Reading the Iliad: Wisdom and Violence
Lydian coins from the time of Croesus in the British Museum. The capacity for abstraction and equalization of differences is never very far from depictions of violence. Are the lion and bull fighting on the Croeseid or have they called a truce?
Force
Simone Weil’s opening line of L’Iliade, ou le poème de la force (1939) is well known. In English translation, it reads: ‘The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force.’ This force both animates men and objectifies them into things. It makes heroes of some while it turns others into their victims. Which one depends mostly on the proximity of the gods to the anthropos in question.
As confrontations of force, the Iliad presents a zero sum game where ‘at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blind, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.’ Even for those who get to temporarily wield force, it is equally debilitating: ‘Force is as pitiless to the man who posses it, or thinks he does, as to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates’.
Weil’s take on the Iliad is consistent with Gustave Glotz’s assessment of the wider Greek culture as an endless repetition of personal acts of vengeance that draw others into a ever-widening and prolonged polemos: ‘The vendetta is a war just as war constitutes an indefinite series of vendettas’ (quoted in Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Society, 30).
Perhaps this was Homer’s point. Had the culture of the Greek-speaking world become so toxic that the only way to overcome it was to show it off in such relentless detail? Is this the beginning of the Western literary tradition that will seek ways of presenting our violent propensities to ourselves if only to draw our attention to them?
Weil’s essay appeared as Naziism was in full force. Like others at the time, turning to the first canonical work of the Western literary canon was inspired by the immediate European kairos of the 1930’s. It could easily appear that vengeance had once again become the organizing force of human relations. In the Iliad, Weil had seen Homer holding up the mirror to this vengeance if only to show it in stark relief.
Is it possible that from time to time we need to hold up this mirror to ourselves? It seems that we’ve reached another point in the West’s long historical engagement with the problem of violence and vengeance where reminding ourselves that the Greek invention of sophia, dike, and politeia was inseparable from the need to find some other way for humans to interact other than the eternally recurring cycle of vendettas.
Wisdom and Violence
Sophia, dike, and politeia are not mere concepts; they are not the mere playthings of Greek philosophias — lovers of wisdom. The are operational terms in a genuine praxis that emerged in the long duration running from Solon to Cleisthenes to Plato and Aristotle. These terms, preceded by the re-invention of isonomia, reshaped the Greek identity in material ways. This reshaping required not the destruction of other identities — farmer, hoplite, aristocrat, master of a techné — but the suspension of those identities when one orients himself (always a him) to the polis.
This capacity for humanity to suspend (not negate) its given identities — especially when those identities become toxic to the broader culture — does not arrive on the scene fully baked with Homo sapiens. Evolution doesn’t work that way. This capacity has a history; it needs to be cultivated because it is not automatic.
Perhaps in the Iliad we can read its contingent origins.
Christian Meier located emergence of sophia, dike, and politeia out of the lack of strong institutions in the Greek-speaking world:
Gradually, politics moved into the foreground. The need to find institutional ways to prevent uprisings, conflict, and civil war became more urgent. As these efforts showed success, there was a demand for more. All of Greece became a field of experimentation. What happened in one place was watched in another; similar rules required different adaptations; where some had failed others tried to do better. (147)
Two things are crucial to bear in mind. First, we cannot see the Greek invention of politics (and therefore sophia, dike, and isonomia) as ideological expressions of a Marxist’s superstructure. Most scholars of this age make clear that we are dealing with loosely collected, scattered poleis that share two things: a common language that allows ideas to move quickly, and no authoritative institutional control over reciprocating vendettas.
The second thing to bear in mind follows from the first. If there are no institutions that create these concepts, then the institutions arise from them. We have to see isonomia, sophia, dike, and politeia as the operational concepts that give rise to new institutions, not their ideological expressions. This understanding should remind us that sophia, dike, and isonomia are temporally before politeia but insofar as politeia is their objective, these concepts get their orientation from politeia — i.e., living and collaborating with others without the necessity of violence.
