—GUARDIAN HELEN MORALES AntigonePREFACE Clearly the gil has a ferce sprit... She does not yet know how to submit to bad k Shreumstances —the old men of Thebes on Antigone in Sophocles’ Antigone ‘Some people can let things go. I can’t. — Greta THUNBERG? WHEN I WAS A GIRL I WAS LUCKY ENOUGH TO READ A BOOK called the Tales of the Greek Heroes. I was enthralled. No one does power and rebellion and love and loathing quite like the gods and mortals of ancient mythology. I liked knowing that the eyes on the peacock’s tail are there because when a be- loved giant of Hera, the queen of the gods, had been killed, she plucked out his hundred eyes and placed them, in tribute, om her favorite bird. I still ove the way that myths open up new ways of looking at the world.Preface What mates aeyth 2 my, rater than just a oy that hat m: " ; : ithas been told and retold over the centuries ans hs become 2 The Gree 1 to a culture or community? The C 7 whe have become embedded in, and an infatia pan 7 oar culture. They form the foundations and seaffl ng of the belief that shape ou polities and our le ‘hese cane . also inspirational and liberat imiting and des:ructive but also inspiral . " "the ith of Antigone, as told by the Greek playwright en of the most well known of the Greck myths Sophocles, is one sats feminism and the most meaningful for oe ° She has become an icon: of resistance. OF lutionary politics’ fs OF pitting personal convietion against state Taw. ° "antigo insists on burying her brother Peymces whe i it 3S, EVE! has been killed while feng agin here The nso ruler 7 hh her uncle Creon, who is rul sre ‘ei the burial and will impose tne death vera i \d of thirteen or .ce. Antigone, just a chil oF fees “ands ip to a powerful adult, even when hers se : stand when the citizens of Thebes are too aii 7 on, antigo in the face of Cre- thority, in the ntigone also challenges male aut - ores ence that ‘women are inferior to men and that men on’s insist sand hae should rule over them. She is vulnerable and she breaks the law anyway. 4 intigone was first performed in fa cn "lay itis performed all over the world; since 2016, i ce. Today, has been staged, with a new purpose, in Ferguson, Missouri, , 08 Bh : and in New York City. Antigone in Ferguson was conceived b y ‘Athens in (we think) 442 Preface Bryan Doerries after the killing of cighteen-yearold Michael Brown Jr. by a police officer there in 2014. It presents a re- hearsed reading of an adaptation of Sophocles’s play, followed bya discussion, with community members, police officers, and } activists, about social justice and race.* Why not just write a play about the death of Michael Brown? Why tum to Antigone to explore this tragedy? Part of the answer must be that using myth allows us to explore extreme situations without risking the crassness of drama: tizing the specific events of a young man’s death. ‘This was the reason that the ancient Greeks turned to mythology as the material for their tagedies: when they had staged plays about contemporary events, it had proven too painful for the audience to watch. Greek myths also explore difficult subjects about abuses of power and human weaknesses. Being able to _ plore questions such as what makes good leadership and hhow to resist state fascism allows audiences to reflect on those __issues in relation to particular, local events, _ Related to tl at one remove. is what the novelist Ralph Ellison called enlargement: myths enlarge people and literary characters "when they overlay them with attributes and accomplishments _ from the figures in the ancient tales.* As scholar Patrice Ran- explains, casting his characters as figures from ancient h enabled Ellison to construct his characters “from out- of a limited, contemporary framework.” This gave them Asiblities [that] transcended the limitations that society upon them."* Seeing a character or person through a ‘of dual vision, as himselfand in the role ofa figure fromPreface inyth, gives the reader an enhanced prism through which to understand them. ‘An initiative run by one of my colleagues, gan, isa good illustration of this. The Odyssey Project teaches the myth of the return journey from war of the Greek hero Odysseus to a class of incarcerated youth and undergradu- ates.” The students are asked to explore how episodes from the myth resonate with their own experiences. They find pow- erful the idea that Odysseus makes terrible mistakes that have devastating consequences for his crew but remains a hero and ‘manages to return home, after many years, Perhaps they can be and do something similar if they see themselves as a kind ichael Mor- of Odysseus (or Telemachus or Circe—there are many pos bilities). Using myth to enlarge their lives gives the students a different sense of who they are and what they can achieve. ‘Antigone’s myth does not end well for anyone, but we'll save that problem for the end of this book. For now, I want to dwell on the courage and endurance of Antigone’s charac- ter. She risks everything for a cause that she believes in and refuses to be cowed either by powerful politicians or by what