Aaron Helton

tags: #History #Literature #Books #Aeneid #Rome

---

I mentioned in my last post that Aeneid was more visibly self-conscious than Iliad or Odyssey, suggesting that it was the distance afforded by time that was at the root of this. Insofar as there is any regional psychology of the Trojan War, it is only as distilled by Homer and, later, by Virgil. While we have a scholar-backed view of the historicity of the city itself, it is unclear if there was any singular event that could be considered THE Trojan War. It is just as likely that, as often happens in the process of mythology, a number of separate events conflated to become the myth, and the separate events themselves faded in importance. In this way, the psychological impact of the war is the folding and weaving of unrelated histories and extant myths into a coherent myth, and therefore entering the burgeoning national consciousness of the early Greek people. But if Homer’s goal was to elaborate a founding myth, such narrative appears absent from his works.

Contrast with Virgil. From the beginning, we get a sense of Aeneas’s destiny to plant the seeds that would flourish into the Roman Empire. Virgil, in fact, is quite heavy-handed in this, layering prophecy and foreshadowing in order to remind the reader at every turn. By the time Virgil was writing, some eight centuries separated his own treatment of the fall of Troy from Homer’s, whereas Homer was separated from his subject by half the time. In human historical terms, a thousand years is a long time. It is a long time in which to study and internalize the myths of others, and it is certainly long enough to carefully construct narratives that serve as exuberantly self-conscious foundation myths.

Beyond layers of prophecy foretelling Aeneas’s destiny, Virgil is a shameless name-dropper. Homer’s Aeneas is but a minor character, rating a mention nonetheless. True, in Greek mythology, he was known to be the son born of the liaison between Anchises and Aphrodite, but Homer hardly dwelt on this fact. Whether there were already prevalent post-Troy biographical accounts of Aeneas prior to Virgil’s treatment of him doesn’t seem to be known, but even if there were, it is Virgil’s work that most defines the character of Aeneas. We are left, then, with a question of why Virgil chose Aeneas to carry the seeds of Rome’s founding, but whatever the questions of provenance, Virgil seeks quickly to establish the credibility of his minted hero by associating him with other well-known people. The most prominent of these is Ulysses (whom the Greeks called Odysseus).

Spoiler: we don’t meet the man of constant sorrow in Aeneid. Instead, we meet one of his luckless mates left behind during Ulysses’s flight from the island of the Cyclops. We’re led to believe that Ulysses has only departed recently, as the blinded Polyphemus has not fully healed from the dreadful wound that ended up enraging Neptune and preventing Ulysses’s return home. With this stroke, Virgil has demonstrated that Aeneas is not only following in the footsteps of Ulysses, but that by the end of his journeys, he will have endured his own odyssey, even if the particular trials end up being different. This, by the way, is only Aeneas’s recounting of the journey that landed him on the Libyan coast to be sheltered by Dido and the Carthaginians.

I think Virgil is setting us up to accept a whole new breed of suffering wanderer. And you know what? Aeneas’s tale, the story of the man who lost before planting the seeds of victory over his enemies, is in many ways far more sympathetic than the tale of the man who won but then just got lost on the way home.

I posted an edited version of this quote on Facebook, channeling its Fitzgeraldian flavor, but here it is more apt in its full length and captures Aeneas’s plight:

Breakneck on, impelled by the sharp edge of fear, we shake our sheets out, spread our sails to the wind, wherever it may blow.

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tags: #History #Literature #Books #Aeneid #Rome

The Aeneid

Not only did I end up delaying my reading of The Aeneid by a month, I have also fallen behind on creating the entry for it. As of today, I have finally made it through the first book, in which Aeneas and his crew, having fled the ruins of Troy, alight on the Libyan coast in search of refuge from the ever-jealous gods who thwart their safe passage to Italy, their destination. Queen Dido of Carthage takes them in and shelters them, at least for a time.

Before venturing forth, Aeneas will spend half the book detailing the fall of Troy and his wanderings since then. It is worth noting that the episode people think they remember most from the previous works, that of the Trojan Horse, is given much fuller account here than it was in The Odyssey (although Homer did mention it briefly).

