mahna mahna? Memnon (mnemonic)

September 12, 2024 7:41 PM

“To hear Helen speak for herself is wild,” says Andrea Patterson, who plays Helen [getty]

mahna mahna previously

posted by HearHere (7 comments total)

.....So, to expand upon the mystery-meat framing....

This is about a production of a new play, telling the story of a previously-unfamiliar figure from ancient Greek lore - Memnon, a biracial Trojan warrior who is equal to Achilles - but is still not COMPLETELY accepted by the Trojans because he is half Ethiopian.

So think like if Euripedes wrote Othello.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:08 PM on September 12 [20 favorites]

"Mystery meat", hell, +100 for the title!
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:54 PM on September 12 [3 favorites]

Fascinating! I had never heard of this character before.

The "Iliad" and "Odyssey" are the only two surviving works of an Epic Cycle of poems describing the entire Trojan War. It seems one of these lost works was the Aethiopis which told the story of Memnon.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 2:20 AM on September 13 [3 favorites]

Well, there's my earworm for the day.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:37 AM on September 13 [1 favorite]

Memnon is (at least mythologically!) the son of a Trojan prince and the goddess of dawn. So...seriously, no complaints about this project at all, sounds very cool and a good way to combat the narrow view many people have of the world prior to basically the twentieth century where longer-distance international travel and trade somehow didn't exist. But just to note that I don't think the Greeks themselves would have pictured him as particularly dark-skinned. (Here's a vase-painting of him from the early fifth century.)
posted by praemunire at 7:52 AM on September 13 [1 favorite]

Teleport me to the villa please
I will watch the historize
Warriors fight as the chorus wheeze
sorry chorus that was the easiest
Anyway let's hear what Helen says!

Thanks for posting I really do wish I could see this, the Getty Villa was one of my very favorite places
posted by winesong at 8:48 AM on September 13 [1 favorite]

praemunire, good point. Sarah Derbew's 2022 Untangling Blackness in Antiquity explores this well (from Bryn Mayr Classical Review:)

Significantly, while the Aithopians’ black skin is noted as a constitutive characteristic, Herodotus’ interest in cultural markers of Aithiopian identity “destabilizes any reductive reading of color as the sole marker of group categorization”.

you may also be interested in some other vase-paintings, via Metropolitan Museum of Art (circa 6th century BCE) & Tumblr
posted by HearHere at 3:58 PM on September 13