| War of the Titans |
| One of the fragmentary remains of the Epic Cycle; the author of The War of the Titans was either Eumelos (Eumelus) of Corinth or Arktinos (Arctinus). |
| There are only eight fragmentary portions of The War of the Titans and they might be summarized as follows: |
| Fragment 1 - The union of Gaia (Earth) and Ouranos (Heaven) resulted in the creation of the three hundred-handed sons and three Cyclopes. |
| Fragment 2 - Ouranos (Heaven) was the son of Aither (Aether) |
| Fragment 3 - Aigaios (Aegaeon) was the son of Gaia (Earth) and Pontos (Sea); he dwelt in the sea and was an ally of the Titans |
| Fragment 4 - A cryptic description of someone’s shield; ‘Upon the shield were dumb fish afloat, with golden faces, swimming and sporting through the heavenly water.’ |
| Fragment 5 - Zeus, the father of gods and men, danced in their midst |
| Fragment 6 - Kronos (Cronos) took the shape of a horse when he mated with Philyra, the daughter of Okeanos (Ocean), and thus Cheiron (Chiron) was born a centaur; Cheiron’s wife was Chariclo |
| Fragment 7 - Theolytus stated that Herakles (Heracles) sailed across the sea in a cauldron but that story was first related in The War of the Titans |
| Fragment 8 - A simple statement that the apples (of the Hesperides) were guarded |
| For the complete translations of the Epic Cycle, I recommend the Loeb Classical Library volume 57, ISBN 0674990633; you can sometimes find this book at the public library or you can order it from the Book Shop on this site. |
| Wasps |
| A comic play by the Athenian poet, Aristophanes, which was produced in 422 BCE and presented at the Lenaea festival where it won second place. |
| Cast of Characters: |
| Xanthias |
| Sosias |
| Philokleon (Philocleon) |
| This is my favorite of Aristophanes’ plays; this play is lighter than his other plays and, although it is biting and direct, does not seem to have the venom and bitterness which characterize some of his other works. |
| The main character of the play is an old man named Philokleon (Philocleon) who is hopelessly addicted to being a judge in court; the judges are chosen from the Athenian citizens and paid three obols per day to pass judgment on civil suits; as an old man, Philokleon simply has nothing better to do so he and his friends spend each day in court. |
| Philokleon’s son, Bdelykleon (Bdelycleon), tried everything to stop his father’s obsessive behavior, including reasoning with him, nagging him, having him bathed and purified, having him initiated as a Korybant, making him sleep in the temple of Asklepios and finally locking him in the house and having the slaves guard every exit. |
| Philokleon makes every comic attempt to leave the house including slinging himself under a donkey just as Odysseus hid under a sheep to escape the Cyclops; when Philokleon’s elderly friends come at dawn prepared for court, they are required to lower Philokleon out a window by a rope; Bdelykleon catches the old men and a debate begins; the old men play the role of the chorus and are deemed the Wasps because of their sting; they are the men who fought at Marathon in 490 BCE and again defeated the Persian army and navy ten years later; the Persians called the men of Attica Wasps because, as the Persians ran for their lives, the Athenians put stings to their backsides. |
| Bdelykleon makes a passionate appeal to the old men and explains that they are not dispensing real justice but are the dupes of the powerful men of Athens; the judges, he explains, are given a pittance for their work and the real money goes into the pockets of the politicians; the play is lively and silly but retains its focus and intensity. |
| Aristophanes’ plays are sometimes difficult to appreciate because he was a very contemporary poet, i.e. he was writing for the Athenian audience of his day; he would use puns, parody regional accents and speak directly to the audience in ways that force modern translators to seek out the contextual meaning rather than the literal meaning of the poet’s words; for that reason, I suggest that if you find a translation that is difficult to enjoy, please don’t blame Aristophanes, simply look for a translation that you can enjoy; you can find this play at the library or you can order it from the Book Shop on this site. |
| Women’s Assembly |
| Ekklesiazusae (Ecclesiazusae); a comic play by Aristophanes produced in 392 BCE. |
| This is one of Aristophanes’ more ribald plays and might not be suitable for younger readers. |
