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Posts from the ‘Mythology’ Category

Jul 28

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No One Truly Knows His Own Begetting: Nolan’s Odyssey

οὐ γάρ πώ τις ἑὸν γόνον αὐτὸς ἀνέγνω. No one truly knows his own begetting. – Homer, The Odyssey I.215

I begin my last book with this epigraph, which Telemachus says toward the beginning of Homer’s Odyssey. Telemachus speaks of the difficulty of knowing his father. The line also speaks to the themes of the epic of returning to one’s home, of knowing one’s home, of fidelity to one’s own, of the temptations and lures that prevent one from returning home, of home needing constant cultivation and of always threatening to devolve.

To talk about what I take to be the insights of Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” I want to treat it as a movie in its own right. I want to set aside the question of whether it is true to its source material. I realize that is practically impossible to do. So I will weigh in briefly in order to think about the film as its own story.

  • I disagree that Nolan leaves out the gods. The gods do show up, as thunder and lightning, as the angry sea, as seducers, as the monstrous source that explains how a father could sacrifice his daughter to make the winds blow. The Greeks invoke the gods to explain why mortals do the unhinged, unpredictable, rash, courageous, wise and foolish things they do.
  • I do think that Nolan depicts a more Roman or Anglo-American Odysseus than a Greek one. We fail to appreciate the strangeness of the Greeks and the Romans are much more accessible as they become a template both for Christianity and for American government. Part of that strangeness is that Odysseus is a cunning trickster. The film depicts him as smart. But he is having more fun than being smart. Leaving out the “no one” joke leaves out the sense both of Odysseus’s joy in defeating Polyphemus and of taking credit as he sails off.
  • The Circe scene is a real let down. Madeline Miller does a great job of showing how Circe is a force of nature, able to meet Odysseus wit for wit. Moreover, Odysseus shows up armed by Hermes to ward off Circe with the moly plant, but he nonetheless stays because he is seduced nonetheless. The female characters in the epic have much more character development than Nolan allows.

Back to homecoming. Athena mirrors Telemachus’ line back to Odysseus at the end of the film, “Don’t you recognize your own home?” It is understandable that he does not. Then Odysseus says to Penelope, “It’s not always an easy thing, a homecoming.” I want to speak to two themes: homecoming and guest-welcoming. And I want to speak to how these themes are mirrored and how both speak to a political crisis.

The story is told in large part by Odysseus as he recalls what he has forgotten on the island of Calypso, where he has been for seven years. Away from home, he has forgotten home. He has not only forgotten what home is like, he has forgotten that he has a home. He has forgotten that home has a call to him. One could trace this forgetting to allowing himself to be lashed to the mast to listen to the Sirens’ Song, a song that could be understood as moving cause of Tantallus, that which motivates desire but can never be had. And Odysseus describes the song in that way,

“What you most can’t have is what you already had and lost; the song of all the promises I failed to keep, telling me I don’t really want to go home.”

Nolan made me think that Odysseus doesn’t get the special privilege of listening to the Sirens’ Song and surviving; listening to the Sirens’ Song and surviving is what sets him off course on the road to Calypso. The Sirens’ Song is the lure of what is unreachable and in being unreachable, unreal, the temptation of the apparently exciting turned banal affair, the manifestation of the death drive, the fantasy as such. The Sirens’ Song makes you forget there is a home to return to and then you leap to your death. Leo Strauss in “What is Liberal Education?” reminds us that the Greek word for vulgarity is apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. The beautiful allows one to tarry with it and live; the beautiful renders one noble. The Sirens’ Song appeals to those with a lack of experience in things beautiful; it entices without satisfaction. Hearing the song and living, Odysseus enters a space in which time does not pass and he has nowhere to go. Fighting his way back to memory, Odysseus fights his way back to the pull of leadership, responsibility and love, which his travels have rendered him incapable of expressing except violently.

