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# Posted 8:52 AM by Patrick Belton

I DON'T KNOW IF WE'VE GOT ANY GEORDIES in our readership, but if we have, you really ought to go see Euripedes's (it's thought) Alcmaeon in Corinth at the Northumbria Live Academy, in which a friend of mine is Nikarete, Priestess of Aphrodite - who, as my friend says, is '(wait for it...) a pimp and brothel-keeper'. Alcmaeon completes the trilogy begun by The Bacchai and Iphigenia at Aulis - where Iphigenia is about the collision between public ambition and private sentiment during social and moral crisis, self-sacrifice and the politics of redemption, and the temptation, timely in an age which has given us Charles Graner and Abu Ghraib, to invoke the barbarism of the enemy to justify inhuman acts; and Bacchai elaborates the human quest for faith, deriving from both terror and hope, in which redemption produces persecution, and compassion, cruelty; Alcmaeon, in the twenty fragmentary lines that are left of it, is less clear in what its themes were meant to be, but seems to grapple with the unanticipated consequences of human action, and the contrasts between memory, anticipation, and social reality. This Alcmaeon, by the way, is produced by a Dubliner, Colin Teevan.

Of Nikarate, incidentally, Asklepiades (c. 156-28 BCE) writes

Nikarete’s face, sweetly moistened
by her desires
and frequently shown
at her gabled window,
was dried by Kleophon
at her door below
and, dear Kypris, his eyes’
sweet blue-bright lightning.

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