Reading the Iliad: Mênis and the Moral Compass
This essay is the start of a longer engagement with the problem of Homeric mênis and Nietzschean ressentiment. My fundamental question is this: when ‘the politics of resentment’ suddenly finds itself in power, is it still resentment?
My hypothesis is that empowered resentment unleashes Homeric mênis—the unhinged revenge of empowered resentment that jettisons its value-creating power in favor of asserting the status of a social group. This value-creating power was only ever a consolation for vengeance that cannot act. This latter phrase—the inability to act—is ressentiment’s defining feature. So, once it can act, we have to look at its dynamic through a new lens.
This essay embarks on two lines of thought. First, I want to look at the politics of resentment as indebted to Nietzsche’s diagnosis of ressentiment. My contention is this: that the authors who write about the politics of resentment actually describe examples that are textbook expressions of ressentiment, but they cling to a psychology of recognition as their explanatory framework. I’ll be investigating the limits of this framework in subsequent installments.
Additionally, I want to look at the politics of resentment from the left. My contention here is that ressentiment is alive and kicking on the left, and has been for far longer than on the right. The long history of the left’s moral compass—channeled through identity politics, political correctness, and woke cultural prescriptions—have caused it to embrace an ethics that is exactly what Nietzsche described as ressentiment—the creation of a moral compass that validate one’s victimhood as a badge of honor. Only those who can lay claim to being victims are part of the ‘inclusiveness’ that the left seeks. This has led to all manner of new ways to heap victimization on its members—microagressions, pronouns, non-binary bathrooms.
In the second line of thought, I want to look at the figure of Achilles in the Iliad because he is a figure of resentment before it develops the capacity to create values. Its values, if it has any, should be understood through Homeric mênis. To be sure, ressentiment doesn’t bring an end to mênis; it sublimates it and therefore holds it in a dormant state. The longer the hold, the more likely it becomes a the psychological type Nietzsche called ‘the man of ressentiment’.
The reason to combine these two lines of thought is this: the dissolution of the moral compass that arose out of the Greek attempt at democracy leads us back to a time when mênis was the de facto source of social order—before the Greeks invented politics. When we lose our respect for this legacy, we risk the return of mênis as our ordering force. We will once again run up against the problems of legitimacy—who is allowed mênis, and what will our battles over relative status become?
These lines of inquiry must come to terms with how the Greeks created the polis as an abstract concept that became a new mode of orientation of the individual to his fellow citizens. Terms like isonomia, dike, sophrysune, among others were much more than interesting topics of conversation at symposia. They were modes of orienting oneself away from special interests to something larger than oneself. So long as this mode of orientation retains a superior importance to other ‘interests’, democratic politics retains at least the potential for a healthy moral compass.
When this orientation devolves into one interest among many—when it is leveled out into merely a subjective interest in a sea of other interests—the democratic moral compass is at risk.
The final idea to which this heads is this: democracy is always a managing of mênis, which never goes away. It takes different forms, left and right, that need to be identified and managed. This management is, as the Federalist imagined, part of the way our governing institutions are structured—separation of powers, rule of law—but that won’t work unless the citizens’ moral compasses are tuned in such a way that they are allowed to hold their leaders accountable to a properly functioning state and society.
Before we get to the politics of resentment in subsequent essays, I will focus this essay on Achilles sitting by his ships. This will set us up for a more complete descent into the politics of resentment.
The Mênis of Achilles
Let’s descend into why I think that Achilles’ withdrawal from battle can be (and has been) described as resentment, but it is not yet Nietzschean ressentiment. This is for two reasons.
Achilles does not respond from weakness. He remains strong throughout, and his withdrawal is purely voluntary.
Achilles does not create new values as compensation for weakness. We will see new values suggested by Homer in what Leonard Muellner has called the ‘teleology’ of Achilles’ mênis in the Iliad. But this teleology hardly yields something like a set of moral values that Socrates could martial in his discussions with fellow citizens.
Nonetheless, how Achilles deals with his mênis is crucial for understanding the origins of our moral compass. All that we get is the possibility that human beings, albeit a heroic one, have the power of deliberating their actions. What is missing is the capacity to orient that deliberation in a productive direction.
Without that orientation, time is stuck, and the narrative has a difficult time moving forward.
