Dylan, Euripides And The Modern Mind

No one is free. Even the birds are chained to the sky.
- Bob Dylan

No one is truly free. They are a slave to wealth, fortune, the law, or other people restraining them from acting according to their will.
- Euripides

Bob Dylan and Euripides. Both remarkable people. Euripides was the original "ahead of his time" kind of guy, a playwright. I didn't have too much to say about him until tonight, when I was watching Jeopardy, and they mentioned that Bob Dylan had won a Pulitzer Prize last year for his contributions to society. I thought that was funny because during the time in which Dylan was doing all that contributing to society - i.e. the sixties - I doubt you would find anyone over the age of thirty who thought that what he was doing was prize worthy much less contributing to the betterment of society. But now he gets a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize. Euripides was kind of the same way. Not so popular when he was alive; now we see him as being "enlightened". But I think that, like Dylan, Euripides wasn't so much enlightened as he was just honest. Sophocles said that while he portrayed men as they ought to be, Euripides portrayed men as they really were. And - revolutionary - women too. Edith Hamilton referred to Euripides as having the "modern mind". Her description is applicable to any revolutionary...and any teenager worth their salt.

Always those in the vanguard of their time find in Euripides an expression of their own spirit. He is the great exponent of the forever recurring modern mind.

This spirit, always in the world and always the same, is primarily a destructive spirit, critical not creative... The modern minds in each generation are the critics who preserve us from a petrifying world.... The established order is always wrong to them.... They behold first and foremost that most sorrowful thing on earth, injustice, and they are driven by it to a passion of revolt. Convention, so often a mask for injustice, they will have none of, in their pursuit of justice at any cost they tear away the veils that hide hateful things; they call into question all pleasant and comfortable things.... They will never accept defeat.
- "The Greek Way", pg. 206, 207

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.
- Bob Dylan

Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.
- Euripides

The Idea of Tragedy

Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

I think it's no coincidence that Fitzgerald and Hamilton, contemporaries of one another, should both write about tragedy.  The times in which they lived saw so much of it.  Edith Hamilton often revisits the idea of the hero suffering nobly throughout her work.  Here is the first thing that I read from her about it.

Why is the death of the ordinary man a wretched, chilling thing which we turn from, while the death of the hero, always tragic, warms us with a sense of quickened life?  Answer this question and the enigma of tragic pleasure is solved.  "Never let me hear that brave blood has been shed in vain," said Sir Walter Scott.  "It sends an imperious challenge down through all the generations."  So the end of a tragedy challenges us.  The great soul in pain and in death transform pain and death.  Through it we catch a glimpse of the Stoic Emperor's Dear City of God, of a deeper ad more ultimate reality than that in which our lives our lived.

- "The Greek Way", pg. 178

   I didn't like her term "tragic pleasure".  I think I associate things with the word "pleasure" that are too much the opposite of "tragedy" so that to hear "tragic pleasure" is an oxymoron.  But the chapter from which this quote was taken did help me to understand a little about why people seem to love those tear-jerker movies so much.  Unless there's alot of action, I don't watch dramas, and I avoid any of those "women" films  at all costs.  I can't relate.  Life inspires enough tears on its own, why go looking for more?  And I especially don't understand the appeal of the victim movies.  Here is a social injustice;  there's nothing you can do about it;  ain't it a shame?  But this chapter shed some light on it.  My deeply religious parents would probably hypothesize that the tragic death of the hero in any story is, at a spiritual level, recognized by the spirit as being an echo of the death of Christ, the ultimate hero, the ultimate tragedy.  I don't know about that, but it is one theory to think about.  I think that there is certainly something in us that recognizes - at a fundamental level - the ancient archetype of the death of the one to save the many, and the heroism inherent when that death is approached by the victim voluntarily.  At any rate, I think that it is all too morbid to spend to much time on.  I don't have the stomach for this stuff.  When are we going to talk about Menander?  

Sparta Versus Athens

The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.
- Thucydides, "The History of the Peloponnesian War"

   So, I've made my statements about what it is about Edith Hamilton's take on the Greeks that I disagree with.  Let's get back to the fun stuff of enjoying her wit and wisdom.  Ms. Hamilton talked a great deal about the Spartans versus the Athenians as seen during the Peloponnesian War in a chapter of The Greek Way entitled "Sparta Versus Athens".  I have some quotes from her below.  I hope that I'm not stepping on any copyright infringement in quoting her so liberally.  I intend to quote a great deal of other sources once I'm done with her.  In an effort to avoid copyright problems, and because it's been hard to find the exact images that I want, I've taken to drawing my own images to illustrate the posts.  They're not great artistically, and their creation slows down the rate at which I post, but they express exactly the idea I wanted to express, and they're wholly mine, I'm not stealing them from anyone, or stealing bandwidth from anyone by posting them.  I thought the shields were a very appropriate choice since they illustrate very clearly the difference between the Athenians and the Spartans.  The Athenians could illustrate their shields however they liked, Gorgons and personal deities being the most popular decorations.  I chose to depict a fierce Gorgon for the Athenian shield.  All the Spartans, however, had the same decoration on their shield, because "freedom" and "individualism" were dirty words in their opinions.  The decoration was always the Greek letter "lambda" which was the first letter in Lacedaemon, the actual name of the city-state of Sparta.  I did not previously know this, but the Spartans didn't call themselves "Spartans".They called themselves "Lacedaemonians".  Therefore, Leonidas never actually said, "THIS IS SPARTA!!!!"  I guess it's possible that he might have said, "THIS IS LACEDAEMON!!!".  I'm sure it would sound more ferocious in ancient Greek.  I gather that the name Sparta came about because, according to mythology, their city was founded by the Lacedaemon, son of Zeus, who gave his name to the region, and named the capital town of the region "Sparta" after his wife Sparta.  So, it stands to reason, since when you visit a region you're unfamiliar with, you're going to start with the capital, there developed the long-winded explanation of "Who? Those people over there?  Oh, they're the Lacedaemonians, you know, the ones from Sparta."  And then that all got shortened to "They're from Sparta."  And that got shortened to "Spartans".     

