Why classical myth and autism?

Why classical myth and autism?

The idea for this project started to take shape at a meeting in 2008 with a special needs teacher, who mentioned that, in her experience and those of her colleagues, autistic children often enjoy classical myth. I began to wonder why this might be the case, and whether – as a classicist who researches, and loves, classical myth – there was anything I could contribute. I started this blog to report on my progress which was often sporadic until the launch of the Warsaw-based European Research Council-funded project Our Mythical Childhood (2016-22) to trace the role of classics in children’s culture.

My key contribution to the project is an exploration of classics in autistic children’s culture, above all by producing myth-themed activities for autistic children. This blog shares my progress, often along Herculean paths, including to a book of lessons for autistic children focusing on the Choice of Hercules between two very different paths in life. The image above, illustrating the homepage of this blog, is one of the drawings by Steve K. Simons, the book's illustrator, of a chimneypiece panel in a neoclassical villa at Roehampton in South West London. The lessons centre on this panel.

Friday 2 February 2018

"We cannot all have the experience of Hercules": so, why Hercules? (resource pack intro part 5)

In recent postings, I have reflected on how to rescue Hercules (14 December 2017), liberate Hercules (19 December) and bring out Hercules from elitist enclaves (23 January 2018). Most recently (29 January), I discussed the Choice of Hercules, the episode that will provide the focus for my first set of resources for use with autistic children. This current posting will back up a little and set out what it is about Hercules that makes this figure especially suitable as the topic for these resources.

For several reasons, Hercules is an ideal topic for resources for autistic people. Some of these reasons I have explored already. Firstly, there is how well-known Hercules is. Thus, engaging with the myth of Hercules can open up cultural experience to those who might find it harder than others to gain access to cultural or intellectual life.

Another reason is this – there is something especially intriguing about Hercules in relation to autism. I am not seeking to diagnose Hercules as autistic. However, there is a good deal in the experiences of Hercules that might be recognisable for an autistic person. Hercules often experiences challenges, and finds solutions to them, only for a new challenge to present itself. Each time he learns how to overcome a difficulty, a new situation comes up and he needs to start all over again.

Also, Hercules is never really at home anywhere. He is often a loner, typically journeying by himself. He is most often found in marginal spaces, in the wilds beyond cities, where others do not like to go. Then, when he does enter civilisation, he tends not to be able to function well. Things go wrong, sometimes disastrously. In the Heracles of Euripides for example, the Chorus sing of how Heracles has been away – away from his home, away from Greece, even away from this world - carrying an array of quests. They recount how:

First, he cleared the grove of Zeus of a lion, and put its skin upon his back, hiding his yellow hair in its fearful tawny gaping jaws.

Next, they continue:

one day with murderous bow he wounded the race of wild Centaurs, that range the hills, slaying them with winged shafts. After that, he slew that dappled deer with horns of gold, that preyed upon the country-folk, glorifying Artemis, huntress queen of Oenoe.

Then, the Chorus recount:

He mounted on a chariot and tamed with the bit the horses of Diomedes, that greedily champed their bloody food at gory mangers with unbridled jaws, devouring with hideous joy the flesh of men.

After that, they continue:

He slew with his arrows Cycnus, murderer of his guests, the savage wretch who dwelt in Amphanae.

Then, travelling to the far west:

He came to those minstrel maids, to their orchard in the west, to pluck from golden leaves the apple-bearing fruit, when he had slain the tawny dragon, whose terrible coils were twined all round to guard it and he made his way into ocean's lairs, bringing calm to men that use the oar.

Returning from the world’s ends Hercules goes on, actually, to hold up the world according to the Chorus:

He stretched out his hands to uphold the firmament, seeking the home of Atlas, and on his manly shoulders took the starry mansions of the gods.

After this, and for once assisted by others:

He went through the waves of heaving Euxine against the mounted host of Amazons dwelling round Maeotis, the lake that is fed by many a stream, having gathered to his standard all his friends from Greece, to fetch the gold-embroidered raiment of the warrior queen, a deadly quest for a girdle. Greece won those glorious spoils of the barbarian maid, and they are safe in Mycenae.

