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	Songs From The Lions Cage / Pride Victims, Treason And Vengeance – February 2002
	The first two Arena albums are linked thematically. Both albums are filled with biblical and mythological elements: Jericho, king Midas, king Solomon, Medusa, the sirens from The Odyssey… Each album has its own central theme, but they also overlap and are interlocked by the Crying For Help-theme that runs through both albums. The Crying For Help-theme is about feeling vulnerable and alone, about being completely isolated, without help, without friends. This leads to despair and to a cry for help: ‘Somebody, anybody, please help me!’ On Songs… the central theme is being a victim. The album is all about persons who find themselves in a difficult situation, without it necessarily being their own fault. It’s also about the way they face these situations, about the determination they have to overcome it, rise above it, and about the doubts that they have.  Out Of The Wilderness is a good example. The song starts with feelings of despair and loneliness. But towards the end, a new determination surfaces: ‘I’m breaking out of this wilderness’! This song also gives a clue about why people may become a victim: the heart is their weak spot (‘Through to your Achilles heart’; Achilles was baptised in the river Styx by his mother to make him invulnerable. She held him by his heel and therefore his heel was his weak spot). There are more references in other songs: ‘When your heart grows cold’ in Crying For Help IV; ‘And the gurgles of laughter are echoes once more in my heart’ in Solomon.  Jericho follows along the same lines. ‘Sadness is your only friend’ really captures the first half of the song. But then it’s ‘Gonna turn the tide against you…’; the person fights back the thing/person that has made him feel the way he feels. Solomon is the song that is literally about being a victim. It’s about being thrown to the lions, about being thrown into the arena. How do you feel? What do you do? The central message is that it doesn’t matter who you are, an important person or a nobody, because in the lion’s cage we’re all the same. Your character is paramount: do you fight the lions, or do you give up? Another theme on Songs… is greed. Greed makes you blind and it makes you do thing you might regret later on. Midas Vision is all about that. King Midas was a mythological king, who was granted a wish by Dionysus. Midas wished that everything he touched would turn into gold…. If you pursue a goal driven by greed, then you may find out that when you’ve achieved it, it turns out not to be a blessing, but a curse. Interestingly, the motto of the album Contagion is ‘be careful what you wish for’… Also, as you’re blindly pursuing your goal, you may alienate those who are dear to you (‘What did I say did I do/To lose my hold on you?’). You got what you wanted, but doing so you’ve created your own private hell. In this song, the protagonist is the victim of his own greed. This theme reappears on Pride. Fool’s Gold tells the same story. You may go for the gold, but it’s not all gold that glisters; i.e. things aren’t always what they may seem at first glance. The ‘gold’ can be a metaphor for any goal or ambition a person may pursue. It turned out different from the way he expected it to be and he can’t undo it: ‘I made my own prison – I must live out my life in it now’. This theme of living with the consequences of your own decisions also surfaces in Welcome To The Cage: ‘You will live with your choices forever’. Another interesting theme is vengeance. Vengeance is an important theme on Pride. In a way, it’s a continuation of the ‘victim-theme’ on Songs…: a victim can fight back and can eventually still be a winner. The people you may sacrifice or alienate from you while you’re pursuing a goal may start to hate you and want revenge: ‘Vengeance – Be sure that I will repay you’. The theme ‘greed’ is also visible in Valley Of The Kings. In this song, a king wants to live forever, at the expense of the lives of many others. He commands a lot of power and abuses it for his own glorification. In the same vein, the ruler in Empire Of A Thousand Days commands a lot of power, which he uses to build his empire. The rulers in both songs sound like megalomaniacs. Their empires may prove to be fragile, because the oppression the rulers use to create it may lead to its downfall; a rapid ascension to power may be followed by a rapid downfall in keeping. Pride must have a fall… Empire Of A Thousand Days has a ‘mirror song’: Crying For Help VII. In Empire… it says ‘Let the meek lie down/I will never set your people free’; Crying For Help VII states ‘Let my people go’. The latter song is clearly from the perspective of the oppressed, the victims. The oppression leads to resistance: ‘But together we can go down fighting’. The victims don’t resign to their situation; they fight back. The ruler knows he stands alone, he can trust no one: ‘And I can count on you to let me bleed’. Treason is another important theme on Pride. It surfaces in different forms in the songs.  Power and treason are also the themes of Medusa and Sirens. Both songs are about treacherous women. The women concerned command power over the ones who adore them and they abuse this power. The song Medusa tells this very powerfully. Medusa is one of the three Gorgons from Greek mythology; female monsters whose hair consisted of snakes and whose glance turned the spectator into stone (‘I’m paralysed before this vision (…) I turn to stone). The protagonist in this song adores her, even though he knows it’s bad for him. He’s ‘addicted’ to her and, while knowing she’s full of hollow words and promises, he still wants to die in her embrace… In Sirens the protagonist deals with the same dilemma. He is lured by the siren’s call (i.e. seduced by a woman he knows is no good), which he fights to resist, because he knows that to follow it will lead to ruin. His inner struggle, both fighting with the attempts of the siren to seduce him yet wanting surrender to it, is powerfully described with the metaphor of a ship lost at sea in a violent storm, the forces of nature striking it, the protagonist desperately trying to weather out the storm. He is torn until the end: ‘Spare me from those sirens’ lies/Spare me from this grand illusion’ (…) ‘Dragged across the rocks by the sirens' whisper!’. Thus the circle is completed; the heart is the weak spot. You can’t help falling in love. By: Erik Beers