Breakfast with Pandora

Question: Is Zeus perfect?

It's been a while since I did a pure mythology post. But in honor of all those students these past two months who googled "Odysseus death" and came to BwP, here's a new one that I think would make for a great paper for your college mythology class.

Image from here.

Last week in school a student asked a brilliant question: "isn't Zeus perfect?"

The question is brilliant because it raises (some would say "begs," but that would be a misuse of the term) so many other questions, among them

• What does "perfect" mean?
• Why would Zeus above all other gods be perfect?
• Why would we think that any god could be perfect?
• What do we know about Zeus that makes it seem like he should be perfect?

Some thoughts follow, rather than complete answers.

If anyone knows anything about Zeus, it's that he's the supreme god of Greek mythology. He's the one with the beard, the thunderbolt, the throne. He's the Big Guy Upstairs, the Father of Gods and Men.

Which makes him a lot like the popular vision of the God of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, who, despite generations of sermon messages to the contrary, is still thought of by many as a Very Large Dude with a Very Large Stick.

The modern God in whom many still believe is supposed to be perfect. That is, he knows everything, sees everything, always existed, will never go away, never makes a mistake, always does the right thing. This God's son Jesus is a good example of who God is. For some people today, Jesus hovers about six inches off the ground and is utterly "perfect" but not quite human.

So, perfection in this popular view involves traits that regular humans could never have.

Zeus was never perfect in this way. None of the Greek gods ever were, either.

In fact, though Zeus was supreme, his stature never approached that of the one holy God of Judaism and Christianity. Zeus was powerful, but within a system of many divinities. His brothers Poseidon and Hades were nearly as powerful, but in different spheres. Aphrodite, goddess who was in charge of making people fall in love, worked her magic on Zeus a number of times. It could be argued that the Fates are the most important of all Greek divinities, for they presided over those things that had to happen. Zeus himself could not change Fate.

Zeus is, in fact, a god of justice who himself doesn't always do just things, among them cheating on his wife Hera ("Aphrodite made me do it!"). That's why philosophers sprang up in Greece who wanted to convert Zeus into something more like the God of Judaism and Christianity. In any case, philosophers were not interested in the bearded man on the throne who was the original do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do type of guy.

Being perfect is a tough job. The movie "Bruce Almighty" starring Jim Carrey, and Morgan Freeman as God, demonstrates in a light but effective way what it might mean to have 3,000,000,000 conflicting prayers on your plate at any given moment. Remember the "You've Got Prayers!" scene? Not everyone can win the lottery who prays for it.

So, Zeus is not perfect in our sense of being perfect, which is part of the reason why Greeks of later times looked at Christ and the God of Christianity as a perfect alternative. I don't think we can actually grasp what perfection is, but many of us hope that perfection in a God includes love. 

At Easter, Report to Greco - I

Christos anesti. Alethos anesti.

This morning, those words of St. John Chrysostom are ringing in my ears. In English, "Christ is risen. He is risen indeed."

The words are Greek, which is the language of the New Testament. And they show up in the most famous Greek-oriented movie of the last decade, My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding.

Photo: Wildflowers at Easter, and our spirits take us upwards.

The female lead, Toula (Nia Vardalos), is trying to teach her non-Greek boyfriend, Ian (John Corbett), to say Christos anesti, which is a traditional greeting for Greeks at Easter.

He says, "Cheese straws are nasty."

I've been immersed in things Greek lately, through Report to Greco (thanks, Iulia!), the memoir and reflection of the great Greek author, Nikos Kazantzakis. The name Kazantzakis might ring a bell as the author of a novel that was turned into a controversial movie, The Last Temptation of Christ.

Some conservative Christians didn't like Last Temptation because it depicted Jesus as less than an untemptable superman. It's been a long time since I saw this one, and Hollywood often gets Christianity all mixed up. But since I haven't read the book itself, I reserve judgment on Kazantsakis' original vision.

Report to Greco shows us Kazantsakis as a deeply spiritual, imaginative person with a thirst to understand the world, God, and himself. You won't like this book if you think people should just keep things simple, enjoy life, and above all not worry about the details of Christianity.

I never write in books, but I underlined this sentence, because I think it's extraordinary:

And still later, when my mind grew overbroad and my heart overbold, I began to discern something behind God's face as well-- chaos, a terrifying, uninhabited darkness...Possessed by satanic curiosity I went further and discovered the abyss.

