On May 4th, the “Theater & the Arts of Healing” students, plus Jaxon who wanted to join us, walked with Nancy and me through pauses in Athens’ mad traffic to the Theater of Dionysos and other sites at the base of the Acropolis. The proximity of theaters and healing centers in several ancient places—including Corinth, Epidauros, and Amphiareion, as well as here—first suggested to me the major theme of this course, and today’s walk helped us to explore that theme on the ground. Founded in 420-19 B.C.E. in response to the plague that ravaged Athens during the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian Asklepion was built above and immediately adjacent to the Theater of Dionysos on the south-facing slope of the Acropolis. Under gradual reconstruction, its ruins are not open to visitors, but the students viewed them from above on a plenary excursion a month ago. Today marked a special opportunity for our class to speculate on ways in which the cult of Asklepios, treating patients by a process of dream therapy, connected to the dream-work of the Great Dionysia: the dramas staged annually for the social health of the body politic.
One such drama was Aescylus’ Eumenides, which we had just read and which framed our other focus. For the play concludes with a solemn procession as the women of Athens escort the Furies—now renamed the “Kindly Ones,” to their cave beneath the Areopagos, the “rock hill of Ares” where Athena convened the trial of Orestes, who is hounded by the Furies for having slain his mother Clytemnestra in the prequel, Choephori, for her having, in its prequel Agamemnon, slain her husband / his father in the bath just home from Troy, an act of matriarchal vengeance for Agamenon’s having sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia so that the fleet could sail to Troy (the Oresteia delivers a long back-story!)—as the women of Athens, I say, and the members of the audience join a torch-lit procession along the lower slopes of the Acropolis to the Furies’ new home. There, having threatened Athens with blight and plague for blocking their vengeance on Orestes (his turn on vendetta’s wheel), instead they will bless the land and its people forever: so, at least, Athena prophesies. One wonders about that these days, with the implosion of credit, the EU’s begrudging bailout, and national strikes over the forthcoming austerity measures in Greece.
We had already followed Orestes into Athens from Delphi, site of a recent group excursion (see below). Orestes takes initial sanctuary from the Furies in Delphi, and Apollo refers him to Athena and a court of law in Athens. Today, as best we could—impeded by the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, built c. 160 C.E.—a “Roman amphitheatre, a trellis-work of heavy brown stone arches one upon another,” Robert Byron described it (Europe in the Looking Glass, 1926)—which structure compelled us to climb high up the slope and down again, we followed the footsteps of the play’s concluding procession. This was a rare opportunity to ground a great piece of literature and theater in the terrain for which it was composed.
The orchestra space and the stage fragments of the Theater of Dionysos are roped off, so we could not perform there. Instead we sat on the weathered marble bleachers and read the play’s finale aloud, joining our voices in the chorus, sounding in a modern tongue the words Aeschylus composed for this place long ago. (Our thanks the late Robert Fagles, a great translator.) Then we climbed up above the theater, paused in the shade at the Asklepion to discuss it, and made our across to the Areopagos. We climbed it, discussed the Athenian court that presided here and the mythic defeat of the Amazons here, and enjoyed the view of the Propolyaia, the ancient Agora, the Hill of the Muses, and the horizon of modern Athens.
Then we descended towards the cave where ancient Athenians imagined the Furies to have returned to the earth to empower their city. Alas, no such deep cavity is intact today. A fig tree sprouts from within a wide gap in the rock. Further along the slope, silt and a cement wall occlude much of the base. Among the many ruins that Athens frames for one’s consumption—ancient building projects excavated, reassembled—the Cave of the Furies rests neglected. The slope of the hill is set off by a shabby metal fence in the weeds. Above that perimeter, however, curving into the outcrop of the north face are deep declivities, dark hollows in the rock. This must be the place.
No comments:
Post a Comment