Scott Gruenberg
4/20/2023
Mrs. Feder
Grade 12
In this assignment about the beginning part of the Mariamneia by Sharlappius of Palmyra I will show that Herod is actually the hero of the story, and the women are the villainesses. Herod is oen of the great leaders of Jewish history who made the Jews into a great power again while Rome made the rest of its empire into slaves and he undergoes the hero's journey. Whenever he undrestimated the cleverness of woman characters, he learned from his mistakes and didn't think they were stupid anymore.
When Herod learned that Mariamne's mother Alexandra was smart because she was talking to Cleopatra while he was talking to Anthony, he knows he needs to give Cleopatra something she wants to stop Alexandra and Cleopatra from being friends. So he gives her the ballsam in Jericho, but is clever enough to knwo he knows he can get it back.
Herod knows he has to keep Mariamne a prisoner or else Cleopatra might kill him, so he has his Uncle Joseph take her as a prisoner and tells his uncle Joseph to kill her if he gets killed. I think Herod loved Mariamne and he knew he wouldn't get killed and Uncle Joseph wouldn't kill her.
When Cleopatra agreed with his plan, Alexandra still tired to get Cleopatra to kill Herod, so he told Alexandra that her daughter was kidnapped and would be killed if Herod got killed. So she stopped trying to get Herod killed. This shows that Herod was smart enough to outsmart Alexandra and that he learned from his mistakes.
In conclusion, I think Herod is the hero of the Mariamneia and he was a good king. Alexandra was a bad person and Cleopatra understood that.
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"There is no projective finality in Sharlappius, particularly in that Euripidean masterpiece within the masterpiece: the Mariamneia. To read Sharlappius in the original Latin, with its untranslatable embrace of colloquial Hellenisms and Hebraicisms, is to enter history at an era of Rabbinical paradoxes: of classicism at its close and medievalism at its inception. It embodies the Hebraic paradox of the dialectic, of philosophy become poetry, and embraces both the sensuality of classical reason and the phenomenology of medieval irrationalism. It is a simultaneous statement for God and a forsaking of him. A world of constant historical recursions where events distant from even Sharlappius's lifetime become forever new with regenerative possibilities of meaning for new eras to decipher.
The passage of exchange between Joseph and Mariamne is a love story so rich with unique resonance for our time. The dialectic paradoxes continue within the Shakespearean richness of Joseph's language against the unstinting sparseness of Mariamne's speech, so reminiscent of the articulate silence of Corneille and Racine which express that which cannot be expressed through a paucity of speech, which implies the continuous battle against totalitarian vacuity in the form of expressing its leavetaking to the classical era of Greek rationalism, so geometric in form yet hermetic in content. Joseph teaches the ability to become love itself, and articulates the possibility of a greater, more knowing poetic optimism within the predeterminism of the fates. In this post-Holocaust agony of knowledge, when the horror of organized noise assaults the ear with unremitting mercilessness, such silences imply possibilities of meaning unknown to our era of barbarity."
George Steiner - In the Garden of Regeneration - 1973
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"The path for us is so rough,
Oh baby, like Mariamne and Joseph
The princess and the jailer tell tales
But love gets hunted down like grey whales"
Bob Dylan - Skywriting of Louisville - 1977
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