The March of Folly (9 page)

Ruse was indeed used in the siege of walled or fortified places in biblical lands in the warfare of the 2nd millenium
B.C
. (2000–1000), which covers the century generally given for the Trojan War. If unable to penetrate by force, the attacking army would attempt to enter by cunning, using some trick to gain the confidence of the defenders, and it has been said by a military historian that “the very existence of legends concerning the conquest of cities by stratagem testifies to a core of truth.”

Although silent on the Wooden Horse, Herodotus in the 5th century
B.C
. wished to attribute more rational behavior to the Trojans than Homer allowed them. On the basis of what priests of Egypt told him in the course of his investigation, he states that Helen was never in Troy at all during the war, but remained in Egypt, where she had landed with Paris when their ship was blown off course following her abduction from Sparta. The local King, disgusted by Paris’ ignoble seduction of a host’s wife, ordered him to depart; only a phantom Helen came with him to Troy. Had she been real, Herodotus argues, surely Priam and Hector would have delivered her up to the Greeks rather than suffer so many deaths and calamities. They could not have been “so infatuated” as to sustain all that woe for her sake or for the sake of Paris, who was anything but admired by his family.

There speaks reason. As the Father of History, Herodotus might have known that in the lives of his subjects, common sense is rarely a determinant. He argues further that the Trojans assured the Greek envoys that Helen was not in Troy but were not believed because the gods wished for the war and the destruction of Troy to show that great wrongs bring great punishment. Probing for the meaning of the legend, here perhaps he comes closer to it.

In the search for meaning we must not forget that the gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind; they are the creatures
of man, not vice versa. They are needed and invented to give meaning and purpose to the puzzle that is life on earth, to explain strange and irregular phenomena of nature, haphazard events and, above all, irrational human conduct. They exist to bear the burden of all things that cannot be comprehended except by supernatural intervention or design.

This is especially true of the Greek pantheon, whose members are daily and intimately entangled with human beings and are susceptible to all the emotions of mortals if not to their limitations. What makes the gods so capricious and unprincipled is that in the Greek conception they are devoid of moral and ethical values—like a man lacking a shadow. Consequently, they have no compunction about maliciously deceiving mortals or causing them to violate oaths and commit other disloyal and disgraceful acts. Aphrodite’s magic caused Helen to elope with Paris, Athena tricked Hector into fighting Achilles. What is shameful or foolish in mortals is attributed by them to the influence of the gods. “To the gods I owe this woeful war,” laments Priam, forgetting that he could have removed the cause by sending Helen home at any time (presuming that she was there, as she very actively was in the Homeric cycle) or by yielding her when Menelaus and Odysseus came to demand her delivery.

The gods’ interference does not acquit man of folly; rather, it is man’s device for transferring the responsibility for folly. Homer understood this when he made Zeus complain in the opening section of the
Odyssey
how lamentable it was that men should blame the gods as the source of their troubles, “when it is through blindness of their own hearts” (or specifically their “greed and folly” in another translation) that sufferings “beyond that which is ordained” are brought upon them. This is a notable statement for, if the results are indeed worse than what fate had in store, it means that choice and free will were operating, not some implacable predestination. As an example, Zeus cites the case of Aegisthus, who stole Agamemnon’s wife and murdered the King on his homecoming, “though he knew the ruin this would entail since we ourselves sent Hermes to warn him neither to kill the man nor to make love to his wife, for Orestes when he grew up was bound to avenge his father and desire his patrimony.” In short, though Aegisthus well knew what evils would result from his conduct, he proceeded nevertheless, and paid the price.

“Infatuation,” as Herodotus suggested, is what robs man of reason. The ancients knew it and the Greeks had a goddess for it. Named Ate, she was the daughter—and significantly in some genealogies, the eldest
daughter—of Zeus. Her mother was Eris, or Discord, goddess of Strife (who in some versions is another identity of Atē). The daughter is the goddess, separately or together, of Infatuation, Mischief, Delusion and Blind Folly, rendering her victims “incapable of rational choice” and blind to distinctions of morality and expedience.

Given her combined heritage, Atē had potent capacity for harm and was in fact the original cause, prior to the Judgment of Paris, of the Trojan War, the prime struggle of the ancient world. Drawn from the earliest versions—the
Iliad
, the
Theogony
of Hesiod, roughly contemporary with Homer and the major authority on Olympian genealogy, and the
Cypria
—the tale of Atē ascribes her initial act to spite at not being invited by Zeus to the wedding of Peleus and the sea-nymph Thetis, future parents of Achilles. Entering the banquet hall unbidden, she maliciously rolls down the table the Golden Apple of Discord inscribed “For the Fairest,” immediately setting off the rival claims of Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. As the husband of one and father of another of the quarreling ladies, Zeus, not wishing to invite trouble for himself by deciding the issue, sends the three disputants to Mount Ida, where a handsome young shepherd, reportedly adroit in matters of love, can make the difficult judgment. This, of course, is Paris, whose rustic phase is owed to circumstances that need not concern us here and from whose choice flows the conflict so much greater than perhaps even Atē intended.
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Undeterred from mischief, Atē on another occasion devised a complicated piece of trickery by which the birth of Zeus’ son Heracles was delayed and an inferior child brought forth ahead of him, thus depriving Heracles of his birthright. Furious at the trick (which does indeed seem capricious even for an immortal), Zeus flung Atē out of Olympus, henceforward to live on earth among mankind. On her account the earth is called the Meadow of Atē—not the Meadow of Aphrodite, or the Garden of Demeter, or the Throne of Athena or
some other more pleasing title, but, as the ancients already sadly knew it to be, the realm of folly.