The meaning and implications of this sentence are impossible to summarize in a blog post, but the basic gist is that God is way too big for us to understand, and anyone who tries is liable to go crazy.

Right up my alley, and strangely comforting.

Then there is Kazantsakis' pilgrimage to the Greek Orthodox monastery on the peak of Mt. Sinai. A mind-blowing account for another blog post.

I am not finished with this book yet. It's 512 dense pages, and unlike a lot of books, I hardly skim over a word.

I found Report to Greco at the huge sale that's held annually by the county library one city over. There are a million books at that sale, and they are only rudimentarily sorted. If I had gone looking for Report to Greco, I never would have found it. But because of some invisible grace, I was led to it, sitting on a table chock-a-block to fifty other titles in which I had no interest. Another instance of the Holy Random Empire.

Easter, in the tradition of my church, goes 40 days, and each day is a day for celebration. I wish everyone the spirit of that celebration in their lives, and pray for this broken world that needs that spirit so urgently.

300 ways to kill somebody

One of my fans (actually, my youngest brother) wrote to remind me that 300, like Pan's Labyrinth, would soon be gone and he and all of BwP's readers would be deprived of my opinion on it. "NPR isn't even that late," he scolded. "This is in your wheelhouse."

Well, of course it is. And so I saw it today, though I still kind of wish I hadn't.

300, a dramatic take on the stand of the Spartans against the Persian Empire at Thermopylae (the "Hot Gates") in 480 BC,  is a movie that makes folk like me wonder if time has passed them by. When it first came out my students crowed about it and told me I should go. "Isn't it violent?" I asked. "Yes, but it's like a comic book," they said. "It's so awesome. You should go."

The first reel is rather attractive in its sepia tones and Gladiator-style wheatfields, but then the fighting starts.

It is violent. It is like a comic book (It should be-- it started out as a graphic novel by Batman author Frank Miller). There's this thing they do in the movie-- they spatter rust-red pixelated globs all over the screen when folks are fighting, to indicate that someone's gotten hurt. This is in addition to the beheadings and the dismemberments and the stabbings, which proliferate as the movie goes on, in direct proportion to the moviegoer's increasing level of emotional numbness.

Also, the movie specializes in the beautification of mass corpse montages, none more lovely than the Saint Sebastian-like final overhead shot of King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) and his men pincushioned by the Persian arrows that first blotted out the sun and then blotted out the Spartans' lives.

Yech.

It all makes you want to believe the psychobiological arguments about how, through a freak of evolution, men are very simply oversexed, overaggressive testosterone machines that have competed well for survival.

Also, the disheartening but probably true psychological proposition that human civilization is based on making sure enough human beings die horrifically so that some of us can go on living.

Is 300 authentic? In some ways, yes. There really were 300 Spartans in the narrow pass of Thermopylae who held off the Persians for three days. Also 6,700 other Greeks.

In the larger scheme of things, this battle did not mean much. It was the Athenian navy, at Salamis a little later on, that broke the back of the Persian thrust into Greece. 300 doesn't bother with that little detail.

More interesting to me is the in-your-face Conservative versus Liberal allegory, by which the freedom-loving and democratic Spartans (they were actually an authoritarian nation), who are universally white, European, superior warriors, and British-accented, fight off the various hordes of soft, non-white, Asian and African, variously-accented Persians and vassals, along with their Spanish transvestite queen-- I mean, king-- Xerxes, who does a great imitation of Agador Spartacus from The Bird Cage.

Oh, also on the Persian side, we have a disabled person, Ephialtes, a Spartan who turns against Leonidas when Leonidas reasonably suggests that a hunchback would not be able to fight in a Spartan phalanx. No matter that half the time the Spartans are freelancing like kung-fu masters.

Plus, the Spartans get to kill elephants and rhinos, animals now on the endangered species list.

Why, I kept thinking, couldn't I just sit back, turn off my brain, and be entertained?

Probably because there is no story.

The outcome is never in doubt here. In a doomed subplot, Queen Gorgo, played by Lena Headey, who looks like she's spent a day at the beach and needs a shower, attempts to sway the Spartan council to send reinforcements to help Leonidas, against the wishes of the traitor Theron, who has taken Persian gold and bribed the priests to say that it is religiously incorrect to attack the Persians in August.

She eventually has a triumphant moment, but it makes no difference to Leonidas. There is no Calvary-over-the-hill style rescue here, only Gerard Butler in a Saint Sebastian pose. That the Persians finally are defeated does get mentioned, but even the screenwriters can't shoehorn in a reference to Leonidas' valiant struggle buying the Greeks valuable time. It didn't.

