Latest news with #Euripides
Spectator
7 days ago
- Spectator
The wolf as symbol of European anxieties
On 19 December 2011, at around 3.30 a.m., a young wolf in the mountains of southern Slovenia trots away from his pack and never looks back. For the next 90 days or so, Slavc (after Slavnik, the mountain of his home) lopes onwards, hardly stopping, fording fast rivers and traversing high passes, until at last, having cut a horseshoe loop through Austria, he crosses into Italy and stops in the picturesque Alpine plateau of Lessinia. More than a decade later, Adam Weymouth follows in the same wolf's padded footsteps. For Slavc, this is a journey into a landscape of confusing novelties, full of motorways and noise and anti-wolf country folk. Head down, a passing shadow in the night, he moves forwards, like 'a ship sailing off the world's edge'. What he finds across the horizon makes all his wandering worthwhile – a lone female from the Apennines, a nomad like him, with whom he quickly creates the region's first wolf pack for more than a century. For Weymouth, the journey – which he makes on foot, following coordinates generated by a GPS tracker attached to Slavc's neck – is also peppered with action and adventure. A hardy traveller (his previous book recounts a 2,000-mile canoe trip across Alaska), he thinks little of bunking down beside the trail or squatting in abandoned outhouses. While cautious about anthropomorphising his lupine guide ('I am not permitted to guess his thoughts'), his desire to 'feel animal' hovers close – as when he stands at the edge of a cliff over which Slavc had chased a horse to its death, or on the banks of a freezing river across which Slavc had swum. Yet the two are far from alike. Weymouth has a stove, and shop-bought food; Slavc has teeth. Weymouth wears warm clothes and waterproofs; Slavc makes do with fur. There is another big difference. While the wolf thinks only of the present, his pursuer is weighed down by questions, some indeterminable. What made Slavc leave? (Meat and mating, most probably.) Did he know where he was going? (Unlikely.) How many wolves now inhabit Europe? (An estimated 21,000-plus.) How many human fatalities have they caused? (Six in the past century, compared with 16 as a result of dog attacks in the UK in 2023 alone.) Other questions seek to separate fact from fiction. Do werewolves exist? (No; but people were still executed on the charge of being them as late as the 18th century.) Did a she-wolf really wean Romulus and Remus? (Again, no; although women once nurtured wolf cubs, according to Euripides.) Weymouth's main concern is with what Slavc's journey can teach us about modern Europe's 'faultlines'. The old ways are disappearing (farming, rural customs, the idea of nationhood), and the new is rushing in (migrants, climate catastrophe, community disintegration). What can the wolf reveal about these 'between times'? Weymouth puts the question to those who cross his path, from dairy farmers and shepherds to hunters and rewilders. The responses vary, but the underlying feeling is the same: fear. People are afraid – of the unknown, of the different, of the untamed. Here, the wolf is – and perhaps always has been – the perfect symbol. The thieving trickery of this 'amoral outcast' is seen as unbounded. Presented like that, parallels between the wolf and the economic migrant are all too clear (and perhaps convenient). Both arrive from the east; both 'slip across borders unnoticed'; both threaten the status quo. Is such a comparison fair or rational? No; but that won't alter how people feel. A self-confessed urban romantic, Weymouth wishes we could all just get along together – wolf, migrant and rustic local. Admirably, he doesn't try to disabuse his interlocutors of their fears. They are real. Loss of cultural diversity is, he notes, as serious as its biodiversity equivalent. Blaming wolves, whether real or imaginary, is misplaced. Yet, tackling root problems such as late-stage capitalism or the Common Agricultural Policy is far harder. As he wryly acknowledges: 'To shoot a wolf… gives at least the illusion of control.' The book is more fun than it sounds. Weymouth's polished prose captures both the joy and beauty of his peculiarly inspired trek. He can also be witty, as with his line about rows of snow cannons 'lined up in batteries, taking aim at climate change'. He never sees a wolf in the wild, but, camping out one night in Slovenia, a lynx passes close to his tent. In a flash, all his questions disappear. He merely sits there, acutely aware of his vulnerability, his earthy nature stirred, moved that human and predator should share the same space, 'both parts of a bigger whole'. If for that feeling alone, wolves deserve their place in our crowded modern world.
