Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths

Abstract

Anhalt's Enraged is written in the belief that “ancient Greek myths offer a nonpartisan critique of rage and they validate alternatives. They invite the audience to think deliberately about the effect of stories on human choices and goals” (6). In the twenty-first century when political and moral positions have become increasingly polarized, these myths can especially help since “the audience may have no vested interest in the story's outcome and can approach the issues without passion or partisanship” (6). Anhalt seems largely unconcerned about the cultural wars that have centered on privileging works of “dead western white males."The main text is divided into six chapters, together with an introduction and conclusion. The first four chapters are devoted to Homer's Iliad. Anhalt only briefly touches on “The Homeric Question”: who was Homer and how did his epics, products of an oral tradition, come into a written form? All chapters are titled. Since Anhalt assumes her readership may not be familiar with the myths, she begins each chapter with a lengthy synopsis of the relevant books of the Iliad she discusses.Chapter 1, “Passions and Priorities (Iliad 1),” deals with the quarrel between Agamemnon, the general of the Greek army, and Achilles who, enraged, withdraws from the fighting because Agamemnon deprives him of the slave-girl Briseis, his war prize. For Anhalt the poem emphasizes human choices. Unlike the autocratic rule of Zeus among the gods, this is an aristocratic society in which “excellence in warfare is their idea of highest achievement” (26). In yielding to their own passions, the warriors make us “consider what qualities we require in a leader and what attributes we must cultivate in ourselves" (26).Chapter 2, “Them and Us (Iliad 6),” shows that Homer is impartial and does not demonize the Trojan enemy. This treatment allows the audience to cultivate multiple perspectives on events and make moral judgments. When Diomedes and Glaucus join battle, they discover their families have a longstanding host–guest relationship and therefore refrain from fighting each other. Their decision to honor such obligations “requires conversation, judgment, and choice” (41), something an audience can appreciate. Later, when Hector returns to Troy and meets his wife and son, the scene shows that although his aristocratic code of honor makes him return to the fighting, the audience realizes that he has other choices as to how to protect his community.Chapter 3, “Cultivating Rational Thought (Iliad 9),” reveals the weakness of Agamemnon's leadership, when the war turns disastrous for the Greeks. He therefore has to take counsel from wiser voices in the army and sends a three-man embassy to Achilles, promising huge compensation, including the return of Briseis, if he will rejoin the war. He does not, however, clearly admit his original mistake in his behavior to Achilles. Although all delegates make reasoned arguments, Achilles' rage prevents him from changing his mind. But consideration of these scenes “promotes the audience's ability to reason logically" (78).Chapter 4, “Violence, Vengeance, and a Glimpse of Victory (Iliad 10–24),” is something of a catchall chapter. After Achilles' closest friend, Patroclus, is killed by Hector, Achilles' rage is redirected toward Hector. So ruthless is he in his savage fury that he continues to maltreat the corpse of Hector whose death harbingers the fall of Troy. This fury only stops when the gods send Hector's aged father to ransom his son. At last, instead of rage, Achilles shows “empathy” (Anhalt's term), if only briefly. The poem ends with the funeral of Hector.By trying to prove that the audience can see alternatives to the heroes' warrior code, Anhalt overstates her case in emphasizing the heroes' freedom of choice. By centering her discussion largely on character analysis, she underestimates other complex issues like the role of the divine and the demands of the plot. To strengthen her thesis, she subtly elides the important distinction between a modern reader and an ancient audience by calling them both “audience.” The original listeners would not have had access to a written text and would have been as much, if not more, concerned with the performances of the “singers” than Anhalts's literary analysis allows for. The poem does show pathos, but the audience would have had no understanding of Anhalt's favorite buzz word, “empathy” (see, e.g., 113), a modern psychological usage. The original Greek adjective means “impassioned."Chapters 5 and 6 deal with two tragedies, scenically set against the background of the Trojan War, but performed later, when Athens was a democracy.Chapter 5, “The Dangers of Democratic Decision Making: (Sophocles' Ajax),” deals with the rage of Ajax when the armor of the dead Achilles is awarded by a vote of the army to Odysseus and not to himself. Ajax plans to kill the leaders of the army, but his attack is thwarted by the goddess Athena, who deludes his mind so that he kills the army's cattle instead. When Ajax realizes what he has done, he commits suicide and there is a violent altercation among the leaders as to whether Ajax should be allowed burial. Eventually Odysseus, Ajax's enemy, recognizing Ajax as the greatest fighter after Achilles, persuades Agamemnon to allow the burial. For Anhalt, the army's vote was clearly wrong (136), but this is too simple a reading. The hallmark of Sophoclean tragedy is ambiguity. Democracy demands cooperative as well as individual values. Ajax may be the best warrior after Achilles, but Achilles is dead and the world has changed. Anhalt's argument is biased and does not do full justice to many of the play's complexities.Chapter 6, “The Abuse of Power and its Consequences (Euripides' Hecuba),” deals with the reactions of the Trojan queen, now a slave, after learning of the death of two of her children. From a downtrodden sufferer she turns into a violent avenger. The Greek army vote to sacrifice her daughter, Polyxena, to satisfy the demands of the ghost of Achilles; then she learns that her youngest son, Polydorus, who had been sent to a Thracian guest friend, Polymestor, with a stash of money in case Troy should fall, has been murdered by him. Persuading a reluctant Agamemnon to overlook her actions, if she can punish Polymestor, Hecuba lures him with his sons into the Greek camp; she then blinds Polymestor and kills his children. For Anhalt, the play essentially demonstrates that the characters “attribute to Chance, the gods, or Luck things that the audience recognizes result from free choice” (171). There are complex issues in the play like the brutalizing effects of war, the use or abuse of rhetoric and more, but Anhalt again rather simplifies the issues to favor her thesis.For Anhalt, these works teach us today about the violent misuse of power, be it democratic or otherwise and show moral alternatives. There are thirty-one pages of notes in smaller print and a bibliography of nearly four hundred works. These seem not so much to bolster Anhalt's main argument as to impress upon us her genuine scholarship. But here, I think, lies a problem. Anhalt's book is not so much aimed at scholars; rather it is a manifesto advocating classical myths for modern readers concerned about the irreconcilable differences in modern politics. Two much shorter works, written by two French female philosophers, Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, in World War II and generally neglected by classicists, including Anhalt, give much more forceful statements as to why the Iliad, at least, still deserves our attention. One can read about them in Seth L. Schein's “Reading Homer in Dark Times: Rachel Bespaloff's On the Iliad," Arion 26, 1 (2018): 1–35.