ORPHEUS wins Criticos Prize, Ann Wroe on The Daily Beast

Congratulations, Ann Wroe! Wroe's recently published Orpheus: The Song of Life is the recipient of the 2011 John D. Criticos Prize for an original work inspired by Greek or Hellenic culture.  As this year's winner, Wroe will receive £10,000 and join a long list of esteemed past honorees including recent prizewinners Zachary Mason (The Lost Books of the Odyssey, 2010), David Malouf (Ransom, 2009), and Stephen Halliwell (Greek Laughter, 2008). Originally conceived by Greek ship owner and businessman John D. Criticos and officially established in 1996, the prize seeks to uphold the ideals of the Hellenic culture and promote Anglo-Hellenic understanding. This year's award brought more than one hundred submissions from publishers and private individuals across the globe, from which the Adjudicating Committee comprised of Hellenic scholars and writers throughout England and Greece selected Orpheus as this year's winner.

To better introduce readers unfamiliar with the central character in her new book, Ann has written a fascinating piece for The Daily Beast, explaining why the mythological muse continues to haunt us today. Check out this excerpt and visit BookBeast for the entire article.

"Some stories haunt us constantly, and yet we hardly know why. The story of Icarus, who dared to fly too near the sun and whose wax wings melted away; the tale of Oedipus, who cannot help killing his father and marrying his mother; the fable of the Babes in the Wood, who try to mark their trail with crumbs that are eaten by the birds, and who in the end are softly buried by them, leaf by leaf.

Yet perhaps no tale has haunted humanity as Orpheus’s has: the musician who sang so sweetly that he persuaded the powers of death to give him back his wife, and then lost her. Poets, from Virgil and Ovid to Mallarme and Rilke, have written his story. Composers from Monteverdi to Gluck, to Stravinsky, to Philip Glass, have told it in music. Rubens, Giorgione, Klee and Corot have painted it; Jean Cocteau has turned it into film. Only last year, I saw his story staged as a musical by players who were crippled or blind, and they acted it with such fervor that it was clearly fountain-fresh to them, at the start of the 21st century. They acted out his life as though it was theirs. And in a way it is.
 

His character is immensely old. Though he emerges by name in the 6th century B.C., I have seen an Orpheus figure on a vase seven centuries earlier, in the museum at Heraklion in Crete: a man with a giant lyre who is headed and beaked like a bird, and to whom the charmed birds fly down. He may have come originally from India, a fisher-god pulling up souls, or from Asia Minor, a vegetation god, not long after the dawn of civilized time. Yet ancient as he is, lost in the mist of ages, he lingers. It seems often that Orpheus still wanders through the world, like the traveling musician he possibly was, reminding us of something, tapping at the window glass, refusing to be forgotten. Mention the name Orpheus to almost anyone, and they will immediately say: 'In the Underworld'—a phrase that is shorthand for a whole life of singing, and mystery, and love, and loss."

Praise for ORPHEUS

"Orpheus is a book of wonders, learned, playful, and passionate ... For all her studies, her wide reading, her historical diligence, Wroe's method is instinctive, as she searches for inspirations and connections across the millennia." — John Banville (The Guardian)

"A transformative adventure of myth ... A book to make readers laugh, sing, and weep." — Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

"The book sings in a learned, singular manner." — Publishers Weekly

"Wroe combines a scholar's attention to evidence with a poet's flair for words in this startlingly original history that traces the obscure origins and tangled relationships of the Orpheus myth from ancient times through today." — Library Journal

Did you miss Richard Billows discussing MARATHON on NPR?

Never fear! Here's a handy link to both his interview (with a transcript!) and an excerpt of the professor's wonderful book MARATHON: HOW ONE BATTLE CHANGED WESTERN CIVILIZATION.

Our favorite part of the interview with Guy Raz actually occurs right at the beginning, and is a great summary of why the Battle of Marathon is so crucially important to our civilization, besides giving us 26.2 mile runs.

RAZ: Aeschylus was a veteran of the legendary battle at Marathon. It happened exactly 2,500 years ago, and it pitted a heavily outnumbered band of mainly Athenians against the far mightier Persian army. It also lent its name to the famous race, which we'll hear about in a moment.

Historian Richard Billows writes about the battle in a new book called "Marathon." And he says that that one day in 490 BC actually changed the course of Western civilization.

Mr. BILLOWS: What we can tell from the way the Persians treated other cities -Greek cities that they attacked in this same period is that if the Athenians had lost the battle, the city of Athens would have been destroyed. The Athenian citizen population rounded up, put on ships and transported to Persia to be interviewed by the Persian king, Darius, at that time and then probably resettled somewhere near the Persian Gulf where they would've been lost to history.

And as a result, all those great Athenians of the fifth and fourth centuries -the likes of Thucydides and Socrates and Plato, one could go on - simply would never either have been born or their works would never have been written and would not have been able therefore to shape subsequent classical Greek civilization and Western culture as we know it.

RAZ: I mean, you say that had the Persians defeated the Athenians at Marathon, democracy would never have flourished.

Mr. BILLOWS: The first democracy that we know of in world history was created by the Athenians just 15 years before the battle of Marathon. It was established as a result of a kind of coup d'etat against a tyrant who had been ruling Athens. And that democracy was a very young and new experiment when the Athenians faced the Persians.

We also love how Mr. Raz chose to end the interview.

RAZ: I'm curious. You emphasize the importance of democracy in the Athenian victory. Why?

Mr. BILLOWS: The way that the Greeks fought was very egalitarian. Every individual soldier fought at his own expense. He paid for his own equipment and for his own upkeep. And essentially voluntarily, they were participating members of the social and political community. They felt that this community, because the democratic system, was theirs, they governed themselves very directly.

We tend to make a distinction between the government and the people. There was no such distinction in Athenian democracy because the people were the government. It was that sense of this is ours - this community, this political state that we've created is our thing.

So, the Greek victories over the Persians were intimately tied up with the political system of participatory democracy that the Greeks had created.

Fascinated yet? Make sure to listen to (or read!) the entire interview. And stay tuned for more reviews, events and interviews with Professor Billows as the marathon race season gears up!