GREEK WITH CONSEQUENCE
Oliver Taplin, Professor,
Magdalen College, Oxford University, UK
"The Lasting Significance of Ancient Greek Tragedy in the Modern World"

Ancient Greek poetry keeps on inspiring contemporary poetry in ever-changing renewals, from Tony Harrison to Derek Walcott, for example. And this is no less true in other modern languages than it is in anglophone cultures. My phrase "Greek with consequence" is from the 1995 Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney (who once told me how greatly he regretted that he could not learn Greek at school). More and more allusions _ or "intertexts" _ have been infiltrating his poetry, and in Seeing Things (1990) there is a wonderful release of the genius of the Odyssey from its bottle. You remember how Penelope tests and tricks her long-lost husband by speaking as if their marriage bed has been dismantled. In the "Lustral Sonnet" Heaney has been told "to saw up the old red-frame, since the stair/ is much too narrow for it". But he just can't bring himself to do it: "A bad action/ so Greek with consequence, so dangerous". My subject this evening is the consequences of Greek tragedy.

In Heaney's new volume The Spirit Level (1996) a central sequence of five poems is called "Mycenae Lookout", and they take as their starting point another centrally potent moment in Greek literature, one that has been called the best opening to a play before Hamlet 2000 years later. The Watchman on the roof of the palace of Agamemnon is looking out for the beacon fire that will signal the fall of Troy: that's the beginning of the Oresteia trilogy of Aeschylus, first performed in Athens in 458 B.C. The first poem of Heaney's sequence is spoken in the voice of the Watchman, the voice of a man who recognises civil war for what it is, but is in a quandary how to speak out. It ends:
 

The texture of Heaney's poem, its feeling for the pain of articulate men caught up in bad times, is incalculably enriched by the Greek intertext. Ancient tragedy here refreshes new poetry.

The Oresteia keeps on being metamorphosed: from Eugene O'Neill's Mourning becomes Electra to Theo Angellopoulos' film jQ Qiaso", The Travelling Plays, to Christa Wolff's Cassandra to H‚lŠne Cixons' La Ville Parjure. (Even to Thomas Berger's recent novel Orrie's Song, with its characters Angie Mencken (Agamemnon his wife, Esther, daughter Ellie, girlfriend Cassie and so forth.) The Oresteia keeps on being adapted, or perhaps I should say it keeps on adapting.

And it lives on in performance, in the theatre as well. Major directors who have undertaken the Oresteia range from Max Reinhardt to Jean-Louis Barrault, Karolos Konn, Tyrone Guthrie, Tadashi Suzuki, Luca Roneoni, Peter Hall, Peter Stein and Ariane Mnoushkine. At the end I shall show some slides to give some idea of what this rich variety means in terms of theatrical and visible reality, as captured in photographs.

In recent years audiences at the world's major festivals have had the chance to see, for example, Peter Sellars' Persians in American; Yukio Ninagawa's Medea in Japanese; Andrei Serban's Ancient Trilogy, in Greek, Latin and Romanian as well as Ariane Mnoushkine's Les Atrides in French and Peter Stein's Oresteia in its Russian version. But also every year there are dozens of lesser productions of Greek tragedy, or at least arising from Greek tragedy in East and Western Europe, North America, Japan and elsewhere.

The phenomenon of Greek tragedy on the modern stage is not only, of course, a matter of the celebrated directors, the performing elephants of the festival circuit. Within the last year or two in London, for example, as well as the Oedipus plays by the pachyderm godfather, Sir Peter Hall, we have seen the medium-sized production of Medea which won Diana Rigg an Emmy off Broadway, and the Studio scale Phoenician Women, directed by Katie Mitchell, one of the most promising young directors of the British theatre. I think it must be true to say that there have been more productions of Greek tragedy in the 1980's, and already in the 1990's, than in any other decade since the end of antiquity.

So why? The fundamental answer has to be that Athenian tragedy of the fifth century B.C. is one of those achievements of human creativity that is so rich, so deep that it can be infinitely experienced afresh; that every age finds its own preoccupations explored in it, yet in a form that is not narrowly specific to the present.

What, then, are the aspects that the last twenty years of the twentieth century have been finding particularly telling? I have divided my very brief, rough and partial answers into two categories: theatre and ideas.

On the theatrical side, to start with, there is the chorus, an essential element of theatre for the Greeks, but regarded as an awkward encumbrance by most stages of modern theatre. Our contemporary theatre, however, has often welcomed this opportunity for physical ensemble work, and for the expressive opportunities added by dance, music and song. And now that a swiftly forward-moving plot is no longer imperative, there is new space for intercutting, for holding frames, and for looking at things in different ways, and from different angles.

