If the Greek tragedies and hero journey tales endure, it is because the hopes, flaws, triumphs, struggles and failures they catalogue are not Greek, but human. The battles they describe, and the casualties of love and war they bring so vividly and painfully to life, are both universal and eternal.
Anyone who doubts this point should see a segment that ran this week on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. A segment that ran on February 3rd told of a theater project called “Theater of War,” currently touring Marine and other military bases around the country. Four actors read aloud from Sophecles’ tragedy Ajax, in which a soldier comes loose of his hinges after serving with Achilles and the Greek Army, and ends up killing animals, thinking they’re the enemy, finally committing suicide in his agony of what we would now call post-traumatic stress syndrome. His wife describes him before the suicide as having that “thousand yard stare”—a characteristic well known to any spouse trying to cope with a partner recently returned from, or traumatized by, war.
Theater of War takes that play, and other Greek masterpieces of war and humanity, and has actors perform the lines in a dramatic reading for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan combat theatres. Discussion follows. At one reading, veterans lined up with comments and questions for over three hours, each one quoting a line, or lines, from the plays they had heard.
Despite the fact that the tales were written in the 5th century B.C., the Greek plays still bring soldiers to tears, because they speak so powerfully to the universal journey of a combat soldier. The challenges, the strength, the cost, the pain … it’s all been felt and wrestled with before. And somehow, that realization is able to bring comfort to the soldiers of today. [click to continue…]
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