Greek myths take care of every contingency. According to a legend told in the
Iliad
, Zeus, repenting of what he had done, created four daughters called
Litai
, or Prayers for Pardon, who offer mortals the means of escape from their folly, but only if they respond. “Lame, wrinkled things with eyes cast down,” the Litai follow Atē, or passionate Folly (sometimes translated Ruin or Sin), as healers.

Meanwhile, Atē came to live among men and lost no time in causing Achilles’ famous quarrel with Agamemnon and his ensuing anger, which became the mainspring of the
Iliad
and has always seemed so disproportionate. When at last the feud which has so damaged the Greek cause and prolonged the war is reconciled, Agamemnon blames Atē, or Delusion, for his original infatuation for the girl he took from Achilles.

and, we might add, many since, the Litai notwithstanding. She appears once again in Mark Antony’s fearful vision when, gazing on the murdered corpse at his feet, he foresees how “Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge with Atē by his side, shall cry ‘Havoc’ and let slip the dogs of war.”

Anthropologists have subjected myth to infinite classification and some wilder theorizing. As the product of the psyche, it is said to be the means of bringing hidden fears and wish fulfillments into the open or of reconciling us to the human condition or of revealing the contradictions and problems, social and personal, that people face in life. Myths are seen as “charters” or “rituals,” or serving any number of other funetions.
All or some of this may or may not be valid; what we can be sure of is that myths are prototypes of human behavior and that one ritual they serve is that of the goat tied with a scarlet thread and sent off into the wilderness to carry away the mistakes and the sins of mankind.

Legend partakes of myth and of something else, a historical connection, however faint and far away and all but forgotten. The Wooden Horse is not myth in the sense of Cronus swallowing his children or Zeus transforming himself into a swan or a shower of gold for purposes of adultery. It is legend with no supernatural elements except for Athena’s aid and the intrusion of the serpents, who were added, no doubt, to give the Trojans a reason for rejecting Laocoon’s advice (and who are almost too compelling, for they seem to leave the Trojans with little option but to choose the course that contains their doom).

Yet the feasible alternative—that of destroying the Horse—is always open. Capys the Elder advised it before Laocoon’s warning, and Cassandra afterward. Notwithstanding the frequent references in the epic to the fall of Troy being ordained, it was not fate but free choice that took the Horse within the walls. “Fate” as a character in legend represents the fulfillment of man’s expectations of himself.

A
t about the time Columbus discovered America, the Renaissance—which is to say the period when the values of this world replaced those of the hereafter—was in full flower in Italy. Under its impulse the individual found in himself, rather than in God, the designer and captain of his fate. His needs, his ambitions and desires, his pleasures and possessions, his mind, his art, his power, his glory, were the house of life. His earthly passage was no longer, as in the medieval concept, a weary exile on the way to the spiritual destiny of his soul.

Over a period of sixty years, from roughly 1470 to 1530, the secular spirit of the age was exemplified in a succession of six popes—five Italians and a Spaniard
^*
—who carried it to an excess of venality, amorality, avarice, and spectacularly calamitous power politics. Their governance dismayed the faithful, brought the Holy See into disrepute, left unanswered the cry for reform, ignored all protests, warnings and signs of rising revolt, and ended by breaking apart the unity of Christendom and losing half the papal constituency to the Protestant secession. Theirs was a folly of perversity, perhaps the most consequential in Western history, if measured by its result in centuries of ensuing hostility and fratricidal war.

The abuses of these six popes were not born full blown from the high Renaissance. Rather they were a crown of folly upon habits of papal government that had developed over the previous 150 years deriving from the exile of the Papacy in Avignon through most of the 14th century. The attempted return to Rome resulted in 1378 in a Schism, with one Pope in Rome and one in Avignon, and with the successors of each, for over half a century, claiming to be the true Pope. Thereafter each country’s or kingdom’s obedience to one claimant or the other was determined by political interests, thus thoroughly politicizing the Holy See. Dependence on lay rulers was
a fatal legacy of the Schism because rival popes found it necessary to make up for divided power by all kinds of bargains, concessions and alliances with kings and princes. Because income too was divided, the Schism commercialized as well as politicized the Papacy, making revenue its primary concern. From this time, the sale of everything spiritual or material in the grant of the Church, from absolution and salvation to episcopates and abbeys, swelled into a perpetual commerce, attractive for what it offered yet repellent for what it made of religion.

Under the heady humanism of the Renaissance, the popes, once the Holy See was definitively restored to Rome in the 1430s, adopted as their own the values and style of the piratical princes of the Italian city-states. Opulent, elegant, unprincipled and endlessly at odds with each other, the rulers of Italian life were, by reason of their disunity and limited territorial scope, no more than potentates of discord. In reproducing their avarice and luxury, the six popes did no better than their models and, because of their superior status, usually worse. Pursuing the spoils of office like hounds on a scent, each of the six, who included a Borgia and two Medicis, was obsessed by ambition to establish a family fortune that would outlive him. In this pursuit each in turn plunged into the temporal politics of the time, which meant into an incessantly shifting series of combinations, intrigues and maneuvers without permanent interest or guiding principle and regulated only by what appeared to be the balance of power at the moment. As the political balance was fragile and fluctuating, these arrangements were in a constant state of reversal and betrayal, allowing, indeed requiring, the exercise of deals, bribes and conspiracies as a substitute for thought or program.