Dune: A Space Greek Drama
Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) has been described as a Space Opera, but it had set out to be a Space Greek Drama.
By making the scions of the Atriedes family the direct lineal descendants of the ancient Mycenean house of Atreus, Herbert involved himself and his story in the very roots of tragedy as a genre.
King Atreus brought a curse upon his own house when he murdered his nephews and fed them to his brother, violating the guest-laws of Xenia and enraging the gods. This curse would manifest in the murder of his son Agamemnon, one of the Atriedes (Sons of Atreus) of Greek legend, who had been one of the chief organizers of the war against Troy. These events, and those surrounding them, were immortalized in a story-cycle which would form the bedrock of material on which the ancient Greek dramatic tradition developed and flourished.
The boldness, arrogance, and sheer bombast with which Frank Herbert carried the ancient Greek dramatic tradition 20,000 years into the future set a whole new bar for Space Opera. A little over a decade after the first Dune book was released, the Space Opera would take the world by storm when George Lucas 1977 film Star Wars became a global phenomena.
In ‘Dreamers of Dune‘ Brian Herbert, son of Frank Herbert, tells us that when his father saw the movie,
... he picked out sixteen points of what he called ‘absolute identity’ between his book and the movie.
Brian goes on to tell us that his father would mask the pain of having his life’s work chopped up into a blockbuster film franchise that gave him no credit with humor; he got together with a coalition of other writers who felt similarly ripped off and formed the “We’re Too Big to Sue George Lucas” Society. Herbert said Lucas was welcome to join if he’d pay for lunch whenever they met.
The way that Noriyoshi Ohrai combined classical discipline with contemporary design elements makes the identity between Dune and Star Wars look even more obvious; they are both stories about fascism in space.
S-F Magazine
Since we started this whole trip with Dune and a pit-stop on Planet Arakkis, let’s bring it back:
Lady Jessica Atreides might have been the first Greco-Roman Baddie in Space.
Well, she was more like a Roman Catholic Baddie in Space, but the full complement of Dune’s inspiration really comes through in the costume design for the first iteration of Princess Leia:
What’s all this got to do with Noriyoshi Ohrai? And just who is that, anyway?
I kept running into Noriyoshi Ohrai’s name in the bottom right-hand corner of old covers for Japan’s S-F Magazine. I had been looking for evidence of Yoshitaka Amano’s first forrays into the freelance economy; allegedly he landed the cover of S-F Magazine in the October of 1981.
S-F magazine is owned by Hayakawa publishing, the same company that gave Amano most of his book commissions. The magazine is ongoing; it has been in print since 1959. S-F seeded the Japanese imagination with reprints of American popular science fiction, and went on to become a pillar of Japan’s distinct sci-fi culture.
I keep talking about Yoshitaka Amano because that’s how I ended up here in the first place, but he was hardly alone in developing the rich iconography of Dark Fantasy that suffused Japan in the 80s. He was operating in a milleu where performing at a high level was the norm. All of the illustrations which appeared on the cover of S-F Magazine in it’s heyday were incredible, and the work of Noriyoshi Ohrai is no exception.
I could not find a comprehensive list of Ohrai’s known contributions to the magazine anywhere; wikipedia does not even acknowledge this phase of his career.
Wikipedia does list an art book to his credit published in 1988 called ‘THE BEAUTIES IN MYTH’, which is going for close to four hundred dollars used on Amazon. This might be the place to look if one wanted a full complement of Noriyoshi Ohrai’s Greco-Roman Baddies in Space.
Noriyoshi Ohrai's Greco-Roman Baddies in Space
Frank Herbert’s Dune was perhaps the first work to transform the much-derided Space Opera into something with real literary weight.
Below is a series of illustrations by Noriyoshi Ohrai that strike up an uneasy truce between the distant past and the far future in a manner eerily reminiscent of Dune.
By projecting women of note from all across the imperial and aristocratic history of Europe several thousand years into the future and off-planet, the artist draws us into an alternate timeline that reminds me of the lyrics to the At The Drive-In song ‘Proxima Centauri’,
Nero has conquered the stars. No one ever saw the space-suit togas; wreathe around the head like Saturn's rings.
Like the books that might have inspired them, if only indirectly, these drawings possess an austerity and gravitas as imposing as the histories their regal subjects were drawn from.
Noriyoshi Ohrai’s illustrations represent a monumental and largely unsung achievement. Likes so many artists of his time, he elevated pulp subjects that served as little more than advertising copy to the status of visual master-works.
ENJOY: Noriyoshi Ohrai’s Greco-Roman Baddies in Space
Vibia Sabina
(83-136 AD); wife and second cousin once removed to the emperor Hadrian, Vibia Sabina was one of the most celebrated women of her time.
She was the first woman in Rome to be featured on a regular and continuous series of minted coins. In 128 a.d., she was awarded the throne of Augusta, a position of high honor.
Hadrian’s Secretary Suetonious was dismissed for conducting himself inappropriately toward her.
Suetonious is famous today for his biography of 12 Roman emperors, which covers the time from the reign of Julius Caesar to that of Domitian. Historians believe her husband may have been more sexually interested in men; perhaps as a result, the two of them had no children.
Tradition holds that she committed suicide as a result of her husband treating her little better than a slave. Contradictory sources include a relief commissioned by Hadrian which depicts the Divine Apotheosis of Vibia Sabina; Hadrian had ordered her deification.
