The Iliad: Fate

That’s Zeus. Feel his power. Some say this bronze statue, recovered from the sea, is Poseidon. It is not. It is Zeus because he is about to hurl his thunderbolt, and even earthshaker Poseidon must yield to that.

With all his power over gods and men, Zeus must not change fate.

Then the bright-eyed goddess Athene said to him: ‘Father, master of the bright lightning and the dark clouds, what is this you are saying? Do you intend to take a man who is mortal and long ago doomed by fate, and release him from grim death? Do it then — but we other gods will not all approve you.’

Fate is for men, and all men have the same fate: to die, whether heroically or not. So Patroklus “met the day of his fate” but, intentionally or not, he chose the day.

…this was a fatal error, poor fool — if he had kept to the instruction of the son of Peleus, he would have escaped the vile doom of back death. But Zeus’ mind is always stronger than the mind of men…. And it was Zeus then who put the urge in Patroklos’ heart.

So Homer provides us with a confused accountability. Your fate is determined, yet you can make the decision about when to meet it — and Zeus can influence that decision. So why can’t he change the fate itself? Fate is for men, not gods.

Then lord Apollo the far-worker said to him: ‘Earthshaker, you would not say I was in my right mind if I do battle with you for the sake of wretched mortals, who are like leaves — for a time they flourish in a blaze of glory, and feed on the yield of the earth, and then again they fade lifeless. No, let us withdraw from battle immediately, and leave the mortals to fight for themselves.’

You may wish for immortality, but it has drawbacks, Thetis, the goddess mother of Achilles, lives forever while her mortal husband ages and she know that Achilles must die and she cannot prevent or postpone it. A man may live on in his achievements and, if he is a warrior, his greatest achievement is to kill. The greater the man killed, the greater the glory. Thus, Hektor,

And people will say, even men of generations not yet born, as they sail by over the sparkling sea in their many-benched ships: “This is the mound of a man who died long ago. He was the greatest of men, and glorious Hektor killed him.” That is what they will say: and my glory will never die.

And the gods? They live forever and do not care about us. As Hera says, “Let them die or live as fortune has it….”

The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism

In The Battle for God, Karen Armstrong provides us with a history of fundamentalism as it has been experienced in three different monotheistic religious traditions: Islam, Judaism and Christianity. It’s a large undertaking, especially as she begins in 1492. Her account offers a dizzying array of people, programs and political developments. What ties them together is her analysis of why people who follow conservative religious traditions have felt displaced in the modern age. She begins with myth.

 We tend to assume that the people of the past were (more or less) like us, but in fact their spiritual lives were rather different. In particular, they evolved two ways of thinking, speaking and acquiring knowledge, which scholars have called mythos and logos. Both were essential; they were regarded as complementary ways of arriving at truth, and each had its special area of competence. Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence…. Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning.

We no longer believe in or take comfort from myth in the old ways. Myth has been set aside in modern thought by logos. In earlier times,

 Logos was equally important. Logos was the rational, pragmatic, and scientific thought that enables men and women to function well in the world. We may have lost the sense of mythos in the West today, but we are very familiar with logos, which is the basis of our society. Unlike myth, logos must relate exactly to facts and correspond to external realities if it is to be effective.

Because rational analysis and scientific processes have been so successful, people today try, mistakenly, to apply them to myth. If we cannot find evidence of the ten plagues visited on the Egyptians before Moses led his people out, then we conclude that the story of the Exodus is not “true” and has nothing to tell us. As a rabbi once said when commenting on the story of Jonah, “Don’t get hung up on the whale – this is a story that makes a point.”

Armstrong traces the relationship between mythos and logos as Islam, Judaism and Christianity adopted and adapted to modernism. Modernism was also experienced as part of a political process, especially in the Middle East. As to how religious people and their leaders respond, some adapt their religious beliefs and practices, some abandon them, and some reject the modernism which threatens their identity and way of life. That rejection takes place in a very real fear of extinction. Armstrong documents many examples of the cycle of rejection. First, within a dominant religious group those who reject changes in favor of clinging to the “fundamentals” experience conflict within that group. Next, if they are not successful, they either subside (often temporarily) or withdraw to a splinter group. Then, as they build their strength they may engage in outreach to others or, perceiving those others as evil and dangerous, they go on the attack.