Herodotus, our primary source for the battle, explains that it was possibly a prophecy that led Leonidas to make his stand: at the beginning of the war the prophecy stated that either Sparta would be laid waste or a Spartan king would die. Herodotus presumes that Leonidas ensured the continued existence of his beloved country through his own death.

So that's the opinion of this left-leaning, blood-queasy blogger. But I should not close before noting that our staff on the Greece trip this year, Greeks all, assured me that the Greeks themselves loved 300. So chalk up a point in its favor, and wash your hands. You've got a spot of blood on your pinky.

Never on Sunday: Dionysus in charge

Although the music by Manos Hadjidakis is immediately recognizable even to those who have never seen Never on Sunday (click here for Melina singing in the movie, with thanks to Iulia for the link and MLight for her help with linking music in general), the movie itself, a small classic, had escaped me till last weekend. It was made before I was born but somehow it doesn't get onto the vintage movie channels-- at least not that I've seen (late flash: it will be on Turner Classic Movies at 12 noon on Wednesday, February 28.).

Photo: Greek Ministry of Culture

But now that my school trip to Greece is exactly a month away, it was time to see something like this, and to reflect on how modern Greece is like ancient Greece, but in different ways than one imagines.

I identify very much with the protagonist of the film, Homer Thrace, played by Jules Dassin, who also wrote and directed. Homer is a wide-eyed American and Hellenophile, an "amateur philosopher" on a mission to Greece to find what went wrong with the world after the end of the Golden Age That Was Greece. Aristotle's name is constantly on Homer's lips, and he wonders why so few people live by logic, which was a Greek invention.

Into Homer's logical world comes the defiantly illogical Illya (Melina Mercouri, who won an Oscar for the role, deservedly so), a prostitute who "makes no price" but only sleeps with men she finds interesting. Her home is in the rubble-strewn port town of Piraeus, a few miles down the hill from Athens, and she is popular among all the men for her  joie de vivre, fierce independence, and anger at injustice.

She makes one of the most arresting first entrances in all of film when she strides down a dock in Piraeus among all the working stiffs, strips down to her bra and panties in front of everyone, and dives into the Saronic Gulf, daring the men to come in after her.

The stage is thus set for a clash between Ilya's practice and Homer's theory. He spends most of the film attempting to get her to see that being a prostitute is not a logical life, and through sheer dint of persistence finally persuades her to become his pupil for two weeks, My Fair Lady style, to see what she has been missing.

Who wins? It's not hard to guess. Whereas in My Fair Lady attention is lovingly given to the process of education ("The Rain... in Spain... Falls mainly... on the Plain!"), Dassin gives Homer's lessons only a brief montage; the most conspicuous evidence of the new Ilya is in the possessions-- books, a piano-- he brings into her small apartment.

The education, in fact, is a kind of brief diversion, with the real conflict coming with Ilya's would-be landlord and pimp, Mr. Noface, who charges the prostitutes of Piraeus exorbitant rents for their flops next to the gangplanks of the world's navies. In the most joyful of the scenes, the prostitutes go on strike to lower their rents, and Ilya is able to negotiate half-price for them.

Finally even Homer, in the time-honored tradition of comedy, must be won over to Ilya's way. His ouzo- and-broken-glass fueled dance at the end of the movie brings play back into his life. During that time-- and maybe forever, but probably not-- philosophy is forgotten.

It would be easy to write a student essay on this film arguing that the central conflict is between Apollo and Dionysus, or between the two poles of human behavior, control and excess, or of civilization versus nature (thank you, Friedrich Nietzche).

Homer represents the human desire to have things make sense and follow an orderly pattern, and to minimize disruption.

Ilya, on the other hand, would represent the human propensity to go wild, not to worry about consequences, and to give in to one's lower self.

Similarly, a Hellenophile like Homer might think that the ancient Greeks were an Apolline people of order, while the modern Greeks, having lost their ancient dignity, are crazier and more happy-go-lucky, more Dionysian.

The fact is, however, that Never on Sunday is a perfect example of why the Apollo/Dionysus distinction breaks down for most works of art.

Ilya's passion for justice, shown in her hatred for Noface, betrays an underlying seriousness to her way of life that, ironically, Homer tries to disrupt. And her refusal to sleep with Homer at the end-- though he finally realizes he's wanted to all along-- shows that her life is not a Dionysian free-for-all.