Stylistically, there are some radical departures from the previous texts, which is natural considering the provenance of this text. The switch from Greek names to Roman ones is the most immediately noticeable feature, but this is just a matter of remapping names. Far more jarring, at least for me, is the constant switching of verb tenses, from past to present. While no such instances stand out from my readings of The Iliad, The Odyssey contained some interesting verb constructions, but ONLY in reference to Eumaeus the swine-herd: here, Homer switched from third person to second person, referring to Eumaeus as “you”. But Virgil, at least as translated by Fagles, seems to take a liberal view of verb tenses, freely mixing past and present forms. It is curious and, as I said, a bit jarring.

The other immediate contrast is that, whereas I saw little self-consciousness in Homer, Virgil is aggressively so, playing up early the mythos of Aeneas as destined founder of the Roman people. We get a sense from the beginning that this is a founding myth and not merely a narrative. By the time Virgil was writing, more than a thousand years had passed since the war itself and 800 years since authoring of The Iliad and The Odyssey. This is more than enough time for both works to have gained significance in the national psychology of the city-states comprising eventual Greece, and Virgil is clearly imitating this, but at a much farther remove.

Note: This is part of a series of posts dealing with the reading of one sacred/epic work per month in 2017. See below for more information on what I’m doing and how to follow along.

2017 Sacer-Epic Reading Journey

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tags: #History #Literature #Books #Odyssey #Greece

The Odyssey + Midyear Check-in

It took me two months to finish The Odyssey. In terms of pacing and story development, I found the story of Odysseus’s journey home to compare quite favorably to modern novels. In fact, this was something I noticed early on, when Homer introduced numerous scene changes to account for parallel events. True, we can see this in The Iliad to some degree, but the tight focus on Troy and its immediate surrounds didn’t convey the same sense to me.

The Odyssey offers a complex interplay of vices and virtues, as well as an interesting view into the proto-Greek society which it ostensibly chronicles. Whereas The Iliad expounds on military virtues, funerary practices, and the like, in The Odyssey we get a picture of domestic life in parts of Ancient Greece, including marriage customs. For instance, it is clear from the outset that Penelope has, and is expected to have, little agency except within the household. The suitors are there to lay claim to the treasures of Odysseus, of which she is merely the gateway. They couch this desire, of course, in terms of her desirability as a wife, but I think that’s beside the point.

Penelope’s chastity stands in contrast today against Odysseus’s lack of it. That men were not held to the same standards as women in Homer’s age is likewise clear, and therefore the ancient listener would have merely praised Penelope for her virtue, but not condemned Odysseus for his vice. Else why explain the lure of Calypso to remove his sense of responsibility? Moving on to less clear grounds, we have a group of suitors, seeking to gain Odysseus’s treasure by way of marriage to his presumed widow. Their behavior was portrayed as shameful, and yet the inhabitants of Ithaca somehow tolerated this. I don’t know what to make of that, really. Odysseus and Telemachus got their revenge on the suitors, but in so doing nearly caused additional strife, avoided only by the intervention of Athena’s call for peace (after she frightened the Ithacans). So in this case we have vice paid with vice, as it seems Odysseus did not have an automatic right to slaughter the entire group of suitors. Again, this is ambiguous to me, and I don’t consider this a bad thing.

—

I thought I would also take a moment to talk about my progress for the year. At the beginning of the year, I set out to read 12 sacred/epic works. I should have been completing my sixth this month, but instead have only completed five. This means an adjustment is in order.

There are two options, really.

1. Double up on reading to fit the remaining 7 entries into the next six months.

2. Bump a reading from the list.

I have a particular reason for choosing the second option. The reason has to do with the particular entry that I plan to bump, and where it’s going. Since this year is a mix of sacred and epic, I thought perhaps I would continue with sacred-only reading next year. Therefore I am thinking of bumping the last entry to next year and finishing 2017 with only 11 entries. This is not firmly established since, if it turns out I can catch up, I will do that. Nor would catching up preclude me from pursuing an all-sacred reading list next year.

