The Greek Tragedy of Tom Riddle Tyrannos
In my office I keep on display a copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, as translated into ancient Greek (Ἅρειος Ποτήρ καὶ ἡ τοῦ φιλοσόφου λίθος) by Andrew Wilson. Visitors marvel at this strange object: they smile upon recognizing the cover, but most people can’t make out what’s going on with the words. Some visitors assume the book is the more familiar Latin translation (Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis), an assumption that arises, no doubt, from Rowling’s use of Latin — or rather Latin calques, as Isabelle-Rachel Casta has shown — for the language of magic. But the very existence of the ancient Greek translation catches almost everyone off guard. In response to their surprise, I tend to offer a variation on the words of Star Trek VI’s Klingon Chancellor Gorkon: “You’ve not experienced Harry Potter until you’ve read it in the original ancient Greek.”
In the twenty years since its initial publication, the Harry Potter series has perhaps brought more students into the Classics classroom than any other books (save D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths and the Percy Jackson series). Yet, as a person who identifies not only as a Classicist but also specifically as a Hellenist, I find the Harry Potter series challenging. Students come to college filled with excitement to learn Latin, as if such esoteric knowledge will grant them access to the wizarding world of spells (such as “Petrificus Totalus!” and “Expecto Patronum!”) or help them understand something more deeply about Pomona Sprout or Quirinus Quirrell. (It will.) From a linguistic perspective, however, the Harry Potter novels offer little in the way of the ancient Greek language and tend not to get those same students into Greek classes.
Sure, there are some passing names and terms. There’s Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody, whose name hints at possession by an alastôr or “avenging spirit” (or, in his case, his form taken over by the vengeful Barty Crouch Jr.). There’s the episkey spell, which comes from a Greek word (ἐπισκευή) for the repairing of broken structures (though not noses). And there’s Xenophilius Lovegood, whose first name suggests both that he is a “lover of strange or unusual things” (a philos of xena) and that he is a “friend to guests” (a philos to xenoi), although he ends up betraying his guests to the Death Eaters. Yet even Aramaic seems more significant or powerful, as we see in that most unforgivable of curses, Avada Kedavra, meaning “let the thing be destroyed.”
If ancient Greek language is largely absent, the Hellenically inclined can leverage the popularity of Harry Potter via the series’ engagement with classical myth. (To date, Richard Spencer has written the most comprehensive study of Greco-Roman myth in the Harry Potter series.) Many figures of classical myth do appear, albeit in transmogrified form: there’s Fluffy, the guard dog for the Sorcerer’s Stone (a version of the hellhound Kerberos), or wacky Divination professor Sybill Trelawney, whose name alludes to the Sibyl, prophetess of Apollo (and whose grandmother is cheekily named Cassandra, another Apolline prophetess). Of course, this may just be Greek myth mediated via Latin literature, just as much of Greek literature and culture has been mediated for us Muggles by the Romans (and the Byzantines and the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and so on).
From this perspective, Wilson’s translation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone into ancient Greek thus seems like something of a lark, even if one reviewer has referred to it as “surely one of the most important pieces of Ancient Greek prose written in many centuries.” It would seem at first (and even sixth) blush that there’s nothing particularly Greek about the Harry Potter series. One has a sense from his own website that Wilson, a retired schoolmaster from Bedford, England, produced the Greek translation in part because he could, in part to lure Latin students deeper into the world of Classics, rather than because of any intrinsically Greek quality to the novels, just as others have produced Latin translations of Winnie Ille Pu and Hobbitus Ille. (Surely Wilson did not produce it because he expected there to be a massive, native ancient-Greek-reading audience to boost royalties.)
While the ancient Greek language may not get much play in the Harry Potter novels, ancient Greek political thought is, surprisingly, crucial to understanding the series, especially its conclusion. The most obvious tip-off is found in the epigraph of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which includes a quotation from Greek tragedy, from Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, the second play of the Oresteia (our only surviving dramatic trilogy, from 458 BCE). I have written about this epigraph in Classical Traditions in Modern Fantasy, or you may wish to read Mitchell Parks’s compelling treatment of the epigraph published last month here on Eidolon. For our purposes, I simply want to emphasize how Rowling encourages us through this quotation to start thinking about the Harry Potter novels in terms of Greek tragedy.
