The Great War and the Homeric Glory
In the run-up to the centenary of the outbreak of World War I in June 1914, the Manchester University arranged a series of lectures on the war from different perspective starting from 9th October, 2013. Among the various lectures on the topic there was a lecture from the classist point of view. The title of the lecture was Homeric Mud in the Trenches. It was a thoughtful lecture with the theme “ the dangers of a classical education are well known; inspired in part by acts of glory learned from their study of Homer, a generation of young men signed up for the First World War, only to find the reality was very different from the heroic epic model. This talk will examine the role of mud in The Iliad has something which destroys glory, and consider how this relates to the physical conditions of fighting in WW1 as seen through the eyes of poets such as Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg” (from the handout). The lecture forensically described the muddy battlefield of Troy and it’s chocked up river Scamander with dead bodies and blood, which matched that of Homer’s. It was a holistic description of the Trojan War, not trimmed down for delicate ears.
The lecture made me think about the World War I: I began to wonder how many lads from Lancashire or Somerset’s peasant stock had classical education which spurred them for the Homeric glorious death for the King or for the Country. They were driven to the war from the oppressive poverty in the home front exacerbated by the exploitative social and economic system. The squalor that was described in the Iliad was not different from the mud and squalor that these lads left behind in their Victorian cottages. The welcoming pomp and bugle were not for them, nor were the national dirge for their loss. Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade on the Crimean or Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth – a lament on futility of the war – were not for them; these were for the youth of the middle-class or upper-echelon background, classically educated, many of them with Oxbridge credentials, taught by teachers who were intoxicated by the clarion call of John Ruskin’s Imperial Duty. In his inaugural speech at Oxford University on the Ideology of Empire Ruskin challenged the youth to face the cannons for “little pay” in order to protect and advance the power of England in land and sea. Nurtured in that kind of imperialistic idea public school teachers were only too ready, in turn, encouraging the imagination of their wards for the glory of battlefields when the time came, and the prospect of Homeric glory in the battlefields stirred the hot blood of well-to-do callow youths who marched to the battlefield not with the hunger in their belly unlike the peasant boys from the shires, but hunger in their hearts for the shield of heroic glory oblivious of mud and blood which their teachers conveniently omitted from their marching out farewell speech to the boys. It was not Homeric glory and imperial ideology that imbued these young minds by their teachers; but misinterpretations of Homer’s epical messages to their charges which led them to face the gory battle.
Homer’s two epics – the Iliad and the Odyssey, are the swansong of heroic age which is drowned out in the battle cry and heroic boasts on the shore of the Trojan sea. The Odyssey is the sequel of the Iliad. To understand Homeric war message one would have to make holistic approach to the both epics. The two epics should be viewed as a single, unified work. Homer is neither a war poet, nor the poet of heroes of the old order who were engaged into the do or die combats for undiminished glory. His is the hero of action for a lasting peace and social order. The Iliad depicts the events of ten days at the shore of the Trojan sea and ends with the funeral of the Trojan hero Hector. The subsequent events of the Trojan War could be found in the Odyssey when Odysseus visited the underworld and met the souls of the characters from the Iliad and also in Bk. 24 of the same epic. Though both epics are the story of the heroic age i.e. the Bronze Age, but were written in the Iron Age when the poet (or poets) had seen the changes that had been brought about which were different from the distant Age of which the poet had heard about in the mythic tales and rhapsodies’ songs. Homer was writing about a distant past in the Age when the known civilised worlds were going through the mind-set changes known as Axial Age. These changes occurred in the social, political, philosophical outlook of the people. It is thought that the Axial Age spanned from 800 BC to 200 BC. As Homer was born during this period (750/700 BC) it will not surprise us if Axial Age’s thinking mode affected the outlook of Homeric Age which covers the Bronze Age right up to the emergence of Greece form the Dark Age to the Archaic Age when the Greeks reinvented their scripts with the help of the sea faring Phoenicians. If we consider the two Homeric epics it becomes obvious that the two protagonists though belong to the same era but represent two different Ages – one is of the declining Age and one is for the New Age. Indeed under the influence of Axial Age Homer is spurning the Homeric Age in preference to the new era when Odysseus’ ship at last reaches home.