 They are engaged in a conflict with enemies whose secularist policies and beliefs seem inimical to religion itself…. They fear annihilation, and try to fortify their beleaguered identify by means of selective retrieval of certain doctrines and practices of the past. To avoid contamination, they often withdraw from mainstream society to create a counterculture; yet fundamentalists are not impractical dreamers. They have absorbed the pragmatic rationalism of modernity, and, under the guidance of their charismatic leaders, they refine these “fundamentals” so as to create an ideology that provides the faithful with a plan of action.

Fundamentalists look to the past, but they act in the present.  Armstrong’s book is devoted to these “not impractical dreamers” and how their fears and action plans have affected all of us.

New Page: Glimpses of Greece – Ancient Arts

There he is, Zeus in all his naked glory. I have just posted a new addition to the Pages section of my blog. Entitled “Glimpses of Greece: Ancient Arts,” it contains links to the PowerPoint presentations and on-line videos I use in the course I give in the spring of 2011 at Lifetime Learners Institute.

The course offers a quick tour of four of the arts of classical Greece:

• Storytelling – myth and legend
• Painted Pots – Greek vase painting
• Classical Sculpture – Hold that pose!
• Greek Theater – then and now

Click here to take a look.

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Roberto Calasso’s book is difficult to categorize. It is about myth and it is also about the gods and heroes who are the subject of myth and what the myths meant to the Greeks then and mean to us now. Sounds like a lot, and it is. Calasso doesn’t move through his subject in a straight line, but wobbles from story to meaning and back. It is an interesting journey and rather long, since we do not go in a straight line.

No sooner have you grabbed hold of it than myth opens out into a fan of a thousand segments. Here the variant is the origin. Everything that happens, happens this way, or that way, or this other way. And in each of these diverging stories all the others are reflected, all brush by us like folds of the same cloth.

The variants don’t contradict, any more than the back of the tapestry contradicts the front of it. The stories are pieces of something bigger, just as the gods are pieces of some bigger power, and all gods — even Zeus — yield to necessity. A friend recently asked me, “Did the Greeks really believe all this, in all these gods?” She asked a reasonable question, but the gods are not reasonable; they just are.

So what did these Greek gods want of men? What they certainly did not require was that we behave one way rather than another. They were as ready to defend the unjust action of a favorite as to condemn the just actions of someone they disliked. So what did they want? To be recognized.

To be recognized. Belief does not come into it. Do you “believe” in the Statue of Liberty? Wrong question: you recognize what it stands for and your recognition comes from your response to its form, how it reaches out and up. The Greeks taught us how to do this, with stunning example after example of their own statues and stories.

Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles

The subtitle of Caroline Alexander’s book about the Iliad is “The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War.” A little long-winded that subtitle, but accurate. This is a recounting of the Trojan War as Homer told it and Alexander now interprets it. The key players are the combatants, Achilles and Hector, and their leaders, Agamemnon and Priam.

The Iliad glorifies the heroes, but it does not glorify war. Achilles is not at Troy in fulfillment of a pledge to defend the husband of Helen of Troy (originally of Sparta). He is there for glory, and yet he is reluctant to fight. He quarrels with Agamemnon not just because Agamemnon took the girl Briseis who had been awarded to Achilles, but because in the taking Agamemnon showed himself to be capricious and unjust and out for more than his fair share. The booty awarded to a warrior after a battle or a raid honored  the glory he had won, but it was not the glory itself, as Achilles understood. Agamemnon did not understand, and probably did not care to.

The new reader of the Iliad comes to it, expecting the story of the Trojan War. It is not. It is the story of a few days during the tenth year of that war, days during which Achilles withdraws from the battle, Patroclos is killed, and Achilles returns to the fight and slays Hector. We know the rest of the story — the beauty contest of the three goddesses, the abduction of Helen by Paris, the death of Achilles, the Trojan horse, the sacking of Troy — from other sources. Alexander explains,

The complete story of the war was once told by a series of six other epics, known collectively as the Trojan War poems of the Epic Cycle. Composed  at various dates, all considerably later than the Iliad, they also, like the Iliad, drew on much older common traditions.

