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India Today
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- India Today
How Rhapsodes became human libraries of Ancient Greece
Most of us today rely on sources like books, phones or cloud drives to remember things. We click 'save' and move on. But there was a time, thousands of years ago, when memory lived inside people. If no one remembered a story, it vanished. In that world, memory wasn't just helpful, it was Ancient Greece, a special group of people took that job seriously. They were called were not just storytellers. They were performers and memory holders. Their task? To carry the great epics of Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey, not in scrolls, but in their heads. A long history and record of events have been passed down using methods like those of the rhapsodes to convey stories to larger Indian civilisation to China, this was a common practice. Today, we face some uncertainties, and many records of events are India, the tradition of folk fairs has been famous, where real stories were once told in such formats, though over time, many have taken exaggerated WERE THE RHAPSODES?The word 'rhapsode' comes from two Greek words: rhaptein (to stitch) and ode (song). So, quite literally, a rhapsode was someone who stitched songs travelled from town to town, performing at festivals and gatherings. They did not need instruments or props. The tool that was utilised by them was the human would gather in large open areas, sometimes in thousands, to listen. Imagine standing in a dusty public square, no stage lights, no microphones, and someone begins to speak. Within minutes, the crowd is rhapsode pulls them in with tales of gods and battles, love and loss. And for hours, that voice holds everyone rhapsodes likely added their own flavour. They adjusted stories to the crowd, the mood, the moment. But as Greek society began to write things down, the rhapsode's role faded. Precision became key. They were expected to get Homer right, exactly people in Ancient Greece couldn't read. For them, the rhapsode was their book. Through these performances, people learned about bravery, betrayal, loyalty, and fate. .THAT'S WHAT MADE THEM DIFFERENTIn the early days, a rhapsode could add his own flavour. He could shift words, change details, move things around. He performed what he remembered, and what he remembered might grow or shrink depending on the crowd, the mood, the things changed. As Greek society began writing its words and building its libraries, the role of the rhapsode narrowed. Now, his job was not to shape the story, but to preserve it room for error. Homer's words were sacred, and the rhapsode had to get every one of them right. He became a guardian of fixed didn't make him any less powerful. If anything, it made the responsibility heavier. He was no longer just a performer -- he was a vessel for cultural memory. He spoke for those who could not read, and often for those who could not him, Greece's values, its heroes, its defeats, and its hopes were kept when people later sat in rooms to study Homer -- picking apart metaphors, checking for meanings, debating context -- they were doing a new version of what the rhapsode once the difference was stark. The rhapsode didn't dissect. He delivered. No footnotes. No references. Just the moment, the memory, the rhapsode was a bridge. Between past and present. Between silence and speech. Between a story nearly lost and a crowd that remembered it live in a different time now. We store everything but remember little. We trust servers and screens to hold our stories. But memory isn't just about rhapsodes knew that the only way to preserve something was to make it matter -- to speak it in a way that people didn't just hear it, but felt maybe that's what we've started to forget -- that the human voice, armed only with memory and meaning, is still one of the strongest forces for keeping things didn't need to say, 'This is important.' They just told the story. And if it was told well enough, people remembered it. Then they told it how cultures through archives, but through voices that refuse to let the story go quiet.- Ends
Scotsman
24-06-2025
- General
- Scotsman
Book reviews: Sanctuary by Marina Warner
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... It is a melancholy sign of the times that the meanings of the subjects of these books – sanctuary and retreat – have become so commodified, solipsistic, similar and etiolated. That they even seem synonymous is a measure of our collective mental laziness. Sanctaury is sought, retreat is chosen; and neither involve bergamot balm nor Seishin Sekai stones. Both require bravery and abnegation, not luxury and indulgence. Caveat lector: although the same price, one is deep and one is hasty. Illustration showing Judah seeking sanctuary at the altar, taken from the Philologus Hebraeo-Mixtus by Johann Leusden, professor of Hebrew, Utrecht, 1657 | Getty Images Stagg's book could have been a decent three-part radio feature, but the work is spread thin. The plurals of the subtitle are misleading: it features a philosopher (Ludwig Wittgenstein), a poet (David Jones) and a theologian (Simone Weil), though the labels are fairly arbitrary – they are also labelled as saint, hermit and martyr; and all could reasonably be termed mystics. The areas of commonality – such as 'all three struggled with doubt' or 'all three of them could be naïve, self-righteous and earnest to the point of insufferable' – are so broad as to carry little insight. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad It would be difficult to write about these three without including interesting, provocative and deep matters. But I yearned for more of the subject and less of the writer. It is like standing in front of a picture with someone blocking your view and telling you their opinions. There is little real engagement with Jones's poetry ('The Anathemata' warrants a solitary quote); nothing about Weil's significant reading of The Iliad, or even Wittgenstein's final yearning for a philosophy that made philosophy disappear. But there is rather too much room for what commissioners call 'the journey'. Stagg forgets to bring swimwear to Austria. He sees a weathered sign for a chocolate factory on Caldey Island, and the alliteration of 'the slop of soup and the slap of spoons and the gulp of swallowed mouthfuls' conveys a kind of disgust at the monastic refectory. In France he meets someone else called Guy. And your point being?, as an old tutor used to say. More worrying, although the text is footnoted, there was one point – a rather gruesome description of Charles II of Spain – that was not referenced, but is almost word for word identical with a passage on the Wikipedia page (itself citing a book in Spanish, but no page number). Such moments undermine trust, and make even the 'revelations' – 'I understood now that withdrawing was no guarantee of happiness' – suspect. (And who on earth told you it was anyway?) There are no such qualms with the new book from Marina Warner, who is every bit as ingenious and meticulous as she was in 1976's Alone of All Her Sex, which by coincidence was my bedtime reading last month. If some of the chapters here are a bit of a stretch to the theme – in particular, the section on Puccini's Turandot – well, it is fascinating nevertheless. Other than Turandot, the major part of the book studies historical seekers of asylum: the Holy Family fleeing from Herod, Empress Helena's 'discovery' of the True Cross and how its splinters then sanctified refuges, the Virgin Mary's 'home' of Loreto, transported, rebuilt, cloned, shrouded and recreated, and the ironies of Dido and Aeneas, two city-founding refugees whose tragic love underwrites – justifies? – epic conflict. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad This is followed by a section on Warner's work with the 'Stories in Transit' initiative. It might seem modest, but given how shrill and vituperative the voices ranged against displaced people are it seems all the more necessary. 'Ownership of one's story' can seem trite, but in the context of having lost almost everything else, it is fundamental; not just for those fleeing but for those with a moral duty to understand their new neighbours. Warner provides the intellectual scaffolding for the endeavour, particularly in terms of how narratives migrate between cultures, and the way in which national myths can be traced to itinerant and 'alien' origins. Part of the exhilaration of reading any work by Warner is the breadth of reference. It is the opposite of dilletantism, a purposeful, sharp stitching: she will link and pierce from Anglo-Saxon Vercelli Manuscript to Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend, Evelyn Waugh, Old King Cole, Seamus Heaney, Orhan Pamuk to Charles III's coronation gift from the Pope. She adeptly brings in visual art and architecture: I was mildly disappointed Nathan Coley's wonderful Lamp of Sacrifice; 286 cardboard 'places of worship' in the Edinburgh Yellow Pages – and therefore all sanctuaries – did not make the cut, even if just to remind us sanctuaries still exist. It is appropriate, particularly here, that the disciplinary borders are so porous. In a clever neologism, Warner refers to 'spories', a portmanteau of story and spore, and playing with the Greek meaning both the scatter and the sow – it is, significantly, a ghostly presence in diaspora, a community more self-consciously bound by its stories. Warner is alert to the fact that knowing something is a fiction does not mean it has any less emotive force. She wryly notes that Ellisland Farm describes itself as the 'most authentic' of the homes of Robert Burns (despite the fact it is now a museum, not a home). The idea of the story as a site (a camp-fire, a well, a glade) of exchange and safety and imagined possibility gives a fixed point to Warner's capacious mind. More importantly, she reminds us why we call the discipline 'the humanities'. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The World Within: Why Writers, Artists and Thinkers Retreat, by Guy Stagg, Scribner, £20.