Though the Iliad is based on the Trojan War, but War Poetry/Song it is not. Iliad is about Achilles and his strives for personal glory, it is the poetry of a hero who, in spite of his success in various battles, achieved nothing. The Odyssey is about Odysseus, unlike Achilles, a hero who succeeded in returning home and uniting with his wife and family, after various trials and tribulations, and achieving a peaceful life. In return for forgoing his nostos Achilles wants to earn the greatest reward of a hero:”fame imperishable” kleos aphthiton. The opening of the Iliad embodies the whole culture of the Heroic Age of individualistic honour measured by the quantity and the type of booty that is due to the hero. A mere hint of deprivation sends our hero in sulky tantrum who prays for a disaster visiting his own side as a revenge for being negated from his just share of the spoils:
“Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Pelus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles” . (Tr. Robert Fagles).
The age of this type of hero was vanished with the end of the Trojan War, making way for the new type of hero whom Homer greets as :-
“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick in the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.
………………………………………………………………..
Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
start from where you will – sing for our time too”. (Tr. Robert Fagles)
The phrase “sing for our time too” is significant, because Homer now has brought the “hero” in his own time where individual glory has replaced the success of one’s mission. There is no longer a Homeric Age Hero; this is the Axial Age where romantic idea of individual’s undiminished glory is no longer valid, because mind-set at this age is much more rational and democratic.
The Iliad though tells the story of ten days during the ten years’ war, but it from the beginning to the end is the story of heroes who participated in the war; this ten day-event mainly centred around six heroes viz. Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, Ajax, Petroklos and Odysseus. Out of these six, the Iliad describes only the death of Hector who fell while fighting Achilles. Petrocklos, who is a minor figure in the epic and Achilles’ soul-mate, whose death triggered Achilles’ rejoining the war which changed the course of the war, died a foolhardy’s death in the hand of Hector. All other heroes died off the battlefield, and not of a hero’s death: Achilles died, not in the battlefield but on an alter, lured by a female with a promise of wedding, when a hidden sniper’s arrow, arranged by Helen, for whose rescue Achilles came all the way from his native land to wage the Trojan War, brought him down. In this case the sniper happened to be Paris who was the prime cause of the war. Agamemnon, the supreme general of the Achaean army (Greek) on the return from the war died in his domestic bath in the hands of his unfaithful wife. The mighty Ajax was so distraught for not winning Achilles’ armour that he went mad and killed himself.
With the demise of Mycenaean society which Homer depicted in the Iliad as a Bronze Age story, the new era in the Geometric period (900-750 BC) in which Homer found him was a different world: the kingship is no longer there. The Greek society found two interdependent innovations of the time – one is the birth of city states and the rational thoughts what may be termed as enlightenment. One may venture to suggest the Greek enlightenment came through the Ionic Greeks who never lost the touch of progressive thoughts by being close to the Near East who were advancing in astronomy and mathematical discoveries at the time. No wonder Homer had appraised the value of heroic age in the light of the new phenomenon in Greek thoughts. We may dare to suggest it was a kind of Hellenism before the Alexander’s association with the East. “In the place of the old cosmogonies associated with royal rituals and myths of sovereignty, a new thought sought to base the order of the world on relations of symmetry, equilibrium and equality among the various elements that made up the cosmos”(J.P.Verment, The Origins of Greek Thought, p 11)
Verment also quotes (p38) TBL Webster’s From Mycenae to Homer (London 1958) that by Geometric Period the distinctions between the heroic bronze Age and the new era i.e. the Iron Age was obvious as the Mycenaean type royal supremacy that we find in Agamemnon in the Iliad was now shared by multiple agencies. The emphasis is no longer a single person dominated the social life but reciprocal apportionment and delimitation of the hitherto royal functions where not a single person is the supreme. The supremacy of Reason established and shaped the political life of Greece. This evolved into a strictly political thought and characterized the Greek civilization which considered public life is the highest human activity and individual could not be isolated from the fellow citizens. This concept permeated to the other areas in Greek life.
“Hesiod’s description of the heroes as the men who died at Thebes or Troy, that is, the heroes were the protagonists in the two major cycles of the Greek tradition”(Hainswoth, p40). These heroes die for undiminished glory, they are half-divine and when they die they are transported to the Isles of the Blessed. That may be reasons only the Greek had their heroic age. Homer’s heroes are not species of separate class like that of Hesiod’s: when they die they congregate in the Hades; they are human and mortal, they struggle for kudos. None of the Iliad’s heroes died of glorious death in the battlefield of Troy; their death was not heroic, nor glorious. Another problem with Homeric heroes is that unlike the medieval kingdoms of Europe, where they can fall back on their medieval heroes of their epics to show breach from the past, the Greece had no such historical reference when she emerged from the Dark Age. On emergence from the Dark Age Greece lost any such historical background and had to rely on the rhapsodic myths of Mycenaean tales, which were essentially formulated by the later day rhapsodes in the distant future, authenticity of such tales is open to question.