Poppaea Sabina
(30-65 AD; Second wife to the emperor Nero; historical sources describe her as a beautiful woman who used intrigues to ascend to the position of Empress.
She was married to the leader of the Preatorian Guard, Rufrius Crispinus, at 14. When Rufrius was executed under Nero, she married Otho, a close friend of Nero. Tacitus says she only married Otho to get close to Nero. Whatever the truth of it, she became Nero’s mistress while married to Otho, and divorced Otho to become the empress of Nero.
Tacitus and Seutonius depict her as a ruthless schemer; Josephus says she worshiped the god of Israel, and advocated to her husband for the Jewish people.
Tacitus, Seutonius, and Cassius Dio attribute her death to a miscarriage that Nero had caused by kicking her in the stomach; a greek poem on frayed papyrus reads that she,
”made a loving farewell speech to Nero, before off to heaven on a chariot driven by a goddess”.
Nero went into deep mourning after her death, allegedly burning a year’s worth of incense at her funeral.
When he remarried, he very shortly divorced his new wife to castrate and marry a young freedman named Sporus, who Cassius Dio says bore an uncanny resemblance to the deceased Poppea.
Cratesicleia
(D. 219 BC) A Spartan queen known to us mostly through the work of Plutarch, Cratisiclea is at the periphery of a tale of overweening ambition, betrayal, and tragedy.
Her son, Cleomenes III, has been described by William Smith as ‘the last truly great man of Sparta, and perhaps… of all Greece’.
Cleomenes III almost conquered the entire Peloponesse during the Cleomenian Wars from 229 to 222 BC, during which time Cratesicleia was sent to Alexandria with her grandchildren to act as a hostage to her sons ally, Ptolomy III.
When Cleomenes lost the Spartan throne in 222 BC, he went to Egypt to seek the support of the Ptolomies. Ptolomy III had died that same year, and Ptolomy IV saw Cleomenes as a rival. Instead of support, Ptolomy Iv placed the suppliant under house arrest.
Cleomenes escaped and tried to incite the population of Alexandria against Ptolomy IV; the revolt failed, and Ptolomy IV had Cleomenes killed, along with his children and his mother, Cratesiclea.
Ermengarde
‘Ermengarde’ appears to have been a popular name among the crusading aristocracy of the 11th century. Did Ohrai mean Ermengarde, Viscountess of Narbonne? Ermengarde of Anjou? Ermengarde of Tours? Ermengarde of Burgundy? Ermengarde de Beaumont? I suspect it was Ermengarde of Anjou, as she seems to be the most popular and was the wife of the first king of the crusading kingdom in Jerusalum, Fulk of Anjou.
Galla Placidia
(392-450 AD); Daughter of Emperor Theodosius I; mother, tutor, and advisor to Emperor Valentinian III. Last Augusta of the Western Roman Empire.
Zosimus writes that she was in Rome while it was under siege by the Visigoths under Alaric I from 408 to 410. Before the fall, Placidia was captured by Alaric and carried off to the Visigothic Kingdom in Spain. Atawulf, successor to Alaric, entered an alliance with Honorius of Ravenna, Placidia’s brother, and campaigned against rival western Roman emperors Jovinus and Sebastinus on his behalf, defeating both in 413.
After this, Honorius consented to the marriage of Atawulf and Galla Placidia. In the year they were married they had one son, who died the same year as his father. Atawulf was assassinated in his bath in 415 in vengeance for having defeated Sarus, a Germanic chieftain.
In 417, Honorius forced Galla Placidia to marry Constantinius III, for whom she bore the future emperor Valentinian III.
In 418, she intervened in a succession crisis which threatened to splinter the Roman church in the aftermath of the death of Pope Zosimus. Constantinus was declared Augustus and became co-ruler of the Western Empire alongside Honorius in 421. Because Honorius had been without wife or child, Placidia was declared Augusta.
In that same year, Contantinius III died of illness. The widowed Galla Placidia fled to Constantinople with her children after a dispute with Honorius turned into an armed conflict between her retainers and his. Valentinian III would become Augustus of the Western Roman Empire in 425 shortly after the death of Honorius. Galla Placidia would act as regent until Aetius usurped the throne in 433.
Irene
(756-803 AD) This must be Irene of Athens, who became Augusta and Empress of the Romans in Byzantium following the untimely death of her husband Leo IV in 780. She was the first woman to rule in her own right in Roman and Byzantine history.
Irene called the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 wherein she declared iconoclasm, or the rejection of religious iconography, to be heretical, thus bringing an end to the iconoclast period (730-787). Because of this notable contribution to the development of the catholic rite, Irene was sainted.
She would act as regent as her son Constantine VI matured, but instead of referring to herself as regent, she publically considered she and her son co-rulers. Irene’s attempts to consolidate absolute power were met with resistance by the Byzantine military, and the Armeniac army formally declared Constantine IV sole ruler in 790.
Constantine restored Irene’s titles and status in 792 in a hollow gesture of friendship, but this seems only to have piqued the zeal of her resentment. In 797, she organized a conspiracy against her son wherein he was forced to flee the capital, and was then carried from his political exile on the shores of the Bosporous back to Constantinople to be blinded in the palace. It is unknown rather or not he survived the event, but it is known that after this point, Irene would act as the sole locus of power in Byzantium for five years.
In 802 the patricians conspired against her, placing Nikephoros, minister of finance, on the Throne. Irene was exiled to Lesbos where she was forced to support herself by spinning wool. She died the following year.