(Please excuse my editing on all this.  I'm still trying to figure it out.  I can't rotate the images yet.  I can't figure out how not to write on top of the images.  I can't figure out why sometimes it automatically wraps the text around the images and other times I have to tell it to do it manually. Ugh.  Anyway....)

While Thucydides may have been ambivalent about the participants in the insane chaos that was The Peloponnesian War, Edith Hamilton was decidedly pro-Athenian.  Here's what she has to say about "Sparta versus Athens".  Note that she was writing this in 1930.   

   The idea that underlay the young Spartans training was their obligation to maintain the power of the state and ignore everything that did not directly contribute to it.  All the other possibilities of life - imagination, love of beauty, intellectual interests - were put aside.  The goal of human aspiration and achievement was to uphold the fatherland.  Only what helped the state was good; only what harmed it was bad.  A Spartan was not an individual but a part of a well-functioning machine which assumed all responsibility for him, exacted absolute submission from him, molded his character and his mind, and imbued him with the deep conviction that the chief end of man was to kill and be killed. Plutarch writes:

"In Sparta, the citizens way of life was fixed.  In general, they had neither the will nor the ability to lead a private life.  They were like a community of bees, clinging together around the leader and in an ecstasy of enthusiasm and selfless ambition belonging wholly to their country."

   Athens was a democracy.  The General Assembly to which every Athenian belonged was the final authority.  The executive body was a Council of Five Hundred for which all citizens were eligible.  Officials were chosen by lot or elected by the people.  

   The state did not take responsibility for the individual Athenian; the individual had to take responsibility for the state.  The result was, of course, a totally different idea of what the state was from that in Sparta.  In Athens, there was never a notion that it was a kind of mystic entity, different from and superior to the people who made it up.  Athenian realism blocked any idea like that.  The idea of the Athenian state was a union of individuals free to develop their own powers and live in their own way, obedient to the laws they passed themselves and could criticize and change at will.  And yet underneath the apparently ephemeral view of law was the conviction peculiarly Athenian which dominated the thought and the art of the fifth century - that the unlimited, the unrestrained, the lawless, were barbarous, ugly, irrational.  Freedom strictly limited by self-control - that was the idea of Athens at her greatest. Her artists embodied it;  her democracy did not.  Athenian art and Athenian thought survived the test of time.  (However) Athenian democracy became imperial and failed.  

Imperial autocracy, when it came to fighting, proved the stronger.

- pg. 149, 150

  How did Edith Hamilton feel as she wrote this?  Her life had been spent in equal parts Germany and the U.S..  She was an academic, headmistress at Bryn Mawr, well acquainted with the history of politics, the rise and fall of nations.  She'd lived through World War I.  In 1930, when this book was first published, the Nazi party was gaining popularity in Germany.  She must have seen the writing on the wall.  Fascism versus Democracy.  And she knew that the good guys don't always win, that war twists peoples' souls, hardens hearts, the end result of war being oftentimes ugly.  But she also knew what was at stake.  I will never know how exactly she felt, but I think it must have been a mixture of fear and faith, faith that, whatever the outcome, there would still be people willing to die for the sake of freedom, just like the ancient Greeks.  And so maybe I was a little rough on her in criticizing her take on the Greek response to the Persian invasion, for it must have been in that spirit of faith that she quoted Herodotus' retelling of something the Greeks had said to a Persian official's demands for submission...

You know perpetually what it is to be a slave.  Freedom you have never tried, to know how sweet it is.  If you had, you would urge us to fight for it not with our spears only, but even with hatchets.

- pg. 133

Thucydides - For All Time

More from Edith Hamilton's "The Greek Way"

Knowledge for the sake of knowledge had little attraction for the Athenians.  They were realists.  Knowledge was to be desired because it had a value for living; it led men away from error to right action.  Thucydides wrote his book because he believed that men would profit from a knowledge of what brought about that ruinous struggle (The Peloponnesian War) precisely as they profit from a statement of what causes a deadly disease.  He reasoned that since the nature of the human mind does not change any more than the nature of the human body, circumstances swayed by human nature are bound to act in the same way unless it is shown to them that such a course in other days ended disastrously.  When the reason why a disaster came about is perceived, people will be able to guard against the particular danger.  

