Aristophanes’ speech

Why does Plato in the Symposium put such an attractive speech in the mouth of the poet Aristophanes, a man he probably held in contempt?

To explain what Eros is, Aristophanes uses an image. Originally all human beings were spherical, self-sufficient and powerful. The perfect unity of the circle was broken in two by Zeus to punish their arrogance. Eros is therefore the desire felt by these half-beings who want to rejoin and regain their happiness lost.

As a token of gratitude for receiving me in this space, I would like to share this short French film on the words of Aristophanes. The director, Pascal Szidon exploits very well the visual charm of this speech.

I think with this we do not move far from a theme so important in Río Wang: the power of images. I am sure that the speech of Aristophanes is the motif which is most remembered by the reader of the Symposium, precisely because it is founded on symbolic images.



Aristophanes professed to open another vein of discourse; he had a mind to praise Love in another way, unlike that either of Pausanias or Eryximachus. Mankind; he said, judging by their neglect of him, have never, as I think, at all understood the power of Love. For if they had understood him they would surely have built noble temples and altars, and offered solemn sacrifices in his honour; but this is not done, and most certainly ought to be done: since of all the gods he is the best friend of men, the helper and the healer of the ills which are the great impediment to the happiness of the race. I will try to describe his power to you, and you shall teach the rest of the world what I am teaching you. In the first place, let me treat of the nature of man and what has happened to it; for the original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word "Androgynous" is only preserved as a term of reproach. In the second place, the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast. Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the sun, moon, and earth are three;-and the man was originally the child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon, which is made up of sun and earth, and they were all round and moved round and round: like their parents. Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods; of them is told the tale of Otys and Ephialtes who, as Homer says, dared to scale heaven, and would have laid hands upon the gods. Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and annihilate the race with thunderbolts, as they had done the giants, then there would be an end of the sacrifices and worship which men offered to them; but, on the other hand, the gods could not suffer their insolence to be unrestrained.

At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way. He said: "Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manners; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg." He spoke and cut men in two, like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair; and as he cut them one after another, he bade Apollo give the face and the half of the neck a turn in order that the man might contemplate the section of himself: he would thus learn a lesson of humility. Apollo was also bidden to heal their wounds and compose their forms. So he gave a turn to the face and pulled the skin from the sides all over that which in our language is called the belly, like the purses which draw in, and he made one mouth at the centre, which he fastened in a knot (the same which is called the navel); he also moulded the breast and took out most of the wrinkles, much as a shoemaker might smooth leather upon a last; he left a few, however, in the region of the belly and navel, as a memorial of the primeval state. After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they were on the point of dying from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and when one of the halves died and the other survived, the survivor sought another mate, man or woman as we call them, being the sections of entire men or women, and clung to that. They were being destroyed, when Zeus in pity of them invented a new plan: he turned the parts of generation round to the front, for this had not been always their position and they sowed the seed no longer as hitherto like grasshoppers in the ground, but in one another; and after the transposition the male generated in the female in order that by the mutual embraces of man and woman they might breed, and the race might continue; or if man came to man they might be satisfied, and rest, and go their ways to the business of life: so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man.

Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous are lovers of women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men: the women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they hang about men and embrace them, and they are themselves the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature.

Carol Wiebe: Other half

Some indeed assert that they are shameless, but this is not true; for they do not act thus from any want of shame, but because they are valiant and manly, and have a manly countenance, and they embrace that which is like them. And these when they grow up become our statesmen, and these only, which is a great proof of the truth of what I am saving. When they reach manhood they are loves of youth, and are not naturally inclined to marry or beget children,-if at all, they do so only in obedience to the law; but they are satisfied if they may be allowed to live with one another unwedded; and such a nature is prone to love and ready to return love, always embracing that which is akin to him. And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and would not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover's intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment. Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side, by side and to say to them, "What do you people want of one another?" they would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said: "Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another's company? for if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of two-I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?"-there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need. And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love. There was a time, I say, when we were one, but now because of the wickedness of mankind God has dispersed us, as the Arcadians were dispersed into villages by the Lacedaemonians. And if we are not obedient to the gods, there is a danger that we shall be split up again and go about in basso-relievo, like the profile figures having only half a nose which are sculptured on monuments, and that we shall be like tallies.

