No Country for Young Women: Classical Reception in Modern Times
By Tim Livingstone
In his irreverent and somewhat desultory “A Real Short Introduction to Classical Reception Theory,” James Tatum says that the field of classical reception got its “final seal of international approval” with the launch of Oxford University’s Classical Receptions journal as recent as 2009. As Tatum notes, however, we had been “receiving” the classics well before this.
The term “classical reception” is a nebulous one. In A Companion to Classical Receptions, “receptions” encompasses the action of seven different verbs (transmitting, translating, excerpting, interpreting, rewriting, re-imagining, representing). Novelists Pat Barker, Emily Hauser, and Madeline Miller have each given successful retellings of Homer this decade, while the classicist Anne Carson’s extraordinary artistic projects inspired by the classical world have earned her numerous accolades. On a more sinister note, the alt-right has shown a zeal for using classical texts and iconography to promote their politics, prompting classicist Donna Zuckerberg to respond first with her essay “How to Be a Good Classicist Under a Bad Emperor,” then with her book Not all Dead White Men.
If the start of this millennium is a boom for classical reception, then an increased acknowledgement of women’s perspectives in literature is a key vehicle for it. In 2015, the online classics journal Eidolon was launched, with Donna Zuckerberg as its editor-in-chief. This journal, however, was no home for academic, peer-reviewed classical scholarship. Rather, it was a site whose mission was to “make the classics political and personal, feminist and fun.” Classical scholars, free from the publishing constraints of the academy, write pieces ranging from thought-provoking articles on classical myth and memory in Bladerunner 2049 (“Do Androids Dream of Electric Greeks”) to ancient-themed listicles (“VII Ancient Philosophies for the Modern Bro”) and what looks like clickbait for classicists (the subheading for “Pausanias’ Guide to Graceland” reads “Newly Discovered Fragment Discovers Ancient Elvis Cult”).
For all this wackiness, however, Eidolon offers a host of thoughtful scholarship on the classics in the 21st century, not in the least on modern classical reception. Indeed, “Reception” is one of the three main categories on the journal’s website menu, though the others, “Ancient vs. Modern” and “Metascholarship,” arguably fit into ‘reception’ as well. The name of the journal itself is relevant here. The Greek εἴδωλον (‘phantom,’ ‘image’) was used by Plato to mean a “phantom of the mind, fancy”, and by Herodotus and Isocrates to mean an “image” or “likeness.” Dutifully, then, do the authors at Eidolon focus their attention on the kinds of “re-writing” and “reimagining” of classical texts – the eidola or “likenesses” of these ancient stories – that make up much of classical reception today.
In her article “Reading Consent into the Iliad,” Rachel Herzog writes about two important books which participate in this trend: Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls and Emily Hauser’s For the Most Beautiful. These books tell the story of the Trojan war, with particular attention to its most dramatized part: the final few weeks, as represented in the Homeric Iliad. Their narratives, however, are told in the voice of the Iliad’s women, particularly Briseis (in both texts) and Chryseis (in Hauser).
This perspective comes with a brutal appraisal of the Iliad’s historical realities in Barker’s book. The novel begins with the fall of Lyrnessus to Achilles, the city allied to Troy and where Briseis reigned as queen. She recounts what awaits the refugees of the city:
Boys, if anywhere near the fighting age, were routinely slaughtered. Even pregnant women were sometimes killed, speared through the belly on the off chance their child would be a boy… Mothers put their arms round girls who were growing up fast but not yet ripe for marriage. Girls as young as nine and ten would not be spared.
Visceral descriptions of the living conditions of the refugees (e.g. “the smells of sweaty bodies, milk, baby-shit and menstrual blood”) and abrupt images of violence such as the one above punctuate Barker’s narrative. It is easy to read this choice on Barker’s part as a way of shocking her readers into an awareness of the horrors of the Iliad – and in some ways it is. However, this is too simple a reading. These images are arresting, and yet they are not much more visceral than the death scenes given to us by Homer himself. For two pages Barker’s Briseis lists the deaths of Trojan heroes at the hands of Achilles with graphic descriptions that are strictly loyal to their Homeric source text. Compare, for example, the death scenes of Polydorus:
… Achilleus hit [Polydorus]… The spearhead held its way straight on and came out by the navel, and he dropped, moaning, on one knee as the dark mist gathered about him, and sagged, and caught with his hands at his bowels in front of him. (Iliad 20.413-18, trans. Lattimore)
Achilles’ spear came out below the navel. Polydorus screamed and fell forward on his knees, clutching his steaming guts in his cupped hands. (Silence of the Girls)
The only real differences in the two descriptions are Barker’s addition of “steaming.” The other main differences, such as “guts” rather than “bowels” and “screaming” rather than “moaning,” are differences between Barker and Lattimore rather than Barker and Homer, since the Greek words used in each instance (ἔντερον and οἰμώζω respectively) could be translated into either Lattimore’s or Barker’s English renditions.
