Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(42)

Because Buffy is the out-of-towner who moves to small-town Sunnydale from LA, when we meet her she doesn’t have a tribe or gang. But by the end of the first episode, she has found one: the Scoobies (as they will come to be known). Buffy’s supporting cast are male and female, unlike the all-female tribe of Amazons we saw Wonder Woman grow up with. Buffy fights alongside Willow, Xander, Giles, Angel, Cordelia and, later, Faith, Spike, Anya and Tara. For her countless fans, the whole point of Buffy is that she may be more powerful than the average person, but she is no less human. Just like her Amazon predecessors, she is always impeccably dressed in her version of the best possible warrior outfit: she may wear fewer patterned leggings and big-cat skins, but she more than makes up for it with chic mini-dresses and bicep-boasting vest tops, and a handy bag or pocket in which to store her wooden stake. Her fighting prowess – like that of Penthesilea before her – is tremendously impressive. She can be beaten in single combat, but only by an exceptional warrior (The Master, who is a vampire of prodigious age and strength; Glory, who is a god). In season one, in her penultimate battle with The Master, she drowns, but is revived. The moment she is capable, she goes to fight him again, and this time succeeds in impaling him on a stake.

Buffy’s second death, in season five, is particularly poignant. Realizing she will have to die or see her sister Dawn killed, she makes the ultimate sacrifice: she dies for love. It is – as we can see in so many depictions of Amazons on vase paintings – an Amazonian death: a female warrior giving up her life so another woman may live. It’s a crucial part of Buffy’s mythology, as we see in season six, when she is wrenched from the afterlife and returned to Sunnydale by a powerful magic spell. ‘It’s do or die,’ the Scoobies sing in the seminal musical episode, ‘Once More With Feeling’. ‘Hey, I’ve died twice,’ Buffy responds. We can surely conclude that death now holds no fear for her. She has become even more like Penthesilea.

Just as her Amazon ancestors appeared in poetry, prose and art, Buffy is a multi-media phenomenon: film, television, musical, video game, comic book and more. There are many reasons the show continues to resonate years after it finished, not least the Amazon-echoing story arc of the final season. Buffy has saved the world many times by season seven and she and her gang decide there is an alternative. By means of a rare artefact and a magic spell, every potential slayer in the world is empowered to become an actual slayer. The Chosen One is now the Chosen Many. Buffy is able to step away from constant demon-slaying because she helps to train up many more young women to fight in her stead. The message is simple: women are stronger together than apart, even ones with superpowers.

And this is what makes Buffy a contemporary Amazon: she may be uniquely talented, like Penthesilea, but she steps away from individual glory. Her status is not threatened by creating more heroic women, quite the reverse: it is cemented. Amazons – even when one is exceptional – are a team, a tribe, a gang, and it is this which Buffy captured so perfectly: an ensemble of women fighting to save us all.





Clytemnestra




IN THE LATE FIFTH CENTURY BCE, A YOUNG MAN STOOD UP IN THE Areopagus – Athens’ most ancient legal court – and accused his stepmother of killing his father. The plaintiff’s father had visited a friend, Philoneus, for dinner one night, years earlier. After the dinner, both men fell ill. Philoneus died almost immediately; the plaintiff’s father lingered for three weeks. Philoneus’ slave was accused of poisoning the wine which she had served to them: she was tortured and put to death. The young man was only a child when this happened, but he tells the jury he promised his father that, one day, he would bring the case against his own stepmother for what he believed to be her part in the crime. His stepmother was defended during the trial by her son, the half-brother of the plaintiff.

The prosecution’s case is that this woman conspired with the now-dead slave-woman and persuaded her to commit murder. The young man has no evidence for his claims, but this doesn’t prevent him from imagining the moments in which the slave-woman carried out the poisoning, after the food had been eaten. And he doesn’t think it was her own idea. Rather, she was carrying out the plan of tēs Klutaimnēstras tautēs – ‘this Clytemnestra here’.1

We don’t know the verdict, nor do we have the speech presented by the woman’s son in her defence. We can assume the latter would have focused on the lack of evidence, the lack of motive, and the absence of a close connection between the stepmother and the woman put to death for the poisoning. Murder is not something we do lightly on another person’s behalf: the entire plot of Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train hinges on the sheer unlikeliness of such behaviour. Given that years have passed since the father’s death – and given that his half-brother is defending the case against him – it seems more likely that the plaintiff was engaged in a property dispute with his step-family and was using the murder accusation to further his claims, or pressure the family into paying him off.

The only piece of evidence the young man offers – and ‘evidence’ is a strong word in the context – is the claim that his stepmother had tried to poison his father on an earlier occasion. She counterclaims that the substance she had given his father then was not poison, but a love potion (a mistake also made by Heracles’ final wife, Deianeira, in Sophocles’ play The Women of Trachis). In a society where women had very little freedom and their husbands were legally within their rights to have sexual relationships with other women, the fear of losing your husband (and with him, your home and your children) must have been immense. The incentive to use a love potion was considerable.