Orithya or Boreas?

(As taken from Edith Hamilton's "The Way of The Greeks")

Socrates and Phaedrus are taking a summer stroll....

"Is not the road to Athens made for conversation?" 

The younger man asks if they are not near the place where Boreas is said to have carried off Orithya.

"The little stream is delightfully clear and bright.  I can fancy there might be maidens playing near.  Tell, me, Socrates, do you believe the tale?"

"The wise are doubtful," Socrates answers, "and I should not be singular if, like them, I too, doubted.  I might have a rational explanation that Orithya was playing when a northerly gust carried her over the rocks, and therefore she was said to have been carried off by Boreas.  Now I quite acknowledge that these allegorical explanations are very nice, but he is not to be envied who has to make them up; much labor and ingenuity will be required of him; he will have to go on and rehabilitate Hippo-centaurs and chimeras dire.  Gorgons and winged steeds flow in apace, and numberless inconceivable and portentous natures.  And if he would fain reduce them to rules of probability it will take up a great deal of time.  Now I have no leisure for such inquiries; shall I tell you why?  I must first know myself as the Delphic inscription says; to be curious about things not my concern while I am still in ignorance of my own self would be absurd.  And therefore I bid farewell to all that sort of thing.  I want to know about myself; am I a monster more complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent Typho, or a creature of a gentler and simpler sort, to whom Nature has given a lowlier and diviner destiny?"

- Ms. Hamilton's translation is from Plato's "Phaedrus"

Ethics

God offers to everyone his choice between truth and repose. Take which you please - you can never have both.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I haven't often considered some of the deeper questions of philosophy. The branches of metaphysics and epistemology are new ways of thinking to me and very exciting, although I think that I may not have enough patience to investigate them thoroughly. The questions of "Where does knowledge come from? Where do we come from? What is the nature of reality?" have rarely crossed my mind. They seem to me to be impractical. Indeed, if anything, I question the point of ever posing those questions because I do not believe that we can ever know the answers. By the very act of asking, "What is knowledge? How is it best acquired - through the senses or by reasoning?" aren't we answering ourselves? Isn't that a question of reason? And shouldn't we be engaged in a deeper investigation of the knowledge that we already do have to see if it leads us someplace else? Isn't that what we do, what history is all about? I don't know. Greater minds have gone before me; who am I to question the conclusions they drew? But maybe a new generation comes up with its own answers to everything. And, even if fresh eyes don't come up with new answers after all, maybe they can learn to better defend the answers already given, especially where the existence of Truth (with a capital "T") is disputed.
I believe strongly in the existence of the ultimate Truth. Of course, the great Socrates was wise enough to not give a definition to Truth because he knew that the height and breadth of it could never fully be grasped. Indeed, perhaps there's a fear that, defining it, is kind of like defining God; we run the risk of limiting our imaginations as to what it is. Nevertheless, I am not as wise as Socrates. So, for the purposes of this journal, I will at least give a broad definition of that which I'm looking for. Truth (capital T) is, in my opinion, the union of the fundamental, all-inclusive explanations as to the nature of life, living, and living things.
This, I think, is where there's a crossover between the branches of philosophy - metaphysics and epistemology - over to ethics, the only branch that really holds my interest. Because, if we're going to talk about "What is ethical behavior?" then don't we have to acknowledge that there is a Truth, a fundamental acknowledgement that X kind of behavior is always harmful and Y kind of behavior is always helpful, or, if not behavior, at least motives? And then we have to acknowledge the Truth in every human heart, right? What I really want to know is, "How should I live? What should I do?" Ethics interests me the most because, first of all, I believe that, at the end of my life, I will have to answer to God as to how I spent my time. But, second of all, even if today I suddenly lost all my faith in a Higher Power or an afterlife, the question of "What is right living?" would still be important because I believe that ethical behavior brings quality and satisfaction to my life as well as making life easier on those around me, thus strengthening our bond as a community, and this has its own intrinsic rewards regardless if there's a bigger one after death. I want to reach the end of my life in satisfaction that I used everything that I was given, and I'd given everything I had. Is that possible? Can we ever be satisfied with our own efforts? That leads me in a circle. The Biblical argument for a Savior is that we need someone to atone for the shortcoming that are the very nature of humanity thus reconciling us with the Perfection that is God. It all tangles my head into knots. I feel that I have been given every advantage that someone can be given and many wonderful opportunities besides. I have not always been thankful for these advantages, and I have not always made use of the opportunities. I can - and, by all means, should - strive towards excellence even if I can't fully achieve it. But I think maybe what's more fundamental to ethics than the goal of excellence is the role of gratitude. I will never be the "best" at anything, I will always fall short in the way of behavior or words, but out of gratitude for the gifts given me, I can take advantage of the opportunities that I have left for service, the gifts for giving. Investigating the questions that the branch of Ethics poses is the only way to know how to do this fully, correctly, and purposefully.

