By zeitguest poster Clavdia
The ancient Greeks were like everyone else, but more so. Other cultures around the Mediterranean, of equal or even greater antiquity, had their own stories – fantastic explanatory tales of how it all began; biographies of gods and goddesses; legends of conflict and heroism; and prescriptive fables & parables meant to guide human behavior.
The Greeks went further. They let loose their wildest and most eccentric imaginings – they sang (and later wrote) of nightmarish horrors and peculiar ecstasies and all combinations between. Hesiod's cross-kingdom transformations (a sylvan example being girls morphing into trees) and Homer's grand monstrosities along his hero's voyage – these form the early generation of a vast body of mythology that accumulated over many decades, from the 8th or 9th centuries (before the common era) up to the age of the great philosophers and dramatists of the 5th century. What were the Greeks doing – just telling a good yarn, and then another and another, and then tying some of them together?
The answer rushes in with Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons. Her existence in the canonic mythology of these "irrational" Greeks needs an explanation. A compelling reason for Penthesilea's existence – this is the quest of the present essay. And if successful, the quest will reveal not only Penthesilea's place in the imaginative universe of Greek civilization, but the implicit rationale for all those curiosities and "unthinkables" that inhabit the peripheries of this otherwise well-ordered, normal society.
Before stripping her down – that is, clearing Penthesilea of events and adventures about which a number of writers, contemporary and across the centuries, are not unanimous – before proceeding to the bare essentials of this imagined character, we must first consider the main outline of her drama – the course of her brief life – since much of her identity rests on these actions and encounters.
Famously, Penthesilea was killed in battle, during the Trojan War, by the great Achilles. The most common account of her presence at Troy – why she was there at all – tells of a kind of journey for penance, for expiation, after a tragic accident in which Penthesilea killed her own sister while both were on a hunt in forested terrain. (There is, it should be noted, an alternative version of the death of this sister, Hippolyte, in which Penthesilea had no part.) Once at Troy, Penthesilea fought bravely for the Trojans, in full battle attire, until a fatal encounter with Achilles. The story splits into two or three versions at this point, the most popular being a brief episode in which Achilles raises the visor of his victim and discovers a beautiful female face, now quite dead, and thereupon experiences the remorse appropriate to the occasion: a manly hero realizing he has just slain a desirable woman. (There are, it should be noted, alternative versions of events that follow.)
If we return to Penthesilea, alive and well, at the commencement of her myth, we see an anomalous figure in the society of her time: an unusually large woman, taller than most, very well formed – voluptuous in some representations – with a beautiful face, and dressed for battle (=helmet, armor plate, protective coverings). She was – what? – a woman warrior! – a startling figure in the gender-role arrangements of this period – a real outlier. Why should such an un-female female exist in the Greek consciousness?
Consider for a moment that Greek mythology in all its expanse was not generally a didactic phenomenon. It differed from the books of wisdom and instruction being assembled by peoples elsewhere in the region, and it stands in special contrast to the Hebraic "mythology" accumulating across the Mediterranean and east of the Peloponnese. Indeed, the Greek-Hebrew contrast is among the sharpest of the ancient period – the Hebrews thoroughly engaged in an inspired journey toward moral development and an obedience to the laws of YHWH, and the Greeks with no deliberately didactic purpose to their dramatic narratives, nor intentions of training a population in the capricious workings of Zeus or his minions. A lesson might be drawn by interpretation from certain of the Greek endgame predicaments; but constructing "behavior lessons" was not the first impulse of their myth-making.
They were, however, contributing to the world a kind of lesson, that might be understood as a meta-lesson, encompassing all expressions of the Greek imagination. They were saying – and it was a momentous humanistic announcement still not fully appreciated 2500 years later – that every configuration of human life is a possibility recognized by the human intellect, a possibility that may be explored and expressed and given an energetic form. The Greeks, implicitly, grant all strange and wonderful and terrible beings a permission to exist – free of moral judgment. Penthesilea simply is – a woman both comely and fierce. One of a seemingly limitless combination of human characteristics.
And so, the Greek mentality-given-form (a hyphenated description that fairly expresses this dynamic) taught something after all, by virtue of its rich incongruities: diversity is a potential of the human world as well as an essential strength of the natural, botanical world. What if strict gender roles are disregarded to create a woman warrior, and what if a girl's lovely tresses are turned to snakes (to cite yet another story), and what if a lusty god becomes a shower of gold coins (to cite another) – all creatures are welcome, all have value, all are examples of a diversity that—if you think about it—guarantees each of us our unique individuality.
Part of a consciousness of a people 2500 years ago in the eastern Mediterranean – how does it sound to a 21st century reader and listener? Ideally, he would assent to the proposition – social diversity is valuable – and then he would probably be obliged to add that the modern world -- as he looks around at it -- must guard against a drift away from Penthesilea – a drift away from the unconventional, and toward a sameness, a conformity, a neat & tidy set of attitudes that would gradually diminish the imaginative powers of our species.
Note: In Greek
studies, the word "irrational" (used in the third paragraph of this
text) is strongly associated with the historian E. R. Dodds, whose collection
of seminal lectures appeared in 1950 as the book, The Greeks and the
Irrational. In the forward, Dodds
cautions the reader that the subject of his book, which seems so broad and
deep, is only "an aspect of the mental world of ancient Greece." And he continues, "But an aspect must
not be mistaken for the whole."
Dodds's cautionary description applies to the essay above.
