Epidemics-or, rather, in poetic parlance, “plagues”-set up the conditions for two important mythical stories: Homer’s Iliad, and Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos. Presidents and prime ministers have been tested against COVID-19, and some found wanting. Political leadership is, of course, something else that has been thrown into sharp relief during the pandemic. So two soldiers, Odysseus and Neoptolemus, set off to persuade Philoctetes to return with them to Troy. Except, a decade after this rather brutal abandonment, the Greeks realise they need their ex-comrade after all: a prophecy has told them that his bow is required for Troy to be taken. Owing to a badly injured leg, the stench of which disgusts his fellow Greek soldiers, he has been left on the island of Lemnos while his erstwhile comrades lay siege to Troy. The eponymous lead character is an archer. Philoctetes is a drama not often put on in the U.K., perhaps because of its rather peculiar story.
What might Greek mythology have to tell us about the largest crisis looming in our own time: the COVID-19 pandemic? Last summer-during a brief respite from spikes of COVID-19, when theatres could open-the National Theatre in London staged a delayed production of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, freely adapted by poet Kae Tempest (who retitled the drama Paradise). But we can still see in these dramas something useful and telling about, say, the moral compromises made when nations go to war (Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis) the horrific “collateral damage” visited upon non-combatants (Euripides’ Hecuba) the harm and violence that can travel through the generations when family members turn on each other (Aeschylus’ Oresteia). The context may have changed beyond all recognition: we’re not staging these plays as part of a religious festival devoted to Dionysus in the blazing Athenian sunshine to an audience largely consisting of men, for instance. That is, we’re using the lens of Euripides’ take on unimaginably distant stories of long ago to help us understand our present. When we restage these plays -and in the early 21st century, we never seem of tiring of doing so-we’re undertaking something similar, albeit at an extra remove. Those fifth-century BCE dramatists of Athens-Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides-used mythical material, often radical expansions of moments or scenes in Homer’s epics, to address the politics of their own time. The stories contradict each other wildly. But there’s another Helen who doesn’t go to Troy (thanks to Euripides). There’s the Helen who goes to Troy (thanks to Homer). But there’s another Medea who doesn’t kill her children (thanks to a number of other tragedies that survive only in fragments). There’s the Medea who kills her children (thanks to Euripides’ play). There’s no “right” version of any of them.
The stories of the Homeric poems the Iliad and Odyssey, for example, are by their nature impure, composites, traces of multiple stories told and retold by travelling rhapsodes who sang them and adapted them to their audiences in archaic Greece, long before versions of them were captured and pinned down in writing. There are no canonical versions of the Greek myths. Myths, on the other hand, are unstable, inherently contaminated, existing precisely in order to be reread, rewritten and reinterpreted. The work of historiography is to locate events in time, in all their contingent specificity.
“History is always then, myth is now,” wrote the novelist Pat Barker recently.
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