In Alexander’s analysis of the Iliad she points out many places where Homer’s poem is at variance from that older tradition. Homer skillfully chose his incidents and characters to make real the meaning of leadership, friendship and death in the lives of the Greek and Trojan warriors. He also shows us the grief of mothers and of aged fathers, as parallels are developed between the suffering of Priam and the sorrows of Achilles’ mother, Thetis.

Thetis is a sea nymph, one of the immortals. Married to a mortal man, she gave birth to the mortal Achilles. She is destined to see him die while she lives on. (This is a disadvantage to immortality I had not considered before.) Alexander develops the idea of the inequality of the relationship between the gods who will live forever and the men who will not.

Of greater interest than the nature of the gods per se is the nature of their relationship with mortal men. The Olympians of the Iliad know everything about the mortals they look down upon…. Rarely indolent, usually zestful and opinionated, the extended family of Zeus aggressively engages with the mortal world. In disguise, the Olympians move, speak, and act freely among men, partaking of the human experience….

By contrast, despite the busy flow of divine activity that drums through their lives, the Homeric heroes and heroines know very little about their gods.

Because they know so little, men must propitiate the gods out of a proper caution for the future. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. One has a sense here of why Homer still speaks and we still listen: the gods know all including the future toward which men must grope blindly.

There is so much in this book that my comments here are just picking threads off the surface. I enjoyed the comparisons with other myths and folktales, the analysis of names and language, the evidence from archaeology. Best of all was the differentiation of character that Alexander perceives in the Iliad and the way Homer’s construction of the story conveys his views of gods and war and men and, especially, Achilles.

Here was a hero with both the nature and the stature to think and speak as an individual, to stand apart and challenge heroic convention. In the hyperstated mortality of Achilles lay the origins of something potentially greater even than epic — and that was tragedy.

Classical Myth: Heroes and Heroines

In several chapters in Barry Powell’s Classical Myth, he tells the stories of heroes and, occasionally, heroines:

• Perseus
• Heracles
• Theseus
• Medea
• Oedipus
• Antigone
• Jason

I have learned something really useful — my concept of the heroic is not the one the Greeks shared. I thought a hero was strong, brave and moral, a super Boy Scout. The Greeks saw the hero as strong, brave and dangerous, very understandable in a warrior culture. The Greeks respected both those who fought and those who talked, but the heroes were those who fought.

For example, Oedipus casually killed several people on the road and thought no more about it until the investigation years later. Also, it seemed to me that the gods did not play fair with him. Certainly his previous killings were not admirable, but he was condemned not for what he knowingly did, but for the fate he could not escape. Powell comments

To our minds, conditioned by two thousand years of Christian ethics, he may appear violent, hasty and overconfident, but the Greeks would not have seen that. In their eyes Oedipus had no moral fault: He wants to obey the will of the gods, as conveyed through Apollo’s instructions, and he wants to save his people. He applies his intelligence and courage to discover the truth for the benefit of the citizens he serves. He freely chooses a course leading to his own undeserved destruction.

Oedipus also applies his intelligence to arguing with prophecy, accusing the blind seer of plotting against him and threatening torture for a shepherd who (rightly) fears telling Oedipus what he will not want to hear. “Violent, hasty and overconfident,” he can’t escape his fate, despite his courage and intelligence. Perhaps that is the message here — no matter what your warrior skills, you cannot escape what the gods have in mind for you.

And what about the women? It appears that the threat of the female is that she can take on male characteristics. Medea aggressively pursues Jason and even more aggressively punishes him. The need to hurt him is greater than her need to protect her own children. Antigone presents a gentler image, but she is equally determined. Her sister protests that they can do nothing but submit, being women. She does not submit and one of the charges against her is of not acting like a woman. Medea is accused of worse: not acting like a Greek woman.