Once operating together, they mutually form and transform each other. As the institutions emerge and stabilize, they too transform and modify these operational concepts. As much as the Greeks of Classical Athens loved geometry and equilibrium, we should not see unidirectional flows of time from ideas to institutions just as we should not see reified institutions and their concepts. Everything remains in motion.
When we lose sight of this legacy, we lose a critical human capacity to make our institutions responsive to necessary changes in the broader milieu that surrounds the institutions. The factors that drive the majority of our time spent making a living will always move much faster than our institutions can respond. It takes a commitment to sophia, dike, isonomia, and politeia as those operational concepts that allow the institutions to keep pace.
Our problem today is similar to the problem Weil found in the Iliad for its time and hers. Institutions aren’t keeping up with the pace of the broader society. In Homer’s time, they didn’t exist and needed to be invented. For Weil’s time, they had devolved into the bureaucratized apparatuses of a totalitarian state whose driver was the violent imposition of an end to history. Today, our democratic institutions that were created to mitigate violence are now albatrosses that one party is throwing overboard while the other party hand-wrings its way into trying to deparately hold onto them.
The latter party needs to take a hard look at not just holding onto them, but how to rejuvenate them.
This is a problem of rejuvenating Modernity’s aspirational temporality.
Dreamers and Mirrors
Weil places the Iliad in squarely in this aspirational temporality:
For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors.
She has captured, in this single sentence, the historical challenge that Homer’s poem seems always to activate. Do we dreamers read the Iliad as an historical record of a fading past in which, as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra put it, ‘The spirit of revenge: my friends, up to now that was man’s best reflection . . .’ Or do we read it as if looking in a mirror to see a contemporary warning about the dangers of ‘man’s best reflection’ that is very much alive?
The Iliad always seems to be untimely. This is its power.
The Untimely Iliad
When I first read the Iliad, I was Weil’s dreamer. This was a historical document that showed in stark relief a mode of experience before our modern subjectivity. This subject aligns intentions, beliefs, and actions and thus holds itself accountable for what it does. This subject is ‘rational’ and seeks a narrowing of focus. It has a preference for setting and hitting goals. Its life is a line laid out as purpose and progress. When thwarted, it leads to Nietzsche’s self-poisoning ressentiment and all its pathologies.
In the Iliad, I could find a time before this subjectivity had been born. Reading it as Weil’s historical document would not have to be an emotionless academic exercise, however. To read the Iliad in this way can provide that powerful engagement with a moment in history where humanity is working out things that we now take for granted, such as logical thought, psychological depth, and the self-sufficiency of human wisdom.
Today, I see the mirror. Understanding the transition is worthwhile because I don’t think it’s just my experience.
My philosophical lineage was born of the 1990’s, a time when Weil’s ‘dreamers’ were justifiably in the ascendance. Fukuyama had just declared the end of history alongside others touting how the ideals of liberalism had conquered the world. Listening today to Richard Rorty’s lectures on liberal democracy and pragmatic philosophy reveals the same optimism, more vivid now for the distance. At the end of the twentieth century, it seemed possible to imagine that liberal democracy and the market economy could in fact become the de facto and de jure standards for a global consensus on how nations should be organized.
Since then, however, Weil’s other Iliad seems to have won out. From our post-2001 vantage point, force does seem to be ‘at the very center of human history’.
Weil’s Iliad-as-mirror feels more relevant today.
Untimely Mirrors
Perhaps reading the Iliad is to come into contact with humanity as it is working out, in a relatively little corner of the globe, what it means to live with other humans without the necessity of vengeance.
This need not be a prescription for overcoming vengeance. Rather, it may be just holding up the mirror so as to throw vengeance itself (of humans and of the gods) into relief. Such a reading would mean coming into contact with the early history of our capacity to suspend the weight of culture, even if that suspension does not prescribe (or even know) what comes next.
This would make the Iliad into an ‘untimely meditation’ (or ‘unfashionable observation’ as Nietzsche’s most recent academic translator has it). It tries to break the prevailing temporality of reciprocating vendettas without having a replacement ready to go.
Perhaps the replacement can only emerge from the intense clarity of the mirror Homer holds up to his culture. Are we reading an early moment in the history of humanity’s ability to step back and abstract itself by showing itself to itself?
