Odysseus in America (55 page)

¹
Very rarely is his
mētis
simply “good counsel”—good practical advice without legerdemain, without any “wow, how did he ever think of that!” The semantic range of
mētis
eventually extends to simply being expert at something, such as wood chopping, fishing, sailing, chariot driving. Not being a classical philologist myself, I must rely on secondary sources. The impression I gain from the main work on the subject, Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant's
Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society,
trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), is that the marker that indicates the border between everyday skill and
mētis
is the “wow!” response evoked in the witness. “Such an astonishing sight leaves the spectator dumbfounded and makes him feel dizzy,” p. 303.

²
Chester W. Richards,
A Swift, Elusive Sword: What if Sun Tzu and John Boyd Did a National Defense Review?,
Center for Defense Information, 2001, p. 15, quoting the Cleary translation. Richards's short, clear, and illuminating book is available on the Web in its entirety at
www.cdi.org/mrp/swift_elusive_sword.pdf
. Within Chinese culture many of the same struggles erupted over the value and dangers of
mētis,
cunning intelligence, as were fought out in the Greek world. Scholar Lisa Raphals has given a fascinating account of these parallels in
Knowing Words: Wisdom and Cunning in the Classical Traditions of China and Greece
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

³
Scholars, with some justice, will object that the whole hyperindividualistic culture of epic Greek heroism placed the acquisition of the tokens and emblems of personal prowess far above the common good. Their enormous economic value made a major if subsidiary contribution to the kleos-is-everything mentality of the epic hero. (
Kleos
means “fame.”) However, as the contrast with Achilles shows, other-regarding motivation was available even in this epic world.

⁴
In keeping with “dual motivation,” Athena is equally credited with the ruse. Epios is mentioned as the actual builder of the wooden Horse. The Greeks overcame defeat in
two
forms. One was catastrophic failure of the amphibious expedition, leading to its destruction, as visualized in
Iliad
10. This was
almost
turned into victory by Patroclus' surprise attack on the Trojans' flank with the fresh troops that Achilles had released to him. The other was the kind of defeat suffered by the English in the American colonies, or the Americans in Vietnam—realizing they could not win, they gave up and went home. The trick of the Horse turned stalemate, which would have resulted in the second sort of defeat, into victory for the Greeks.

⁵
Virgil [Publius Virgilius Maro],
Aeneid,
Book 2, line 258, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, 1981). Line numbering is to the translation. Emphasis added.

⁶
The classic treatment of the psychology of the leaders and bureaucrats of the side that is successfully surprised by its enemy is Richard K. Betts,
Surprise Attack
(Washington: Brookings Institution, 1982).

⁷
Little Iliad
1, in Hesiod,
The Homeric Hymns and Homerica,
trans. H. G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press Loeb Library, 1914), p. 511.

⁸
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

⁹
James J. Wirtz,
The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 133.

¹⁰
Both instances of Trojan deception somehow involve Paris, first in
Iliad
3, where he slips away from the single combat with Menelaus, designed to end the war in a political settlement, and second when the Trojan Pandarus, a political ally of Paris, is egged on by Athena to break the truce. He shoots an arrow at Menelaus from a hidden position in
Iliad
4. The Greeks also make two deceptions in the
Iliad:
first was the defensive surprise sprung by the Greeks in
Iliad
7, when they threw up a rampart on top of the funerary mound of those killed in the battle after the truce was broken in
Iliad
4. This was Nestor's idea. The second was the offensive surprise (also Nestor's idea) achieved by Patroclus, disguised in Achilles' armor, when he and the Myrmidons took the Trojans on the flank.

¹¹
Nagy,
The Best of the Achaeans,
pp. 47,145. Homer pays great attention to Odysseus in the
Iliad,
who is often called “equal to Zeus in artifice.” Achilles, a guileless embodiment of the straightforward fighter, is repeatedly contrasted to Odysseus, who is called “master of stratagems” (
Iliad
3:321, Fitzgerald). On the battlefield the Trojan Skôdos addresses him, “Odysseus, great in all men's eyes, unwearied master of guile …” (
Iliad
11:490f, Fitzgerald). His divine patron and inspiration, Athena, is daughter by Zeus of Mētis, the Olympian personification of
mētis
(Hesiod,
Theogony
886, p. 511).

¹²
Thucydides III.82-83. See Martha Nussbaum,
The Fragility of Goodness,
pp. 404, 507
n
24.

¹³
Hesk translation. Hesk,
Deception and Democracy in Classical Athens,
p. 26. Hesk further demonstrates that the Athenian Hoplite ideology scorned military deception as a sign of fear or cowardice. See his section “Honest Hoplites and Tricky Spartans,” pp. 23-40.

¹⁴
Rhesus 510-11; Hesk,
Deception and Democracy in Classical Athens,
p. 113
n.
Hesk expands this theme in his section “Deceit, Fear and Hoplite Courage,” pp. 107-22.

¹⁵
While the troops were certainly undisciplined, the current ethos of the American officer corps finds the commander culpable when his troops run riot, unless he has demonstrated every reasonable effort to prevent such loss of control and to restore order in his command, once it has broken down.

¹⁶
Parts of this discussion are taken from
The Secretary of the Navy's Guest Lecture,
“Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemnon: Homer on Military Leadership,” Pentagon, Naval Command Center Auditorium, February 23, 2000. Available in its entirety on the Web at
www.belisarius.com/author_index.htm
with the handouts distributed at the talk.

¹⁷
Homer shows Agamemnon's courage by having him
pray
to be chosen by lot to duel with Hector in
Iliad
7 and gives him center stage in the big battle in Book 11.

