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Tuesday
Having spent time over the past three years talking about Divine Comedy, The Aeneid, Absolom and Architophel, Rape of the Lock, In Memoriam, Paradise Lost and Moby Dick, our faculty discussion group has moved on to The Iliad. For those who know Sewanee faculty, our other members are John Reishman, John Gatta, Ross MacDonald, and (our newest member) Pamela Macfie, all from the English Department.
After our first discussion of Iliad, I am convinced more than ever that one of Plato’s attacks on Homer is wrong. Contra the philosopher’s criticism, the poet offers an absolute masterclass on leadership.
Plato’s critique occurs in The Republic when he is accusing literature of being several steps removed from truth. Plato has Socrates say that Homer’s renditions of such professions as charioteer, general and doctor are inferior to what we would get from actual charioteers, generals, and doctors. The same goes for legislators, as Socrates notes in the following interchange:
Socrates: [W]e have a right to know respecting military tactics, politics, education, which are the chiefest and noblest subjects of his poems, and we may fairly ask him about them. “Friend Homer,” then we say to him, “…if you are able to discern what pursuits make men better or worse in private or public life, tell us what State was ever better governed by your help?…
Glaucon: I think not; not even the Homerids themselves pretend that he was a legislator.
Socrates: Well, but is there any war on record which was carried on successfully by him, or aided by his counsels, when he was alive?
Glaucon: There is not.
The question is not whether Homer was an actual legislator, however, but whether The Iliad could help someone become a better legislator. Our group concluded that the argument between Agamemnon and Achilles, around which the entire poem revolves, should be read by every aspiring leader.
Agamemnon, who heads the allied Greek forces, feels himself humiliated when he is forced to give up a woman he has captured. The situation is this: Chryseis is the daughter of a priest of Apollo. When the Greek leader, despite proffered ransom money, refuses to return her, Apollo unleashes a plague upon the Greeks. After nine days of watching the troops suffer, Achilles—their most fearsome warrior—calls a council meeting and queries the Greek seer Kalchas about the plague’s cause. After ensuring he will not be punished for telling the truth, the seer points to Agamemnon.
In a fury, Agamemnon lashes out and, since Achilles has forced the issue, demands that the warrior recompense him by handing over his own captive (Briseis). Achilles objects in no uncertain terms:
You wine sack, with a dog’s eyes, with a deer’s heart. Never
once have you taken courage in your heart to arm with your people
for battle, or go into ambuscade with the best of the Achaians.
No, for in such things you see death. Far better to your mind
is it, all along the widespread host of the Achaians
to take away the gifts of any man who speaks up against you.
(trans. Richmond Lattimore)
While concurring that Agamemnon is clearly in the wrong—in fact, he is constantly making poor leadership decisions—our group noted that the two men have different imperatives. Agamemnon, who is trying to hold together the Greek alliance, can’t afford to be publicly humiliated, regardless of the justice of the accusations against him. In some ways, lashing out at Achilles, who has demonstrated superior leadership qualities, reveals his own insecurities. While failing to command the respect that Achilles does, he also recognizes—and resents—his dependency on his greatest warrior.
Both Agamemnon and Achilles are provided off-ramps by Nestor, the wisest of Greeks, who offers the following advice:
You, great man that you are, yet do not take the girl away
but let her be, a prize as the sons of the Achaians gave her
first. Nor, son of Peleus, think to match your strength with
the king, since never equal with the rest is the portion of honor
of the sceptred king to whom Zeus gives magnificence. Even
though you are the stronger man, and the mother who bore you was immortal,
yet is this man greater who is lord over more than you rule.
Son of Atreus, give up your anger; even I entreat you
to give over your bitterness against Achilleus, he who
stands as a great bulwark of battle over all the Achaians.
Agamemnon will take this advice later, when it is too late, but for the moment he spurns it, revealing his insecurity when he says,
Yet here is a man who wishes to be above all others,
who wishes to hold power over all and to be lord of
all, and give them their orders…
This is a classic case of projection.
Just as Agamemnon doesn’t acknowledge the respect due to a great warrior, so Achilles doesn’t fully recognize Agamemnon’s governing challenges. As Ross noted, it’s as though Agamemnon is the coach and Achilles his star player, and we see regularly what happens to teams when coach and star are at odds. Achilles quits the alliance and then, working through his goddess mother, obtains Zeus’s promise to make the Greeks pay for Agamemnon’s insult. In other words, comrades with whom Achilles has been fighting shoulder-to-shoulder will pay with their lives to prove his indispensability.
Agamemnon’s bungling continues. In Book II, hoping to galvanize the Greeks into an assault, he attempts reverse psychology, telling his forces that Zeus has commanded them to “go back to Argos in dishonor,” where their effort will come to be seen as
a thing of shame for the men hereafter
to be told, that so strong, so great a host of Achaians
carried on and fought in vain a war that was useless
against men fewer than they…
John Reishman, a Notre Dame graduate, noted that legendary coach Knute Rockne would use such an approach to fire up the Fighting Irish football team. After hearing themselves described as women, the players would charge onto the field to prove themselves men.
We noted that Agamemnon, having just lost his major warrior, perhaps uses the strategy to reunite the Greeks in a shared sense of purpose. In this instance, however, the ploy backfires as the Greeks are only too happy to run to their ships and prepare to set off for home. Only frantic damage control by Odysseus keeps the force from entirely disintegrating.
(I’ll have more to say in a future post about Odysseus’s strategy since, as one of our members noted, it has some worrisome application to authoritarian practices in our own society.)
To sum up, Plato shouldn’t ban Homer from his ideal republic but instead invite him in to teach the future leaders of the state. And regarding future leaders, it’s worth noting that Sewanee’s new president, about whom everyone is excited, has probably read The Iliad. John Reishman tells me that Robert Pearigen, when a Sewanee undergrad, may well have taken the course “Representative Masterpieces,” in which the old epics are taught. While we probably can’t attribute Pearigen’s success as the Millsaps president to Homer, we can predict success at Sewanee if he avoids Agamemnon’s insecurity and temper tantrums, respects the gifts of the talented forces who serve under him, and listens to the wise Nestors around him.