This isn’t unusual or far fetched for this period of human history. The eighth to the sixth centuries BCE created new modes of abstraction that remade the cultures surrounding the Aegean. Electrum coins are invented in Lydia and further standardized by Croesus, who had the silver separated from the gold. Anything can be measured and valued by these coins. The Phoenician alphabet is making its way out of the Eastern Mediterranean across Crete and into Attica, eventually making its way to the Etruscans and then Romans. It revives writing, which had disappeared for three centuries. This alphabet replaces the Linear B script with a smaller set of symbols without inherent meaning. These letters can be assembled in innumerable combinations to make any imaginable word. The Iliad and the Odyssey are widely assumed by scholars to be among the first works written down with this modified alphabet. In Milesia, geometry is being imported from Egypt and Babylon and being turned into abstract math.
Isonomia and Transformation
Amid these changes, the political concept of isonomia — equality and symmetry among men — is gaining currency across Attica. Like the other abstractions we’ve just discussed, isonomia offers a new and more abstract dimension to identity that allows for the suspension of all other given identities — farmer, aristocrat, hoplite, et cetera — so as to become a citizen that is equal (isonomic) with other citizens. As with the coins of Lydia, the other identities are not destroyed; they gain a new dimension of value that finds its measure in the abstraction.
We should be careful about labeling this new dimension as negation and replacement of ‘old identites’ with ‘new identities’. The other identities remain, but they are merely suspended and held in the background through the action of an equalizing abstraction. Croesus’ coins do this same work. To exchange one thing for another in the marketplace of Sardis is streamlined because of a universal measure that has a twofold movement. This requires a mental transformation by the individuals entering into the exchange relationship. They have to simultanesouly allow a third dimension of meaning into the relationship, which is represented by the coins.
The previously held meanings of the objects being exchanged are not destroyed. They are abstracted and transformed into the third dimension represented by the coin whose purpose is to mediate the exchange relationship so that, ideally, it does not yield violence. Accordingly, the abstraction has to apply to the individuals and how they see themselves in the relationship. The coin, therefore, doesn’t just transform the objects by making them exchangeable; it makes the individuals isonomic in the sense that they do not confront each other as Lydians or Persians but as people in a marketplace who have a tacit or explicit agreement to equate themselves and their objects through this new medium.
It is not a stretch to say that the mental acrobatics of abstraction in the exchange of things using Lydian coins can readily be applied to the decision-making power of the polis. Isonomia is therefore not merely the intellectual rumination of lovers of wisdom. It has direct application to how an individual’s identity undergoes transformation. Vernant writes of the movement from Solon’s economic reforms to the political reforms of Cleisthenes (and of isonomia in particular) that a new problem had emerged: ‘how to create an institutional system that makes it possible to unify groups of human beings of different social, family, territorial, and religious status; how to detach individuals from their former loyalties and traditional ties in order to weld them into a homogeneous city composed of similar and equal citizens sharing the same rights of participation in the direction of public affairs’ (Myth and Thought, 236, my emphasis).
This human capacity for detaching ourselves from ‘former loyalties and traditional ties’ is precisely the aspect of isonomia that is of interest to me. This capacity to suspend the weight of culture is at the heart of the Greek transformation of vengeance into politics that we risk losing today. It is what I hope to see rejuvenated.
Are these wholly new capacities for humanity? It’s hard to say, but they certainly take on the aspects of a system that doesn’t fully exist before this. The capacity to step back, suspend what is happening and possibly envision some other way has become a feature of Homo sapiens. This capacity, we must always remember, emerges as a way to suspend the impulse to violence and vengeance. It is transmitted to us through the Greek’s adoption of the Phoenician alphabet — first in the works of Homer but equally so in the letters of Paul and the Gospels collected as the New Testament, which raise the same issue for a different time in roughly the same place.
We must never, therefore, lose sight of isonomia’s connection to violence.
Isonomia and War
Like all things, isonomia’s origins are contingent and dependent on other things. It has a long history well before it becomes the equality of citizens collectively making decisions on behalf of their polis. It is not immediately democratic; it isn’t even immediately political. Some aspect of its transformation has been traced to the evolution of warfare from ‘individual combat’ into ‘elbow-to-elbow warfare, of shoulder-to-shoulder struggle’ of the hoplite phalanx (Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought, 63).
