Classics in Contemporary Culture

Intellectual History

A new on-line resource of concern to this blog: the Dictionary of the History of Ideas (1973-74 edition)...Lots of good stuff...Go check it out...[Thanks to Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber]

Achilles Hits the Blogosphere

In a point that meanders from a discussion of the new movie about Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries, Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber brings in Achilles (as well as Hegel on Alexander the Great, incidentally):

Lack of success and damaging facts should not necessarily be enough to deprive a hero of heroic status: Achilles was flawed, and Achilles was cruel, and Achilles failed, but we still respond to him.

The discussion is picked up by Brad DeLong (inter alia), arguing that Hector is the hero, not Achilles; a response from Henry Farrell (Crooked Timber):

For Brad, a hero is someone whom we should both admire and emulate. Thus, we should aspire to the virtues of the sagacious Hektor, who fights only because he must, and not those of the vainglorious Achilles. But Homer and his interpreters among the classical Greeks surely understood Achilles in a rather different way. To them, he was an embodiment of the arete of the hero bound by his self-understanding and his honour-code to choose glory over a life of respectable insignificance, and to seek retribution for affronts regardless of their consequence (as in Achilles’ vengeance after the slaying of Patroklos).The fate of the hero is bound up in tragedy - he (and it is usually a ‘he’ of course in early Greek thought) does what he must, even when he knows that he will be punished by the gods. He is bound by his fate and his code of honour. Bowra captures this sense of heroism quite well in this fragment - as he argues elsewhere, it is precisely the capacity for heroism that distinguishes men from the gods. Just because Guevara did “personify a historical moment and he did turn his back on a comfortable future as a communist bureaucrat to pursue the goal of the revolutionary liberation of humanity,” he was a hero in a certain sense, and his fate was precisely a tragic one - it was a direct consequence of his aims and personal limitations. His arete may not be one that anyone sane would want to emulate in today’s world, but it’s surely an arete nonetheless.

...And a riposte from DeLong...(and comments threads a-bristle with comments all around...)

Mark T. Garbanzo

Right, well, I signally failed to note the Cicero reference that was bandied about before the first presidential debate in the US, here mentioned by the Washington Post:

Matthew Dowd, the Bush-Cheney campaign's chief strategist, said in an interview earlier this month that Kerry "is very formidable, and probably the best debater ever to run for president." "I'm not joking," Dowd added. "I think he's better than Cicero," the ancient Roman orator. "But I think it'll be a very good thing for the American public to see these two men stand side by side. You can't hide who you are."

This, of course, is the converse of the "Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking" trope...[as Vincent Fiore points out in reference to this story]; cf. the opening of Plato's Apology...

But now (this just in!) there's also a re-writing of the history of the 2nd Triumvirate with an eye to contemporary politics, called "Marcus Antonius for President." Yes, this sort of thing is now almost a cliche, but this example's elaborate enough to notice. Here's a taste:

After fence-sitting for some time and publicly insulting Octavian, one of the greatest attack-machine propagandists the world will ever know planted himself wholeheartedly in the Octavian camp. The arch-conservative (but with his own speckled life) Cicero (you'll have heard his name tossed around before the Kerry-Bush debate) launched a smear campaign of exaggerations, outright lies, and innuendo about events dating back to Antonius' adolescence (I'm not saying he was, you know, involved in the homosexual lifestyle, but why did he hang around with that fellow who everyone knows was a—well, I shouldn't even mention it. Plus, I heard he threw up in the Senate privy once... a rhetorical device known as Bogus Blathering). Marcus Antonius fought back with good humour—for a while. I leave it to the interested student to research the punishment meted out to Cicero when Octavian literally sold out his Karl Rove. Cicero may have been gone, but the attack machine had been built.

Octavian's hollow attempts to live up to his famous (but one-term, so to speak) dad resulted in a false and furious moralising, but it resonated with the Romans, who fancied themselves the moral authorities of the world, an upright people whose examples of personal responsibility, free trade, and military might made them the apex to which all other nations must aspire. Octavian's own indiscretions either did not play well as propaganda, or were not exploited vehemently by the Antonius spin-team, or the record of them has been so thoroughly erased we are missing some of the counterattack. Today we find scattered remnants of Antonius' campaign of ideas against the opposition's campaign of prejudice and fear. Evidence remains in scanty contemporary accounts, but many of the surviving pieces of Antonius' campaign show pro-Antonius argument rather than anti-Octavian attack. The rest, and Marcus Antonius' books, were banned, and burned.