Vogue
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
‘Eurydice' Star Maya Hawke on Making Her Off-Broadway Debut, the End of ‘Stranger Things,' and Her Fan Letters to Emma Stone
What do you mean when you say you're trying to figure out if you still have those skills? First of all, let me say that I fell in love with acting doing a Greek play. The play I did that made me want to be an actor was Euripides's The Bacchae. I played Agave and we did it in masks, which was the traditional Greek way. There was this community-building effort that occurred, and it's happened in almost every play I've ever done, where you become a part of this troupe and this team and you almost try to magically conjure the story, and it is as much about the rehearsal process and table work as it is about the product. But then I started working, and my first job was [the BBC's Little Women], and I was supposed to do a play right after that, but the funding fell through and the play didn't happen. And things like that kept happening. I was gonna do a different play and then the Stranger Things schedule didn't work, or I got scared about my voice. I think endurance is the most different part. In film work you can kind of hurt yourself, but it's okay because you don't have to do it again tomorrow. You can scream so loud that you hurt your voice, but it's okay because that was the screaming scene and you don't have to do the screaming scene tomorrow. Or you can do a stunt and really give it your all and get sore and hurt yourself a little bit. In the theater you have to build a performance that has endurance, that takes care of your voice for the whole run of the show, that takes care of your body for the whole run of the show, and takes care of your emotions for the whole run of the show. Completely. On that note, I wonder what it is like to channel so much grief every single night. Are you exhausted? Yeah. It's also fun. It's as exhausting when you do it right as when you get it wrong. Because when you don't meet your own expectations of emotional connectivity, then you punish yourself. And I can't say that I've totally figured it out yet. But I believe that what I'm trying to do and what I think actors generally are trying to do is to exist simultaneously in the reality of the world of the play and in their own emotional reality, and to allow those two worlds to blur and cross like a kaleidoscope.
Daily Maverick
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Maverick
Ramaphosa gets braaied and fed to Trump's Maga at the US-SA Boerewors Summit
Cringe diplomacy reigns as timid South African delegation stumbles into Trump's made-for-TV unreality show. There is a genre of comedy, probably as old as laughter itself, that asks the audience to baste in the sauce of the protagonist's humiliation. Not being a classicist, I have no idea if this kind of thing appeared in, say, Euripides; not being an Africanist, I have no notion of its prevalence in pre-contact Bantu poetry. I seem to remember some of it in Shakespeare, but don't quote me. It is certainly a feature of British sitcoms. Think Basil Fawlty, John Cleese's splenetic hotelier from the Fawlty Towers series, who bumbled himself into excruciating social mishaps. Or Ricky Gervais' The Office, where David Brent snivelled his way into disastrous interactions with his colleagues at a dead-end paper factory. Cringe comedy is now a staple on television and in the movies. It's also a staple of international diplomacy. Consider the unfolding of the much-anticipated Boerewors Summit betwixt President Cyril Ramaphosa and US President Donald J Trump, which unfolded in and around the Oval Office on Wednesday, 21 May. There sat Ramaphosa as Trump played a video montage of Julius Malema's greatest hits, wearing a face that suggested 'recently embalmed'. It was an arse-clenchingly difficult experience. But welcome to the era of cringe geopolitics. And remember, if it's free to watch, you're the product. Braai (front) pack Give Ramaphosa this much: he knows how to pacify cranky white supremacists. Remember when he talked a whole bunch of trigger-happy (yet, sadly, broke) apartheid people off a ledge? Neither do I. But we're constantly reminded of it by Ramaphosa's apologists, who insist that he is to negotiation what Kim Kardashian is to lip filler. In advance of the Boerewors Summit, so named because, as my colleague Rebecca Davis has pointed out, Trump doesn't like to hear ladies talk (AKA DEI), Ramaphosa stacked his delegation with men. And indeed, it's as if Ramaphosa & Company planned to set up a braai in the Oval Office and jaw about golf and stuff. Johann Rupert was on the dance card, as living, walking, breathing proof that nothing has ever been taken from white people in South Africa. And maybe to furnish Trump and Melania with a host of luxury goods-cum-bribes, as has now become the norm? There were also golfers on the list, good ones, and there is nothing Trump loves more than golfers – a sport he would later describe as a sort of messianic rite of passage akin to walking over hot