Sphinx

There was a surprising amount of laughter at an otherwise fascinating conference at Leeds this week on Classics and Classicists in WWI. Nervousness at the subject matter, perhaps, or at the idea that we’ve decided to make sense of the appalling slaughter by spotting classical allusions in modernist poetry? Or just historical distance, as the events are far enough in the past that we don’t feel we have to empathise with these people or understand their intellectual positions properly but can observe their (by our standards) naivety and idealism with scholarly detachment? Gauging the quality and intent of laughter is of course a wholly subjective matter; it’s probably just my own prejudices that led me to hear the response to Rupert Brooke’s description, say, of travelling to the eastern Mediterranean on a troop ship as an all-expenses-paid cruise to view classical sites, as indulgent and nostalgic laughter, ‘oh those silly but heroic doomed youths’, while the claims of German classicists in 1914 that they were fighting to defend the heritage of Hellenic civilisation were laughed at scornfully.

I’m willing to accept Liz Sawyer’s suggestion in discussion that all the joking, swapping of classical tags and ironic comments along the lines of “once I’ve seen Troy I can die happy” were a way of coping with the actual likelihood of death, and above all a means of writing home to loved ones by talking about the things that could be talked about. I still feel that a couple of days in the company of these people would have driven me up the wall, and statements like ‘The Hellespont has always been the key to history, the Trojan War is an entirely modern war and the Iliad is a textbook of strategy’ – can’t remember the exact reference, but that’s the gist – ought to be utterly terrifying. Why do we apparently find it so easy to identify with gilded Oxbridge youths? Why do Gilbert Murray and others get a free pass for churning out propaganda while German classicists don’t? I can’t help feeling that a less anglophone conference might have had a different dynamic…

The one paper which focused on a German text (Chris Stray talked about exchanges between British and German classicists, and I’d like to think that my paper on readings of Thucydides treated the two traditions even-handedly, and emphasised their similarities) was for me by far the most thought-provoking: Ingrid Sharp, a Leeds Germanist, on the adaptation of The Trojan Women by Franz Werfel, staged in Berlin in 1916. As we all know, not least because that’s how Gilbert Murray interpreted it and promoted his translation in these terms (originally written in response to the Boer War, the play was revived by the Women’s Peace Party in the US in 1914), this is the great anti-war play; how could such a play be put on in the heavily-censored German theatre in 1916? The answer is that nobody – perhaps not even the playwright, though his prologue hints in this direction (but wasn’t performed) and was later revised to make the message clearer – thought that it was an anti-war play. No reviewer denounced it, none of the audience felt that it was inappropriate; it will be fascinating to learn – Dr Sharp is going to be exploring the archives of the Berlin theatre police – whether the censors thought there was any problem, and whether that’s why the prologue wasn’t performed.

Trojan Women works as an anti-war play if we assume that the Greeks are us (Murray’s argument: this was performed just a couple of years after Melos, so how could the original Athenian audience not see themselves as the agents of atrocity? It occurs to me that this takes Thucydides’ presentation of Melos as a key event completely at face value, which could certainly be questioned) or if we assume that the Greeks are men/soldiers in general, including us. If we see the Greeks as the enemy, then it’s a play about the sufferings caused by war that offers a template for female endurance and shows why the enemy need to be defeated. It fits perfectly with the closing section of the Funeral Oration on the expected behaviour of grieving wives and mothers – and with a raft of non-classical expectations and social pressures: don’t devalue your sons’/husbands’ sacrifice, don’t undermine those who are still fighting, don’t unsettle their families, just endure. In these terms, it posits a new form of heroism, the home front version, as equally essential for the war effort.

It’s a salutary reminder of the familiar phrase: meaning is realised at the point of reception. It’s easy enough to keep this in mind with Thucydides, whose text has been so variously interpreted by different people; not just equally popular with Germans and Allies in WWI, but understood both as a call to arms and as a devastating indictment of war. It’s a bit more of a shock to realise just how far we’ve tended to take it for granted that Trojan Women does have a single, inherent message, and that every staging can only ever be an anti-war protest. I suppose someone might still try to recuperate this by claiming that it is an ‘appropriation’, implying illegitimacy and the distortion of the ‘true’ meaning of the play for immediate, instrumental ends, but that’s unlikely to get anywhere. Perhaps it is the tradition of reception itself that has offered an alibi for such an assumption; of course we’re not naive enough to believe that Euripides’ text can have only one possible meaning – but because (in the anglophone tradition) it has only ever been presented as an anti-war play (at least in the modern era), we can legitimately talk about it as if it does. Werfel’s play, simply by virtue of its production at that specific time and place, throws Murray’s confident assertions into question; and, to judge from the passages quoted by Ingrid Sharp, it was also a much better, more dramatic and effective adaptation…