The curse of Atreus

There is no war in history which is more of a blueprint for all subsequent ones than the Siege of Troy; possibly because it was the first war in the history of the world that was caught in a sung narrative, like a fly in amber, for the rest of time.

The Judgement of Paris, the Abduction of Helen, the Sacrifice of Iphigenia, the Death of Hector, The Death of Laocoon, the Fall of Troy, Aeneas and Anchises and many, many more episodes of the Trojan War have all been the subjects of great works of art both visual and literary which will, I am certain, survive as long as man himself.

The works of the great Greek tragedians like Aeschylus and Euripides drew inspiration from Homer's great ballad which only records part of the whole story; concluded many centuries later by Virgil in his Aeneid. Just as the story of one of the returning Greek Kings, Odysseus, is recorded in the Odyssey, so Euripides, Aeschylus and Sophocles wrote plays about Agamemmnon and Clytemnestra and their children, prolonging for ever more the curse on the House of Atreus for which one can easily read the curse of the human race.

Nothing much has changed after so many thousands of years and the Priams, Achilleses and Menelauses of the contemporary world act in much the same way. They may dress differently, they may speak a different language, their weaponry is vastly improved but emotionally they are no different to Agamemmnon and his allies.

Teatru Anon's free adaptation of Steven Berkoff's Agamemmnon, designed and directed by Paul Portelli, proves my point. I was privileged to have been invited to a preview of Agamemmnon on March 4, which I enjoyed tremendously. Berkoff/Portelli start off their fascinating tapestry in prose and song with The Curse of Atreus and end it in the murder of Agamemmnon by his tremendously wilful and ambitious wife Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus, who happens to be his first cousin. All through the story of the return of Agamemmnon the story of the Trojan War is interwoven with the delicacy of a Bach counterpoint. Berkoff/Portelli also highlight their work with references to contemporary history proving to all that nothing has changed.

The Trojan War was the first great clash between Europe and the Near East in which the Europeans, represented by the Greek federation of kings, emerged victorious but at what huge personal cost. The second great clash was the invasion of Europe by the king of kings, Xerxes, who, although defeated at Salamis, still managed to establish Persian rule on what today is Northern Greece and Turkey running all the way to the Indus Valley.

It was Alexander the Great who defeated and utterly destroyed the Persian Empire, creating, after his untimely death, Greek satrapies all over the East from the Nile to the Caspian Sea. When the last Macedonian kingdom, Egypt, was absorbed into Pax Romana on the suicide of the last of the Ptolemaic rulers, the fabled Cleopatra, for many centuries the entire world lay in thrall to an Empire that had been established by the fleeing Aeneas.

The Romans were therefore of Trojan descent and proud of it, hence, the Aeneid, which was a subtle legitimisation of Roman aggression. When the Eastern and Western Empires split and Rome fell in 410AD, history moved in such a way as to prove that even with the same ancestry, the curse of Atreus lived on in the Great Schism that found its ultimate manifestation in the Crusades. Once Byzantium fell in 1453 and the Ottoman Empire came into being, the clash between the cross and the crescent raged sporadically right up to the 18th century. By this time Islam had become the rallying cry of the Eastern world.

So debilitated and under Western influence were the kingdoms and caliphates stretching from Morocco to Turkey that these countries never had much of a chance to develop and it was only with the relatively recent discovery of oil that countries such as Iraq and Iran became the powers to be reckoned with that they are today.

So here we are at the start of the Third Millennium engulfed in what appears to be yet another colossal clash of Eastern and Western civilisations. Just like Agamemmnon and his fellow kings, George W. Bush has invaded the East. Just like Agamemmnon he is not having much luck. Although initially defeated, the Iraqis have proved to be anything but tractable and the storm clouds of terrorism that hitherto were confined to the East have now convulsed Europe and America too.

The more time passes Mr Bush and his allies remind me more and more of the Uffizi statue of Laocoon and his sons being devoured by serpents. The possibility of establishing Iraq as a self-governing democratic state becomes more of a delusion every day as news of new atrocities and terrorist acts fill our newsreels. Since 9/11, the entire Islamic World has militarised itself, both physically and morally, and there seems no end to what surely looks like the greatest tragedy since WWII.

There are many who will argue that Western intervention was necessary and there are many too who will maintain that Mr Bush and his allies have managed to save the world. At what cost? Like the relatively unimportant Helen, the weapons of mass destruction remain as mythical as the phoenix and nobody will ever forget that the invasion of Iraq was based on that premise. What's done is done.

While the vast majority of us only wish to live in peace we now live in a world which totters precariously at the brink of an abyss. Our energy has become prohibitively expensive and nobody knows how or when terrorists may strike. The tinderbox for the whole shebang, Israel and Palestine, are in a state of flux, with a Hamas-led Palestinian Parliament in power and an Israeli Prime Minister in a coma. Never has the situation looked so utterly bleak. Because the West simply cannot afford war on yet another front, the Iranians have been given concessions regarding the development of nuclear energy. Can we trust them? With a Head of State publicly expressing views and opinions that in any Western country would get him arrested, I doubt it. Meanwhile the Muslim world has been rioting non-stop about some cartoons! We are in a sorry state indeed.

The Zeuses, Athenas and Poseidons of the Trojan War have been consigned to the trashcans of history and it seems as if only Ares, Bringer of War, has remained, running amuck, uncontrolled by his fellow Olympians who, when things got too hot for their liking, intervened to protect their favourites. The Curse of Atreus still lives on. Just like the Trojan War the present one also involves the heavens.

The God who we Maltese call Alla is the Allah of Islam and the Jehovah of the Jews. A God in whose name hatred, intolerance, bigotry and war have been legitimised. Only last week in an interview, Tony Blair declared that only God is his judge and that Britain's participation in Iraq was, in his opinion, justified according to his Christian conscience; an uttering that once brought an English king to the scaffold!

kzt@onvol.net