Unit 3

English 201:    Masterpieces of Western Literature

Background:

Ponies: WT students should appreciate horses & horse jokes.  Homer wasn't a Texan, nor a cowboy, but I would like to have seen the horses he imagined.  When you visit Venice you will see near cousins to:
16.173     Xanthos & Balios, racers in wind.
16.177     In the side-traces Pedasos, a thoroughbred,
               was added to the team . . .
               Mortal, he ran beside immortal horses.

Isn't this what we aspire to?  Mortals though we are, to run with divinities.

The joke is a reversal of our experience with pets.  Our dogs & horses get old & die before us.  Thus Zeus laments over the divine horses:
17.497     Poor things, why did I give you to King Peleus,
               a mortal, you who never age nor die,
               to let you ache with men in their hard lot?

The horses stand weeping for PAT whom they cannot save from death:
17.479     The horses of AK, from the time
               they sensed their charioteer downed int he dust
               at the hands of deadly HK, had been weeping.

Later, as though he remembers his failure to bring PAT back from battle alive, Xanthos warns AK:
19.453     Yes, we shall save you,
               this time, too, AK in your strength!
               & yet the day of your destruction comes,
               & it is nearer.  We are not the cause,
               but rather a great god is, & mighty Fate.
               Nor was it by our sloth or sluggishness
               the Trojans stripped PAT of his armor.

The divine horses:
19.461    might run swiftly as the west wind blows
but they cannot help man outrace death:
19.463     it is your destiny to be brought low
               by force, a god's force & a man's!

Aristocrats: We will consider the problems of aristocratic power for the polis in our Review.  Here I simply want to call your attention to AK's special status as the son of Thetis.  Having tried to desecrate HK's corpse for many days, AK is not judged guilty of outrageous behavior (hubris).  Zeus tells Thetis:
24.133     I, however, accord AK honor
               as I now tell you -- in respect for you
               whose love I hope to keep hereafter.

A little bit later, Zeus decrees that AK:
24.187     is no madman,
               no blind brute, nor one to flout the gods,
               but dutiful toward men who beg his mercy.

Isn't this news to us?  We remember AK telling the dying HK that he wishes he could revive him only in order to kill him again & that every scrap of his body would be devoured by dogs & vultures & worms.  Perhaps you think AK has changed, grown mature & is now empathetic.  It is certainly true, as Aeschylus says about his tragic characters, that AK has suffered into wisdom.  I think we have to take aristocratic privilege into account in order to exaplain why AK is not held to stricter standards of behavior.  Priam scolds his remaining children:
24.304     Would god you had been killed
               instead of HK
24.313     These poltroons are left,
               hollow men, dancers, heroes of the dance

Because they live deeper or greater lives than the rest of us, shouldering immense & crushing responsibilities, aristocrats apparently do not have to be as attentive as the rest of us to little courtesies & manners.  Indeed, Priam ridicules the timid & mincing steps of dance compared to marching, racing, & standing in battle.

Funerals:What is the big deal about corpses?  When Sarpedon falls under PAT's weapons, PAT prays, "may we take him, dishonor him" (16.645).  Zeus "unfurled a deathly gloom" around the body & ultimately commands:
16.764    Come, dear Phoibos,
              wipe away the blood mantling Sarpedon;
              take him up, out of the play of spears,
              a long way off, & wash him in the river,
              anoint him with ambrosia
16.772    there his kin & friends may bury him
              with tomb & stone, the trophies of the dead.
 

We are told that a similar "long & bitter struggle ensues for possession of" PAT's body (17 summary, p. 207).  Ak vows to bury (or burn) PAT's body cutting the throats of 12 children (18.392).  He subsequently drags HK's corpse around PAT's tomb (24.16).  HK is seems almost as concerned for his corpse as for his life: 22.402    I beg you [AK] by your soul & by your parents,                do not let the dos feed on me (The illustration is of Akhilleus holding Patroklos' corpse.)

These are warriors who were exclusively devoted to the culture of the body.  They were the body in the sense that, centuries later, Socrates can say that he was the mind.  They did not gamble with fate over money or any other possession.  They gambled their body.  Imagined life in the next world without the body is gloomy at best.  If you cannot feel life, you have only an idea of life.  When the Greeks sculpted statues of the divine, they were anatomical studies of perfect human bodies.  Beauty is embodied.
     The funeral was a formal ceremony that fixed one's identity permantly & objectively.  It was more important than baptism, marriage, or graduation.  Without the funeral, your life, in a sense, is wasted.  You are anonymous.  Or you are the subject for various subjective assessment.  Once men in power dedicate a statue to you -- George Washington or Abraham Lincoln -- your identity is publically fixed.  Paradoxically, the funeral is the moment of one's greatest triumph.  It completes, declares, & celebrates everything that an individual fought to achieve in life.

Click on the next section: Explication above.