Welcome to the podcast “An Ancient Language for a Modern Soul. Poemi Conviviali by Giovanni Pascoli. Today we listen to two poems called “Ate and Mother”. They both belong to the section in Poemi Conviviali called “Poems of Ate”. The third one in this section is “The Courtesan”, which we discussed in episode 14 of this podcast. In Greek mythology, Ate is the goddess personifying recklessness, folly, and moral blindness, and this concept feature prominently in Greek tragedy, where characters make terrible mistakes when prone to this madness and are punished for them. My guest today is Doctor Akrivi Taousiani, who teaches Classics at King's College London. She's an expert on Greek tragedy, particularly on Sophocles, on aspects of theatricality and performance, political thought, and the evolution of morality. She's also a colleague of mine, and I'm very happy that she's here today as a guest of this podcast. The poem “Ate” is read by David Carter. The music is by Giovanni Tardini, who plays the celesta, while Arianna Mornico plays the harp. “Mother” is read by Ali Harmer, and the music and harp accompaniment are by Mark Harmer.

ELENA

So welcome Akrivi and thank you very much for being here today.

AKRIVI

Thank you so much and it's so great to be here with you.

ELENA

Fantastic. So today we will listen to two poems, the first called Ate and the second called Mother. These are two different stories, but what they have in common is the fact that the two protagonists, two men, make a fatal mistake, and this mistake has dire consequences for them. So this mistake stems not so much from a conscious decision on their part, but from recklessness, from blind folly. These two men are possessed by Ate. So before we listen to the first poem, I'd like to ask Akrivi to introduce us to Ate, a goddess personifying, as many Greek divinities do, a state of mind. Maybe we can start from the etymology of the word “ate”.

AKRIVI

Thank you again, Elena. It's so, it's really hard, I think to not have a tragedy without Ate. So I think it does make perfect sense to dwell into the linguistics of it to start with and then try and decode its meaning. So Ate does come from the verb “ateo”, which means to be reckless, to be foolhardy. And you will be very unsurprised to hear that it has a Proto-Indo European root, like most of, you know, ancient Greek and and Latin and obviously other sort of languages have. In this particular case, and you need to forgive me the pronunciation of this -it's the version that we can reconstruct- it reads something like “na-ha-ta”. So this  "ha” and the “ta” sort of bring together the sense of , first of all, he-te, so in Latin, “to go”, but with the negation of the “ha”, you get the “not going” or if you like, the being lost while you go. So a sense of yes, losing your way, right, not going, in that particular respect. So it's really, I think unsurprising that you find that in, I mean, I don't think I'm actually not exaggerating because I have, you know, I've looked up the instances of the word “ate”, in the tragic corpus and beyond. Unsurprisingly, all three tragedians are full of it. It is everywhere. And I'm, you know, I'm really excited to talk about Ate, you know, in the Oresteia in more detail.

ELENA

Excellent. So you said that Ate is pretty much everywhere. So in which Greek authors do we first find a mention of Ate?

AKRIVI

Again, I'm not going to make a guess, but I'm absolutely certain because obviously you have classical, you know, you're, I mean, you're an expert yourself, so you don't actually need me here. But yes, I'm not going to make you guess, but you absolutely know who it is, it’s Homer. So it is in Homer where we have the first instances of the word “ate”. And the first thing that I find striking is that you find “ate” and its variance twenty times in the Iliad and five in the Odyssey. And I hope that, you know, in the remaining of the talk, we can talk about why. But again, “ate” is everywhere. It's in lyric poetry. I mean, it is obviously in Hesiod, but then Archilocus, Teognis, Pindar, pretty much everywhere. Going down to Plutarch. I won't give you the whole list, but essentially it takes us to the Byzantine years and beyond. It does change its meaning. And in fact, I would say that you have a variety of meanings already in the tragedy, in tragedy, let alone in different genres. And this is another thing that I'm really interested in. And I'd like us to, you know, to try and decode what is the spectrum, right, of Ate. And I will focus on on tragedy. You have absolutely the blindness, like the moral blindness and the logical blindness. You can't see. Remember, they're not going, so the characters cannot go. They are stuck. They think they know where they're going and they don't. And then of course, Ate focuses as a or comes up as a precursor of the hybris. And hybris is where everything goes wrong because you make wrong decisions and everything goes bad so essentially, and there has to be some kind of a dramatic event that will bring catharsis and the order is restored. So Ate definitely has a meaning of a blindness of the mind and the soul. But it does, and again, I find that interesting even just in the Oresteia, but in tragedy as a whole- also features as an expression of destruction. So Ate is, yes, destruction. Arte is also a curse, which I think becomes very relevant if you know you're focusing, I mean, again, on all tragedies, but especially the Oresteia trilogy. And it is interesting to see how each author deals with ‘ate” in all these different variants of meaning, but blindness is the one that I would choose as the most defining one.