A hero of the Homeric Age is an isolated figure, he fight for his tribe alone; he dies in the battlefield alone winning a glorious death in the eyes of the other(Latimore:Iliad 22.305). Though fame is a universal motive, but to a Greek hero it is the prime motive. They strive for “immortal glory among mortals” [(Heraclitus, fr,29 Diets, Hainsworth p.49)]. Homeric heroes concern themselves with the concept of honour (τιμέ) and glory (kleos or kudos) – these are the driving forces of the Iliad heroes: the sole purpose of a Homeric hero is the pursuit of such glory. Odysseus in the epics distinguished himself with the aristocratic arete and his particular intellectual qualities (métis). Odysseus is a holistic Man – from a destroyer of a city (without his cunning the Greeks were hopeless in breeching the Trojan wall) to a builder of a city upon his homecoming. His journey is the journey of initiation and individualism –his journey is his ability to cope with life and to prove Homer’s world view and dream of social eunomia . The heroes of the Bronze Age are aristocratic born and usually blood related with the gods. They treat their subjects with some indifference and disdain as the gods the human beings. Odysseus is the new hero, his treatment of people is different “Odysseus now, that godlike man, and kindly as a father to his children” (Ody. 5. 10-12). However, the aristocratic high-mindedness may veer towards megalomania. This is described in the Greek literary tradition as hubris – Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax – they all had this dark side of aristocratic arete. In the Homeric Age such ‘blindness’ is accepted as god given, so such heroes were not being denigratedin the eyes of the people. Reason or sober-mindedness which may lead to reticence in the brutality could be regarded as un-heroic. Odysseus consciously followed his reason, his insight, and his antenna for cautious stance and discretion. In the Iliad he possessed traditional heroic virtue, but is also the object of suspicion on the part of the traditional hero for his rational approach to any problem. These caution and unique characteristic, the sense of strategy made him the hero of the Iliad who caused the fall of Troy with the invention of the wooden horse – a “gift” of the Greeks to the Trojans. It has not achieved for him the Homeric undiminished glory, but made him the hero of the coming Age, for his wit and power of inventiveness. In the speech to Achilles, Odysseus made it clear the self-restrained (sophrosyne) is the part of the heroic arete. Achilles’ wounded honour determined the ten-day carnage in the Iliad – his megalomania was the whole cause of the loss of great number of Achaeans. Wise Odysseus reminded Achilles his father’s advice that anger should be held fast in preference to consideration (Iliad 9.308-10 Tr. Fagles).
Homer’s choice of weapons for the two is significant, and speaks volume of his message in the epics. Achilles’ spear is the weapon of Bronze Age hero. Odysseus’ weapon is bow – each weapon is symbolic. A spear once thrown is gone forever, a short-lived violence; whereas a bow remains in the hands of the thrower which he could use it time and again replenishing it with new set of arrows – a calculating, persistent weapon. A bow has a long-sighted goal which requires mental fitness and agility in the thrower. A spear’s journey is limited and is depended upon the strength of the thrower. A bow needs calmness, steadfastness and intelligence in its execution. It is for a ‘distant fighter’, not for the Age when combatants fix their eye-ball to eye-ball in executing their mission. A bow’s ultimate metamorphosis is a rifle of the modern-day warfare, while a spear is the weapon of ‘chancer-fighter’. Unlike Achilles or other heroes of the Iliad who act on the prompting of the gods, Odysseus’ numerous activities are prompted by his own vision. The contrast between Achilles and Odysseuse is the contrast between Kratos and metis. (Zeruneith, p.50-51)
The arete of heroes, despite their limitations, could serve as examples of courage, sense of duty, and in the case of Odysseus, the discursivity and tenacity of moderation. There are many elements that are embedded in these epics, which also include the ideas of constitutional evolution, this is especially clear in Odyssey – the Odyssey’s future- oriented goal is utopia of a peaceful society free from the horror of the war. Homer depicts Odysseus free from hubris unlike other heroes of the Iliad, and also of the Odysseus strives for social stability (eunomia) the idea of which was the precursor of Solon’s social reform.
