ACHAEANS: Top scribes reason like Achaeans!

FRIDAY, MAY 10, 2024

What triggered Achaean rage? "Man [sic] is the rational animal," he's widely said to have said.

We're referring to Aristotle, no last name required, an intellectual giant of the age of Classical Greece—an intellectual giant who also offered the view that all matter is composed of earth, water, air, and fire, though he also threw in hot, cold, wet, and dry, or who at least said something roughly to that effect.

Are we humans really "rational animals," as that term is now understood in the colloquial sense? Are even our high-end, mainstream journalists capable of such behavior at times of major cultural stress—as, for example, when a badly disordered former president faces 34 criminal charges in a Gotham trial which the pundits will discuss on TV all through the day and the night, ignoring all other news events as the otherwise boring hours slip quite pleasurably past?

In the New York Times, on Morning Joe, we've seen astonishing flights of novelization in the past several days. It seems to us that many of our own Blue America's major thought leaders have been reasoning like a bunch of Achaeans—though we'd have to say that, if anything, the conduct of those warriors from the late Bronze Age possibly made more sense.

(Good God! In the first ten minutes of this morning's show, Mika Brzezinski offered this deduction—she said that when Stormy Daniels said she saw a certain toiletry in Donald J. Trump's hotel room, that "proved" that the alleged sex actually happened. 

(We'll present the full transcript when it becomes available. That said, where on earth—where in the world—do they go to find good and decent, "well-educated" people who are able to "reason" like that?)

Returning, if only for now, to the conduct of the Achaeans:

We return at this time to the western world's first great "poem of war." As the famous poem begins, the Achaeans have been laying siege to sacred Troy for something approaching ten years.

They've been fighting and dying, in the dust and the mud, for more than nine years at this point. Every time Agamemnon melts down and suggests that they sail home admitting defeat, headstrong warriors rise to insist that they stay and continue to fight. 

Why did the Achaeans do that? What led them to do such things?

To answer your question, we turn to Professor Knox's lengthy essay, which serves as the formal Introduction to Robert Fagles' 1990 translation of this famous poem. At the start of his Introduction, Professor Knox describes the state of play as the Iliad begins:

INTRODUCTION

THE ILIAD 

"Iliad" is a word that means "a poem about Ilium" (i.e., Troy). and Homer's great epic poem has been known as "The Iliad" ever since the Greek historian Herodotus so referred to it in the fifth century B.C. But the title is not an adequate description of the contents of the poem, which are best summed up in its opening line: "the rage of Peleus' son Achilles." 

The incident that provoked Achilles' rage took place in the tenth and final year of the Achaean attack on Troy, and though Homer does work into his narrative scenes that recall earlier stages of the war  (the muster of the Achaean forces in Book 2, for example, and Priam's first sight of Agamemnon and the other Achaean chieftains in Book 3), the rage of Achilles—its cause, its course and its disastrous consequences—is the theme of the poem, the mainspring of the plot.

Indeed! Within the Fagles translation, Book One—the first "book" of twenty-four—is called "The Rage of Achilles." 

That said, the rage of Agamemnon, lord of men, also dominates that first book. But what are these gentlemen enraged about? 

The gentlemen are enraged about the only topic which actually matters, back then but also perhaps today. Professor Knox continues:

Chryses, a priest of Apollo, whose daughter has been carried off by the Achaeans in one of their raids, comes to the camp to ransom her. But she has been assigned, in the division of the booty, to the king who commands the Achaean army, Agamemnon, and he refuses to give her up. Her father prays for help to Apollo, who sends a plague that devastates the Achaean camp. 

Achilles, leader of the Myrmidons. one of the largest contingents of the Achaean army, summons the chieftains to an assembly. There they are told by the prophet Calchas that the girl must be returned to her father. Agamemnon has to give her up, but demands compensation for his loss. 

Achilles objects: let Agamemnon wait until more booty is taken. A violent quarrel breaks out between the two men, and Agamemnon finally announces that he will take recompense for his loss from Achilles, in the form of the girl Briseis, Achilles' share of the booty. 

Achilles represses an urge to kill Agamemnon and withdraws from the assembly, threatening to leave for home, with all his troops, the next day. The priest's daughter is restored to him. Apollo puts an end to the plague, and Briseis is taken away from Achilles' tent by Agamemnon's heralds.

So begins the western world's earliest detailed account of human conduct. 

The Achaeans have stolen an array of young woman to be held for sexual purposes. When one of these young women must be returned to her father, Agamemnon lord of men says he will take the young woman assigned to Achilles as compensation for his loss.

This provokes the rage of Achilles, which in turn provokes the rage of Agamemnon. Soon, Nestor the seasoned charioteer rises in council, attempting to calm the two enraged men. He offers advice to each party:

Don't seize the girl, Agamemnon, powerful as you are—
leave her, just as the sons of Achaea gave her,
his prize from the very first.
And you, Achilles, never hope to fight it out
with your king, pitting force against his force:
no one can match the honors dealt a king, you know,
a sceptered king to whom great Zeus gives glory.
Strong as you are—a goddess was your mother—
he has more power because he rules more men.

