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 Iliad: How They Die

The Greeks and Trojans fought man to man. It was personal. You saw your opponent fall.

He fell to the ground in the dust, like a poplar….

He crashed down on his face, and his armour clattered about him.

Life and strength collapsed where he lay.

Death was darkness.

…darkness covered his eyes, and he crashed, like a tower….

…and black night covered over his eyes.

…he crashed from the chariot, and the hateful darkness took him.

It was the same experience for both sides. No remote weaponry separated winners and losers.

So he fell, and the bronze of his crafted armour rang over him

…..many of the Trojans and Achaians lay stretched side by side, face down in the dust.

They lay dead on the ground, a sight now to gladden the vultures, not their wives.

It was the fate of the warrior to die.

…over his eyes came the surge of death, and strong fate took him.

…filled the measure of their fate at the hands of king Agamemnon, and sank down into Hades.

Hades is below the earth and from Hades you do not return. Earth could sustain life, but it does no more.

…all these, one after another, he brought down to the nourishing earth.

…he crashed in the dust and his hand clawed earth.

…the life left his bones.

I am rereading The Iliad after many years. During my previous reading I was disgusted by the fighting and maiming and dying and those warriors who gloried in it. But it is not glorious to claw the earth, and surely that is the point.

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.

David Malouf, Ransom

Homer’s Iliad tells of Achilles’ rage; it is also the story of Priam’s grief over the death of his son, the noble Hector, at the hands of Achilles. We know of this rage and that grief, but at the remove of centuries. David Malouf, in Ransom, brings us into the experience.

This novel is also a meditation of the meaning of our roles in life: Achilles’ role as a warrior, Priam’s role as king.

My role was to hold myself apart in ceremonial stillness and let others be my arm, my fist–my breath too when talk was needed, because … I have always had a herald at my side, our good Idaeus, to find words for me. To be seen as a man like other men–human as we are, all of us–would have suggested that I was impermanent and weak. Better to stand still and keep silent, so that when old age came upon me, as it has at last, this world would not see how shaky my grip has become, and how cracked and thin my voice. Only that I am still here. Fixed and permanent.

Priam’s permanence as a king has cost him humanity and the power to express his own human needs. He has also lost — or never had — the daily experiences that most men share of work and occasional hardships and doing without. Priam sets out on a journey to ransom his son, accompanied only by a workingman, a carter, and his two mules. He is allowed to be hot, to be hungry, to speak for himself, and to enjoy the talk that is not ceremonial.

Priam was himself ransomed when, as a boy, he was redeemed from a life of slavery by his sister. Priam’s name means “the price”, the price that was paid for his freedom. It is also, ironically, the price he has paid for many years for his kingship, his sons, and now this war. Malouf brings us back to to Homer again because Homer contains it all: a young man’s rage and and old man’s grief.

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.

Circe, by Homer, by Joyce

When Odysseus landed on the Aeaean Island he was unsure how dangerous the inhabitants would be. He sent half the crew to check it out, and they were turned by the goddess Circe into swine – with the exception of one man who escaped and returned to tell Odysseus. Circe is attractive:

…But still
they paused at her doors, the nymph with lovely braids

Circe—and deep inside they heard her singing, lifting
her spellbinding voice as she glided back and forth
at her great immortal loom, her enchanting web
a shimmering glory only goddesses can weave.

The Odyssey, Book 10, Robert Fagles Translation

With the help of the god Hermes, Odysseus resists Circe’s drugged wine and gets her to free his crew from their animal forms. Then there is bathing and feasting and going to bed and the goal of Ithaca is forgotten for a year. When Circe sends him on his way, she instructs him to visit Hades to consult the seer Tiresias.

I am reading/struggling through James Joyce’s Ulysses and wonder what the long Circe section there has to do with Homer’s Circe. Joyce has written in dramatic form, with indicated speakers and with stage directions, so the externals of who is saying this or doing that are clearer than in some of the preceding sections. Yet it reads like an extended dream sequence in which all the themes take their turn on the stage.

