Seoul Hero

Lately, I’ve been reading and re-reading Euripides’ Ion, and have found it absolutely fascinating. The story concerns a boy, Ion, who is born to a woman, named Creusa, who has been raped by Apollo. Apollo is embarassed, and orders Creusa to keep the pregnancy a secret. Terrified of her mother’s reaction, Creusa abandons her baby, along with two symbols of protection, in the cave she bore him in. Unbeknownst to her, Hermes, at Apollo’s “polite request, as one god to another,” has rescued the baby, and deposited him at the entrance of the shrine of Apollo at Delphi, as must have been done quite commonly in ancient times. Ion has grown up as a temple servant, and is now on the cusp of manhood. The story begins at that point, along with the modern reader’s questions.

The modern reader might well wonder why Apollo, the god of the sun, should also be associated with music, and should furthermore have an underground oracle. A sun-god travels in the sky, and so, presumably, sees all things. It makes sense to pray to a sun-god for justice, for knowledge. But how does a sun-god acquire an underground oracle? The idea of a dying and rising god, very topical at this time of year, may help us.

In Apollo’s case, however, I feel there is another explanation. According to the glossary at the end of my Penguin volume, Apollo killed a huge snake, “Python,” “who had possessed the shrine [at Delphi] before him. Hence Apollo bore the title ‘Pythian.’ ” Also, the priestess of Apollo who uttered the oracles at the Dephic shrine was known as “Pythia.” I don’t have access to any scholarship on the history of Greek religion at the moment, but my guess is that the divine encounter mirrored a human one, in which Apollo worshipers overcame an older religious order at Delphi.

Interestingly enough, according to the notes in the edition I’m reading, snakes were used in Athenian worship. They also appear in the play itself as apotropaic symbols guarding baby Ion. (By the way, writing on world mythology, Joseph Campbell has the snake being associated with the moon, since both shed their skin and renew themselves. I don’t think there’s a connection to this play, however.) Snakes have a very earthy sort of presence, as is appropriate to the Athenians, who believed that they were desended from Erichthonius, a man “born of earth.” It’s always fascinating to see what stories people create to explain their origin. The myth of Erichthonius traces his origins to the lustful pursuit of Athena by Hephaestus, who ended up fertilizing the ground instead. From the impregnated ground Erichthonius emerged, the father of the Athenians.

Interestingly, contrary to what might be expected, the name Python did not appear in (the English translation of) this text.

I noticed quite a few names for Apollo. The most frequent were “Phoebus” and “Loxias.” The former means “bright” or “pure.” The latter might be connected etymologically with “crooked,” owing to the ambiguity of the oracular utterances, or with the idea of the “ecliptic,” a “circle representing the apparent annual path of the sun.” The name “Apollo” itself was used rather sparingly. Interestingly, “son of Leto” designates Apollo, while “son of Zeus” designates Heracles. Had I a nice computerized corpus of the Greek text (I may try to construct a rudimentary one in transliteration, using either AntConc or TextStat), I would try to remember my Greek, and perform searches on the titles and names of the deities to see if I could conclude anything. So far, I have only been able to note that “palace of” or “temple of” occurs regularly with “Phoebus,” but not with “Loxias.” What does occur often enough with that name is the phrase “the oracle of.” This would seem to support the interpretation of “Loxias” as “crooked.” Of course, statistical counts like this based on an English translation are bound to be problematic.

As is usual with Euripides, there is a complex set of interactions between gods and men, with the gods often coming off looking morally worse than the human players. Since I wrote about this at length in my posts on Heracles and Iphigenia, I won’t address that topic here, apart from the final words of the Chorus:

“Apollo, child of Zeus and Leto, farewell! The man whose house is troubled by misfortune should revere the gods and not lose heart; for at the end the good shall get their just reward, while the wicked, as their nature directs, shall never know happiness.”

This is identical in thought and very similar in words to both Psalm 1 and the postscript to Ecclesiastes. In both cases, those books are “wisdom” books that have many passages that are antithetical to the conclusions of one of the two conventional strands of near Eastern wisdom literature: namely, the good prosper and the bad wither. In Ecclesiastes, the orthodox, reassuring postcript is almost certainly a late addition, and in any case is not the logical conclusion of the book. As the book of Psalms, the book of Ecclesiastes, and this play now stand, they all contain conflicting ideas about divine and human life and morality. I submit that that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because it reflects the complexity and the wonder of the universe itself.

Some other thoughts: points of comparison with the Bible occur fairly frequently. Some examples:

1. Somewhere in the New Testament, St. Paul has this really beautiful turn of phrase concerning God or Jesus: “through whom we live and move and have our being.” I found something very similar in Ion: “I will serve my master Phoebus and never cease to worship the one through whom I live” (approx. line 182).

2. Paul also writes “and you, who were dead in your tresspasses and sins, he has made alive together with Christ.” This is strikingly similar to the language used in the recognition scene of Ion and his estranged mother, Creusa. Creusa has been told that Ion is the bastard son of her husband, so she tries to have him murdered in order to protect her position within the royal household of Athens. In revenge, Ion is on the verge of killing her at the altar, when the recognition scene occurs. (Another prolonged recognition scene occurs in Iphigenia among the Taurians.) Ion and his mother are reconciled, however, and Ion says to the woman who had discarded him as a baby in a cave, “dearest mother, here you see me in your arms, your son who was dead and yet was alive.” In both cases, what is being talked about is not literal death, but “reckoning” or “counting among” the dead and/or the living.

3. Speaking of killing at the altar, educated readers will know how it was customary in the ancient world for criminals and suspected criminals to take refuge at the altar. In some cases, they are dragged away by force, as was threatened against the family of Heracles in the Euripidean play of that name, and as happened to Joab in the Bible.

4. Catholic and Orthodox veneration of Mary as the mother of Jesus, and the person to turn to in order to present requests to Jesus, (who will then present them to the Father–a thoroughly polytheistic system–not that there’s anything wrong with that!), is mirrored in the prayer of Creusa to Leto: “O blessed Lady, mother of Phoebus.” This is noteworthy, because Leto wasn’t ordinarily the sort of being to whom one would direct prayers. What makes this prayer special, and logically directed, is that both Leto and Creusa were raped by gods: Leto by Zeus, and Creusa by Leto’s son Apollo. Talk about patterns of violence in the family.

Points 1 and 2 serve to underscore a point I would like to make about the study of backgrounds for the New Testament. In light of the Judaism observed in the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran, scholarship is increasingly focussing on the Jewish origins of much of Jesus’ and Paul’s teaching. While this is not in itself bad, I think that the Hellenistic background of the New Testament has been comparatively ignored in recent years, which is most unfortunate. If there’s one thing the world needs more of these days, it is the tolerant, humanistic, and rational approach to life of the ancient Greeks. Happy Easter.

If there’s one thing more I may add as a reflection on the date of the lunar calendar, it is this: the biblical Absalom understood better than most people today that the only real way to achieve immortality was through progeny. I believe that when I die, I shall continue to be dead. My son, who will be born next month, will outlive me, I hope, carrying a piece of me and Chae Young into the future. Quite apart from his value as a person in his own right, a person whom I can’t wait to get to know, I feel a bit of pleasure knowing that I have fathered another life, and that something from me will continue to exist when I am gone. I am also very grateful to the country I now live in for giving me good opportunities, grateful to my wife, for loving me and carrying our child, and to my parents for loving and supporting me–and doing a much better job of it than either Apollo or Creusa! My immortality, such as it will be, and the resurrection to the new life I now experience are intimately connected with my place in my family, both the older and the younger generations. I am thankful.

Easter Sunday, 2006.