The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours

Gregory Nagy

• Editore: Belknap Press
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674075443
• Argomento: Literature
• Categoria: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism

The ancient Greeks' concept of "the hero" was very different from what we understand by the term today, Gregory Nagy argues—and it is only through analyzing their historical contexts that we can truly understand Achilles, Odysseus, Oedipus, and Herakles.In Greek tradition, a hero was a human, male or female, of the remote past, who was endowed with superhuman abilities by virtue of being descended from an immortal god. Despite their mortality, heroes, like the gods, were objects of cult worship. Nagy examines this distinctively religious notion of the hero in its many dimensions, in texts spanning the eighth to fourth centuries bce: the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey; tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; songs of Sappho and Pindar; and dialogues of Plato. All works are presented in English translation, with attention to the subtleties of the original Greek, and are often further illuminated by illustrations taken from Athenian vase paintings.The fifth-century bce historian Herodotus said that to read Homer is to be a civilized person. In twenty-four installments, based on the Harvard University course Nagy has taught and refined since the late 1970s, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours offers an exploration of civilization's roots in the Homeric epics and other Classical literature, a lineage that continues to challenge and inspire us today.

PART ONE

HEROES IN EPIC AND LYRIC POETRY

Introduction to Homeric Poetry

0§1. Before I delve into the 24 hours of this book, I would like to familiarize the reader with Homeric poetry, which is the primary medium that I will be analyzing in the first 11 hours.

0§2. Homeric poetry is a cover term for two epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The major part of this introduction will deal with the Iliad.¹ This epic is in and of itself the best introduction to its companion piece, the Odyssey.

0§3. Admired through the ages as the ultimate epic, the Iliad, along with the Odyssey, was venerated by the ancient Greeks as the cornerstone of their civilization. By force of its prestige, the Iliad sets the standard for the definition of the word epic: an expansive poem of enormous scope, composed in an old-­fashioned and superbly elevated style of language, concerning the wondrous deeds of heroes. That these deeds were meant to arouse a sense of wonder or marvel is difficult for the modern mind to comprehend, especially in a time when even such words as wonderful or marvelous have lost much of their evocative power. Nor is it any easier to grasp the ancient Greek concept of hero (the English word is descended from the Greek), going beyond the word’s ordinary levels of meaning in casual contemporary usage.

0§4. Who, then, were these heroes? In ancient Greek traditions, heroes were humans, male or female, of the remote past, endowed with superhuman abilities and descended from the immortal gods themselves. A prime example is Achilles. The greatest hero of the Iliad, Achilles was the son of Thetis, a sea-­goddess known for her far-reaching cosmic powers.

0§5. It is clear in the epic, however, that the father of Achilles is mortal, and that this greatest of heroes must therefore be mortal as well. So, too, with all the ancient Greek heroes: even though they are all descended in some way or another from the gods, however many generations removed, heroes are mortals, subject to death. No matter how many immortals you find in a family tree, the intrusion of even a single mortal will make all successive descendants mortal. Mortality, not immortality, is the dominant gene.

0§6. True, in some stories the gods themselves can miraculously restore the hero to life after death—a life of immortality. The story of Hēraklēs, who had been sired by Zeus, the chief of all the gods, is perhaps the most celebrated instance. In Hour 1 of this book, we will examine the broad outlines of the story. But even in the case of Hēraklēs, as we will see, the hero has to die before achieving immortality. Only after the most excruciating pain, culminating in his death on a funeral pyre on the peak of Mount Oeta, is Hēraklēs at long last admitted to the company of immortals. In short, the hero can be immortalized, but the fundamental painful fact remains: the hero is not by nature immortal.

0§7. As I will argue in Hours 10 and 11, the Odyssey is an extended narrative about heroic immortalization. But this immortalization happens only on a symbolic level. As the Odyssey makes clear, if only in a prophecy beyond the framework of the epic, Odysseus will have to die.

