The Greeks and their Heroes

this year I'd like to spend some time reading the Greeks and it doesn't prose any specialized knowledge of the Greeks and what I want to talk about in particular is the idea of the hero uh in some ways the most important myth for ancient Greece was the myth of Prometheus because he stole the fire of the Gods and uh brought them down to human beings because they were not capable of fighting off uh ferocious predators and uh as a result he was punished by Zeus chained to a rock and gruesomely every day uh uh vultures would come down or an eagle would come down rather that would be Zeus and eat his liver overnight it would grow back and it would happen again um that's kind of a tough sentence you have to admit that's kind of draconian but that's the kind of sentence of punishment you could expect from uh the head of the Greek pantheon the only thing that gives Prometheus and is Solus the thing that prevents that experience from being something like uh the punishments in Dante's Inferno is the Ace in the Hole that Prometheus has he knows of an ancient prophecy which he believes to be true that Zeus and the rest of the Olympians will event eventually be overthrown what that means is uh Gods are are just as mortal as we are they're just a little more uh temporally extended and the idea of taking God's place of displacing the Gods the way Zeus did with his father Kronos uh is a quintessentially Greek stance towards the world in other words let's push the limits the let's push the envelopes of what human beings can do and what they can aspire to it's a powerfully attractive humanism uh there's a deep optimism about human nature uh on the other hand this optimism about human nature this self assurance in uh undertaking the greatest tasks uh easily lends itself to arrogance which in Greek is hubis and self-destruction that's what tragedy is about but not just tragedy you will find that the great figures the the most important of the greatek heroes actually uh are probably centered in the Greek epics rather than the Greek tragedies or even comedies uh there are more of course of the tragedies in existence but the importance of heroism and of status and and of Honor uh is very important and it changes over time so the Greek poet Homer uh who is to whom is attributed The Iliad in The Odyssey was in the business of writing something like an encyclopedia for all of Greece uh everything that you want you would want to know that you would teach a uh an upper class young man might be found in the stories of Homer well it turns out that that kind of an education has some significant downsides and among those downsides is the fact that uh much of the mythology in the magic stuff uh has to be taken with a grain of salt and not every young person is able to do that so uh Homer creates the ideals of Greek culture as well and if you look at the Iliad this is clearly from a much more primitive stratum of Greek history right the in other words the stories that got swn together you know uh into a a coherent Plot In The Iliad um probably existed in an oral form from many centuries earlier it's the pulling them together and creating coherence that's great about Homer or whoever it is that was actually doing this The Iliad asks the question what makes a man excellent in other words if someone has arate um what does it look like and the answer is Achilles uh the first line tells us that the story is the poem is about the Wrath of Achilles and uh he does get awfully angry during the course of the uh action uh but it's about much more than that and so many important elements in Greek culture which will be important to us later as we read Plato and as I unpack this for you I'll be making references to this stuff um the most important thing uh about Achilles is that uh he's one-dimensional right um think about let's go to the readings uh book one of The Iliad how well as is traditional uh an epic starts in media race which means in the middle of things you can't start in the middle if you're writing an epic you need a flashback later on to tell us what's going on so uh we open the the poem with uh a conflict and a problem and these conflicts and these difficulties reflect a great deal about the way these very ancient Greeks viewed the world I mean on the assumption that Homer gets written down about 800 BC uh I got to think that um it was pulled together over a period of centuries and my guess would be 1,400 or 1500 BC for the original uh Hero Stories that were so that were told around the campfire or more likely chanted around the campfire in other words we would sing the song of Brave Ulisses or uh murderous uh fleet-footed uh Achilles but whatever we're doing we're trying to figure out where can we find Human Excellence and one answer would be on the battlefield I mean it clarifies a lot of things uh it's hard to be hypocritical on the battlefield and it's even hard to to uh to tell lies or to be uh crafty on the battlefield uh so much is uh attributable to uh main strength as in the case of Achilles everything else seems to be relatively uh unimportant so let's assume that for The Iliad uh Achilles is our main character what what's he like well first of all he's impulsive they haven't invented self-control yet I know that may sound unusual and it is but look um The Virtue of self-control rather than just say stabbing someone who looks at