Ranting on and on about something in the news, I was interrupted by another reporter’s question.
I don’t remember what I was pontificating about. It could’ve been the veracity of a Herman Cain accuser, or the New York DA dropping charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn. But evidently my rambling left my colleague confused.
“What’s the subject?” he asked.
“What does it matter?” I responded, a quip with more than a bit of truth behind it.
I’m addicted to scandals. Not the kind the supermarket tabloids headline. I’m uninterested in the romances and drug problems of ephemeral starlets with talents more modest than their proportions. The high and mighty getting their comeuppance — that’s the kind of tragedy you can sink voyeuristic teeth into. Aristotle figured that out a long time ago, as I learned in graduate school.
I’ve had a lot to feed on recently. Cain was accused of a marathon infidelity, sending his presidential bid down the tubes. The New York Review of Books, a high-tone publication, ran a conspiracy theory account of Strauss-Kahn’s fall from power.
For me, the adrenaline downtime is the interval between juicy news — like when the Balloon Boy saga ended and the retrial of Amanda Knox had yet to begin. I was traveling in Sicily when local television announced it would broadcast live the sheriff’s account of the Colorado family that faked their son’s launching in a runaway balloon. Given the time difference between there and Sicily, my traveling companions opted for their usual bedtimes.
I stayed up to hear the sheriff report that the boy’s parents met in acting school and “put on a good show for us.”
Before this, I wouldn’t publicly admit to giving up a good night’s sleep for a morsel of tragicomedy. I’d like to pretend it was beneath my dignity as an educated person. En route to a Ph.D., I read “The Iliad” and “The Aeneid” in the original languages. By now, my Greek barely serves to exchange a few words with the owners of coffee shops where a picture of the Parthenon hangs. Yet I still read Latin for pleasure.
And now, I can come out of the closet, thanks to the New York Review of Books. It’s no National Inquirer, but a serious literary journal with articles like: “Wagner & Wotan & Paradise Lost” and “Was Alexander Great?”
So if the intellectuals who publish the Review can display their fascination with the mystery of Strauss-Kahn, I can reveal my preoccupation with who did what to whom in Room 2806 of the Sofitel Hotel.
Confession must be good for the soul; I realize it was a mistake to think of a classical education as an vaccination against susceptibility to scandal-mongering news. If anything, it’s a source of my affliction.
Much of Greek and Roman literature is akin to tabloid stories. Homer told the tale of Helen, a married woman taken to Troy by another man, and her nebbish husband who had to get his brother Agamemnon to fight his battle. The ancient playwright Aeschylus takes up the story at that point: When Agamemnon brings another woman home as a war trophy, his wife murders him. Mrs. Agamemnon was no goody-two-shoes, either, having taken a lover in her husband’s absence.
With the ability to churn out plots combining sex and violence, Aeschylus and Homer would have been hot properties, had they lived in the age of motion pictures. The New York Review of Books would lament the plays Aeschylus might have written, had he not gone to Hollywood.
Which is not to say there weren’t high-minded writers in ancient times. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius doubled as a philosopher, setting down lofty thoughts like: “If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.”
That’s pretty bland stuff, if you ask me. It must have seemed so to the Roman writers who realized the public wanted not the wisdom but the dirt on their rulers. According to the account of his biographer Suetonius, the Emperor Tiberius anticipated the tragedy currently unfolding at Penn State by two millenniums: “He trained children whom he termed little fishes to tease him by crawling between his thighs when he bathed.”
In fact, the classics survive for much the same reason as Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers flourish. They speak of humans as they are — sometimes noble, other times petty; with enormous capacities for love but also for hate; constantly struggling to contain the bubbling volcano at the core of their being.
Consider the ever-fascinating story of Phaedra. It was told by the Latin poets Virgil and Ovid. The Greek playwright Euripides staged it. So, too, did the Roman writer Seneca the Younger, and the 17th-century playwright Jean Racine. She appears in several modern operas — and no wonder.
Wife to King Theseus, she fell in love with her stepson, Hippolytus, who spurned her advances. Her despairing prompts her husband to suspect his son raped her. Hippolytus dies in an accident and Phaedra kills herself. Theseus, thinking his suspicions confirmed, refuses the lad a proper funeral.
Imagine a tabloid editor getting his hands on a tale like that. He’d be yelling: “I want that story on Page 1! See if the photo desk has pictures. Send a reporter to get the usual quote from the neighbors: ‘We’re shocked. They seemed like such a nice family.'”
