Past Salons – Classical

Days on Agistri

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Photograph of Toby Brothers on Agistri by Sandrine Joseph, @london_lost_in

As we wrap up another sparkling Salon week at Rosy’s Little Village (a name that doesn’t do justice to the place), I reach to capture the enriching moments that make this immersion so fulfilling. 

It is, of course, a luxury to spend a week immersed in one work of literature.  To do so on a wooded Greek island in the Saronic Gulf is pretty extraordinary. Our venue provides a unique community feel: just minutes from a humming port, Rosy’s Little Village offers all we need to sustain us through our days of reading and discussion, and it is a simple amble down through the flower strewn terraced rocks to the sea.

Going away. The upheaval of habit, the reckoning of what you really need (and how that can fit into the limits of baggage), the many details of home leaving that brings you to some clarity about how complicated life is—how many daily tasks need to be passed along, how the build-up of things undone needs reckoning to be able to leave with some lightness . . .

But when all that is done—or, at least, done enough—the lightness that you have earned as you step off the plane, find your way to the ferry, drink deeply of the sea-fed air and let the intense sun of the Saronic gulf envelop you: this is where the release begins. 

In the first week, the Odyssey study rolls out with sessions of reading and discussion, exercises to develop our attention to breath, language, presentation, embodiment of the text and a sense of play; poetry interludes allow us to explore as a group —sometimes discussing, sometimes just sitting in wonder at the craft. Everyone finds their own rhythms around the scheduled sessions and nourishing meals. For some, it is early morning walks to the wild headlands to seek alpine swifts skimming over the sea. For others, it is an early dip to greet the dawn and her rosy fingers. For others, it is Jane’s gently guided yoga practice where the sun salutations feel like an intimate encounter with the glistening light that floods us from the open space of the performance tent. For others, it is painting or writing or reading time in a nook of the flowered rocky terraces. 

Photograph of dawn on Agistri by Sandrine Joseph, @london_lost_in

In this fresh world, I find my mind unclenching as the days simplify. This makes a fecund space in which to consider ancient and profound works. No matter how many times I have encountered the monsters and sought Ithaca with Odysseus, I open myself newly with each group and learn more—about the epic, about myself. S points to the way Homer makes respectful space for grieving as natural, as necessary; SJ wonders if the journey shows how the structure of home can be psychological – a space that moves with us – can you, snail-like, be your own home and therefore make peace with a travelling life? Others are amazed at the immense staying power of an oral text: interactive and shared in the group, these passages become chants that we embody. 

In the second week we encountered the Oresteia with a seasoned group—many of whom had been on the previous year’s Odyssey study. This was my second encounter with the dramatic trilogy, first studied on a long weekend in the outskirts of Paris. I gained such rich nuggets from the work on Agistri with this particularly game group. I learned what stichomythia is, how it functions in the dramatic context and, finally, how to pronounce it.  I watched Jane coach the group into speaking as one voice, and witnessed the pulse of power that group chanting creates. There was also the special sonnet recitation while planking, but that really needs to be experienced to be appreciated . . .

We considered the strange and primitive drive for justice—when is it revenge, when is it punitive, when is it restorative? We discussed the various ways of understanding the resolution of the Furies into the Eumenides: what it suggests about the role of female deities, how this moves towards democracy, whether this is the submerging of matriarchal power into patriarchal authority. We considered the right of a mother to rage against the needs of communal security when faced with the murder of her child. We read together the astonishing poetry that the Oresteia has inspired since its first performance and, after inhabiting rage and vengeance performed in the most majestic language, we danced a jig of life to celebrate our return to the clear light of present-day sea-soaked space.

To immerse myself in one work, for one week, with a curious and playful gathering of minds is truly a luxury. We come together, we question, disagree, explore, inspire and laugh together. Sometimes, we even dance.

Here is some feedback from participants:

“The Odyssey study on Agistri island has been a total marvel . . . It was on every level nourishing, emotional, spiritual and always caring . . . The island is beautiful, especially in Spring, you can swim, go kayaking, walk to the village and go hiking in the pines trees forest. Looking forward to going again!”

SJ

“To sit by the Agean and delve into the mysteries of Homer’s Odyssey, expertly facilitated with an intimate group was such a treat!  Learning about meter, oratory performance, Greek history and mythology with breaks to dip into the blue was heaven.  I think what I enjoyed most though was the extraordinary community formed over the week-long study.  Looking forward to the next one!”