anyone else thinks. The spirit of Antigone lives on in Iesha Ev- ans, who was photographed standing firm in her flimsy sum- mer dress while facing a wall of police officers in riot gear in a Black Lives Matter protest in Baton Rouge. Itives on in Malala ‘Yousafzai, who campaigned for the rights of girls in Pakistan to be educated, even though it was dangerous to break the law of the Taliban (who tried, unsuccessfully, to kill her in 2012). ‘And it lives on in the resolute opposition to climate change Preface shown by Greta Thunberg, who, at sixteen years old, went on strike from school to protest outside the Swedish parliament: once a lone figure with a cardboard sign, now the inspiration for a global movement. ‘The “girl against the world” scenario has a glamorous ap- peal; we like it when the underdog triumphs. Sophocles’s Antigone is frequently taught in high schools in the United States, and whenever I speak about the play in local schools, the students are clearly on the side of Antigone. She is a her- oine, they say, and Creon isa total fascist who deserves every- thing he gets. It is unlikely that the play’ original audience would have been so one-sided in their sympathies. ‘The Greeks would likely have been more critical of Antigone, a girl who spoke and acted out of turn, even as many would have also recog- nized the failings of the king, Creon. A medical text from the time called On the Diseases of Virgins tells us that girls in Antigone’s situation, who were old enough to be married but had not yet taken husbands, were thought to be diseased.* They went mad and had visions of death. In Antigone, Antigone longs for death; she obses- sively imagines her own death and tells us that she weleomes it Much is also made of the fact that she is unmarried, de- spite being old enough to be married, Her name is a clue: it can mean against (anti) procreation (goné). ‘The medical text gives us a new frame through which to understand Antigone’s resolve. Instead of seeing her as a heroine who is determined to do the right thing, even if she risks being put to death, wePreface now see her as showing symptoms of the “disease of young girls,” as dysfunctional, unhinged, mad. Sometimes simply juxtaposing ancient and modern can reveal new and unexpected perspectives. Greta Thunberg’s behavior has also been pathologized: she has been criticized and belittled for having Asperger's syndrome. It has made her, critics say, more open to exploitation by others. But Thunberg, herself has spoken about how having Asperger's has helped with her activism: it is a gift that “makes her see things outside the box.” She has not allowed herself to be defined negatively but has tuned the pathology around into something posi- tive. Perhaps we can also take this approach with Antigone We can understand her madness and dysfunction, as some ancients would have seen it, as giving Antigone a political edge, as enabling her not to fear death, and as fueling her single-mindedness. Through this lens, ancient myths don’t just enlarge human stories; modem figures and events can also invite us tosec the ancient myths in new ways For the ancient Greeks and Romans, the gods were more than just exciting characters. Most worshipped them and took religious rituals very seriously.” But, there is a crucial differ- ence between ancient Greek and Roman religious practice and the main religions practiced today. Unlike our monothe- istic religions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, Greek and Roman religion was polytheistic, Zeus or Jupiter (as the Greeks and Romans called him, respectively) was the most powerful god, and it was sensible not to get on the wrong side of his thunderbolt, but all of the gods demanded worship, and there Preface was no religious text or commandments to follow. (When Antigone appeals to the eternal and unwritten laws, what she means is unclear, which is part of the problem). A couple of key things follow from this, The first is that mythological narratives became a way of thinking through complicated moral dilemmas. ‘This makes them useful for us too; we keep returning to Greek and Roman myths precisely because they avoid the simple “good versus evil” stories, from fairy tales to Disney movies, that are such a strong part of our culture. Second, myths, especially those that were told in epic poetry and drama, were widely known and authoritative. All educated, and many uneducated, Greek and Romans would have known their Homer, We don’t have anything like thi when I asked my class of seven hundred students, the book that was familiar to most of them was not the Bible or the Ko- ran or Shakespeare or Walt Whitman—but Dr. Seuss The cultural authority of epic and tragedy continued through the advent of Christianity as a major religion, Chris- tian texts often rewrote Greek and Roman myths to give them a different message. Greek and Roman mythology, and cla cal antiquity more broadly, have been enormously influential in Western culture and beyond." By classical antiquity [ mean the period when Greek and Roman cultures flourished in the lands that we