The difficulty of rendering Homer’s victims humanely is metatextually addressed by Briseis-as-narrator, who asks, “How on earth can you feel any pity or concern confronted by this list of intolerably nameless names?” It is precisely this oxymoron of Homeric poetry – that by repeating victims’ names their names lose significance – that Barker and her Briseis attempt to address. As stated above, this description occurs in a two-page list of Achilles’ killing spree. Each death scene is punctuated by the anaphora of “And then –,” as well as narrative lapses into the victims’ personal stories. We are told how Polydorus (“Priam’s youngest son… too young to fight… but in the closing… weeks… underage boys were routinely sent into the field.”) was “showing off” when he died, “charging the Greek lines without looking to see who was coming up behind.” Other victims are remembered as children when their mothers reminisce about them to Briseis: “Iphition’s mother, remembering the first time his dad took him fishing, the frown of concentration on his face…” It is these descriptions which ultimately make the “steaming guts” all the more tragic than they are in Homer. And while the ancient poet often commemorated not just his victims’ names but also their origins, it was often in the form of formulaic patronymics and geographical descriptions. Consider the same Iphition as described by Homer:
Born of a naiad nymph to Otrynteus… Under the snows of Tmolos in the rich countryside of Hyde. (Iliad 20.384-5)
The clearer focus on personal descriptions in Barker’s telling is what makes these soldiers more memorable. However, this is but an example of the narrative approach which Barker applies to her more important narrative subjects: Homer’s women. Indeed, the personalisation of the Iliad’s victims is the very project of Barker’s Briseis and, thus, of Barker’s narrative. Upon being picked as Achilles’ prize, Briseis is told by Nestor to forget her old life. The narrator thinks in response: “Forget. So there was my duty laid out in front of me…: Remember.” In this subversive thought lies the very subversion of Homer that Barker is attempting. Homer and his Iliad, in their very refusal to remember women’s voices, condemn them to be forgotten. Barker, however, disagrees and gives voice to not just Briseis but Uza, the former sex worker from Lyrnessus, Iphis, Patroclus’ sex slave, and all the other women kept in the Greek camp at Troy.
In this light, Barker’s novel lives up to its description as a “feminist Iliad,” and can be read as a continuation of the “female reworking of Homer” that emerged, if not began, at the beginning of this century. Alongside it can be read Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, which re-imagines Patroclus as weak and cowardly and focuses on his and Achilles’ love. In her version, Achilles, who is exclusively homosexual, claims Briseis and other captive women as prizes at Patroclus’ behest in order to save them from sexual slavery at the hands of the other Greek kings. Similarly, in Hauser’s novel, Briseis is somehow able to convince Achilles to respect the boundaries of sexual consent by showing fierce defiance towards him on their first night together.
However, there are problems with these texts and their treatment of their source material. Simply put, the positives found in the Greek camp by Hauser and Miller are only found in their imagination, and not in Homer’s Iliad. The compassion for women of Miller’s Patroclus is terribly ahistorical and seems to only arise once, when Briseis is chosen by Achilles to be his war bride, which makes it read more as a convenient plot device than a plausible interpretation of Patroclus’ character. Indeed, even Miller’s own Patroclus seems not to understand this misplaced characterisation: “I don’t know what came over me,” he says, before asking Achilles to save Briseis. As mentioned above, Hauser’s Briseis somehow avoids rape with an ease which, according to Herzog (herself a social worker at the Crime Victims Treatment Center in New York), “feels alienating to all of us who have to live outside the fantasy and contend with the reality and pervasiveness of rape.” There is a difficulty, then, in engaging with classical material at time when the classics’ ugly features are much more prominent.
These ugly features are nowhere more prominent than in the gestures and iconography of the alt right. There is a growing tendency in this political movement to appropriate classical material for its own use, which was first noted by Donna Zuckerberg shortly after Trump’s electoral (college) victory in 2016. Further than replica Spartan helmets being worn at protests and Roman imperial insignia such as the fasces being co-opted onto the logos of alt-right groups, Plato is used in “philosophical defence of misogyny” (the subtitle of a blog post by alt-right blogger Matt Forney) and the indifference towards women’s sexual rights in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria is eaten up by “redpilled pick-up artists.” Indeed, Steve Bannon’s new project in an Italian monastery is to create a “modern gladiator school” to train people to fight in the “culture wars”, and the project’s supporter, Bannon’s European populist-right think tank, bears a Latin name: the Dignitatis Humanae Institute.