However, the question naturally emerges: in what way is the Harry Potter series like Greek tragedy? What do the novels gain from tragedy, or what do we stand to gain thinking about them in this way? For example, in quoting this ode from the Libation Bearers, Rowling is able to emphasize several key themes in the series: kin-slaughter and inter-generational cycles of violence; the problem of political tyranny; and the importance of the “house” (or many houses) banding together to heal its own sickness.
Alice Mills helpfully observes that we might not look so much to Harry Potter as a corollary to Orestes as to the novel’s main antagonist, Voldemort or “Tom Riddle,” as engaged in an “anti-Oresteia.” Voldemort is an Orestes gone wrong, the abandoned child who does not find salvation in the bonds of family, friendship, and education, but instead descends into isolation, fear, and paranoia of the future, becoming a tyrant and murdering those who he thinks stand in his way. Dumbledore suggests so much in his last lecture to Harry in Half-Blood Prince (p. 510):
Harry, Harry, only Voldemort made a grave error, and acted on Professor Trelawney’s words! If Voldemort had never murdered your father, would he have imparted in you a furious desire for revenge? Of course not! If he had not forced your mother to die for you, would he have given you a magical protection he could not penetrate? Of course not, Harry? Don’t you see? Voldemort himself created his worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back! Voldemort is no different! Always he was on the lookout for the one who would challenge him. He heard the prophecy and he leapt into action, with the result that he not only handpicked the man most likely to finish him, he handed him uniquely deadly weapons!
Dumbledore’s lecture is perhaps the series’ most complete statement on the nature of tyranny and seems to point to the question — or, if you will, the riddle — at the heart of the Harry Potter story: “What makes a man become an evil tyrant?”
In this way, Rowling’s riddle bears a striking resemblance to another figure of Greek tragedy, Sophocles’ Oedipus in Oedipus Tyrannos (c. 429–425 BCE). In myth, the hero Oedipus famously solves the riddle of the Sphinx — What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening? — with the self-aware answer anthrôpos (“man” or “humankind”). In Sophocles’ drama, the same Oedipus next attempts to solve another mystery — Who killed the previous king of Thebes, Laius? — and learns that not only did he, Oedipus, commit the murder, but Oedipus does not even know himself, including the fact that he is the son Laius had abandoned and exposed to die. In the process of this discovery, Oedipus isolates himself from the advice of others, becomes a “stage tyrant,” destroys his family, and blinds himself.
Tom Riddle follows a similar path to tyranny, which we learn along with Harry during his Pensieve-aided exploration of Tom Riddle’s childhood in Half-Blood Prince. We see Riddle’s abandonment by his father, his broken home, and his eventual murder of his own family. Tom Riddle’s relentless pursuit of knowledge and immortality leads him to murder his family, become Voldemort, and lay the foundation for his many forms of self-destruction.
If Voldemort traces the arc of the Sophoclean tragic hero, Harry follows an Aeschylean course, following in Orestes’ footsteps. Through Harry, we see Rowling’s attempt to solve her own riddle by suggesting that tyranny is the product of a failure in what the ancient Greeks called philia (“love,” “affectionate regard,” and “friendship”), the relationship that exists among philoi (“one’s own,” “kin,” or “friends”). Tyranny arises from the failure of parents (who could be called philoi) to love their child; the failure of kin (likewise philoi) to protect their own; the failure of friends (also philoi) to trust one another and join together to protect the shared house.
As we follow Harry’s development from “Boy Who Lived in the Cupboard under the Stairs” to savior of the wizarding world, we see the crucial role philia and Harry’s philoi play in steering him away from becoming the next Tom Riddle or tyrant. This theme makes even more interesting Xenophilius Lovegood: although his Greek name suggests that he would treat his guests as kin, we learn that Xenophilius is a father who so loves his daughter Luna that he’s willing to sacrifice his guests — and Luna’s philoi (Harry, Hermione, and Ron) — to save her: the right intent, if by the wrong means.