SC

“What more can I say than that it was once again fabulous in every sense of the word!”

JG

“I love Rosy’s; it’s peaceful, beautiful and uncomplicated. The location and access to the sea are both amazing.”

ST

Aeschylus’ The Oresteia

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Aeschylus’ The Oresteia

From Beowulf through The Odyssey, our study of the classics informs our understanding of the role of art and literature in forming our sense of ourselves and human history. This will be the first Salon study of the Oresteia so will have the energy of new and unexplored territory. Aeschylus explores the shift from a world ruled by force and feud to a time when human rationale and the early ideas of civilisation start to inform law and behaviour.

From http://www.neebo.com/Textbook/the-oresteiab9780140443332/ISBN-9780140443332:

The only trilogy in Greek drama that survives from antiquity, Aeschylus’ The Oresteia is translated by Robert Fagles with an introduction, notes and glossary written in collaboration with W.B. Stanford in Penguin Classics. In the Oresteia Aeschylus addressed the bloody chain of murder and revenge within the royal family of Argos. As they move from darkness to light, from rage to self-governance, from primitive ritual to civilized institution, their spirit of struggle and regeneration becomes an everlasting song of celebration. In Agamemnon, a king’s decision to sacrifice his daughter and turn the tide of war inflicts lasting damage on his family, culminating in a terrible act of retribution; The Libation Bearers deals with the aftermath of Clytemnestra’s regicide, as her son Orestes sets out to avenge his father’s death; and in The Eumenides, Orestes is tormented by supernatural powers that can never be appeased. Forming an elegant and subtle discourse on the emergence of Athenian democracy out of a period of chaos and destruction, The Oresteia is a compelling tragedy of the tensions between our obligations to our families and the laws that bind us together as a society. Aeschylus (525-456 BC) was born near Athens. He wrote more than seventy plays, of which seven have survived, all translated for Penguin Classics: The Supplicants, The Persians, Seven Against Thebes, Prometheus Bound, Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides. If you enjoyed The Oresteia, you might like Euripides’ Medea and Other Plays, also available in Penguin Classics.

‘Conveys more vividly and powerfully than any of the ten competitors I have consulted the eternal power of this masterpiece … a triumph’ –Bernard Levin

‘How satisfying to read at last a modern translation which is rooted in Greek feeling and Greek thought … both the stature and the profound instinctive genius of Aeschylus are recognised’ –Mary Renault, author of The King Must Die

The Aeneid

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Virgil’s Aeneid

“Arma virumque cano. . .”

“Wars and a man I sing–an exile driven on by on by Fate. . .”

T.S. Eliot claimed that the Aeneid is the ultimate ‘classic’: “our classic, the classic of all Europe.” Even more than Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey, the Aeneid is probably the one text from classical antiquity that has had the longest continuous influence over the later Western tradition. Taking both of Homer’s great epics as his models, Virgil created a hero and a poem that are uniquely his own—and that are distinctly Roman. Through them he told his story of the formation of a vast imperial power, and the human cost of that process.

The Aeneid is a grand poem of adventure, heroism, duty and love, recounting along the way the famous tale of the Trojan horse and the fall of Troy, Aeneas’ love affair with the doomed Queen Dido, his journey into the underworld, and ultimate settlement of Aeneas and the survivors of Troy in Italian lands. Salon participants who have studied Dante will recognize in the Aeneid the tension between personal and political, as the hero Aeneas struggles with and against his duty to carry forth the remnants of a fallen Troy to a new land from which will spring the grandeur of Rome.

This study is the third of a three-study sequence, covering Homer’s Iliad, Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. New participants are welcome to join the sequence with this study; familiarity with the preceding books is not required.

SALON DETAILS

  • Six meeting study
  • Recommended edition: Virgil’s The Aeneid, translated by Robert Fagles, introduction by Bernard Knox; Penguin Classics; ISBN-13: 978-0143106296

Antigone

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Sophocles’ Antigone

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“A man, though wise, should never be ashamed of learning more, and must unbend his mind.”

