When we turn to the past, do we seek a mirror to reflect our own faces back at us, to reinforce our current attitudes and behaviours? Or do we look for a window that could show us other faces, other ways of thinking and living?
By the same token, when we deal with plays and poems, art and stories of the past, should we "reinterpret," "reimagine" them for "today's audience," to align them with current ideologies, or should we allow them confront us, to challenge us, on their own terms?
In 163 BC, the Roman playwright Terence translated a Greek play by Menander; this became HEAUTON TIMORUMENOS ("The Self-Tormentor"), remembered today for one brief riposte. "Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto."
"I am human: nothing human is alien to me."
When we look into the past, we find attitudes and activities that we share now, and yet, often in subtle, disconcerting ways, we also find differences. These differences have become all the more striking in our current crises.
The West is collapsing. Human values and human relations have been supplanted by values and relations of the market. This is neoliberalism, the defining ideology of our times. In September 1987, while interviewed in WOMAN'S OWN, one of the pushers of neoliberalism, Margaret Thatcher, said, "Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families."
Yet if we go back to the 5th century BC, we find that Aeschylus took a different view. At the conclusion of his dramatic trilogy, THE ORESTEIA, he shows how the legal system of a democratic state can end the seemingly unstoppable cycle of murders for the sake of revenge. For too long, the House of Atreus has been trapped in this brutal cycle, but now, the citizens of Athens hold a trial and reach a verdict that finally puts the killings to a stop. Left on their own, individual men and women and families can tear themselves apart, but a democratic society can bring justice and civic peace.
In today's dying West, democracy crumbles into rule of the rich and powerful. Human rights retreat into smaller and tighter coffins of identity, and thus become self-limited, unthreatening, no challenge to the power of corporations and oligarchs. We need reminders of another time, when democracy held the promise of liberation, when societies and human beings mattered. For this, Aeschylus represents a good starting point, but only a starting point.
"Nothing human is alien to me." This is true, yet it also remains true that the people of yesterday did not quite resemble us. We do not read Montaigne or Thomas Browne to find ourselves; we read them to encounter minds better than ours. We read the Greek dramatists, the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, for their poetry, for their piercing insights into human character and human failings. We read Shakespeare's CORIOLANUS, or the OEDIPUS REX of Sophocles, because the nobility of these heroes perplexes and challenges us in ways that the idiotic Trumps and Macrons, Bidens and Zelenskis, Modis and Netanyahus never could.
As L. P. Hartley wrote in THE GO-BETWEEN (1953), "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." This is why we need the past. This is why we should allow the past to speak to us on its own terms, with all of its difference, because we have lost many ways of being human, and we must rediscover all that we can, to survive.