coals while carrying a small planet on your shoulders. It escaped no one that the delegation was stacked towards white folks. This abused minority group was finally having its moment – a visit to the White House, never more appropriately named, to meet the Grand Vizier of the latest franchise of the Ku Klux Klan. They carried gifts – although none as eye-catching as the luxury Bribe Airways 747 recently handed over to the Pentagon by Qatar – and they were ready to smooth the white sheets, bribe the administration with a Starlink deal memo and try to get some business done. The thing about braais, though, is you never know how they're going to end. Once the sausage hits the flames and the third Klippies and Coke is poured, it's game on. The only thing missing was the rugby. Sausage in Chief Twenty-first-century politics is indiscernible from entertainment. In fact, it is entertainment. Trump not only understands this, he embodies it. He not only embodies it, he doubles down on it. Ramaphosa, on the other hand, lives comfortably in and around 1998. The South African Constitution has been drafted, he's been deployed to business, he's farming large draft beasts, and all is well across the land. Unhappily, time moves on. In his various roles since those halcyon days, which now includes more than a decade as either deputy president or president, he has cut an enigmatic figure. 'Enigmatic' is a euphemism for someone who refuses to speak to the press, and prefers to communicate by reading off an iPad into the blinking eye of a television camera. This means that there was no one on Earth less prepared for a press scrum in the Oval Office, apart from death row prisoners held in solitary confinement, or medieval friars at the tail end of a vow of silence. The initial parts of the meet-and-greet seemed to go according to protocol, minus the usual blips. And it was clear, as everyone filed into Trump's lair, that the South African delegation was determined to stay on message and come home with some of that delicious Foreign Direct Investment. And, at first, it did go well. Soft and obsequious, careful not to ruffle the Big Bwana's hairdo, Ramaphosa laid out the case for South Africa as an investment destination. He made Trump aware that 600 American businesses flourish to varying degrees in the country, and that it remains a place replete with 'critical minerals' – a term that made Trump twitch like a slumbering lion that catches wind of a buck, and may have doomed South Africa to a barrage of intercontinental ballistic missiles in the near future. Trump seemed bored, mostly because he was. This meeting was, for him, nothing at all to do with business and the usual diplomatic niceties. Which is why, after Ramaphosa's pitch was done, he began playing videos of Julius Malema's greatest hits. On screen, the lights in the Oval Office darkened for dramatic effect, a supercut of Malema singing Dubul' ibhunu played for what seemed like an Andy Warhol film installation amount of time. The braai had begun. And it turns out that the South Africans were the boerewors. Flames thrown What unfolded next was an ambush that should have been anticipated, but wasn't. Give Trump this much – he has tried to get the entire world to play along with his Oval Office slugfests, but so far only Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has been willing to stand up for himself and push back against the administration's lies. Ramaphosa shifted vaguely in his seat like a puppet whose master was in the toilet doing coke with a fallen congressman. After Trump showed a video of a protest in Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal, featuring white crosses lining a roadside – not grave sites, as he implied, but rather a memorial to victims of South Africa's unacceptable levels of violence – and after Trump shoved reams of paperwork into his hands, all the South African could muster was a weak, 'I haven't seen that.' Trump showed nothing more than the usual stuff circulated by Maga. What was required now was a forceful rebuttal, a reminder to those pre-sent that there is no 'white genocide' in South Africa, and that minority rights are protected. It was time to own the internet and the nightly news shows with a polite but determined speech. Crickets. Instead, Ramaphosa deferred to John Steenhuisen in his capacity as minister of agriculture. He gave a short, standard DA campaign speech. Trump then threw to the golfers, whom he seemed to regard as second sons, who couldn't muster a full-throated pushback against Maga lies. In fact, Retief Goosen was spectacularly inarticulate, but nevertheless it seemed to thrill Trump that he could speak at all. Then came Johann Rupert, in keeping with the theme of white grievance, insisting that he was the greatest victim of Malema's agitation. (Tell that to the township folks shaken down by the EFF's racketeering troops, but that's a story for another day.) The handbag salesman also wasn't able to say THERE IS NO CAMPAIGN OF WHITE GENOCIDE, perhaps because he was too busy tapping Ronald Lamola on the