A change of pace: Alcman and "One Direction"

English: Alcman, Poem in hexameters (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 I was in Toronto this weekend, where I went to the pantomime "Snow White".  At one point the handsome prince and all the little forest animals gather around Snow White, who is standing on a tree stump saying "oh I'm really nothing very special, why would anyone want to look at me?"  The prince and animals responded with very good production number of  of One Direction's " What Makes You Beautiful". 

I had never really listened to the lyrics before, and I was amazed, on being forced to listen this time (while gagging a little to be honest) when I realised the parallels between the "virtuous young woman" performance of gender described in "What Makes You Beautiful" and that enacted in  Alcman's "Hagesichora" hymn. In both, what makes a young woman beautiful is is that "you're beautiful because you don't know you're beautiful" - the line is from One Direction, but Alcman would be completely on board.

The entire text of the Alcman hymn, in an old-fashioned translation, can be found here: http://www.theoi.com/Text/LyraGraeca1B.html . I have cut and pasted a sample stanza here: 

 See you not first that the courser is of Enetic blood, and secondly that the tresses that bloom upon my cousin Hagesichora¹⁰ are like the purest gold? and as for her silvern face, how shall I put it you in express words? Such is Hagesichora; and yet she whose beauty shall run second not unto hers but unto Agido’s, shall run as courser Colaxaean to pure Ibenian-bred; for as we bear along her robe to Orthia, these our Doves¹¹ rise to fight for us¹² amid the ambrosial night not as those heavenly Doves but brighter, aye even as Sirius himself.

Eva Stehle, in Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece: Nondramatic Poetry in Its Setting (Princeton, 1997), argues that Alcman's hymn will have been sung by a chorus of young women, possibly at a wedding, and that it will have been used as an occasion for a public demonstration of the appropriate performance of their gender. The chorus of young women praises the beauty of first young one woman and then another, apparently also members of the chorus. However, the chorus never praises its own beauty. The chorus never says "I am beautiful", or "We are beautiful". Instead, it directs the gaze of the viewer to other young women. 

By directing the gaze of the young men in the audience to the beauty of the young women in the chorus, the singers direct the audience's thoughts appropriately towards beauty - their own included - sexuality, and marriage. However, the chorus never owns or acknowledges its own beauty. Each young woman in the chorus acknowledges the beauty of the other members of the chorus, while remaining modestly and charmingly unaware of her own.  The chorus makes a gift of its beauty to the community, but never tries to wield the power of its beauty and fertility for itself. This is the appropriate performance of gender for unmarried young women in Sparta, argues Stehle: they are supposed to be beautiful, and they are supposed to be modestly unaware of it.  The chorus is directing the audience's attention to both aspects of this performance.

"What Makes You Beautiful" is thus an exact parallel.  The young woman addressed in the song is apparently beautiful, but she is beautiful precisely because she doesn't know it; she doesn't own it, she doesn't use it for herself, she does not wield the power of her own beauty. If she did know she was beautiful, she would no longer be attractive.  It is precisely her modesty, her insecurity, the way she looks at the ground instead of looking any male in the eye – these are the things that make her beautiful.  A sample stanza:

Baby you light up my world like nobody else,
The way that you flip your hair gets me overwhelmed,
But when you smile at the ground it ain't hard to tell,
You don't know,
Oh oh,
You don't know you're beautiful,
If only you saw what I can see,
You'll understand why I want you so desperately,
Right now I'm looking at you and I can't believe,
You don't know,
Oh oh,
You don't know you're beautiful,
Oh oh,
That's what makes you beautiful

So c-come on,
You got it wrong,
To prove I'm right,
I put it in a song,
I don't know why,
You're being shy,
And turn away when I look into your eye eye eyes,

(Full lyrics here: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/onedirection/whatmakesyoubeautiful.html )

 The ideal performance of gender in a young woman of Sparta in the eighth century BC, or in the object of adoration for the singers of "What Makes You Beautiful" 2800 years later,  is the same: to be beautiful but unaware of it; to have the power to make men desire, but never to consciously wield that power.   

It's a tricky line to walk, the razor edge of having beauty, even knowing what beauty is, but never seeing it in yourself; because as soon as you know you have it, you are no longer a desirable girl, because you are no longer "innocent".   You might be a desirable woman, but that is a very different thing, more dangerous, more culpable,  more likely to attract anger and blame. 