Wherefore let us exhort all men to piety, that we may avoid evil, and obtain the good, of which Love is to us the lord and minister; and let no one oppose him-he is the enemy of the gods who oppose him. For if we are friends of the God and at peace with him we shall find our own true loves, which rarely happens in this world at present.

Plato, Symposium (189 c- 193 b), translated by Benjamin Jowett

El discurso de Aristófanes

¿Por qué Platón en el Banquete pone en boca del poeta Aristófanes, a quien posiblemente detestaba, un discurso tan atractivo?

Para explicar qué es Eros, Aristófanes se sirve de una imagen: originalmente los seres humanos eran esféricos, autosuficientes y poderosos. La unidad perfecta del círculo fue cercenada por Zeus para castigar su soberbia. Eros es, entonces, el deseo experimentado por las mitades de hombres que quieren volver a unirse y recuperar la felicidad perdida.

Como token of gratitude por recibirme en este espacio, quisiera compartir este cortometraje francés sobre las palabras de Aristófanes. Su director, Pascal Szidon, muestra muy bien el encanto visual de este discurso.

Creo que no nos alejamos con esto de un tema muy transitado en Rio Wang: el poder de las imágenes. Estoy segura de que el discurso de Aristófanes es el que más se graba en la memoria del lector del Banquete justamente porque se funda en imágenes simbólicas.



–Efectivamente, Erixímaco –dijo Aristófanes–, tengo la intención de hablar de manera muy distinta a como tú y Pausanias habéis hablado. Pues, a mi parecer, los hombres no se han percatado en absoluto del poder de Eros, puesto que si se hubiesen percatado le habrían levantado los mayores templos y altares y le harían los más grandes sacrificios, no como ahora, que no existe nada de esto relacionado con él, siendo así que debería existir por encima de todo. Pues es el más filántropo de los dioses, al ser auxiliar de los hombres y médico de enfermedades tales que, una vez curadas, habría la mayor felicidad para el género humano. Intentaré, pues, explicaros su poder y vosotros seréis los maestros de los demás. Pero, primero, es preciso que conozcáis la naturaleza humana y las modificaciones que ha sufrido, ya que nuestra antigua naturaleza no era la misma de ahora, sino diferente.

En primer lugar, tres eran los sexos de las personas, no dos, como ahora, masculino y femenino, sino que había, además, un tercero que participaba de estos dos, cuyo nombre sobrevive todavía, aunque él mismo ha desaparecido. El andrógino, en efecto, era entonces una cosa sola en cuanto a forma y nombre, que participaba de uno y de otro, de lo masculino y de lo femenino, pero que ahora no es sino un nombre que yace en la ignominia.

En segundo lugar, la forma de cada persona era redonda en su totalidad, con la espalda y los costados en forma de círculo. Tenía cuatro manos, mismo numero de pies que de manos y dos rostros perfectamente iguales sobre un cuello circular. Y sobre estos dos rostros, situados en direcciones opuestas, una sola cabeza, y además cuatro orejas, dos órganos sexuales, y todo lo demás como uno puede imaginarse a tenor de lo dicho. Caminaba también recto como ahora, en cualquiera de las dos direcciones que quisiera; pero cada vez que se lanzaba a correr velozmente, al igual que ahora los acróbatas dan volteretas circulares haciendo girar las piernas hasta la posición vertical, se movía en círculo rápidamente apoyándose en sus miembros que entonces eran ocho.