When Achilles withdraws from battle, taking his Myrmidons with him, it is explicitly due to being slighted by Agamemnon, who has taken his ‘war prize’ Briseis as compensation for appeasing Apollo’s mênis by giving up his own war prize Chryseis. We will return to Apollo’s mênis, which is its first demonstration in the Iliad (I.75), but for now let’s focus on Achilles.
Before his withdrawal is characterized as mênis at I.488, I would like to look at two moments that begin to shed light on Achilles resentment. First is the intervention of Athena as Achilles deliberates whether or not to kill Agamemnon at I.188-222. The second is the scene where Achilles ‘sat beside his ships and seethed with mênis/wrath’ (I.488-92).
The Intervention of Athena
At the heart of this episode is a moment where Achilles’ ‘heart debated anxiously in two directions’.
ὣς φάτο: Πηλεΐωνι δ᾽ ἄχος γένετ᾽, ἐν δέ οἱ ἦτορ
στήθεσσιν λασίοισι διάνδιχα μερμήριξεν,
ἢ ὅ γε φάσγανον ὀξὺ ἐρυσσάμενος παρὰ μηροῦ
τοὺς μὲν ἀναστήσειεν, ὃ δ᾽ Ἀτρεΐδην ἐναρίζοι,
ἦε χόλον παύσειεν ἐρητύσειέ τε θυμόν.So he [Agamemnon] spoke. Distress arose within the son of Peleus, and his heart within his hairy chest debated anxiously in two directions,
whether to draw his sharp sword from the side of his thigh
on the one hand and scatter the ranks and kill Atreus’ son,
or whether to put an end to his rage and rein in his spirit. (188-192)
Homer’s words διάνδιχα μερμήριξεν (diándicha mermḗrixen, ‘debated anxiously in two directions’) narrates a time that has no basis for choosing a direction. Time is stuck because the narrative, which is time, is stuck. At the moment Achilles chooses to slaughter Agamemnon—somewhat arbitrarily and automatically for the destined hero—Athena intervenes, imploring him to ‘hold back’ (ἴσχεο, ískheo) and use words instead to berate Agamemnon.
τὸν δ᾽ αὖτε προσέειπε θεὰ γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη:
ἦλθον ἐγὼ παύσουσα τὸ σὸν μένος, αἴ κε πίθηαι,
οὐρανόθεν: πρὸ δέ μ᾽ ἧκε θεὰ λευκώλενος Ἥρη
ἄμφω ὁμῶς θυμῷ φιλέουσά τε κηδομένη τε:
ἀλλ᾽ ἄγε λῆγ᾽ ἔριδος, μηδὲ ξίφος ἕλκεο χειρί:
ἀλλ᾽ ἤτοι ἔπεσιν μὲν ὀνείδισον ὡς ἔσεταί περ:
ὧδε γὰρ ἐξερέω, τὸ δὲ καὶ τετελεσμένον ἔσται:
καί ποτέ τοι τρὶς τόσσα παρέσσεται ἀγλαὰ δῶρα
ὕβριος εἵνεκα τῆσδε: σὺ δ᾽ ἴσχεο, πείθεο δ᾽ ἡμῖν.207 Then the goddess, bright-eyed Athena, spoke to him in turn:
208 “I have come to curb your fury—if you will listen—
209 from heaven; for white-armed Hera, the goddess, sent me first,
210 loving you both alike [Agamemnon and Achilles] and caring in her heart.
211 Come, cease from strife; do not draw the sword with your hand.
212 With words indeed revile him, as it shall surely be;
213 for thus will I declare, and that word shall also be fulfilled:
214 some day for you there will be three-times-so-great splendid gifts
215 because of this outrage. Restrain yourself—obey us.”
I’ve underlined two phrases to draw attention to the connection Homer is making between the capacity to restrain one’s knee-jerk reaction to meet an insult to his status with overwhelming force and the transference of that reaction into words.
We should not separate the two. Athena is not saying ‘repress your desire for revenge.’ She is not asking for Nietzschean ressentiment, and there is no automatic path to ressentiment. There is, however, a distinct possibility for this holding back to become ressentiment depending how Achilles deals with the time that is now slowing down dramatically: the drawing of the sword reverses (220) to become a flow of words and a withdrawal from battle (223-44) where we get the famous pronouncement of how Achilles’ passive mênis will play out through the unleashed violence of ‘man-slaughtering Hektor’: ‘And then you will eat out the heart within you in sorrow, that you did no honor to the best of the Achaeans.’