Furthermore, the presence of the chorus brings home that great crisis and tragic catastrophes are bound to be communal events as well as personal. It is the grand individuals who actually enact and suffer them, but there are others, less exalted, anonymous, who look on, observe and survive. And it is they _ the chorus _ who try to make sense of the terrors that they have witnessed. (John Gould has recently published an excellent essay on this.)

Just as the chorus has gone from seeming to be a tedious relic to being seen as a challenge with great possibilities, so too the mask has moved from being thought of as a primitive convention to presenting a suggestive resource. Many modern directors are interested in mask work, and in the new kinds of acting and of body-language that the mask can release. When theatre is concerned to bring out its differences from the cinema, and even more from television, with their emphases on the close-up, the naturalistic, minute expression loses its centrality.

Even productions that don't use actual masks often use mask-like make up or facial control. The denial of facial expression does diminish the possibilities of psychological detail _ so much of the way that we read people's minds is through fleeting facial expressions. But the mask and related acting-techniques shift attention from this dimension to a more social and interactional view of the self. In this the individual is primarily defined through roles and relationships _ within the family, within power-structures, the society as a whole. This is all in tune with the broad movement Ñ on the whole healthy, I think Ñ from the introverted psyche-centred concept of the self to a more social and relational view. We are not autonomous interiors, we are members of families, groups, and of the world.

This train of thought makes a transition to the contemporary attraction of Greek tragedy in terms of ideas and issues. "Man is a political animal", Aristotle is quoted as saying, though his words mean actually something closer to "human beings are a species that naturally live in socialised groups". In the strongly participatory, almost totalitarian, democracy of fifth-century Athens, the question of the place of the individual, of attention-seeking and of refusal to conform are all very much live issues _ and the same is true now, in a different way, mutatis mutandis, to use a useful Latin phrase, meaning something like "well, of course you have got to make adaptations and allowances for any relevant factors which have relevantly changed from the time and/or place with which the comparison is being made". Society, the polis, is not perceived as the impersonal, alien machine that it was perhaps in the middle part of this century. We are closer to Athens in that we, the citizens, realise that we are our society _ however little we can change it by ourselves, we cannot separate ourselves out from it.

For issues of the individual and society you might think of Sophocles' Antigone, or in a different way of Euripides' Bacchae; for questions about the individual and the family of, say, Hippolytus or Electra; for the individual and war, Ajax or Trojan Women. And then there are issues that centre on anger and on vengeance _ the Oresteia or Medea, for example. Anger and vengefulness are forces that should not be underestimated, which our laws and ethics cannot abolish, and cannot always contain. Then there is mortality and how to face it _ we certainly can't abolish that _ and bereavement and how to live with that fact of life. And there is the whole unfairness and meaninglessness of human suffering, and its unpredictability. It is no coincidence, I think, that Greek tragedy has returned so powerfully to the centre-stage in an era when the comforts and explanations of Christianity are losing their predominance. It seems ever harder to believe that a loving, beneficent god has made such a sorry disaster of humanity. Given, unflinching confrontations with the apparent anarchy of suffering, like Sophocles' Oedipus or Euripides' Heracles, offer not redemption, but a sense of endurability, of keeping your head up. (I may, I realise, be making Greek tragedy sound more uniformly grim than it actually is _ this is something that I shall return to.)

And, not least, there are the issues of gender _ hardly a subject without interest in our times. It seems a strange paradox that the world of Athens, where women were treated so repressively, in a manner closer to Islam than to the modern West, _ that Athens should have produced such extraordinary dramatisations of women, and in such variety. They are, variously, articulate, determined, powerful, vindictive, virtuous ... Clytemnestra, Deianeira, Antigone, Electra, Alcestis, Medea, Iphigineia, Hecuba ... they must make, between them, as strong and fascinating a team of femmes, more or less fatales, as any comparable collection in the history of human story-telling.

The speech of Apollo in the Oresteia, claiming that the mother is not really a parent, but merely an incubator for the man's seed _ "the mounter, the male's the only true parent ... the womb of the woman's a convenient transit" _ the shocking bluntness of the speech is still electrifying; and at the Tony Harrison version of it at the National Theatre it provoked spontaneous hissing from at least part of the audience. And Medea. I have not yet had the opportunity to gather the data (though I hope to do so before long), but I suspect that Medea, during the last 10 or 12 years, has been the Greek tragedy most frequently staged in new productions. Not only is there the proto-feminist material in the first half of the play, but the issues of infidelity and of the use of the children in the battle between estranged parents, and the exploration of the blurring of a clear distinction between cold-blooded and hot-blooded revenge _ all those are horribly modern, mutatis mutandis.