This book is a wonderful source and reference for classical myths. In addition to recounting the myths, Powell quotes extensively from the Greek and Roman authors who provide the source material. He compares accounts and provides useful family trees for the Thebans and others. I particularly enjoy his related Perspectives and illustrations from classic art. For Medea, for example, we have a description of Seneca’s Medea and a reproduction of Delacroix’s Médéé. The myths are still with us and so are intelligence, courage and undeserved fates.

Classical Myth: The Olympians

Some think this striking bronze statue is Zeus, while others think it must be Poseidon. I think the figure is Zeus. He looks like a take-charge guy and the pose is someone about to throw something important. Zeus hurled his thunderbolts, whereas Poseidon waved his trident or struck with it — it didn’t leave his hand.

The gods who gathered on Mt. Olympus were the 12 children of the Titan Cronus. In his valuable book, Classical Myth, Powell breaks them into three groups: (1) the ruler Zeus and his consort Hera, (2) the male Olympians, and (3) the female Olympians. Plus we hear about other lesser gods and spirits. Powell gives us portraits of the Olympian gods which convey not only their attributes, but their histories and personalities.

The meaning of the name of a god is often a valuable clue to his origin and qualities. It had puzzled me when I saw my first Greek Herm statue and learned it was used as a boundary marker. Cute statue, a real attention getter, but why a boundary? (If you’ve never seen a Herm, it is a stone pillar with a head on the top and an erect phallus on the front.) Hermes means “he of the stone heap” and is probably a reference to the heap of stones used to mark trails for travelers. You can mark a trail with stones, and also a boundary. Since Hermes protects travelers, he also protects — equally I hope — both merchants and thieves.

Apt quotations from Hesiod, Homer,  and Ovid accompany what we can learn from art, legends and archaeology. Here is Athena in the Iliad,

Athena marched down the ranks, arousing their will to attack.
In every heart she injected new courage to fight to the end,
and suddenly war seemed sweeter than sailing in hollow ships
and making a safe return to their own dear native land.

As Powell explains,

Athena represents reason’s control over elemental force, as here she imposes order on an impending attack. In war Ares is unrestrained violence; Athena teaches strategy and disciplined tactics.

See my earlier posts for additional comments about the book Classical Myth.

My Odyssey

I have just completed Homer’s Odyssey in a prose translation by Rieu and Rieu. How could I reach such an advanced age without having read it? Yes, I did know the story, but that’s not the same thing at all. Like knowing the plot of Hamlet without ever reading or seeing the play. About 30 years ago I stumbled through the Iliad. I didn’t like the Iliad very much: too many gods, too much blood and mayhem, too many petty quarrels over booty. There’s plenty of blood and booty in the Odyssey also, with many appearances by Athena of the bright eyes in various guises, but the feeling I have for it is entirely different.

Odysseus is a true Greek hero, brave but full of flaws. He looks for more booty instead of going straight home to wife and child. He enters the Cyclops cave without an invitation and eats his cheese, no less. Not satisfied to get away after losing several of his men, he has to taunt the blinded giant who is then almost able to sink his boat. We constantly hear that Odysseus is resourceful, clever, cunning. He is all these things, but he is also curious, hot headed and more than a little greedy. Again, while sitting in disguise among the riotous suiters of his wife Penelope, he almost blows the whole thing by provoking a fight. He is no gentle soul. When the old nurse recognizes him, he grips her by the throat:

I am indeed home after twenty years of grief and touble. But, since a god has revealed it to you, keep your moth shut and let not a soul in the house learn the truth. Otherwise I tell you plainly — and you know I make no idle threats — that if the gods deliver these fine Suitors into my hands I won’t spare you, though you’re my own nurse, on the day when I put the rest of the maids in my palace to death.

In the Odyssey, we travel in a different time, a time recorded by Homer over 2500 years ago but set in  an even earlier age. Men are violent, seeking food, women and treasure. They also seek adventure. They want to see the world. They know they are not perfect, yet they glory in such strength as they have and fear death. They are us, or we are them, but the focus shifts slightly, sometimes clear and sometimes fuzzy. Still, I think we can imagine them more clearly than they could have imagined us.