoint where as Creon is looking at alliances and who to honor and who represents the enemy that should be subject to disgrace. And so we have parallel intentions and responsibility on a collision course.

Antigone is making the case for family responsibility and honorable behavior being more valuable than city-state's interests and being subjected to a leader's will expressed in a decree written to preserve a cities growth, strength, power and unity.

Ismene doesn't seem to be standing up for either view and is taking care of her own skin. She seems to be saying it is life that is most important and to preserve your life you stay under the radar and obey a decree regardless of a greater calling from the dead.

Ok what does this underlined (by me) phrase mean -

how our father
died hated and infamous from offenses
self-detected, smiting both his eyes with
his very own hands. His wife and mother—
both words at once!—took her life with twisted noose;
then, third, our two brothers in just one day
slew each other,

Is this saying his wife was his mother? Ah found it - so he is the one who it was prophesied would kill his father. who was Laius and marry his mother.

[PatH]

Antigone is really getting popular, it's coming out as a new movie or opera or musical, can't remember which, but it's already several operas, isn't it, by various composers?

I had no idea.  Turns out there are a number, notably by Arthur Honegger and Carl Orff.  I can just imagine Orff's take on it.

The most recent I could find has words by poet Seamus Heaney, an adaptation of West Indian poet Derek Walcott's The Burial at Thebes, directed by Walcott.  I wonder what sort of fireworks you get with two Nobel prize winning poets working over a script together.  The composer is Dominique le Gendre, born in Trinidad, based in London.  I hadn't heard of her before.

http://www.dominiquelegendre.com/

[PatH]

That's an excellent presentation of issues, Barb and Ginny.  Now all we have to do is answer all the questions you've raised.

[Babi]

 JOANK, I assumed that the purpose of the introductory chorus was to give the audience
the background of the story and bring them up to the present time. Since the play takes
place entirely in the course of one day, that would be pretty important.

 Ismene is, of course, the weaker character, but also possibly the sensible one. She says she will keep Antigone’s purpose secret, and advises her to do the same. Sounds reasonable to me. Antigone reveals a rather arrogant pride in her reply, imo. “Go and denounce me! I shall hate you more if you keep silent and do not proclaim it.”   She appears determined not only to
bury her brother, but to defiantly sacrifice herself in doing it.  This is carrying hardheaded to
fatal extremes.  I am seeing a young woman with her head full of notions of glory.

[JoanK]

Great responses!

BARB: "how our father
died hated and infamous from offenses
self-detected, smiting both his eyes with
his very own hands. His wife and mother—
both words at once!—took her life with twisted noose;"

Clever of you to find this. The first two plaays summed up in one sentance! Yes, their father was the man who, not knowing it, married his mother, making her "his wife and mother-- both words at once." He discovered her identity himself ("offenses self-detected"). When his wife/mother found out that he was her son, she hanged herself ("took her life with twisted noose"). He blinded himself, and left.

The two girls were young at the time, left to grow up with their uncle Creon. If this was a modern play, they would be spending all their time on a psychiatrist's couch, poor things.

[JoanK]

OK, here we have moral and practical dilemmas laid out. Practically, do we risk our lives to right what we see as a wrong? Which of you felt more like Ismene, seeing a beloved sister risking her life and which more like Antigone?

And morally, what things are more important than our duty to obey the law? When are we justified in saying that our personal beliefs are more important than the law? Is duty to family? religious duty?

Both sides of the argument have been widely quoted. During the time after it was written, when Greece was trying to establish a strong city-state, Demosthenes quoted Creon on the duty of the citizen to the state. Victorian England had such confidence in progress that they assumed such a conflict would never arise.

Source: Fagles: The Three Theban Plays: Antigone.

Can you think of more modern situations where it would be politically relevant?

[JoanK]

Any of you dissatisfied by your translation, the Fagles translation is available on kindle under the title "The Three Theban Plays"

[PatH]

During Sophocles' time, the problem of how to keep city-states stable must have been important, and Thebes was an important city-state.  The religious duty was important too, a requirement of the gods.  If the rites weren't performed for a body, the spirit wouldn't be recognized in the underworld.   If you passed a body and didn't sprinkle dust on it, you risked a curse.

