Homer's imaginative sympathy

Earlier this week I ran across a book called The World of Herodotus at our local used book store. The author sold me on it instantly—Aubrey de Sélincourt, whom I know best as a translator of Livy and Herodotus for Penguin Classics in its early years. When I got home and was leafing through it, I happened across this passage, which expresses what is to me one of the strongest and characteristic features of Homer’s poetry:

“[T]he burden of the poem is the universal tragedy of Man; none the less, the fact that one can ask it indicates another profound and beautiful trait in Homer—the breadth of his imaginative sympathy.”

— Aubrey de Sélincourt

Is the Iliad the tragedy of Hector, who is killed, or of Achilles, who loses his friend—and is himself doomed, as we know, to early death? The question is idle, because the burden of the poem is the universal tragedy of Man; none the less, the fact that one can ask it indicates another profound and beautiful trait in Homer—the breadth of his imaginative sympathy. It is no part of Homer’s purpose to exalt the Greeks at the expense of the Trojans or the Trojans at the expense of the Greeks. He does not take sides. If Mycenae is ‘golden’, Troy is ‘holy’; if Achilles is ‘splendid as a god’, Hector is ‘glorious’, and Priam as well as Agamemnon is shepherd of his people. We are moved by the grief of Achilles when his friend is killed, but we are moved as deeply by the noble scene in which the King of Troy humbles himself to come to Achilles’ tent and beg for the body of his son. Greeks and Trojans—all are men, splendid in manhood, and the poet looks upon them with benign and indifferent love. They fight to the death, for it is the nature of men to do so—of men proud of their strength and skill, hungry for honour and fame, glorying in the sunlight and the world of sense, but doomed so soon to fall like the leaves of a tree and to go down into the eternal darkness. It is a view of life stripped of complexity, bare of speculation, unburdened by any mystery but the ultimate mysteries of beauty and of death.

I’ve taken pains to explain Homer’s fair and sympathetic presentation of both sides of the Trojan War—his concern being less with political rights and wrongs or regional loyalty and more with arete regardless of who demonstrates it—to my students for many years. This puts it beautifully.

I especially like how de Sélincourt talks of sympathy rather than its weakling modern cousin, empathy. Sympathy, which is not coincidentally a Greek word, is what Homer evokes so powerfully throughout, even—or perhaps especially—in those vignettes that introduce us to a character as he’s dying violently. Remember that, at root, sympathy means to feel with or even to suffer with, and who hasn’t finished the Iliad feeling as if he’s suffered alongside Hector, Achilles, and Priam?

I have to anticipate at least one modern rejoinder, though, provoked by de Sélincourt’s repeated use of the word men there. Wouldn’t a dead white man’s sympathies be narrow and bigoted? Aren’t the Iliad and the Odyssey just war stories for boys? Aren’t the main characters all afflicted with toxic masculinity? Certainly the readership for the present fad of feminist parallax fiction based on Greek myth would think so, to judge by the way they talk about these stories. To which I can only say that they haven’t read Homer very well, if at all, and that it’s not Homer whose “breadth of imaginative sympathy” is limited.

If Homer, in his world, could reach across boundaries and battle lines to feel and understand—and to make his audience feel and understand—I think he deserves as much or better from us.

A thesis

The following started as only semi-serious off-the-cuff pontification in my Instagram “stories.” I’ve expanded on it and fixed a lot of autocorrect “help” along the way.

A favorite web cartoonist, Owen Cyclops, shared the following on Instagram this morning:

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If you’re unfamiliar with semiotics, which I discovered via Umberto Eco late in high school, here’s the first bit of Wikipedia’s intro:

Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes (semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, usually called a meaning, to the sign's interpreter. The meaning can be intentional, such as a word uttered with a specific meaning; or unintentional, such as a symptom being a sign of a particular medical condition.

The phrase “usually called a meaning” should give you some sense of how arcane, abstract, and high-falutin’ this can get. Emphasis on abstract. But semiotics is not really my point, here. Owen’s cartoon brought Dr Johnson’s refutation of Berkeley to mind. Per Boswell:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute it thus.”

This is the “appeal to the stone.” Wikipedia classifies it as “an informal logical fallacy.” I don’t care. When confronted with academic disciplines that have descended to this level of abstraction, I join Dr Johnson’s stone-kicking camp.

At some point, something has to be real. Argument divorced from concrete reality simply turns into sophisticated dorm room bickering.* That’s what Owen’s cartoon captures so well—argue about the “meanings” of “signs” like carrot tops and foxholes all you want, the real carrot and the real fox are going to present an inarguable ultimate meaning to those rabbits. I refute it thus.

