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| Sanctuary of Artemis Brauron, late 6th century B.C. |
"Whether the Greeks saw things most freshly because they came first or it is pure good luck that, having come first, they answered life with unmatched alertness, they in either case keep ageless sparkle, as if the world lit by a kind of six-o'-clock-in-the-morning light and the dew imperishable on the grass. The Greek mind remains in ours, because this untarnished freshness leaves it, like youth itself, our first exemplar."
- Finley, Four Stages of Greek Thought
As I read the above quote in Richard Tarnas' Passion of the Western Mind a few months ago it left me with an impression, precisely the one it wanted to, of a sort of Elysian field somewhere with a white temple, and a desire to visit in the mind and pay homage. You find yourself searching for pictures to match as a header, but nothing quite captures the essence of it (what an appropriately Platonic conundrum, although that's getting ahead of myself). Nonetheless, here I am, at last setting sail on the wine-dark sea (there, an apt reference) to appreciate the Greeks, and therefore Western civilization, from the beginning.
Last year I had the good luck of rescuing a 1948 copy of Greek Literature in Translation (GLiT) by Howe, Harrer, and Epps from my library's fire sale of old books, a purchase of $1 that is staggering in its true value. One of those moments when you're oddly grateful that your interests are not in societal alignment, so that the monetary cost bears no relationship to quality. Of late in particular I have come to love older books, especially on art and the classics; they have a confident assumption in the value of it all, feel it intrinsically, and do not seek to apologize for or distort the past in the same way. Their roots often just feel deeper.
Cracking that book open finally last month, it naturally started with selections from The Iliad and The Odyssey. I had read The Odyssey in eighth grade as part of my home schooling, but little remains in my mind aside from the outlines. I remembered liking it, and this newest experience did not disappoint. For I admit, I had been slightly worried that my project to appreciate everything would be a flop. That I would read the classics merely because I ought, strained in boredom and wiling away effort in order to claim I had done my cultural due diligence. This was not the case. I was enthralled by the selections; I simply wanted to read more, like any great story, and so after jumping through a few pandemic-inspired hoops at my university's library I acquired both Lattimore's and Fagels' translations. The first an old approach that, from selections researched, possesses poetry, and a new, with which at times I could compare for meaning. Both introductions were well worth reading as they complemented each other, although I felt in the end Lattimore's had more gravitas.
As of this writing I am still only in the midst of Book Nine, the envoys visiting Achilles, and so not even halfway through, but some firm impressions have already struck me and it seemed an appropriate place to start, my first post on the first great piece at the rosy-fingered dawn of the West.
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| Sarpedon Krater by Euphronios, c515 B.C. |
Violence in a Pre-Christian World
I have read some intellectual histories, discussions that include how values have shifted over time. That the Greeks did not believe in an afterlife, that they thought in terms of fate, and did not value the same way we do such things as sympathy and humility. I thought I had appreciated this fact. And I was wrong.
The selections in GLiT had outlined for me the major events: Achilles' quarrel with Agamemnon, characterizations of Helen and Hector, the envoy to Achilles and his rage at Patroclus' death, the forging of the shield by Hephaestus, and the slaying of Hector. I had not even realized before then that The Iliad only covered a few weeks in the tenth year of the Trojan War (although as Lattimore persuasively argues in his introduction, Homer has made this selection reflective of the totality; I may end up writing on this later). Coming out of reading these segments I had a scaffold, but confronting the work in its entirety conveys a texture that one cannot get from just those.
What has slightly overwhelmed me is the shocking violence. I suppose that would be obvious because it is a war poem, but what I did not anticipate was how unsentimentally brutal it was. To take a few instances (all from Lattimore 1962):
Now his doom caught fast Amaryngkeus' son Diores,
who with a jagged boulder was smitten beside the ankle
in the right shin, and a lord of the Tracian warriors threw it,
Peiros, son of Imbrasos, who had journeyed from Ainos.
The pitiless stone smashed utterly the tendons on both sides
with the bones, and he was hurled into the dust backwards
reaching out both hands to his own beloved companions,
gasping life out; the stone's thrower ran up beside him,
Peiros, and stabbed with his spear next the navel, and all his guts poured
out on the ground, and a mist of darkness closed over both eyes.
