CLAS 351
April 28, 2022

Pio Fedi, The Rape of Polyxena, ca. 1860

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GROUP PROJECTS (Tuesday, May 3): 15 mins. presentation on a post-classical reception (plays, films, music, visual arts, etc.) of one of these tragic (Senecan) or "tragicomic" (Plautine) plays: Amphitryon, Captivi, Rudens, Thyestes, Phaedra, Medea, Trojan Women

examples:

direct receptions (explicit adaptations)
Thyestes: a revenge tragedy such as Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus or Hamlet
Amphitryon: Jean Giraudoux's Amphitryon 38
Phaedra: Sarah Kane's Phaedra's Love, Jules Dassin's Phaedra
Rudens: Shakespeare's The Tempest
Medea: films, e.g. Pasolini's Medea, A Dream of Passion; fantasy novel, Blade of Fire

indirect receptions (common themes, ideas, characters)
Medea: love & vengeance, monstrous anger, metatheater (awareness of self-performance), contradictions of "civilization"
Trojan Women: the captured city, trauma of war's non-combatants, vengeance vs. mercy, toxic masculinity
Thyestes: cannibalizing family dysfunction & fragmentation, autocracy, human bestiality, horror as spectacle
Phaedra: familial dysfunction and miscommunication
Captivi, Rudens: terrifying loss of identity
Amphitryon: ontologically confusing Doppelgänger

Seneca, Trojan Women (cont.)

• Ulysses (Act 3): "time to be all Ulysses" (614); deaf to history's lessons ("The higher gods have raised you, / the more you should be gentle to the fallen", 695-696) & Andromache's example of boy Priam's plea to Hercules (betrayed by Laomedon) for mercy, clementia (718ff.; cf. Seneca's De Clementia); his exit ("These tears go on forever / Seize her; she is holding up the Argive fleet", 812-813)
  
  
• Andromache (Act 3): Hector or Astyanax ("my son's life or my dearest husband's ash". 643); "Both of them are Hector", 659; cf. Vergil, Aeneid 3)? Odysseus's order to destroy tomb, release of Astyanax ("Mother, help me!", 792); Chorus contemplates future in Greece
  
  
• Act 4: Helen's ("my grief is secret, I alone / must weep for Paris ... Both sides rage against me", 908ff.) & Andromache's competing traumas; Hecuba & revelation of Polyxena's fate ("Her great soul is glad to hear of her death", 945) & Greek lottery (Hecuba's fate?); Chorus (misery loves company > melancholy, "What will our feelings be ... when the land grows small and the sea grows big, / When even Ida's height is hard to see, 1047ff.)
  
  
  Gabriel François Doyen, The Young Asyanax, 1763
  
  
• Act 5: Andromache demands full account of "double murder" from messenger ("Agony likes dragging out / every single wound", 1066-1067)
  
  
• death of Astyanax: the memory-laden tower; autonomy in death (... sponte desiluit sua / in media Priami regna—, 1102-1103)
  
  Trojan Women 1071-1087 (Astyanax's Stoic death as spectacle)
  ... On that very tower
  he comforted his grandson in his arms,
  while Greeks ran terrified from Hector's sword and fire.
  The old man showed the child his father's fights.
  This tower, once renowned, the glory of the wall,
  is now a cruel crag, surrounded on all sides
  by soldiers and their leaders. The whole rabble
  assembled there, abandoning their ships.
  Some went up a distant hill to get a better view,
  others crowded to a high rock, on whose peak
  they stretched up on their tiptoes, trying to see.
  People climbed the trees: pine, laurel, and beech:
  the whole wood quivered with suspended men.
  Some chose the edge of a sheer mountain cliff,
  while others perch on burned-out buildings, others on the rubble
  of the ruined walls, and one man—what an obscenity!—
  sits to watch—barbarian!—on Hector's tomb.
  
  Trojan Women 1110-1121 (fragmentation & spectacle society)
  MES. There is no body left
  after so steep a plunge. His bones are broken,
  smashed by his fall. His weight as it crashed to the ground
  obliterated his fine face and body. No sign left
  of how he once looked like his famous father.
  His neck was snapped off as he hit the rock.
  His head cracked open and the brains burst out.
  His corpse is mangled, shapeless.
  ANDR. Still so like his father!
  MES. When the boy toppled headlong from the walls,
  Greeks wept to watch the crime they had done themselves,
  then that same crowd turned back to further wickedness,
  and to Achilles' tomb.

  
  Sacrifice of Polyxena, Tyrrhenian amphora, 570-550 BCE

• silent Polyxena's sacrifice in setting "like a theatre" (1125); Andromache & Hecuba as Messenger's internal audience
  
  
• death as entertainment (excitement, joy, pity, revulsion, attraction, etc.); the wedding/sacrifice/funeral
  
  Trojan Women 1125-1142 (viewers' various reactions as they gather for second spectacle)
  The whole shore thronged
  with an enormous crowd. Some of them believe
  this killing can set free the fleet from calm. Others
  are happy at any enemy child mown down. But mostly,
  the fickle mob hates the crime, but watches anyway.
  Even the Trojans
  crowd to see their own death, terrified
  they watch the final scene of Troy's destruction:
  when suddenly, as at a wedding, comes a torchlit procession,
  and out comes the Maid of Honour: Helen, with her head
  bowed down by sorrow. The Trojans pray: 'May Hermione
  suffer with a wedding like this: may hateful Helen herself,
  return to her husband in just this way.' Now horror
  stuns both Greeks and Trojans. The girl looked down
  modestly, but her cheeks were bright, and at last
  she was more beautiful than ever before,
  just as the light of the sun is often sweeter
  as it it sets and the stars are taking up their places
  and doubtful day is pressed by the neighbouring night.
  
  Helen and Menelaus, Athenian red-figure vase, 450-440 BCE
  
  
• Polyxena's Stoic death in a theater of cruelty
  
  Trojan Women 1143-1164
  The whole crowd was dumbfounded: indeed, people
  have more respect for things about to die. Some notice her beauty,
  others her youth, while some are moved to think
  of Fortune's mutability. All are affected
  by her courage in meeting death. She walks before Pyrrhus.
  Everybody quivers with pity and wonder. As soon as she reached
  the top of the mound, and the young man stood up there
  high on the top of his father's tomb, the brave young girl
  did not step back. She stood there strong and fierce,
  with a fixed frown as she turns to face the blow.
  Everyone is moved to see such courage.
  And look, another wonder: Pyrrhus is slow to kill.
  As soon as he drove his sword deep into her body,
  she died at once, and suddenly blood burst out
  from her massive wound. But even in death
  she did not lose her spirit. She fell down face-first, furious,
  as if to burden the earth that buries Achilles.
  Both sides were weeping, but the Trojans wept
  fearfully, while the winners made their lament ring loud.
  This was the way the sacrifice went. The spilt blood
  did not pool or flow over the ground: immediately
  the savage funeral mound drank all the blood.
  
  
• Romanized context (history's current victors): world of spectators, pity without clementia, final image of vengeance & banality of evil ("Hurry, captured women, hurry to the sea. / Already the sails are unfurling on the prow, the fleet is moving", 1178-1179)
  

**GROUPS**