now call Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia, from the eighth century nce, when the epic poems of Homer were first sung, to the fifth century cE, when what we now call the Middle Ages began. (I'm all too aware of the fast leaps across time and space and how imprecise a phrase Greek wiiPreface and Roman can be.) Intellectual history, by which I mean the major philosophers, novelists, theorists, playwrights, pol- iticians, and other thinkers from antiquity to today, has con- tinually drawn on Greek and Roman myths. ‘That means that for us to enter into conversations— philosophical, historical, artistic, and political —more often than not involves engaging with ideas and arguments from ancient Greece and Rome. ‘The ideological purpose of these conversations has varied widely. Classical antiquity has been used to justify fascism, slavery, white supremacy, and misogyny. It has also played ‘a crucial role in political idealism, inspiring, variously, the Founding Fathers (and influencing foundational statements such as the Declaration of Independence and the US Con- stitution), trades union movements, Marxism, and the gay rights movement. As ancient historian Neville Morley writes of classical’ antiquity, in his book Classics: Why It Matters, “There is always a struggle over its ownership, and who gets to claim and define it” So maybe we're due for a fresh under- standing of how ancient Greck and Roman myths, and their characters, can be claimed and defined by all of us who want to resist the current movement toward greater patriarchal con- trol and who are working to make this a more equal, empa- thetic, and enlightened world. “This book brings together two parts of my life: my profes- sional sefand my role asa mother. Ihave been researching and teaching ancient mythology for over twenty-five years, in uni- versities in England and the United States. Its through teach- ing the myths to my students that I have seen how powerful I | | Preface these tales are and how reading them critically and creatively can be empowering. Telling new stories is, of course, essential, but viewing our worlds through the lens of the old myths is also meaningful. Lam also the mother of a teenage daughter, Athena. She and her friends have been taught about ancient Greece and its myths and culture but without any understanding that what they were learning had much relevance to their lives today, be- yond vague notions of inheriting democracy. This book grew from my attempts to explain to Athena that the things that were preoccupying her and her peer group—girls’ safety, school dress codes, and dieting, as well as dealing with a changing Political climate in which their freedoms were being curtailed and environmental protections reversed —are all underpinned by cultural narratives. One of the planks in this ideological scaffolding is classical mythology. Part of being empowered and fighting back involves understanding these myths and their cultural impact and turning them to our own advantage. In cach of the chapters, the relationship between ancient and modem is different. In some, specific Greek and Roman texts take center stage: Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, Sophocles’s Antigone, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. We will look at how they have been read, and misread, to serve (or resist) progres- sive agendas. The chapter on dieting will argue that the an- cient Greek doctor Hippocrates has been misunderstood and misquoted in modem medical and popular writing on diets: the relationship between ancient and modem here is specific and clear, as the ancient is appropriated by the modern inPreface ways that are especially hurtful to women. This chapter and the one on controlling women also give us some insight into ancient attitudes toward women, beyond what can be gleaned from myth, In the first chapter, and the chapter on school dress codes and the policing of women’s dress by the “women control- Jers” of ancient Greece, the relationship between ancient and modern is looser; itis one of congruence rather than direct influence. Or, to put it another way, direct influence across swathes of time and space is difficult to map. Sometimes it is impossible to trace the precise origins of an idea or behavior to ancient Greece or Rome, but more often than not we have no idea whether something originated there or whether it was passed down to them from another culture or whether indeed ithad many different origins.!