I was struck that Wikipedia’s article on Johnson’s stone-kicking compares this appeal to the reductio ad absurdum, which it also treats as a fallacy. Its full article on the reductio is more circumspect, classifying it as a legitimate line of argument, though I’ve always regarded the reductio more as a useful rhetorical device, a way of comically** setting the boundaries to an argument or of twisting the knife once the logic has worked itself out as impossible. But, tellingly, the article’s “see also” points us toward slippery slope. This is, of course, described not just as an informal fallacy but “a fallacious argument.” I contend that slippery slope is not a fallacy but, at this point, an ironclad empirical law of Western behavior.

And that’s what brought the late Kenneth Minogue to mind. In my Western Civ courses I use a line from his Politics: A Very Short Introduction, to impart to students that the Greeks and Romans were different from each other in a lot of fundamental ways. Chief among these differences was the Greek and Roman approach to ideas:

The Greek cities were a dazzling episode in Western history, but Rome had the solidity of a single city which grew until it became an empire, and which out of its own decline created a church that sought to encompass nothing less than the globe itself. Whereas the Greeks were brilliant and innovative theorists, the Romans were sober and cautious farmer-warriors, less likely than their predecessors to be carried away by an idea. We inherit our ideas from the Greeks, but our practices from the Romans.

Succinct, somewhat oversimplified, sure, but helpful to students who mostly assume the Greeks and Romans were the same, just with redundant sets of names for the same gods. It’s also correct. Minogue goes on to note that this mixed heritage manifests differently culture to culture, state to state, but that “Both the architecture*** and the terminology of American politics . . . are notably Roman.”

Were, I’d say.

So, a thesis I’ve kicked around in conversation:

Given Minogue’s two categories of classical influence, as the United States was founded along (partially but significantly) Roman lines by men who revered the Romans, a large part of our cultural upheaval has arisen as the country has drifted more Greek—becoming progressively more “likely . . . to be carried away by an idea.”

The emphasis has shifted from the Founders’ “Roman” belief in institutions governed by people striving for personal virtue to a “Greek” pattern of all-dissolving ideologies pursuing unachievable ends. This reflects both political and social changes. Like Athens, the US became more aggressive and more inclined to foreign intervention the more it embraced democracy not just as a system but as an end. And note the way that, when an ideal butts up against an institution in our culture, it’s the institution that’s got to go—as does anything that stands in the way of the fullest possible fulfilment of the implicit endpoint of the ideal. How dare you impede my slide down this slope, bigot.

And this is not a new problem. A whole history of the US could be written along these lines.

* During my senior year of college I once listened to two roommates argue over whether the Trix Rabbit was a “freak of nature.” This lasted at least an hour. Take away the humor and you’d have enough material for several volumes of an academic journal.

** Comically, because what’s the point of arguing if you can’t laugh the whole time? That’s not an argument, but a quarrel. See note above.

** Not always for the best, as I’ve argued before.

The Dancing Floor

John Buchan June continues with an eerie slow-burn thriller that anticipated some of the themes and terrors of Witch Wood. The novel is the third Sir Edward Leithen adventure, The Dancing Floor.

Written after but taking place chronologically before Leithen’s poaching lark in John Macnab, Leithen narrates this novel in the first-person, as a series of wide-ranging reminiscences. In the first half, Leithen introduces the reader to Vernon Milburne, a young man of noble family and every advantage who is nonetheless pensive and withdrawn, a haunted man. As Leithen gets to know him, he learns that Vernon has been terrorized annually by a nightmare. Once a year, on precisely the same night, he dreams of someone or something approaching his bedroom though a long series of interconnecting rooms in the family home. Every year it comes one room closer. When the person, or presence, or creature finally reaches his bedroom, Vernon believes, he will come into some terrible destiny. All he can do is wait.

Interwoven with Leithen’s narrative of his friendship with Vernon is how the two of them met Koré Arabin. Beautiful, popular, and rich, Koré is also the only daughter of a legendarily depraved eccentric, an Aleister Crowley type who moved to Plakos, a remote island in the Aegean, where he could research and experiment with the occult and practice his sexual debaucheries with utter liberty. He also, it is darkly hinted, preyed upon the local Greek islanders. But he is dead, and Koré, his only heir, is now the mistress of his house and the most powerful person on the island.

So Koré arrives in England already the subject of salacious rumor. And her personality does not help. When she meets Leithen and Vernon she is brusque, forward, and aggressive. Leithen finds her off-putting. Vernon is offended and deliberately avoids her. But as Leithen almost accidentally gets to know her—and even falls in love with her—she reveals that there is much more to her than her dark family history. Abrupt and ill-mannered owing to her remote and strange upbringing, she nevertheless rejects her family’s occultism and is concerned to help the people of Plakos. Far from using her position to indulge, as her father and ancestors did, she embraces the responsibility she was born into and hopes to make amends.