Mutatis mutandis is, I guess, a tag that could be applied to Darwinian genetic evolution. The genetic transmission has to adapt in order to survive and flourish. An unrefreshed gene-pool becomes stagnant and eventually dies out. If Greek tragedy had less capacity for change Ñ or if the only kind of production were to become museum-piece reconstructions Ñ then it would die out. Instead, rather like some species of bird that has adapted in such a way as to break out from a localised habitat and multiply more widely (as has the stock dove, I gather), so ancient Greek tragedy has broken out of the limited, conservative world of the European Classical education, at its strongest in the mid-nineteenth century, to colonise a world theatre in our times.

The history of the genre has been a long and varied one. After all, tragedy was all but extinct in Western Europe between say 400 and 1400 A.D. _ learned men knew dimly of its previous existence but could not read, let alone see, any. It was scarcely known even in the Byzantine world in the Greek eastern Mediterranean. The first proper performances of modern times was on 3 March 1585 when Sophocles' Oedipus (in Italian) was put on in Palladio's superb new Teatro Olimpico at Vicenza. Various kinds of adaptation, which now seem to us pretty distant from ancient Greece, were made over the next two centuries by, for example, Monteverdi, Racine and Dryden. And eventually a great infusion of new life flowed into ancient Greek through what we now roughly label "the Romantic Movement".

There is still much work to do on this and to take the story through the nineteenth century. The great century of classical education and of adulation of the ancient world was not, in fact, at all a golden age for Greek tragedy in theatrical performance. Our disturbed twentieth century, with all its atrocities and insecurities, its modernism, postmodernism and fragmentation, has, however paradoxically, proven the treat era for the renewal of ancient Greek theatre.

I am going to end by giving you some idea of the photographic record of modern productions of Aeschylus' Oresteia, and among these pictures from the last 20 years not unsurprisingly predominate. Since these slides are simply my own private collection, you will gain some idea of what a vast and fascinating body of pictorial evidence must exist for potential research.

There has been a very interesting and contemporary new monograph on the theatrical reception of the Oresteia. This is Die Orestee der Aeschylos auf der modernen Bhne by Anton Biert of the University of Leipzig, published in November 1996. It is mainly about five productions: Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1960 and in later metamorphoses; Luca Ronconi's of 1970; Peter Stein's of 1980, revived in 1994; Ariane Mnoushkine's of 1990-3; and a weird-sounding 1995 subversive version by Romeo Castelluci. Bierl's subtitle is Theoretische Konzeptionen und ihre szenische Realisierung, and his work has a strongly theoretical basis. His purpose is to relate these productions to the political, philosophical, academic and theatre-theoretical ideas that they grow out of and reflect. There is little on theatre practice, or on the design, costumes, music, choreography, lighting, spatial settings, use of crowds Ñ in a word on the staging Ñ of these productions. This is reflected by the virtual absence of pictorial material.

I shall, then, go rather to the other extreme by emphasising these aspects in going through my slides. I shall also try to show how you can tell surprisingly much from photographs, even when they are without other kinds of documentation.

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But I am going to turn back now to a particularly important _ and little known _ chapter in the genetic and generic adaptation of Athenian tragedy. That is the very first: the spread of tragedy out from Athens to the rest of the Greek world _ and hence in due course to the Roman world. Tragedy, as we know it, was an especially Athenian achievement, in fact an almost exclusively Athenian achievement. Much of the best recent scholarship has been precisely on how tragedy is the product of the institutions, political systems, and social and religious mentalities of fifth-century Athens. It was not originally Greek tragedy at all, but Athenian tragedy, composed by Athenians and performed by Athenians for Athenian audiences at the Great Festival of Dionysus at Athens, which was the largest civic gathering of each year.

Yet, despite this, it did spread and did become Greek tragedy. And, what is more, it spread to cities and societies which were politically and ideologically quite from Athens, quite often actually hostile (it even spread eventually to Sparta). I find this an extremely interesting example of the capacity of art and culture to cross political and military boundaries Ñ an important, neglected Ñ and somewhat heartening Ñ subject. And I believe that, with Athenian tragedy, this happened more widely, and earlier, and more readily than has been supposed. Why? What did non-Athenians see in tragedy? If we could answer that question fully, we would, I suspect, have decoded some of its genetic secrets.