So, perhaps, let this stand as an initial call for sacred texts to read. I am interested in anything canonical or semi-canonical in Buddhism, as well as good English translations of the Zend Avesta. The total number of works needs to be divisible into 12 months of reading, but otherwise there are no real restrictions.

Note: This is part of a series of posts dealing with the reading of one sacred/epic work per month in 2017. See below for more information on what I’m doing and how to follow along.

2017 Sacer-Epic Reading Journey

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tags: #History #Literature #Books #Odyssey #Greece

Or, Poseidon vs Odysseus

Homer, Odyssey manuscript. Date: 3rd quarter of the 15th century. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Odyssey-crop.jpg (Public Domain)

I’ve dedicated May to The Odyssey which, in contrast to The Iliad, is not a strict re-read for me. That’s not to say I am unfamiliar with the material, only to say that I’ve never actually read the epic cover to cover before. Despite my late posting, I am in fact reading the work, which concerns ill-fated Odysseus and his very long journey home. The Iliad has some wonderful scenes, but the scope of the story is so limited that I don’t enjoy it nearly as much as other entries on this year’s reading list. For instance, Shahnameh was chock full of terrific episodes made all the better by their freshness to me. The Odyssey is not so fresh, of course, but it does contain numerous episodes that likewise delight, and I am looking forward to it more than its prequel.

Whereas The Iliad in large part concerned itself with the consequences of Achilles’s abstention from battle, stemming from his rage against what he perceived as injustice committed against him by Agamemnon, The Odyssey concerns the fate of a man who has drawn the ire of a god. Odysseus’s greatest crime was his hubris, which directly led to the events for which Poseidon sought vengeance on him, thwarting his passage home for 10 years.

As with The Iliad, I am reading the Fagles translation. I hope this epic is more fruitful for me than the previous.

Note: This is part of a series of posts dealing with the reading of one sacred/epic work per month in 2017. See below for more information on what I’m doing and how to follow along.

2017 Sacer-Epic Reading Journey

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tags: #Iliad #Beowulf #Books #Literature

A Confluence of Funerary Practices

By Bermicourt — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37502478

Separated by more than a thousand years and at least as many miles, two authors in vastly different cultures nevertheless described strikingly similar treatments for their heroic dead. The earliest of the two appears in Book 7 of The Iliad, where Hector is issuing his challenge for single combat to the Achaeans.

“But if I kill him and Apollo grants me glory,
I’ll strip his gear and haul it back to sacred Troy
and hang it high on the deadly Archer’s temple walls.
But not his body: I’ll hand it back to the decked ships,
so the long-haired Achaeans can give him full rites
and heap his barrow high by the Hellespont.
And some day one will say, one of the men to come,
steering his oar-swept ship across the wine-dark sea,
‘There’s the mound of a man who died in the old days,
one of the brave whom glorious Hector killed.’
So they will say, someday, and my fame will never die.”

Compare with Beowulf’s deathbed instructions and note the distinct similarities.

“Order my troop to construct a barrow
on a headland on the coast, after my pyre has cooled.
It will loom on the horizon at Hronesness
and be a reminder among my people —
so that in coming times crews under sail
will call it Beowulf’s Barrow, as they steer
ships across the wide and shrouded waters.”

I have little to offer in the way of commentary here. Both accounts must be products of militaristic sea-faring cultures who also burn their dead before burial, and the intent, though directed quite differently and provided in different contexts, is to honor fallen heroes. That the details between the two match so precisely is of mild curiosity to me.

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tags: #History #Literature #Books #Iliad #Greece

Triumphant Achilles. Source

My post-Beowulf lull allowed the new month to steal upon me and catch me unawares. I am therefore underprepared this time around and haven’t yet had a chance to put together a proper introduction. This brief post will have to suffice.

