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How many circuits?


The name is Orestes



On the track, on the track again, on the track, how many times around, how many bloodied laps, how many black rows; the people who watch me, who watched me when, in the chariot, I raised my hand glorious, they roared triumphantly. The froth of the horses strikes me, when will the horses tire? The axle creaks, the axle burns, when will the axle burst into flame? When will the reins break, when will the hooves tread flush on the ground on the soft grass, among poppies where, in the spring, you picked a daisy. They were lovely your eyes, but you didn’t know where to look nor did I know where to look, I, without a country, I who go on struggling here how many times around? and I feel my knees give way over the axle over the wheels, over the wild track knees buckle easily when the gods so will it, no one can escape, there’s no point being strong, you can’t escape the sea that cradled you and that you search for at this time of trial, with the horses panting, with the reeds that used to sing in autumn to the Lydian mode the sea you cannot find no matter how you run no matter how you circle past the black, bored Eumenides, unforgiven.[1]


‘How many times around?’ That’s how Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard translate the modern Greek phrase ‘πόσοι γύροι;’ which is running through the speaker’s mind in these lines by poet and diplomat George Seferis (1900-1971). They might just as easily have gone for ‘How many circuits?’ This sense of the word ‘circuit’, recalling the series of laps run by a chariot driver at ancient races, rather than a tangle of electrical wiring, draws out an irony in the latest dead metaphor in the lexicon of the new Covidspeak.


A short ‘circuit breaker lockdown’ was meant to slow the infection rate by isolating people, like electrical nodes on a circuit board, from each other. The irony lay in the fact that the very measure which promised to ‘break the circuit’ would feel, for many, like ‘going round in circles’, repeating the psychological, social, and economic trauma of the first national lockdown. Its brevity also implied that, once restrictions lifted, we would soon see the infection rate rising again and, ultimately, lockdown re-imposed. So the cycle of circuit breakers would continue. But the circuit breaker might also have brought some form of progression in our handling of the pandemic by slowing the infection rate earlier in the second wave, allowing businesses and people to prepare in advance, minimising the impact of prolonged restrictions. Perhaps we might have converted the racetrack into a spiral staircase—going round in circles, but rising gradually higher.


It seems, however, that the same old mistakes have been made. We are in the second national lockdown of this year, set to last a month or more, and doing so, as medical experts warn, far too late. And so we find ourselves in the position of the chariot driver, battling the exhaustion of racing round an elliptical racetrack, turning, turning in endless loops, asking ourselves “how many more times round?”


I could go on like this emphasising the immediacy, or ‘relevance’, of the charioteer image to our experiences in 2020, but you’d be justified in feeling that some sleight of hand is happening. Most of us will live our lives without ever seeing a working chariot in person, let alone riding in one. In other ways, too, Seferis’ poem seems to belong to a distant world. The subtitle ‘the name is Orestes’, for instance, indicates that the words of the poem are spoken by the mythological prince of Mycenae, who was known for murdering his own mother, Clytaemnestra.


What’s the use of invoking a poem about this story to talk about the Covid-19 pandemic? Have the frustrations of being locked down with our families driven us to parricidal revenge killings? Or could the prime minister have had classical precedent in mind when he told the youth ‘Don’t kill Granny’?

But here’s the interesting thing: the poem isn’t about the killing. Most people who know who Orestes is would be surprised at a poem that imagines him as a charioteer. We’re left thinking, ‘Where does this fit into the story of matricide?’ Seferis leaves a couple of hints to allow us to place this moment in the narrative. The poem’s subtitle puts the idea of Orestes into our mind, but the phrase ὄνομα δ᾿ Ὀρέστης is actually a fragment of ancient Greek, taken from Sophocles’ tragedy, Electra (l. 694). Here, Orestes’ tutor and accomplice in murder is telling Electra, Orestes’ sister, that her brother has died in a chariot race. He says the phrase ‘the name is Orestes’ or ‘Orestes by name’ while describing how the prince was proclaimed victor in his first race at the Pythian Games. ‘So far,’ he says, ‘things stood thus; but when one of the gods does mischief, not even a mighty man can escape.’[2] The fatal crash is supposed to have taken place on a later day. In truth, Orestes is alive and well; the tale of the chariot accident is part of a plan to gain entry to the palace and murder Clytaemnestra. So it seems that this poem is something of a fiction within a fiction. Seferis’ evocation of Orestes’ internal monologue lies inside the speech of the tutor, which in turn lies inside the play by Sophocles—like Russian nesting dolls.



