Perseus and Medusa Apologia

Well originally I didn't have much of a reason for choosing Perseus and Medusa and my story to focus on from Ovid's Metamorphoses. In fact, I originally searched for a picture of a different story. After I couldn't find any decent representations of my original story, I decided to go with something a little more well known. Immediately I thought of the early 1980's movie Clash of the Titans and remembered how cool I thought it was when I watched it as a kid.

The story of Perseus and Medusa from Ovid's Metamorphoses is a little more than Perseus beheading Medusa and using that head to turn people to stone. It also contains a mini-tragedy of how Medusa came to become what she did. She was once a woman of great beauty, whose hair, in particular, was more beautiful than one can imagine. Her beauty was so great that she was highly contended for by many jealous suitors. This led her to being kidnapped and raped by the God of the sea. Out of jealousy Zeus' daughter (Aprodite maybe??) turned her hair into snakes and cursed her gaze.

It's sometimes a little disturbing to see how vicious the mythology of ancient culture's sometimes is. It's hard to imagine that Medusa was deserved to be raped. It's even harder to imagine her being punished with a curse because of this rape. However, it is an example of how bad things still sometimes happen to good people, and stories such as this perhaps help serve as an example of this to the member's of the society it arose from.

An Image of Perseus and Medusa

http://www.puppetcraft.co.uk/images/perseus%20and%20Medusa.jpg

Here is a link to an interesting depiction of Perseus and Medusa...puppet style!

The Bacchae

The Bacchae ended up being a rather disturbing tale. It seemed that at first Dionysus was attempting to change the minds of the family who denied him but it slowly became more and more obvious what Dionysus' intentions were by the end. Agave's ignorance of what she had done was one of the more disturbing things that I have seen in any literature.

Once again, everyone who does not listen to Tiresias was punished. You would think that people would eventually listen to everything he had to say. Cadmus' punishment was the hardest to accept. He, like Tiresias, was involved with the celebration of Dionysus. However, it seems that Tiresias was attending the rituals because he truly believed (well since it's Tiresias, he truly knew) that Dionysus was a god. It seems that Cadmus was motivated by other things and that he may not have necessarily believed that Dionysus was a god, nevertheless, having someone who is believed to be a god as part of the family would be advantageous.

I must say that I personally felt sorry for the characters who were punished, Pentheus in particular. There are probably several reasons why he was punished, including pride and ignorance, but to me the main thing he was punished for was having doubts about the gods. I feel it's pretty safe to assume that most people today have probably had spiritual doubts. Facing these sort of consequences for the doubts that everyone seems to have is a pretty scary thought. What's more is that I think if the tables had been turned around, and Dionysus was not actually a god but was claiming to be one and Pentheus had worshipped him, he probably would have been punished by Zeus and/or the other gods. It appears that Pentheus and the entire family were doomed no matter what, further reinforcing the idea that forms the foundation of tragedy - that the best thing in life for these people would to have never been born.

Encomium of Helen

I also just wanted to post a link to a speech by Gorgias called the Encomium of Helen for all of those Illiad fanatics out there. It is basically just a famous speech written by Gorgias in defense of Helen, concluding that the Trojan War was not her fault as it was often believed in Ancient Greece.


http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/gorgias/helendonovan.htm

Lysistrata and China

Well, I just finished Lysistrata. I find it interesting that the subject of sex (or withholding of sex) which is humorously explored in Aristophanes' play related to an article I read on MSN.com just the other week. The article was about the future of China. It made the claim that China is soon to be on the verge of a crisis due to the lack of female population. As most of you are probably aware, China has a strict rule of only allowing one child per couple in an attempt to control the massive population. Many Chinese couples prefer to have a male child (to preserve their name maybe??) and have an abortion of their child is a female. Apparently, as this article argued, in the future this will cause them a major problem as the male population will become very frustrated and unproductive due to the the lack of females. So after finishing Lysistra I immediately made the connection between this play and the effects that the lack of sex can have on society.