courage, doubt, shame, virility, power, glory and fate.
Judged by today’s standards, Homer’s language is very different; some would say primitive. Yet there is a beautiful simplicity in employing an action language stripped of dubious abstractions and the circular reasoning involving abstract nouns which claims that people act aggressively because they have aggressive personalities. Homer describes the world in human terms; he does not concern himself with a mysterious inner world of mental events or personality traits. This was soon to change, however.
In his dramas, Aeschylus suggests that when people act some psychological process is involved. Philologist Bruno Snell, in The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature, notes that Aeschylus emphasises human choice, by which he means a deliberate act of decision. Homer does not speak of such a dilemma; his warriors merely know that it is their fate either to die as young men in a blaze of glory, or to live long and mediocre lives. Aeschylus is less interested than Homer in what his characters do because he believes that the essence of human action is to be discovered in the act of decision. Action involves a commitment to the future: it is more than a mere reaction to events. So when people are about to act, they weigh alternatives and assume the responsibility for their decisions, and this is what gives the dramatic tension to Aeschylus’ plays.
Aeschylus composes tales of what happens to people when they make crucial choices. When Homer makes the meaning of human events depend upon the actions of gods, these deeds are unalterable facts in the face of which human choices are impotent. In the world of Aeschylus, the power of gods has been replaced by personal power. But these powers are also a burden which many people find onerous. In Aeschylus’ plays they wear people down and isolate them from the support of gods. This inexorable path to isolation continues in the plays of Sophocles whose characters are already lonelier than those of Aeschylus.
In Sophocles psyche is ‘I’ which has taken over the functions of Homer’s thymos. Psyche now means ‘life’ or ‘person’ as contrasted with soma or body. Psyche is the psychological correlate of soma which together make a human being complete. By the fifth century BC psyche is used to refer more to the emotional than the rational, self: it is the seat of courage, passion and anxiety.
Like Aeschylus and Sophocles, Euripides attempts to understand the quintessential nature of human beings, their motives and their capacity for choice. In Euripides’ world, individuals are alone with their passions and their passions are not easily tamed by reason. Indeed, Euripides thought that reason was relatively impotent in the face of strong passion and wondered whether any rational purpose is to be found in the world of human affairs. Good and evil are not God-given qualities assailing reason from without. Rather, they are part of the defining characteristics of human beings.
Euripides places the responsibility for good and evil actions inside individuals. Passion and knowledge are the two great determining factors; external factors are devalued as deceptive devices used to avoid confronting the sad fact that human beings are individually responsible, through the power of passion and inadequate powers of reasoning, for the good and evil they create. It is therefore important to study the workings of ‘I’ if we are to discover the personal powers which inspire good and evil deeds.
In Euripides’ play, Medea, two themes which loom large in the centuries ahead dominate: the qualities of women and the importance of human motives. In her attempt to win back Jason from another woman, Medea threatens and then proceeds to kill her children. While audiences, ancient and modern, are appalled by her actions, they strive to understand her motives. Medea, for all her crimes, is more human (if not humane) than Homer’s characters because she defies her biological and social conditioning. She rises above everyday feelings to achieve her goals and even though we find her behaviour despicable, we try to understand why she acted as she did.
Medea knows that she is at war with her irrational self. Her tragedy is that she chooses to surrender to the power of her passion, knowing that she can do otherwise. She says that she understands the horror of what she is going to do, but anger masters her resolve. Referring indirectly to the Homeric sense of heroism, she says that a woman is weak and timid in most matters: the noise of war makes her a coward. But touch her right to marriage and there is no bloodier spirit. Women may be useless for heroic purposes but they are skilled practitioners in all kinds of evil. She refuses to allow anyone to think of her as weak or passive: she is dangerous to her enemies and loyal to her friends. To such a life glory belongs.
If we are defined by our ability to transcend our biological and social conditioning, we are very dangerous indeed. We are saved from this danger if we master the power of passion. But Euripides is not sanguine about this; he is convinced that humans can be relied upon to allow their passions to control and guide them on the important matters of living. So long as ‘I’ as psyche is granted the status of the emotional self and the cause of important actions, there seems to be little room for the ‘rational individuals’ who can, with education and intellectual discipline, tame their passions. These individuals were soon to appear on the world stage with the Greek Rationalists, who took the crucial step of identifying psyche or ‘I’ with rational thinking, whose virtue is knowledge. Through the exercise of rational thinking Medea’s problems can be re-defined and managed and the tragic element in human affairs eliminated. This grandiose worldview, based on a new intellectual optimism, was to wage war on Homeric heroism and consign it to an ignoble history.
In the Iliad heroism does not produce happiness: its reward is fame. Yet there is no self-pity in Homer’s heroes. They confront a brutal and dangerous world courageously and without any sense of being depressed by a future which will end in pain and misery. They teach how to live nobly in the face of adversity and death. If we cannot be immortal, we can at least live nobly and die well. Homeric folk resist the impulse to invent a perfect, spiritual world to house its heroes. Homer’s is a realistic philosophy of life in which ‘what you see is what you get’ and nobility means confronting a harsh world without illusion. To confront and accept the tragic element in human life demands a worldview which does not excuse poor performance, or tolerate hand-wringing complainers.
Homer’s men are hardy folk with strong bodies of classical beauty. Their philosophy emphasises all the finer human emotions – love, chivalry, courage, virtue, excellence and justice. The warriors are lusty in company, fearless in a fight and steadfast in friendship. They applaud excellence in battle and in oratory. Faced with a cruel and short life, Homer portrays human existence as more than an insignificant struggle, even though human life is governed by conflict. A philosophy of glorious power is, therefore, an understandable consequence of the need to transform their intolerable, battle-bound lives into a spectacle. We cannot help but wonder how these high-spirited men and women could have found life so enjoyable. To be able to confront a brutal life without self-pity suggests a philosophical worldview which we would do well to study.
Social commentators have noted that we live in a narcissistic culture which screams for freedom without responsibility and happiness without pain. If true, we must seriously question whether we can begin to understand the ancient idea of the heroic. If we pursue ‘happiness’ and ‘quality of life’ we distance ourselves from the heroic life. If we submit to political correctness and the demands of paranoid minority groups, we vote for a dubious democracy which has lost touch with the great aristocratic standards by which greatness is achieved. If we, in our self-pitying haste, seek out counsellors for our minor ills, we deny the virtues of courage and nobility. It is Homer’s genius that he was able to describe the heroic worldview in a way that combined an emphasis on heroic self-assertion with a deep sense of the tragedy of human existence. Homer’s heroes are alive today and deserve respect because they looked squarely at the world and stood firm in the face of its terrors. They have never left Western consciousness and they stride across the stage of history as giants who bow their heads only to their mortality.
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