Eran tres los sexos y de estas características, porque lo masculino era originariamente descendiente del sol, lo femenino, de la tierra y lo que participaba de ambos, de la luna, pues también la luna participa de uno y de otro. Precisamente eran circulares ellos mismos y su marcha, por ser similares a sus progenitores. Eran también extraordinarios en fuerza y vigor y tenían un inmenso orgullo, hasta el punto de que conspiraron contra los dioses. Y lo que dice Homero de Esfialtes y de Oto se dice también de ellos: que intentaron subir hasta el cielo para atacar a los dioses. Entonces, Zeus y los demás dioses deliberaban sobre qué debían hacer con ellos y no encontraban solución. Porque, ni podían matarlos y exterminar su linaje, fulminándolos con el rayo como a los gigantes, pues entonces se les habrían esfumado también los honores y sacrificios que recibían de parte de los hombres, ni podían permitirles tampoco seguir siendo insolentes. Tras pensarlo detenidamente dijo, al fin, Zeus: «Me parece que tengo el medio de cómo podrían seguir existiendo los hombres y, a la vez, cesar de su desenfreno haciéndolos más débiles. Ahora mismo, dijo, los cortaré en dos mitades a cada uno y de esta forma serán a la vez más débiles y más útiles para nosotros por ser más numerosos. Andarán rectos sobre dos piernas y si nos parece que todavía perduran en su insolencia y no quieren permanecer tranquilos, de nuevo, dijo, los cortaré en dos mitades, de modo que caminarán dando saltos sobre una sola pierna». Dicho esto, cortaba a cada individuo en dos mitades, como los que cortan las serbas y las ponen en conserva o como los que cortan los huevos con crines. Y al que iba cortando ordenaba a Apolo que volviera su rostro y la mitad de su cuello en dirección del corte, para que el hombre, al ver su propia división, se hiciera más moderado, ordenándole también curar lo demás. Entonces, Apolo volvía el rostro y, juntando la piel de todas partes en lo que ahora se llama vientre, como bolsas cerradas con cordel, la ataba haciendo un agujero en medio del vientre, lo que llaman precisamente ombligo. Alisó las otras arrugas en su mayoría y modeló también el pecho con un instrumento parecido al de los zapateros cuando alisan sobre la horma los pliegues de los cueros. Pero dejó unas pocas en torno al vientre mismo y al ombligo, para que fueran un recuerdo del antiguo estado.

Así, pues, una vez que fue seccionada en dos la forma original, añorando cada uno su propia mitad se juntaba con ella y rodeándose con las manos y entrelazándose unos con otros, deseosos de unirse en una sola naturaleza, morían de hambre y de absoluta inacción, por no querer hacer nada separados unos de otros. Y cada vez que moría una de las mitades y quedaba la otra, la que quedaba buscaba otra y se enlazaba con ella, ya se tropezara con la mitad de una mujer entera, lo que ahora precisamente llamamos mujer, ya con la de un hombre, y así seguían muriendo. Compadeciéndose entonces Zeus, inventa otro recurso y traslada sus órganos genitales hacia la parte delantera, pues hasta entonces también éstos los tenían por fuera y engendraban y parían no los unos en los otros, sino en la tierra, como las cigarras. De esta forma, pues, cambió hacia la parte frontal sus órganos genitales y consiguió que mediante éstos tuviera lugar la generación en ellos mismos, a través de lo masculino en lo femenino, para que si en el abrazo se encontraba hombre con mujer, engendraran y siguiera existiendo la especie humana, pero, si se encontraba varón con varón, hubiera, al menos, satisfacción de su contacto, descansaran, volvieran a sus trabajos y se preocuparan de las demás cosas de la vida.