-Book 4, p127
He spoke, and threw; and Pallas Athene guided the weapon
to the nose next to the eye, and it cut on through the white teeth
and the bronze wearilessly shore all the way through the tongue's base
so that the spearhead came out underneath the jawbone.
He dropped them from the chariot and his armour clattered upon him,
dazzling armour and shining, while those fast-running horses
shied away, and there his life and his strength were scattered.
-Book 5, p136
It is a mixture I have never quite experienced, completely detailed but without any sense of voyeurism that modern gore elicits. We have been brought up to regard violence and its products as intrinsically horrific, something that is fundamentally at odds with our view of what the human experience ought to be like. To be presented with it is either to elicit pathos at the victim or a sort of flighty fear coupled with a thrill that it is not us. That is how a good slasher film has its effect, playing on our morbid curiosity of things that are hidden away behind dark doors and medical curtains. Perhaps that is our privilege.
Homer has no sense of this. None at all. He may call war "hateful" at times, but there is no moral here, no intimation that the violence is surprising or reprehensible. His descriptions serve not to titillate but as a common-sense conveyance of the facts of what happens when people are stabbed, crushed, and otherwise mutilated in the course of combat. I understand that of course some of it is played up, for even the ancients enjoyed a good spectacle, but underneath you realize that little enhancement has been required. Homer does not think he is saying anything that ought to surprise us because this is just how war, and life, is.
In the midst of this, the repeat phrases at the end take on a certain weight. What at first was a simple descriptor, a rote mentioning of dark mist or scattered strength, builds as time after time the men fall to the same expressions no matter their station. It is like a final knell to each of these small vignettes, a drawing to the close of the episode that ends as abruptly as the life with nothing following it. This person is over. What is even more disconcerting is Homer often describes the fallen in detail before they perish:
Meriones in turn killed Phereklos, son of Harmonides,
the smith, who understood how to make with his hand all intricate
things, since above all others Pallas Athene had loved him
...
This man Meriones pursued and overtaking him
struck in the right buttock, and the spearhead drove straight
on and passing under the bone went into the bladder.
He dropped, screaming, to his knees, and death was a mist about him.
-Book 5, p129-130
Or what will happen later:
...but Diomedes the powerful slew them. Now he
went after the two sons of Phainops, Xanthos and Thoön,
full grown both, but Phainops was stricken in sorrowful old age
nor could breed another son to leave among his possessions.
There he killed these two and took away the dear life from them
both, leaving to their father lamentation and sorrowful
affliction, since he was not to welcome them home from the fighting
alive still; and remoter kinsmen shared his possessions.
-Book 5, p132
It is not just the straightforwardness of it, it is the human touch present. The field is full of people who have lived out their lives, earned renown through their merit, and are often beloved. Homer even treats both sides with equanimity in this regard. In a modern work we would be moved, and indeed as modern readers we are moved, to feel pity for what seems so much waste. But then the sudden disconnect: where we would expect the moral, the sensibility that people ought not kill each other and cause sorrow for distant fathers... it simply stops. This is the way of things and it will continue whether we lament it or not.
It is here that I recall a discussion from MacIntyre's After Virtue concerning roles in the Greek mind. The people here are kings and princes, which makes them warriors. Warriors kill. It is not about doing good or ill in our moral sense, but in fulfilling duty and purpose. People are good so long as they are doing what their role dictates. Indeed, there is for us an extraordinarily strange exchange where Diomedes on the Greek side, having established with Glaucus on the Trojan side that their grandfathers feasted together, says:
Let us avoid each other's spears, even in the close fighting.
There are plenty of Trojans and famed companions in battle for me
to kill, whom the god sends me, or those I run down with my swift feet,
many Achaians for you to slaughter, if you can do it.
But let us exchange our armour, so that these others may know
how we claim to be guests and friends from the days of our fathers.
