Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths Reviews

Emily Katz Anhalt, a professor of Classics at Sarah Lawrence College, New York, argues that ancient Greek myths tin assistance us tackle our virtually pressing problems today.

Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Mythsdescribes its homely origins ("my married man…suggested that I turn my repeated dinner-table conversations into something more constructive"), but also stems from the context in which Katz Anhalt works: the "mythology form" is a key element of US liberal arts education and usually involves making the case for classical literature to the uninitiated. In both subject and style, the volume reflects this: "Maybe you lot are familiar with some ancient Greek myths. Maybe not. In this book, I retell a few of them in the hope that they can help u.s.a., as they helped the ancient Greeks, to meet the costs of rage and tearing revenge and to cultivate more effective ways of interacting." In short, the project is reader-centred. Information technology asks: what accept the Greeks ever done for usa?

We may, of course, besides ask what we, in turn, do for the aboriginal Greeks – specifically, in the case of this book, to what extent it promotes a new or meliorate agreement of aboriginal Greek mythology. At the heart of the exploration stands a fundamental insight: "When nosotros are enraged, nosotros hands mistake acrimony for moral correctness; we think, 'I'm really angry, so I must exist right'."

Greek myth, in the reading offered past Katz Anhalt, helps to betrayal the problems and pitfalls of this moral defoliation. "Rage", the first word of the Iliad, announces a grand poem about a very specific issue. Achilles, the strongest Greek warrior, is angry with Agamemnon, the leader of the expedition against Troy. Their quarrel, we are told, was caused by the god Apollo, who in turn felt "rage" at Agamemnon.

At the beginning of the Iliad, Achilles and Apollo feel and conduct in the aforementioned way. When Agamemnon refuses to render a slave girl to her male parent, who is a priest of Apollo, the god sends a illness that decimates Agamemnon's army. Pressure mounts on Agamemnon to return the girl; Achilles is particularly vocal about it; and Agamemnon eventually agrees, on condition that he accept possession of Achilles' favourite slave daughter instead. This enrages Achilles, who withdraws from the fighting, thus ensuring that the regular army continues to suffer heavy losses.

It is when Agamemnon tries to persuade Achilles to relent that we run across how the mortal hero differs from the god. When Agamemnon returns the first slave girl, Apollo is appeased. When he offers to return the 2nd, Achilles is driven to even greater anger – and for more profound reasons than Agamemnon'southward insulting manner. He will not run a risk his life for Agamemnon, he insists, because life is more than precious to him than anything that the commander can offer. Likewise, the Trojans accept done him no incorrect; they did not steal the woman he loves.

Achilles refuses to exist appeased because he knows that he must die. It is only when his closest friend is killed by Hector, all-time of the Trojan warriors, that he changes his position. At present revenge matters to him even more than his feud with Agamemnon. He returns to the battlefield, kills Hector and continues to defile his body for days on end. Hector's father eventually begs him to let go of Hector'due south corpse and allow it to exist buried, and information technology is only so that Achilles finally relents: he sees in the old man an prototype of his own father. The Iliad ends with the funeral laments for Hector, performed by the women who depended on him for their survival and well-beingness. They express something that Achilles could hardly grasp, in his great anger: that people need to await afterward each other in social club to thrive.

Sophocles' Ajax, the second text discussed in this volume, is set towards the end of the Trojan War. Achilles is dead and Ajax expects to inherit his armour, since he is now the best of the Achaeans. Odysseus, even so, persuades the regular army to give him the armour instead. Mad with anger, Ajax slaughters an entire herd of cattle, thinking that he is really murdering Odysseus, Agamemnon, Menelaus and all the Greeks who slighted him. When he realises what he has done, he kills himself in shame – despite the fact that his slave Tecmessa tries hard to dissuade him from doing so, too in the name of the child they take together. Offended and horrified by Ajax's actions, Agamemnon and his brother pass up to bury his corpse, but at present Odysseus uses his rhetorical skills to persuade them to do so. The funeral of Ajax ends this enigmatic play.