you in the wrong way uh takes up a lot of development in the course of human history uh most men particularly you know young adult men uh are too full of testosterones and and too light on brains to uh be easily subdued so uh when we we look at uh Achilles in the first book of the uh Iliad Agamemnon is angry and Agamemnon is a jerk of the first order I mean a damn fool and uh he's so consumed with his own status and with his own arrogance and with his own um self- congratulation that he is wildly out of touch with the world and he cannot accept responsibility except for being the boss anything that goes wrong he finds someone else to uh blame now turns out uh Agamemnon has among his uh division of the treasure uh because Troy hasn't fallen yet but they still have captured quite a bit he uh takes a slave girl and it turns out that the girl's father is a priest of Apollo now think about the conception of nature that we're dealing with here an epidemic strikes the Greeks and back then you don't look to uh scientific medicine you look to a soothsayer a priest somebody that can tell you what the gods are thinking and why they're doing this because the gods are assumed to be behind find it okay the priest is scared so he gets Achilles to stand up for him and then when he's asked by Agamemnon he says look um you've been disrespectful to Apollo's priest and Apollo is angry about it you have to give his daughter back to him even though you said you wouldn't and you would just being mean it was just pointless and arrogant um but if you don't Apollo is going to keep on sending down his Arrow arrows which happen to take the form of people stricken with uh an epidemic and many dying from it so Agamemnon gets quite angry he doesn't uh Fe believe that uh he has been honestly treated by the sus but since Achilles is backing him up there's no question of starting violence because Achilles if he gets violent will kill every breathing person there he will kill agamemnon's guard he will kill the rest of the heroes and he will make it a point to kill Agamemnon he was just about to do that which would deny us a wonderful story when Athena came down and put her hand on his on theil's great gnarly hand as he reaches for his sword and he she says Achilles don't do that believe me we'll take care of agam n leader but for now I want you to understand that the idea of Achilles uh being self-restrained uh in this case requires divine intervention that's how much uh a creature of direct Simplicity Achilles is Achilles is extremely eloquent but the eloquence is not derived from studying Aristotle's rhetoric or studying with the sophus his eloquence comes from the fact that he uh says nothing he doesn't believe and he says everything that he does believe apparently so uh Achilles turns out to be a an extremely simple individual not very complicated but he has the advantage of being The Terminator you can think uh when I've taught the the ilad nsy in the past almost always the young men among the undergraduates like uh The Iliad women are for the most part turned off by it but they do like the Odyssey so I found a a difference in the Sexes and how they seem to like this and uh you can think of this as an ancient action movie right but here what what we're doing is creating the ideal Greek and like Homer's two poems it comes in two phases I might guess that the Odyssey represents a cycle of of Hero Stories connected to the earlier cycles of stories which still hadn't put pulled together yet but these second cycle of stories or reflect a much more sedentary a much more uh Mercantile uh mode of living so initially the uh you know in 14 or 15 15 or 14400 BC uh the Greeks were like Vikings they're Pirates essentially uh that's whates talks about in book one of his history but after a couple of centuries they found advantageous islands and places on the mainland to settle down uh they found that trading was actually more lucrative than raiding uh they of course were perfectly willing to defend themselves or to steal if they had the possibility but what is important is that this second poem gives us a new hero this new hero is going to be adicus okay now we find in book eight or book nine of The Iliad one of the funniest subtlest most poetic scenes uh that I've seen in any epic it's just so smart and so understated and it's all about what doesn't get set there said there you have to imagine the expression on people's faces as they are throwing sidelong glances to one another here's the deal Achilles instead of murdering Agamemnon and everyone in his guard and everyone in his in the locality uh just says I'm not working with you anymore I will not take your arrogance and your uh uh destructive conduct you took my slave girl to replace yours but you had no right to do that I had no quarrel with Apollo you're just trying to prove who's the toughest who's number one and uh in some ways it's the ethos of the street gang you disrespected me I was tempted to sh but uh self-control inter intervened whether that's a goddess or not you know you can leave open but um Achilles feels disrespected and you see you don't disrespect Achilles because he's only here to gain the greatest possible Glory even though he knows about the uh the uh prophecy that he will be uh killed here in exchange for that he will get undying glory and he decides that's the way I want to live not live quietly at home