Indian Express
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
10 books that breathe new life into Greek mythology
Written By Prachi Mishra Greek mythology and its stories of love, power, betrayal, and tragedy have fascinated many generations. But let's also take a look at some of the writers and their works who are reframing these corpus and telling it from the perspective of characters that were once silenced or sidelined. In these retellings, the familiar myths take on unexpected turns. Circe is no longer a mere witch from The Odyssey instead she is a woman finding her voice and Briseis, the enslaved Trojan queen, becomes the heart of The Iliad in The Silence of the Girls or Medusa is no longer a monster rather she is a girl punished for surviving violence. Here are ten books that reimagine ancient myths with fresh emotion and new profound meaning. 'I had been old and stern and strong. I had been young and silly and weak. And now? Now I was something else.' While in Homer's Odyssey, Circe is a witch who transformed men into swine, Madeline Miller gives her so much more: goddess, exile, lover, mother. Told in the voice of Circe, the novel narrates the lonely childhood she spent amidst cruel gods, her banishment to a remote island, and the centuries spent in learning herbs, magic, and herself. It's a quiet yet powerful journey of a woman making her own decisions and choosing her own destiny. Moreover, Miller uses poetic and reflective writing style which does not try to hide Circe's vulnerabilities even though she becomes stronger. 'Now that I'm dead, I know everything.' We have all heard about the story of Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus who waited for twenty years for her husband to return. But, in Atwood's The Penelopiad, she gets the chance to tell her side of the story in a very witty and sharp manner. Atwood also gives voice to the twelve handmaids who were hanged at Odysseus' command. And, thus a clearly distinct result comes in front. Told with wit and lyricism, the book questions what justice really means in a world built by men, and whether myth can ever do justice to women. 'The world is made of choices. Some we make. Some are made for us.' Alcestis is the woman who gives her life to save the life of her husband. In Katherine Beutner's reworking, we follow her not only to the world of the dead but on a journey of self-discovery, yearning, and rebellion. Down in the underworld, Alcestis encounters Persephone and starts to question all she had ever thought about love, duty, and sacrifice. The novel is rich in the sense that it's meditative, quietly yet fiercely questions things and also explores queer identity. It is less about lofty mythic grandeur and more about the soft insurgence of claiming one's very own existence. 'They were gods. But they weren't necessarily good at it.' What happens to Greek gods when they lose their divine power? They are crammed into a dilapidated booth-flat in London and try to cope with the modern world in Marie Phillips' side-splitting novel. Apollo fancies himself a TV psychic, badly at that, Artemis walks other people's dogs, and Aphrodite is doing some heavy stirring up of trouble. It all threatens to become a mess of divine drama when a mortal couple gets caught up in it all. This book goes all witty and irreverent, not caring for itself much and that is its charm. It reminds us that myths, just like humans, can be merely ridiculous and lovable at one go. 'What will they make of us, those who come after?' Pat Barker gives The Iliad a new interpretation through the eyes of Briseis, a Trojan queen turned war-captive in the hands of Achilles. Apart from being stripped of her name, power, and voice, she only remains as a silent witness to the so-called glory of war. Barker's novel is raw and haunting, filled with the quiet suffering of women erased from heroic tales. The novel just narrates the truth, and provides no easy redemption or proper closure. Briseis, in her quiet manner, describes her story through the noise of battle with heart-wrenching honesty. 'They turned me into a monster. And I became one.' We all are well-versed with the story of Medusa, a monster with snakes for hair, but Jessie Burton provides a gentler, sadder version of her. In this beautifully illustrated novel, Medusa is a teenage girl cursed for a crime she didn't commit, sent into exile on a lonely island whose only company consisted of the snakes that sprouted from her scalp. And, when a boy named Perseus arrives, her world is transformed again. This version doesn't cast her as evil, instead, it reveals the girl behind the myth-full of pain, wonder, and rage. 'This is not Theseus' story. It is mine.' Ariadne, who is simply known for helping Theseus defeat the Minotaur, only to be later abandoned on an island. But Jennifer Saint gives her character a richer and more complex voice. Ariadne is not just a helping hand or lover, but she is also given the role of a sister, a mother, a woman living in a world shaped by gods and betrayals. Saint has written the novel by infusing prose with the characteristics of poetry and explored the themes of sacrifice, sorrow, and the emotional burden and pain of unrequited love. The story is also about two sisters, Ariadne and Phaedra, who are attempting to hold on to whatever agency they have in stories that were never theirs to begin with. 'This was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of them all.' What if the Trojan War was not documented in the words of the warriors but instead from those left behind by the war? A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes sets in the voices of countless females from myth-rooting queens, slaves, sisters, goddesses, and survivors. From Penelope writing to Odysseus, to Cassandra cursed with visions, every chapter casts another dimension over well-known tales. The tone is lyrical, somewhat wise, and all too often angry. It's a reminder that history is written by victors but, if told well, stories can belong to anybody. 'The Greeks gave us logic. The myths gave us meaning.' The origin stories of Greek mythology, from the birth of Chaos to the ascent of Zeus, are retold with warmth and humour by British author and comedian Stephen Fry in his book Mythos. It's the type of book that turns myths into stories for the dinner table. It's detailed, funny, and surprisingly emotional as well. Anyone interested in the Greek gods and their complex relationships should start with this book because of Fry's conversational, contemporary, and engrossing narration style. 'The old stories refused to die, and so they became something else.' In the modern world, every seven years the gods are hunted by descendants of ancient bloodlines, and if killed, the killers inherit their powers. Lore, the last descendant of Perseus, does not want to be involved in any bloodshed. But, when wounded Athena and childhood friend Castor seek her help, Lore is reluctantly dragged back into the war she tried to leave behind. Bracken's Lore is a blend of mythology and urban fantasy, delivering a very gritty attitude toward ancient power struggles. The action is grueling fun, but beneath it all lies a very human question: can we choose who we become?
