English 201 Unit 01

Unit 1

English 201:
Masterpieces of Western Literature

.Unit 1 Reading

Background:

Greek Concepts:

Divinity. In addition to gods, human, & animals, there are many other beings: semi-divines (like Akhilleus), semi-human animal forms (centaurs, the Minotaur), Titans, monsters (e.g., Skylla & Kharybdis, 424-5), Kyklopes, nereids, hamadryads, ghosts, etc. We are humans. Our inescapable problem (fate) problem is death. The Olympians personify different dimensions of life, but above all, they are immortal. People die, the Olympians do not.
Logos. We expect that the world operates logically, even if we do not know the intricacies of science. The universe is not simply a project in power (Nietzsche calls it "a will to power"), it moves or grows in an orderly fashion, in accordance with rules (logos). This includes stages of human growth & development.

Fate. In addition to generic or universal stages of human growth & development (logos), each person also has a particular mixture of propensities & talents that are fated to be worked out in a particular culture & in a particular stage of that culture. The illustration of the 3 Fates is from a painting by Michelangelo. The 3 Fates emerge out of the shadows (of the unconscious). One spins your destiny, another measures the length of your life, & the third snips the thread of the life that you are destined to have.

Hubris. The usual synonym is pride. Instead of accepting our fates, we hope to evade trouble or to seize more than our allotment of pleasure.
Dike. This is the response of moral outrage that egregious acts of hubris cause. The more vividly you can imagine someone putting cigarettes out on a two year child, the more you become morally disgusted.
Nemesis. In our reading of Aeschylus, the Furies are the voice of conscience, which is silent as long as we remain innocent of hubris. Moral outrage (hubris) awakens the sleeping (unconscious) Furies. They become nemesis thirsty for our blood, for punishing the guilty & re-establishing justice.
Sophrosyne. Everyone knows soph-omores are wise. The other part of the term is also present in words like synchronous transmission or synchronize your computer clock with atomic time. Soph-ro-syne means having the wisdom to put your individual life in synchronous harmony with the logos. Thus sophrosyne is the opposite of hubris.

The Good Life: The Iliad opens with the Greeks besieging Troy for the 10th year. The question is why? What is worth such implacable dedication? The answer is complicated but initially given in the form of the myth of Paris/Alexandros who was asked to choose which of three divinities was the fairest. At the end of The Iliad the narrator laments Alexandros' "mad choice" for "ruinous lust" (24.32). Consider Paris' three choices. What do Hera, Athena, & Aphrodite each personify?
If Paris had chosen Hera, what would it have meant? It would have suggested that life is most essentially about power & that one should become someone like Alexander the Great. Choosing Athena would have similarly suggested the models of Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle as heroic. Instead Paris chose beauty. Another way to consider the choice is to characterize it as the culture of the body, the culture of the mind, or the allure of emotion. You can also recognize levels of maturity. Hera offers accomplishment, Athena insight; Aphrodite offers infantile self indulgence & pleasure.

The Atreidai: Imagine the situation with Helen as a debutante. All the eligible aristocratic bachelors show up at her dad's house. Whoever he might choose as the husband for his daughter will inevitably end up dead before he is married, so that one of the rest of us will have a chance to get Helen. So he makes all the bachelors sign an agreement pledging that they will respect the process & fight anyone who abducts Helen from her rightful husband. Who does he choose for Helen's husband? The rich guy, Menelaos.
Naturally Aphrodite can ignore human rules. She gives Helen to Paris. Menelaos would have little chance of getting her back except for the fact that his brother, Agamemnon, has military ambitions. He assembles an army. The officer corps is composed of all the former suitors to Helen.

Innocence:So the army is sitting in Aulis grudgingly ready to get someone else's wife back & the wind won't blow.

Kalkhus, the diviner, explains that they must do something to indicate that they are seriously committed. The nominal goal of the exercise is to rescue beauty, but Helen is not some wispy girl. She is, as I said earlier, a match for Akhilleus; a woman who is a masterful game player & dominates in every relationship. Aeschylus & Sophocles illustrate the notion that "we suffer into wisdom." The equation in The Iliad is that power is bought at the price of innocence. The illustration for this is Agamemnon's (hereafter AG) willingness to sacrifice his virginal daughter, Iphigeneia. This sounds so barbaric that we need to better consider AG's motives.

First compare AG to Abraham. Soren Kierkegaard, a great 19th c. Protestant theologian, confessed that the model of Abraham appalled him (Fear & Trembling). Here is a man who says that he heard voices that prompted him to murder his son. What do we think of such people today? Either that they are crazy or evil. Especially from the Islamic perspective (Islam means "submission"), Abraham personifies the decision to believe in something more profound than the operations of his own mind. He is willing to be branded as a psychopathic child murder. He doesn't care about his standing in the community. He only cares about his standing before Yahweh. AG represents something different. No doubt, Iphigeneia is the apple of her father's eye. But AG is willing to sacrifice his personal pleasure in order to promote the public good. His sacrifice is for patriotism. Of course, he also wants to be a general.
Now compare AG to Paris & to AK (Akhilleus). Paris is an adolescent narcissist interested in nothing more than satisfying his own emotions. AK is consumed by his emotions. He alternatively goes into nearly uncontrollable rages & then sulks & cries to his mommy (Thetis) when he doesn't get what he wants. Who would you prefer as your neighbors in the polis?
You may say, none of the three. Our text reminds us that the Greeks were realists, "characterized by a direct, unblinking view of reality" (6). When the Persians invade & the lives of everyone you love are imperiled, you may change your mind about AG & AK.

Real Life:Our text says the Greeks were realists. We do not want to die, but there is no way to evade it. We may hope to renounce violence, but we know that this is not possible in the world we live in. Moreover, the figure of Paris (who is content to dream in his bedroom) is contemptible. The paradox is that the gods trouble those whom they love. If we could evade fate & get what we wanted, wouldn't we each choose what Paris did? A life of pleasure, luxury & no trouble. If we were able to do this, we would not have a real life, we would spend our time dreaming. No one would choose trouble (odium / Odysseus), but because we endure trouble & struggle to overcome it, we achieve an identity. We become, as Jesse Jackson says, somebody.
In the Greek view, death meant the loss of the body. Even if one retained a mind & memories, the afterlife seemed bleak & boring. One could not eat, drink, wrestle, fight, make love, or even simply feel alive. Since this fate is unavoidable, we should prepare for it by spending the limited time we have daring to be great, performing actions that we will be proud to remember. We will consider this paradox again several times in Homer's work.

Pelops wins the race against Elis. The prize is Hippodamia who is looking on.

The house of Atreus produces the brothers Agamemnon & Menalaos; & their half-brother Agisthos. Here is part of the family geneology:

=Neoptolemus
=Orestes

(Neoptolemus, also called Pyrrhus, is AK's son who killed Priam.)

Click on the next section: Explication above.