* Tracing precise historical gene- alogies is not the point of the book. Recognizing entrenched cultural patterns is In the second half of the book, I turn to consider the very different and striking ways in which the superstar Beyoneé, novelist Ali Smith, and Mexican vigilante killer Diana, the Hunter of Bus Drivers, have reimagined ancient myths as acts of resistance: resistance toward tired and damaging misogynist myths, including racist and transphobic ones. These re-creations of ancient myths ask over and over: Who owns classical antiquity? Who owns culture? The re- sponse: We do. ONE KILLING AMAZONS THIS BOOK STARTS WHERE MISOGYNY ENDS, WITH MEN KILL= ing women. We will come tothe reality of men killing women (and men) shortly, but I want to begin with the fantasy. I want to begin with one of the earliest fantasies of killing women ever recorded: ancient Greek myths about killing Amazons. The Amazons were warrior women from faraway lands and some of the most fearsome adversaries of the heroes of Greek myth.! They were reputed to be “the equals of men” According to one mythological tale, the hero Hercules was sent on a quest to recover the girdle of the Amazon queen Hippolyta (Girdle makes it sound like an ancient vewion of Spanx; war-belt is probably a better description.) He stabs or bludgeons her to death and steals the belt. Some versions of the story describe how Hercules kills Amazon, after Amazon,CODA: ANTIGONE RISING Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a ‘people. But stories can also repair that dignity —CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE, “The Danger of a Single Story” TED Talk Somos muchos. We are many. ~SARA URIBE, Antigona Gonzélez THE COURAGEOUS SPIRIT OF ANTIGONE MAY LIVE ON IN Malala Yousafrai, Olga Misik, and Greta Thunberg and in the many young women who stand up to the misuses of power, but the story of Antigone, as told by Sophocles in his tragic drama, ends in catastrophe, pain, and ruin. Antigone breaks the law and defies her uncle Creon, the king of Thebes, when she buries her brother who wasan enemy of the state. When she will not back down, Creon orders that 145Coda: Antigone Rising she be buried alive in a tomb. (This isa particularly cowardly act: Antigone is left to starve to death, but because Creon has not ordered her immediate death, he hopes to avoid the reli- gious stain that might arise from executing his niece.) Creon has a change of heart after a visit from the blind seer Teiresias who tells him that his actions have been immoral, but it is too Tate: when his guards go to release Antigone, they find that she has hanged herself inside the cave. Haemon, who is Creon’s son and Antigone’s fiancé, kills himself, and his death leads to the suicide of Queen Eurydice, his mother. Creon is left a broken man, but at what cost? As a seript for successful activ- ism, this story leaves quite a bit to be desired. Antigone’s lack of sisterhood is also a problem. At the very beginning of the play, Antigone asks Ismene to join with her in burying their brother, but when Ismene voices objections to Antigone’s plan, Antigone allows for no debate, disagree- ment, or compromise: “You will be my enemy,” she says: When Ismene attempts, later in the play, to share the blame for burying their brother and to be Antigone’s ally, Antigone will have none of it. [tis striking that in Sophocles's play, An- tigone never says we. Toward the beginning of the play, she uses the formula you and I or you and me, and after that, her speech is all about I or me, Her language of exclusion reflects, and reveals, her polities. ‘Antigone’s certainty and single-mindedness are part of her appeal. But certainty also breeds extremism, which, as Soph- ocles cautions, can be destructive. Today, Antigone’s kind of intolerance and self-ighteousness can be seen especially on 46 Coda: Antigone Rising social media, which tends to aggravate and inflame disagree- ‘ments. Feminists are primed to call one another out, to punish transgressions, no matter how minor, to lack perspective, and to ercate a culture of silencing and shame. As Jessa Crispin puts it in her critique of modem feminism: “An environ- ment where we strong-arm dissidence and varied opinion is an environment devoid of possibility and dynamismn.”* “Bum it down” is a catchphrase of keyboard warriors; itis easier to castigate and condemn than to persuade, inspire, and do the hard work needed to bring about positive change. There's a strand of nihilism in Sophocles's play Antigone that we would do well to reject One of the conclusions of this book is that ancient myths (stories) have subversive power precisely because they can be told—and read—in different ways. In the words of novelist Ben Oke, myths “always take wings and soar beyond the place where we can keep them fixed.” This can be due to their inherent ambiguities and their ability to reveal a different perspective if we read them with care (as we've seen in the ‘way myths about sexual trauma, the environment, and gender transitioning in Ovid's Metamorphoses can be read in a new light). It is also due to the creative reimagining of myths by modern artists like Ali Smith and Beyoncé and by activists like Diana, the Hunter of Bus Drivers. These new adaptations change not only the plots of the ancient tales but also what they have to say about women, about race, and about human. relations: in other words, in changing the myths (stories), art- ists subvert the myths (false ideas and beliefs) too. M47Coda: Antigone Rising The problem is that misogynist myths are more strongly culturally entrenched in our societies than myths that sub- vert them. The beliefs that women, especially foreign women, are to be