The only truly safe, utterly non-blameworthy way to  wield the power of being an attractive female in public in ancient Sparta or in 21st-century North America, to  reap the rewards of your beauty without being blamed for inappropriate sexuality, is to perform the difficult maneuver of being beautiful while apparently being unaware of that beauty. 

At the same time, the ideal performance of gender in a young woman in either culture will attract male attention towards the beauty - and modesty - of which she is apparently unaware. The performance is wasted if the male audience misses it, and just carries on obliviously thinking of other things, football perhaps, or homework, or some book they just read.  

So the ideal performance of gender in a young woman directs male attention to her beauty and her modesty alike. Point out that your friends are beautiful, just to get the male audience's mind on the subject. Walk into a room and flip your hair, and smile, but at the ground – because if you actually looked a man in the eye, it would be clear that you knew the effect you were having. It would be clear that you were actually trying to have that effect.  And then you'd be a bitch, and not beautiful at all.

The cognitive dissonance this mandatory performance of gender imposes on the billions of young women trained to think that beauty is essential, but that believing you don't have it yourself is also essential, is - I remark as an aside - naturally frequently catastrophic.  But it wasn't until I actually had to listen to the lyrics of "What Makes You Beautiful" that I realized not only that we had heard all this before, but how long we had been hearing it for.

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The research day

I was not going to do this, but just this once:

Scheduled:
an entire free day with no scheduled interruptions! I can get some work done at last!

Actual events of the day
9:00 am - 9:45 am phone call & conversation with family member
10:00-10:05 am  Pet clinic calls re: cat test results.
10:30 am - 10:40 am Vet from pet clinic calls with options re: cat treatment.  None really palatable, all very expensive except option where cat dies in pain.
11:00-11:15 am Perimeter drain cleaners show up; prices outrageous; negotiation not possible; leave, perimeter drains uncleaned
11:30 am roofer calls to schedule repair
12:00-12:15 pm drugstore calls re: cat medication, for some reason requires all my biographical data
12:15-1:15 pm answering urgent email.  Then distracted into answering less urgent email.
1:30 pm son home from school (PD day) and suggests that he is hungry now. Is there lunch?
1:45 pm phone rings AGAIN. Car-related.
2:15 pm realize I'm missing guest lecture at 2:30.
2:30 pm drug store phones again. Apparently cat's heart medication is urgent.  Must go and pick it up NOW NOW NOW.
3:05  back home; can finally start work ... but the phone rings again; I don't answer, but waste time worrying that it might have been important ...
3:30 pm children's piano lesson ... It's time to go for a walk anyway.
4:30-6:00 pm ferry child to Aikido class, wait in parking lot with laptop answering email, ferry child home.

And that is it for the research day.

Solution:
Work in the library, or unplug the phone.

Patroclus' aristeia, not

Ulysses (with a pilos) and Greek warriors around the body of Patroclus. Detail of a silver oinochoe dedicated ,by Q. Domitius Tutus, made in Italy, first half of the 1st century AD. From the Berthouville treasure. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Homer now gives us 200 lines of Greeks slaughtering Trojans.  First every Greek leader kills his own Trojan, a kind of bring-your-own-(dead)-Trojan buffet; then Patroclus starts slaughtering them wholesale.  We get descriptions of how each one died as long as they're being killed by different Greek chieftains, but when Patroclus steps in we just get a list of names of the Trojans he slaughters.  Oswald gives us nothing but a list of 21 names; we aren't told who killed each one and she doesn't differentiate between the ones killed by other Greeks and the list of those killed by Patroclus.  The list ends with the name of Sarpedon's charioteer, Thrasymelos, which in Homer is preceded by the lengthy discussion between Zeus and Hera about the coming death of Zeus' son Sarpedon, which Zeus would like to avoid (and which is important because he is Zeus' son).

The importance of the slaughter in Homer is that the tide of battle has now turned back, and the Greeks are winning again; and that Patroclus may be primarily important as Achilles' close friend and companion, but he is a formidable warrior in his own right.  Since he's going to die soon he needs to be given weight and importance of his own, and this aggregation of deaths gives him that.  Even the Trojans killed by the other Greeks redound to Patroclus' credit because they occur after his arming scene and because his appearance has heartened the Greeks to go back on the attack.  Oswald elides the foreshadowing of the death of Sarpedon, which gives weight to all the deaths, and to the death of Thrasymelos, because here as elsewhere she lets individual deaths stand on their own.