― Sophocles, Antigone

 Across time, this play from the height of the culture of Ancient Greece has engaged our questions around the desires of the individual against the coherence of the community. Although modern audiences tend to sympathise fully with Antigone, it is important to remember,as Bernard Knox explains in his introduction to our edition, that “…before (Creon) is driven by the consequences of Antigone’s defiance to reveal his true and deepest motives, he represents a viewpoint few Greeks would have challenged: that in times of crisis, the supreme loyalty of the citizen is to the state…” This essential query of the needs of the individual or the bonds of the family up against the rule of law or state structure is relevant in our contemporary experience as we try to find room for individual conscience in a world increasingly dictated by faceless agency.  As with all Salon studies, our approach is both thematic and language-based as we work to discover meaning and relevance together.

SALON DETAILS

  • One-meeting intensive study
  • Recommended edition:The Three Theban Plays by Sophocles, translated by Robert Fagles,introduction by Bernard Knox; Penguin Books. ISBN-13: 978-0140444254

Here are some further thoughts on the work situated in a modern context:

Like all great Greek tragedies, Antigone presents us with existential questions similar to those addressed by Socrates and Jesus. In the choral ode to man, human existence is characterized as wondrous, riddle-like, uncanny. Human beings are natural and rational at once, bound by necessity yet gifted with freedom, mortal yet capable of transcending the mere necessities of life and survival, the doers of good and evil, makers and breakers of laws and city walls. Although the story of Antigone addresses these universal and timeless contradictions and perplexi- ties of humankind, it simultaneously tells the story of a singular individual: Antigone, a woman who defies King Creon’s edict without any fear, doubts, or regrets. This courageous woman, the fruit of incest, has fascinated philosophers in the nineteenth century, inspired playwrights in the twentieth century, and intrigued feminist thinkers and activists for decades.
— http://www.sunypress.edu/pdf/62070.pdf   from the introduction to Feminist Readings of Antigone (© 2010 State University of New York Press, Albany)

The Sagas of Icelanders

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The Sagas of Icelanders

“With law shall our land be settled, and with lawlessness wasted.”

– Njal’s Saga

As grandly epic as Homer, rich in tragedy as Sophocles, compellingly human as Shakespeare, and psychologically keen as Chekhov—the sagas of Icelanders are the crowning achievement of medieval Scandinavian narrative and rank among the world’s greatest literary treasures. They describe a world of a millennium ago that nevertheless rings familiar with perennial human struggles.

The forty-plus narratives of adventure and conflict that comprise the sagas are set in Iceland’s 9th- and 10th-century Age of Settlement, when a handful of families fled the oppressive kingship of Norway to set up new lives on an island in the middle of the Atlantic. It was in Iceland the era of a unique commonwealth of free chieftains with no king, clerical hierarchy, or armies, ruled by Viking traditions of honour and blood vengeance. Written down anonymously several hundred years later, the sagas look back on a pioneer generation struggling to forge and maintain a self-governing community in a harsh environment at the edge of the known world.

With economy of style and astute insight into character, the sagas portray poets, warriors, statesmen, farmers, and outlaws —strong and determined men and women who strive for power, wealth, fame, respect, and love in a frontier society that wavers between the rule of law and vengeance. In this six-meeting study we will start with a reading of two shorter tales—the Saga of the Confederates and the Saga of Hrafnkel Frey’s Godi—that will introduce us to the unique Icelandic literary style. We’ll follow that with two full-length sagas that are among the finest examples of the Icelandic family sagas, Egil’s Saga and the Saga of Burnt Njal.

SALON DETAILS

  • Six-meeting study
  • Recommended edition:
    • The Sagas of Icelanders, introduction by Robert Kellogg, preface by Jane Smiley; Penguin Classics, 2001;
      ISBN-13: 978-0141000039
    • Njal’s Saga, edited and translated by Robert Cook; Penguin Classics, 2002; ISBN-13: 978-0140447699

Ovid’s Metamorphoses

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Ovid’s Metamorphoses

metamorphoses

The Salon Intensive offers a one-meeting study that ambitiously takes an entire work in one big, energetic gulp. Participants have described this as a wonderfully dynamic approach– we work hard and have a joyous time.  Why Ovid? Folks in the  Salon have considered Homer (The Odyssey and The Iliad), The Oresteia, Virgil’s Aeneid among other significant classical works. Ovid’s work includes characters and situations referenced throughout literature–and a deep meditation on how humans and gods shift and change as a result of harrowing circumstances. We will consider the work in the context of its own time and how Metamorphoses illuminates our own moment.

The recommended edition is the Ted Hughes: Tales from Ovid (Faber & Faber, 1997).
From Hughes’ brilliant introduction: 

“In its length and metre, the Metamorphoses resembles an epic. But the opening lines describe the very different kind of poem that Ovid set out to write: an account of how from the beginning of the world right down to his own time bodies had been magically changed, by the power of the gods, into other bodies.

