In the end of 2020, towards the end of my work on my collection of greek myths, I was editing my version of Phaethon’s story. The source is Ovid’s famous epic poem about transformations, Metamorphoses. Phaeton is the son of the sun god Helios, who drives his flaming chariot across the sky every day. But Phaethon never met his father. Instead, he lives with his mother in obscurity and his friends scorn his claim to be the son of God. Eventually, Phaethon goes looking for Helios, who, when they finally meet, promises the boy a gift: whatever he wants. “I want to drive your chariot across the sky, just for a day,” Phaethon said. Helios is horrified and tries to persuade Phaethon to withdraw his request to no avail.
This is obviously a disaster. A mere boy, he has no chance of controlling the horses of the sun god. The tank veers wildly towards Earth. Crops turn black, rivers dry up, mountains burn, people go hungry. Ultimately, it is Gaia, the centuries-old goddess of the Earth herself, who, parched and tired, cries out in distress. The king of the gods, Zeus, hears this and sends lightning to kill the boy and stop his journey.
At the time, I didn’t have to try hard to imagine what the poet was describing: I just had to watch the news from California, where the sky was tinged orange and black by the flames and smoke from forest fires.
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The special quality of myths lies in their ability to send us signals from an unfathomable and deep past. But these signals are there to be read in our present, in our moment; and every moment of reading is different. The story of Phaethon has long been read as a fable about the arrogance and folly of youth. When I first read it, many years ago, I interpreted it as the story of a son who desperately needs the love of an absent father. More recently, however, it has become inevitably clear to me that it demands to be read through an ecological lens: as that of a human so caught up in his own petty desires that he is blind to the appalling environmental damage he is doing. cause. The tragedy of the story, as I rewrite it in my mind now, is that Phaethon’s despair, his sense of loss and injustice, is so understandable, so intensely human. But he is a prisoner of the smallness of his field of action. And it’s this inability to see the bigger picture, to understand the consequences, that is so horrible.
“History is always then, myth is now” wrote novelist Pat Barker recently. The work of historiography is to situate events in time, in all their contingent specificity. Myths, on the other hand, are unstable, intrinsically contaminated, existing precisely to be reread, rewritten, and reinterpreted. There are no canonical versions of Greek myths. The narratives of the Homeric poems of the Iliad and the Odyssey, for example, are inherently impure, composite, traces of multiple stories told and retold by itinerant rhapsodes who sang them and adapted them for their audiences in archaic Greece , long before their versions. were captured and pinned down in writing. This is true for all classic myths. There is no “right” version of any of them. There is Medea who kills her children (thanks to Euripides’ play). But there is another Medea who does not kill her children (thanks to a number of other tragedies which survive only in fragments). There is Helen who goes to Troy (thanks to Homer). But there is another Helen who does not go to Troy (thanks to Euripides). The stories contradict each other greatly. But these are all Greek myths.
The Athenian playwrights of the 5th century BCE – Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides – used mythical material, often radical expansions of moments or scenes from Homer’s epics, to address the politics of their own times. When we replay these pieces – and at the start of the 21st century we never seem to tire of doing so – we are undertaking something similar, albeit with an added distance. That is, we use Euripides’ perspective on unimaginably distant stories from long ago to help us understand our present. The context may have changed beyond recognition: we are not putting on these plays as part of a religious festival dedicated to Dionysus under the blazing Athenian sun, in front of an audience mostly made up of men, for example. But we can still see in these dramas something useful and revealing about, for example, the moral compromises made when nations go to war (Euripides, 1977). Iphigenia in Aulis); the horrible “collateral damage” inflicted on non-combatants (Euripides Hecuba); the evil and violence that can pass through generations when members of a family turn against each other (Aeschylus Oresteia).
What could Greek mythology tell us about the greatest crisis facing our time: the COVID-19 pandemic? Last summer, during a brief respite from COVID-19 spikes when theaters could open, London’s National Theater staged a delayed production of Sophocles. Philoctetesloosely adapted by the poet Kae Tempest (who renamed the drama Heaven).
Philoctetes is a drama that is rarely seen in the UK, perhaps because of its rather unique story. The eponymous main character is an archer. Due to a badly injured leg, the stench of which disgusted his fellow Greek soldiers, he was left on the island of Lemnos while his former comrades besieged Troy. Except that a decade after this rather brutal abandonment, the Greeks realize that they finally need their ex-comrade: a prophecy tells them that his bow is necessary for Troy to be taken. Then two soldiers, Odysseus and Neoptolemus, go to persuade Philoctetes to return with them to Troy. The problem is he doesn’t want to come.
It is a play that has a lot to say about moral damage, about the corrosion of the sense of good and evil under the influence of conflict. But in this moment of pandemic, what was radiating from it when I watched it this summer – even if it had been adapted, designed and even rehearsed? Before the pandemic has begun – this is what she had to say about the deep physical distress and costs of isolation. Perhaps more clearly, it also appears to constitute a warning that returning to “normality” is not as easy as it seems.
Political leadership is, of course, another aspect that has been highlighted during the pandemic. Presidents and prime ministers were tested for COVID-19, and some were found deficient. Epidemics – or rather, in poetic language, “plagues” – create the conditions for two important mythical stories: that of Homer Iliad, and Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannos.
In the very first lines of Iliad, the poet asks rhetorically: What provoked the anger of the hero Achilles? The answer comes: it was the god Apollo who sent a disease to kill the Greek troops. For what? This was in response to a prayer from one of his priests, whose daughter had been captured and enslaved by Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks. Agamemnon finally agrees to return the woman, but he will catch Achilles’ captive slave Briseis as compensation, which will anger Achilles and cause him to sulk in his tent for a long time.
Trying to discover the cause of an outbreak is also what triggers action. Oedipus Tyrannos. At the beginning of the play, a delegation of citizens begs King Oedipus of Thebes to do something about the terrible disease plaguing the city. Oedipus promises to discover the cause, and it is this investigation that becomes the action of the play, culminating in Oedipus’s terrible discovery – or diagnosis – that he unknowingly married his mother and killed her father. It turns out that Oedipus himself is the miasma, the source of corruption, the cause of the plague.
I would like to think that most of us no longer believe that epidemics are divine punishment for some kind of moral defilement or unspeakable sin (although, of course, many people have tried to claim exactly that when AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s). What is interesting about these mythical epidemics, in relation to our present, is what they reveal about the characters of the political leaders, Agamemnon and Oedipus. Agamemnon behaves with arrogance and unyielding pettiness, thereby losing the trust of his best fighter, Achilles, and sending the Greeks on a path to military disaster. Oedipus, with all his speed and ingenuity, discovers in real time, throughout the drama, the cause of the epidemic. But even as he responds to his desperate subjects in the play’s opening moments, his authoritarian assurance and overconfidence are palpable. He’s so smart. And yet he is so blind to what actually exists. For each of these famous mythological leaders, the handling of the epidemic proves quite revealing of who they are.
