When Aeneas founds Rome, he has to go past Carthage - in fact he wouldn't have founded Rome unless the goddess of love (his mother) hadn't convinced Zeus to order him away from a marriage sanctioned by Hera (although performed in the shelter of a cave during a thunderstorm) - in Carthage Dido offers him hospitality, and he accepts her love. When he leaves he forsakes her, she burns herself, he becomes the founder of Rome. So with Theseus - it is Ariadne who welcomes the enemy, saves him from the Minotaur, and when he has taken her love - and the girl herself - as far as Naxos, he forgets her, goes home and becomes the hero under whom Athens is united! Why are these women forgotten? In Theseus' case the death of his father has sometimes been understood as punishment - in the form of a second forgetting: twice immemor. But we have been reading Theseus as a victorious hero - one who isn't just the saviour of the city once, but finally. Why the Minotaur doesn't come back as a plague is probably explicable in terms of the two puzzles: a) the sphinx puzzle is dissolved: being known by Oedipus the sphinx destroys herself, but will resurface later b) the labyrinth puzzle is solved: in order to get to the minotaur Theseus traces the pattern of the maze with a thread, he lays it out, walks through it - kills the beast himself - and then retraces the path that is the puzzle (and its solution). I would even add that it is the feminine that Theseus addresses in the labyrinth with Ariadne's thread, that Oedipus fails to deal with with the sphinx - that for Oedipus the feminine is split between the monstrous hostility of the sphinx and the appalling hospitality of his mother, and so finds no resolution...The victorious hero deals with the feminine, accepts hospitality to a point, and then leaves. But why is this the resolution? Why is Ariadne abandoned? Why does Aphrodite condemn Dido to such a hell? Is it because the city is always (can only be?) founded in that way? By rejecting - the dark feminine? African Dido, Cretan Ariadne half-sister of the Minotaur? This is the nightmare of the host(ess)! That the stranger will accept your love, love you, take you, with him as guest, and then leave you on the beach while you sleep...At which point we might say, if only you'd stuck to justice! The stranger shouldn't be named, you might fall in love!
Frances
Dear Frances,
Wonderful ideas. I have to concur with the idea that there is a feminine side here missing in these stories, and can’t help also think of Medea and Jason, who so callously uses Medea much as Theseus uses Ariadne. Quite a while back, I read the following article by Melissa Mueller on the way in which Medea expects a charis relationship of mutual exchange between her and Jason, but Jason denies her one...here is the link, which you can probably access by the web through bc libraries. Essentially she sees Jason as an equal in gift giving exchange, and he thinks of her favors as disposable: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/american_journal_of_philology/v122/122.4mueller.pdf
Prof McCoy
Prof McCoy
Dear Frances,
ReplyDeleteYou'll have to forgive my gropings, this is all Greek to me; but, while I certainly can't deny that the point you raise has troubled me too, I will defend the Greeks as a whole because it seems like there are other stories which, to some extent, even the field. It seems to me that generally when heros leave behind women who love them, it is because they have a mission to complete (a city to found) which cannot be accomplished if they stay with their loved ones (cf. too, Christ's 'Who is my family? Those who follow me' & the Buddha's untimely renunciation of the world).
But even so, I don't think that it is always so simple a message as the priority of work over love. For example, though Iphigenia faces the dagger for the Greek mission to wage war, the gods save her. It may not be very consoling that though men are willing to sacrifice a woman, the gods will still care about her, yet on some level I think that it does negate the possibility of making a simple choice between the mission and the human.
An even more problematic case seems to be Odysseus at Aeaea. If Odysseus remains true to Circe, he renounces Penelope. Only by abandoning his hostess Circe can he continue his mission of returning himself & his men home. Only by leaving the love of Circe can he continue his mission & return to the love of Penelope. Maybe you can make this more Latin to me, but I have trouble seeing where justice can fit into this scene.
-Gabriel
Circe!She doesn't even complain when he leaves, and her hospitality had to be won by the trickster's root and then assured by an oath! No - but Calypso: most beautiful of nympths, so close to keeping Odysseus and his sex for eternity, denied this modest pleasure by the stingy Olympians - she might be called abandoned... But really its Nausicaa who Odysseus leaves behind: white-armed, his rescuer, decieved by Athena into dreams of marriage. It seems to me Nausicaa is the flip-side of Calypso (they are shadow to each other, strangers to each other). Odysseus has to go home to Penelope because she is the mature feminine - bed and loom in their appropriate places: desire and cunning, modesty and work, balanced.
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