[JudeS]

I have returned from my trip to Ashland, Oregon and the Shakespeare Festival.  Also visited Crater Lake , which unbeleivably had fourteen fffet of snow. The mountains and forests were covered in white for miles and miles  but the road was passable. Crater Lake has the most snow of any spot in the lower 48.

I read your posts up till now, got to the library and took out the Fagles translation with a brilliant intro by Bernard Knox.
I still need to get my bearings about the play.  I would like to mention some fact that Knox talks about....

"Two modern adaptions of the play, both of them alive with political urgency, are highlights in the modern theatre. In Feb. 1944, in a paris occupied by the Nazis.. jean Anouilh produced HIS  Antigone . in which Antigone is unmistakrnly identified with the French Resistance movement."

"The other modern adaption , Bertold Brecht's radical revision of staged at Chur in Switzerland in 1948......Against the Hitlerian Black of Creon , Antigone is all white she is the image of what Brecht longed to see-the rising of the German people against Hitler, a resistance thar never came to birth...."

[Frybabe]

Wow, I just downloaded iTunes so I could see some of the podcast links that are listed now and again on sites I frequent, and to check out iTunesU. I see a lot of the places I have already bookmarked in there (like the Yale lecture on Roman Architecture I am back to viewing). I did a search on Antigone. There are some interesting things to view after dinner, including a lecture called Antigone's Political Legacy. It looks like I can remove some of my bookmarks, because iTunes links to them.

[JoanK]

FRYBAbe: that soundss neat,

More on Anouilh's version of Antigone. Fagles says that the Nazis allowed the play to be produced in occupied France because of it's treatment of Creon. "Anouith presents him as a practical man whose assumption of power faces him with a tragic dilemma: his desire to rule firmly but fairly, to restore and maintain order in a chaotic situation is frustrated by a determined. fanatical, apparently irrational resistance." (Fagles "Antigone")

So the Germans saw the play as describing their frustrating situation as occupiers, while the French saw it as a call to resistance.

[straudetwo]

Jude,   Welcome back!

Thank you for the information regarding Bertold Brecht's adaptation of Antigone.  As basis for his adaptation of Sophocles' play he used the German translation by Friedrich Hölderlin, a Romantic poet.  

Brecht's second wife, Helene Weigel, played the starring role in  Chur, which is in is in the German-speaking part of Switzerland.  It was difficult for her, a native of Vienna,  to find work in their years abroad because she did not speak foreign languages as well as her native tongue. For her Brecht wrote Mother Courage and Her Children, in which she was mute.  After WW II  they returned to Europe, but lived in the Soviet-occupied DDR because of Brecht's Stalinist leanings.

JoanK,  It may well have escaped the German watchdogs that Jean Anouilh's play Antigone was  seen also as criticism of Maréchal Philippe Pétain's Vichy Government.  After marching into Paris in 1940, the Germans installed him as head of what was called L'Etat de France based in Vichy. The Marshal was an old man of 84. The Vichy government collaborated with Nazi Germany until  the summer of 1944, when the German troops were withdrawn. In 1945 Pétain was put on trial for treason, found guilty and sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to life in prison. He died in 1951 at 95.

[kidsal]

Read that burying the dead was the sole duty of women.  Denying Antigone this duty took away her dignity.

[Babi]

Tough questions, JOANK. I think I would have felt an obligation to bury my brother, but I would not insist on flaunting it in Creon's face. 
  Historically, people have always felt they had a right to defy the law if they felt
oppressed by it. What was the American revolution all about, if not that. And we all
probably have personal and/or religious ethics that we could not betray.

“There is no art that teaches us to know the temper, mind or spirit of any man until he has been proved by government and lawgiving.”    Can’t quarrel with that.  How many seemingly strong, good men have been seduced by power or found themselves unable to combine ethics and political ‘necessity’?

  The Greek love of their city-states is apparent here.  They refer to the city as ‘she’, just as a ship is always ‘she’.  Why is that, I wonder, for cities or ships?   They, (or Sophocles) also attribute an awareness to the city.  “For be sure of this: it is the city that protects us all; she bears us through the storm....”