Carol Wiebe: Other half

Desde hace tanto tiempo, pues, es el amor de los unos a los otros innato en los hombres y restaurador de la antigua naturaleza, que intenta hacer uno solo de dos y sanar la naturaleza humana. Por tanto, cada uno de nosotros es un símbolo de hombre, al haber quedado seccionado en dos de uno solo, como los lenguados. Por esta razón, precisamente, cada uno está buscando siempre su propio símbolo. En consecuencia, cuantos hombres son sección de aquel ser de sexo común que entonces se llamaba andrógino son aficionados a las mujeres, y pertenece también a este género la mayoría de los adúlteros; y proceden también de él cuantas mujeres, a su vez, son aficionadas a los hombres y adúlteras. Pero cuantas mujeres son sección de mujer, no prestan mucha atención a los hombres, sino que están más inclinadas a las mujeres, y de este género proceden también las lesbianas. Cuantos, por el contrario, son sección de varón, persiguen a los varones y mientras son jóvenes, al ser rodajas de varón, aman a los hombres y se alegran de acostarse y abrazarse; éstos son los mejores de entre los jóvenes y adolescentes, ya que son los más viriles por naturaleza. Algunos dicen que son unos desvergonzados, pero se equivocan. Pues no hacen esto por desvergüenza, sino por audacia, hombría y masculinidad, abrazando lo que es similar a ellos. Y una gran prueba de esto es que, llegados al término de su formación, los de tal naturaleza son los únicos que resultan valientes en los asuntos políticos. Y cuando son ya unos hombres, aman a los mancebos y no prestan atención por inclinación natural a los casamientos ni a la procreación de hijos, sino que son obligados por la ley, pues les basta vivir solteros todo el tiempo en mutua compañía. Por consiguiente, el que es de tal clase resulta, ciertamente, un amante de mancebos y un amigo del amante, ya que siempre se apega a lo que le está emparentado. Pero cuando se encuentran con aquella auténtica mitad de sí mismos tanto el pederasta como cualquier otro, quedan entonces maravillosamente impresionados por afecto, afinidad y amor, sin querer, por así decirlo, separarse unos de otros ni siquiera por un momento. Éstos son los que permanecen unidos en mutua compañía a lo largo de toda su vida, y ni siquiera podrían decir qué desean conseguir realmente unos de otros. Pues a ninguno se le ocurriría pensar que ello fuera el contacto de las relaciones sexuales y que, precisamente por esto, el uno se alegra de estar en compañía del otro con tan gran empeño. Antes bien, es evidente que el alma de cada uno desea otra cosa que no puede expresar, si bien adivina lo que quiere y lo insinúa enigmáticamente. Y si mientras están acostados juntos se presentara Hefesto con sus instrumentos y les preguntara: «¿Qué es, realmente, lo que queréis, hombres, conseguir uno del otro?», y si al verlos perplejos volviera a preguntarles: «¿Acaso lo que deseáis es estar juntos lo más posible el uno del otro, de modo que ni de noche ni de día os separéis el uno del otro? Si realmente deseáis esto, quiero fundiros y soldaros en uno solo, de suerte que siendo dos lleguéis a ser uno, y mientras viváis, como si fuerais uno solo, viváis los dos en común y, cuando muráis, también allí en el Hades seáis uno en lugar de dos, muertos ambos a la vez. Mirad, pues, si deseáis esto y estaréis contentos si lo conseguís.» Al oír estas palabras, sabemos que ninguno se negaría ni daría a entender que desea otra cosa, sino que simplemente creería haber escuchado lo que, en realidad, anhelaba desde hacía tiempo: llegar a ser uno solo de dos, juntándose y fundiéndose con el amado. Pues la razón de esto es que nuestra antigua naturaleza era como se ha descrito y nosotros estábamos íntegros. Amor es, en consecuencia, el nombre para el deseo y persecución de esta integridad.

