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Photo: Homer in the British Museum. From Wikipedia.

For our grief we’ll need the strong stuff. We’ll have to go back, all the way to the beginning, to Homer.

This is from War Music, Christopher Logue’s account (not an exact translation) of Books 16-19 of Homer’s Iliad. While prowling around the bookstore yesterday I literally tripped over the Logue. If not for the pain in my foot I might never have opened it, but I did and it was like being shocked into full consciousness. This is what literature is for. I don’t want to hear that everything is going to be fine and dandy because that would be a lie. I need to be reminded that although life is cruel and full of sorrow, it holds out the possibility of the sublime.

from War Music (an account of books 16-19 of Homer’s Iliad)
by Christopher Logue

Down on your knees, Achilles. Farther down.
Now forward on your hands and put your face into the dirt,
And scrub it to and fro.
Grief has you by the hair with one
And with the forceps of its other hand
Uses your mouth to trowel the dogshit up;
Watches you lift your arms to Heaven; and then
Pounces and screws your nose into the filth.
Gods have plucked drawstrings from your head,
And from the templates of your upper lip
Modelled their bows.
Not now. Not since
Your grieving reaches out and pistol-whips
That envied face, until
Frightened to bear your black, backbreaking agony alone,
You sank, throat back, thrown back, your voice
Thrown out across the sea to reach your Source.

Guardi’s Tobias and the Angel

The Book of Tobit is one of the Apocrypha left out of the official Bible (they’re also known as Deuterocanonicals; they are printed in a third section apart from the OT and NT). This book is about Tobias, who travels to the land of Media accompanied by a stranger who unbeknownst to him is the Archangel Raphael. They have all sorts of adventures, not necessarily the goody-two shoes kind, getting into brawls and casting devils out of beautiful women.

Oedipus and the Sphinx by Gustave Moreau. Creepy, no?

Speaking of myths, I like the way Sigmund Freud summarizes the story of Oedipus in Interpreting Dreams. This extract from the Penguin Classic edition appears in the prologue to Salley Vickers’ novel, Where The Three Roads Meet.

Oedipus, the son of Laius, King of Thebes, and Jocasta, is exposed as an infant because an oracle had informed the father that his as yet unborn son would be his murderer. He is rescued and grows up as the son of a king at a foreign court until, unsure of his origins, he consults the oracle himself and is advised to avoid going home since he is destined to become the murderer of his father and husband to his mother. On the way from what he thinks of as home, he encounters King Laius and kills him in a fight that erupts swiftly. He then approaches Thebes, where he solves the riddle posed by the Sphinx barring the way; the grateful Thebans express their thanks by making him king and giving him Jocasta’s hand in marriage. He rules for many years in peace and honour and, together with the woman he does not know to be his mother, has two sons and two daughters—until a plague breaks out, occasioning a fresh consultation of the oracle, this time by the Thebans…

The plot of the play consists quite simply of the gradually intensifying and elaborately delayed exposure (not unlike the task of psychoanalysis) of the fact that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laius as well as the son of the murdered man and of Jocasta. Shattered by his unwittingly performed atrocity, Oedipus blinds himself and abandons his homeland. The words of the oracle are fulfilled…

My introduction to Oedipus and the Greek myths was via Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. There was a dusty paperback in my cousins’ house, where my parents had parked me in the hope that I would learn to play with other children. That didn’t work, but it got me interested in the classics. If they’d known what I was reading they probably would’ve freaked out—big ick factor—and had me exorcised again. In my defense I could’ve pointed out that part in the Bible where Lot’s daughters decide that in the absence of potential mates their father would have to do.

In Pasolini’s film adaptation, Oedipus is a young man in fascist Italy.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex

Woody Allen’s spoof Oedipus Wrecks in the New York Stories trilogy is the story of a guy whose mother vanishes onstage during a magic act and reappears in the sky to embarrass him.

Oedipus Wrecks

In the TLS Peter Stothard muses on a human-divine affair that led to a cataclysm and gave Euripides the subject of his Phaeton, which survives only in fragments.

Writing in around about 420BC, Euripides tells the ever fresh story of a woman who decided to keep her secret and, as an added attraction to the modern reader, caused some early global warming too.

Until, in Euripides’s Scene One the mother decides she has to tell her boy who his father really is…

Then Phaeton met his real dad, took his dad’s chariot out, and crashed it. He did get cars named after him. But is it a good idea to buy a car named after a terrible driver who died in a spectacular crash?

One of the most important Roman discoveries of the last fifteen years is still little known. Unearthed in northern Greece, it is the monument erected to commemorate the naval battle of Actium in 31 BC, fought between Octavian (the future emperor Augustus) on the one side and Mark Antony, with his lover and financial backer, Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt, on the other. Victory effectively handed to Octavian control of the Roman world, and ended the decade of civil wars that had followed the assassination of Julius Caesar. Antony and Cleopatra, the rival claimants to power, sloped back to Alexandria, the capital of Egypt. The vast memorial to the battle is a major work of Roman state art, with terraces, colonnades, freestanding statues, and a large altar covered with sculpture celebrating the new Augustan regime. It stood on a prominent headland, overlooking the site of the battle, reportedly on the exact spot where Octavian had pitched his tent before the engagement and just outside his new city of Nikopolis (“Victory Town”)…

Mary Beard reviews Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt by Joyce Tyldesley.

For seventy years, a prayer book moldered in the closet of a family in France, passed down from one generation to the next. Its mildewed parchment pages were stiff and contorted, tarnished by burn marks and waxy smudges. Behind the text of the prayers, faint Greek letters marched in lines up the page, with an occasional diagram disappearing into the spine.

The owners wondered if the strange book might have some value, so they took it to Christie’s Auction House of London. And in 1998, Christie’s auctioned it off—for two million dollars. For this was not just a prayer book. The faint Greek inscriptions and accompanying diagrams were, in fact, the only surviving copies of several works by the great Greek mathematician Archimedes.

A Prayer for Archimedes, in Science News. Take that, Newton and Leibniz.