-Book 6, p159
Diomedes does not begrudge in the slightest that Glaucus is here to kill his countrymen. If anything, what would be a failing on Glaucus' part would be to lack the courage to fight and an insensitivity to the value of hospitality as a princely warrior. It is this sense that overlays it all, that there's no argument of justice as to why the Greeks are here to sack Troy... but one is not needed. Everybody is doing what they ought in the roles they have been given in a world that runs the way it does. We can be sad about it, but a moral requires fault, and there is no fault here, for there can be no fault if it cannot be otherwise:
There Telamonian Aias struck down the son of Anthemion
Simoeisios in his stripling's beauty, whom once his mother
descending from Ida bore beside the banks of Simoeis
when she had followed her father and mother to tend the sheepflocks.
Therefore they called him Simoeisios; but he could not
render again the care of his dear parents; he was short-lived,
beaten down beneath the spear of high-hearted Aias,
who struck him as he first came forward beside the nipple
of the right breast, and the bronze spearhead drove clean through the shoulder.
He dropped then to the ground in the dust, like some black poplar...
-Book 4, p125-6
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| Achilles and Penthesilea by Exekias, c530BC-525BC |
"Come, Friend, you too must die."
"The cruelty and the sympathy each ring true, and do not mix or interfere with one another, so did the Greeks and Romans keep all their sadnesses and gladnesses unmingled and entire."
The above is a quote from William James in his epochal Varieties of Religious Experience. Reading now I have come to something of a realization of what this means.
I think as moderns we subconsciously believe in a sort of cosmic justice. While many may flirt with them for the scandalous appeal, very few moderns truly break into existentialism or nihilism. We are too inured to a meaningful world, if not cosmically then at least through science-fueled progress as its substitute. Things are better than they appear, or things must get better, or else the trap door is opened with nothing to break the fall.
Thinking on it now, I see that we are forced to synthesize our world into a single comedy as a result. The plot must in some way make sense, the nature of the universe being conducive to upward motion. While violence, and by extension evil, may exist, it exists as a sort of holdover, an intrusion that has no place in our perfect future. Since it is not essential, it therefore represents a sign of failure when it manifests; noise in the data, unimportant deviations from the theory, it may be noted, resented, then ignored. In this way we can maintain our all-encompassing optimism, that there is one true nature of the world, and it is good, and therefore there is one true attitude, and it is life-affirming hope (conversely, when we stop believing, the world is all bad and there is only vicious unmitigable despair).
The Greeks do not have this, and I am beginning to have a sense for what fate meant to them. It is not the determinism of Newton, that things must play out in an entirely predetermined manner. They are before an era of cosmic law. It is not karma, either, for that implies a sort of fundamental justice. That has no place here either. It is rather that the world is full of inscrutable chance, which at first would seem to be the opposite of fate but is really its twin. Both are a profound diminution of human power. Things will happen, people will be who they are in the roles they were born into, and though they be arbitrary they are still unalterable. The structure of the universe is fixed, and it is not in alignment with human desires. Troy has done nothing worthy of such punishment, the Greeks aren't going to win due to moral superiority, everybody here is human, but fate says people die and cities burn, so that's what must happen.
At the close, then, I believe this is the source of both the realism and the disconnect. The realism because just as this is an era that exists before the need to justify war, it exists too then before the need to romanticize it. The facts stand for themselves: everybody shares the same fate of death. Similarly, the disconnect. There are good things in life, and they are good, and can be accepted openly as good. There are also terrible things in life, things which visit at unanticipated hours and without reason. No need to synthesize the two, to choose one or the other as the essential nature of the universe. They are simply held, unmingled and entire, and thus Achilles can utter his executioner's lines with no enmity:
Come, Friend, you too must die. Why moan about it so?
Even Patroclus died, a far, far better man than you.
And look, you see how handsome and powerful I am?
The son of a great man, the mother who gave me life--
A deathless goddess. But even for me, I tell you,
Death and the strong force of fate are waiting.
There will come a dawn or sunset or high noon
When a man will take my life in battle too--
flinging a spear perhaps
Or whipping a deadly arrow off his bow.
-Book 21, p523 (Fagels)