It would be tempting to classify much of the alt right’s ‘understanding’ of their classical material as partial or incorrect. Indeed, in many instances, it is, as in the alt right’s fascination with Marcus Aurelius “soundbites” which rarely engage intellectually with his Stoicism – an example among many noted by Zuckerberg. This is, however, too easy a dismissal of alt right appropriations of the classics. In fact, part of Zuckerberg’s book on the issue, Not all Dead White Men, deals with the “disturbing continuities” between the Ars Amatoria and modern Red Pill philosophies. Part of being a “good classicist under a bad emperor,” therefore, is not pointing out how the alt right’s understanding of the classics is “partial”, but rather how chillingly accurate it can be. Sarah Bond argues exactly this in her article on the glorification of Hellenistic Sparta in Steve Bannon and the alt right, “This is not Sparta.” Noting Sparta’s dark history of eugenics and its appropriation by Nazi Germany is important for understanding the significance of its glorification today.
What, therefore, do we do with the classics, this collection of cultural purists, slave owners, war criminals, and rapists? It is a question that goes to the heart of modern classical reception. Herzog asks it abruptly: “So, Achilles, the hero of Greek epic, idol of everyone from Alexander the Great to half the readers of Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles, is a rapist. What do we do with that?” Peggy Xu, in her review of Not all Dead White Men, notes that this is the question to be addressed by Zuckerberg: “What do we do with the misogyny of classical literature?” Indeed, it is the question raised by Barker’s Briseis herself:
… [Achilles] was probably the most beautiful man alive, as he was certainly the most violent, but that’s the problem. How do you separate a tiger’s beauty from its ferocity? … Achilles was like that — the beauty and the terror were two sides of a single coin.
In the eyes of Miller and Hauser, perhaps, the answer could be as simple as the “rewriting” action of reception. Their versions of the Iliad, as discussed above, are fanciful, but there is nothing to say that this is an illegitimate mode of ‘receiving’ the classics. Their failure to address their classical material’s ugly features does not have to be a failure at all if the criteria for what is appropriate classical reception are changed. To paraphrase USyd Latin professor Dr Anne Rogerson (speaking at a university forum entitled “Classics in the 21st Century”): nobody owns the classics and it is not up to classicists to determine whose interpretation of the classics is right or wrong. Indeed, their work in retelling Homer is nothing short of what Virgil (among many other classical authors) was doing. In his Aeneid, Homeric source text was reshaped and appropriated for his imperial Roman audience. In this light, authors such as Miller and Hauser slip themselves into the classical tradition, as they have every right to do.
Nevertheless, there are more direct responses to the challenge posed by Achilles as rapist/hero. This is where Barker’s novel is outstanding. Barker’s project is not to make the Iliad’s story more comfortable to read for modern audiences. As we have seen, she does not refrain from visceral depictions of the Iliad’s historical realities, and for good reason. Herzog notes that any “elision” of sexual violence in classical texts risks being “another kind of silencing, a denial of the realities of the survivors who lived when the Iliad was first performed, and who read it in our classrooms now.” Indeed, her project is to rectify this elision, started in Homer and continued through the archaic, Hellenistic, classical, and modern ages. In a scene where Troy has just been sacked and its women have been gathered together to be distributed as prizes, Barker brings her narrative full circle. Andromache, princess of Troy, now sits where Briseis did and has been allocated as the sex slave of Pyrrhus, the son of her husband’s killer, just as Briseis was allocated to the killer of her husband and brothers. Looking at this new generation of “prize” women, doomed to an “amputated life as a slave,” Briseis thinks, “We need a new song.”
The lives and names of the men of Homeric poetry have continuously enjoyed the kleos aphthiton (‘undying fame’) awarded to them through divinely inspired song. Barker, rather than rejecting this Homeric tradition, appropriates it for her own purposes. She does not need to “rewrite” Homer to realise her project of saving the Iliad’s women. She excavates the women that are hidden between the lines of Homer’s Iliad, who are implied in its descriptions of the cooked meats, mixed wines, and finely woven textiles enjoyed by its heroes. In Patricia Storace’s distinction, Barker’s novel is thus not simply “a feminist Iliad,” which risks relegating it to a “niche of fiction, a genre of retellings by women,” but an “archaeologist’s Iliad.”
The task of the modern classicist, then, is not a myopic understanding of the classical past, nor its re-imagining. It is, rather, to keep an eye out for and indeed to expose those perspectives and lives in the classical world that have been so overlooked. It is, perhaps, to sing a new song.