Epoch Times
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Epoch Times
‘An Iliad': A One-Man Triumph at the Court Theatre
CHICAGO—Imagine being in a room with the most famous poet in antiquity, the man whose storytelling influenced literature for ages, and listening to him regale you with events that took place during the most important event in ancient Greek history: the siege of Troy. This unforgettable experience is unfolding at the Court Theatre in Chicago. Based Homer's 'The Iliad,' (circa 850 century B.C.), this work, titled 'An Iliad,' is co-authored by Lisa Peterson and Denis O'Hare. It's a one-man play of Homer's epic poem that tells the story of the 10-year war between two civilizations. It's also a perfect choice for the Court's mission to reimagine classic works for contemporary audiences. A Classic Work of Great Depth For the longest time, scholars believed that Troy was a mythological place, but recent archeological excavations have led many archeologists to believe that Troy really existed. Its remains are at Hisarlik, a city situated in modern-day Turkey.
Los Angeles Times
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘The Life of Chuck' is an apocalyptic, soul-seeking puzzle that's missing a few pieces
How narcissistic to believe you're living in the end times. The thought might cross your mind — I'm guilty of it, sure — but it can be chased off by imagining how it felt to witness the Dust Bowl or the French Revolution or the fall of Tenochtitlan. 'The Life of Chuck,' a sentimental jigsaw puzzle by Mike Flanagan ('Doctor Sleep') from a 50-page 2020 novella by Stephen King, argues the opposite. Here, in this backward-structured triptych of short tales, the death of an ordinary accountant, Chuck Krantz (Tom Hiddleston), is the end times, at least for the characters in his head. Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), his ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillan) and their friends and co-workers don't know their catastrophic existence is merely a dying man's reverie. Their reality is that the Earth is collapsing, even as every surface is suddenly covered with confounding billboards and commercials thanking whoever some Chuck is for '39 great years.' Of what? No one knows. 'He's our last meme,' Marty jokes. In Chuck years, the film starts when he's 39 and in his final hours of fading away from brain cancer, rewinds to nine months earlier and then leaps back to his boyhood. As the film trudges from his hospice bed to his youth, we'll come to see that the doomed townsfolk have the same faces and mannerisms of people Chuck knew as a child. It's a heartening, humanistic thesis that even a rather dull dude like Chuck has an inner life that rivals 'The Iliad.' Paradoxically, that way of thinking belongs specifically to storytellers like King, who make up whole yarns about anonymous humans on the street. My mental landscape may just be grocery lists and song lyrics. To emphasize its timeline, the movie titles its first section Act Three. The book did the same thing. 'The Life of Chuck' is a nearly line-by-line faithful adaptation, with a few more jokes and heavy use of a narrator, Nick Offerman, who reads King's words with a nature documentarian's gusto. Originally, King was inspired only to write the middle-aged Chuck chapters, and then a year later he bound those pieces together by adding the boyhood kicker and its superfluous supernatural element. In his author's note, King said he'd leave the success of his narrative architecture 'up to readers to determine.' Well, it doesn't work. But I can see why he tried the rearrangement. The closing section has the most Chuck, which makes it the most banal. An orphan who lives with his grandparents, Albie and Sarah (Mark Hamill and Mia Sara), Chuck pads through a rather milquetoast coming-of-age sketch. He endures loss, visits his neighbor Vera (Heather Langenkamp) and along the line learns to waltz, samba and moonwalk. (Young Chuck is played at various ages by Cody Flanagan, Benjamin Pajak and Jacob Tremblay.) He also discovers a mystical portal at the top of the stairs that the script doesn't satisfyingly explore. Instead, it simply muddles the everyman point of the film. If you started the movie at the end, you wouldn't be champing to find out what happens next. But the apocalyptic opening act is pretty great. For 15 minutes, nearly