We should dwell a bit on the substitution of words for fighting because this will unlock much of the moral direction Homer is offering his time. It also is key to understanding how Achilles deliberates his two possible fates in Book IX.
Displacing violence into words is the fundamental performative mechanism of the Iliad. There is a self-reflexive and self-referential aspect to it as we’ll see in Book IX. But here we get an early glimpse of the contingent birth of the moral compass and the possibility of democracy. This is all taking place in an assembly of Greek warriors. The word for ‘assembly’ throughout the Iliad is agorá—a term that would be easily recognizable to anyone living in a Greek polis at the time. These were the centers of the cities, and the place where issues were debated, decisions were made, news of the Mediterranean world was shared, and goods were exchanged, likely using newly invented coins imitated from the Lydians.
So this episode is taking place in an agorá of warriors who are using words to channel their violent impulses. In some cases, as in Athena’s intervention with Achilles, to redirect the anger; in other cases, to whip it up.
Homer seems insistent on this point.
Not only does Athena intervene to suspend Achilles’ desire to act on his anger, but Nestor, the respected elder, intervenes as well and makes the same plea, but it is directed at both men to hold back acting on their anger. His speech to both Achilles and Agamemnon is a ransfer of power from Athena to an elder who is explicitly marking out two problems in the current quarrel:
Achilles and Agamemnon are lesser men than the heroes who came before them. They represent an historical decline in Nestor’s speech.
Nestor’s speech explicitly sets up the problem of mênis by questioning which hero, lesser though they are, can legitimately claim the right to be insulted, and therefore can claim the right to mênis.
As a result, Nestor’s speech is a pivotal moment in which the legitimacy of status is called into question, specifically Agamemnon’s legitimacy:
The locus of Agamemnon’s superior status is the extent of his domains and subject peoples. This becomes explicit when Nestor later restates Agamemnon’s assertion of superior rank in an unsuccessful attempt to reconcile the two heroes: “You Achilles are strong [kartéros again], and a goddess mother bore you, but he is better [phérteros again] since he rules over more people (280-81). (Muellner 110; my emphasis)
The upshot here is that the fact of ruling over more people is not a recognizable claim to legitimacy in the Greek world. The fact that Nestor’s speech marks a decline in heroic status further emphasizes this point.
Muellner’s focus on kartéros and phérteros is important. The former term is a legitimate basis for authority, and it is contrasted with cunning (mêtis) as the other claim to legitimacy (which is Odysseus’ strength). Agamemnon clearly has neither of these as the basis for his claim to being better (phérteros). Only one person who Nestor addresses can make a claim to legitimacy of status: Achilles.
While kartéros is not questioned in terms of Achilles status, Agamemnon’s claim to phérteros is questioned, if only implicitly. Thus, in terms of who has a legitimate claim to mênis, Achilles comes out on top. But Nestor is not himself a legitimate source for making this pronouncement.
Ultimately, only Zeus can do that. Which is exactly what happens. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Wrath at Rest
We can now turn to the moment where Achilles khólos has transformed into mênis. After Nestor’s speech, neither man relinquishes their khólos. Achilles explicitly at 292-303, and at 318 Homer tells us that Agamemnon ‘did not stop the conflict’. Both men postpone the physical expression of their anger that results from competing claims to status. The hold onto their anger as personal dispositions residing in their hearts (thumos?)
In the intervening lines, Agamemnon sends two men to collect Briseis, which causes Achilles to reach out to his mother, whom he asks to intervene with Zeus on his behalf. In this episode with his mother, the goddess Thetis, we find the transition from khólos to mênis.
αὐτὰρ ὃ μήνιε νηυσὶ παρήμενος ὠκυπόροισι
διογενὴς Πηλῆος υἱὸς πόδας ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς:
490οὔτέ ποτ᾽ εἰς ἀγορὴν πωλέσκετο κυδιάνειραν
οὔτέ ποτ᾽ ἐς πόλεμον, ἀλλὰ φθινύθεσκε φίλον κῆρ
αὖθι μένων, ποθέεσκε δ᾽ ἀϋτήν τε πτόλεμόν τε. (488-92)And sitting beside his swift-going ships he had mênis,
the Zeus-descended son of Peleus, swift-footed Achilles.
Neither was he visiting the man-enabling assembly
nor was he going to war, but he was wasting away his own dear heart
staying there, and he was longing for the war cry and the battle.