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Sep 14

Buying a House: The Ship of Theseus

I just finished redoing the deck.  My dad who is a contractor recently told me that you should be putting 5% of the value of your house into it every year if you don’t want to be losing value.  And as if that wasn’t bad enough, he continued by saying, you’re basically rebuilding your house over the time you own it.   I was actually glad to hear the 5% because I had misremembered him saying 10-15% some years ago.  The rebuilding point is something I have been mulling over a bit.  It reminded me of the problem of Theseus’ ship.  In Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, Socrates explains that he has been waiting in jail for some time to be executed because no executions could occur during a festival.  The current festival celebrated Theseus’ defeat of the Minotaur, which I report on after visiting Knossos last summer, where the fabled labyrinth was said to be.  To celebrate the festival, a ship was sent out to Delos ritualizing a recreation of the trip to Crete.  But over time, the boards had to be replaced, raising the question of whether the ship was still the same ship if none of the original boards remained.  Socrates’ discussion of the festival in a dialogue focused on the question of the immortality of the soul raises the question of what keeps a person the same if all the “boards” that comprise a person change.  (One recent commentator points to the range of ways that the dialogue associates Socrates on the one side and the Athenians on the other with Theseus, the fabled founder of Athens, suggesting that the execution of Socrates is the final stage of this re-enactment for the Athenians, where Socrates takes the place of the Minotaur and on the other hand Socrates himself re-enacts the trip by finally dying and escaping the labyrinth of his body). Read more

Aug 31

Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World, A Review

One of my side projects has been thinking about how the shift from polytheism to monotheism parallels a shift from politics to philosophy in ancient thought, as I discussed here awhile back.   I am particularly interested in how the dichotomy between the false and the true god only becomes possible with monotheism, just as the dichotomy of false and true knowledge only becomes relevant with the introduction of philosophy, the arena of being and knowledge, against politics, the arena of appearance and opinion. I was looking forward to what Whitmarsh could add to the discussion in his new book, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World.  I was interested in how ancient atheism fit into this production of the true.  If Assmann’s account of polytheism as a domain of shared opinion and shared gods is accepted, it would seem that denial of the existence of gods put people outside the realm of even those who had political opinions. While there is a brief discussion of Assmann (26), Whitmarsh does not attempt to think atheism within that structure.  In fact, this lacuna points to a larger problem with the book: it makes the case that there were ancient atheists, but it does not lead to further insight about what that might mean for the social and political world.  Instead, the point seems to be, atheism is fine because it is not new.  And also, “clever people could not possibly believe in gods,” as Barbara Graziosi reads Whitmarsh.

In this post, I discuss the ways that Whitmarsh’s treatment of mythology, Plato and Socrates, and Christianity lead to flatfooted readings that fail to consider the robust complexity of Greek thinking about the gods. Read more

Jan 2

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Day 2: The Greeks Exhibit at the Field Museum

On New Year’s Eve, I went to the Field Museum in Chicago to see its special exhibit on the Greeks.  The Museum has collected 500 artifacts from Greek museums, which cover 3500 years of history, beginning with the Minoans on Crete and other Cycladic islands.  I had seen many of these pieces in their home museum, which admittedly, is already pulled from the original context, but seemed at least to beckon to the sense of the place from which they were found.  Seeing them all pulled together robbed them of their aura (in the Benjaminian sense), it seemed to me.  I’m glad they could pull it together for people to see, but I just want to put the plug in for going and visiting places and the museums in those places.

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Dec 2

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Aristotle on Happiness

Aristotle scholars spend a lot of time arguing over whether and in what way a life of action, what is called a ‘practical life’ (from the Greek praxis), which includes a life focused on ethical and political concerns, can possibly achieve happiness, or whether only contemplation — the theoretical life of the philosopher or thinker or scientist — can achieve complete happiness for human beings.  Commenters suppose from several chapters in Nicomachean Ethics X.7 that the case is obviously on the side of contemplation.  Then they fight over how to limit that claim or re-interpret it.

But today, I’ve been prepping those passages to teach and I just don’t think they add up to the obviously strong argument for contemplation against deliberation that pretty much everyone who reads Aristotle seems to think they do.  One argument in particular — that it’s what the gods do — seems just not the case.  What the heck then is Aristotle doing?  Here’s what Aristotle writes:

But that complete happiness is a certain contemplative activity would appear also from this: we have supposed that the gods especially are blessed and happy–but what sort of actions ought we to assign to them?  Just acts?  Or will they appear laughable as they make contracts, return deposits, and do anything else of that sort?  But what about courageous acts?  Do the gods endure frightening things and run risks, because doing so is noble?  Or liberal acts?  But to whom will they give?  And it is strange if they too will have legal currency or something of that sort.  And what would their moderate acts be?  Or is the praise, “they do not have base desires,” a crude one?  All that pertains to actions would appear, to those who go through it, petty and unworthy of gods. (1178b8-17, Bartlett and Collins translation)