I am looking for Circe and find an assortment of prostitutes, as well as references to all the women previously encountered. My candidate is Bella/Bello who does indeed work changes in form, both on herself and on Leopold Bloom. Bella becomes Bello and assumes the masculine pronoun. Bloom remains Bloom but is now a female, doing Bello’s bidding. Blamires’ comment:

Thus, before the powerful figure of Bella, the latent femininity and submissiveness of Bloom emerge…. Bloom, with dulling eyes and thickening nose, becomes a humble infatuated creature, while Bella fully takes over the masculine role, becomes ‘Bello’, and orders Bloom down on all fours.

Joyce performs a switch on Homer’s story. Ulysses here, rather than avoiding enchantment and taking control of the situation, is overwhelmed and transformed in ways (feminine) that Joyce perceives as negative. Is that what powerful women do? They make you into the female they no longer are, submissive, groveling, animal like.

More, the entire Circe section is one transformation after another as characters ranging from Milly Bloom to King Edward come and go in Bloom’s disordered mind. What I do not find here is the gift of the Odyssey — the knowledge that enchantment has pleasures but also dangers. Joyce’s Ulysses experiences the dangers, but where is the joy?

Getting into James Joyce’s Ulysses

By one measure I am halfway through, having read 9 of the 18 sections of Joyce’s novel about a day in Dublin. By another measure, I have a long way to go, as I am now on page 218 of the 704 pages of this edition. So why am I plodding on if I have to count pages to encourage myself?

To prepare myself. Dr. Mark Schenker of Yale gives lectures in various Fairfield County libraries and senior centers. It was because of his series on the literature of war that I recently read All Quiet on the Western Front and The Things They Carried. In November he is going to speak on James Joyce’s Ulysses, a literary classic I have avoided until now. I am somewhat prepared, having read Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the past and, more recently Homer’s Odyssey, on which Ulysses is based.

I have a guide as I follow Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom through Dublin’s busy streets in 1904. The Bloomsday Book by Harry Blamires provides an explanation of people, places and allusions. After I read each section in Blamires, I read the corresponding episode in Ulysses, with much less bewilderment than I would otherwise have. Yet something just is not clicking for me. Joyce is a clever writer and this is a clever book. I enjoy the wordplay, the weaving of past and present in the minds of Stephen and Leopold. I see them, I hear them, but I just don’t care about them much.

I want to care. I didn’t expect to care about the fate of Homer’s Odysseus, that self-confident ruler of Ithaca who left his wife to deal with things for 20 years, but I was enchanted with the Odyssey. Odysseus dodged and fought and lied his way around the Mediterranean and a great time was had by all, including this reader. The travels of Dedalus and Bloom about Dublin are much less compelling. Maybe they will avoid Scylla and Charybdis and maybe not; if not, too bad.

Maybe my shift in attitude reflects a shift in expectation. We expect Odysseus to be a sexist warrior but hope for something better from 20th century Dubliners. Joyce  is, if anything, more sexist than Homer. Homer brings us Penelope and Nausicaa with delight in their beauty and dignity and also some sense of their feelings. Joyce trivializes women with slighting names: Molly, Milly, Dilly, Boody. Stephen knows he is arrogantly entitled to his own education and opinions, but when his sister buys a book,

He took the coverless book from her hand. Chardenal’s French primer.

- What did you buy that for? he asked. To learn French?

She nodded, reddening and closing tight her lips.

Show no surprise. Quite natural.

But he is surprised by this evidence of female intellectual aspirations.

Better incidents surely like ahead, but at this half-way point I want to record an honest reaction to Ulysses: it is clever but irritating at times.

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: Troy

A tourist took this picture of the walls of Troy today, a reminder that we all go down in the end. Some power fades slowly, some quickly and with violence.

This is my last post on Barry Powell’s Classical Myth. In it he devotes several chapters to the Trojan War, including what came before and what came after. His chronological account is valuable because we know the story in bits and pieces from many sources. Powell quotes extensively from Homer, but also from Euripides, Aeschylus and Virgil. He gives us the modern interpreters: Tennyson, Yeats, Cafavy and the artists — Lorrain and Turner and all those Greek pots.

That is how it stretches, from some unrecorded events in the Bronze Age through oral song through Homer’s version and then on through Ovid and Virgil to Marlowe and Shakespeare and James Joyce. We cannot top those towers or stop those stories.

If you are interested in myth, here my earlier posts on the book Classical Myth:

Getting Started

Myths of Creation

The Olympians

Fertility and Death

Heroes and Heroines