shoulder and referring to him as 'this one'. Oh, and incidentally, a black woman spoke for several minutes. It was a shambles, but one that should have been anticipated. Trump's intention was simple – to throw red meat to his base as it came off the grill. It was the equivalent of asking Ramaphosa, when was the last time you beat your wife? And the only reply was simpering. Tongs for the opportunity I'm aware that there are those who thought that the Boerewors Summit went about as well as it could have. Clearly, I disagree. The second Trump administration is hardly an American anomaly, but a culminating point on America's long imperial arc, and a return to an expansionist, transactional mode that existed back in the 19th century. You either understand this, or you are unfit for a leadership role in 2025. By visiting the Imperium, Ramaphosa and his delegation should have realised that they were bit players in a larger drama – Trump's acceptance of the role as the White Supremacist in Chief. Yes, business is important, but if there is nothing in it for this administration, it doesn't matter what Ramaphosa says or does, they'll do what they want when they want, with no deference to diplomatic niceties. In other words, it's time to grow up. The message should have been: we're open for business, but we're closed for input in our sovereign affairs. The second Trump regime is an authoritarian gong show, a DEI initiative for drunks and failsons, and a vast empire's noisome death grunt. The moment demanded strength. It demanded a braai master. And that is indeed an ironclad rule in South Africa – never let another person touch your braai tongs. As the refugee farce unfolds, and as the lies pour in from Trump's team of bullshit mongers, it would be wonderful to return to business as usual. But that's not to be. Maddeningly, like all South African reporters in the past 30 years, about 98% of my work concerns the failure of the ANC to do even the basic work of governance with honesty and competence. I'd like to get back to that. But there's a braai happening. It's free for all. Which means we're the product. DM
Yahoo
24-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Contributor: What the ancient world can teach us about death
I first became fascinated by death when I was 8 and my mummy took me to the British Museum to look at the mummies. When, at a slightly older age, I began to study death and the ancient world what struck me most, despite many fascinating cultural variants, was the uniformity, and limitation of the human imagination over the millennia vis-à-vis what to expect when we're gone. The COVID pandemic and its aftermath have killed more than 1,220,000 people in the U.S. alone, and this has made everybody more aware of death's omnipresence. But in the ancient world, you needed no such wake-up call. Your chances of celebrating your first birthday weren't much better than two in three. If you survived and were male, you could perhaps expect to reach your mid-40s. If you were female, your life expectancy dropped to your mid- to late 30s. A birthing mother's odds of surviving labor were grim. 'I'd rather fight in battle three times than give birth once,' says Medea, in the play by Euripides. Big killers of the ancient world were bronchitis, gastroenteritis, tuberculosis, malaria and cholera, which affected people of all social status. Plague was a regular seasonal visitor, sometimes carrying off as much as a third of the population. Floods washed away entire settlements, and fire was an ever-present hazard. Earthquakes, too, took a very heavy toll. The Roman poet Horace's advice to 'seize the day' — carpe diem —could not have been more fitting. Today, people have the option of dying in a hospital or in a hospice . But there was nothing remotely comparable to professional, institution-based palliative care in antiquity. If you didn't die in war or at sea, you breathed your last in the bosom of your family. And except in Egypt and Rome, where the death industry was lively, undertakers were virtually unknown. Instead, the family, women especially, took care of the dead, washing and clothing the corpse in a shroud and preparing it for viewing in the home. Perhaps because of these intimacies, the funeral itself was anything but the solemn and muted affair it tends to be in our culture. Men and women beat their heads and breasts, poured dust on their hair, tore their clothing, rolled on the ground and bewailed their loss in a paroxysm of grief. Polytheistic religion had little to offer by way of comfort or consolation. How could it? The Olympian gods knew nothing of death and conducted themselves without any regard for mortality. And yet, the ancients did have their share of ideas about the afterlife. Most believed that the dead not only continued to exist elsewhere but also, paradoxically, depended on sustenance deposited beside their remains. The modern practice of laying flowers on a grave is fueled by the same vague idea that the dead are contactable at the place where they are interred. In Homer's 'Odyssey' everyone