Furthermore, that crazy, happy-go-lucky quality was always there in the ancient Greeks, who loved comedy as much as tragedy. They have always smiled through tears. In the late 5th century, Aristophanes was writing side-splitting comedies for an Athens at war; Dassin's work comes hard on the heels of World War II and the Greek Civil War.

The defiance, independence, and crypto-Apolline quality of comedy is in its refusal to give in to the chaos of a world that has become orderly-- especially an order that is imposed from the outside by exploiters.

Melina Mercouri was a political activist and would be eventually exiled from Greece after a coup d'etat in 1967. Never on Sunday is not an overtly political film, but you can easily see its heart beating for the ideals of justice and love.

Dionysus, in ancient Greece, was as much about order as Apollo. He just showed it in a different way. But that is for another post.

The minotaur in the museum

Last year at this time I was on a plane heading for Athens, Greece, to start the main leg of the 2005 Fulbright-Hays Seminar to Greece and Cyprus. The participants of the group have been emailing each other and reminiscing, experiencing literal nostalgia, which for the ancient Greeks meant a painful yearning for a return. I don't know when I'll get back to Greece, so for now, remembering is the best way to assuage the yearning.

Towards the end of our time in Greece, we got to tour the National Archeological Museum in Athens, an extremely not to be missed thing if you are there. The government of Greece, quite understandably, protects the jobs of its licensed guides by prohibiting anyone unlicensed from conducting tours or explicating the museum exhibits, no matter how qualified said person is.

Our guide was an intelligent young woman who nevertheless got a few things wrong, in my opinion. Everyone in the group laughed uproariously afterwards remembering the difficult time I had holding my tongue while she was speaking.

The photo below reproduces a piece about which I thought our guide was most off-base. It is a silver drinking vessel called a rhyton, in the shape of a bull's head, with gilt horns and a gold rosette in the middle of its forehead. It is from the Bronze Age (pre-classical) Mycenaean Greek civilization and dates from the 16th c. BC, or about 800 years before the spread of Homer's Iliad.

Our guide walked us up to this piece and declared that it was a representation of the Minotaur. She then launched into the story of Pasiphae (Puh-SIFF-uh-ee), daughter of Minos king of Crete. Goaded by a divinity or on her own, she conceived a passion for mating with a bull, instructed Daedalus, the master technology guru, invent a machine by which she could mate with the bull (I don't want to know the details), and became pregnant by the bull.

The resulting monstrous offspring had a bull's head and a human's body. It is called the Minotaur because it is the bull (Latin taur- = bull) of Minos' (Mino-) daughter. It spent its time in the basement of King Minos' palace, in a maze designed (again) by Daedalus, and was fed people until the hero Theseus came and killed it, with the help of princess Ariadne.

I almost had a fit-- though it makes sense to mention the story to a group of people who know little or nothing about ancient Greece. The Minotaur story is well known, and it would give a general audience something familiar to associate with an otherwise unfamiliar object.

The fact is that we have no idea how far back the Minotaur story goes. There is no Greek mythology written down before Homer, and the earliest recognizable pictorial depictions from Greek mythology only go back a hundred or so years before Homer. The writing in Mycenaean times is not narrative; it records almost exclusively lists of stuff in palace storehouses. And the art, though beautiful and containing many pictures of what looks like gods, heroes, and beasts, cannot be conclusively proved to depict anything from the popular Greek stories we know.

The bull was all-important to Mycenaean and especially Minoan (Bronze Age Crete) religion. Bulls were the supreme animal of sacrifice, and depictions of bulls and especially their horns abound in every sacred space. It makes perfect sense to tell a story about a Cretan princess, Pasiphae, being interested in a bull, because the Bronze Age people of Crete were so preoccupied with bulls in their religion.

The bull-man in mythology, however, did not have to be invented from native religion. The Greeks adapted many stories and religious figures from the ancient Near East when assembling their own story culture. The so-called Succession Myth in Hesiod's Theogony is the most famous of these adaptations.

At this time in Bronze Age Turkey, the Hittites had an advanced civilization with bull-men as prominent, established mythological figures.

Hurri and Sherri, a pair of divine twins, the sons of the thunder god Teshub, were known as the "bulls of Teshub" and depicted as bull-headed bipeds who supported their father by holding up the sky. Teshub himself, like his counterpart Zeus, is sometimes depicted as a bull himself.