0§8. By contrast with heroes, the gods themselves are exempt from the ultimate pain of death. An exception that proves the rule is the god Arēs, who goes through the motions of death after he is taken off guard and wounded by the mortal Diomedes in Scroll V of the Iliad.² As we will see in Hour 5, there is a touch of humor in the Homeric treatment of this death scene, because “death” as experienced here by the Olympian god Arēs is only a mock death. In the world of epic, the dead seriousness of death can be experienced only by humans.

0§9. Mortality is the dominant theme in the stories of ancient Greek heroes, and the Iliad and the Odyssey are no exceptions. Mortality is the burning question for the heroes of these epics, and for Achilles and Odysseus in particular. The human condition of mortality, with all its ordeals, defines heroic life itself. The certainty that one day you will die makes you human, distinct from animals who are unaware of their future death, and from the immortal gods. All the ordeals of the human condition culminate in the ultimate ordeal of a warrior hero’s violent death in battle, detailed in all its ghastly varieties by the poetry of the Iliad.

0§10. This deep preoccupation with the primal experience of violent death in war has several possible explanations. Some argue that the answer has to be sought in the simple fact that ancient Greek society accepted war as a necessary and even important part of life. Others seek a deeper answer by pointing to the poet’s awestruck sense of uncontrollable forces at work in the universe, even of a personified concept of Force itself, which then becomes, through the poet’s own artistic powers, some kind of eerie esthetic thing.

0§11. But there are other answers as well, owing to approaches that delve deeply into the role of religion and, more specifically, into the religious practices of hero worship and animal sacrifice in ancient Greece. Of particular interest is the well-attested Greek custom of worshipping a hero precisely by way of slaughtering a sacrificial animal, ordinarily a ram. A striking example is the seasonally recurring sacrifice of a black ram at the precinct of the cult hero Pelops at the site of the Olympics (Pausanias 5.13.1–2).³

0§12. There is broad cultural evidence suggesting that hero worship in ancient Greece was not created out of stories like that of the Iliad and the Odyssey but was in fact independent of them. The stories, for their part, were based on religious practices, though not always directly. Some myths even draw into an explicit parallel the violent death of a hero and the sacrificial slaughter of an animal. For example, the description of the death of the hero Patroklos in Iliad XVI parallels in striking detail the stylized description, documented elsewhere in Homeric poetry (Odyssey iii), of the slaughter of a sacrificial heifer: in both cases, the victim is first stunned and disoriented by a fatal blow from behind, then struck frontally by another fatal blow, and then finally administered the coup de grâce. For another example, we may consider an ancient Greek vase painting that represents the same heroic warrior Patroklos in the shape of a sacrificial ram lying supine with its legs in the air and its throat slit open (lettering next to the painted figure indicates Patroklos).⁴

0§13. Evidence also places these practices of hero worship and animal sacrifice precisely during the era when the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey took shape. Yet curiously, we find virtually no direct mention in either epic of hero worship and very little detailed description of animal sacrifice.⁵ Homeric poetry, as a medium that achieved its general appeal to the Greeks by virtue of circumventing the parochial concerns of specific locales or regions, tended to avoid realistic descriptions of any ritual, not just ritual sacrifice. This pattern of avoidance is to be expected, given that in ancient Greece any ritual tends to be a localized phenomenon.

0§14. The sacrificial scenes we do find in the epics are markedly stylized, devoid of the kind of details that characterize real sacrifices as documented in archaeological and historical evidence. In real sacrifice the parts of the animal victim’s body correspond to the members of the body politic. The ritual dismemberment of the animal’s body in sacrifice sets a mental pattern for the idea of the reassembly of the hero’s body in myths of immortalization. Given, then, that Homeric poetry avoids delving into t...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Heroes in Epic and Lyric Poetry
• Part Two: Heroes in Prose Media
• Part Three: Heroes in Tragedy
• Part Four: Heroes in Two Dialogues of Plato
• Part Five: Heroes Transcended
• Core Vocabulary of Key Greek Words
• Abbreviations
• References
• Index Locorum