ends up in the same dank, dark, dreary region called Hades, irrespective of what lives they have led. Only a tiny minority — three people in total — get punished for being very bad. Tantalus, for instance, who cooked his son in a casserole and served him up to the gods, is 'tantalized' for eternity by food and drink that is always just out of his reach. The idea of a dualistic afterlife with some kind of heaven for the blessed derives from the ancient Egyptians. According to them, before being admitted to the Field of Reeds, where you'll be able to hunt and party like there's no tomorrow, you have to appear before the underworld judge Osiris, who will cross-examine you to see if you've led a virtuous life. Your heart will be weighed on a scale, against a feather of truth. If it's heavier than the feather, a monster will devour you, but after that you'll simply cease to exist. No hell, in other words. Over time, a number of Greeks came to believe that a blessed afterlife was available for those who had been initiated into the so-called mystery cults, though what exactly this blessedness amounted to is unclear. Over time, too, the belief that Hades was a place of punishment gained traction. Aeneas, making a pit stop on his way to catch up with his father in Hades, learns that numerous categories of criminals experience gruesome punishments. This anticipates the eternal fires that both Christianity and Islam suggest will consume the ungodly. The late Pope Francis' comment relayed by a journalist back in 2018 — 'Hell does not exist; there is the disappearance of sinful souls' — was a welcome sign for sinners like myself, even though the Vatican quickly asserted that he wasn't speaking ex cathedra. By contrast, the Hebrew Bible shows little interest in the plight of individuals after death. Good and bad end up in Sheol, a region very similar to Hades. Today, according to Pew Research Center data, some 80% of Americans believe in an afterlife. Their thoughts about what to expect there remain somewhat confused, but perhaps it's telling that the most commonly held idea is that they will be reunited with loved ones and — if they're lucky — with pets. That view, absent the pets, also prevailed in antiquity. Greek funerary monuments frequently show the dead, or the living and the dead, shaking hands. The same theme is evinced most movingly in Etruscan sarcophagi that depict husband and wife lying in bed together for all eternity. Not even the Egyptians came up with a better way of conveying the hope that the life awaiting us will be as sensual and as pleasurable as our best moments here on Earth. If there's one thing I've learned studying all of this, it's that inconsistency and illogicality lie at the heart of the human effort to imagine what to expect when we're dead. Even some hardened atheists find it difficult to imagine extinction. The belief that humans will continue to exist in a different realm or on a different plane and that they will face a reckoning are ideas that have been around for thousands of years. So, too, has the belief that nothing survives death. 'I didn't exist. I existed. I don't exist. I don't care,' reads an epitaph often found on Roman gravestones. Mark Twain put it equally memorably: 'I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and hadn't suffered the slightest inconvenience.' Robert Garland, professor emeritus of the classics at Colgate University, is the author, most recently, of 'What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife.' This article was produced in partnership with Zocalo Public Square. If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
24-04-2025
- Health
- Los Angeles Times
What the ancient world can teach us about death
I first became fascinated by death when I was 8 and my mummy took me to the British Museum to look at the mummies. When, at a slightly older age, I began to study death and the ancient world what struck me most, despite many fascinating cultural variants, was the uniformity, and limitation of the human imagination over the millennia vis-à-vis what to expect when we're gone. The COVID pandemic and its aftermath have killed more than 1,220,000 people in the U.S. alone, and this has made everybody more aware of death's omnipresence. But in the ancient world, you needed no such wake-up call. Your chances of celebrating your first birthday weren't much better than two in three. If you survived and were male, you could perhaps expect to reach your mid-40s. If you were female, your life expectancy dropped to your mid- to late 30s. A birthing mother's odds of surviving labor were grim. 