Homer’s heroes know nothing of hoplite warfare, which requires a great deal of discipline. Warfare in the Iliad is personal and one-on-one or one-on-many. Before Athena makes the decision for him, Odysseus wonders whether he should pursue Sarpedon alone or turn his attention to slaughtering a large number of Trojans. There is nothing in this scene to differentiate warfare from the personal acts of a heroic individual pursuing a vendetta — against vendetta nested into another vendetta going back nine years. The more we stare into the origins of the story Homer tells, the more we find only vendettas. If our inquiry finds a resting place, it will be the vendetta of the excluded Eris and her apple inscribed ‘to the fairest’.
Hoplite warfare is collective and, ideally, disciplined. It risks everything on treating all troops as equals. ‘The hoplite,’ as Vernant writes, ‘no longer engaged in individual combat; if he felt the temptation to engage in a purely individual act of valor, he was obliged to resist it’ (ibid, 63).
If we can plausibly trace the Greek value of isonomia at least in part to this transformation of warfare from heroes to the phalanx, we begin to see how isonomia has its contingent origins as a response to the violence of war, which was almost always the escalation and contagion of an individual vendetta.
Placing the Iliad in this context would further emphasize its untimely nature. To be sure, the text makes no definitive case for isonomia. Yet, the mirror it holds up to its listeners/readers must yield an untimeliness that, if not fully abstracting listeners into equal citizens, certainly suspends the weight of a violent culture without yet being able to make the case for an alternative.
These moments of suspension are always and experientially heterocronic.
The Heterochrony of the Iliad
Such a reading of the untimeliness of the Iliad would collapse Weil’s two readings into each other. We who ‘who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history’ would also find the early history of the dreamer who hopes that ‘force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past’.
This heterchronic temporality is endemic to the Iliad. The power to experience this heterochrony makes the Iliad relevant today as both the text of the dreamer and those who see ineradicable force as the center of human history.
In the readings that follow, I want to look at the heterochronic nature of the Iliad in detail. I would like to understand its relationship to force and vengeance, which were key issues for Attica at the time. Of particular interest will be its power to show us a mirror-that-creates-the-dreamer without giving us the answer. All we have is the embryonic capacity for humanity to suspend the weight of culture without that suspension coming from a concretely imagined and formulated Utopia.
To channel Nietzsche’s Zarathustra for moment: the lion’s No comes from within the culture’s weight as it bears down on the camel. This is why the mirror is a crucial image. The camel must see the desert and the dragon it has created for itself. This mirror abstracts and suspends the weight in the very act of showing humans to themselves as dragons presiding over a wasteland of ossified values.‘All value has already been created, and the value of all created things — that am I. Indeed, there shall be no more “I will!”’ Thus speaks the dragon.’ The ‘I will’ is swapped for only ‘Thou shalt’. This mirror, if powerful enough, transforms the weight into the lion’s No and then into the child’s Yes. Time is remade in the movement: instead of the (always violent) great leap forward, Zarathustra says the child is ‘the wheel rolling out of itself’. The wheel can never leave violence behind, but it can learn to recognize the necessity of its Eternal Recurrence without the necessity of its activation.
Eventually, the Greeks will invent new ways to talk about themselves using sophia, dike, and politeia. Anaximander will break the prevailing cosmology based on the reciprocating domination of air, earth, fire, and water to invent the apeiron as a wholly new way to conceive of power. Balance and equilibrium among competing forces will be its vision. None of this is in the Iliad, which is not a philosophical treatise. But we can see each of these as downstream effects of the mirror that the Iliad held up to its age. We dreamers ought not lose sight of this connection between sophia, dike, and politeia with the problem of vengeance. When we lose that connection, violence, vengeance, and vendettas aren’t far behind.
In my ongoing re-reading of the Iliad, I will hope to make the case we should never lose sight of the birth of sophia, isonomia, politeia, and dike as responses to the problem of violence.