After this list Oswald gives us this simile:

Like hawk wings cut through a sheet of starlings
Like wing-scissors open and close
Through a billow of jackdaws

This comes from a simile that actually shows up fairly close to this scene in Homer.  After Patroclus kills Sarpedon, a Trojan kills a Greek (whom we've never heard of before) over his body, and Patroclus, enraged at his sudden new BFF's death, returns to the Sarpedon's corpse:

"And he went straight through the fore-fighters like a hawk
swiftly, who terrifies the jackdaws and starlings;
so you, horse-driving Patroklos, drove off the Lykians and Trojans,
and your heart was angered for your companion."

I initially thought that Oswald was using the simile exactly the same way, and even about the same person (Patroclus), but actually not quite.  In Homer, the hawk is the subject.  In Oswald, the hawk doesn't appear; only the hawk wings, the hawk's effect, like scissors, cutting through a sheet of starlings, a billow of jackdaws.  Homer's hawk is Patroclus; Oswald's hawk is death, impersonal; the starlings and jackdaws are the living beings here.

Pyraikhmes and Paeonian bison (?)

English: Picture 47 of the Ambrosian Iliad, Achilles sacrificing to Zeus. Français : Image 47 de lIliade ambrosienne, Achille dédiant un sacrifice à Zeus. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Prolonged absence during which I discovered I have arthritis in one hip and moped about it. However, I have bought an expensive chair that makes my hip hurt less, so, back to work.

So: death of Pyraikhmes. (I've worked through a few others since I last posted, but today was Pyraikhmes.) He's important, in the Iliad, because his is the first death after the Greeks are actually chased back to the ships - apparently with very little loss of life, since about a dozen Trojans die for every Greek. Antilochus gets another Trojan, just before the Greeks retreat with the Trojans in headlong pursuit. The Trojans actually manage to set fire to a ship. And at this point, Patroclus persuades Achilles to let him suit up in Achilles' armour and chase off the Trojans. Achilles sacrifices (in vain) to Zeus for Patroclus' safety. Pyraikhmes is the first of the many Trojans Patroclus kills in his subsequent aristeia, culminating, of course, in his own death.

None of this context matters to Oswald; we don't know which side Pyraikhmes is on or that his death is made significant, in Homer, by the fact that Patroclus is the one who kills him. Here's Homer:

"(Patroklos) hit Pyraikhmes who had led his Paeonian horsemen from the Amydon and the broad waters of the river Axios; the spear struck him on the right shoulder, and with a groan he fell backwards in the dust; on this his men were thrown into confusion, for by killing their leader, who was the finest warrior among them, Patroklos struck panic into them all." (Perseus translation.)

Now here's Oswald:

The River Axius has the silverest sweetest water
It flows through Paeonia
Where there are bison in the hills
And men make curved bows from their horns
To get there you have to go miles over mountains
Some of his men might make it
But not Puraichmes

Some of this she got from the Catalog, where Pyraikhmes and the Paionians are again described, with the addition of the 'crooked bows" (ἀγκυλότοξος) they use and the beauty of the water in the Axios river. I was distracted however by the bison. Homer does not, as far as I can find, mention any bison or mountains anywhere. However, an increasingly obsessed search eventually brought me to Aristotle's History of Animals, which tells me

Aristotle, History of Animals,630a20

Ὁ δὲ βόνασοϛ γίνεται μὲν ἐν τῇ Παοιονία ἐν τῷ ὄρει τῷ Μεσσαπίῳ, δ'ὁρίζει τὴν Παοιονικὴν και τὴν Μαιδικὴν χώραν, καλοῦι δ'αὐτὸν οἱ Παίονεσ μόναπον.". "The 'βόνασος' (bison) lives in Paionia on Mt. Messapion, which borders the lands of Paionia and Media, and the Paionians call it a "monapos".

So as far as I can tell, Oswald takes the 'crooked bows" from the Catalog, adds them to the bison mentioned in Aristotle, and throws in the mountain as well, in a casual display of naked erudition. Pyraikhmes' men get a mention (actually not many of them are going to make it).

A puzzling thing: she then uses the most famous simile in the Iliad, the one where Achilles is chasing Hector around the walls of Troy:

Like a man running in a dream
Can never approach a man escaping
Who can never escape a man approaching (Oswald p. 58)

But here, it's about how Puraichmes is never going to make it home.  But why use it here?  It leaves Puraichmes, and all the other warriors, and us, trapped in the limbo of constant combat, in which no one, including Puraichmes, will ever make it home.   Perhaps that's the point. And also, of course, to increase the significance and magnitude of Puraichmes' death by attaching such a famous simile to it.