The cruellest month is dedicated to The Iliad, one of the two great epics of Classical Greece, attributed to Homer. It tells the story of the final weeks of the ten year long Trojan War, and begins with a focus on a feud between Achilles and Agamemnon. Just as important, however, is what it doesn’t cover. Those who should know better, but have for whatever reason only pretended to read The Iliad, cite the Trojan horse as a favorite scene, but this of course does not appear anywhere this month’s text. It makes a brief appearance in The Odyssey (which is May’s text), but we will have to wait until June to get a fuller account by way of Virgil, in the Aeneid.

Thematically, The Iliad shares much with other epics. Glory in battle is, perhaps unsurprisingly, among the most prominent of these, followed by honor, homecoming, and fate. But the opening lines of the epic set the overall tone:

Rage — Goddess, sing of the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighers’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.

Rage is where we begin, and rage is what informs the events that follow.

This is my second reading of The Iliad. I will be using the Fagles translation, which presents the epic in a delightfully readable language that should engage most modern readers.

Note: This is part of a series of posts dealing with the reading of one sacred/epic work per month in 2017. See below for more information on what I’m doing and how to follow along.

2017 Sacer-Epic Reading Journey

++++ Like what you just read? You can subscribe to new posts on this blog via any ActivityPub platform (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @aaron@www.aaronhelton.com or via RSS at https://www.aaronhelton.com/feed

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tags: #History #Literature #Books #Iran #Shahnameh

Earlier, I mentioned that the Sekandar character in Shahnameh was none other than Alexander the Great, and to a large extent the analog holds. There are, however, some interesting anachronisms in Ferdowsi’s text. This is to be expected if you recall that Shahnameh is not a faithful historical document, but instead serves other, more allegorical purposes. Indeed, in earlier parts of the epic, the mists of time obscure familiar reference points such that they just don’t matter that much. But as the story has progressed inevitably toward a time with better-corroborated historical records, the correlation of events separated by centuries starts to raise eyebrows.

Consider the following passage in which Sekandar, upon having visited the Andalusian queen Qaydafeh while he was disguised as his vizier, Bitqun, promises not to conquer Andalusia:

Seeing Qaydafeh on her throne, Sekandar said, “May the planet Jupiter accompany your deliberations. I swear by the Messiah’s faith, by his just commands, by God who is a witness to my tongue, by our rites and by our great cross, by the head and soul of your majesty, by our vestments, our clergy, and the Holy Ghost, that the soil of Andalusia will never see me again, that I shall send no army here, that I shall not seek to deceive you, that I shall do no harm to your loved son, neither through my commands or by my own hand.”

Here, then, Ferdowsi has depicted Alexander the Great as a Christian king. On the one hand, ascribing a religion to a historical figure regardless of whether s/he practiced that religion is not terribly uncommon. On the other hand, this is usually done by members of the religion that has been ascribed, as in the case of Beowulf and the Christianized Anglo-Saxons who wrote down his epic. Writing as late as 1010 CE, Ferdowsi composed Shahnameh nearly 400 years after the birth of Islam and the Muslim Conquest of Persia. Throughout the work, Ferdowsi writes about pre-Zoroastrian and Zoroastrian religions through a primarily Muslim lens, and later turns that lens on the anachronism that a Christianized Alexander the Great represents.

I think what surprised me most about this depiction is that Alexander the Great pre-dated the birth of Christ, and therefore the advent of Christianity, by a couple of centuries. This is not a case like Beowulf, in which Christian authors are examining an era containing both Christians and pagans. This is something else entirely. An 1854 article by Justin Perkins and Theodore D. Woolsey, appearing in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, suggested that Ferdowsi was importing his Alexander myth from the Greeks themselves, but, writing as he was at a time when the only examples of Greek rulers he had were Byzantine, he made Alexander a Christian.

Also note the particular language of the oath. This doesn’t look like any kind of oath I’ve seen from a Christian, which makes me think it comes from Ferdowsi’s lens. Since I can’t claim to have a broad experience of Christianity in all its forms through history, I could definitely be uninformed on this one. Still, I find it curious.