“This licensed him to take a wide sweep through the teeming underworld or overworld of Romanised Greek myth and legend. The right man had met the right material at the right moment. The Metamorphoses was a success in its own day. During the Middle Ages throughout the Christian West it became the most popular work from the Classical era, a source-book of imagery and situations for artists, poets and the life of high culture. It entered English poetry as a fountainhead, as one of Chaucer’s favourite books, which he plundered openly,sometimes, as with the tale of  Pyramus & Thisbe–in quite close translation. A little later, it played an even more dynamic role for Shakespeare’s generation–and perhaps for Shakespeare in particular. The ‘sweet, witty soul’ of Ovid was said to live again in him.

“But perhaps Shakespeare’s closest affinity lay not so much in the sweet, witty Ovidian facility for ‘sniffing out the odoriferous flowers of fancy’, as one of his characters put it, nor in his aptitude for lifting images or even whole passages nearly verbatim, nor in drawing from two stories in the Metamorphoses his own best-seller, the seminal long poem Venus & Adonis. A more crucial connection, maybe, can be found in their common taste for a tortured subjectivity and catastrophic extremes of passion that border on the grotesque. In this vein, Shakespeare\’s most Ovidian work was his first–Titus Andronicus. Thirty or so dramas later, in Cymbeline, his mild and blameless heroine Imogen– whom her beloved husband will try to murder, whom her loathed step-brother will try to rape–chooses for her bedtime reading Ovid\’s shocking tale of Tereus and Philomela.”

The Odyssey

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Homer’s Odyssey

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“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.”

Homer’s Odyssey is the original tale of longing for and coming home. The hero Odysseus has been away from his kingdom on the island of Ithaca for almost twenty years. For ten of those years he has fought before the walls of Troy; it was his stratagem the Trojan Horse that finally enabled the assembled Greek forces to storm that city and bring the war to an end. Now, he has wandered the Mediterranean for another ten years, beleaguered by an angry god, threatened by monsters, bewitched by temptresses. Odysseus endures trials and temptations that arouse his sense of adventure, but still he drives on, to reach Ithaca, his wife Penelope, his son Telemachus—his home.

The Odyssey is both a marvelous adventure drama and a moving tale of loyalty, friendship, family, fate, and lasting love. David Denby, in his work Great Books, describes his engagement with The Odyssey as an essential exploration of the formation of the self for the reader as well as for Telemachus and Odysseus: “Even at the beginning of the literary tradition of the West, the self has masks, and remakes itself as a fiction and not as a guiltless fiction either.”

This study is the second of a three-study sequence, covering Homer’s Iliad, Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid.

SALON DETAILS

  • Six meeting study
  • Recommended edition: Homer’s The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fagles, introduction by Bernard Knox; Penguin Classics; ISBN-13: 978-0143039952

The Odyssey in Greece

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Homer’s Odyssey in Greece

Kayaking near Agistri

We are excited to expand the studies by offering retreats that place participants in locales that reflect and expand the literature. By taking participants to beautiful places, the London Literary Salon retreat offers a more intensive immersion in the book while opening the mind to a part of the world illuminated through the beauty of the language.

The Greek Odyssey study uses Homer’s epic poem to consider closely the guest-host relationship, the defining struggle of humans against overwhelming nature, the struggle to know ourselves in foreign spaces, our understanding of the heroic and the role of myth and epic in lived experience. Actor Jane Wymark and Poet Caroline Hammond will be assisting Salon Director Toby Brothers in this week-long study, sharing their insights into the spoken word, metre and translation.  In an era where the epic poem is in eclipse, the novel and film having taken over as the preferred vehicles for  complex narratives, we will explore aspects of the Odyssey as a work in the oral tradition.

We have found the perfect site to host this study providing the ideal combination of a local space run by someone who understands our mission & can provide us room & board that has some cultural and adventure offerings — and is easy to access. We will be staying at Rosy’s Village on the stunning island of Agistri.

SALON DETAILS

  • Facilitated by Toby Brothers, Jane Wymark and Caroline Donnelly
  • Two preparatory meetings in London
  • Recommended edition: The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles AND the Emily Wilson translation

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About the epic. . .     