Then, alone again:

He burned to ashes Lerna’s murderous hound, the many-headed hydra, and smeared its venom on his darts, with which he slew the shepherd of Erytheia, a monster with three bodies.

After this:

Many another glorious achievement he brought to a happy issue.

And now, the Chorus conclude, after his various experiences at various locations of this world, he has left it, for the underworld:

To Hades' house of tears has he now sailed, the goal of his labours, where he is ending his career of toil.[1]

Attic black-figure hydria, c. 510-500 BCE now in Toledo (1955.42).
Further information here
Later in the play, he finally returns home, to his father, wife and children but, having rescued them from Lycus, a tyrant who was threating them, he goes mad, kills his wife and children and would have killed his father, too, had Athena not intervened by hurling a stone at him that knocked him unconscious. Usually Hercules defeats others. This is what he does in labours, as narrated by the Chorus. This is what he is doing on the Attic hydria, pictured here. In an encounter so significance that it attracts divine witnesses, he is attacking Cycnus, watched by gods including Ares, the father of his opponent, and Athena, here in her usual guise of the supporter of Heracles.

Hercules finds it hard to do what others manage – above all, he finds it hard to live alongside others. Instead, he tends to stay in a particular location for a short time only before moving on. He is the great traveller, typically on the move, journeying to a range of different lands, including those named by the Chorus of the Herakles in their account of the labours, and even managing to travel to the land of the dead – to Hades. This page on the Perseus website attempts locate the labours in relation to maps of Greece and the wider world known to the ancient Greeks.

And then, after his death, he manages what few achieve when he attains godhead among the Olympians. Hercules is different and other and he sometimes finds it hard to live among people. Yet he has skills that others lack, including exceptional powers of endurance and an ability to solve problems that flummox others. As a result, he can serve as a model both for the hardships that autistic people might experience, for instance around fitting in, and he can also serve as a model for a different way of being – and a different way of negotiating the world.

With this in mind, I am going to present materials geared to enabling autistic children to develop their own imaginative potential. These resources are aiming to grow into an intellectual life that is going to be different from other people’s – including being different from that of any other autistic person. After all, no two autistic people are the same. As the saying attributed to Stephen Shore goes (quoted here for example), ‘if you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism.’

However, the resources are also aiming to achieve that other thing, namely to help skill autistic young people to engage with the non-autistic world. This includes by finding ways to achieve such things as reading body language and other non-verbal communications such as facial expressions. It also includes finding ways to respond to particular cues from others and recognising cause and effect. Another of my goals is to help enable someone to see how an action can have consequences and, therefore, how the present can turn into the future. And another of the goals is to help people work out what to do in a particular social situation.

Here is a summary of some of the potential I see in the resources. They have value in various respects, including how to:
  • ·      understand how people behave
  • ·      recognise emotions – of oneself and others
  • ·      turn a critical eye on what people decide to do at any moment
  • ·      relate to the world
  • ·      work out what to do in a social situation
  • ·      respond to cues, including non-verbal
  • ·      hold a conversation, with one person or with others
  • ·      develop a rapport with others
  • ·      read body language and facial expressions
  • ·      gauge what others are experiencing
  • ·      process information
  • ·      deal with changes in routine
  • ·      recognise the relationship between cause and effect
  • ·      understand how the present can turn into the future
  • ·      imagine!

In the next posting, I shall begin to show how it is that Hercules – and particular his choice – has this potential.

Cicero said (see the previous posting’s ‘Ciceronian detour’ for the context – and the reference) ‘we cannot all have the experience of Hercules.’ But, in some ways, we all can. And I shall begin, in the next posting, to show how the ‘we’ here includes autistic children. This next posting will move closer to presenting the resources by saying more about the autistic skills and challenges to which the activities are responding.




[1] 359ff. Translation by E. P. Coleridge, Random House very slighted adapted. Available here on the Perseus site. This and other urls in this posting correct as at 2 February 2018.

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