controlled, conquered, and even killed, that some 1 women deserve to be raped and will not be believed if they speak the truth about sexual violence are hardwired into our culture. The diet industry and the use of dress codes to control and punish girls and women and to enforce gender and racial ‘norms are global social phenomena that cause immense dam- age and misery. ‘The paradigms from antiquity that challenge these stories, beliefs, and practices are not as well established or widely implemented. However, the creative adaptations of myth—the stories, videos, images, and novels that present radically different perspectives—are more than individual contestations: they amount to a formidable cultural trend. ‘This was always the case: rewriting myth from different perspectives goes back to antiquity. Before Ali Smith, Spike Lee, Suzanne Collins, Mai Zetterling, and Beyoncé (and Inua Ellams, Madeleine Miller, Pat Barker, Ursula K, Le Guin, Natalie Haynes, and ...) were ‘Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, and a whole host of later mythographers who delighted in recasting the stories told by Homer and in other (now lost) epic poems.> Subver- sive mythmaking is a process—one that involves the past and : the present and all of the versions in between. ‘The Antigone myth is a good example of this. Euripides's play about Antigone, which no longer survives, almost certainly revised Sophocles’ tragedy and allowed Antigone and Haemon 8 Coda: Antigone Rising toget married and havea baby son! Scholars’ educated guesses, ased on later summaries of the play, envisage wildly different endings for Antigone and her family. Perhaps Creon tracked them down, recognized them, and had them killed. Perhaps the hero Hercules intervened, and they all lived happily after, an ending that would have allowed Antigone to rebel against Creon’s authoritarianism and to have a future.® Even more shocking is the likelihood that in Euripides’s version of the myth Haemon helped Antigone to bury her brother. She did not act alone. The possibility of Antigone taking collaborative action is also raised in an exquisite mod- em adaptation of the myth: a book (not exactly poem, play, novel, or newspaper article but containing elements of all these) called Antigona Gonzélez, written by Sara Uribe and translated by John Pluecker.” It contains elements of, and meditates upon, previous Antigones in life, literature, and po- litical theory, as it traces the journey of Antigona Gonzélez, who searches for the body of her brother who has “disap- peared” in Tamaulipas, Mexico, so that she can give him a | proper burial. It gives us a sense of the long and rich tradi- tion of using the Antigone myth to articulate abuses of power. Uribe’s Antigone quotes a Colombian activist who took her name, even as she harks back to Sophocles: No queria ser una Antigona pero me toes. : I didn't want to be an Antigone but it happened to mes 49Coda: Antigone Rising She fights a system, not a despot: Supe que Tamaulipas era Tebas y Creonte este silen- cio amordazéndolo todo. realize Tamaulipas was Thebes / and Creon this silence stifling everything The book draws on a long Latin American tradition that identifies Polynices with the marginalized, the separated, and the lost? It evokes the mothers and fathers whom the US me- dia calls migrants, although the mildness of that word erases their desperation, as they search for the children snatched from them by the country that they hoped would give them sanctuary but took their children instead. ‘A repeated refrain in Antigona Gonzdler quotes Sopho- cles; “Will you join me in taking up the body?" But whereas in Sophocles the character Antigone asks the question to her sister Ismene, in Sara Uribe’s book, Antigone asks the ques- tion to us, the readers. Within this haunted question is a re- minder that how the past influences the present and whether it is used to uphold or subvert brutality depends on us. Unlike in Sophocles’ tragedy, Sara Uribe’s Antigone insists on there being an “us” and an “us” with power. Antigone is rising. Antigones (and Ismenes and Haemons) are rising, Somos muchos. We are many. AUTHOR'S NOTE YOU DON’T NEED TO KNOW THE GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHS before reading this book. But if you want to read them, or re-read them, then Stephen Fry's Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold (Penguin, 2018) and Heroes: Mortals and Monsters: Quests and Adventures (Penguin, 2019) and John Spurling’s Arcadian Nights: The Greek Myths Reimagined (Overlook Press, 2016) are excellent retellings, though, like all retell- ings, they take some delightful liberties. If yon prefer to go back to the ancient versions, then Penguin and Oxford World's Classics have good, accessible translations. There is fascinating material in Anthology of Classical Myth: Primary Sources in Translation, translated and edited by Stephen Trzaskoma, R. Scott Smith, and Stephen Brunet (second edition, Hackett, 2004) ‘The names of the characters in Greek and Roman myth differ (Athena/Minewa), and some can be spelled in a dizzying