How the ancient Furies escaped from the pages of Edith Hall’s library to cast a shadow across her life
The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
By Daisy DUNN Facing Down the Furies by Edith Hall (Yale, £18.99) is out on May 14
It is often said that Edith Hall is to Greece what Mary Beard is to Rome. Over a long career, each has made extraordinary contributions to classical scholarship: Hall in theatre, philosophy, ethnicity and education; Beard in the history and religion of the Roman Republic and early Empire. Both have raised the profile of a once beleaguered subject; neither shows the slightest sign of slowing down.
Hall, 65, is talking to me from the home in Cambridgeshire she shares with her husband, a journalist, and two daughters when they’re home from university. Next month will see the publication of her new book, Facing Down the Furies, in which she confronts the horror of suicide. Her maternal grandmother, great-grandfather and cousin all took their own lives, and there have been times when Hall has contemplated doing the same.
She was just a toddler when her grandmother Edith jumped to her death at the age of 72. Growing up, Hall found her mother reluctant to discuss her own mother, telling her only that she was named after her and was “just like her”. Silence, as Hall says, “makes the ghost or the Fury far more palpable… If you don’t face the ghosts, and talk to and about them, they will have their way.”
The Furies, also known as Erinyes, were the Greek goddesses of vengeance. In Aeschylus’s Oresteia, they hover over the house of Atreus until they’re appeased by the deaths of three family members. The concept of a family curse resonates with Hall’s understanding of the inheritance of suicidal tendencies down her own bloodline. My early impression that she is not only an expert in Greek drama, but almost an unwilling participant in it, deepens as our conversation develops.
Hall wrote her memoir quickly, “as if I was being taken over by a muse”, completing much of it in a month. No sooner had she finished, than she was diagnosed with a virulent type of breast cancer. Fortunately, it was caught early, and treated with radiotherapy. The experience has made her “more pleasure-grabbing”, though she remains “an obsessive worker”.
Hall is currently Professor of Classics at Durham, where she has been running research projects since 2022. Earlier in her career, she taught at Oxford, but the schedule proved unaccommodating: “I wasn’t going to ruin my relationship with my two little babies because of Oxford protocols.” Hall’s maternal instinct comes across strongly.
It was as a student at Oxford in the 1980s that Hall first encountered suicide outside her own family. She recalls vividly the day one of the tutors, Colin MacLeod, took his life on a railway line. The shock, when she was already battling depression in the run-up to her final exams, nearly tipped her over the edge.
Eerily, she had discovered that MacLeod’s tutor, Eduard Fraenkel, had also died by suicide. The idea of it as a kind of contagion shook her, and Hall collapsed in the street after realising she was about to step in front of a bus. “Fraenkel’s suicide probably played a big part in Colin MacLeod’s,” she says. “And MacLeod’s suicide nearly killed me.”
This autumn, she will publish a commentary and text of Agamemnon, the first play in the Oresteia, in which the Furies are on the warpath. The experience – and a determination, perhaps, to break the cycle and appease the Furies – has strengthened Hall’s resolve to live.
She still battles “very well-controlled” manic depression, to which she attributes her literary productivity, as well as “suicidal ideation”. “An image of a blade sinking into my forearms appears almost every time I reach for a knife to chop the evening’s vegetables,” reads an alarming line in her book. But picturing suicide and actually doing it, Hall has come to realise, are different things.
She hopes that her book will encourage us to talk about suicide and help those who have suffered a bereavement or contemplated the act themselves. Throughout, she turns to Greek tragedy for guidance. Playwrights, Hall explains, saw it as their duty to educate their audiences in morality. Suicide was not illegal in ancient Greece, but it was heavily frowned upon, so much so that victims’ bodies were often buried separately from the hand with which they had killed.
Of all the surviving plays, she believes Euripides’s Hercules Furens may offer the best advice on how to treat a suicidal crisis. In it, the eponymous hero recovers from a psychotic episode only to realise that he has killed his family. Other relatives, Theseus and Amphitryon, listen to him in his despair and ensure he’s not left unattended.
Hall has long been determined to bring ancient wisdom into the modern world. She is currently preparing to pilot an initiative for educating young offenders in classics, and often visits state schools to encourage the introduction of classical subjects as part of Advocating Classics Education (ACE). The campaign “is working slowly but surely”, though the northeast lags behind.
Not everyone approves of the mission to introduce Classical Civilisation and Ancient History to schools in place of Latin and Greek. Hall herself admits that she wouldn’t take on a PhD student who wasn’t prepared to learn the language if they didn’t know it already. But this isn’t about creating academics. Class Civ can be taught by teachers of other subjects, so doesn’t require the employment of extra staff. “Knowing a little about democratic Athens and the Roman Empire, being able to spot the top 10 statues, having a few bits of rhetoric… this should be compulsory,” Hall says. “It is in Denmark.”
She sympathises with efforts in the US to make classics “less white”. However, she feels that poor handling of the debate has perpetuated the myth in schools here that the subject is horribly elitist: “I hate the word ‘class’ [as in ‘Classics’],” she says, “but the answer is not for white people with tenured jobs at Ivy League universities to go virtue-signalling all over the place.”
Better, she says, to “excavate the thrilling progressive past of the subject and show it hasn’t always been elitist”. Hall did just that in her recent book, A People’s History of Classics, co-authored with Henry Stead, which charted the historical efforts of gardeners, cabin boys, fishermen, bakers and others to study the ancient world.
Hall’s first book, Inventing the Barbarian, examined xenophobia, particularly on the stage. Published in 1989, it propelled her into the media just as apartheid was crumbling in South Africa. Although Hall “never set out to be a public anything”, her fluency in discussing febrile terrain earned her many radio engagements, to the annoyance of some of her academic colleagues.
“I got so slagged off until at least 2000 as [broadcasting] was seen as a vulgarisation and absolutely deleterious to your career,” she tells me. “Mary [Beard] has done wonders. You have to hand it to that woman. She has made it respectable to be a public classicist and has managed to be regarded as probably the greatest expert on the Roman Empire alive as well as a great communicator.”
Yet Hall observes that while Beard was welcomed to TV as “this delicious, slightly batty-looking” expert, she was typecast in early meetings as a babe with brains. “With me, it was quite clear I was the girl with the big tits and long hair.” She recalls one producer referring to her as “the Greek professor who looks like a barmaid”.
“I don’t mind if I look like a barmaid,” she says now. “I like bright colours. I feel like Kat on EastEnders. But I was not going to do it.”
The dangers of this kind of public exposure, when so many women in the media are “fetishised and worse”, were brought home to Hall in 2004. Following an appearance on Radio 4’s In Our Time, her husband and the then wife of the programme’s host Melvyn Bragg were targeted with obscene letters.
“Some said that Melvyn and I were having this torrid affair, [that] the affair consisted… of him raping me very sadistically,” she recalls. “I had to go to the police.” The topic of the radio programme had been Homer’s Odyssey. If theatre feels like safer ground, it is perhaps because it is so familiar to Hall, whose own life often seems reflected in it. For all the tragedy she has endured, however, she speaks of having lived “a fantastic life”, though she remains conscious of human frailty.
“I’m 65, I’ve had cancer… I’ve only got three or four big books left in me,” she says. “I’m going to pick very carefully.” Her next will be an ecological reading of the Iliad. “I can’t tie myself to railings”, she says, “So this is my bit for my daughters’ generation.”
Revenge: Sargent’s Orestes Pursued by the Furies (1922); below, Edith Hall