ELENA

Well, thank you, Akrivi for introducing us to Ate. Well, let us now listen to the first poem called Ate. This is the story of a warrior, Mecisteus of Gorgo, who has committed a crime and is forced to flee his city. I always say in this podcast that Pascoli never invents his stories and characters, but in this case he simply takes the name Mecisteus from the Iliad, where this name belongs to two Greek warriors but none of them though are from Gorgo. So in this case, Pascoli just picked a g Greek name and built a story from scratch, a story that very much reads like a Greek tragedy. And in particularly we are reminded of the Oresteia.  So, “Ate”.

ELENA

Scholars have said about this poem that there are echoes of Aeschilus, particularly the trilogy Oresteia devoted to Orestes. We know that Orestes was the son of Agamemnon, and Agamemnon was the king who took the Greek army to Troy. But in doing so, to do so, Agamemnon had to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. So Clytemnestra then kills Agamemnon upon his return, and then Orestes avenges his father Agamemnon by killing Clytemnestra. And obviously Orestes is very much under the spell of Ate. So Mecisteus finds himself in an anguished state of mind that reminds the reader of Orestes in Aeschilus's tragedies. Over to you, Akrivi.

AKRIVI

I I would certainly love to and thank you, Elena, because again, it is impossible to think about Ate and not think about the Oresteia and I can prove it to you with numbers, which I love. If we obviously, you know, Ate is not simply, doesn't simply, so when we talk about Ate, it's not just the appearance of the word  “ate”. But if you want to look at it, to look it up this way, you find that Aeschilus uses “ate” forty-nine times,  thirty of which come, you guess from the Oresteia, right? And he's, in fact, there is, in his corpus we find the highest concentration of the word “ate” and its variants. And I think it's really telling that Ate really dominates that trilogy. So I think it's wonderful that you're making this association. And I should say, I'm by no means an expert in Pascoli. So I'm really led completely, you know, by your expertise. And I I really relish the chance to to try and get to know him and to see, you know, his Oresteian roots. So going back to Ate and Orestes right and the trouble, the blindness of the soul. I would say that I want us to again to use that opportunity to look at Orestes, yes, as a troubled man, absolutely, but what kind of blindness are we talking about? Let's decode that meaning and if you want to follow me down that particular road. So Orestes obviously doesn't, you know, feature in person in the first part of the Oresteia, which is the Agamemnon, but Ate does, massively. So I think yes, if I do remember it correctly. It's I think just eighteen times or fifteen times that you find the word “ate” in the Agamemnon and Ate is all of these and it has all of these different meanings already there. The blindness, the destruction. Clytemnestra says, well Agamemnon deserved it, you know, deserved this “ate” and Cassandra predicts the “ate” The chorus is scared about the “ate” and of course the killing happens. And I I'm I'm very tempted to go off a tangent and say that, you know, in the major scenes you don't find the word “ate” on the carpet scene, which I find fascinating. Why on earth is no sense  of the doom, of the impending doom? You find it before and after, but to focus on Ate and and Orestes, yes, Agamemnon is full of it. So even before Orestes comes on stage, we have seen that the Ate has found him and the chorus despairs, says how are we, you know, how we're going to get out of this. And obviously in the Coephorae, which is the second part of the Oresteia, we get Orestes and he's there. And I think that's what really interests me like in a, in, you know, as a kind of academic interest. So yes, he's there to take revenge. But let's think about him in relation to Ate. How blind is he, if you want to look at it this way? So he has, and hear me out on this. So thank you. So he starts and he's very confident. He's a young man, comes in very confident. And he does say, oh, I am here, you know, I have arrived. I will avenge my father. But he also says, Apollo, really he's making me do it in the sense that you know, the gods are absolutely with me and he’s not just that they're with me. If I didn't do it, there will be all kinds of curses and diseases and ulcers. The whole description is is very biblical. If I didn't do it, right, I do want to do it. He’s sure of that's because “I’m grieving”. But also to top it all off, “I've been reduced to poverty by a pair of women, right? “Women meaning his mother and her lover. And you know, she finishes in a dark knot how we'll see how much of a woman that man is. And obviously not going into the genders of stereotypes here, but you see there's so many different motivations right behind his Ate. So he reminds me of a lot, and you will see why I'm making that parallel of another young man who is making a journey, which is Neoptolemus in the Philoctetes, who is my first love, I have to come out as a disclaimer. And Neoptolemus also a young man also well on a literal journey with Odysseus, saying Odysseus comes up and says, I know your moral, I know you're genius, you're brave, but you have to deceive. And he says, no, I'm not doing that, That's not me. But then Odysseus says you will get the cleos, the glory right if you do it. And he thinks, well, glory is good. Why don't I compromise myself for one day and do this? And what I find interesting in both cases is you're talking about or you're looking at two young men with a purpose who, to me, they're almost overcompensating. They're coming in and saying, you know, I am right, I am do this, I'm going to do this. But you can feel even in that confidence, that cockiness, that there is something disturbing, something that that doesn't agree, if you like, with their values, their morality, or else this is harder to to, I think, convey that, you know, totally must did say from the beginning, and this is not me. I'm not doing it. And of course he changed his mind. But even Orestes, which again I find fascinating, quite early in the play, it’s line 435, he says, oh, let me only take a life, then let me die, which is a very dramatic statement to make. What? Why die if this is, you know, if you're so convinced about the justice of what you're doing, why end your life on this? And you could say, yes, this is, this is caught up in the moment. It's an exaggeration. But we all know that we don't say things accidentally. There's always the meaning right behind that. And the meaning obviously becomes clear when, you know, you have the famous, I mean, you know, exchange between Orestes and Clytemnestra and his mother. When she has seen Aegistus dead, she's realised what has happened and Orestes say,s well, I will kill you, you will die. And she bares her breast to say you need you know, so, so pity to this breast that nursed you. And you know, this is the crux. This is a pivotal moment for Orestes. And he has this, you know what is called the the tragic aporia in a literal sense. What will I do? Which is exactly what Neoptolemus does when Philoctetes, who has been so nice to him and and wonderful, and he calls him my son and my child,  plead to him, take me, take me away from here. And Neoptolemus just can't, can't fool him anymore. He can't. So he says, ti draso, what, what, what shall I do? And you see that moment of, as I say, reckoning for both young characters and they they have similar they they have a similar journey. If you think about this, Neoptolemus is an easier one. There is obviously, you know, a a peripateia there lots of debates, but they all you know, Philoctetes is convinced they all go to Troy. Glory awaits, Orestes does kill his mother when Pilades asks,  Pilades, what shall I do? Should I spare my mother out of pity? And he says no, remember Apollo, remember what the god ordered and anger everyone but not the god and he does it. And this is obviously precisely the moment when the Furies come.