Nestor advises Agamemnon to let Achilles keep Briseis as his rightful "prize." Also, he advises Achilles to avoid a war with Agamemnon—with the sceptered king to whom Zeus has given such glory.

Eventually, Briseis is taken away from Achilles' tents by Agamemnon's heralds. So begins the violent quarrel which almost dooms the Achaeans' siege of Troy.

As far as we know, there is no point in this ancient poem where anyone, Trojan or Achaean, expresses moral disapproval of the cultural practice in question here. Inside the walls of Troy, King Prim's halls contain women who have been taken in successful military operations in the past. 

At one point, Hector—a Trojan prince and the noblest figure in the poem—describes for his wife the way she will be taken away after sacred Troy falls. Plainly, Hector is a loving husband and father, but he pulls few punches as describes Andromache's almost certain fate.

At any rate, the question of who owns Briseis triggers the rage of Achilles. And the rage of Achilles—"its cause, its course and its disastrous consequences—is the theme of the poem, the mainspring of the plot."

That said, why did the Achaeans ever sail for Troy in the first place? Why have they spent more than nine years dying in the mud and the dust?

Professor Knox spells that out a bit later in his essay. How did it get this far? His brief account goes like this:

There are in the poem two human beings who are godlike, Achilles and Helen. One of them, Helen. the cause of the war, is so preeminent in her sphere, so far beyond competition in her beauty, her power to enchant men, that she is a sort of human Aphrodite. In her own element she is irresistible. Every king in Greece was ready to fight for her hand in marriage, but she chose Menelaus, king of Sparta. 

When Paris, the prince of Troy, came to visit, she ran off with him, leaving husband and daughter, without a thought of the consequences for others. Her willful action is the cause of all the deaths at Troy, those past and those to come. When she left with Paris she acted like a god, with no thought of anything but the fulfillment of her own desire, the exercise of her own nature. But when the Iliad opens she has already come to realize the meaning for others of her actions, to recognize that she is a human being. She criticizes herself harshly as she speaks to Priam:

"if only death had pleased me then, grim death,
that day I followed your son to Troy, forsaking
my marriage bed, my kinsmen and my child . . ."

In his essay, Professor Knox is remarkably hard on Helen, radiance of women. She is described as "the cause of the war." The feckless Paris isn't similarly charged.

At any rate, the rage of Achilles doesn't occur until a decade has passed. The problem started when Helen, radiance of woman, left her Achaean husband and married Paris, a prince of Troy.

This blow to tribal honor leads the Achaean warriors to spend the next ten years of their lives killing and dying in the mud. It's all about who's zoomin' who. It's all about access to young women—access to those who have been stolen and to those who chose to leave.

Within the four corners of the Iliad, this is the only thing the Achaeans seem able to care about. Over and over and over again, this has been the one part of life concerning which the rational animals of our mainstream press corps seem able to become fully engaged.

There are very few policy questions which engages them in any real way. They can't be forced to discuss such matters in the way they want to discuss the way certain public officials may have had sex, on one or possibly ten occasions, with some woman who wasn't their wife.

This is all they seem to care about. Few things could be more obvious.

To appearances, this is the way our human brains may perhaps be wired. On the lower ends of our functioning, our brains are wired to care about this and about little else—and, ideally, to turn our presidential elections into a set of stampedes in search of the answers to such eternal questions.

There's a great deal more to be said about the role of the various women in the Iliad—the women who live inside the walls of Troy and the young women who have been stolen by the Achaean invaders.

There's also a great deal more to be said about the sexual politics of our modern mainstream press corps—a sexual politics which barely exists, except when these pre-rational animals are given the chance to spend their days, and their nights, speculating about the (alleged) sexual behavior of the political figures of whom they disapprove.

(They will typically disappear the sexual misconduct of the pols they still revere.)

It's all about who's zoomin' who! Litle else actually seems to matter to these feckless modern humans, who may sometimes seem to resemble a group of time-travelled Achaeans.

We moderns! We pretend to engage in journalism. We pretend to author important moral judgments. But are we actually reasoning like a bunch of Achaeans?

We'd be inclined to say the answer is yes, though a great deal remains to be said.

"Man [sic] is the rational animal," Aristotle is widely said to have said. In fairness, he never read the New York Times, and he never watched the gang on Morning Joe.

He never saw how little these people seem to care about the actual lives of others. He was never exposed to the novels they're inclined to compose as they while away their hours.

Aristotle got certain things right. Depending on what he actually meant, we'd say he got that one thing wrong.

The journalists have been amazing this week. When Mika said that Stormy's statement amounted to proof, no one on the "cable news" panel rose to say, "Hold on!"