Polytropy

Note added May 5, 2019. This may be the post I return to the most, of those on the books of the Iliad so far (through Book XIV). I begin with Chapman’s four-line “Argument,” but his two-line “Other Argument” for now serves better:

Iota sings the Ambassie,

And great Achilles sterne replie.

The stern reply is that Achilles will not fight, and his mind will not be changed by material gifts. Agamemnon has violated the “general laws of virtue,” according to lines 610–9, in the modernized spelling of the Wordsworth Classics edition (2003):

He answer’d: ‘Noble Telamon, prince of our soldiers here,

Out of they heart I know thou speak’st, and as thou hold’st me dear:

But still as often as I think how rudely I was us’d

And like a stranger, for all rites fit for our good refus’d,

My heart doth swell against the man that durst be so profane

To violate his sacred place; not for my private bane,

But since wrack’d virtue’s general laws he shameless did infringe,

For whose sake I will loose the reines, and give mine anger swinge,

Without my wisdom’s least impeach. He is a fool, and base,

That pities vice-plagu’d minds, when pain, not love of right, gives place …’

Achilles defends not only virtue, but his own right to disrespect somebody who lacks virtue. This is not really part of the “blow for civilization” that I shall attribute to Achilles, except insofar as it results in inaction rather than action.

The moral investigations are specific to Chapman, who makes ten lines out of Homer’s six (643–8), even while passing over most of the first of these:

τὸν δ᾽ ἀπαμειβόμενος προσέφη πόδας ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς:

“Αἶαν διογενὲς Τελαμώνιε κοίρανε λαῶν

πάντά τί μοι κατὰ θυμὸν ἐείσαο μυθήσασθαι:

ἀλλά μοι οἰδάνεται κραδίη χόλῳ ὁππότε κείνων

μνήσομαι ὥς μ᾽ ἀσύφηλον ἐν Ἀργείοισιν ἔρεξεν

Ἀτρεΐδης ὡς εἴ τιν᾽ ἀτίμητον μετανάστην.”

In Murray’s literal prose, some words of which I rearrange to make lines corresponding to Homer’s:

Then in answer to him spake Achilles, swift of foot:

“Aias, sprung from Zeus, thou son of Telamon, captain of the host,

all this thou seemest to speak almost after mine own mind;

by my heart swelleth with wrath whenso of this

I think, how hath wrought indignity upon me amid the Argives

the son of Atreus, as though I were some alien that had no rights.”

A twofold reason why I return now to Book IX and this post:

1. The book’s words such as Julian Jaynes cites, to argue that Agamemnon and Achilles are not conscious.
2. The post’s mention of the Finnish movie Upswing, which offers a counterargument.

In Book XIX, Agamemnon will attribute to Zeus the taking of Briseis from Achilles. For Jaynes (on pages 72–3 of Origin), “this was no particular fiction of Agamemnon’s to evade responsibility.” That seems right, but not the conclusion that Agamemnon “did not have any ego whatever.” In our terms, Agamemnon’s abnegation is an accepting of responsibility for an ego that caused the Greeks to suffer. Responsibility is shown by self-humiliation.