From Damocles to Socrates - EIDOLON (original) (raw)

Growing up in 1990s Harlem, I couldn’t have escaped hip-hop if I’d wanted to. The streets bumped with it: the boombox action on the corner and in the park, the speakers screaming from apartment windows, the cars reverberating with bass. On the way home from school every weekday, a nerdy Dominican boy listened to the beats and was mesmerized. None of that loudmusic in our house, my mother would always say — but I itched to bump the beats at home on our radio. Sometimes, if Mom had stepped out to the store and I was feeling brave, I’d tune in to Hot97 and live a few minutes of glory.

It wasn’t only the sonic architecture of the bass that snared me. The allure was in the verses themselves with their mighty torrent of words: sharp and cutting, smooth and coy, boisterous and threatening. And the prolifically inventive rhyme schemes! When, at the innocent age of twelve, I first heard the Notorious B.I.G. rap “Escargot, my car go / one sixty, swiftly” I had no clue what escargot was and had to look the word up — but even before receiving enlightenment from the dictionary I knew the verse was a gem. As much as the books I devoured at the local library, the rap game expanded my cultural horizons.

Although Biggie would become a staple of my adolescence (with Staten Island’s Wu-Tang Clan not far behind), the Fugees were my first real hip-hop love. The summer of 1996, as I sweated through classes with the Prep for Prep program in NYC before heading off to independent day school for seventh grade in the fall, all of my classmates were talking about the Fugees and rapping or humming to songs from their album The Score. Since not knowing the songs like the back of your hand meant not having a social life, I tried to sneak in some furtive radio time and commit the songs to memory.

The album’s hit single, “Killing Me Softly”, set my preteen heart aflame with dreams of Lauryn Hill. But because merely parroting the consensus would have been a sign of lameness (well before my private school baptism into Horace, I had the sentiment behind Odi profanum vulgusdown pat), I endorsed another song on the album as my personal favorite: “Zealots.” Lauryn Hill’s electrifying second verse (“And even after all my logic and my theory / I add a ‘Motherfucker’ so you ignant niggas hear me”) would become an unofficial life motto in the years to come, but it was the menace of Wyclef Jean’s opening warning to the “zealots” who “bite” (copy) his group’s rhymes that left the deepest impression: “I haunt MCs like Mephistopheles, bringing swords of Damocles…”

Long after a dip into the encyclopedia cleared up the references for me, I found myself coming back to one question: why thesespecificreferences? Teenage and young adult me was (mostly) content to answer that the references were just fly as hell. The Fugees were brainy, well read, sophisticated — exactly what the popular discourse of hip-hop as vulgar and disreputable, gaining in traction and vehemence throughout my teenage years, claimed rappers could not be. But as this Dominican boy from Harlem matured into a professional classicist, the question took on new forms and different complexions. Just what precisely was at stake for Wyclef and the Fugees in invoking the sword of Damocles? Did other rappers play with the Greco-Roman past too?

It slowly became apparent to me that answers to these questions, however provisional or tentative, could enrich the study of classical reception.

Over the past few decades, research into the afterlives of ancient Greece and Rome — in multiple genres of text and media, in different historical periods and geographic locales — has proliferated. Now ranging well beyond its original boundaries, the field of classical reception enjoys a firm trans-Atlantic and intercontinental disciplinary footing. By acknowledging and documenting African-American and Afro-Caribbean encounters with the Greeks and Romans, classicists (in volumes such as African Athena) have generated powerful insights into how historically marginalized groups have processed and narrated their engagement with a heritage long constructed and promulgated as Eurocentric in focus and content. Hip-hop’s entanglements with the Greco-Roman past have much to offer the student of reception.

So: what about those swords of Damocles?