| It seems that the women of the city of Athens have decided to kill the poet Euripides because of the demeaning way in which he portrays women in his plays; the women put Euripides in the same category as the accursed Persians and declare him an enemy of the state; Euripides persuades his father-in-law Mnesilochos (Mnesilochus) to dress like a woman and attend the Women’s Assembly in order to speak out on Euripides’ behalf; at first, Mnesilochos speaks well for Euripides and seems to be generating some sympathy for the doomed poet but an informant arrives and tells the women that a male spy has invaded their assembly; it doesn’t take long for the women to deduce that the only woman to speak out for Euripides is the intruder. |
| At this point the play takes a unique turn; I have to admit that I was more than a little surprised when Mnesilochos snatched up a baby from a woman in the assembly and threatened to kill it unless he was allowed to leave the hall unharmed; I won’t tell you how the situation is resolved but I will say that it’s scenes like this which demonstrate Aristophanes’ true comic genius. |
| After Mnesilochos is taken prisoner and restrained, Euripides enters the scene to save his father-in-law from the wrath of the women; the comic banter between Mnesilochos and Euripides is dialogue taken from Euripides’ tragedies and turned into farcical parodies. |
| Although the play mocks Euripides, there is an element of respect for his work laced throughout the puns and jokes; the net result of reading this play is that I wanted to read more plays by Euripides and Aristophanes. |
| Aristophanes’ plays are sometimes difficult to appreciate because he was a very contemporary poet, i.e. he was writing for the Athenian audience of his day; he would use puns, parody regional accents and speak directly to the audience in ways that force modern translators to seek out the contextual meaning rather than the literal meaning of the poet’s words; for that reason, I suggest that if you find a translation that is difficult to enjoy, please don’t blame Aristophanes, simply look for a translation that you can enjoy; you can find this play at the library or you can order it from the Book Shop on this site. |
| Wooden Horse |
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| The fall of Troy was accomplished by use of the Wooden Horse which is also called the Trojan Horse; the horse was designed by a man named Epeios (Epeius) with the inspiration of the goddess Athene (Athena). |
| After ten years of an unsuccessful siege on the walls of Troy, the Achaean Greeks devised a plan by which they would pretend to abandon the war and retreat back to their homes; the Greeks built a hollow Wooden Horse in which they could hide some of their best warriors; the horse was then left in front of the gates of Troy with the assumption that the Trojans would take it into the city as a trophy. |
| Some of the Trojans thought that the Wooden Horse was a symbol of peace and a tribute to the goddess Athene; others thought that the Wooden Horse was a trick and should be burned where it stood; the Trojan seer Laokoon (Laocoon) tried to warn King Priam that the Wooden Horse was a trick and not a peace offering but Poseidon (lord of the Sea), who was clearly on the side of the Greeks, sent one of his giant sea-serpents to kill Laokoon and one (or both) of his sons; Priam assumed that Laokoon was killed because he was giving false prophecy and ordered the Wooden Horse to be brought inside the walls of the city. |
| The Trojan War was not simply a dispute between nations or a feud over territory; the war was started and perpetuated by the Immortals with the intention of ridding the earth of a good portion of the human population; a beautiful young woman from Sparta was used as the bait to lure a handsome prince of Troy; the love affair between Helen and Alexandros (Paris) was all that was needed to set the mainland Greeks against the Trojans; the Trojans were actually Greeks even though they lived on the coast of Asia Minor but their common heritage did not prevent the war. |
| Zeus decreed that the walls of Troy would eventually be toppled but he was also intent that it would be a slow and bloody process; the construction of the Wooden Horse was the signal that the war was coming to an end; with the Achaean Greeks apparently gone and the Wooden Horse inside the city walls, the Trojans were ecstatic; they believed that they had survived ten years of fierce fighting and that their city would become prosperous again. |
| Helen had been living with the Trojans for ten years and was sympathetic to their survival even though her Spartan husband Menelaos (Menelaus) was in the Greek army fighting to free her from her supposed captivity; Helen knew the Greeks well and suspected a trick when she saw the Wooden Horse; when the horse was brought into the city, Helen walked around it imitating the voices of different men’s wives to see if any of the men she suspected to be hiding in the horse would answer; with one exception, all the men hiding inside the horse remained silent; Odysseus forcefully restrained a man named Antiklos (Anticlus) when he tried to answer Helen’s convincing imitation of his wife. |