When stories cross cultures, details change to suit the needs and concerns of the new culture. I would not be surprised if Greeks and Cretans heard stories of these bull-men divinities, didn't want their own divinities to be bulls (all the time at least), but liked the idea of a composite creature. Thus the divinity became a monster-- because what is unusual either is unusual in a wonderful way, a terrible way, or both at the same time.

What about the rosette on the forehead?  Our guide thought it was a sun, but it could be just about anything. Before sacrificing a bull, the Greeks used to throw barleycorns at the animal's forehead, right in the location of the rosette, to make it nod "yes" to being killed. Maybe that rosette is the first "bull's eye."

What Pandora had for breakfast

The other day in my daily websurfing (I get lots of virtual exercise) I came upon an elementary-school curriculum for teaching ancient Greece through the myth of Hercules. Amidst the mass of information offered was this sentence:

"The most common ancient Greek breakfast was a hard bread dipped in grape juice or wine."

And it struck me that even though my blog name is Breakfast with Pandora, and the blog is concerned with food as well as mythology, I had never written anything about breakfast and ancient Greece.

Gumballs: Not just for breakfast anymore.

The writer of this curriculum failed to mention her source for this sentence, but if it is true, then her students and anyone else using these lessons can simulate an actual ancient Greek breakfast using Wheat Thins and Welch's. Or, put more simply, you can get the impression that the ancient Greeks had Snack for breakfast.

Americans have developed a fetish about breakfast-- reflected in the dozens of flaked, toasted, and sugared cereals that fill supermarket shelves and in the neurotic binge-and-purge attitude towards eggs and bacon (bad for you, unless you're on a low-carb diet). There is even a popular website owner called Mr. Breakfast, who will tell you the 411 about his mass media appearances, along with breakfast recipes and other pertinent info. Not to mention the cereal cafes called Cereality, where you can have Wheaties mixed with Cap'n Crunch with Crunchberries 24 hours a day.

Now we have no exact statistics from the ancient world, but sources suggest (try the Oxford Classical Dictionary under "food and drink," "meals," and "cookery") that the ancient Greeks weren't nearly so fussy about food-- or breakfast. Depending on time and place, morning meals weren't even eaten.

The juice-and-cracker curriculum has it right that wine and bread were important to the ancient Greek diet. With olive oil, wine and grains make up the "Mediterranean trio," or staple food for those living from Lebanon to Spain.

But ancient Greeks never ate hard bread if they could help it, dipped in grape juice, wine, or anything else. Their pithoi (the ancient refrigerator) were filled mostly with barley or wheat. They used grains to make a hot porridge, cakes sweetened with honey, or bread. Wheat was preferred for bread, but barley was cheaper and more commonly eaten. Beans, peas and lentils were incorporated into grains for more protein.

The Greeks did not drink nonfermented grape juice-- except for the juice that comes from grapes they might eat from the wine press at harvest time. Nonalcoholic grape juice is an invention of Mr. Welch, for abstainers interested in taking the liquid part of communion but not drinking alcohol. The alcoholic strength of wine was often cut with water for everyday use, but never to the point that there was no kick at all.

As to dipping bread in wine-- who knows? It sounds like someone extrapolated this out of dipping donuts in coffee. Americans love to dip. But for the Greeks, wine was for drinking, whether at breakfast or any other meal. Nowadays at chic Italian restaurants we dip our bread in olive oil instead of buttering it. I don't know if that practice goes back to the ancient Greeks, but they certainly had bread and oil always on the same table, when there was food to eat.

What about bacon and eggs? The Greeks have always loved pork products and ate lots of sausages; I ate pounds of sausage on my Fulbright trip to Greece and Cyprus. In ancient times, however, meat was considered a festival food, because animals were often slaughtered by sacrifice on festival days. Also, most ancient families were too poor to have fresh meat on a regular basis. Goat cheese, pickled fish, and perhaps dried meat provided everyday protein for working folk. A breakfast of bread and anchovies might have been considered an elegant sufficiency.

In Roman times, so says the Oxford Classical Dictionary, a breakfast might be as simple as bread and salt.

I read somewhere that modern farmers in Crete drink a glass of olive oil for breakfast, and that would also make a fine ancient Greek breakfast. It's cheap, has calories, and fills your belly. That's the main point for poor people who work hard on farms.

I congratulate all elementary school teachers who integrate the ancient world into their classrooms. It is a delicate thing to give students authentic material that is also age-appropriate.