let's go become famous and let's kill everything in sight okay now when Achilles says look I'm not fighting for you anymore I'm going to spend a couple of days getting ready and then I'm just going to sail home and uh I'm going to take my Mir my soldiers and uh you know you can see if you're able to take Troy without me this is I mean it's like a a really great quarterback saying look I can walk from this team as a matter of fact I am walking and that actually can create a tremendous problem for Agamemnon and his big ego so they are the Greeks are fighting against the Trojans and uh Hector the uh head of the Trojan Army The Greatest Warrior of Troy uh who is at least a match for other uh Greek Heroes um he does very well and he routes the Greeks several times and uh the Greeks are in very bad shape because they can't call upon the near Invincible Achilles so Nester or our figure of old uh seasoned wisdom he says to Agamemnon I'm sorry to have to bring this up but it's the elephant in the room uh without Achilles we have no chance and now Agamemnon can see that but he doesn't want to admit that he was wrong so he says you know you're right I must have been mad or possessed at the time because ordinarily I wouldn't make s such a terrible Gaff and so neest says of course not uh knowing of course that he's just dodging being stupid or or bit the accusation of being stupid and self-centered um that will come out later when he reunites with cl manester um so Nester says let's get uh a couple of ambassadors from great Kang of bnan to uh the angry and uh isolated uh Achilles now what's wonderful about this is you have to imagine the speech the action and the double meanings uh Nester chooses odyss because he's real smart he chooses Phoenix because he used to be the tutor of Achilles and he also choose is Ajax because uh Ajax is a great one of the greatest and most respected Heroes and the the hope is that he will be able to uh say if I would do the deal I would accept aon's Ransom because he's going to pay you all this great stuff a whole bunch up front you get the girl back that was taken and you get a whole bunch of stuff once we destroy try all right so uh I'm sorry about that I'm just I'm digitally uh difficult um so uh they're bringing him gifts as a kind of consolation prize and a kind of not quite apology from magam mennon and so Achilles allows the men and what's important here is that he's very agreeable very hospitable towards them which is of course not just company uh not just customary but a very big element in Greek society so uh he has petroplus uh His companion uh get a dinner ready for his guests and they just sit down and Nester begins talking and uh then Phoenix begins talking and aisus is at least initially uh somewhat reserved but then he ends up explaining the proposition that Agamemnon was offering finally of course this Phoenix's old uh tutor and this great Shaggy Ajax you know the giant the Hulk and he's nodding vigorously but he's not all that bright he's just there because he's Earnest and serious like Achilles but nobody is as Earnest and S and serious as Achilles and the reason why is because um he uh he's not a complicated person very much the opposite there's a sense in which Achilles doesn't even have an internal life I know he's he's supposed to everyone does but the idea is that um the discrepancy between ailles body and uh ailles mind is astonishing I mean the disjunction between these two things uh none of the ambassadors knew all that well uh what his um mental life was like and everybody was impressed with his eloquence because every word he said was sincere uh like a four-year-old he has no filter he said what if he thinks it he says it and that's it if you don't like that he will kill you so um he has that combination of a uh action and thought here but it's a very primitive kind of thought so I would call you uh Achilles uh version 1. 0 of the Greek hero it's an early primitive Warrior culture and what they mean by a hero a man who possesses AR and I would emphasize man here because we're not going to get interesting female characters until we get to the Odyssey and then to the tragedies uh but here in the ill this is a man's uh space and a man's time because uh this is all about The Clash of muscle until adicus cracks the problem open by making it a clash of brain so our version 1. 0 of the Greek hero he has about a dozen or so characteristic activities and each of these characteristics IC activities corresponds to a unique State of Mind a particular state of mind that Achilles is in to give an example all right when Achilles is tired Achilles goes to sleep there's no need to say Achilles are you tired all you need to do is look at Achilles if he's still awake then he's not tired what you see is what you get Achilles uh if he's sexually aroused he has sex with the slave girl that much of this is uh contention is about remember the slave girl is not an object of romantic attachment we haven't got romantic love yet it's a marker of status and that's why they're at odds this I mean she's a she's a poker chip not uh the real issue so uh Achilles is very hospitable and he invites the uh ambassadors in and he hears them out and uh I'm reminded of another event when Achilles is uh fighting a little later on in the Iliad but uh he captures someone or bests someone at a a spear fighting and the guy throws away