A year ago today – St David’s
Day 2018 – I had just met a deadline. I had completed my first set of
activities for the Our Mythical Childhood
project (scroll down this blog and you’ll find a set of postings, all from February 2018
which present several activities all associated with the Choice of Hercules).
Today, a year on, I have just met another deadline – for an abstract for a
paper to be delivered in Warsaw later this year setting out what my second set
of activities will be about. This current posting runs though some of the stages which have
taken me to this point. It also makes some initial comments about how I plan to
conduct the session in Warsaw. By the end of the posting, the role of the following drawing
(one of a series produced specially for the project by Steve Simons) should be clear.
From the time when my now
colleagues and I were developing the bid to the European Research Council for the
Our Mythical Childhood project, I had
wondered quite how my work on autism and classical myth would tie in with the
second of our three main conferences – the one for May 2019 – on the topic of Our Mythical History.
The first conference topic,
on Mythical Hope, was one to which I
could readily respond, including to offer a challenge to how hope is sometimes presented
in relation to autism, namely as the hope for a way to deal with the hardships
linked with being autistic. Indeed, it was in preparing my presentation for the
Hope event, and then developing my
paper for publication, that I increasingly became convinced that a suitable topic
for the first set of activities was Hercules.
This is because Hercules is a mythological figure who can ‘speak’ to what is to
be autistic: both in relation to the hardships that autistic people face and as
a gateway for non-autistic people to an understanding of autistic experience.
But in light of the mythological
focus of my project, I had wondered what the fit would be with the
historically-geared turn for 2019. This was until, during a pilot study of the
set of activities, with a group of children aged 7-11, the germ of an idea
grew. As the Choice of Hercules activities were introduced to them, the children
were full of questions about Hercules, including when he lived and who his friends
and family were. What I tried to convey, in response, was that Hercules never
actually lived, but that, at various points in history, people have been
interested in Hercules and the stories told about him. Indeed, I tried to convey
that, at different points in history, people have made the figure of Hercules
their own.
Therefore, I have come to a realisation
it is not the case that the 2019 focus on History
needs to be less relevant than Hope
was. Indeed, just as an engagement with Hope
took my project in a new direction, this move for 2019 to Our Mythical History looks set to do the same.
At a time when discussions
of who classics is ‘for’, and how classics is being appropriated by specific
groups, are escalating, I am going to offer a set of activities geared towards
offer an opportunity for autistic children to experience ancient Greek history.
The time I have picked is
one which offers potential, I think, to address some of the aspects of being autistic
that are also explored in the Choice of Hercules activities. The time is the
sixth century BCE, a time when there was much ferment and unrest and change –
change that seems to have impacted widely across society. It was at this time
that – in Athens, the city for which we have particular evidence – Herakles
(shifting now to the Greek name) helped to express a time of transformation –
where previous ways of doing things were being overturned, and where new ideas
and new ways of seeing world, were being offered.
I am going to zoom in on two
moments, when Peisistratos, the would-be tyrant of Athens, did things of a ‘Heraklean’
nature. One was when he wounded himself and as a result managed to acquire a bodyguard
of (‘Heraklean’) club bearers. The second was when he got into a chariot with a
woman pretending to be Athena and rode into, and then through, Athens. This act
is ‘Heraklean’ because of the fit with a scene repeated on sixth-century art, when
Herakles rides a chariot with Athena. One way of understanding what was going
on is as a performance of a mythological moment when, if the woman was taken as Athena
on some level, the man might be have been understood in relation to Herakles.
One focus I plan to take is
on how the Athenians would have responded to both sets of things done by Peisistratos.
I shall do this in response to certain of the features of autistic experiences
that were relevant to the first set of activities. These include:
- What to do in
times of stress
- How to read what
others do and say
When I present the
activities in Warsaw, I shall start with the Hercules from the first set of activities as drawn, now, by Steve Simons.
We will take Hercules out of
the Choice landscape and put him into sixth century Athens for his Peisistratos-themed
adventures.
I’ll share more in future
postings – and, right now, I’m going to write my actual abstract for the Warsaw
session.
I said in the
previous posting that, having written that posting, I was about to write my
abstract for Our Mythical History in
Warsaw in May 2019. Here is the abstract, accompanied by one of the drawings by Steve Simons that I’ll present there.