There is no doubt that by 300 B.C. _ a hundred years after the deaths of Euripides and Sophocles _ tragedy had diffused throughout the whole wide-spread Greek world. From Marseilles to Sebastapol, every city with any cultural pretensions had built a theatre and was reflecting theatre in art. (In fact about 240 B.C. tragedy had even been translated into Roman, or Latin, the primitive Italic language of that upwardly mobile township.) but I don't think it is difficult to show that this spread was well under way before 350 B.C. There is already enough evidence of theatres, of travelling players, star actors (many not Athenian) and of big spending on theatre by, for example, Dionysius of Syracuse or Philip of Macedon. And Plato is already complaining about tragedy as a harmful, highly popular danger well beyond Athens.

I am inclined to believe, taking further a suggestion of Pat Easterling, that there are internal indications in many of the plays of an awareness that they might potentially be performed beyond Athens. I think I can find pointers not only to Sicily, Southern Italy and Macedon, but also to Thessaly, Corinth, Argos and even Boeotia, politically very alienated from Athens. But leaving this approach aside as too detailed and too speculative for now, there is external evidence for the activity of the playwrights themselves outside Athens, already in the fifth century. The best known story tells how Athenian prisoners in the stone-quarries of Syracuse, after the disastrous Sicilian Expedition of 415-413, won their release by teaching Euripides to their captors. But over fifty years earlier than this, there is good evidence of Aeschylus being active in Sicily, and even of his dying there in 456 (you may remember the dim Sicilian eagle that dropped a tortoise on his bald head). It seems that he even composed a play called The Women of Aitnai to celebrate the new City of Aitnai (present-day Catania) which was founded in the 470's by Hieron, the powerful ruler of Syracuse, who no doubt bank-rolled the event in style.

The kings of Macedon also paid for high Greek culture. Euripides was not impervious to this, and for King Archelaos he wrote a play, Archelaos, telling how his mythical ancestor wandered from Argos, and eventually founded a city at Aigai (now known as Vergina). But for this to have happened at all, tragedy must already have significantly infiltrated into remote Macedonia.

Aitnaiai and Archelaos both told of the mythological foundation of cities; and this might be suggestive. Many Greek tragedies include one or more aetiologies, that is, just-so stories which explain the mythological origins of a name or landmark or custom, or often of a religious cult. To us these may seem rather intrusive and tedious, but their frequency suggests that they offered some kind of satisfaction to audiences: they suggest, perhaps, that the story of mythical sufferings is somehow carried down into the present day; that, however terrible the agonies, they are worth memorialising, and worth re-enacting. There is a kind of comfort in an aition (not unlike the comfort from those miserable hermits and martyrs who have given their names to our present-day places). This is a very different kind of "redemption" or "saving grace" from eternal life or resurrection in the kingdom of heaven or anything of that sort, but it is something to set alongside the grim bleakness of many tragedies. To explore this idea further, I turn to another, I think important, kind of evidence for the spread of Athenian tragedy.

In the fourth century B.C., the Greeks of Southern Italy and Sicily went in for decorating their own pottery, following the red-figure style and technique of fifth-century Athens. We have about 20,000 of these pots, many _ about half _ are from the area of Apulia, and especially from the big and wealthy city of Taras (Tarento) which is on the high instep of the boot of Italy. (Taras was, like Syracuse, a Doric-speaking city on bad political terms with Athens.) While they date from between c. 440 and 300, the period of greatest production was probably, say, 360-330. Aesthetically these painting seem brash and crowded and oversized, compared with the restrained and poised paintings from Athens Ñ they are the product of the USA of Classical Greece. But they are very interesting in their own way. Furthermore many hundreds, thousands in fact, have been newly published only in the last 25 years. These accessions are a mixed blessing because they have nearly all been illegally excavated and exported from Italy _ probably under Mafia organisation, and certainly not without the involvement of the big London auction houses. This means that their archaeological context, and all that that could tell us, is irremediably lost.