Finally, Euripides' Hecuba stages the fury of the former Queen of Troy, who has non only been defeated, bereaved and enslaved by the Greeks, but betrayed by an ancestral friend, the King of Thrace. She had entrusted to him her youngest kid in social club to ensure that at least one of her sons would survive the war, but the king killed the boy. Despite her own enslavement, Hecuba manages to exact her revenge: the king ends upwards blinded and his two children dead. "In this play, as and so often in our own violent times," concludes Katz Anhalt, "ruthless, unnecessary killing masquerades as moral correctness."

Taken equally a whole, the volume traces (and advocates) a development from "primitive, private rage" to empathy and rational deliberation. Katz Anhalt rightly insists that the Trojan War belonged to the mythical past fifty-fifty for the earliest, 7th-century audiences of the Iliad, let alone fifth-century Athenians who watched the plays of Sophocles and Euripides in the theatre. For the latter, thinking about the great heroes of the past was likewise a ways of reflecting on their own political and institutional progress: Athenian citizens were used to debating and voting on all major political decisions, in what was the first straight democracy in history. Katz Anhalt suggests that ancient historical developments should inform our ain individual psychology – that we too should "set anger bated" and engage in compassionate thinking and rational decision-making instead.

This seems sensible, especially equally a message to students, but I have 2 reservations. The start is moral: it seems important to acknowledge the possibility of righteous anger and its political usefulness. Take the undereducated and poor: they may exist angry (and fifty-fifty target their rage at, say, female professors in privileged institutions, such as Katz Anhalt, myself or, more probable, Mary Bristles), only the trouble is not the anger. Surely, the problem is the poverty and the lack of didactics. Rational thought should not e'er or necessarily be presented every bit a substitute for acrimony but, in some cases at to the lowest degree, as a means of ensuring that it is well directed and effective.

My second business organization is aesthetic. Maybe because she insists on calling the works of Homer, Sophocles and Euripides "mythology" rather than "literature", Katz Anhalt tends to turn them into stories with rather clear morals. In antiquity, these works were appreciated by the rich and the poor, the educated and the illiterate – and yet, in their original grade, they made greater moral and artful demands on their audiences than the versions offered in this volume make on readers today.

Barbara Graziosi is professor of Classics at Durham University and is currently working on a book well-nigh homecoming.

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Enraged: Why Violent Times Demand Ancient Greek Myths
By Emily Katz Anhalt
Yale University Press, 288pp, £25.00
ISBN 9780300217377
Published iii Oct 2017

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The author

Emily Katz Anhalt, professor of Classics at Sarah Lawrence Higher, was built-in in New York City. She studied aboriginal Greek at Dartmouth College, followed past a primary's and PhD in classical philology from Yale University.

Studying philosophy and ancient Greek at Dartmouth, Katz Anhalt recalls, "I was taught to read like a philosopher, with one eye on the text and 1 eye on the world. My work focuses on the way that stories – literary, historical, political – shape our conscious and unconscious goals and controlling."

Asked virtually her political commitments, she says that she "spend[due south] much of [her] time in aboriginal Greece, and emerge[s] intermittently to a 21st-century reality of violent conflict in places both far and near. Ancient Greek myths, told and retold over centuries in ballsy and tragic poetry, accompanied and promoted a historically unprecedented movement away from tyranny and tribalism and towards broader forms of political participation, exemplified almost famously past the Athenian democracy of the 5th century BC, the first democracy the world had ever seen. Today, we risk reversing this trajectory, as many people remain unaware that the Greeks' political evolution required not merely the implementation of specific institutions but a transformation of attitudes and values."

So what practise we gain past adopting Greek ballsy and tragedy equally a resource in addressing today'south bug?

"Ancient Greek myths expose tyrannical behaviour as short-sighted and self-destructive," replies Katz Anhalt. "They remind us that violence promotes violence, and brutality breeds brutality. They promote intellectual inquiry and exact debate as more constructive alternatives. Although the ancient Greeks never fully lived up to the ideals of humanity, equality and justice that their own stories introduced, we ignore or carelessness these ideals at our peril."

Matthew Reisz

POSTSCRIPT:

Print headline:Vengefulness is humanity'southward Achilles heel

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Source: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/review-enraged-emily-katz-anhalt-yale-university-press

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