   "It will perhaps be found," he writes, "that the absence of storytelling in my work makes it less attractive to listen to, but I should be satisfied if it is considered useful by all who wish to know the plain truth of the events which happened and will according to human nature happen again in the same way."

   It was written, not for the moment, but for all time.  

- pg. 140

Part Two - East vs. West - Spirituality

What is the first business of one who practices philosophy? To get rid of thinking that one knows; for it is impossible to get a man to begin to learn that which he thinks he knows.

- Epictetus, "Discourses"

   In my last post on this topic, I was discussing what Edith Hamilton had said in regards to Eastern and Western art/spirituality.  She asserted that, in ancient times, the art produced in the West reflected its love of order and realism (relative realism anyway) whereas the art of the East reflected fear, chaos, and dark imaginings. Since most art is religious art, "art" in this context became synonymous with "spirituality". The spirituality of the East, she concluded, was despotic, irrational, and downright evil.  I disagreed.  What's more, I wondered what her motivations were in ultimately condemning Buddhism while writing under the guise of a discussion about The Battle of Thermopylae seeing as how the ancient Persians were certainly not Buddhists.      

   This leads me to my next point:  the ancient Spartans were certainly not Christians!  The Spartans weren't anything but Fascist animals whose modus operandi was entirely blood lust.  Now, an argument that the rest of the Hellenistic world - specifically the Athenians - could be made that they were the first to actually think about what they were doing in terms of spirituality, they were the first to question it all, they were the first to envision the idea of a personal relationship with God, and to ultimately deny their own myths in favor of the idea that God had to be always good (revolutionary at the time).  The Spartans didn't do any of that.  The Spartans didn't believe in anything but war.  The movie "300" was very popular among the video game crowd, but the historic inaccuracies of that film have been well-documented.  I like action movies, but I wasn't going to throw money at anything that aggrandized a group of people who "toughened" their sons up by throwing them out into the wilderness at the age of seven, "And don't come back until you've killed a slave or two!"  They were murders, sadists, and thugs of the most unnatural kind.  Indeed, the only natural urge they ever valued was rage.  Love, affection, mercy, family relationships, male and female relationships, hunger, sadness - all these things were weakness to the Spartans.  So, for the movie to portray the Spartans has "normal" and the Persians as "freaks" is contrary to reality.  Indeed, if modern man were to be stuck in a time capsule and shot back 2,500 years, everyone would appear to be quite freaky to him.  Furthermore, for Ms. Hamilton to use The Battle of Thermopylae as a backdrop for a conversation about how the Western approach to spirituality was superior to the Eastern approach completely ignores the fact that the very reason there was only a very small number of Hellenes fighting the enormous Persian forces was that everyone else  in Greece was too busy observing religious various religious festivals, the biggest one being the Olympics!  How's that for a denial of reality? 

   
Ancient Persia is modern day Iran, and the Iranians were incensed at the portrayal of the Persians in "300".  They should have been.  Considering how sour the relationship between the United States and Iran is, I totally thought the movie was a piece of propaganda.  The creators claim that it wasn't;  it was just meant to be a little bit of pornography for people who get off on violence more than sex.  And maybe they're telling the truth, and it was just poorly timed.  After all, "a small army of ancient thugs fights a large army of ancient thugs; small army dies" sounds unappetizing.  "A tiny army of superheroes stands up to an enormous army of ambiguously gay monsters; tiny army dies heroically" equals box office gold.   We don't want the truth; we want heroes.

   In a later chapter in "The Greek Way", this one specifically devoted to Herodotus, Ms. Hamilton finds the real heroes in the Athenians at the Battle of Marathon.

How could it happen like that - the little band of defenders victors over the mighty armament?  We do not understand.  But Herodotus understood, and so did all the Greeks.  A free democracy resisted a slave-supported tyranny.  The Athenians (Athenian soldiers) at Marathon had advanced at a run (i.e. willingly); the enemy's officers drove them (the Persian soldiers) into battle by scourging them.  Mere numbers were powerless against the spirit of free men fighting to defend their freedom.  Liberty proved her power.  A wave of exultant courage and faith swept through the city, and Athens started her career.

- pg. 135

  As a lover of Democracy and all the liberties that I enjoy as an American, I do hope that it happened that way, but nothing is that simple.  

    In the August 2008 issue of National Geographic (which, coincidentally, is devoted primarily to Iran) there is also an article on modern day Moscow. In it, an interviewee says, "Americans will never understand Russia because they see things as black or white. Russians see a gray area of 80 percent." I think that's true. Here in America, as they say on basic cable, "You're either in or you're out." Anything else is impossible to identify with. Hell, it's worse than that; it's not fit for prime time! But I am not a reality TV contestant. I'm becoming comfortable with uncertainty. Indeed, I'm finding that uncertainty is the very frame of mind one needs to learn anything.