The episode itself is out of time as well, as the queen in question, Qaydafeh (also Qidafa) is hard to place anywhere but, perhaps, the Kingdom of Kush, in modern Sudan, in which case this name seems to be a Persian transliteration of Kandake or Candace. Anyway, like the problems with Christianizing Greece prior to the rise of Christianity, Andalusia itself isn’t a recognized place name until the the Umayyad conquest of the region in ca. 715, a thousand years after the death of Alexander the Great.

Again, this sort of thing seems to have arisen out of Ferdowsi’s devotion to the art of myth-weaving rather than strict historicity, as well as the sources to which he had access and the civilizations with which he was familiar. That we can compare his output to other sources is a testament to the availability of historical record more than anything else.

Ancient Globalization

What Ferdowsi doesn’t get wrong, however, is the contiguousness of the empires along what would come to be known as the Silk Road. At the height of his power, Alexander’s imperial reach extended as far north and west as the Balkan Peninsula, as far south as Egypt, and as far east as the Indus River and Western China, encompassing the former Persian Empire and then some. Intense civilizational pressures had already rendered this space somewhat traversible, eventually producing well-maintained roads, the first of which was the Persian Royal Road (itself the product of earlier road networks). This traversibility is undoubtedly a reason behind the scale of the empires it produced, as good roads made for easier governance of far-flung peoples. The eventual Silk Road began coalescing under Greek expansion eastward.

In any case, Ferdowsi offers up another scene, which I found curious both in terms of the interconnectedness of the ancient world (a clear precursor to modern levels of globalization) and the warping effect of muliple religious lenses applied to a distant religion. The episode is that in which Sekandar travels to India to meet with some wise men (Brahmins) he has heard about. What we get as a result is a Persian Muslim view of a fictionally Christianized Greek’s reception of ancient Hindu wisdom. These bits of wisdom offer up a slight contrast to the text’s previous sensibilities:

An ambitious man struggles to gain something that is not worth the effort he has put forth, and then he passes from the world while his gold and treasure and crown remain here. Only his good deeds will accompany him, and his head and glory will both return to dust.

And

[W]hy do you long for the world in this way, why do you breathe in the scent of this poisonous flower so eagerly? All you will receive is suffering, while your enemies will inherit the wealth you acquire; to make oneself suffer for another’s profit is the act of an ignorant man or a fool.

Up to this point, the characters have been concerned mostly with the vicissitudes of fate under the invisible hand of what, on the surface, looks like a pretty capricious god. Building up treasure is an occupation that retrospectively indicates God’s favor, something like modern Prosperity Gospel, and, furthermore, makes one’s life more comfortable in the here and now. At times, characters have mentioned rewards after death, but this doesn’t seem to be a major preoccupation in the first half of the text. Therefore a good deal of effort goes into wealth building, and the religious ideals seem to have supported it. This passage appears to refute such ideals.

The best explanation I can think of for why Ferdowsi inserts this episode (assuming it didn’t come from one of this sources) is that it serves as foreshadowing for the fate of Alexander’s empire, which he would leave without a legitimate heir upon his untimely death at age 32. The Persian portion of the empire was ruled thereafter by the Hellenistic Seleucid Dynasty, whose empire declined in fits and starts as encroachment from the east (Punjab, etc.) and the west (the Romans) destabilized it.

Since I have yet to see just how Ferdowsi approaches the death and succession of Sekandar, I have little evidence to support this hypothesis, and will have to wait until I get a little further in the reading to find out if there is any truth to it.

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tags: #History #Books #Literature #Iraq #Gilgamesh

Update on The Epic of Gilgamesh

Source: http://www.mesopotamia.co.uk/gods/explore/bullheav.html

As I am finishing up my reading of The Epic of Gilgamesh, I started this morning on the portion of the Sumerian poems used as the source for Tablet XII. The stark difference in tone and style was immediately noticeable, and this difference, along with the inconsistencies it introduces by way of involving a living Enkidu has caused scholars to consider it an “inorganic appendage” to the main epic.

