Unit 3

English 201:    Masterpieces of Western Literature

Review:

You witnessed the inescapable truth about human life: that no matter how glorious, it ends.

• Sarpedon, the son of Zeus. If Zeus could save anyone, certainly it would be his own son. This is an interesting alternative to the idea that God so loved the world [humans] that he gave his son for our redemption. 
• PAT’s death illustrates the tragedy of youth that is vital & has everything to look forward to accomplishing – cut down, wasted, perhaps because of youth’s folly in feeling so vital, so invincible, so successful.
• HK is virtue. The Hebrews had their ark & then their temple. The Greek equivalent is the polis. Life in the polis is absolutely religious. Athens was an intensely religious city. One adored Athena by cultivating the life of the mind. HK is the model citizen, the man who defended every value of civilization. Who else in The Iliad treats women with respect? Who else has empathy for the powerless? The tragedy is that virtue needs power to exist is this world. Even then, it is eroded by time. The people who honor virtue grow old & die, & virtue has no power to exist in the world of flesh. It reverts to the idea & ideal it was. & HK is a ghost.
• AK does not perish in The Iliad, but he is doomed. He & Priam, whose city is doomed, literally cry together about the implacable & inhuman power of chronos that destroys even the rage that destroyed order, civilization, & beauty.

1.The problem with an unconditional dedication to power is injustice (dike). 

Apollo charges that:
24.46Murderous AK has your [the Olympians] willing help--
........a man who shows no decency, implacable,
.......barbarous in his ways as a wild lion

Hera answers:
24.67 Lord of the silver bow, your words would be
........acceptable if one had a mind to honor
........HK & AK equally.
........But KH suckled at a woman’s breast,
........AK is the first-born of a goddess

This seems to be a horrific inversion.HK is the moral champion, the very person of virtue.AK is a baby, a narcissist who is alternatively awesome & contemptible.How can Hera defend AK over HK?We need to perform two operations to find the answer.First, what does each character personify?AK personifies power.HK personifies virtue.Which is more fundamental?If we could choose only one (like Paris), which would we choose?The world of the Iliad illustrates the results of unconditionally choosing power regardless of any other consideration.The second operation asks whether or not you wish to live in such a world?The heroic world is awesome, stark, & alluring.The cost of giving in to that allurement (Helen) is that you give up the (reasonable) right to object that it is injust; that there is an unbridgeable gap between the divinities & humankind, between aristocratic warriors & everyone else.If power is the only value, the answer is a sneer.Was it president Nixon who said, “let them twist in the wind”?Aeschylus ends his first play about AG with Klytemnestra sneering comment about those who want justice: “let them howl—they’re impotent.You [Aegisthus] & I have power now” (p. 663).

2.Power consumes every virtue, every value other than itself.

An unconditional commitment to power engages the best men (best in the sense of power) in battles without victors.The victor who prevails in one battle must meet others & still others.The result is that the best citizens come to the fore in defense of civilization & are consumed, leaving the cowardly rats & cockroaches & lords of the dance to inherit what they gave their lives to defend.The only way out of this collapse is to acknowledge that there must be values, in addition to power, that we should be committed to.

3.When everyone is unconditionally committed to nothing but power, success is grief.

  Priam Ransom's Hektor's Corpse From Akhilleus

I don’t see any change.Two points resist the idea of a fundamental reorientation of values.“New longing” seems to me to imply a new object for the same old emotional circuit.Just as the loss of Briseis was replaced by the “new longing” of loss for PAT; or rage at AG replaced by HK; here the grief for PAT (really AK’s self-pity at not being able to affect fate & escape his own mortality), is temporarily replaced by grief for his father. It is simply another emotional indulgence in a life of similarly sweeping & deep emotion.Secondly, isn’t it interesting that Homer characterizes Priam as weeping for “HK, killer of men.”What of all the men HK killed?Sure we can say that he was nobly defending the city against savage force.But those men had wives & children.Remember Diomedes saying, “we came here under god” (9.58)?
Violence & power that has overcome ever obstacle, & perhaps, every principle, does not glory in its own victory.It weeps at its own success, having cynically proved that there is no reality but power & death.

4. A single loss means totally erasure.

The Iliad began something like a college football game or any other athletic rivalry where guys bet on Troy Aikman or Emmitt Smith – who is more valuable to the team?The brute power of AK as a fullback who will knock the teeth out of Jack Ham or any other linebacker.Or Troy whose finesse & intelligence & control will put the ball in the end zone?The display of power was intoxicating.The level of violence seemed acceptable.By the end of The Iliad, we should be dragging.Our team didn’t just win, it left young men maimed & dead.Something went very wrong.We leave the stadium not sure when we will return; not knowing exactly how we will return because our enthusiasm for the spectacle is gone.Our great hero [AK], who we cheered on to beat hell out of any adversary, is himself in tears.There must be a better game or a better way to play this game (life). Homer is about to show us a better world.If Homer had begun his instruction with the Odyssey, suggesting that it is a good thing to consider the outlook & advice of little girls, he would have invited ridicule from the jocks & fighter pilots & Wall St. wizards – the men of power, however it is defined.He had to first disgust you with the celebration of nothing but power before you were ready to consider an alternative way of life.

Next week we will begin an odyssey to consider if we can imagine a world based on values in addition to power.Homer never imagined a world without the grim working of power (cash, violence, prestige, class).But he did dream of a world where power did not so immediately destroy beauty.  See you then for unit 04.