The Sudden Legend

Recently I've been reading through the Ancient Greek plays (or rereading, as with Euripides' Bacchae); this includes Euripides' Trojan Women, Aristophanes' Lysistrata and Frogs, and Aeschylus' Oresteia Trilogy. All of these, as well as almost all other plays these Greeks wrote, dealt with myths and legends that even at their time in the 5th century B.C. were ancient. However, an event happened that was so monumental that it instantly attained the status of a play-worthy story: the Persian Wars, in which the Greek underdogs defeated the massive forces of Xerxes in humiliating defeat, particularly at one of the most stunning naval victories of all time, the Battle of Salamis. The Greek world was stunned by their triumph. In Athens, the poets and playwrights saw, aside from the greatness of it, what C. John Herington called "a perfect exemplification of the ancient law of hybris-ate; almost, one might dare to say, the incarnation of it, on the grandest conceivable scale." He wrote this in an introduction to Persians, written by Aeschylus only 7-8 years after Salamis, in which he fought. Persians tells of the aftermath of the battle from the view of defeated; it begins with the chorus of Persian regents at Susa, the capital, praising their empire and emperor. Atossa, the queen and Xerxes' mother enters and joins. However, a messenger arrives and delivers the bad news: the Persian navy has been destroyed and the army's morale has been struck a mortal blow, and in their retreat have nearly completely perished from hunger and the elements. There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth, they call forth the ghost of Darius, Xerxes' father and former emperor who had made Persia great, who explains all, and then Xerxes himself enters, completely miserable and humiliated. Of course, Aeschylus would have no way of knowing the inner workings of Susa on that day, or any day really, so the play is mostly imagination playing upon the common tragic theme of that time, overweening pride. Xerxes dared to overcome nature and the gods, and thought that by merely amassing a large force, he could defeat a supposedly inferior people; the gods thought differently.

Now, some two and a half millennia later, we face a similar situation. The disaster of September 11, 2001 has had global consequences, and yet, people in the arts are very wary on how to approach it. Granted, the Greeks who wrote about the Persian Wars were of the victors, so they didn't face the burden of calamity. As a slew of articles today in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch have shown, there is great unease in movies, television, even theatre and literature. Most works include 9/11 slant-wise, sometimes making it seem like we only see the World Trade Center in the distance through a window, or at other times making it the white elephant in the room that everyone feels to reverential about to mention. Some have dealt with it directly: there's United 93, a movie dramatizing the events on the plane and on the ground about the people who courageously but perilously sabotaged one of the missions; there is another movie, World Trade Center, whose title explains enough. I also should mention documentaries, like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Loose Change 9/11, which raised grave questions about practically everything. In music, the composer John Adams was commissioned to write a commemorative work, and produced On the Transmigration of Souls, which is shattering, and Steve Reich wrote a string quartet called WTC 9/11, which faced controversy recently for the album's cover art. This particular controversy is endemic of what seems to be the large problem, which is: what is proper? Where is the line between reverence and sacrilege, the line between mere truth and too much? 9/11 has become a sudden legend; the truth about the events of that day, as well as its cause and effect, have already entered the foggy realm between objective truth and metaphorical truth, as well as being corrupted by official lies and common prejudices. But unlike the joyous victory for the Greeks that were the Battle of Salamis and the Persian Wars, 9/11 was a disastrous defeat for the whole world, and we are all burdened with that question of what is proper, so until we figure out our stance, we can only tell the truth slant, if there remains any truth by the time we feel comfortable.