But instead of having students dip crackers in grape juice, consider these possibilities:

Bring in a tin of anchovies and have them smell it. This would be an excellent way of understanding how lack of refrigeration determines the foods one eats.

Pearl barley and wheat berries are fun to play with-- count grains, pour them, "sell" them to "customers," grind them in a bowl with wooden dowels. Or the teacher could make a hot cereal at home, microwave it at school, and give each student a dab on a napkin.  Even study the differences between barley and wheat, doing botanical drawings, or what have you.

The activity doesn't have to be difficult, time-consuming, or perfectly done. Anything that shows that the Greeks were different from us will be worthwhile. Who else out there does something with ancient Greek breakfast or meals?

Etwart, The search for his roots - I

Etwart has a good life as the only pygmy Cypriot hippopotamus in the world-famous San Diego Zoo. But every day he wakes up with a hole in his heart.  He wants to know the story of his family and the deeds of his forehippos-- maybe even find some of his relatives. So with his friend junior zookeeper Katterly Meadows he sets out on a journey of discovery.

Read the whole story from I-VI in order.

"How's that bok choy, Etwart?"
Katterly Meadows, Mediterranean Small Mammal Care Summer Intern I, hosed down the sun rocks in the habitat of the San Diego Zoo's star attraction, Etwart the pygmy hippopotamus.
"Urmmf."
"That doesn't sound so good. What's wrong? It's your favorite." The bok choy was a special kind of spicy green grown by Heather's father, an organic farmer just outside La Mesa. That stuff gives him gas, thought Heather. But usually he doesn't start groaning until after he's eaten it.
"Miss Meadows, I am heartsick," said Etwart.
She turned, taking the pressure off the spray gun. The little hippo was lying next to his mound of bok choy, gazing at the reflection of himself in his swimming pool. A tear fell down into his luxuriant bottom lashes, then dropped into the pool, sending tiny circles along the surface of the water.
She sat down next to him and stroked his snout. He loved having his snout stroked, almost as much as having his crinkly ears tickled. This always calmed him down after a long day of being stared at by thousands of zoo visitors.
"I've been doin' a lot of thinking," said Etwart. "Ooh. Mmmhmm. Over the eyes a little. Right there. Urmmm..." His eyelashes waved like fans. "I got no family here in San Diego, and I'm awful lonesome."
"Sure you are," said Katterly. She was planning to major in zoology when she went to college, with a specialty in endangered species. She knew that Etwart was the last of his kind-- as far as anybody knew. But the zoo administration had decided not to tell him.
"I mean-- no offense to you. You're my best friend."
"None taken. I wish we could get some of your family out here," she said. She hoped there were still some pygmy hippos left. But she didn't know. None had been spotted in years.
"This life ain't for ever'body," said Etwart. He always told people he had a Southern accent because he came from South Cyprus. "It's a non-stop paparazzi parade. I never cottoned to the idea of swimming in a glass-bottom pool."
"You do a great job for your fans."
"I know. But what I really want is to go back to the old country, and search out some of my hippo history. I've never known my own kind, Miss Meadows."
"You know you can call me Kat," she said, and patted his snout. His head was about as big as Coachella Valley watermelon, and nearly as smooth-skinned. A very good-looking celebrity hippo indeed. But she hated to see him so down.
"Do you think I could just... hop on a plane and go have a look-see?"
They'd spent many a foggy morning poring over maps of Cyprus. Etwart knew it was an island about three-quarters the size of Connecticut, tucked in the right-hand corner of the Mediterranean sea, like a big pork chop in a shake-and-bake baggie. He knew it had a long history, and some of the people there didn't like each other. An army had come from the nation of Turkey and taken over some of the land, and was still there. But there was no information about current hippo habitat, only that the first pygmy hippopotami had swum to the island from Egypt (100 miles away) over 10,000 years ago. Etwart said they had smelled the wild capers-- a special, good-tasting plant-- from that far off.
"Hop on a plane?" Katterly frowned. "Cyprus is a long way away."
Another tear plopped into Etwart's swimming pool. "Anyways, I ain't got no money to get there."
"Maybe my dad--" Katterly caught the next words before they came tumbling out-- could help us. He was throwing all his money into the business. And what was she thinking? Us? She had a summer job, and responsibilities, and in the Fall she would enter the ninth grade at Luther Burbank World Biosphere Magnet High School. Goodness, she had to study her flora and fauna, or be left behind.
"Kat?"
She and Etwart turned at the same time. It was her boss, Vikram Singh, in his khaki jumpsuit and turban. She scrambled up and wiped her pants, hoping he would not notice the sun rocks had only been half-hosed.
"Kat, this came for you."
It was a letter from the Fullbright Commission on Biological Research.