Puh-lease, Aristotle.  It seems just as likely from all this that the gods don’t do any of these things because the gods don’t really live virtuous lives.  Do the gods do just acts?  No, Zeus steals women and cheats on Hera on the regular.  The whole of Hesiod’s Theogony seems to be about the frightening risk-taking acts of gods.  But no, not because it’s noble.  They want power, or they’re just bored.  Liberal acts?  Well, basically, that seems to be all of Homer and most of Hesiod where Zeus gives things to gods, and that part where Zeus and Prometheus divide stuff up and give it out.  “And what would be their moderate acts?”  Got me there, Aristotle: we don’t know, because no god has yet to be moderate. Read more

Jul 12

Zeus, Caves, a Goat, and another Bull: The Beast and the Sovereign, Pt. 2

I just returned to Heraklion from several days driving around Crete.  I’m particularly impressed by how little the Olympian gods are on display here.  The Minoans, as we learned at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, worshipped the snake goddess.  The same snake goddess who is defeated by Apollo to establish himself at Delphi.  And yet, Zeus nonetheless is part of the story on Crete, particularly as situating himself as the beast and the sovereign, a theme I keep returning to in light of my summer reading of Derrida.  For Derrida, the relation of the beast and the sovereign is peculiar because the sovereign is both what is most separated, other than, the beast and what becomes beastly in order to maintain, enforce or display sovereignty.  Hobbes’ Leviathan is the sovereign who must be a beast to maintain power.  Rousseau’s sovereign must be a wolf.  Machiavelli’s a lion and a fox.  For Derrida, the effort to drive out the beastly appears to produce the beastly in what attempts to drive it out.  Thus, at the heart of the logic of sovereignty, even in human sovereign rationality, there lurks a beast.  I can’t help but see this beastly sovereign in all the stories on Crete where Zeus, the sovereign Olympian appears.

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Jul 9

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Knossos, Minos and the Minotaur: The Beast and the Sovereign

Today we visited the palace at Knossos and the Heraklion Archaeological Museum.  Knossos is considered the cradle of the first European civilization and is believed to have been continuously occupied for 8000 years from the Neolithic through to the Byzantine period.  As I said in my last post, I’ve been reading Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign lectures, so I see beasts and sovereigns everywhere.  Or perhaps, it’s Greece, so beasts and sovereigns–beast-sovereigns, sovereign beasts–are everywhere.  Knossos and its environs are the ancient Minoan site of the beast and the sovereign, of the beast who opposes the sovereign and of the beast who is sovereign, of the sovereign who appears as the beast and as the sovereign who becomes sovereign by defeating the beasts.  This is the place of the Minotaur and of Zeus.  I’ll get to Zeus in another post–we’ll be visiting his birth place and his place of rest (Zeus died!) in a couple days. Read more

May 4

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New to You Music in 2015: Anaïs Mitchell, Hadestown

I said at the beginning of the year that I’d listen more to new music and write about it. I did that once so far.  I was a little overwhelmed with all the different new things I should be listening to.  Then in the freshmen colloquium course I taught this semester, we had a class session where we read and listened to protest songs–Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, Woodie Guthrie, Rage Against the Machine.  We talked about what makes protest songs work as protest songs.  In the next class meeting, students were asked to bring in their favorite protest songs.  To get things started, I offered my own: Anaïs Mitchell’s “Why We Build the Wall.” Read more

Sep 8

The Gods Must be Crazy and So is Nature

I asked my students to write a paper explaining how Zeus in Hesiod’s Theogony is a model of what a standard for nature is, what such a standard reveals about Hesiod’s view of nature or “the way things are”, and what is difficult about establishing a standard for how things are. I decided I would do this assignment, too, to give them a sense of what I am looking for and for an opportunity to continue blogging about Greek mythology. Read more

Jul 1

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The Theater at Epidauros

Yesterday was our anniversary and our last full day in Nafplio.  Today we are off to Athens for two days, where we hope to see Aristotle’s Lyceum, which has only recently opened, and the National Archaeological Museum.  On Saturday, we took our last excursion in the Peloponnese, this time to Epidauros which has the largest and best preserved Greek theater.   Read more

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