Regardless of its provenance, intention, and import, I find this poem more elegant than the standard version, the first eleven tablets. Perhaps this is in part due to the fragmentary nature of the main epic. Repetition is a notable feature of ancient works, which were only written down after an unknown amount of time as oral traditions. As oral traditions, fidelity of reproduction was vital, and it seems various methods of memorization were developed to both aid this process and to strengthen the form and content. Precisely what styles the Sumerian scribes used, we can’t be sure. Whatever the case, repitition is important in all parts of the epic, but it takes on an almost liturgical character in what became Tablet XII.

In those days, in those far-off days,
In those nights, in those far-off nights,
In those years, in those far-off years,

The whole poem flows like this, building on itself as it relates the story of Enkidu’s descent into the underworld to fetch some items of Gilgamesh’s that were dropped there, and Gilgamesh’s attempts to get his friend back from the underworld. Reading this, I can just about smell the high-church incense and hear this uttered from the lips of a priest.

Re: Memorization

Any time I think about the repetitive patterning in ancient works drawn from oral tradition, I recall a Ribbonfarm post that touches on that topic as it applies to ancient India and the memorization practices of those preserving the Vedas. The assertion is that the memorization practices would have made it harder to memorize, not easier, but by extension force the scribe to pay attention to the text itself. We can’t necessarily know whether the Sumerians practiced a similar set of methods, but we can see the remains of their handiwork in the cuneiform tablets they left behind. Copying these over and over was the work of apprentice scribes, who, according to a 2012 article published in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, appear to have been working primarily from memory. It would be fascinating to uncover evidence of their memorization methods, but we should surmise that extensive repetition played a key part.

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tags: #History #Literature #Books #Beowulf #Scandinavia

(Note: Still missing the header image)

Vendel Era Helm on display at the Swedish Museum of National Antiquities.

The epic for March is Beowulf.

When I began thinking about its place among the epics I chose for the year, I thought I might focus on Beowulf’s elegiac quality, something that not all of the epics share, at least not in the same way. On second thought, however, it is clear to me that Gilgamesh also possesses this quality, especially in the Sumerian poems, which refer to him as Bilgames. Both are concerned with gaining lasting fame through deeds, though it is true that Gilgamesh is vastly more focused on action than introspection. Where they diverge most, however, is in their views on death. Whereas Gilgamesh undertakes a quest in search of eternal life (a quest he fails), Beowulf wastes little time in resigning himself to death, so long as he can die in a blaze of glory. Both come around to the idea of death in their own way, but Gilgamesh is famous for his existential angst in this regard.

Contrast these attitudes with those from Shahnameh, which also cannot help but examine the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Time and again the characters of Shahnameh caution and counsel one another not to put too much stock into life, the world, possessions, and the like, because God, the heavens, fate, or whatever forces have been set in motion cause one to rise and another to fall. The death scene of Dara (whom we must interpret as representing Darius III) provides particularly evocative passage in Shahnameh. It’s worth quoting the whole speech:

When he heard Sekandar, Dara said, “May wisdom always be your companion! I think that you will find the reward for what you have said from God himself. You said that Iran is mine, and that the crown and the throne of the brave are mine; but death is closer to me than the throne. The throne is over for me, and my luck has run out. So the high heavens revolve; their turning is toward sorrow, and their profit is pain. Look at me before you say ‘I am exalted above all this great company of heroes.’ Know that evil and good both come from God, and see that you remain grateful to him for as long as you live. My own state shows you the truth of what I say. Look how I, who had such sovereignty and glory and wealth, am now despised by everyone. I who never injured anyone, who had such armor and such armies, such splendid horses, such crowns and thrones, who had such sons and relatives, and so many allies whose hearts bore my brand. Earth and time were my slaves, and remained so while my luck held. But now I am separated fom good fortune, and have fallen into the hands of murderers. I despair of my sons and family; the earth has turned dark for me, and my eyes are white like the eyes of a blind man. Our own people cannot help us; my one hope is in God the Creator. I lie here wounded on the earth, fallen into the trap of death, but this is the way of the heavens whether we are kings or heroes. Greatness too must pass: it is the prey, and its hunter is death.”