John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) Orestes Pursued by the Furies, 1921. Museum of Fine Art, Boston

But then we reach a striking, surreal image as the ‘black rows’ of spectators morph into the figures of the ‘bored black Eumenides’ towards the end of the poem. The Eumenides, also known as ‘Furies’, are another important part of the Orestes myth. These are the terrifying creatures called down on the prince to torment him, driving him mad as punishment for killing his mother. We don’t see this event in Sophocles’ Electra, and their appearance only makes sense well after Orestes has got into the palace and carried out the killing. We do meet the Eumenides, however, in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, which deals with roughly the same events as Electra. And here we have another link, for as the madness of the Eumenides starts to set in after the murder, Orestes exclaims that he feels like a charioteer careering off course (ll. 1022-5).[3]


In the intervening years between Sophocles and Seferis, numerous paintings of Orestes being pursued by the Furies contributed to the scene being thought of as an archetypal figure for the experience of madness, eroding the importance of specific time, place, and circumstance (see, for example, the version by John Singer Sargent above). The difference in Seferis’ poem is that that the furies aren’t pursuing Orestes with torches and snakes.

In a bold subversion of our expectations, they’re sitting bored in the stands, watching the prince run laps in a chariot that isn’t careering off course, but wearing down their victim through a never-ending race.

Orestes in his chariot, therefore, becomes a new meditation on a different kind of insanity—one brought on by or experienced as exhausting cycles of repetition.


Today’s Orestes, when he asks «πόσοι γύροι;» (‘how many times around?’), might laugh ruefully at the thought that he would have used the word γύρος in happier times to order a ‘gyro’ (kebab meat carved off a rotating spit) on a late evening overlooking the Saronic Gulf. These days it evokes the repetitions of life within a reduced orbit – the news cycle. The up-down-up oscillation of the infection rate, the hospital admissions rate, the death rate. With hopes of a vaccine, we look forward to the time when these circles might be broken completely, when the foaming horses stand still, their hooves flush with the grass. But the end is not here; there is no respite. Orestes is still going, and even the Eumenides charged with tormenting him are bored with their task.

We must read this poem also in the context of Seferis’ personal life: restless wanderings around Europe, the feelings of futility weighing on an early-career civil servant. Or the cycle of political infighting, short-lived half-formed governments, and their myriad failures, which characterised the political life of the fluctuating Greek state throughout Seferis’ lifetime. Mythistorema, the collection featuring the Orestes poem, is marked with the post-script December 1933-1934. In Greece, this was no period of respite between wars. The end of the First World War continued into the Greco-Turkish War, which culminated in the destruction of Smyrna (the city of Seferis’ birth) in 1922. Then came the German occupation of Greece, struggles with Britain and Turkey over the contested island of Cyprus, and a coup launched by a military junta, which was in power at the time of Seferis’ death.


Today’s UK citizens can perhaps better appreciate the experience of living in such a prolonged time of ‘national crisis close at hand’. We can feel a point of contact with the Greece of Seferis at the end of the second part of his poem, «Κίχλη» (Thrush), written shortly after the end of the Second World War. Here the poet portrays a familiar kind of radio broadcast, faltering between stations airing a news report and a pop song:


—“Athens. The public has heard the news with alarm; it is feared a crisis is near. The prime minister declared: ‘There is no more time…’ Take cyclamen…needles of pine… O woman… —…is overwhelmingly stronger. The war…” SOULMONGER[4]


This last, portentous word, ΨΥΧΑΜΟΙΒΟΣ, that intrudes on the text of the poem is adapted from a term used to describe Ares, the bloodthirsty Greek god of War, in Agamemnon, another play by Aeschylus: “Ares, the moneychanger of bodies” (line 438), ὁ χρυσαμοιβὸς δ᾿ Ἄρης σωμάτων. Seferis’ Ares, though, does not deal in bodies alone, but also ψυχές, which is to say our lives, our souls, minds, spirits.


If we are to make the fraught comparison of this pandemic to wartime, then we must avoid casting the virus as the malignant enemy bent on world domination—the ordered ranks of familiar little COVID particles bouncing along to the rattle of drums, brandishing their spike glycoproteins menacingly. Seferis spent his war with the Greek government in exile, frustrated with political and bureaucratic backstabbers who were incapable of helping their suffering people. The corridors of impotence where the fight is not noble—too few of us too late are starting to realise that that is where our living catastrophes are made. This is like wartime in the sense that it is a crisis, a deadly crisis for which our leaders, our socio-economic infrastructure, we ourselves, were unprepared. A crisis that is ongoing and is wearing us down.

We are running round and round like this because we are caught in inescapable cycles of incompetence, because our leaders are bargaining with the Soulmonger, waiting for Lady Science to be lowered down onto the scene from a mechanical crane and dish out vaccines like Christmas candy.

Until then we are on the track asking ourselves, ‘How many times around? When will the circuits end?’ Sometime next spring, perhaps. As a later poem from Mythistorema says:


A little farther we will see the almond trees blossoming the marble gleaming in the sun the sea breaking into waves a little farther, let us rise a little higher.[5]





[1] Translation from Seferis, G. (1973) Collected Poems: 1924-1955 (E. Keeley and P. Sherrard trans.). London, 40-43. [2] H. Lloyd-Jones (1994) Sophocles. Ajax, Electra, Oedipus Tyrannus. Cambridge MA, 229 [3] This reading is much indebted to R. Padel (1985) ‘Homer’s Reader: A reading of George Seferis’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 211, 98-100 [4] Seferis (1973) 324-5 [5] Seferis (1973) 57

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