The episode, probably first narrated in one of the 4th or 3rd century Greek historians, is reported by Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations (5.61–62). Dionysius II of Syracuse, tyrant without peer, had a courtier Damocles who flattered him to no end about the majesty of his resources and the abundance of his wealth. So Dionysius decided to teach him a lesson: “Do you want to get a taste of my life, experience my good fortune?” the tyrant asked Damocles. The latter replied yes, and the rest was history (or legend). Damocles was set up on a golden lectum and received the royal treatment, with boys ministering to him and all kinds of wealth and goodies wheeled out before him. But Dionysius also had a sword lowered over Damocles’ head, and at the sight of the sword Damocles quickly lost his appettite and asked to be excused. Cicero clinches his presentation of the story with a moral for the day (and for that section of his treatise): “Doesn’t Dionysius seem to have made it plenty clear that nothing is happy for him over whom terror always looms?”

In the early modern period, Damocles’ story became popular among artists. Among the best known representations of the legend is Richard Westall’s 1812 The Sword of Damocles, commissioned for a wealthy Dutch-British patron who was himself an important figure in the history of classical reception in 19th-century Britain: Thomas Hope. Author of the travel-novel Anastasius; or, memoirs of a Greek, Hope also moonlighted as an expert in ancient clothes and costumes and even took a stab at interior design. Perhaps in a nod to his patron’s sensibilities, Westall replaces Cicero’s ministering boys with neoclassical maidens attired in meticulously rendered clothes.

Now on display at the Ackland Art Museum in North Carolina, the painting gets its fair share of visitors each year; through the magic of Google Images and WikiCommons, anyone searching “sword of Damocles” online is swiftly directed to Westall’s work. Yet it is a 21st-century hip-hop sensation who should be credited for (re)introducing the painting to a global audience.

On July 29, 2010, Kanye West tweeted “This is what I’m on” and linked to an image of Westall’s painting. The mystery behind Kanye’s tweet was dispelled the following week, when the music video for his single “Power” (headlining his album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy) was released. In the video’s opening sequence, Kanye — dressed in black and wearing a Horus chain — appears between two rows of black Ionic columns with gilded capitals. As the camera pulls away from his face, two female sentinels and two female angels appear, and a sword — positioned directly over Kanye’s head — enters the frame.

The video was directed by Marco Brambilla, an Italian-born and Canadian-trained filmmaker and artist. In interviews following the release, Brambilla alluded to the Westall painting as an inspiration for the video’s iconography. Another apparent influence on the selection and arrangement of visual motifs is the Major and Minor Arcana of the Eteilla Tarot card series: one of these cards, the Ace of Swords, is also known as the Sword of Damocles (See D. Tarr, The Kanye West Handbook p. 271). This link between the Ace and Damocles is rooted in tarot’s centuries-long cultivation and use of an imagistic repertoire that drew liberally from Greco-Roman and Egyptianizing motifs in circulation during and after the Renaissance (a process documented in Helen Farley’s 2009 Cultural History of Tarot).

What viewers of the video were being treated to was a provocatively intermediated version of the Damocles legend: the sword positioned right over Kanye’s head is paired together with Ionic columns, female figures arrayed in diaphanous tarot-inspired costumes (Westall’s maidens, remixed), to generate a new vision of the implied threats to the man in power. In the words of the song’s refrain:

No one man should have all that power
The clock’s tickin’, I just count the hours
Stop trippin’, I’m trippin’ off the power

The Damocles legend is at work not only in the video itself but in the cover art commissioned by Kanye for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. American-born artist George Condo — the subject of a 2011 mid-career retrospective at New York’s New Museum — designed not one or two but five covers, two of which directly engage with the classicizing aspects of the video. The best-known cover features a sword driven into the severed head of a black man wearing a crown and the word “Power” suspended over the scene. “Power” is the same shade of red as the blood dripping from the severed head, the gems studded in the crown, the knob on the hilt of the sword.

Condo’s impaled head cover.

Is the impaled head — meant, according to George Condo, to evoke both cubistic and classical portraiture traditions— intended as a stand-in for Kanye ipse? Kanye as rapper and artist? In the “Power” video, a man with a sword flies towards Kanye, and in an interview with MTV Kanye himself described the sword-wielder as “about to cut my head off.” While the logic of the transition from the legendary sword to the decapitating sword isn’t outlined explicitly, cover and video collaborate to generate a new set of meanings through creative distortion of the Damoclean original. In the move from imminent to realized decapitation, the threat portended by the sword is fulfilled, and with a twist. Once the king/tyrant has been slain, the head — trailing blood — is placed on a flat surface for display in a manner reminiscent not so much of a Greek tyrant but of a prophet executed on the orders of a tyrannical king: John the Baptist.

