Servants and lords: a Greek constant that reaches ‘Parasites’ | Culture


The myth has accompanied us since the beginning because the human need to relate a past that allows it to face the future is universal. In the West its origin is usually traced back to Homer and Hesiod, the great poets of Greece from the archaic period (8th to 6th centuries before our era) and, although the influence on them of the Egyptian models has been proven, this ancestry is in General accepted. “There are in the Greek myths a series of components that inaugurate a new era of the mythology, where we still remain, ”says Edith Hall, Professor of Hellenic Studies at King’s College in London.

Author of about twenty books and consultant for theatrical productions of classical dramas, Hall (Birmingham, United Kingdom, 60 years) believes that "the family conflicts of the gods, with their political character" define in archaic Greece a new way of understanding the myth without direct precedents. This would not be the only novel element, but the fundamental one. "The characters also change, who are many more and participate in their totality of what happens, including slaves and women, but in the stories almost always underlies a political key: the poor detest royalty and aristocrats."

The statement, coupled with the author's certainty that "screenwriters, film and television and novelists" are today the poets of three millennia ago and that Greece remains the main reference, allows her to glimpse in films such as Parasites, last Oscar winner for Best Film, a kind of contemporary adaptation of the old image of servants who, more intelligent, mock the desires of their lords. "It is the Greek and Roman comedy," he tells as an example of the contemporary vitality of the great figurations of Antiquity. But there is much more, the author continues: Clint eastwood and his films of cowboy they would recreate Ulysses' travels narrated in The odyssey Y Bryan's life, the triumphant comedy of the Monty Phyton about a guy born in a manger in Bethlehem on the same day as Jesus Christ, would be nothing more than a story already told, in The Death of Pilgrim, by the Satyr Lucian (2nd century).

All in all, these are but some examples of the intense irradiation that the classics have exerted for centuries. “Themes, arguments, characters. Everything repeats. The names and contexts hardly change, ”says Hall.

Professor Edith Hall.


Professor Edith Hall.

Where does this great Greek hoarding power come from? You might think that in his own language and Hall argues that there are a good handful of reasons to sustain it. The opposition of ideas on which it was based - "They had an absolutely polarized thought" -, their grammatical subtlety - "They were able to discriminate when an action caused a second and when the latter preceded the first, but without necessarily being its cause "- or his metaphorical wealth -" I think of the dawn of pink fingers of the goddess Eos, in The Iliad, as a way of talking about dawn ”- they would explain the almost decisive character of the Greek myth about the arguments and characters that would follow each other in later centuries.

But the teacher clarifies that that explains only one part. The secret of the Greek myth always nests the secret, as if that justifies the fascination it produces. "Thanks to language, but also for other factors, rhetoric, science, democracy, theater, etc. were born." Hall points out that, like language, "all these Greek creations" contributed to the significance of the Greek myth of its historical era. The one of Protágoras, says the author, illustrates this process: in Hesiod it represents “the conflictive relations between gods and men and between the latter and women”; for the dramatic author Esquilo, "the democratic rebellion against tyranny"; and for Plato, "the progress of the human being through arts, crafts, skills and technology."

"It's not that the myths were replaced, but that they continually re-adapted," says Hall, adding that, in addition, "each Greek polis had its own local myths." Castor and Pollux, horse tamer the first and fearsome warrior the second, "were exalted" in Sparta, the most militarized polis in Greece and where they came from. Hercules, "that great walking hero" who strangled perverse lions and water hydras, "claimed the Greek communities by the Black Sea, ready to ensure that he had done some of his twelve famous works on them."

With the advent of science and rational thinking, Athens and other Greek cops mutated the myth. Poets and philosophers came into conflict about who was responsible for establishing the story. Proof of this quarrel is Plato's ambivalent position, which in the Republic expels poets from the city, but does not cease to go in other dialogues to phrases of Hesiod or Pindar and praises Safo, that erotic poet who came to consider the Tenth of the Nine Muses.

The philosophers introduced a rational filter into the myth, but their interpretations did not yet contain "a hidden sense." The "allegorization" of the myth did not come, says Hall, "to the Christian Neoplatonists" (3rd century). And the result, explains the author, is that Ulysses' trip in The odyssey It is transformed, in the narrative of the Neoplatonic Plotinus, into "the search for a spiritual homeland that transcends the beauty of the world around us." , as in the ancient Greek polis, the local myths. “The great American myth of the rise of the poor through adversity; that of the heroic failure of the British, either arriving at the South Pole or fleeing in Dunkirk, ... ”, Hall says.

And in Spain? "I don't know, but I bet it has to do with lying next to windmills or something else in Cervantes."

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