Antes, como digo, éramos uno, pero ahora, por nuestra iniquidad, hemos sido separados por la divinidad, como los arcadios por los lacedemonios. Existe, pues, el temor de que, si no somos mesurados respecto a los dioses, podamos ser partidos de nuevo en dos y andemos por ahí como los que están esculpidos en relieve en las estelas, serrados en dos por la nariz, convertidos en téseras. Ésta es la razón, precisamente, por la que todo hombre debe exhortar a otros a ser piadoso con los dioses en todo, para evitar lo uno y conseguir lo otro, siendo Eros nuestro guía y caudillo. Que nadie obre en su contra –y obra en su contra el que se enemista con los dioses–, pues si somos sus amigos y estamos reconciliados con el dios, descubriremos y nos encontraremos con nuestros propios amados, lo que ahora consiguen sólo unos pocos.

Platón, Banquete (189 c- 193 b), traducción de Marcos Martínez Hernández, Barcelona, Biblioteca Clásica Gredos)

Dying and resurrecting

Zoroastrian dakhmeh, “tower of silence” near to Yazd in Central Iran

Plato in his dialogues often gives a myth in the mouth of some of his speakers. Sometimes one of the well known Greek myths, but much more often some intricate story of faraway origin that obviously proclaims of either having been composed by himself, or having been thoroughly transformed to his own taste. The purpose of these myths, as Catalin Partenie writes in her selection made in 2004 for the Oxford World’s Classic series, was on one hand to adjust historical, philosophical, political or scientific concepts of large breadth to the genre of storytelling customary in banquets and to present them as sanctioned by the authority of tradition, and on the other hand to expound some truth in an indirect and hidden way, and thus stimulating further thought, just like parables do. The best known one is of course the legend of Atlantis in the Timaeus that Plato pretends to derive from Egypt, but here belongs also the story of the androgynes cut in two halves, or that of the ring of Gyges in The Republic that made his owner invisible and which has also served as an inspiration for Tolkien.

In The Republic Socrates also narrates the vision of Er of Pamphylia who dies in a battle, but then revives on the funeral pyre and tells of his journey in the afterlife, of the souls who, according to their actions while in life, descend for a thousand years of punishment under the earth or for the same amount of pleasures to the sky, and then by choosing themselves new forms of life return to the earth again.

To me the most interesting detail in this story has always been the name of the protagonist, archetype of Aeneas of Dante. This name – in contrast to all the other Platonic myths – does not sound Greek at all. As if Plato, contrary to his custom, conserved here a foreign – Pamphylian? – name that can in fact hint to the foreign origins of this myth.

The commentaries obviously slide over this name, or if they don’t, then they fabricate a whole series of gratuitous Greek etymologies eclipsing even those by Heidegger and Isidore of Seville, like for example Bernard Suzanne does:

The name of Er (èr, contracted form of ear) means “spring” (the season). But this name, whose only mention, at 614b, is the genitive form èros, evokes much more than that. It looks like the masculine form of Hera, the name of Zeus’ wife, except for the smooth breathing replacing the rough one. And if we look at what Plato has to say about the etymology of Hera in the Cratylus (404b-c), we see that he associates it with love (eros) through the adjective “lovable (eratè)”, but also with air (aer), which, applied to Er, opposes him to Gyges the earthling : hope is not in our material, earthly nature, but in our celestial, godly power of thought and understanding, and in the power of love that sets it on the move. Panphulos, the name of Er’s tribe, means “of all tribes or races”. Shorey suggests in a note that he might as well have translated “to genos Pamphulou” by “of the tribe of Everyman”. And while we are at names, the name of Er’s father, Armenius (tou Armeniou) is a close call for Harmony (armonia), a concept dear to Plato and central to the whole Republic, as well as to the myth of Er, with the “harmony of the Sirens” mentioned at its center (617c).

