Despite its main title, this collection isn’t actually about ‘everything’, in the way that Douglas Adams’s Life, the Universe and Everything (the third volume of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) claimed to be. It’s the subtitle that says it all – well, almost everything.
Joyce’s modernist masterpiece was first published in Paris in 1922, the author by then well removed from his native Ireland. I’m a Classicist (trained in ancient Greek and Latin languages and Greek and Roman culture) and a specialist ancient Greek historian and archaeologist.
Joyce’s Ulysses occupies a very special, indeed unique place in what’s now routinely – and centrally – labelled ‘Classical reception’.(Ulysses is the Latin near-transliteration of Greek Oulixes, an alternative to Odysseus.) It’s a famously ‘difficult’ text, not so much in its underlying and structuring leitmotif – a transposition in every sense of the original Homeric epic hero Odysseus’ 10-year nostos, return journey, from Troy to Ithaca, into a single day in the life of a very un-epic ‘ordinary’ Dubliner of Jewish ancestry, Leopold Bloom – as in its multilingual linguistic expression and multiplex cultural allusion and allusiveness.
Last year my University’s Press (Cambridge) published a centenary facsimile edition of the 1922 original – but in a modestly priced, bumper edition, afforced with helpful explanatory footnotes. For this is a text that, like my own source texts from Antiquity, from Aeschylus to Zosimus, demands as well as repays annotation. A footnoted ‘edition’ is one way to access Ulysses for the first time, or anew. Another is by way of the collection I’ve selected here. Like all collections, it’s uneven both in treatment and insight, but it has several singular merits.
The Table of Contents by itself reveals just how closely Joyce’s version can be mapped onto the Greek original via its ‘episodes’ named after principal ancient characters – from Telemachus (Odysseus’ only son) to Penelope (his only wife – though his ‘dalliance’ with the divine Calypso did occupy a staggering seven of those ten years of, er, return). Another bonus is that the volume is kickstarted by foremost Dublin-based Irish Classicist, John Dillon. And it is tailended (pun intended) by Marina Carr’s brilliant envisioning of Molly Bloom’s riposte to Joyce for betraying her innermost bedroom secrets.
‘Homer’ in the subtitle is slightly cheeky: yes, there is a snatch – a most amusing snatch – from Book 8 of Homer’s Odyssey (the tale of war god Ares being literally ensnared by craftsman god Hephaistus having adulterous sex with his sex-goddess wife Aphrodite), but the unifying theme of the beautifully produced book’s 14 sections, divided according to deity or divinities, is provided by what are called Homeric Hymns, none of which has been believed since ancient times to be actually by Homer (whoever he might have been…).
Besides the 27 (almost all the extant) Homeric Hymns, included here also are the Hymns of Callimachus (3rd century BCE), the Orphic Hymns, and the Hymns of Proclus (5th CE). Greek humnoi were generically sacred songs, more specifically metrical poems composed and performed publicly and communally in praise of gods or heroes, sometimes if rarely mortals.
By Proclus’ day the official religion of the entire Roman world, whether governed from Constantinople or Rome, was a form – Orthodox, Catholic – of Christianity, yet he, like all the other mostly anonymous composers in this volume, was not a Christian but, philosophically speaking, a neoplatonist. By no means all Professor Powell’s composers sang from the same hymn sheet. That’s a large part of this book’s charm.
Take the section devoted to Aphrodite. She, besides her offstage starring role in the Odyssey, was deemed worthy of three Homeric Hymns, an Orphic Hymn (Orphics stood apart from the ancient Greek mainstream in eschewing animal blood-sacrifice), and two Hymns by Proclus: one to as it were universal Aphrodite, the other to an Aphrodite local to what is southwest Turkey today.
Not the least attractive feature of this collection are its 35 illustrations, all in colour; figure 20, for instance, shows a delightful scene,from a white-ground, clay drinking cup made in Athens c. 460 BCE and found on Rhodes, of Aphrodite riding a swan.
My final choice – last but by no means least – is an exhibition catalogue, of an exhibition currently on at Cambridge’s major university museum, the Fitzwilliam (founded 1816).
Besides the organising co-curators and co-editors (Dr Avery is Keeper of Applied Arts at the Fitz, Dr Richards a historian of law, empire and the African diaspora at the LSE), no fewer than 28 colleagues and experts (their Biographies and the co-editors’ Acknowledgements occupy 8 densely printed pages) have contributed to this splendidly produced and brilliantly illustrated volume.
When it was announced that Cambridge University would be conducting a full-on investigation of the extent to which both university-level institutions (such as the Fitz) and constituent colleges had benefited historically from exploiting the labour of enslaved African persons, groans went up both inside and outside the University community.
This exhibition and its catalogue are a robust response to such criticism. For though there is, of course, an inevitable degree of navel-gazing involved, there is also an even greater degree of necessary soul-searching at stake. The eponymous Richard 7th Viscount Fitzwilliam, a student at Trinity Hall, without question profited personally and hugely from the African slave trade. A fortiori so did the University and the Museum that his legacy enabled.
To focus academic resources on the explication of the full implications of that legacy was a no-brainer. To do so as the co-curators have done, involving multiple contributions from contemporary artists of Black African heritage, is meritorious in the extreme. It’s invidious to single out any one exhibit, but with some trepidation I do so here: the so-called ‘De Catharina’ plantation-bell cast originally in 1772, for which Dr Avery has contributed the Catalogue entry.
This is if I may so put it a classic illustration of how far the study of slavery has recently been advanced, and of how intensely and disturbingly reinterpretation may cause, indeed require, moral re-evaluation of seemingly innocuous artefacts.
The ancient city of Thebes in central Greece was both of major historical interest and significance in its own time and has influenced our ways of behaving and thinking to this day.
A pioneer of federalism and of major military developments that included a crack regiment of adult male lovers, Thebes was briefly the top dog in all of mainland Greece until the city was destroyed on the orders of Alexander the Great.
Thebes's genius for producing memorable myths was exploited and appropriated first by Athenian tragic dramatists of the top rank and then by Sigmund Freud, making Oedipus and his daughter Antigone, among others, household names. My book aims to give Thebes the oxygen of publicity more usually accorded to Sparta, Athens, and Alexander.