¹⁸
The story of Achilles' invulnerability, except for his heel, was either unknown to Homer or suppressed by him as out of keeping with his picture of Achilles' heroism, which
requires
that he be mortal and vulnerable, that is, human.

¹⁹
See Richard P. Martin,
The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 146-205, “The Language of Achilles.”

²⁰
See Shay, “Achilles: Paragon, Flawed Character, or Tragic Soldier Figure?,” for a discussion of the purely military background of the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon.

²¹
In response to this dishonor, Achilles pulled himself and his troops, the Myrmidons, out of the war. As the independent leader of a national contingent, Achilles was free to withdraw. No one could arrest Achilles for desertion, any more than Westmoreland could have arrested the head of the Australian contingent in Vietnam.

²²
Erwin Cook, “Agamemnon's Test of the Army in
Iliad
Book 2 and the Function of Homeric Akhos,”
American Journal of Philology,
in press, notes these same two betrayals of the army's moral order, and their probable destruction of the army's morale, but credits Agamemnon with recognizing the impact of his own actions, and with ultimately restoring the army's loyalty and morale by his “paradoxical” test.

²³
American military assignment officers insist that this is exactly what they do. However, many constraining concepts, practices, and policies make this illusory.

¹
Stanford,
Enemies of Poetry,
p. 5.

²
See Gregory Nagy,
Greek Mythology and Poetics
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 13, giving Herakles as the early Greek pattern of the hero who both suffers and causes great pain; and see Cook,
The Odyssey in Athens,
pp. 29-32.

³
Otto,
The Idea of the Holy.

⁴
Fukuyama,
The End of History and the Last Man.
Fukuyama coins the word “megalothymia” for this inflammation and aggrandizement of the
thumos.

⁵
There has been a burst of scholarship in this area, for example,
Understanding the Political Spirit,
ed. Zuckert; McGlew,
Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece; Dēmokratia,
ed. Ober and Hedrick; Koziak,
Retrieving Political Emotion;
Nussbaum,
Upheavals of Thought.
Inquiry into equal political respect is woven throughout Nussbaum's large book.

⁶
Pp.7-32.

⁷
I hope it is clear from Part II that I do not believe this is all that is required for recovery, but some form of the circle of communalization of trauma seems to be essential to the second stage of recovery.

⁸
Homer's contemporary Hesiod speaks of the Muses in his work on the history of the gods,
Theogony.
He describes therapy of suffering by these goddesses of the arts in terms of forgetting, which I do not endorse: Hesiod,
Theogony
, lines 96ff, in Hesiod,
Works and Days and Theogony
, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), p. 63f. Happy is the man
Whom the Muses love. Sweet flows the voice from his mouth.
For if anyone is grieved, if his heart is sore
With fresh sorrow, if he is troubled, and a singer
Who serves the Muses chants …
He soon forgets his heartache, and of all his cares
He remembers none: the goddesses' gifts turn them aside.

⁹
I have no desire to get tangled up in legalistic “what ifs” that would be raised by any governmental participation in such rites of purification. What I have in mind has nothing to do with “impunity” or “immunity” or “amnesty” for military crimes that should be prosecuted. A secular variant should be available for those who have no religion or have left the one they were born into, as many of my patients have done.

¹⁰
Our brain
is
expensive to feed. It is only 2 percent of our body weight but burns 20 percent of our calories. In an evolutionary perspective, that is a tip-off that something very special is going on. To invest the effort and take the risks for food to feed this hungry brain, it has got to be worth it or natural selection would not have grown it. What makes it worth the cost and the risk is precisely that it is a social and cultural brain. The communicative powers of language and symbol and the capacity to internalize the moral codes of a society provide the adaptive advantage that makes the human brain worth its keep.

¹¹
I give a much more extensive treatment of this subject in “Killing Rage:
Physis
or
Nomos—
Or Both?,” in
War and Violence in Ancient Greece,
ed. Hans van Wees (London: Duckworth and the Classical Press of Wales, 2000). Available online at
www.belisarius.com/author_index.htm
. That chapter explains a resolution to the controversy over how military self-sacrificial altruism that benefits nonkin could have evolved, based on the theoretical breakthrough of E. Sober and D. S. Wilson,
Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). Our physical brain size exploded by 50 percent with lightning rapidity a short time ago in evolutionary time. This began roughly 250,000 years ago and was completed by the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic, about fifty thousand to seventy thousand years ago, when highly specialized and artistically flaked flint tool kits, as well as the first bone and antler tools, appeared. Unlike their stereotyped predecessors, these tool kits varied dramatically from place to place, often within only fifty miles, and they became unfrozen in time. Astonishing prehistoric cave art was first created then; and for the first time the dead were buried with grave goods and we find the first evidence of clothing. In short,
culture
had appeared, probably with full human language. Our modern brain had
coevolved
with it. See Richard Leakey,
The Origin of Humankind
(New York: Basic, 1994), p. 125f. A useful time line is found in the frontispiece to his book. Also useful are the charts on p. 136, summarizing the differing chronologies coming out of the different methods that various scientific disciplines use to measure and mark periods. Robin Dunbar,
Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), gives somewhat different brain volumes and dates. It is important to recognize how sparse the fossil record is for most of the periods we find interesting, and also to recognize that cranial volume, even if perfectly measurable from a few skull fragments, tells us nothing about the evolution of the microscopic architecture of the brain, particularly in critical structures such as the hippocampus that make up only a tiny fraction of total brain volume.