Although Aeschylus' Oresteia moves toward resolution on many fronts, there are significant counterpoints to these positive progressions. Human stature and initiative decline over the course of the trilogy; the "hero"of the final play is largely passive, with speech and action increasingly the province of the gods; Orestes' "initiation" in Eumenides remains incomplete; and the trilogy ends with not just "uppity" women put in their place but the capacity for human greatness itself reduced. These and other contrapuntal undercurrents complicate and enrich (...) our response to the many resolutions that do occur in the final play of the trilogy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.3 (2003) 473-476 [Access article in PDF] Metamorphoses and Metamorphosis:A Brief Response David H. Porter Like Joseph Farrell, I found much to admire in Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses, 1 but I nonetheless left the theater disappointed. Given all that the play—and this production—had to offer, what was it that I looked for but did not find? Excerpts from the foreword to Cesare Pavese's Dialogues with Leucò (...) suggest an answer: What is more acutely disturbing than to see familiar stories troubled into new life?... The surest, and the quickest, way for us to arouse the sense of wonder is to stare, unafraid, at a single object. Suddenly—miraculously—it will look like something we have never seen before. 2For me, what Pavese describes did not happen in Metamorphoses: I found the play an imaginative retelling of Ovid, but I'd been hoping for a true metamorphosis. In terms of the play's most famous feature, the pool of water that serves as a central stage, I felt most of the time that figures I knew from Ovid were playing out their expected roles around and in this pool. My hope had been that this brilliant theatrical innovation might mirror a play in which Ovid's tales themselves take on liquid freedom and fluidity, plunging, as it were, into this central metaphor to emerge changed, unexpected, reborn.The distinction I draw is one I've found useful both in assessing modern versions of ancient myth for myself and in teaching such works. 3 Readers will undoubtedly vary widely as to their favorites among the growing list of such versions, but I expect most would agree that a handful, including perhaps Joyce's Ulysses, Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, [End Page 473] Strauss's Elektra, Yeat's "Leda and the Swan," and Picasso's "Guernica," fall into a special category: different as they are in genre, style, and approach, all strike us as works of artists who have so inhabited a myth, so made it part of themselves—and themselves part of it—that what emerges is totally their own, totally transformed: a re-creation. With each we feel that never before have we experienced the myth this way, and that never again will the myth be quite the same for us—precisely what a New York Times reviewer wrote about a version of Medea that was playing at the Classical Theater of Harlem in April 2002: "I suspect that no matter how many versions I see in the future, my perception of them all will be affected by the revelations here." 4Again, this is the sort of reaction that Metamorphoses, for all its virtues, did not elicit in me, and I would extend this exclusion to most other modern reworkings of ancient myth—among them Pavese's own Dialogues with Leucò, which, despite the penetrating insights of his foreword, strike me the same way—as charming, distinctive retellings, not revelations. The issue, I think, has to do with the depth and degree of an artist's immersion in a myth, something that goes well beyond the superficial test of how far the artist diverges from "the original." Eliot's and O'Neill's myth-based plays, for instance, or a novel like Updike's The Centaur, make radical changes in the names and settings of the ancient myths, but in contrast to Joyce's Ulysses, the changes feel artificial, incompletely realized—transpositions rather than transformations. In contrast, Odilon Redon's painting of Polyphemus as a mountainous crag from which a huge voyeuristic eye peers out springs directly from an image in the Odyssey—and yet has a nightmare quality that is indeed "like something we have never seen before." 5A musical analogy may be useful. Listeners reported that when Franz Liszt played Beethoven, he gave the impression at each performance [End Page 474] that he was creating the music anew. 6 And Edward Steuermann, Arnold Schoenberg's long-time colleague, once wrote, "Is not music, the great music, so much alive because it was... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Provoking a ConversationDavid H. PorterLee T. Pearcy's The Grammar of Our Civility: Classical Education in America (Baylor University Press, Waco, Tex. 2005) is a book every classicist should read. Pearcy's focus is on the state of classics in our country today: where we are, how we got there, where we need to go. His book is wide-ranging, tightly argued, and carefully researched. Pearcy's assessment of the present state of (...) classics in America strikes me as overly bleak, but his analysis deserves our close attention. Chapters 1 and 2, which trace the history of classical studies in Europe and America since the Renaissance, are filled with valuable information and insights; chapter 3 dissects four interlinked arguments that, to Pearcy's thinking, explain the parlous state of classics today—and threaten its future survival; and chapter 4 offers thoughtful suggestions as to how classicists might respond to these challenges. I doubt that most readers will agree with all of Pearcy's analysis—I certainly do not—but I found his book consistently stimulating. He writes that his purpose is to provoke a conversation, not to solve a problem (118); it is a conversation that will benefit us all, and this book is a welcome and timely catalyst.Pearcy's starting point, and the theme to which he repeatedly returns, is what he identifies as an essential difference between classical studies in Europe (including Great Britain) and classical studies in America. To quote from Pearcy's account of Vittorino da Feltre, whom he sees as an architect of what we now call "liberal education," classical education was designed above all "to take those who would... rule and those who might be admitted to the governing class and to form their minds and souls in such a way that they would be the best rulers (8)... "Renaissance classical education... [was] designed to educate members of the governing class by exposing them to the best patterns of conduct, modes of thinking, and products of culture..." (9). In Europe this form of education made sense in that its presupposition of a governing class matched the social and political realities of the countries in question. In America, by contrast, the advent of democracy undermined the central assumptions of such education and threatened its relevance to our society: "The necessary openness of thought in a democracy has a consequence that is fatal to [End Page 595] the paradigm of classical liberal arts education. In a democratic society, the freedom and theoretical equality of all citizens make it necessary to avoid privileging any single set of beliefs or ideas" (23).Pearcy's hypothesis is thought-provoking, but it strikes me as overly neat. A quick glance at two individuals, one English, the other American, offers some corroboration and also raises some intriguing questions. Leonard Woolf majored in classics at St. Paul's School and Cambridge, and, though his origins were not "aristocratic," upon graduation he entered the ranks of the governing class as a civil servant in Ceylon. The progression matches Pearcy's model, and Woolf even comments on it in terms similar to those Pearcy uses: "The male members of the British aristocracy of intellect went automatically to the best public schools, to Oxford and Cambridge, and then into all the most powerful and respectable professions."1 By contrast, S. S. McClure, the American publisher, migrated from Ireland to the States at age nine as a virtual pauper, spent eight years putting himself through Knox College, and chose to major in classics for reasons similar to those Pearcy identifies as the basis for classical education: "During the years that he reads and studies Greek a boy gets certain standards that he uses all the rest of his life, long after he has forgotten grammar and vocabulary."2 Unlike Woolf, however, McClure found to his dismay that though he had graduated third in a class of thirty, his classical education did not open doors to a professional career: "I talked with other boys, and found that most of them had arranged for the immediate future. One classmate was going into his father's law office; another was going to enter his uncle's... (shrink)