In breaking things down into such small bits I am missing such overarching patterns as Oswald's poem has.  But I'll continue doing this for now; I don't have that much farther to go with it; and then go back, and see if I notice larger patterns.

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Myth on the Map

Fresco on canvas mounted on board (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Spent my productive time today looking over Myth on the Map.  I see that two months ago I was wildly optimistic about getting onto a new author: Homer, perhaps, or Pausanias, this summer.  But it is now the end of the summer, and I have spent all the grant money, and we still aren't finished Apollodorus. I don't believe we will ever finish Apollodorus, so there's no point even beginning to wonder what author we should do next. This depresses me.

On the other hand mapping Apollodorus is not such a bad project.  I am unlikely to get any more money from the university for this project, but at least Apollodorus on the Map will be a useful website.

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Dolops, and whirlwinds

English: Menelaus (Ancient Greek: Μενέλαος) was a king of Sparta, the husband of Helen, and a central figure in the Trojan War. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A particularly dense passage today.  In Homer, Dolops tries to kill Meges, remains hopeful of victory even after his spear bounces off Meges' armour and Meges slices off his helmet crest (or possibly yanks off the whole helmet), but is killed by Menelaus, who gets around him and rams a spear through him from behind.  Oswald renders this as Dolops not believing he could die even after his spear fails, even after he loses his helmet:

"It was not until the beak of death
Pushed out through his own chest
That he recognized the wings of darkness".

She follows this with a short simile: 

"Like when god unwinds his whirlwind
A single cloud moves into the middle sky "

which, like most weather similes, took awhile to locate; but it seems to be the beginning & end of a simile from book 16, where Patroclus has routed the Trojan army and the cloud of dust whirling up from their chaotic retreat is like a cloud sent by Zeus when he's sending a storm.  There is  a double shift here from Homer to Oswald.

First,  the single cloud from Zeus heralding a storm = the 'beak of death' heralding Dolops' own death (the "wings of darkness").

But using a simile from the route of the Trojans in this passage, where they're still winning, reminds us of their coming defeat; so the spear through his chest heralds Dolops' death to him, as a single cloud augurs a storm; but Dolops' death, in turn, is the single cloud for us, that augurs the whirlwind of the coming Trojan rout.

Then spent the afternoon, or some of it, contemplating sacrificial virgins.  We have decided to write the easy version of the paper - that is, the chunk that will be the easiest to write, about S1 Buffy - and see if we can find a journal that wants it.

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three balls in the air

Jacques-Louis David - Homer Reciting his Verses to the Greeks - WGA06120 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

First, Myth on the Map.  Spent an hour today in conversation trying to disentangle when we should, and when we shouldn't, indicate group membership in the xml coding.  I don't think like a computer programmer at all and this made my head hurt.

Second, sacrificial virgins.  Agreed that we would go over our notes and meet on Tuesday and decide if we actually want to write this paper, since we both have things we are supposed to be doing and will get more credit for doing. But this would be fun. But.

Third, Oswald p. 56, on the deaths of 2 Greeks and 2 Trojans, in a list  (though she doesn't identify them by group affiliation, which was particularly striking to me as I'd just spent the morning thinking about groups in Homer; in Homer, the group is the whole point; in Oswald, each individual death is the whole point).  She then has a simile which she's pulled from Iliad 12, the battle at the walls where the Trojans and Greeks are flinging boulders at each other:

"As the flakes that fall thick upon a winter's day, when Zeus is minded to snow and to display these his arrows to humankind - he lulls the wind to rest, and snows hour after hour till he has buried the tops of the high mountains, the headlands that jut into the sea, the grassy plains, and the tilled fields of men; the snow lies deep upon the forelands, and havens of the gray sea, but the waves as they come rolling in stay it that it can come no further, though all else is wrapped as with a mantle so heavy are the heavens with snow - even thus thickly did the stones fall on one side and on the other, some thrown at the Trojans, and some by the Trojans at the Achaeans; and the whole wall was in an uproar." 

(Perseus website translation).

Oswald's translation is much prettier, and repurposes, this time from active to passive.  In Homer, the stones thrown by the Greeks and Trojans at each other fall as thickly as snow in a blizzard.  In Oswald, after another list of bodies, it's the deaths; the bodies falling so thickly and fast that they obscure the landscape, the trees, the fields, the harbours and beaches, and are obliterated in the sea.

And it has indeed occurred to me that I would make much faster progress on any one project if I had only one project.

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