My History With History

For thousands of years, humans were oppressed - as some of us still are - by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings were pulled by a god or gods, unseen or inscrutable. Then, 2,500 years ago, there was a glorious awakening in Ionia; on Samos and the other nearby Greek colonies that grew up among the the islands and inlets of he Aegean Sea. Suddenly, there were human beings who believed that everything was made of atoms; that human beings and other animals had sprung from similar forms; that diseases were not caused by demons or the gods; that the Earth was only a planet going around the Sun, and that the stars were very far away. This revolution made Cosmos out of Chaos.
- Carl Sagan, "Cosmos"

So, long ago, on a hot summer day not unlike today, I would sometimes be lucky enough to be taken to a nice cool library. My parents are Christian fundamentalists. My Mom is Roman Catholic, and my Dad is right-wing fundamentalist Protestant. For me to take out a book on Greek mythology would be a sin. The Greeks, in their opinion (and not entirely without basis), were all homosexual pagans. Worse than that, their pagan religion was adopted by the Romans. The Romans then went on to persecute the Christians viciously for not worshipping in the Roman way. Therefore, to perpetuate the memory of that pagan religion by the reading of its myths was, as they said, to vicariously support the Romans and murder the early Christians and even Christ himself all over again. So, if I went to the library with my mother, I had to sneak off to read the myths. Or, if my Aunt Julie took me, I had to leave the checked out book on mythology at my Grandmother's house. It was just as well. I was both fascinated and appalled by Greek mythology. For one thing, women are treated very shabbily in most Greek myths. And the ones who are not - the goddesses, like all the immortals - are all coniving, manipulative, fickle, and brutally unfair. None of it had any ring of truth at all to me. My parents did love movies, and we saw "Clash of the Titans" which only furthered my confusion. Human sacrifice anyone? The final blow to my budding interest in the Greeks was given by my know-it-all friends, all of whom were nerdy boys. I was a fat, nerdy girl. I figured out pretty quickly that the boys who got beat up all the time were a lot nicer to me than the pretty girls and their bewildering interest in Barbie dolls. But, as I said before, my friends were know-it-alls, and so if I said, "Did Aphrodite and Venus ever get into a fight since they had the same powers?" They would've said, "Duh! Everyone knows Aphrodite and Venus are the same goddess!" Or if I called Zeus "the father of the gods" they would've schooled me that Kronos was in fact the father of the gods, and how could I be so stupid? So, I then surmised that Greek mythology was a "boy" thing that I'd never understand much like video games or the myriad of seemingly insignificant characters in Star Wars.