| After a day and night of celebration, the Trojans collapsed into a state of exhaustion; the soldiers inside the Wooden Horse emerged from hiding and opened the gates of the city; the entire invading army entered the city, leveled the walls of Troy and killed or enslaved every Trojan citizen. |
| The first mention of the Wooden Horse is in The Odyssey and there are very few details as to the size of the horse or exactly how many men were concealed inside; we are simply told that the best of the Achaean warriors were inside the horse; Menelaos, Odysseus, Diomedes and Antiklos were listed as being inside the horse but the other warriors are not named; however, later authors seem to have had no trouble in filling in the blanks; the number of warriors inside the horse began to vary from thirty to fifty and then seemed to stabilize at forty; also, the names of the men inside the Wooden Horse were finally revealed by authors writing fifteen hundred years after the Trojan War and seven hundred years after Homer. |
| Modern authors have proposed that the Trojan Horse was not a hollow troop carrier in the shape of a horse but instead a battering ram, i.e. a long wooden pole with a horse head on the end; others have speculated that the Trojan Horse was an earthquake brought on by Poseidon who is credited with giving mankind the horse; Poseidon, a.k.a. the Earth Shaker, wanted Troy to fall and he created the horse, therefore the Trojan Horse was an earthquake; the correlation is strained at best; another far reaching explanation of the Trojan Horse is that it was not a wooden structure but simply the Achaean Greeks disguised as a Trojan cavalry unit which gained access to the city by just riding through the gates; the problem with all these explanations is that Homer did not use the term Trojan Horse, he consistently called it a Wooden Horse and said that there were men concealed inside. |
| I mention these alternate explanations because it seems that some of us have not yet learned the lesson so clearly demonstrated by Heinrich Schliemann; Mr. Schliemann (1822-1890 CE) proposed that there had been a real city named Troy in antiquity; he was promptly ridiculed by contemporary scholars who were convinced that Troy was a mythical city in a fictional story; since Homer and other ancient authors spoke of Troy as a real place and Alexander the Great and Julius Cesar both claimed to have visited the ruins of Troy, Heinrich Schliemann reasoned that Troy actually existed and that the ruins could be found by following the clues found in The Iliad and The Odyssey; Mr. Schliemann found Troy and history had to be rewritten; let’s apply the same logic to the Wooden Horse and assume that the Greeks actually built a huge Wooden Horse and that Trojans unwittingly took the horse into their doomed city. |
| The Little Iliad, fragment 1, line 19 |
| Odyssey (Lattimore and Loeb), book 4, lines 271-280; book 8, lines 492-520; book 11, lines 522-532 |
| Odyssey (Fagles), book 4, lines 304-324; book 8, lines 552-576; book 11, lines 596-609 |
| Odyssey (Fitzgerald), book 4, lines 289-311; book 8, lines 526-550; book 11, lines 621-639 |
| Works and Days |
| A poem by Hesiod which consists of 828 lines; assumed to have been written in the seventh century BCE and passed from generation to generation until it became the poem we now possess. |
| In this poem, Hesiod engages in a monologue with his brother Perses on matters that range from the practical day-to-day administration of the family farm, to the spiritual and ethical conduct that Hesiod believed was essential if Perses wanted to lead a productive and worthwhile life; there are priceless pieces of advice and humble bits of wisdom included in this poem; one of my favorite passages urges Perses to be friendly and welcoming to his neighbors because, during times of crisis, your neighbors will rush to your aid at a moment’s notice whereas your relatives will take the time to dress properly before they come (lines 342-345). |
| Works and Days can be found as part of the Richmond Lattimore book, Hesiod, which includes Works and Days, Theogony and The Shield of Herakles, ISBN 0472081616 (paper bound) or 0472439030 (clothbound); for the complete translations of the Epic Cycle I also recommend the Loeb Classical Library volume 57, ISBN 0674990633; you can find these books at most libraries or you can order them from the Book Shop on this site. |