Fascination with the generative potential of grotesque distortion is also evident in another of Condo’s album covers, in which a naked woman straddles a caricatured depiction of Kanye holding a bottle in his hand and reclining on a blue chaise lounge. The image, which shocked and disgusted some critics and led to the banning of the cover from Wal-Mart displays and from Apple’s iTunes Music Store, is remarkable for the incorporation of classicizing elements. “She’s a kind of fragment,” Condo stated in an interview for New York Magazine’s Vulture blog when asked to characterize the female-like figure: “between a sphinx, a phoenix, a haunting ghost, a harpy.” With the chaise lounge, we are invited to think of Damocles’ lectum — and/or a 21st century strip club, a context made plausible by the harpy’s furry go-go boots. Once again we see the same meaning-generative appropriation of the classical and its iconographies, in part through parody and inversion.

Condo’s ‘Sphinx’ album cover.

So Kanye and his collaborators have a thing for Damocles. Why? For several decades, hip-hop artists have riffed on the rapper-as-king trope — most memorably exemplified in Barron Claiborne’s 1997 photograph of Biggie wearing a crown. To understand why the legend of Damocles in particular became so resonant, we need to retrace our steps to a hip-hop classic. After all, as we saw earlier, a hip-hop group wove Damocles into their music some fourteen years before Kanye’s variation on the theme. The Fugees were all over Damocles before Kanye made it cool.

The opening to “Zealots”, dotted with Jean’s mentions of Faust and the sword of Damocles, warns other rappers not to bite or copy the Fugees’ rhymes precisely by producing a verse text so overloaded with allusions as to be nearly impossible to imitate. Hill’s verse sequence, leaping from “odes / manifold on your rhymes” to “gamma rays” to “grammar pays” to “Santana plays,” ramps up the challenge even further (on the consonance in these lines see A. Bradley’s Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip-Hopp. 65). The gauntlet has been thrown down; test us if you want, we can’t be bested.

At the same time, Jean’s allusion to Damocles is destabilizing, since the legend undermines the construct of royal invincibility projected by the rest of the song. No matter how extravagant the boasting and inspired the versifying, the threat of being supplanted and replaced as kingly MCs remains. Heavy is the head that wears the crown — to channel Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 2 as paraphrased by P. Diddy. And it wasn’t only a matter of artistic rivalry: the rap game could prove fatal, as the tragedies of 1996 and 1997 would confirm. Eight months after _The Score_’s release, rapper Tupac Shakur was gunned down in Las Vegas; the following year, three days after being photographed wearing a crown, Biggie was murdered in Los Angeles.

With “Power,” Kanye took up where the Fugees left off. Within a year of the song’s release, he and Jay-Z would revisit the discourse of kingly power under perpetual threat in the collaborative album Watch the Throne (the title a nod to the Damoclean anxiety). First in “Power” and then in WT, classical allusion sweeps beyond the practice of naming to encompass a whole host of secondary claims about the rapper as kingly in his consumption of iconic symbols of white cultural power: not just the hard capital of flashy things but the soft capital of the classical past. Already with the Fugees but even more dramatically with Kanye and Jay-Z, Greco-Roman antiquity is integrated into a program of acquisition and (apotropaic) display — which program then becomes a subject for the rappers’ own philosophizing.