I fared little better in college. All the know-it-all friends grew up to be argumentative young men, two even went on to become actual philosophers themselves. Ugh, philosophy. Argument for the sake of argument has the distinction to me of being both tedious and stressful. And simple things, innocent comments, they took pleasure in flipping so as to make themselves always the intellectual alpha dog. I teased my boyfriend (now husband) about his "yeah buts". Always with the "yeah buts" over any opinion. Even if he agreed with your opinion, he had to play devil's advocate with the "yeah buts". Now, I have a three year old with a serious case of the yeah buts. Of course, what did I have to say at this time that was of any interest? Not much. They had to make it fun for themselves somehow. I was so depressed and so confused. I changed my major something like six or eight times, I lost track. One of the courses of study I pursued - and probably should've stayed with if my boyfriend-now-husband hadn't offered such a convincing argument on "why history is completely stupid and only stupid people are interested in history" - was art history. There were two art history professors in my little college. I pissed off one completely through a series of personal disasters in which he openly took sides. The other was a great lady professor, very passionate, especially about overlooked women artists, which was illuminating and inspiring. But she wasn't exactly a fan of the Classical Studies. She had an even more sour opinion of the ancient Greek than my parents, I think. The Greeks were women haters, she said. They hated women and thought that sex with women was an odious task, done only out of the necessity of producing young boys bred for the sole purposes of child rape. The Romans that followed were a little better, but they were gluttons and drunkards and they all got what they deserved in the end when the barbarians invaded, didn't they, ha, ha?!

So, what? Were the Greeks all these things, really? Were they just all these things? Were they all these things and more? Or were they something completely different from what I'd been told? In 2003, I was a receptionist working in a medical marketing office office populated entirely by highly-Botoxed Southern Baptist women. I was bored with women's magazines. I was bored with the snarky, one-upsmanship of the the internet. I was tired of having my poor Catholic soul prayed for during the day and listening to endless fire-and-brimstone-your-best-isn't-good-enough phonecalls from my mother at night. I craved an intellectual makeover. I craved an intelligent conversation. I craved reason and order. I love my faith, but why did spirituality have to seem so far removed from those things?I turned again to the library. But why did I pick up a book of Plato and another by Marcus Aurelius? Rebellion? Was it just that Plato was synomynous with logic by general opinion? Had I read somewhere that Marcus Aurelius's "Meditations" was a work of Stoicism, and that Jesus himself could have been considered a Stoic (ironically considering Marcus Aurelius' persecution of the early Church)? I don't know. I remember only that my interest was perked. In "Symposium", I found the Socratic method to be a much more gentle and gentlemanly manner of debate when coming from its source than the bitter diatribes I was used to hearing from my school friends. Nevertheless, I have to admit that even the best of arguments didn't hold my attention, and that book remained unfinished. "Meditations", on the other hand, was right up my alley. I don't remember which version I read, but the one I had was annotated, which only added to my enjoyment of it, if you could call it enjoyment. It's not the happiest piece of literature, but at least I had finally read something different. There was a recognition of truth there by my spirit, a little bit of the same feeling that I had felt as a child upon reading Proverbs or The Gospel of John.

But, as I said, it was not the happiest tome one could read, especially as I did it over an otherwise romantic weekend with my husband (who now thinks it's absolutely fabulous that I'm interested in history even if he isn't). I was struck at that time with the baby fever, but it wasn't until 2005 that the longed-for baby actually materialized. Baby's are a lot of work. Young babies make you tired, and tired makes you stupid. Last summer, 2007, I dropped the finally two year old off at Mother's Day Out for a few hours. I was feeling very empty, drained, depressed. I'd sucked the teat of the library dry, so I went to the bookstore looking for comfort. Barnes and Nobles. Clearance section. What made me pick up a book of Greek quotations? That I have no idea. Angelic intervention? A little bird told me? I really have no answers. But, just by flipping randomly through "The Wisdom of the Ancient Greeks" by Steven Stavropoulo, I thought I heard the strum of a million harps. There was such a chorus of truth in my heart that I was wide-eyed with amazement. I became like a starving person who had stumbled upon a banquet. A week later, I had purchased "The Greek Way" by Edith Hamilton, and a coffee-table on Greek art and history. Summer 2007, I read "The Iliad", and a lot of other things. I don't know if words can express how much I love Edith Hamilton. She has bridged the gap for me between modern Christianity and the ancients. A good many of the next few posts will be shameless homages to her wisdom and insight. But here ends my account of how I came to be interested in Classical Studies. Edith Hamilton. She's where I'm at right now, interspersed, of course, with readings from the actual readings that she quotes. Her enthusiasm is contagious. The ancient Greeks and Roman thinkers have as much to say to us about ourselves today as they did to the people of their generation. And that is what this blog is all about.