2024-03-11 15:19:12
Literature History-Novel
Come, you doomed ones, and put on a show
Status: 13.03.2024 | Reading time: 4 minutes
With a tragedy mask: playwright Euripides
Quelle: Print Collector/Getty Images/Hulton Archive
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Syracuse, 412 B.C. 400 BC: After their devastating defeat, thousands of Athenian prisoners of war are herded into quarries. In Ferdia Lennon’s historical novel, two tragedy fans want to stage Euripides there. Cynical? Clear. But with a surprising ending.
Lampo and Gelon are best buddies in ancient Syracuse. They met while working in a pottery workshop that has since gone bankrupt. They make it through the scorching hot summer of 412 BC more well than badly, pouring themselves bad wine in the evenings in Dismas’ wine bar at the fishing harbor and pursuing their common passion during the day: Attic tragedies.
Euripides is the name of the poet of the hour. The playwright’s reputation has long since reached Sicily, even though the Peloponnesian War is raging and the Syracuses, allied with Sparta, have just inflicted a devastating defeat on the Athenians – the beginning of the end of their political supremacy. In the field of aesthetics, however, the hegemony of the Athenians is only now really beginning and will last for a good two and a half millennia. At least until our era, when an Irish-Libyan writer and classical philologist is so fascinated by the Greek heritage that he sets his debut novel in the era of Euripides.
Painful death in the quarry
Its two main characters, Lampo, a rather simple braggart, and Gelon, clever and well-read, have discovered a supposedly perfect opportunity to live out their passion for tragedy. The approximately 7,000 Athenians who were captured after the decisive battle were herded together by the victorious Syracuse people in a disused quarry so that they would starve and die of thirst there.
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The victors, severely traumatized by their own losses, take cruel revenge – as far as the historical framework is concerned. Lampo and Gelon profit from this outrageous war crime by offering the perishing food in exchange for verses: Anyone who knows a few words of Euripides gets water and cheese; If it’s from “Medea”, there’s even a handful of olives on the side.
Ferdia Lennons Roman begins with a monstrosity presented by Lampo in a naive, conversational tone, a cynical enjoyment of life and death: “Many people come forward, but when the time comes, they get confused and get stuck and complain about headaches and thirst, or they simply collapse , so we only ever hear a single line. … A bluffer begins a scene where Achilles woos Medea, and even I know that’s nonsense. Medea was far ahead of Achilles. She was in a relationship with Jason.” But there are prisoners of war who are good at writing and even talented at acting. The friends are seized by ambition: a theater should be built in the quarry, at least for one day Athenian culture should triumph in the middle of enemy territory.
Cultural Local Sensation
On the one hand, “Glorious Deeds” tells the story of how an inhumane pastime becomes one obsession and then becomes a local cultural sensation. But the actual story takes place inside the protagonists: the work on the production gives the poor, doomed Athenians back a bit of dignity and hope; At the same time, the two amateur directors experience first-hand the humanizing power of stage art. In the terrible fate of Medea, who kills her own children in revenge against Jason, Gelon relives the loss of his own family. The suffering of the “Troean women” after the defeat reflects the grief over the dead that Syracuse and Athenians, victors and vanquished alike feel.
Lennon narrowly misses a cliched celebration of the reconciling power of art; especially since he also includes Syracuse children, some of whom were severely traumatized by the war, in the production. Instead of catharsis there is plenty of catastrophe, but in the end it is not quite as dark as in Greek tragedies.
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The charm of the action-packed novel lies in the boldness and ease with which Lennon evokes the everyday world of antiquity. The two theater friends talk like boys in Dublin pubs; and her rivalries with snooty “aristos” of rich origins also have nothing distant or strange about them. At the same time, wine and other things are quite naturally sacrificed to the usual merciless gods, slave girls are groped and all sorts of skulls are carved without much fuss. There is a lot of cruelty in this story, but also a lot of love, friendship and humanity.
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There are already enough parallels to today in the descriptions of the Peloponnesian War. The question arises as to what the much-praised progress of humanity actually means. The fact that the ancient tragedies with all their cruelty still touch our hearts today, just as they did the people of Athens and Syracuse back then, does not exactly speak for our present.
At the end of the novel, Lennon lets the master himself appear – Euripides says that he “was eternally in love with misfortune and considered the world a damaged place that could only be healed through stories.”
Ferdia Lennon: “Glorious Deeds”. Translated from English by Thomas Überhoff. Rowohlt, 336 pages, 25 euros.
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In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is necessary, as the providers of the embedded content require this consent as third party providers [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (revocable at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can revoke your consent at any time using the switch and privacy at the bottom of the page.
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