Reading the 5th-century History of Armenia by the first Armenian historiographer Movses Khorenatsi, in chapter I, 15 I find the story of the Armenian king Ara and the Assyrian queen Semiramis. Ara, son of Aram was an extraordinarily beautiful man, and the queen desired him to be either her husband or her lover. She sent several embassies to him with gifts, supplications, flattery and menaces, but all in vain: Ara remained faithful to his wife. Thus Semiramis finally went with her army upon him. They clashed under the mountain that received its name Ararat from Ara, and although the queen commanded the king to be brought to her alive, he fought heroically and remained dead on the battlefield. The queen had his corpse brought to her, and – a surprising turn – had it placed on the roof of her palace. When she was asked for the reason, she answered: “I have ordered my gods to lick his wounds, and he will be restored to life.” However, as the dead fails to resurrect and begins to decompose, she commands it to be cast in a ditch, while she has dressed up one of her paramours similar to Ara in Armenian clothes and presents him to the court like this: “The gods licked Ara and brought him back to life, fulfilling our wish and pleasure. Therefore from now on they are all the more to be worshiped and honoured by us, as they fulfill our pleasures and accomplish our desires.”

Our way across Lake Van from Tatvan to Van, on the way from Istambul to Iran. The environments of Lake Van were the cradle of Armenian civilization, the central region of “Greater Armenia”

It is observed that when Christian chroniclers mention such impostures in the pagan stories quoted by them, then they are usually “rationalizing” miraculous legends, disputing the power of the pagan gods to work miracles, for this is obviously a prerogative of God. It looks like Khorenatsi did the same with the story of Ara and Semiramis. For in the Armenian mythology collected from folk tradition, Ara was in fact “licked to life” by the divine dogs, the aralezks (whose Armenian name also means “Ara-lickers”), and he thus returned from the afterlife.

I think that there are too many common elements in the stories of Ara and Er to be independent from each other. Apart from their similar names, there is the name of Ara’s father ‘Aram’ which in Greek recalls the ethnonym ‘Aramaic’, thus Platon logically could have changed it for the ethnonym Armenios, ‘Armenian’ which fits better to the origin of the story – or perhaps he converted an original attribute ho armenios, ‘the Armenian’ into tou Armeniou, ‘(son) of Armenios’. Pamphylia was an existing region in southern Anatolia, in the direction of Greater Armenia when seen from Athens, especially if we consider that the sailor nation of the Greek looked with repugnance on the countries in the interior of the continents – a good example for this is the Anabasis of Xenophon marching across this same Armenian region – and they might have hinted to them like lying somewhere, anywhere behind the seashore region nearest to it. And finally the fate of the protagonist dying in a battle to then resurrect and bring news from the afterlife makes it almost impossible that it was not this very story which was heard by Plato and rearranged for his own purpose.

If it were only this much, it would be already interesting enough. However, there is another twist in the story. The corpse put on the roof, the aralezks “licking it to life”, and even the decomposed body cast into a ditch evoke the Zoroastrian funeral ritual, as it was described by another Greek source, the History of Herodotus (I, 140) like this:

What follows is reported about their dead as a secret mystery and not with clearness, namely that the body of a Persian man is not buried until it has been torn by a bird or a dog. The Magians [= the Zoroastrian priests] I know for a certainty have this practice, for they do it openly.

In the Zoroastrian religion, neither earth nor fire can be contaminated with dead corpses. Instead, they put them on “towers of silence” (in Persian dakhmeh) built on high places outside of the towns, and later they place the bones cleaned by predatory birds and sunshine in ossaries. In modern Iran still there is one such tower near to Yazd, the city of the greatest Zoroastrian community that we have also seen. And as the renowned scholar of pre-Christian Armenian culture James Russell explains in his Zoroastrianism in Armenia (1987), this religion became dominant in Armenia after its conversion into a Persian province. And near to the Armenian town where, according to Armenian mythology, the corpse of Ara was licked to life by aralezks, and which thereafter was thus called Lezk or Aralezk, on an altitude there stood a similar Zoroastrian shrine. After the conversion of Armenia to Christian religion – first among all countries, in 303 – it was converted into a church in honor of the dying and resurrecting Saviour.