ELENA

I'm also glad that you brought up young men and mothers, because that also takes us to the other poem, which is a poem about a young man and his mother, and it's called “Mother”. And in this poem, the male protagonist, Glaucos, has offended his mother by slapping her, and her heart cannot withstand the pain this causes. And so the poem says: “and thus she had to die”. And when she dies, the demon that leads all Souls to the Underworld dips her three times into the river Lethe to make her forget the world and take her up to the sky, to the top of the world. So the reference here is, as you well know, is Plato, particularly from the dialogue Phaedo, where we see a cosmological theory of the earth and the pure sky above it, where all good souls ascend after death, something that we think may have influenced Christianity. But that is a story for another episode. So while the mother ascends to the sky, Glaucos is thrown deep into the Tartar, a pagan hell described both by Homer and Plato in the Phaedo. So in this description of the Tartar, there are also many echoes of Dante's Divine Comedy. Obviously it seems that the punishment for offending his mother for slapping her is extreme, but I seem to remember from my reading of Aeschylus, and now you're going to tell us about it, that the power of Ate is stronger for crimes committed against kin, as it is the case here.

AKRIVI

You. Are absolutely correct. There is, I don't think there is anything more worthy, if you like of punishment than any kind of hybris or any insult to to your family, to your oikioi, the philoi as you know, philos, yes, is your dear one and oikios is your own and oikos obviously is, is then the family. We know that there was a driving principle in the 5th century, hence in tragedies as well. It was helping your friends harming your enemies. You know, famous publication on that but you're absolutely right. Harming not just a philos, not just an oikios, but a mother really deserves, in the Greek psyche, the harshest of punishments. If you think and it, it was interesting to me to think about this that you have on the one hand, you have, what? I find it almost funny, to be honest. Euripides’ Alcestes, right, Alcestes where Amidus is dying. And you know, he's, he's expecting his, his mother, his, his parents to sacrifice themselves for him, as you do for your child. And his father says no, no, no, no. Life is too nice. I'm just, you do your thing, you can lose your life, it's fine. And only his wife, Alcestes comes in to take his place. So you have that end, which to be honest, it's quite unusual. I don't think Greek tragedy should be judged by that. Of course, I'm oversimplifying, but yes, it's a, it's  almost a comic interlude to what is a very established theme which you get in, again, in every single tragedy. I would say the most fundamental is obviously Oedipus and, you know, the perversion of that relationship and the absolute doom and disaster, the pollution, the miasma that he brings in the whole city of Thebes, but also another, another.. it's really, it's really, you know, it's really difficult to find the right word for it. A genealogy of crime towards family is very much part and parcel of the Oristeia. And you know, I'm talking about the curse of the House of Atreus. It's impossible, it's impossible to really understand any of the three plays without understanding the curse that runs through the family in enormous literal sense. And I can take you, I mean, I know obviously you, you know, you know these stories, but I think it's it's worth just thinking, taking, you know, a minute to run through the curse to understand what it means to be violent towards an oikios and what repercussions are brings right to the person, to the agent of the violence. You start with Tantalus, who is unbelievable how he thought, you know, that this would work out. I mean, of course, you know, these are stories that a Greek audience is very familiar with and there's a lot of scholarship as to, you know, whether tragedians came up with it. They, I don't believe that they did. I believe with some scholars that they were part. They were the history, as you know, mythology was history, right, for the ancient Greeks. So you have Tantalus, who is so clever that he wants to test the gods, and how he does it is by serving his own children to the gods. And only, you know, Demeter is preoccupied because she's lost Persephone. So she has the shoulder of Pelops. All the other gods understand it. They send, understandably, Tantalus