The Bad Boy of Athens: Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones. Daniel Mendelsohn

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Preface

      In the autumn of 1990, when I was thirty years old and halfway through my doctoral thesis on Greek tragedy, I started submitting book and film reviews to various magazines and newspapers, had a few accepted, and within a year had decided to leave academia and try my hand at being a full-time writer.

      On hearing of my plans, my father, a taciturn mathematician who, I knew, had abandoned his own PhD thesis many years earlier, urged me with uncommon heat to finish my degree. ‘Just in case the writing thing doesn’t work out!’ he grumbled. Mostly to placate him and my mother – I’d already stretched my parents’ patience, after all, to say nothing of their resources, by studying Greek as an undergraduate and then pursuing the graduate degree – I said yes. I finished the thesis (about the role of women in two obscure and rather lumpy plays by Euripides) in 1994, took my degree, and within a week of the graduation ceremony I’d moved to a one-room apartment in New York City and started freelancing full-time.

This bit of autobiography is meant to explain the contents and, to some extent, the title of the present collection of essays that I’ve published over the past two decades. When I was first settling into my new life, I was eager to leave my academic past behind and write about genres that I’d been passionate about since my teens (opera, film, theatre, music videos, and television) and subjects that exercised a particular fascination for me (not only the ancient past but family history; sexuality, too). This I began to do, as a perusal of the Table of Contents here will show. But fairly early on in my freelancing career, I found myself being asked by editors who knew I’d done a degree in Classics to review, say, a new translation of the Iliad, or a big-budget TV adaptation of the Odyssey, or a modern-dress production of Medea. I ended up finding real pleasure in these assignments, largely because they allowed me to write about the classics in a way that was, finally, congenial to me. My graduate-school years had coincided with a period in academic scholarship remembered today for its risibly dense jargon and rebarbative theoretical prose; writing for the mainstream press about the ancient cultures I’d studied allowed me to think and talk about the Greeks and Romans in a way that for me was more natural, more conversational – more as a teacher, that is, putting my training in the service of getting readers to love and appreciate the works and authors that I myself loved and appreciated. Euripides, for instance, to whom the title of this collection refers: formally experimental, darkly pessimistic in his view of both men and gods, whose existence he repeatedly questions, happy to poke fun at august predecessors such as Aeschylus, he really was the ‘bad boy’ of Athenian letters; in my essay on Fiona Shaw’s performance in his Medea, I saw no reason not to call him just that.

The desire to present the ancient Greeks and Romans and their culture afresh to interested readers – and, as often as not in these essays, to ponder what our interpretations and adaptations of them say about us – informs many of the pieces in this collection. A new translation of Sappho, for instance, provided an occasion to think about why that poet and her intense, eroticized subjectivity means so much to us today – although what she means to us may be quite different from what she meant to the Greeks; Oliver Stone’s blockbuster biopic Alexander, for its part, was a useful vehicle for thinking about why a mania for historical ‘accuracy’ doesn’t always make for good cinema. So, too, with my reconsiderations of Euripides’ vengeful Medea, whose modernity may reside elsewhere than many modern interpreters imagine; or of Virgil’s Aeneid, which may be unexpectedly contemporary in ways that have little to do with its much commented-on celebration of empire.

      But most of the essays here are not about the classics per se, although they inevitably, and I hope interestingly, betray my attachment to the cultures I studied long ago. Hence a review of a pair of recent movies about artificial intelligence, Ex Machina and Her, begins – necessarily, as I see it – with a consideration of the robots that appear in Homer’s epics and what they imply about how we think about the relationship between automation and humanity. And an essay written for the centenary of the Titanic disaster sees, in its enduring fascination for popular culture, ghosts of the most ancient of myths: about hybris and nemesis, about greedy potentates and virgin sacrifice, about an irresistible beauty that the Greeks understood well – the beauty of the great brought low.

Still other pieces here reflect other, more figuratively ‘Greek’ interests of mine. There is a series of review-essays on plays and movies that feature powerful female leads (on Tennessee Williams, and on Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours, about Virginia Woolf, and the movie based on it). I see now that all of these are haunted by my long-ago dissertation on ‘brides of death’ in Euripides’ dramas, and the questions this motif raised about the ways in which male writers represent extremes of female suffering. Another series of essays focuses on works by or about gay authors: from Noël Coward, a great favourite of mine, to the most recent film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s greatest play, to Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, a drama about A. E. Housman that pointedly contrasts that ‘dry as dust’ classicist-poet with Wilde.

      Finally – and unsurprisingly, given that I am also a memoirist – there is a sequence of pieces that ponder the way in which writers’ personal lives intersect with their literary work. Susan Sontag’s diaries, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s elaborately self-mythologizing travel narratives, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s heavily autobiographical My Struggle