a shield falls on his knees throws down his sword and says please take me captive my family will Ransom me and achilles stopped and thought about that and then he said well you see here's the thing I'm not an accountant I'm a hero and I'm not leaving this place anyway so I'm not really interested in making money and then Achilles impales him with a spear what that means is Achilles is uh knows that he has has the lifespan of a mayfly if he stays here so he has to have some good reason and accumulating wealth isn't it accumulating honor and Kalos which is Glory Kudos which is which is Glory um which is very very important that he sees as the Acme of human achievement to be the greatest most destructive Warrior anyone has ever seen and who willing gave up his life so that he could feed his um his egoistic hope of being remembered forever knowing that he's going to Drdie at Troy is straight is ironically an attempt at immortality okay so Achilles uh has a a few mental States and they correspond to a few characteristic activities so if Achilles is insulted Achilles refuses to fight uh if Achilles gets angry Achilles kills people uh if Achilles is uh hungry Achilles eats do you see the idea that there's a one to1 correspondence between simple mental states that you could probably rep replicate in uh in some invertebrate animal that's a little bit of the quality of the mental activity here uh you have to imagine Achilles first of all as being a great big hugely built guy imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger early in his career I mean gigantic muscles and uh protected by a magic uh potion the river leate so uh he's pretty much he's the Terminator of the ancient world and a culture that that chooses to elevate uh a Bronze Age Terminator to the high point of human achievement um is a very limited culture right it's a primitive culture that's mostly destructive and uh probably not sedentary primitive group of people in the embassy he does something like that disdain for ransom says look I'm not here to make money and it's been beneath me uh there's a Greek term for money grubbing bosia it's beneath me to uh accept any kind of bribe uh I should have cut that guy's head off but I didn't I'm just going home because I don't have to put up with this um so they the the embassy fails and uh before they go adus Achilles says something very revealing um you have to imagine him telling uh Ajax most probably uh looking at him saying oh how I hate like the gates of Hades itself a man who thinks one thing and says another now Achilles has only the greatest dislike and uh disapprobation and rage uh for liar now he's not some sort of uh contion who wants to obey Universal moral rules rather Achilles finds lies baffling and when he is faced with them he can't detect them because he doesn't see the possibility of telling lies Achilles has not told a lie throughout the entire uh story of The Iliad and won't tell any lies when he gets encountered in the underworld in The Odyssey but the point is what you see is what you get with Achilles in a way he doesn't have an inside or the inside and the outside of him are the same thing so uh Achilles says I hate the liar now you have to imagine Phoenix his teacher and uh uh Ajax look looking at him and and being quite serious and Earnest as well but Nester the old wise man and dsus are stepping back there and I imagine adicus stroking his beard saying yeah absolutely I mean what kind of person says one thing and thinks another and then look over slightly alarmed at Nester saying good Lord or not good Lord but what have we here you have to imagine a uh what does I say a Formula 1 race car with a lawn mower engine in it good god he has the mental development of a 10-year-old perhaps not even a 10-year-old and he's built like the Terminator and you can be sure that what ailles is doing is completely agreeing with nodding sagely and Nester is going to say oh yeah we got a live one here of course uh you're on a a a separate path and uh the reason why Achilles hates Liars is worth thinking about Achilles hates Liars because when you lie you have to have two things in your head at the same time you have to have the real fact of the matter which you are obscuring and you have to have a verbal account of the matter which is not the case which is false now adius does this out of habit as you'll see when he in the next chapter in The Odyssey in The Iliad when he you know goes out with diamides and they catch Dolan and all that the point is he's crafty and he lies at least half the time Achilles on the other hand cannot see that in adicus because he's unable to distinguish uh truth tellers from liars and the reason why is that it boggles his mind see Achilles is surrounded by people that say one thing and think another having two things in their mind at the same time enrages Achilles because uh that's one thing too many for him he has one idea at a time I am hungry I will eat I am angry I will kill you uh he's the simplest human uh tool right uh he's a he's a blunt instrument but on the other hand we didn't hire him to do our taxes right or to program computers for us we want a guy in this context who's just like Achilles he slays people and he's really good at it uh he's temperamental and childish but what difference does it make he's on our side and he's the key to winning so uh that's what Achilles version 1.