Many of these vases, especially of the grander kind, which were painted not for practical use but for putting in tombs, many show mythological stories, of the kind that are dramatised in the tragedies. The relation between these paintings and the actual plays has been much disputed by scholars. But for now, I ask you to believe me that many of them are, in fact, demonstrably related to tragedy. They are, that is, inspired by or informed by tragedy, in many cases by an identifiable tragedy. They are not illustrations of the plays, but, I am firmly convinced, the viewer of the paintings has his or her appreciation enhanced by knowing a particular tragedy. Surveying them as a whole, it is striking how few are related to Sophocles. More are related to the archaic Aeschylus, above all, interestingly, to his Oresteia. It is, however, notable that while we have many vase-paintings which are related, more or less closely, to the tomb-scene in Choephori and to the omphalos-scene in Eumenides, there is not one that is clearly related to Agamemnon. But by far the most popular is Euripides, the "most tragic" as Aristotle called him. This fits with other evidence that from very early on Euripides was the most popular playwright for reperformance. Which plays especially? There are vases related to Medea, for example, and Alcestis and Hippolytus; but by far the most popular is a play we do not have, his Telephus, a relatively early play that is also a favourite for parody by Aristophanes. This is a reminder that not only do we not have all the output of the great three tragedians, we don't necessarily even have their most popular or their best. Telephus told how the wounded king Telephus from Asia Minor travelled to Greece and was eventually cured. The next most popular play on the vases is Andromeda, a play from what is sometimes called Euripides' "romance period" between 414 and 410 B.C. The princess Andromeda was exposed on a rock to be devoured by a sea-monster, but fortunately Perseus came flying along on Pegasus in the nick of time, killed the monster, and lived happily ever after with the beautiful Andromeda.

The next most popular play is from the same period, but it is one that does survive: Iphigeneia among the Taurians. Iphigeneia, rescued by Artemis from being sacrificed, is now her priestess at a temple in the remote Crimea, where she narrowly avoids having to sacrifice her own brother Orestes, before they eventually escape from the barbaric Taurians. This play has not been at all highly rated by twentieth-century taste; but those of you who recall Aristotle's Poetics well will know that Aristotle picks it, along with Sophocles' Oedipus, as a model tragedy.

Do these vases, then, give us any clues as to why tragedy was so popular outside Athens? Well, on the most immediate, visible level, I don't think we should scorn the sheer spectacular appeal of the plays and their theatricality. These were thrilling, shocking performances; and the vases revel in threatened murders, drawn swords, corpses, and desperate suppliants; and they also love the gruesome reports of the messenger speeches. They also dwell on the fine ornate costumes and on the special tragic footwear _ the kothornos. And they never tire of theatrical paraphernalia _ sceptres, swords, altars, Medea's chariot, Telephus' bandage, Iphigeneia's letter and temple key, and so forth.

On a more intellectual level, the choice of plays may be revealing. The first, crucial spread of tragedy was not, it seems, based entirely on the dark tragedies that dominate the modern canon _ Agamemnon, Oedipus, Trojan Women, Bacchae. There is perhaps, on the contrary, a tendency towards scenes of release, of the clearing of guilt, of families re-united, or escape from danger, of suffering cured, or at least of suffering crowned by a celebrated death. This suggests some kind of consolation extracted from tragedy. The awful waste and suffering of human life are worth witnessing, this seems to say; and out of them emerges something to celebrate, to sing about and to think about, and to record in art. And that tangle might have something to offer us. Our notions of salvage or salvation are persuasively imbued by the Judaeo-Christian tradition; but there may be other ways of finding consolation in this harsh world. And Greek tragedy may give us something to think on.

The vases are also suggestive for their only partial fit with the twentieth-century canon. This is something that scholars have already been thinking about; and there are also signs of a revaluation in the theatre. Plays which have recently been given significant fresh productions include Aeschylus' Persians, Sophocles' Ajax, and Euripides' Hecuba, Phoenissai and Ion.

One last thought. I have been trying to show how Greek tragedy is a genre that goes on being transmuted and revitalised; how, mutatis mutandis, it stays alive _ and even kicking. But I have also been trying to show that this is not merely a matter of every age reading itself back into the ancient Greeks, and of confirming, authorising its own prejudices. I strongly believe that, by working with this literature from a very different past, the present can learn, and can gain new insights, new ways of seeing things, which might not otherwise have been realised. The past is good not just for using but also for learning from. The consequences of Greek can enrich and enlighten us in the here and now.

* * * * * * *

 

I turn, lastly, to a play which is not canonical, or which at least has only quite recently been recognised for the great play that it is _ and a tragedy with a kind of rescue and happy ending: Sophocles' late play Philoctetes.