Take, for example, the opening sequence of Jay-Z’s verse in “No Church in the Wild,” one of _WT_’s hit singles:

Tears on the mausoleum floor, blood stains the Colosseum doors
Lies on the lips of priests, Thanksgiving disguised as a feast
Rolling in the Rolls Royce Corniche
Only the doctors got this, I’m hiding from police
Cocaine seats, all white like I got the whole thing bleached
Drug dealer chic, I’m wondering if a thug’s prayers reach
Is pious pious ‘cause God loves pious?
Socrates asked: whose bias do y’all seek?
All for Plato, screech…

The lines are crammed with references: not just obvious nods to the Colosseum or to the high-end products of the 21st-century luxury economy, but — with the phrase “a thug’s prayers” — a double allusion to Tupac and to Bizzy Bone (of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony fame). But it’s the question “Is pious pious ‘cause God loves pious?” that really brings a tingle to my spine. Jay-Z’s reference to Plato’s Euthyphro is motivated in part by the rapper’s obsession with positioning himself as a Plato to his Socrates — Biggie, the man whose hip-hop mantle Jay-Z has long laid claim to inheriting. In a 2009 interview for The Root, Professor Cornel West, reminiscing about the rapper’s visit to one of his Princeton graduate seminars, recalled that Jay-Z had stated in class that he was “Plato to Biggie’s Socrates.”

Biggie needed a disciple to continue and promote his legacy after his untimely and unjust death, and Jay-Z represented himself as that disciple: hence the attraction of the Socrates-Plato paradigm as a means of rearticulating and rebranding his relationship to his fallen predecessor. Despite attending the same high school, Jay-Z and Biggie did not really get to know each other until they collaborated on the song “Brooklyn’s Finest” for Jay-Z’s 1996 album Reasonable Doubt (for the story see Z. Greenburg’s Empire State of Mind, pp. 13–15). Some skeptics — my wife among them — doubt that Jay knew Biggie well, but then again classicists have long wondered just how well Plato knew Socrates. Claims of discipleship routinely figure in disputes over authority and legacy, and Jay-Z is not the only rapper to position himself as Biggie’s heir and rightful successor: P. Diddy has so doggedly marketed himself and his record label as a shrine to Biggie that in 2010 a rival rapper started a petition “to let BIG rest in peace.” If Jay-Z is playing Plato, Diddy — fan of the _Anabasis_-themed 1979 movie classic The Warriors — is a worthy candidate for the role of Xenophon.

As with any allusion, this invocation of Socrates in hip-hop has a history. Jay-Z had been engaging with Greco-Roman antiquity in his music well before WT: when commenting on the 2006 song “Beach Chair” in his memoir Decoded, he specifies that the line “I said from not being afraid to fall out the sky” gestured at the myth of Daedalus and Icarus. “It’s a great story,” he adds, “but sometimes we have to ignore the lesson of it, especially those of us who come from backgrounds where there’s always someone telling you to quit or to keep a low profile. We can’t be afraid to fly — or to be fly — which means soaring not just past our fear of failure but also past our fear of success.”

What makes Jay-Z’s decision to appropriate Socrates particularly striking is how it cuts against the grain of a longstanding tendency in socially and classically conscious hip-hop: the deployment of the philosopher as a metonym for the modes of white hegemony about to be upended by the rapper’s art. Here I limit myself to two examples. In 1990, the Bronx-based Boogie Down Productions released the album Edutainment. Several of the album’s skits and songs feature appearances by Stokely Carmichael, one of the pioneering leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and popularizer of the slogan “Black Power.” Riding the wave of Afrocentrist discourse whose most controversial scholarly exposition took the form of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena(the first volume of which had been published three years prior), Boogie Down’s song “Blackman in Effect” pits ancient Egypt against ancient Greece:

… The Egyptians, giving birth to
Science, mathematics, and music …
So, people that believe in Greek philosophy,
Know your facts, Egypt was the monopoly
Greeks had learned from Egyptian masters
You might say “Prove it,” well, here’s the answers:
640 to 322 BC originates Greek philosophy
But in that era Greece was at war
With themselves and Persia, what’s more,
Any philosopher at that time was a criminal
He’d be killed, very simple
This indicates that Greece had no respect
For science or intellect…

For a generation seeking to dethrone Eurocentrist cultural power by charting an alternative intellectual genealogy, these lines were trenchant. It was blackness, discursively constituted as having its roots in ancient Egypt, that had given birth to the arts and sciences. The Greeks, on the other hand, were latecomers and borrowers — hardly the original geniuses conjured into being by the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment Greco-Roman fetish. One irony, of course, is that Greek acknowledgment of debts to Egypt reaches all the way back to Herodotus; another is that efforts to torpedo Greek pretensions to cultural superiority by locating them as heirs to and plagiarists of other cultures have a distinguished ancient pedigree, as any reader of Josephus will know.