to Hades. Pelops gets a beautiful ivory shoulder He survives. He's the only survivor of this atrocity. And then Pelops, he grows, he wants to get married. He finds a beautiful Ippodamia, but the father, enormous, doesn't want to let her go because again, there's oracles involved in losing power. So Pelops promises his bride, right? His bride first night to Myrtilus, who is the charioteer of her father, who loves her. And he says yes. He compromises the King's chariot. Pelops wins. He doesn't keep his promise. He pushes Myrtilus off a cliff. He dies, Myrtilus curses him right before he dies, so the second generation of a curse. Then you get Pelops’ sons, who are Thyestes and Atreus. They fight with each other in the usual again tragic trope of brothers that won't rule they and and as an aside, Thyestes sleeps with Atreus’ wife. So Atreus as an act of vengeance also kills Thyestes' children and serves them to him in an unbelievable repetition of that familial past. And remember, this is a grand-grandson imitating essentially the grandparents’ amartia, right? And Thyestes obviously doesn't understand at first, you know, that he presumably eats them. And then when he's told what happens, he also, you know, curses essentially obviously Atreus. He finds out, Thyestes finds out that the only way to beat Atreus is and you know that I will give a trigger warning for this is to have a child by his own daughter, which he does. He attacks her. She doesn't know who her attacker is. And that way Aegistus is conceived so Aegistus then once obviously to get rid of Agamemnon; he also sleeps with his wife, as we know, and together the pair of lovers kill Agamemnon. So Orestes, if you trace down that curse has four of I think, four generations of “ate” that have been visited. You know, his genealogy, his his family line, He's the the one to break the curse. How does he break it? By killing, He kills his mother, the ultimate sin. And I think it's, it's, you know, it's crucial that it's a mother that he kills the mother who again shows her breasts to him and he still does it. And that's why he has to suffer. And he immediately loses his mind with the “ate” So I think this is why in a way, and not to be anticlimactic. I think just slapping your mother when I'm giving you this cycle of horrific violence is, maybe it doesn't matter, you know, such a horrible punishment. But I do think that Pascoli was tapping into a really established, if you like, driving force of you cannot harm your mother, that bond is too..and I, I again, I, I tried to sort of educate myself a little bit about Pascoli and I understood that he he lost his his father earlier on, his mother also later, but quite early. And he clearly that imagery of violating family was an impossible amartia to him.

ELENA

Absolutely. Absolutely. So let us listen to the poem “Mother”.

The ending is quite surprising because we see that the son from his place in the Tartarus implores his mother to rescue him. And although she has drunk from the water of the river Lethe, which is the river of oblivion, she can still hear her son cry, and she feels pity for him and wants to give him another chance. So and because a mother's heart is stronger than any god, as Pascoli says, Glaucos' mother gets a wish, and both she and her son go back to the earth, she to bleed and he to wound. So motherhood, as you said, Akrivi, you, you, you got this right, is a very Pascolian theme. And there is much to be said about how important mother figures are to this poet and how female figures in general are always placed at the threshold of life and death, granting passage in and out of this earth and into life. And as it is the case here, Glaucos’ mother gives him life not once, but but twice, before life and after death. We must once again think of Plato's Phaedo as the source of this passage. But of course, I agree that Pascoli taps into this very rich tradition of tragedy that you've just narrated to us. So, but in Plato souls reincarnate into bodies and, and when they keep repeating the same mistake over and over again, So again we have a mistake that is repeated across generations and across lives, a mistake that is caused by ate as we said, the blind folly that obfuscates what is most human in all of us, which is rational thinking. And we, I think we had a wonderful exploration of, of Greek mythology. And I really want to thank Akrivi very much for this conversation.

AKRIVI

Eleanor, no, I'll thank you. I had a wonderful time. Thank you so so much.