What the Greeks Foresaw about The Hunger Games

Katniss: what took her so long?

I wish I was as brave as Katniss Everdeen, the reluctant protagonist of Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games trilogy. As a mother of adolescent girls, I welcome this bow-wielding young adult female role model.  Next Friday is our long-awaited family date for the premiere of the second movie. I have already ordered the popcorn.

The significance of the Stoical Katniss, played with conviction by Jennifer Lawrence, cannot be over-estimated. Quest she-heroes just did not happen in the western imagination until Alice fell down the rabbit-hole to Wonderland in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel, followed by the more radical Dorothy in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). 

Dorothy: Quest Hero

Dorothy explicitly left Kansas to search for something other than a man to marry--her totemic pet dog. Baum supported Women’s Suffrage and his mother-in-law Matilda Joslyn Gage, a prominent feminist.   Yet both Alice and Dorothy were portrayed as pre-adolescent. A biological woman with a mission that had nothing to do with catching a man-for-babies took many more decades to appear.

None of this is my idea. It was in an incendiary 1985 lecture, entitled "What was Penelope unweaving?"  that American scholar Carolyn Heilbrun identified the absence of female quest heroes as preventing women from escaping the single narrative line in which they have been configured. Heilbrun showed how few narratives prepared women for entry into public life rather than the marriage market, kitchen or nursery. She identified Homer’s Penelope—static on Ithaca, bored and unfulfilled—as the figure who defines, by what she was not allowed to do, the dreadful plotline plight of womankind.

Iphigenia saves Two Big Strong Men

The ancient candidates for the status of female action- / quest-hero are few, but two exist and are both associated with the archer-goddess Artemis. One is the never-to-be-wed, intelligent and altruistic Iphigenia who in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris rescues her brother Orestes, his male chum, and the “holy grail” of the cult image of Artemis. The other is Saint Thecla, who (in by far the most exciting of the apocryphal apostolic Christian Acts) tames animals in the amphitheatre, heals the sick, and dies a virgin in her nineties, successfully evading gang-rape. 

Thecla Laughs off the Lions

Sadly, who now reads that obscure tragedy by Euripides, or Acts which never made the New Testament? Perhaps the patriarchal Byzantine monks who put the finishing touches to the selection of our Classical Curriculum strategically marginalized the Artemisian Iphigenia and Thecla.    

But it is in the company of the spirits of these ancient she-heroes that I will certainly be getting inspired by Katniss at Cheltenham Cineworld next Friday.

Aesop's Reformist Twigs v. Mussolini's Fasces

Aesop's Twig Fable Shows that Unity is Strength

A visit to the People’s History Museum in Manchester this week reminded me that, once upon a time, artistic representations of twig bundles were inspiring and wholesome.[i]  This was when illustrations of Aesop’s ancient Greek fable of the twig bundle appeared on early Trade Union banners.

Aesop's Fable the Workers' Centrepiece

The fable said that a father, worn out by the quarrels between his sons, asked them each in turn to break a tightly bound bundle of twigs. Each son failed. Then he asked them to break a single twig, a feat which they easily accomplished. The moral the father drew was that STRENGTH LIES IN UNITY.

When 19^th-century workers without legal rights banded together against their employers and the state legislation to form Trade Unions, Aesop was one of the few ancient authors most of them had met. His fables were used to teach elementary literacy. Integrating an illustration of the fable into a banner was visual shorthand for ‘Unity is Strength’ and widespread, for example in these details from the 1898 banner of the Watford branches of the Worker’s Union and the Ashton & Haydon miners’ union.

Mussolini's Fascist Twig Bundle (Left)

But in 1919, the quite different—Roman—twig bundle was appropriated by Benito Mussolini’s new Partito nazionale fascista. Ancient Roman magistrates called lictors had carried their ceremonial twig bundles (fasces), bound by red tapes and with an axe protruding, to symbolise state authority and the power to punish. They had inherited the fasces from the Etruscans; many non-Fascist nations such as the US subsequently borrowed the Roman fasces long before Mussolini arrived on the scene.

The Power to Punish: Roman Fasces

So the peacable, Aesopic twigs of the British unions, who were standing up against the state, were abandoned after World War I because of the antipathy felt by members of the Trade Union movement, uniting the workers of the world, to the racism and nationalism of Fascism.  Next time you see a twig-bundle in any political iconography, ancient or modern, ask yourself whether it is a reformist bundle, derived from Aesop’s Greek fable, or an authoritarian bundle whose ancestor was once borne by a Roman magistrate. 

Table where Tom Paine wrote Rights of Man, People's History Museum

---

[i] My mind was on organisations set up for self-improvement since I had been invited to address the venerable ManchesterLiterary and Philosophical Society, founded in 1781 and the oldest such group in Britain, on the question of whether Classics is inherently elitist. You can read more about this visit to Manchester on Henry Stead’s blog here.

How to Treat the Disabled in 2013 AD and 403 BC

Sophocles directs sympathy to the wounded Philoctetes

This week further chaos has struck the Department of Work and Pensions’ replacement of the Disability Living Allowance with the Personal Independence Payment (PIP—a euphemism some Whitehall spin artist was paid a salary from my taxes to think up). But PIP also requires the applicant to face the humiliation behind closed medical doors which passes as an assessment process.  The same ordeal is faced by disabled soldiers on incapacity benefit.

Although the decision about which applicant “deserves” help is still made by a “DWP Decision Maker,” the DWP has outsourced the actual assessment of the injured/ill to businesses, primarily one called ATOS, which claims on its website to have “extensive expertise in delivering healthcare solutions.”

Mark Dryden, denied incapacity benefit

They were presumably Delivering a Healthcare Solution to former Lance-Corporal Mark Dryden, who earlier this year had his incapacity benefit withdrawn by the DWP Decision Maker after assessment by an ATOS-hired doctor. Dryden lost one arm to a bomb in Iraq and has little function in the other. The doctor had the insensitivity to ask him if he was left or right-handed! Dryden has no index finger at all and yet was asked to pick up a one-pound coin.

Scroungers?

Nor is he alone: the Royal British Legion published figures at the end of May showing a scandalous 72 % RISE in the number of wounded war veterans denied benefits in the past year after an ATOS assessment.

Does this man look fit to work?

Two crucial texts give us complementary views on how the disabled were treated in classical Athens late in the fifth century, after more than two decades of war.  In his tragedy Philoctetes, Sophocles portrays in the most negative moral light a leader (Odysseus) who had no sympathy for the wounded archer Philoctetes, the ancient Mark Dryden, and dumped him alone on a desert island, screaming in pain.

On the other hand, in the 24^th speech of the legal adviser Lysias, a real, historical Athenian man on a state disability pension defends his entitlement to financial support of one obol a day. A personal enemy has challenged the entitlement, saying that he has been seen on horseback—the speaker reasonably asks if it is so surprising that a man in his condition occasionally uses this means of transport.  But his major argument is an appeal to the common sense of the jurors based on his actual physical appearance.

Athenian one-obol coin

Unlike our sick and disabled citizens' ordeals behind closed doors, this Athenian got to make his case publicly, with expert legal advice, in front of 500 democratically selected members of the Athenian Council.  We do not know whether he won his case, but we do know when, where and to whom he was allowed to make it, and it wasn’t a tactless rent-a-doc who has lost all contact with the real world working for a profit-making organisation.