Arriving as this does slightly more than halfway through the Dick Davis translation of Shahnameh, it is hard to read this as an elegy for Iran, even though that’s sort of what it is. This segment of the epic portrays the ascendance of Sekandar, or Alexander the Great, over the Persian empire, an eclipse of the old with the new. Dara’s conscious elegy here is common throughout Shahnameh, as generations rise and generations fall, but it has additional import because the changing of the guard is from one empire to another. This, perhaps, renders Shahnameh the real outlier in this set of epics so far. Nothing in Gilgamesh can be construed as concerning itself with the rise and fall of particular civilizations; indeed, Gilgamesh’s most pressing concerns involve only himself and, before his death, Enkidu.

Beowulf, on the other hand, has an air of the rise and fall of civilizations about it. By the end of the work, when Beowulf has reached an old age, enemies of the Geats are crowding ‘round awaiting his death. His lack of a natural heir and his deathbed choice of the inexperienced thane Wiglaf as heir leaves Geatland in a precarious position, one his people cannot help but notice. This brief passage from Seamus Heaney’s translation occurs during Beowulf’s funeral:

A Geat woman too sang out in grief;
with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
of her worst fears, a wild litany
of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
slavery and abasement.

This is, indeed, the ending note of the work. Had Shahnameh ended with Sekandar’s conquest of Persia, or just on the eve of conquest, in the moments after Dara was struck down by his kin, it might have carried this same note. But whereas Beowulf ends on a low note, Shahnameh continues on, largely unconcerned with the fates of individuals and even civilizations in the larger scheme. I imagine this is a consequence of Persia having continued on, never really having lost its sense of identity, the security of which Shahnameh helped retain.

About the Text

The story of Beowulf contains many elements that may be familiar to many of us today. Composed between 1000 and 1300 years ago, it tells the story of the Geatish hero Beowulf and his various exploits. If you have seen the adequate but not terribly noteworthy 2007 film of the same name, then you know more or less what happened in the first part of the epic: arriving in Denmark, Beowulf and his companions offer to rid Hrothgar of the predations of Grendel, a monster who hunts and eats Danes. In so doing, he provokes Grendel’s mother into a fit of revenge and must likewise defeat her. Successful, he takes his spoils back to what is modern Sweden, where he later rules as king of the Geats. As an old man, having ruled for 50 years, he ventures forth one last time to rid his land of the scourge of a wakened fire-breathing dragon, and though victorious, he perishes in the battle. It deals with themes of bravery, legacy, and death, and offers up some curious examples of early medieval kingship.

Translations

Because I already owned it, I will be reading Seamus Heaney’s bilingual edition of Beowulf. I am also interested in the posthumously published translation by J.R.R. Tolkien, who undoubtedly drew heavily from Beowulf; since I don’t own it, however, I will have to put off reading it until later. Finally, a friend pointed me to an interesting experimental take on Beowulf, the translation by Thomas Meyer, which I would love to pick up at some point.

Other Resources

As with previous works in the sacer-epic reading list, Beowulf has been covered elsewhere. I was quite happy with the three-part series that aired recently on the Myths and Legends podcast. You might enjoy it as well.

(These are mp3 links)

60A — Beowulf: I’m Kind of A Big Deal

60B — Beowulf: The Depths

60C — Beowulf: Unknowable but Certain

Note: This is part of a series of posts dealing with the reading of one sacred/epic work per month in 2017. See below for more information on what I’m doing and how to follow along.

2017 Sacer-Epic Reading Journey

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tags: #Philosophy #Life #Sisyphus #Progress #Struggle

The Myth of Sisyphus more closely describes the tragedy of the progressive condition than it does the universal human condition. Here I use the term progressive at face value: that is, of or pertaining to progress, and specifically people who hold human progress as a desirable, achievable goal. In this piece, I intend to examine the rationality of pursing human progress when one believes it is impossible.