The Greek leaders against Troy have abandoned Philoctetes on the island of Lemnos, because a snake-bite in his foot has made him so malodorous and so horribly noisy in his howls of pain that he is unliveable-with. All he has is his supernatural bow which he was given by Heracles. Now, after nearly ten years, the Greeks have an oracle that Philotetes' bow is needed before Troy will fall. The pragmatic, unscrupulous Odysseus uses Neoptolemus, the inexperienced young son of Achilles, as a kind of decoy, since Philoctetes will never give up his hatred against his former colleagues who deserted him. Neoptolemus' better nature, however, turns against Odysseus' deviousness, and makes him firm friends with the old hero against the corrupt Greeks at Troy. Philoctetes will not change, even though an oracle promised him that at Troy his terrible wound will be healed. In the end Heracles, now a god, appears to them and directs them to Troy.

One can see the reasons why this tragedy used to be disregarded. It has no melodrama, no deaths, no family conflict, no gender interest _ and really only three characters: Philoctetes, Odysseus and Neoptolemus caught between them. Yet it's a marvellously subtle and fluid and unpredictable play, a fine modern-feeling study on a young person caught between the unscrupulousness needed for success and the integrity which leads to isolation from the world where it is all happening.

For English-speaking awareness it was the American man-of-letters Edmund Wilson, in his 1941 essay "The Wound and the Bow", who drew attention to the potency of those two symbols: the price of the wonderful bow is the repulsive wound. For Wilson the bow was the artist's creative gift, the wound was his depressive and anti-social temperament; the cure for him was the affection of beautiful young people, like Neoptolemus. (A broadly similar reading is incorporated into Timberlake Wertembaker's recent play, set in the art world, Three Birds alighting on a Field.)

In France there is a kind of unperformed drama by Andr‚ Gide, which ended with Philoctetes staying on Lemnos. In Germany the 1968 Philoktet of Heinz Mller has been often performed. In this hard-bitten sub-Marxist version Neoptolemus suddenly and cynically runs Philoctetes through the back. Tom Stoppard wrote a radio play in which a disaffected spy, Philo, has to be lured back from isolation to defeat Moscow Station. Even more bizarre is The Man in the Maze (1969) by Robert Silverberg, which is quite a cult-book for some science fiction devotees. In this gripping story the only way to deal with the aliens is to win back Dick Muller _ the trouble is that he has shut himself away in the deadly mazes of the planet Lemnos.

There have been occasional productions of Philoctetes on stage in Britain; but it may have been a kind of turning point when in 1988 Declan Donnellan picked it to be the first-ever Greek play put on by his brilliant company "Cheek by Jowl". I shall conclude with two further examples of the capacity of Philoctetes for the genetic adaptability which has turned this perhaps unlikely play into an inspiration for two of the greatest living poets, both Nobel prize winners.

In Derek Walcott's epic poem Omeros, published in 1990, there is a character called Philoctete, a poor fisherman on Walcott's Caribbean home-island of St. Lucia (source of "Five Isle" bananas, the best I think). If you have not read Omeros it's a bit late in the lecture for me to start telling you all about it. Read it. The best place to read it is on the beach. It may be flawed, but it is great.

The narrator-figure of Omeros is suffering from an internal wound from a past relationship which has gone wrong _ this festers with terrible self-loathing. Philoctete has a suppurating ulcer on his shin where he was pierced by a rusty anchor. He is eventually cured by the old wise-women sibyl of the island, Ma Kilman, who finds a strange plant whose seed was carried there by a bird from Africa. She bathes Philoctete in an infusion. Let me read you some brief snippets which may give you some idea of Walcott's extraordinary poetry:
 

That was published in 1990, and its importance is still now, I think, only slowly sinking in. It was also in that year that Seamus Heaney wrote his first and, so far as I know, only play, The Cure at Troy. This is a version of _ of course _ Sophocles' Philoctetes. It was written for the Field Day Theatre Company, and first performed in Derry on 1st October 1990. Most of the dialogue is pretty close to Sophocles, and is fairly plain. But the chorus's lyrics are vintage Heaney, an unmistakable voice. Near the end of the play, when Philoctetes and Neoptolemus are about to depart for home, only to be stopped by Heracles Ñ who in this version is a kind of voice from the Lemnian volcano Ñ at this point is an added lyric which has already become quite well-known. I shall read you four stanzas:
 

Heaney himself, with typical self-depreciation, said of this ending "too much pious uplift". But he has built in a realism that works in counterpoint with the uplift. The claim that once in a lifetime home and history can rhyme is a pious hope, but at the same time "hope" and "history" never can and never will rhyme. In any case, this is most surely "Greek with consequence".