We could also regard Odysseus’ inner self as the precursor of Plato’s Socrates, especially Socrates of Republic. Homer attributes eunomia as one of the qualities (arete) in Odysseus which we see centuries later in Socrates’ thinking in striving for the truth of the soul. Odysseus resembled Socrates in the Symposium when he appeared at his palace doorstep wherein the suitors in their smart clothes lounging in palace couches. Earlier we also have the Odysseus’s famous repartee which summed up the ideal man: the internal beauty is far superior to the external man. At the banquet of the Parakians when Odysseus was taunted by a guest that he looked like a sea merchant, Odysseus replied that there could be a mismatch between a beautiful exterior and inner lack of grace:
“the gods don’t hand out all their gifts at once,
not build and brains and flowing speech to all.
One man may fail to impress us with his looks
but a god can crown his words with beauty, charm,
and men look on with delight when he speaks out.
Never faltering, filled with self-control
he shines forth at assembly grounds and people gaze
at him like a god when he walks through the streets.
Another man may look like a deathless one on high
But there is not a bit of grace to crown his words”. (Ody. 8.193-2002 Tr. Fagles)
Socrates’ overall appearance with his unshod flat feet and in a threadbare apparel, bearded but baldish and snub-nosed was like a beggar. Homer’s utopian goal was the ultimate peace in the world at the conclusion of the Trojan War. Plato’s Socratic Republic is that utopian state of the inner man, the philosopher who is the ideal guardian of a man’s well-being vis-a-vis of the State. The grace what the Greeks call Charis (derivative to Charisma) marks a man’s ultimate personality. We see example of this in the well-dressed and arrogant suitors with their sick inner-self, and beggar like Odysseus with his regal-self intact. This is our new age hero whose sense of eunomia is greater than any undiminished glory.
Homer’s is not a war poet, nor the poet of heroes of old order who are engaged into the do or die combats for undiminished glory. His is the hero of action for an everlasting peace and social cohesion. Homer’s epics were not designed to advocate or glorify war or death in the battlefield wrapped up in the shroud of undiminished glory, rather he is stressing that there are other means of achieving peace and social harmony. Peace and a just society should be pursuits of heroes of the day, and not the violent death to achieve this as in the bygone days.
The First World War warriors that we sent out for the battlefield were not given this message. They were sent to the war to achieve glory, not for the well being of the society and the peace in the world. Our boys were sent to protect the King and the Empire, in other words for the protection of the machinery engaged in exploiting the subject nations. John Ruskin’s Imperial Duty calls for “she must found colonies as fast and as far she is able, formed of her most energetic worthiest men – seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot in, and there teaching these her colonists that their chief virtue is to the fidelity to their country”. The Great War was designed to do just that. Ancient Greece has example of this in abundance. Our fighters were fed with wrong kind of diets, i.e. misleading ideology. Their deaths in the muddy battlefields of Europe are dutifully remembered on each anniversary date as a job lot affaire soon to be forgotten next morning. Their deaths are archived in the historical annals for the research fellowship. The poets who remembered the war never mentioned any one’s name with the exception of Ivor Gurney.
No, the deaths of the unsuspecting young men from the shires and metropolis in the foreign lands could only be achieved the everlasting glory, not us in striking medals or erecting cenotaphs, but by remembering them in our folklores by another Homeric poet who would chronicle their deaths and struggles in his/ her great epic with which the modern-day rhapsodes would fill our churches and village halls with the tales of what happened in the trenches of Somme, Passchendale and the battlefield of Ypres for the generations to recite to their children as bedtime tales.