Dear Miss Meadows,

You have been identified by your eighth-grade science teacher as a student with high potential in the fields of biology and zoology. We would like to encourage you to apply for a grant to do research abroad in any of a number of worthy habitat zones.

This year's list includes...

There were about a dozen different places around the world, including Tasmania and the Galapagos Islands. But Katterly leaped in the air when she read

--Cyprus. Wetlands and riverine areas.

You and an adult companion would spend two weeks in the target zone, doing first-hand research in your topic. All expenses would be paid by the Fullbright Commission...

"What is it?" asked Vikram. "An award?"
"No," said Katterly. "Something better-- much better."

Iokaste: The Novel of the Mother-Wife of Oedipus

Victoria Grossack is co-author with Alice Underwood of the mythological-historical novel, Iokaste, a retelling of the Oedipus tale made famous by Sophocles. Recently an AP review enthused, "This well-written book, about an intelligent, observant and questioning woman to whom big events happen, is riveting." On the authors' website, you can read other notices, just as fine.

Though deserving of publication, this novel languished in a prestigious New York City literary agency for ten months, according to Victoria. The agency began sending Alice and Victoria "rave rejections." Finally  the authors decided to take matters into their own hands and publish Iokaste with the help of Publish America, a large Print on Demand firm (it is their current Book of the Month). Now with the success of the book, Victoria and Alice are hoping for a mainstream sale-- but they already have sold Iokaste in Greece (through Kedros Publishers), where a modern Greek translation is being prepared.

Yesterday Victoria consented to tap out a few words to me using Instant Messenger. For a newcomer to the technology, she did a great job.

BwP: But I'm glad to see you're on IM now. You're in the 21st century, Victoria.
Victoria: Only occasionally. I prefer to think about 13th century BC.

Iokaste tells the story of Oedipus from the point of view of the title character, Oedipus' wife and mother, also known as Jocasta. Victoria had been wanting to write this novel since she was 14, when she realized that there was great potential in Iokaste's untold story:

Victoria: Hardly anyone thinks about Iokaste (Jocasta). But she must have given birth at an early age, had her son taken away from her, ruled Thebes as Queen during her first husband's rule, survived the news of his death, and let herself be put up as the prize for solving the riddle of the Sphinx. And that's only from looking at the most obvious of the myths.
BwP: So there's a tremendous back story that isn't being played out in the play-- or only implied.
Victoria: Yes. And when you start linking together the other myths, lesser known, and the archaeology, you can uncover a lot. I think we discovered a mass murder which has gone unpunished for the past 3000 years - and we know who did it!

I'll let readers take a look at Iokaste to figure out how that mystery plays itself out.

Victoria and Alice have uncovered a little-known truth about Greek Mythology-- only a very small percentage of the stories have survived in literary form. There must have been many other plays and poems we just don't have, because the material is too rich to have been left alone by creative ancient Greeks.

The novel is told with modern psychological motivations, and gods never stride out on stage, according to Victoria, who thinks that it's difficult to avoid portraying divinity in modern entertainment as anything other than "campy." Sophocles' original also avoids the appearance of gods on stage. The presence of the curse of Oedipus is so claustrophobic, even suffocating, that it is quite sufficient for establishing the gods' power.

The authors were also interested in telling a consistent story that made sense to modern readers, untangling the various threads of myth which grew up around the character of Oedipus-- and, on purpose, not letting Sophocles' tragic vision have the last word on the subject.

Iokaste is a part of "The Great Conversation," as Victoria puts it, the continuing interpretation, reviewing and revising of all classic works of literature. But it is also a page-turning read, as all reviews have noted. Check it out.

PS: Victoria also wanted any writers in BwP's readership to benefit from a few links, which I reproduce below.

• An agent's description of the state of the fiction market. This is pessimistic-- and realistic, unfortunately.

• A list of literary agents. There's a good story behind this one, which you will find out if you do a little exploring.

• A good writing website. Victoria has a column there, and they sponsor a critique group - one of the best ways there is to improve your writing.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding for $7.99

At our local drug store, a display has been set up with about three dozen DVDs for sale. I was in the store for something else and noticed a copy of My Big Fat Greek Wedding for $7.99. Sold.