We can examine human history and development through a few different lenses, each with its faint air of mutual exclusivity hanging over the fact that reality is somewhere in between. The two primary ones are the Progressive and the Cyclical. To these, I would like to add the Evolutionary. Each lens offers varying degrees of comfort according to what the observer values most. I’ll spend a few moments outlining them to help frame the rest of the discussion.

Progressive

The first point of the triptych is the Progressive view, which is the idea that human history has an arc, a direction, and that as moral agents we human have progressed to new moral heights. Evidence we use to support such claims include technological progress, the fact that “we” don’t own slaves anymore, and the slate of (politically) Progressive agendas we have managed to advance, however slowly. This is an attractive idea for obvious reasons, among them that we can see elements of progress with our own eyes. Implicit in this view is the idea that our human ancestors were all terrible people. By extrapolation, so are we, because we are not as good today as we will be tomorrow.

Cyclical

The second point of the triptych is the Cyclical view, which suggests that, insofar as human history has any kind of arc, it is a periodic function, mirroring the rise and fall of empires and civilizations. Evidence we use to support this claim primarily includes the fact that history is littered with the corpses of dead empires and civilizations. For those of us who read history as a long game, this view is, while perhaps not overly attractive, at least comforting in its rationality, somewhat like the cold clockwork certainty of death. Implicit in this view is the idea that, unless we’re in a golden age now, we are simultaneously marching away from and and toward golden ages. By extrapolation, we are never in a golden age, but always retreating from one and avancing toward another. Also implicit here is that we can count on human nature to both create and destroy, else we would be firmly ensconced in the Progressive view. The danger of hewing closely to this, however, is that it allows the worst devils of our nature to undermine the better angels. Insofar as these remain in balance (which they never do), any ideas of human progress or regression remain static.

Evolutionary

The third point of the triptych is what I am calling the Evolutionary view, which is that the best we can hope for in human history is that we adapt well enough to temporally local circumstances to survive. In other words, it suggests that we make the best of whatever situation, but exhibit no bias toward either explicit improvement or explicit regression. We have a number of human-built institutions that superficially operate this way, exercising situational discretion rather than blanket edicts as a matter of flexibility (or perhaps antifragility). Similarly, we tend to find some comfort in the encapsulation of moral and ethical stances within their temporal circumstances and calling them artifacts of their time. Implicit here is that there is no larger goal or meaning; rather, all meaning in this system is contained in local optima.

I am suggesting that reality is probably some mix of these. Human history does show signs of real progress, but it is neither as pronounced nor as durable as the Progressive view supposes. At the same time, empires and civilizations DO rise and fall, but their undulations are not as clean or complete as the Cyclical view posits. And finally, there is a strong strain of the globally aimless but locally optimized Evolutionary process tooling around in the other two views, one that adds a resilience that’s hard to ignore, but ultimately remains silent with regard to our desire to see ourselves as improving our lot. The Myth of Sisyphean Progress

My personal view of history most recently has been one of nearly complete retreat from the idea of real, durable human progress in favor of a evolutionary cyclicality. Whatever gains we make as humans in moral terms seem frail in the long view of history. Democracy is all we as Americans may know (unless we are immigrants or persons of color), but it is a historical aberration despite the seemingly universal longing for liberty. Technology appears to be more durable, but it needn’t coincide with any sense of moral development. Indeed, technological progress often outpaces the capacity for both governance and moral response, but rarely fails to capitulate to the onslaught of oligarchs.

Despite my dim view of the durability of human progress, especially moral progress, I find I’m still committed to progressive values. If I hold no hope of overcoming the weight of human history, how is it that I can still cling to a doomed moral structure? This, then, is where Sisyphus is most instructive. Or, rather, Camus’s conception of Sisyphus. In his essay, Camus wrote:

It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

Clinging to the myth of human progress in the face of overwhelming evidence against it seems absurd, and indeed it IS absurd. But:

The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.

We prove nothing to anyone but each other and ourselves. If we do not succeed where we cannot succeed, how can that constitute failure? And if we somehow do succeed, then all the better. It is for the struggle itself: We must imagine the progressive happy.

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