"Let me not then die ingloriously and without struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter."
One of the themes of
world history is the increasing complexity of man, society, and ideas over
time. The further we travel back in time the fewer of the distinctions we
recognize will apply, for the world was, if not simpler in a metaphysical
sense, at any rate simpler to live in, in ancient times. For instance, the
earliest written documents of most societies (along with temple records) are
epic poems, which were not then, as they are now, works of art, entertainment,
or curiosity. Or, rather, they were not only those things, but complete
perspectives on life – at once the religion, the art, the science, the entertainment,
the history, and in short the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of the people
who produced them. The Mahabarata, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Song of Roland,
and our present example, the Illiad, are all examples of the epic poetry genre,
and all share similar features.
To appreciate them in
their own time, we must forget what we know about our own, and, indeed, that we
are even reading them at all – for these were spoken, personal performances,
recited rhythmically from memory, and their power is much-impaired simply by
the act of seeing, rather than listening, to them. The poet would have stood in
the court of a king or lord, or perhaps in a market square before a crowd
gathered specifically to hear him, and they would have listened (if he was
skilled) with rapt attention to a story they knew by heart, but which
nonetheless came alive again with every retelling.
“Sing, O goddess,” the
performance began, “the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless
ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to hades,
and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures, for so were the
counsels of Jove fulfilled from the day on which the son of Atreus, king of
men, and great Achilles, first fell out with one another.” These are indeed the
themes of the poem from beginning to end – anger, violence, and the feud
between the immortal Achilles, who has agreed to trade his life in return for
glory, and the brutal tyrant Agamemnon.
The scene is of course Troy,
a city in Asia Minor which the Achaeans have been laying siege to for a decade.
The war was brought on by the Trojan prince Paris, who, asked to judge a beauty
contest between Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena, accepted (foolishly), and chose
Aphrodite. She returned the favor by allowing him to seduce Helen, the
beautiful wife of Agamemnon’s brother. They pursued Paris back to Troy, Paris
refused to return Helen, so the Achaeans laid siege to the city. Early in the
campaign, Agamemnon took a young woman as a slave. When her father begged for
her return, Agamemnon refused – so he prayed to Apollo, who struck the Achaeans
with a plague. When the Achaeans realized the only way to end the plague was to
return the girl to her father, Agamemnon took it out on Achilles, and demanded
one of his slave-girls in compensation. Indignant, Achilles was about to kill him,
but Athena persuaded him to relent. So instead he swore to sit out the rest of
the war, no matter what happened.
Ten years later, the
Achaeans are on the verge of defeat, for no one can stand up to the Trojan
champion, the noble Hector. Achilles’ lover, Patroclus, has been sitting out
the fighting as well, but before what seems the Achaean’s resolve will falter, he
takes Achilles’ armor and challenges Hector to a duel. Hector kills him, and
for a moment believes he has killed Achilles. But when Achilles learns of Patroclus’
death he swears to rejoin the fight and kill Hector in revenge.
Over the course of
several further battles, Hector refuses to face Achilles, for he knows he cannot
beat him. When he does resolve to fight him, his courage fails, and he flees.
Achilles chases him, and again Athena comes to his aid by tricking Hector into fighting.
Achilles has his revenge, and refuses Hector’s dying request to return his body
to his father, so it can be properly buried. Achilles angrily refuses,
reminding Hector how he killed Patroclus. With his last words Hector reminds
Achilles that he too must lose his life before the campaign is over. Achilles
ties Hector’s corpse to his chariot and rides victory laps around the walls of
Troy, signaling his pride in triumph, his utter contempt for honor or
tradition, and the certain doom of the Trojans.
At the Achaean camp,
where they are celebrating since they now seem certain to take the city,
Patroclus’ ghost visits Achilles and asks him to return Hector’s corpse, but
not even the ghost of his beloved can sway him. When the Trojan king Priam comes,
however, and Athena informs him that he must return the corpse, he relents, and
allows Priam to bury his son.
….
Perhaps surprisingly,
this is where the poem ends. Not with the Trojan horse, the death of Achilles,
or anything else we might like to know, for our concerns are very different
from the poet’s. For him, the siege is an event of no real consequence – it is
simply another battle, like any other, and he does not dwell on where and why,
and tells us practically nothing about when, it was fought. What he cares about
is the violent passions and immortal deeds of heroes, who always occupy the center
stage. Indeed they are presented to us, as they would have been to his
audience, as inhabiting a realm beyond time.
This is because, in a
very real sense, the people who created this poem had no past. What they saw,
when they looked backward and forward in time, was a changeless, featureless,
pointless desert of time, in which one generation succeeded another, living and
thinking and believing and acting just as the others had, on and on without any
definite beginning or end. There might be a creation myth or several, and a
time of legends such as Achilles and Hector inhabited, but how that had turned
into the present was never quite clear. What mattered about the past, rather,
was that “once upon a time” great things had happened there, and that, by imitating
those deeds, one could reconnect to that distant time in one’s own life, if
only for a moment. Put another way, their concept of time was one of
overwhelming continuity, with few, unspecified, and uninteresting moments of
change. For similar reasons, their concept of space was also unclear. The land
of Troy was “far, far away,” and that was all that mattered about it.
There is also very little
sense of collective identity among either party. The only thing that seems to
distinguish them is that they are fighting each other, for they have the same
gods, the same rites and rituals, and the same basic beliefs about the world.
What matters is, again, the great man – an attractive feature in any poem
designed to be recited for aristocrats who fancied themselves the descendants
of gods and legendary heroes of old, and who saw in Achilles and Agamemnon
models of martial prowess whom they could imitate. Little people, by contrast,
don’t count. For similar reasons, the basic values and assumptions of the world
they inhabit are never questioned. On the contrary, the poet affirms them
repeatedly, for they enjoy the sanction of the gods and time immemorial.
In short, the Illiad, and
indeed all epic poems, depicts a world in which change in our sense of the word
is almost unthinkable, in which differences in time and space have very little
meaning, and in which there is no sense of collective identity, and hence no
subversive ideas to undermine it. It is a very simple view of the world, but
not, for that, one without meaning or appeal. The moral of epic poetry is
indeed timeless, and persists in much historical writing today. It is that the
past exists to provide inspiration in the present, for those who model their
lives on the heroes of old share in their immortality, and can, like them,
transcend time and space and enter into everlasting glory.
(Part of a Series on Philosophy of History II of XXXV)
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