If you are a fan of the movie, don't own it, and find it in your drug store for $7.99, buy it and consider it money well spent-- not only for the movie, which is tons of fun, but especially for the commentary by Nia Vardalos, the lead actress (Toula) and writer of the movie; John Corbett, the lead hunk (Ian); and Joel Zwick, who directed.

Of course they gush on and on. But Nia really gives a full, funny, and touching portrait of what it's like to be from a Greek immigrant family. With my Fulbright experience under my belt, I appreciate this account a whole lot more. I know what it feels like to circle dance, or to be expected to eat a lot, or to hear "opa" (hey-hey!) and "eucharisto" (thanks) in the course of a conversation in English. I even appreciate Michael Constantine's (Gus, the father) dead-on Greek accent, when he can't say the "sh" sound, just like our Greek instructor at NYU during the pre-departure orientation.

Yes, I'm a fan. And a hopeless romantic. For me, the commentary's best moment came during the wedding scene, when Nia was discussing the unconditional love Ian has for Toula: "Sometimes people say 'Is Ian too good to be true?' and I'm like, aren't you tired of the bad portrayals of men in movies? Like, isn't it about time we had this guy that is willing to do anything for the woman?...Why does the man have to be flawed for us to accept that he's an actual man?"

Amen to that, sister.

Photo: cnn.com

The Multivalent Pomegranate

Walter Burkert, my favorite writer on Greek religion, loves to use the word multivalent when talking about religion and the myths that go with it.

From dictionary.com:  Multivalent. adj. 4. Having various meanings or values: subtle, multivalent allegory.

The derivation is Latin,  from multi (many) and valere (to be strong). Myths are multivalent when they comprehend not only various meanings, but meanings which also mutually reinforce one another-- and therefore demonstrate a kind of strength.

I've been working on the Persephone chapter in my Teenagers in Greek Myth ms., and I've been impressed with the multivalence of the pomegranate.

To me the pomegranate is a red softball, often more trouble to eat than it's worth. You have to get past the pale yellow rind, pull out the seeds, suck on them and hope they aren't hard and woody. If you get a good one, the juice will stain your hands and drip down your wrists. Be ready to pucker, as well. It's vividly sweet-sour.

The pomegranate is a trendy ingredient in recipes nowadays. It earns its trendiness in these health-conscious times by being packed with antioxidants, which can also be found in other delicious things such as dark chocolate and tomatoes.

It turns out that, like a lot of healthy things, the pomegranate has been used in traditional medicine for a very long time, from Greece to China. In Greece it's used in weddings. A bride can throw a pomegranate instead of a bouquet, and on the island of Karpathos, near Crete, the groom traditionally breaks open a pomegranate when he and his new bride reach their home.

Hades, the new husband of Persephone, offered her pomegranate seeds in the Underworld. She ate them, and mysteriously became bound to Hades for life. Demeter, the mother of the bride, managed to negotiate this commitment down to one-third of the year (one-half in some versions), but the seeds clearly had power.

Here are some multivalent advantages of the pomegranate, myth-wise:

• It is something you eat, which gives it an automatic power to bind common eaters together; this is known in the Christian faith as communion
• Its shape is womblike, therefore associated with childbirth;
• Many seeds hide inside the "womb," ditto
• The color of the pomegranate resembles blood-- which could have to do with menses, childbirth, violence, secret societies, nutrition, medicine, strength, wine...
• The juice of the pomegranate is staining, like blood. Another way to bind the eaters together: there is evidence on your hands that you ate and therefore are bound
• The taste of the pomegranate is sweet and sour, like childbirth and life itself (think harmolype)

Demeter and Persephone were intimately linked with a secret religious society called the Eleusinian Mysteries, where initiates (apparently) went underground, sacrificed an animal, and were bathed in its blood before rising to the light again. Burkert points to the "bloody" pomegranate eating as a kind of initiation for Persephone, and therefore a model for human initiates.

For intermediate readers just getting used to looking at symbols, I like to lean on the staining part of the meaning, and think of the pomegranate as wedding cake.

When a groom or a bride smears his new spouse's face with wedding cake (instead of just feeding it to him or her), it's a way of saying, "look, s/he's mine, s/he ate with me, and there's the evidence." Pomegranate juice, staining as it is, probably ended up getting Persephone caught "red-handed." Hades chose something that would prove Persephone had indeed eaten in the Underworld, and had made a bond with him.

Here's a previous post on cereal as communion.