The shape of Rowling’s riddle is partly a product of her own life experience. In terms of themes, she regularly speaks of her experience as a single mother caring for a child in the face of poverty when she was developing the Harry Potter story. As Lev Grossman reported in Time in 2005, Rowling described Voldemort in complementary terms: “evil seems to flourish… in places where people didn’t get good fathering.” In a 2008 commencement address at Harvard, Rowling also spoke of her experience as a researcher working for Amnesty International with ex-political prisoners who had escaped totalitarian regimes in Africa. In terms of genre, Classicists know from her own writing (and from an article by one of her professors, “Petrus Sapiens”) that Rowling studied Classics at Exeter University, including the study of tragedy with Richard Seaford, whose published ideas about the tyrant figure in Greek tragedy are remarkably similar to the ideas Dumbledore espouses in the quotation above.
The Harry Potter series, then, appears to be Rowling’s unique synthesis of these experiences in family and survivors of totalitarianism with Greek tragedy. Rowling seems to see in Greek tragedy a deep well of feeling around the familial and the political, as well as an opportunity to link these two seemingly disparate realms of human activity in order to make sense of our greatest political evils in terms of our most basic emotions and needs.
Not only do the Harry Potter books make more sense, then, when we read the series as a Greek tragedy about the perils of philia and the threat of tyranny, but other responses to the books in our Muggle worlds also start to make more sense. For example, the series has led to the establishment of the Harry Potter Alliance, a non-profit, human rights organization whose mission is framed precisely in terms of philia: “The weapon we have is love.”
More interesting is the case of Voldemort and U.S. President Donald Trump. Republicans have long been satirized as being supporters of Voldemort, as we see in one popular bumper sticker. More pointedly, however, as Time reported last summer during the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, political science professor Diana Mutz of the University of Pennsylvania published a study that found readers of the Harry Potter series were significantly less inclined to vote for Donald Trump.
Mutz explained the correlation in terms of “Trump’s dominating kind of politics,” while another political science professor, Anthony Gierzynski, in an interview with The Guardian this past March described the perceived correspondence in terms of “a president whose rhetoric promotes intolerance and who fits the typical authoritarian personality.” Rowling herself tweeted in response to Mutz’s study that it “made my day” but also “How horrible. Voldemort was nowhere near as bad.” This comparison is not without its detractors, too. For example, Sonny Bunch wrote an Opinion piece on May 31 in The Washington Post criticizing those who make such comparisons with the title “If you’re going to use books to resist Trump, pick better ones than ‘Harry Potter’.”
In comparing Donald Trump to Voldemort, these responses collectively fail to recognize that there is a missing middle term in the comparison, that Rowling’s theory of tyranny is deeply dependent on an ancient Greek tragic prototype. Rowling has created a magnificent and memorable caricature of the Greek tragic tyrannos in the figure of Voldemort (even if his name sounds French) — a caricature that Dumbledore encourages us in his lesson to project onto “tyrants everywhere.” Such caricature, however, also points to the real limitation of Rowling’s theory of tyranny for understanding contemporary politics. While Rowling offers a heartfelt meditation on the relationship between fatherly neglect, familial love, and political evil, such theorizing might be open to the same criticisms as projects like the Trump 101 syllabus — a project that met sharp criticism for turning towards (European, ancient) history to understand tyranny rather than addressing present (American) structures of racism, sexism, and xenophobia (hence the subsequent Trump Syllabus 2.0 and 3.0).
There is little obviously ancient Greek about the Harry Potter series — not its language nor its names. And yet there is something deeply Greek about the novels. The quotation of Libation Bearers reveals the importance of Greek drama as a form of knowledge that structures the Harry Potter series, as both a crucial epistemological structure for the series’ theory of tyranny and part of its warm, beating heart. Whether or not we are persuaded by Rowling’s solution to the tragedy of Tom Riddle and the strategies for resistance she seems to offer in the face of real-world authoritarianism or tyranny is up for debate. What I can say is that perhaps I ought to change up my quip to those who marvel at my ancient Greek copy of Harry Potter: “You’ve not experienced Harry Potter until you’ve understood it as Greek tragedy.”
Brett Rogers is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Puget Sound, where he teaches and writes regularly on Greek epic and drama, as well as classical antiquity in popular culture. He has co-edited with Benjamin Eldon Stevens Classical Traditions in Modern Fantasy (2017) and Classical Traditions in Science Fiction (2015). Despite knowing better, he really, *really* wants to tickle a sleeping dragon.
