David R. Slavitt, translator
The Theban Plays of Sophocles.
Yale University Press, 237 pages, $28
The West inherited Greek literature, philosophy, art, and elements of ancient political culture, yet Greece remains, in some respects, a foreign world. Those simple, white classical statues were adorned and painted in vivid colors. The hive-society of Sparta or an Athens drenched in what seems like obscene imagery were not what the Victorians had in mind in terms of classical values. Once one discovers that statues called herms sprouted enormous phalluses (which were allegedly desecrated by Socrates’s pupil Alcibiades) and were dotted across Athens, for example, one never again quite sees classical Greece in the same way. Thus, too, in their theater: an all-male cast, wearing masks, performing plays set to music (lost to us) at quasi-religious festivals that trace their connections, some believe, to songs of goatherds presents an arresting picture at odds with how we think the Greeks behaved.
This more nuanced picture of the ancient world has not seeped much into popular culture. Of course, there are mass-culture events such as the recent cinematic take on the battle of Thermopylae, 300 (which, in a window on the culture, is based not on Herodotus or other ancient writers, but on a graphic novel), the Odyssey-inspired George Clooney vehicle, O Brother, Where Are Thou?, or the truly awful Alexander, with Angelina Jolie as the wife of Philip of Macedon, sporting snakes as fashion accessories. There are, however, other