“Blackman in Effect” cites Socrates (unnamed) as an example of ancient Greece’s failings: his death, proof that among the Greeks there was “no respect / For science or intellect,” is incorporated into the Afrocentric polemic against the Greek legacy. Far from merely signifying Greek backwardness, however, the figure of Socrates could also operate as a marker of the limits that the black hip-hop artist would transcend. The witty bombast of Wu-Tang’s Inspectah Deck in the 1997 song “Triumph” hammers the point home:

Socrates’ philosophies
and hypotheses can’t define how I be droppin’ these
mockeries …

This verse came back on my radar when, not long ago, I took a break from prepping a class on the first three books of Plato’s Republic — for a section I was teaching in Columbia’s Contemporary Civilization sequence — to listen to a “Jalen and Jacoby” ESPN podcast on the best hip-hop groups “of all time.” As the podcast hosts sampled and discussed Wu-Tang’s music, I was struck by how exquisite the classicizing-_cum_-canonizing project of sampling Deck on Socrates was. Exquisite not only because Deck was invoking the legacy of the Greek past as embodied in the figure of Socrates to surpass and outdo it; or because Deck had elevated his rap to the status of Socratic thought only then to dismiss the possibility that such thought could contain his lyrical mockeries; or because Wu-Tang had been striving ever since its emergence as a group to fashion itself as an icon of the East and of Chinese martial arts; or because I was tickled by the thought that the Socrates of Plato_’_s Republic would most assuredly ban hip-hop from his ideal city.

No: what made the lines so exquisite was their participation in a conversation that had been taking place before Wu-Tang and has continued to the present day. The conversation is about how to think about the Greek and Roman past — and how to experience, relive, and reimagine that past — through the dense allusivity and intertextuality of the hip-hop arts.

Last summer, I asked the students of my Stanford ancient Greek myth class if they thought hip-hop artists knew about, read about, or had any meaningful exposure to the stories and the texts we were reading. “Absolutely not,” one of them confidently replied. “Why would they?”

The urgency of addressing that “why” reaches beyond any one classroom or any one moment of uninterrogated privilege. On blogs and at annual meetings and over forwarded Chronicle of Higher Ed articles, the future of Classics in a 21st century of shrinking budgets and (growing) ideological tensions has many of us concerned. Sure, there is nothing new under the sun: much like Nietzsche’s God, Classics has been pronounced dead more than once only to rise again. However, in the era of institutional and financial challenges to humanistic education, the anxiety is growing: perhaps the phoenix act won’t be replicable this time; perhaps we really are screwed.

The study of hip-hop’s classical receptions can open our eyes to the remarkably robust, highly diversified, and very public reworkings of the Greco-Roman past being performed for and consumed by millions — hundreds of millions. Appreciating the breadth and depth of these reworkings requires not only discarding the Odi profanum vulgus attitude (for so long a fixture in the ideological substructure of Classics) but in its place articulating and adopting a more flexible understanding of our field. For a dark-skinned child of the Dominican Diaspora who spent his formative years in Harlem, it was both captivating and empowering to detect the pulse of Greco-Roman antiquity in hip-hop. In the heat of that collision new worlds were born.

Trained as a Roman historian, DAN-EL PADILLA PERALTA is a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Lecturer in Classics at Columbia University, where he researches and writes on a variety of topics. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton (2006), his M.Phil. in Greek and Roman history from Oxford (2008), and his doctorate in Classics from Stanford (2014). In the fall of 2016 he will begin a tenure-track appointment in Classics at Princeton. Undocumented, his memoir of growing up without legal immigrant status in New York City, will be published this July by Penguin Press. His monograph on Roman Republican religion is under contract with Princeton University Press.

A version of some of the material in this article first appeared on the Stanford Classics website.

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