The Salon has certainly been a place to re-discover- or discover for the first time – the works that form the cornerstones of Western literary tradition. The Odyssey is a root for our understanding of ourselves as well as the words and ways of the ancients. How does it continue to shape our idea of the heroic? What do the dilemmas that Odysseus faces offer to us today? Can we still appreciate the lyric and narrative quality alongside a violent story filled with the suffering and death of nameless servants, slave girls and soldiers?

Many artists have used The Odyssey as an inspiration for their work as Joyce does with Ulysses and the Coen brothers did for their film(winning an Oscar for the best screenplay adaptation from Homer’s original)…the epic struggle to return home and exploration of the guest/relationship remain relevant across time.

David Denby, in his work Great Books, describes his engagement with The Odyssey as an essential exploration of the formation of the self for the reader as well as for Telemachus and Odysseus: “Even at the beginning of the literary tradition of the West, the self has masks, and remakes itself as a fiction and not as a guiltless fiction either. . .

The Odyssey is an after-the-war poem, a plea for relief and gratification, and it turns, at times, into a sensual, even carnal celebration.”

Further reading : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10833515/Alice-Oswald-how-to-read-Homer.html

The Iliad

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Homer’s Iliad

“Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls. . .”

The first great work of Western literature is a magnificent poem recounting the story of the final stages of the Trojan War—one of the central legends of ancient Greek, and later European, culture. Tales surrounding the Trojan War constitute a vast and interwoven cycle of Greek poems, plays, myths and artwork: the rape of Leda by Zeus; the Golden Apple and the Judgement of Paris; the Oath of Tyndareus; the abduction (or seduction) by Paris of Helen, “the face that launched a thousand ships”; the sacrifice of Iphigeneia at Aulis; the siege of Troy, its fall, and the death of Achilles. The Trojan War, too, is the starting point for Homer’s Odyssey, one of the many stories of the aftermath of this culturally-scarring war.

The Iliad takes place over just a few pivotal weeks near the end of the Greeks’ ten-year siege of Troy. The invading Greek army’s greatest warrior, Achilles, withdraws from the fighting after a dispute with their leader Agamemnon, bringing the threat of defeat and destruction upon the Greeks. His action precipitates devastating results for both sides, ultimately leading to the fall of Troy itself.

Though memorable for its scenes of bloody battle and the squabbling of the gods on Olympus, the Iliad exudes an intense humanity, infusing a tragic longing for peace amid the seeming inevitability of war and destruction.  Homer invites us to put ourselves into the world of the war: a place no one wants to be, where the gods seem unpredictable, and where there\’s a genuine question of whether justice is anywhere to be found. We are challenged to take seriously the warriors\’ values of honor and glory, which may be very different from values we hold.

The Iliad asks basic questions about what really matters: about what is worth living—and dying—for. It confronts us with fundamental questions about honor, community, justice, love, and loyalty, as the story’s characters search to make sense of their own mortality.

SALON DETAILS

  • Six meeting study
  • Recommended edition: Homer’s The Iliad, translated by Robert Fagles, introduction by Bernard Knox; Penguin Classics; ISBN-13: 978-014027536

Book of Genesis

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Book of Genesis

“When God began to create heaven and earth,
and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep
. . . God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.”

The stories in the Book of Genesis are a rich narrative inheritance woven throughout our culture, our literature, our language, almost into our unconscious. From the origin stories of Creation, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and the Great Flood, on through the patriarchal narratives of Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Esau, and Joseph and his brothers, Genesis records a grand account of creation, destruction, regeneration; faith and disobedience; promise and fulfillment. It tells how a people understands their beginnings, their place in the world and their relationship to the divine.

In this study, we will explore how these stories attempt to understand our humanity, the nature of divinity, morality, the sacred and the profane. This study will read the impressive translation of Genesis by Robert Alter, which honors the meanings and literary strategies of the ancient Hebrew and conveys them in fluent English prose.

SALON DETAILS

  • Six meeting study, also available as a one-meeting intensive study of Chapters 1 – 11 of Genesis.
  • Text: The translation of Genesis we will use for this study will be by Robert Alter. It can be found in either of the two editions below, which are available new and used in the UK:
    • Genesis: Translation and Commentary by Robert Alter; W. W. Norton & Company; New Ed edition (14 Jan. 1998); ISBN-13: 978-0393316704
      OR
    • The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary by Robert Alter; W. W. Norton & Company (28 Oct. 2008); ISBN-13: 978-0393333930
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