We have in these lines the first manifestation of Achilles’ mênis, which we were promised in the opening line of the song.
This location beside his ships is important because it is a non-space—neither battlefield nor assembly (ἀγορὴν, agorá), both places where men are ennobled. Homer is placing the location of mênis not just in the heart of Achilles; this manifestation of mênis resides in a no man’s land. It is a kind of time out or improper space where nothing happens but waiting for fate and the will of the gods to play out.
When the embassy arrives in Book IX, they find Achilles contemplating returning home, which constitutes a third definitive space and therefore emphasizes that the current space is an untenable non-location whose temporality is only indecision. It not an agorá; it is not a battlefield; and now it is not his polis of Phythia.
It is, however, a non-space that allows Homer to open the possibility that mortals have some autonomy in how they compose time from this location that is not a proper location.
The indecision Achilles deliberates appears to be completely his. Fate is held in abeyance and a choice appears genuinely and humanly possible:
μήτηρ γάρ τέ μέ φησι θεὰ Θέτις ἀργυρόπεζα
διχθαδίας κῆρας φερέμεν θανάτοιο τέλος δέ.
εἰ μέν κ᾽ αὖθι μένων Τρώων πόλιν ἀμφιμάχωμαι,
ὤλετο μέν μοι νόστος, ἀτὰρ κλέος ἄφθιτον ἔσται:
εἰ δέ κεν οἴκαδ᾽ ἵκωμι φίλην ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν,
ὤλετό μοι κλέος ἐσθλόν, ἐπὶ δηρὸν δέ μοι αἰὼν
ἔσσεται, οὐδέ κέ μ᾽ ὦκα τέλος θανάτοιο κιχείη. (IX.410-16)410 “For my mother, the silver-footed goddess Thetis, says to me
411 that I bear two-fold dooms and an ending of death.
412-413 If I stay here, fighting about the city of the Trojans, home-coming is lost to me, yet my glory will be imperishable;
414-416 but if I go home to my dear native land, my noble glory is lost, yet my life will be long, nor would the swift end of death quickly overtake me.
While the non-location of this deliberation has been emphasized up to now, we have to shift our lens from space to time in order to understand what is happening here.
Achilles is choosing how he will compose time from here on out. How, in other words, will time become unstuck and move in one of two possible directions—toward battle and everlasting glory (κλέος ἄφθιτον, kléos áphthiton) or toward home and a quiet though unremarkable life?
Homer is asking, through the deliberation of Achilles, if the everlasting glory of heroic combat is the only way we can envision time?
From the perspective of time as the movement of more or less stable regularities and contingency, a clinamen is becoming possible. But the hold of culture is so strong that it will not happen—not at this moment in the tent. The going home option is not fully available. To get there, Homer will need to move through an incandescent mênis that exhausts itself in the pursuit of glory with such fury that it can only flame out in grief at that scale and scope of its destructive power.
Imperishable Glory
The English phrase ‘my glory will be imperishable’ translates kléos áphthiton: literally ‘imperishable glory’ according to Gregory Nagy. This imperishable glory can only be captured in epic song—i.e., in the words and rhythms of epics such as the Iliad and Odyssey.
It is a problem of time: to choose a short life is to choose a long legacy. ‘The thing of art [the epic song] is destined to last forever, while his own life, as a thing of nature, is destined for death’ (Nagy, Greek Hero, Hour 1, page 29). In other words, it is ‘the infinite time of the artificial song’, which makes the art of the epic more real than life itself.
Now we can fully understand Homer’s challenge with respect to words and the heroic deeds of men in battle. To choose which direction to go—back home or into battle—is decided ultimately by the kléos áphthiton as the moral compass. As Homer already showed us with Hektor and Andromache in Book VI, the only viable option for imperishable glory is on the battlefield, not in the polis tending to the things of a more mundane life.
The rhythmic words of the kléos áphthiton—the epic song that brings imperishable glory—are not just representations of heroic acts of the past. They are the future as an everlasting and imperishable glory that lives only in its continual reactivation and recitation.
Time, in other words, is not automatic forward movement, nor is it the ticking of a clock. It is the recitation of the kléos áphthiton itself over and over again.
This is why the short life is in reality a much, much longer one.
Now we can begin to understand the self-reflexive aspect of the Iliad, which is nothing other than a kléos áphthiton. At the moment Achilles is deliberating, he is deliberating the possible end to the Iliad itself. Without his return to battle, there is no Iliad as the signing of Achilles’ mênis.
