Melvyn Bragg: Hello. The French mandate forces remained in Syria throughout the Second World War, representing at times the Third Republic, Free France, Vichy France, and the Provisional Republic through governments liberal, conservative, socialist and fascist. Stationed in Damascus during all twenty-three years of the French Mandate was an Alsatian consul and amateur Assyriologist named Richard Westenbach who came to French Syria in search of a work long regarded as a mere grandmother's tale: the Tales of Classical Perversion by Sharlappius of Palmyra - a telling of power's wares in the classical world so revolting it puts to shame anything in Tacitus and Gibbon. So shameful were the tales that they were burned and banned by the Prophet Mohammed. For 1300 years, the only mention of the work which survives to this day is in Pyrrus Menander's Chronicle of Historical Shame, and yet oral tradition of its tales persisted among Syrian tribes for centuries - entire tales recounted in detail from first word to last.
Yet as Europe burned, this government clerk used his off hours to toil in search of a text that would rewrite the entire history of antiquity. Pyrrus Menander makes mention of a multivolume work with separate texts for the eras of Pharaonic Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Hellenic Greece. Yet after twenty years of search, Westenbach found an enormous scroll within the stone seat of a Syrian church pew. While a sizable portion of the contents are illegible, many of the remains corresponded to Syrian folk tales about Judea word for word.
What Westenbach found in 1945 was not merely a work that rewrites the entire cultural history of antiquity but something far more mediocre and disgusting. A work which claims that Julius Caesar enjoyed Cleopatra shitting in his mouth and would have us believe that Herod spoke Greek in the patois of Quentin Tarantino.
But missing until 1989 was the supposed crown jewel upon which the entire volume sat. All we knew of the Mariamneia came from Pyrrus Menander who mentions a dramatic triptych of this name which he calls 'Judea's greatest gift.' Contained in the Tales of Classical Perversion is only the briefest fragment of the Mariamneia, a work of literary quality as negligible as the rest of the volume. And yet the Mariamneia arrived upon the world like a hydrogen bomb of sublimity that sold out runs in every major metropole around the world, revived classics studies for a new century, and reduces even schoolchildren to tears. Every city schoolboy now knows the quote 'Caesar's dead but the Jews won't leave,'
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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 - 2000
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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 white whales"
Bob Dylan - Skywriting of Louisville - 1997
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"The Mariamneia lacks Shakespeare's prophetic force. Herod cannot self-overhear after the manner of Hamlet and Falstaff, but Mariamne's tragic eloquence retains a metaphysical projection of gnostic splendor."
Harold Bloom - The Prophets and the Kings, 1999
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"There are those who presuppose that asserting a woman's right to choose whether to carry her child to term is something inherent in the constitution, and an assertion of autonomy as brave as Mariamne's monologue of defiance against Herod."
Antonin Scalia - Nirenberg vs. Irving, 2009
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"Mariamne acts the part of a woman and queen but in fact she is truly performative in the sense that Herod's generation of capital produces a hegemonic projection of power upon Mariamne's body through a vast succession of performative acts which are accepted as the normative standard of Herodian court life. Mariamne assumes a the only performative role available to her within the superstructure of courtly life and over time her ability to maintain her performance disappears, whereupon Herod feels compelled to kill her, and even in death she has insufficiently submitted to Herod's will. The sodomization of her corpse in death is a means by which Herod requires her in an eternal submission prefigurative to the eternal submission of sinners in Christianity. In each act of sexual dominance, Herod reasserts his hegemony and rearticulates his power, but the totality of his superstructure remains unfulfilled against Mariamne's sole act of rebellion."
Judith Butler - Recursions and Dispersions in the Mariamneia, 2007
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