'I'd rather fight in battle three times than give birth once,' says Medea, in the play by Euripides. Big killers of the ancient world were bronchitis, gastroenteritis, tuberculosis, malaria and cholera, which affected people of all social status. Plague was a regular seasonal visitor, sometimes carrying off as much as a third of the population. Floods washed away entire settlements, and fire was an ever-present hazard. Earthquakes, too, took a very heavy toll. The Roman poet Horace's advice to 'seize the day' — carpe diem —could not have been more fitting. Today, people have the option of dying in a hospital or in a hospice . But there was nothing remotely comparable to professional, institution-based palliative care in antiquity. If you didn't die in war or at sea, you breathed your last in the bosom of your family. And except in Egypt and Rome, where the death industry was lively, undertakers were virtually unknown. Instead, the family, women especially, took care of the dead, washing and clothing the corpse in a shroud and preparing it for viewing in the home. Perhaps because of these intimacies, the funeral itself was anything but the solemn and muted affair it tends to be in our culture. Men and women beat their heads and breasts, poured dust on their hair, tore their clothing, rolled on the ground and bewailed their loss in a paroxysm of grief. Polytheistic religion had little to offer by way of comfort or consolation. How could it? The Olympian gods knew nothing of death and conducted themselves without any regard for mortality. And yet, the ancients did have their share of ideas about the afterlife. Most believed that the dead not only continued to exist elsewhere but also, paradoxically, depended on sustenance deposited beside their remains. The modern practice of laying flowers on a grave is fueled by the same vague idea that the dead are contactable at the place where they are interred. In Homer's 'Odyssey' everyone ends up in the same dank, dark, dreary region called Hades, irrespective of what lives they have led. Only a tiny minority — three people in total — get punished for being very bad. Tantalus, for instance, who cooked his son in a casserole and served him up to the gods, is 'tantalized' for eternity by food and drink that is always just out of his reach. The idea of a dualistic afterlife with some kind of heaven for the blessed derives from the ancient Egyptians. According to them, before being admitted to the Field of Reeds, where you'll be able to hunt and party like there's no tomorrow, you have to appear before the underworld judge Osiris, who will cross-examine you to see if you've led a virtuous life. Your heart will be weighed on a scale, against a feather of truth. If it's heavier than the feather, a monster will devour you, but after that you'll simply cease to exist. No hell, in other words. Over time, a number of Greeks came to believe that a blessed afterlife was available for those who had been initiated into the so-called mystery cults, though what exactly this blessedness amounted to is unclear. Over time, too, the belief that Hades was a place of punishment gained traction. Aeneas, making a pit stop on his way to catch up with his father in Hades, learns that numerous categories of criminals experience gruesome punishments. This anticipates the eternal fires that both Christianity and Islam suggest will consume the ungodly. The late Pope Francis' comment relayed by a journalist back in 2018 — 'Hell does not exist; there is the disappearance of sinful souls' — was a welcome sign for sinners like myself, even though the Vatican quickly asserted that he wasn't speaking ex cathedra. By contrast, the Hebrew Bible shows little interest in the plight of individuals after death. Good and bad end up in Sheol, a region very similar to Hades. Today, according to Pew Research Center data, some 80% of Americans believe in an afterlife. Their thoughts about what to expect there remain somewhat confused, but perhaps it's telling that the most commonly held idea is that they will be reunited with loved ones and — if they're lucky — with pets. That view, absent the pets, also prevailed in antiquity. Greek funerary monuments frequently show the dead, or the living and the dead, shaking hands. The same theme is evinced most movingly in Etruscan sarcophagi that depict husband and wife lying in bed together for all eternity. Not even the Egyptians came up with a better way of conveying the hope that the life awaiting us will be as sensual and as pleasurable as our best moments here on Earth. If there's one thing I've learned studying all of this, it's that inconsistency and illogicality lie at the heart of the human effort to imagine what to expect when we're dead. Even some hardened atheists find it difficult to imagine extinction. The belief that humans will continue to exist in a different realm or on a different plane and that they will face a reckoning are ideas that have been around for thousands of years. So, too, has the belief that nothing survives death. 'I didn't exist. I existed. I don't exist. I don't care,' reads an epitaph often found on Roman gravestones. Mark Twain put it equally memorably: 'I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and hadn't suffered the slightest inconvenience.' Robert Garland, professor emeritus of the classics at Colgate University, is the author, most recently, of 'What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife.' This article was produced in partnership with Zocalo Public Square.