The Iliad, therefore, must exhaust itself in the movement of a kléos aphthiton through the stages of mênis—a movement through an incandescence so intense that mênis exhausts itself in grief and sorrow at the vastness of its destruction.
Wrath in Action
Homer is not content to leave Achilles’ kléos áphthiton as merely the transition from passive to active mênis. Achilles’ mênis must move out of its passive state in order to exhaust itself as it transforms its incandescence into philotes (fellowship, friendship, group solidarity) and then to grief and sorrow. The latter is the moment when humans and gods are clearly separate—humans share a bond of grief over the violence they suffer at the hands of the immortal and therefore fickle gods:
The gods have spun for all unlucky mortals
a life of grief, while nothing troubles them. (24.525-26)
Achilles’ alliance with the gods—his mother, Zeus, Apollo, Athena—has become his alliance between mortals that seeks a distance from the gods. It seeks to understand a mortal condition on its own terms. Of course, this condition is violence and its resulting sorrow and grief over mass death.
Nonetheless, mortal temporality is opened that seeks to envision a life free of menacing gods hell-bent on loyalty oaths and sacrifices.
The path to Epicurious and later Lucretius is open—a world where gods are indifferent to mortals, and the universe is disenchanted. Even so, the gods are never completely gone. They merely recede into the background held in a kind of ‘standby’ state for mortals to call upon when they need moral guidance.
Moral Compass
Have we seen in Achilles’ holding back and the transformation of his mênis the contingent birth of a moral compass?
We are asking Nietzsche’s question again, but our answer may be a bit different this time around.
As we have plunged into Achilles’ mênis, we have discovered the possibility of ressentiment but not its necessity. In the Homeric world, the moral gravity-well is public esteem. Wrath that can spend itself openly in battle need not harden into the inward-looking bitterness Nietzsche anatomises.
It has been tempting to see a dividing line in linear history between the Homeric Greeks and later developments. I don’t wish to place a dividing line that would create a linear history. Time is more complicated and polychronic than circularity or linearity.
If Alasdair MacIntyre and Bruno Snell teach us to hear the key-change between heroic and teleological virtue, and Nietzsche detects a later modulation into Christian ressentiment, I want to keep the score open to syncopation and reprise. Greek, Roman, and Christian motifs overlap, collide, and remix—time modulates, it doesn’t march.
I wish to see contingencies and regularities. I wish to see the Eternal Recurrence of the Like, not the Same. The latter hardens history into the fixed rotation of a circle. The former loosens it just a bit. Contingency becomes various patterns of regularity in the turbulence of motion. These regularities—mênis, holding back, substituting words for violent deeds, ressentiment—these are all operating within the fundamental contingency of Eternal Recurrence where nothing is exactly the same but the recurrence of patterns is possible.
Mênis remains the condition of democratic practices because it remains an Eternally Recurring ‘likeness’ that must be dealt with as we live. Any belief that we have reached a stabilized ‘end of history’ is a prescription for complacency that we are now paying for.
If there is a moral compass on display in Homer’s tracing of the movements of Achilles’ mênis, it is truncated by our modern standards. There is only the human power to be directionally confused and not to automatically do the first thing that comes to mind. Athena’s imperative to hold back promises great material rewards. Nestor’s imperative to hold back anger, without necessarily giving it up, is backed up by the invocation of history. Not genealogical history, but a lineage of heros to which neither man measures up.
Over the course of the next few centuries, Greek culture will stare into this capacity for deliberation and shunt the gods aside as it seeks a fuller articulation of the capacity for mortals to control their reactions on their own. We are still staring into it when we look for the sources of motivation, the dysfunctions of personality, the diagnoses of the DSM.
What we find in this moment with Achilles and Athena is a problem of self-orientation. Where should Achilles direct his anger, the anger that must choose one of two directions? This must be understood temporally. In which direction will Achilles send time? At Agamemnon or away from him? Those are the only two choices. Time is still percolating without crossing a threshold into concerted action.
Crucially, time in the Iliad will never leave mênis. The only question is whether or not the mênis will be active or dormant, but it will never be absent. Not even at the end, when Achilles and Priam meet. Their mutual recognition as men racked with grief and sorrow for the deaths caused by mênis will only last 12 days until the war, as agreed by the two men, will resume.
The history of our moral compass opens into this early moment in the Iliad.