The Importance of Remembering

Continuing on in Edith Hamilton's "The Greek Way", there's a paragraph on page 213 that, I feel, sums up Ms. Hamilton's purpose in writing the book.  It is my opinion that she was writing to remind mankind of the greatness that they are capable of attaining, to remind them of the obstacles they are capable of overcoming.  She was writing just before World War I broke out.  She could see the storm clouds gathering.  She wrote...

"As defeat grew ever nearer, Athens grew terrified, fierce, cruel... One thing alone to help her he (Euripides) had been fitted to do:  he could so write as to show the hideousness of cruelty and man's fierce passions, and the piteousness of suffering, weak, and wicked human beings, and move men thereby to compassion which they were learning to forget...."

Ms. Hamilton was fitted with the same command.  And I think that it is important today, as we see those storm clouds gathering again, to be reminded through history and literature of what human beings are capable of, to think instead of panic, and to stand firm on the side of independence and independent thought, to value knowledge over willful ignorance, and to always choose compassion.  

History IS Important Dammit

"In a recent survey, new college graduates listed history as the academic subject whose lessons they found of least use in their daily affairs.  In part, this reflects the show-me pragmatism os today's rising generation.  Yet as America embarks on the 1990's, people of all ages feel a disconnection with history.  Many have difficulty placing their own thoughts and actions, even their own lives, in any larger story.  As commonly remembered, history is all about Presidents and wars, depressions and scandals, patternless deeds done by people with power far beyond what the typical reader can ever hope to wield.  If history seems of little personal relevance today, then what we do today seems of equal irrelevance to our own lives (and the lives of others) tomorrow.  Without a sense of trajectory, the future becomes almost random.  So why not live for today?  What's to lose?.....

....This book presents the "history of the future" by narrating a recurring dynamic of generational behavior that seems to determine how and when we participate as individuals in social change - or social upheaval.  We say, in effect, that this dynamic repeats itself.  This is reason enough to make history important:  For if the future replays the past, so too must the past anticipate the future."

- William Strauss and Neil Howe, "Generations:  The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069" (1991)

A Mastermind Outstrips the Ages: Aeschylus

And the Furies that I feared/ were Eumenides to lead me here..."
- Band: Over the Rhine Song: Rhapsody

That line references Aeschylus's play "Eumenides" which ends with Athena re-naming the Furies "Eumenides", and thus re-purposing them as givers of mercy as opposed to justice. (Aeschylus, btw, is pronounced "es'-kuh-lus" or close to that anyway.) The three great Greek Tragedians were Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Aeschylus is recognized as the "Father of Tragedy" as a theatrical art form. He had a very colorful life as can be read about on Wikipedia among other places. His works were heavily influenced by the Persian invasion of Greece during which he fought as a soldier. His life ended with a bang; he died by the accident of a bird dropping a tortoise shell on his head.
Here's what Ms. Hamilton had to say about him in comparison to Euripides and Sophocles...

The spirit of inquiry in Aeschylus' day had moved him, too, to wonder and surmise. He was never one to acquiesce in what he found because it was there. He, too, saw war with clear eyes... (However) completely a modern mind he was not. He would never, under no circumstances, in no age, have seen mankind as chiefly pitiable... stamped upon his whole work is the conviction that human beings are capable of grandeur, and that calamity met greatly is justified. Passionate protests against the facts of life is no more to be found in him than in Sophocles, but for a totally different reason; a hero's death awakens neither pity nor indignation.
Completely unlike him in this point, Euripides is nevertheless his opinionated son... Aeschylus disregarded the current religion; Euripides directly attacked it. Again and again, he shows up the gods in accordance with the popular conception of them, as lustful, jealous, moved by meanest motives, utterly inferior to the human beings they bring disaster upon, and will have none of them.:

'Say not that there are adulterers in Heaven,
Long since my heart has known it false.
God if He be God lacks in nothing.
All these are dead unhappy tales.'

His final rejection, 'If gods do evil then they are not gods,' is essentially a rejection of man's creating God in his own image, a practice that was to hold the world completely for centuries after him an is today more common than not. So can a mastermind outstrip the ages. Of certainties he had few:

'For who knows if the thing that we call death
Is life, and our life dying - who can know?
Save only that all we beneath the sun
Are sick and suffering, and those gone before
Not sick, not troubled with evil.'

- "The Greek Way", pg. 212, 213

Aristotle said that Aeschylus, after having been initiated into the ultra-secretive Eluesinian Mysteries kind of pissed all over the sect by placing clues about their rites in his most famous play, "Prometheus Bound". It almost got him killed.

There is nothing secret that will not be revealed. There is nothing kept secret that will not come to light.
- Luke 8:17

Indeed.

Ancient Television

Set your Tivos....

My PBS affiliate, WKOP, will be showing an episode of "Secrets of Archaeology" in which they look at ancient Rome on Tuesday, 9/9 at 12:30 pm. Maybe yours will too.

The History Channel will show "Lost Treasures of Pompeii" at 7 am on Friday, 9/14.

And that's about it for now.

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