Mary Beard,
The New Yorker, May 2021:
“…One person’s civilization
is another person’s barbarism; history teaches that civilization is always the
insiders’ view of themselves. As for the pandemic, rather than “civilization,”
let’s say it’s perhaps challenged the role of “arts and culture.” There’s been
a bit of a blindness to those things—a sense that what was really keeping us on
the road was, of course, the work of scientists, who were working on the
vaccine and on better treatment. And in no way would I like to suggest that
that wasn’t important. But people tend to think that music, literature, and so
on is icing on the cake.
But the arts are essential. They help you understand what you
are experiencing. Look at ancient history. Where does Western literature start?
It starts, in the “Iliad,” with a bloody plague!…”
Homer, ‘The
Iliad’, Book I, translation by Peter Green, 2015:
“…So when
they had gathered and were all assembled together,
swift-footed Achilles stood up and spoke among them:
“Son of Atreus, I think we shall now be driven into retreat
and forced back home, even should we escape with our lives,60
if indeed war and plague together are to crush the
Achaians!
Come, then, let us find and question some priest or
diviner,
or even a reader of dreams, since a dream too is from Zeus,
who might explain to us Phoibos Apollo’s deep anger—
Is it a missed vow that riles him? Were some oxen not
sacrificed?—65
Maybe, catching the savor of lambs and unblemished goats,
he’ll be willing to give us relief, call off this
onslaught.”…“
Peter Jones, ‘Eureka! : Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the
Ancient Greeks But Were Afraid to Ask’, 2014:
“…We have no idea when Sophocles’ Oedipus Turannos was
performed. But we do know that, even though Aristotle made it his ‘perfect’
example of a tragedy, it did not in fact win the first prize.
The story centres on the uncovering
by Oedipus of the true nature of events occurring many years earlier. The play
opens with a plague that has struck the city of Thebes, and the Delphic oracle
tells Oedipus that he must find the killer of Laius, king of Thebes before
Oedipus was made king (Oedipus was now married to the bereaved queen Jocasta).
Oedipus sets about the task with a
will, but as the truth slowly emerges, two things become clear: not only did
Oedipus kill Laius, but in doing so he had killed his own father and then
married his own mother, in the process fulfilling oracles of long ago. Jocasta
commits suicide and Oedipus blinds himself. The play ends with Oedipus being
led away into the palace.
However unlikely the actual plot,
it is so masterfully constructed by Sophocles that one is swept away by it – a
great man, determined to reveal the guilty man behind an event happening
long ago, finding that every move he makes points the finger of guilt more and
more clearly at himself, with even more horrific consequences for
his mother and for his surviving daughters by her, Antigone and Ismene.
It is Oedipus’ determination not to
flinch from facing this increasingly dreadful truth about himself that
makes him such a powerfully tragic figure.”
"Plague Arriving" by Frederick Simpson Coburn, 1909