Bibliography:
The Origin of Greek Thoughts by J. P. Verment
The Iliad – A Commentary by Bryan Hainsworth Vol. III, books 9-12 Gen. Editor G. S. Kirk, Cambridge University Press
The Wooden Horse by Keld Zeruneith, Overlook Duckworth, 2007
Amal Basu Manchester 
Arabian Nightmare
There is no doubt that Syria crisis, indeed whole of “Arab Spring” is precipitate by the Saudi’s Wahabbi outlook. If we consider the history of the regime nothing would come as a surprise : Saudi Arabia is a Sunni-led state, engaged in financing the Wahhabi religious schools and clerics that are spreading the kind of extremist doctrine that is at the heart of the Islamic State’s ideology. Saudi Arabia spends enormous sums on mosques and Islamic schools, or madrassas, in countries like Malaysia and Pakistan, and it has given Lebanon significant military aid. ‘Sometimes they have an inflated sense of their importance in the world because they spread their money around,’ (William Hartung of Centre for International Policy). [Read more: http://sputniknews.com/world/20151219/1032024880/saudi-radical-ideology-media-attention.html#ixzz3z0xfaIl8] Malaysia’s Chief Minister was given £431m as a personal gift by the Wahhabi Saudis not for building play grounds (now this has been called back because he lost influence being ousted from the position)! The Wahhabi books and teachings funded and exported by Saudi Arabia, which want “to propagate an ideology of hate toward the ‘unbeliever,’ which include Christians, Jews, Shi’ites, Sufis, non-Wahhabi Sunni Muslims, Hindus, atheists and others.” (London Evening Standard quoting Freedom House Report)
This ideology has driven the Sunnis in a kind of jihadist zeal to invade others territories and living space simply to convert them or wipe them out from the face of the earth. ISIL is the ultimate product of Wahhabiesque philosophy and have covert affinities of Saudi Arabian regime. “In fact, it is hard to see Saudi Arabia, a Sunni-led state, as a serious partner against the Islamic State unless it stops financing the Wahhabi religious schools and clerics that are spreading the kind of extremist doctrine that is at the heart of the Islamic State’s ideology. Although the Islamic State has pledged to destroy Saudi Arabia, Saudi leaders have so far been more concerned with opposing Shia-led Iran, which they consider their greatest adversary,” the New York Times wrote in an opinion piece.( Read more: http://sputniknews.com/world/20151219/1032024880/saudi-radical-ideology-media-attention.html#ixzz3z0yphOL4 )
The much vaunted Arab Spring (which I call Arabian Spring) was led by the Sunnis indoctrinated in Arabic Wahhabism. In Tunisia it exploited the disaffected unemployed, spreads with the active support of the gullible West to the Gaddafi’s Libya, who, though a devout Moslem, did not care about Whhabi’s type of Muslim supremacy and also a rival to oil prosperity. Next was Egypt which was toppled by the Sunni avant-garde only to install Moslem Brotherhood whose covert job was to eliminate the ancient Coptic Christians through discriminations and mass persecution. Iraq was their golden opportunity in riding to the back of blind West to seek a foothold in the secular Sunni regime and an oil rivals. However, majority Shiite new regime thwarted that ambition. Syria is the classic case of Wahhabi aggression perpetrated by Saudi Arabia with the help of Western duplicity. While West is clamouring through some Sunni stooges for so called western type democracy in Assad regime in Syria where hitherto races of all shades lived harmoniously, Saudi Arabia with the collaboration of Turkey, another closeted Sunni regime, covertly sending weapons and mercenaries through Turkish, so called porous borders. When these mercenaries used gas-filled cylinder bombs among the civilian population, the West did not publicise the fact, but Syrian barrel bombs against the foreign intruders so enraged them that they brought Resolution at the Security Council. Saudi Arabia’s so called Arab Spring, so long it is led by the Sunnis is acceptable, but when in their homeland democracy is sought by a group led by a Shiite cleric, his head along with his supporters’ heads rolled with a meek protest from the West. The belligerent young foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia is making Arab aggression more acute in all fronts.
I have little sympathy for all the so called Syrian refugees (except for children and women) who are mostly Sunnis, secretly collaborated with these mercenaries from Saudi Arabia and their allies; when they found out the true nature of these mercenaries whose regime is tougher than the liberal alawites Syrian regime, the mercenaries who confiscated all the food sources for their own families when government troops surrounded the rebel held territories creating famine among the inhabitants, they started fleeing, not to the government held territory but neighbouring Sunni countries including Turkey who facilitated the mercenaries easy passage to the country. These so called refugees, who have the miserable life in the neighbouring countries since the conflict started, how could they beget children of two months old in the camps seeking asylum in the rich Europe? Donald Trump was right when he questioned the true nature of these refugees. Cologne and Sweden are getting the taste of these so called refugees: these healthy young men could have fought against the Assad regime if they did not like it. The West wants free election in Syria – yes, when Syria is free from the mercenaries and proper citizens of Syria is free to take part.
If we look around in the world we notice that most of the bombings have happened to Shiite shrines. The Sunnis have destroyed systematically foreign worship places than any other religious groups. Sunnis, hold on Islam by shedding blood of a child, Mohammed’s direct blood relation, in Karbala. Since then all the destructions are perpetrated by Sunni led conquerors: now Wahhabi led Sunnis inherited that mantle. The blood bath that Sunni regime of Saudi Arabia unleashed in Syria in the name of democracy with collaboration of the West is not Arab Spring –it is the Arab Nightmare intend of spreading all over the world.