every line of dialogue could be an elevator pitch for a Roland Emmerich movie: earthquakes in California, volcanoes in Germany, a nuclear meltdown in Japan. All these calamities are happening simultaneously — so many disasters coming at such speed that the bad news slams into Marty like a psychological avalanche. Luckily, the internet is also glitching, causing a vicarious thrill when Marty quits trying to get service and throws away his phone. There's a stand-out scene where Matthew Lillard, playing Marty's acquaintance Gus, advises him to take a detour to work as a sinkhole has just opened up on the road to his commute. Twenty drivers are trapped at the bottom, some of whom, Gus says nonchalantly, are 'probably not coming out.' The incomprehensibility of it all, of every awful thing wreaking havoc at once, has Gus in a state of jocular shock. Until almost without him aware of it, a tear slips loose. We don't see much of this destruction on-screen. Flanagan is strictly interested in what futility does to the human soul — and how it can be a salve, too. By his reckoning, suicide and marriage rates will rise. Gillan's Felicia, who is both a despondent nurse and a lonely divorcée, nicely illustrates why. I'm inclined to believe him, and it's also a gas to eavesdrop on Marty's parent-teacher conferences, where the adults no longer give a flying fig about their kids' futures. One dad (David Dastmalchian) spends the session whining about his inability to pull up internet porn. Mood-wise, this first section is magnificently done (although the celestial spa-music score by the Newton Brothers is a twinkle too much). In the spirit of schadenfreude, I'd have happily watched a whole additional hour of this Chuck-driven armageddon where, as his body collapses, the stars in the sky blink out one by one. Pity as its title character gains health, the film loses its verve. The second act is a likable, fragile bubble of an idea. One afternoon before his terminal diagnosis, the adult Chuck takes a stroll and spontaneously dazzles a crowd with a dance number done in wordless alliance with two strangers, a lovelorn book clerk (Annalise Basso) and a street drummer (Taylor Gordon). The performance is elaborate and delightful and impeccably choreographed, with Hiddleston doing long-legged strides as though he's the second coming of Christopher Walken. Like the film's central conceit, it's about making magic out of the mundane. Shrewdly, once the exuberance ends, Flanagan lets the blahs back in. The musical trio regresses into that awkwardness of knowing they've shared a special moment, but there isn't much left to say to each other besides so long and good luck. The movie has a key advantage over the book. Flanagan can visually emphasize that Chuck's mind contains a universe of memories. For starters, he's double-cast many of the actors; tragic Marty was once a teacher who young Chuck spotted in the hall. (To my disappointment, we never spot Lillard and Dastmalchian again.) But even the casting itself deliberately tugs on our own memories. An unusual number of the supporting players are beloved for one famous role — not just big parts, but eternal parts — that have so immortalized them in the public's consciousness that their fictional identities have supplanted their real ones. Hamill, of course, was in 'Star Wars,' Sara in 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off,' Langenkamp in 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' and Lillard in 'Scream.' If it was just one or two icons, you might not bat an eye. But at this concentration, the film itself is making a statement even to the most grocery list-minded of us. There are faces who will live in our brains until we die. As philosophical puzzles go, 'The Life of Chuck' doesn't add up to much. But I'm glad I saw it for one reason. A few days later, I was recounting the plot to a friend at a Koreatown steakhouse that had just opened for the afternoon. We were alone in a back booth when the waiter approached and said he'd overheard us mention moonwalking. He hit play on his phone and began to pop and lock and, yes, attempt to moonwalk on the carpet. Thinking of the message of the movie — that these might ultimately be the only moments that matter — I forced myself to stand up and join him in doing the robot. Together, we made magic out of the mundane and it was marvelous.