I wanted to know where Lezk is and how it is called today, but in vain. The name of this locality can be found on the web only in the relations of the survivors of the Armenian Genocide of 1915. And where the map of 1914 of Van vilayet, published in the history of Van by Hovannisian, shows it – about ten kilometers to the north of Van city – there in the modern map of Turkey no locality can be found. It is possible that it was deserted in 1915 together with several other hundreds of Armenian settlements.


However, this story has one more twist in store. In fact, the scholars of Armenian mythology compare the story of Ara and Semiramis to the most important metaphor of dying and resurrecting nature, celebrated year by year from Mesopotamia through Syria and Greece to Egypt: to the story of a goddess and her lover – Inanna and Dumuzi, Ishtar and Tammuz, Cybele and Addis, Venus and Adonis –, so beautifully evoked by Thomas Mann, where the young man is wounded to death by some infernal power, but his divine lover resurrects him, and she even manages to obtain the right to spend half of the year with him in the sunshine, so that he must spend only the other half down in the other world – usually with the infernal rival of the goddess. It is not by chance that Khorenatsi also narrates in the following chapter that Semiramis, „as she liked the region very much”, had also a castle built near to Van on a cliff, so that she could spend a part of the year – the summer – there, and go back to Ninive only for the winter. This castle, albeit ruined, still stands, and its strange position made it a favorite topic for the engravings of those few 19th-century Western travelers arriving this far away.

“Citadel of Semiramis” near to Van, engraving by Eugène Boré, 1838

The name of Tammuz and Ara were connected not only by erudite mythographers, but also by Armenian folk tradition, and one of their most popular dances bears the name of “Tamzara”, Tammúz-Ara. Since 1915 this dance has not been performed in Eastern Anatolia, but the Anatolian Armenians of the diaspora have preserved it together with the rest of their traditions. In the video below it is performed by the Armenian Folk Dance Society of New York. Even if it has no lyrics, there is enough history behind it so that we can include it in our “history sung” thread as well. We wish the violent death of this culture was also followed by a resurrection.

Dilemma

where there is discord, I may bring harmony; where there is error, I may bring truth

I am standing in the queue for the Easter confession at the Franciscans, reading the verses of the prayer of Saint Francis on the wall of the corridor, and I realize that these two things are so much contrasting to each other that in fact only God can realize both simultaneously. At least this is my experience, especially recently. When one stands for truth where there is error, be sure that soon there will be discord as well. “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. A man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.” (Mt 10:34-36)

On the other hand I see that most people I know – unfortunately especially the Christians – aspire at any cost to the appearance of harmony, and in exchange they give up without hesitation the representation of truth, the clear distinction between good and bad, the straight speaking. “Let there be peace above all.”

I am still ruminating on this when – tolle, lege – I read this in Augustin, chapter 1.8. of The City of God, as if he wrote it as an answer for me:

For often we wickedly blind ourselves to the occasions of teaching and admonishing them [who do wrong], sometimes even of reprimanding and chiding them, either because we shrink from the labor or are ashamed to offend them, or because we fear to lose good friendships, lest this should stand in the way of our advancement, or injure us in some worldly matter, which either our covetous disposition desires to obtain, or our weakness shrinks from losing. ... Because it is a sin, that they who themselves revolt from the conduct of the wicked, and live in quite another fashion, yet spare those faults in other men which they ought to reprehend and wean them from.

At the same time I also experience that all the odium – losing people, doors being closed, being branded as “unloving” and “hating” or, in another dialect, “intolerant” and “fanatic” and the rest – that accompanies the representation of truth, is not just an accidental “risk” that can be avoided with some tact and sense of diplomacy, but a necessary consequence of this behavior. The more so the more straightforwardly and consequently one represents the truth. In an extreme case, to the point that was foretold by Plato in his Republic (361e) four hundred years before Christ:

The just man with this kind of soul ... will be scourged, racked, bound, will have his eyes burnt out; and, at last, after suffering every kind of evil, he will be crucified: Then he will understand that one does not have to aspire to be a just man, but to seem only.

And with this we are here at the object of the feast of today. Blessed Easter!