But Leithen is not sure this is possible. Through various means and sources, the well-connected Leithen learns that the people of Plakos, particularly those in the village nearest Koré’s house, have not forgotten her father’s evil. And following a hard winter and bad harvest, the dimly remembered pagan rites of their ancestors have resurfaced. These entail nighttime footraces, a symbolic marriage, and human sacrifice, all played out on the broad plain near Koré’s house known as the Dancing Floor. Leithen suspects—accurately, is it turns out—that the selected female victim of the sacrifice will be Koré.

In the second half of the novel, Leithen assembles a team and journeys to Plakos, aiming to intervene personally and either evacuate or protect Koré. But the locals are more suspicious and hostile than even he expected. Armed men guard Koré’s house and every movement Leithen and his friends make is watched and followed by a mob. Only the tenacious Orthodox priest, damning the locals’ apostasy, offers Leithen aid. But Leithen cannot save Koré by holing up in the village church.

Finally, as the locals capture and imprison or scare off Leithen’s men, as Leithen explores the island by night and wonders what he can possibly hope to do, and as the night of the sacrifices on the Dancing Floor approaches, he detects that he is not the only person creeping around the island by night. Is he being stalked? Or is there someone else on the island with dark and secret purposes?

The Dancing Floor, like Sir Edward Leithen’s debut in The Power-House, is a seemingly rambling personal narrative that slowly lays the groundwork for the tight, complex, and exciting events of the climax. (I’d encourage the reader beginning this novel to stick with it even if it seems to be going nowhere; the first half is Buchan setting the pieces on his chessboard.) But unlike that earlier adventure, The Dancing Floor relies far less on coincidence. It is, if anything, a character-driven thriller—a true oddity but a successful one.

It is successful in no small part thanks to the characters. Despite his infatuation and emotional vulnerability early in this novel, Leithen is his solid and reliable self, a steady professional who won’t back down from a task no matter what the hardships or risks once he has determined that it is the right thing to do. Vernon offers an intriguing departure, a moodier and more phlegmatic character than is typical for a Buchan story. Vernon has good reasons to be so, having spent much of his life as an orphan tormented by nightmares in a vast lonely house, but overcoming this, embracing his inheritance, and stepping into the role he was born to play—going from passively awaiting fate to actively pursuing it—gives him a compelling arc.

That arc also makes Vernon an interesting mirror of Koré, who is inarguably the best character in the book. With her strange and terrible background, her struggle to fit in, and a core of goodness that she is determined to act upon, she is a beautiful woman not only because of her looks but because of her character. She proves a challenge to Vernon, and an important and necessary one.

The other aspect of The Dancing Floor that makes it so successful as an adventure is its atmosphere. With its dream-haunted young men in empty houses, its lonely and desolate woods and cliffs, its dark pagan rites recounted in obscure old manuscripts, its hero creeping through dark landscapes filled with inscrutable and violent enemies, its mob of justifiably angry peasants, and the same peasants’ unjustifiable human sacrifice by firelight under the moon, The Dancing Floor is steeped in the gothic. Even beyond my personal taste—and I am an absolute sucker for gothic atmosphere—the foreboding and gloom, which even the indomitable Leithen struggles to overcome, pervades the novel and gives it weight. I relished it.

Buchan wrote The Dancing Floor the year before Witch Wood. Pagan survivals—relict human sacrifice, nighttime revels, and “elaborate cultural and religious transactions with death” as David Bentley Hart has described them—were very much on his mind. Some critics have suggested the influence of the (now utterly debunked) theories of Margaret Murray. That may be. But it certainly reflects Buchan’s recognition of the fragility of civilization. A bad harvest, a harsh winter, and a truly wicked foreign interloper in the big house on the hill is all it takes to drive people back into blood sacrifice, into the smoke and ash and the shrieking of burnt offerings.

But more importantly, this evil is only a background against which virtue and goodness can be glimpsed more sharply. Koré and Vernon, in complementary ways, demonstrate this. As in Witch Wood, true goodness in the face of evil takes two. And the redoubtable Leithen is our witness.

Having read them so close together, I can’t help but compare The Dancing Floor to Witch Wood. The latter is far better. But as an exercise in the some of the same themes, on a smaller, contemporary scale and structured as a thriller, The Dancing Floor is a gripping, moody, and unusual thriller, and another good entry in Sir Edward Leithen’s adventures.

Athens and Sparta... Georgia

The Temple of Hephaestus and the Athenian acropolis c. 1870

Maybe it’s my background in British history, or just growing up in northeast Georgia, but I love placenames and the layers and layers of history you can discern as you dig through them.

The Georgia connection is important. Long ago, I noticed that not only did my homestate have an Athens, the city where I was born and where my family has deep roots, but a Sparta, too. And a Rome. And a Smyrna. And a Cairo.