0 is like and the only tiny advance that he makes is at the very end of the book when when he after he killed Hector and disgraced the body and the uh um and uh in addition to that uh Priam comes and begs him for the body of his son and he breaks down crying because this reminds uh Achilles of his own father and uh this appears to be the first time in ailles life that he has ever asked posed the question to himself what would it be like to have someone else's experience what would it be like to have someone else's feelings and then he thinks about poor sad old men whose sons are dead this old man is sad and crying soon my father is going to be sad and crying that makes me want to be sad and cry so this is the the Odyssey the internal Odyssey of Achilles what does he do he moves from being uh not fully interiorized uh there's a onetoone correspondence between thought and action two hypothetical py what would it be like to be say that guy that I impaled even though he offered me a bunch of money that's kind of an interesting thought I had never considered that I'm tired now I'll go to sleep one idea in his head at a time now let's compare that with the Odyssey there we get the version 2. 0 of the Greek hero instead of the Terminator what we get is a mix of brains and Brawn so if he's got to fight it out odys is can do that he's a great competitor great hero on the other hand if you need a problem solved in uh uh an intelligent way rather than a violent way uh Achilles is particularly Adept at that we find out in a flashback that Achilles was the one who invented the stratagy of the Trojan Horse and the the horse after the Greeks appeared to have left the uh Trojans brought the horse into their city and uh this is what won the day because they broke out at night and opened the gates and this was the end of Troy now if the Greeks had waited for ailles to think this up they would still be waiting he has not the wit to think up a thing like that but Achilles does he represents the move from Trader from Raider in The Iliad to trade her as an Outlook think of it as a cycle of stories still quite heroic but you don't get quite the same pitched battles but a cycle of stories from a a sedentary group of people that likes to explore and plant new cities and uh conduct long large scale trade and uh make money at that it's it's actually a lot safer more predictable quite a bit easier than uh trying to be Pirates or the Vikings forever so adicus looks at things in a calculated way all right and he's going to be able to disguise himself when he goes back home to Ithaca in a way that Achilles just couldn't uh if both of them were to go back home with Ithaca in it to itha the first time someone disrespected them Achilles would say something ironic and then or rather odys would say something ironic and then Achilles would kill everyone in the vicinity because he just lose his temper so adius doesn't need the goddess to show up in order to get him to show self-restraint can you see how the idea of what Human Excellence is has extended and now it involves the ability to solve problems mentally not just with the response I will will kill you so version 2. 0 of the Greek hero um at the end of his uh his career he gets home back home to itha and uh he reflects on his life and it turns out that when he had uh just left Troy he pointlessly destroyed his City and raped and killed and murdered and he also had a and know running with the Cyclops and it wasn't enough just to outsmart the Cyclops he had to be full of hubis and that Greek hubis will will get Greek Heroes every time as he leaves he shouts out to Cyclops who's dumb uh it wasn't no man that stabbed you in your single eye it was me odyss and then laughing he and his men sail away but uh Cyclops Daddy was Poseidon and he was unhappy that his son had been blinded so he uh initially intended to kill adicus but Zeus intervened and said look you can knock him around the Mediterranean for 10 years or so but eventually you got them let him go back to itha I have plans and uh the will of Zeus's fate so that's that's where uh the Odyssey uh really begins in a way because he is is an inveterate Warrior he's a murderer he's a killer and uh he is full of arrogance and hubis and if he doesn't cleanse himself of this he is going to go home and things will not go properly so the Odyssey is a series of stripping Downs where odyusa he loses his crew eventually loses his clothes he's got nothing so he gets stripped down and rebuilt you couldn't strip down and rebuilt and rebuild Achilles because he's not competent uh complicated enough for that but aysus is so when he goes home he reflects on uh what it is that Warriors stand for and what violence should mean for a well uh a welldeveloped hero and he says after he kills the suitors to Ura who's one of his servants who's uh very happy and jumping up and down with Joy at all these dead suitors and dead maids and all that and he says this is key this is what he learns analogous to what a achilles learns what he learns is it is Unholy to vaunt over the body IES of the Dead this refers to ura's little happy dance with all the corpses but also it refers back to uh Achilles uh disgracing of Hector's corpse it is Unholy to do that finally um we're going to find out about the version 3.

0 of the Greek hero um it turns out he's named Socrates and uh Plato intends to literally supersede homo uh supersede Homer because uh he believes that Homer while an extraordinarily gifted poet has miseducated Greece so the version 3.