Nuclear throne together cwep8/8/2023 Only a few dozen of the Greek tragedies remain, among them works by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. A facsimile of Carson’s own personal playbook, “H of H” is a performance of thought, one that speaks not only to the heroic past but to the tragic present. A cross between a dramaturge’s dream journal and a madman’s diary, it features Carson’s transformed version of the Euripides play, rendered in handwritten lines and blocky paragraphs of pasted word-processor text, alongside original illustrations: marked-up maps, smears of blood-red paint, haunting sketches of human figures and tortured faces, pencil and eraser stains that resemble heaps of ash, plus the occasional glacier and lion. Like Herakles, Carson gets away with everything in this strange and surprisingly timely book. That’s how Euripides told the story in “Herakles,” which was first performed some twenty-four hundred years ago and which has recently been reimagined by the poet Anne Carson, in “H of H Playbook.” Many people thought that his labors were punishment for his crimes, feats of strength by which the fallen hero could propitiate the gods others claimed the labors preceded the massacre, suggesting that violence always begets violence. Neither the children’s film nor any of the other pop-culture depictions of Herakles mentions what he was famous for among the ancient Greeks: murdering his wife, Megara, a Theban princess, and their sons.Īlmost everyone believed that the gods made Herakles kill his family, but exactly when he did so was the subject of some disagreement. Olympus beside Zeus-who, in the myth, fathered Herakles with a mortal, Alcmene, the wife of a Theban general, Amphitryon-seems like a mashup of “Survivor” and “American Idol.” “Person of the week in every Greek opinion poll,” Disney’s Motown-style muses sing, capturing the contemporary image of the mythical figure. In the cartoon version of the tale, from 1997, Hercules’ hardscrabble climb from the lowly farms outside Thebes where he was raised to his rightful place atop Mt. Those dozen labors have inspired countless playwrights, poets, and philosophers throughout the centuries, not to mention Walt Disney Pictures. Yet Herakles, often called by his Roman name, Hercules, is known for everything else: slaying the man-eating birds of the Stymphalian marsh, the multiheaded Lernaean Hydra, and the Nemean lion, with its Kevlar-strength fur capturing the wild Erymanthian boar, the golden-antlered deer of Artemis, and the Minotaur’s father stealing the girdle of Hippolyta, the golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides, the flesh-eating mares of Diomedes, and the red cattle of the giant Geryon mucking the Augean stables in a single day and kidnapping the three-headed dog Cerberus from Hades. Murdering her children is all she would ever be known for-ask Medea.
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