When I began teaching US History almost ten years ago and regularly explaining the Founding generation’s love, admiration, and emulation of the classical world to students, I remembered these observations and connected them to things I had learned about other states since then—that Cincinnati, Ohio is named after a heroic dictator from the early days of the Roman Republic (and, implicitly, George Washington), that New York has even more Greek and Roman placenames, and so forth. And I developed a pet theory I would occasionally expound to students.

Give someone a lot of spare time and grant money, I thought, and the ability to map the locations and dates of founding of American cities with classical placenames, and I bet they’d cluster noticeably along the frontier of the Early Republic, roughly from the Washington to the Jackson administrations.

And, lo and behold, this week I came across a piece from Antigone, an online classical journal, entitled “Classical Place-names and the American Frontier.” This essay concerns upstate New York specifically, where the author notes 130 classical placenames in use by 1860:

An upstate New York itinerary could take you on a drive from Troy to Ithaca via Utica and Syracuse, with stop-offs off in Camillus, Manlius, Cicero, and Pompey. One could be buried under four feet of snow in Rome. The founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, lived in a log cabin in Palmyra. You can read the works of Homer or study the military tactics of Marcellus in places that bear their names.

And the author confirms precisely the guess I made about Georgia’s classical cities: “Classical place names were given to frontier settlements there in the years immediately following the War of Independence. As the frontier moved west, so too did the practice.” He goes on to explain the shady buyout of the Iroquois Confederacy’s land in the upstate and the influx of settlers coming northward and inland from the coast.

Looking at Georgia’s considerably fewer such names, you can still note the same pattern: an early city like Sylvania, founded in 1790, lies in well-established territory between Savannah and Augusta, itself a classical name by way of the Princess Augusta, King George III’s mother. Sparta, founded in 1795, is farther north and west. Athens, founded in 1806 as a college town with a name intentionally meant to evoke Plato’s Academy, is yet farther north and west of that.

The displacement of Indians plays a role here, too, albeit a generation later than in New York. Following the Indian Removal Act in 1830 you get Smyrna (1832) and Rome (1834) in former Cherokee territory in the northwestern corner of the state, beyond the Chattahoochee, and Cairo (1835) in the far southwest.

Look at these cities on a map and mark them in the order they were founded and you see a clear march upcountry from General Oglethorpe’s original enclave on the coast and the Savannah River.

Even Atlanta (1847), with its complicated history, fits this pattern, given its cod classical name (part feminine tweak of Atlantic, which is itself derived from Atlas, and part nod, probably coincidentally or indirectly, to Atalanta). Before taking the name Atlanta, the city was Marthasville (1843), and before that it was Terminus (1837). As the New Georgia Encyclopedia notes, Terminus “literally means ‘end of the line,’” an appropriate name since Terminus was established as mile marker zero on a new railroad built to connect the western interior of the state to the coast (there’s that westward, inland movement again). But it only means that because Terminus was originally a Roman deity who protected boundaries and property lines, a god of ends.

I’ve already started recommending this essay to students, not only because it gratifyingly confirms a pet theory but because it makes abundantly clear the pride of place the classical world had in the imagination of the Early Republic. And not only for obviously learned showoffs like Jefferson and Adams.

“It was part of a wider cultural movement to align the new Republic with Classical ideals,” the author notes, “but it was neither as organized nor as calculated as one might think.” Such naming conventions were not part of a top-down agenda but grassroots:

What is interesting about the Classical place names of upstate New York—and what previous historians who have addressed the subject have overlooked—is that many of them were chosen by the pioneers themselves. Except for the town names of the Military Tract, there was no government initiative or evident persuasion that lay behind their selection. The pioneers in their rough-hewn settlements—far from the centres of education in the coastal cities—were choosing to align themselves with the Classical past.

Even the hardbitten types moving to edge of civilization were well-versed in the classical past and its republican ideals and made those cultural priorities clear in the names they gave their settlements.

And their children. Georgia has both a Homer (1859) and a Homerville (1869). These were founded later than the other examples I’ve given and were named for prominent local men, and so only indirectly for the great blind bard, but consider when these men were born.

Of course, me being me, I couldn’t help but reflect on the change since then—given the option of naming things, Western civilization has gone from Utica and Troy and Ithaca and Rome to Boaty McBoatface and friends in two centuries.

I’ve marked a few cities on a Google Map and embedded it above. If you click through to the full map you can see the dates of each city’s establishment arranged in chronological order. Mouse over the list and the pins will light up in exactly the pattern described. I don’t have the time to do that with with all the New York and Ohio placenames mentioned in the Antigone piece but I hope someone will someday. An animated map would be a stellar classroom resource.

In the meantime, definitely read the entire essay. It’s a concise and insightful look at ordinary the relation Americans from an earlier era had to the classical past and should give us cause to reflect on our own relation to them.