Old and Forgotten Ways

Once you learn to pay attention to Achilles’ Shield, you begin to notice the “hero’s shield” trope everywhere in literature. Aeneas carries the future of his people on his shield; Gawain carries his knightly virtues. A hero’s shield, as a literary device, carries significant symbolic meaning. When that hero, like Achilles or Aeneas, speaks for an entire culture, the shield often encapsulates the world-picture his deeds create. At the beginning of Greek literature stand two great titans: Homer and Hesiod. We have seen in the first post how Homer uses Achilles’ Shield to portray a cosmos in competition. In a fragment attributed to Hesiod called The Shield of Herakles , a similar passage presents one of the culture-hero’s famous exploits: the slaying of Cycnus. This unstoppable war machine has been waylaying pilgrims journeying to Apollo’s sacred grove, and before Herakles can impose civilization on the outlaw, he has to arm himself appropriately. Cycnus is the son of Ares, or unres...

In our last post, we examined the close link between medicine and magic evinced by Homer’s healers in the Iliad . This week, we turn to another Homeric adept in the art of pharmaka , one step closer to the ideal European “witch” Judge Hathorne had in mind at Salem: Helen of Troy. By 1692, Helen of Troy’s name had already entered the pop-canon of European witch-lore with Christopher Marlowe’s play Faust .* Marlowe specifically plays on the idea of Helen’s irresistible sexuality as a temptation of the Devil. While Homer knew nothing of the Devil, he does portray Helen’s beauty as supernaturally baleful. The Trojans are so enraptured by her that they refuse to release her, against the advice of the elders, even though it spells doom for their city. These elders see Helen clearly:   Small blame that Trojans and well-greaved Achaeans should for such a woman long suffer woes; she is dreadfully like immortal goddesses to look on. But even so, though she is like them, let her g...

A friend of mine in Classics responded to my article on the Shield of Achilles by saying that it reminded her of the Pre-Socratic philosophers Heraclitus and Empedocles. I followed her lead and found it to be an excellent illustration of the persistence of the Greek world-picture. The Pre-Socratics were a group of thinkers spread across the Mediterranean that rejected the gods of Homer’s poetry in favor of the quest for the “Arche” or basic unit of existence. Their movement culminated in the great triad of Athenian philosophers: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Nevertheless, the Pre-Socratics share some fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality with Homer, and their models of the cosmos have peculiar similarities with Achilles’ shield. Heraclitus attacked Homer as “deceived”: Men have been deceived, he says, as to their knowledge of what is apparent in the same way that Homer was – and he was the wisest of all the Greeks. [B 54] .* Yet Heraclitus captures the essence...

The book of Exodus’ injunction is well-known from cinema, television, and stereotypical brimstone sermons: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18). Before fetching the pitchforks and torches, however, we must grapple with the question of what, exactly, it means to be a “witch.” The answer is not as easy as it first appears. Bridget Bishop of Salem, Massachusetts, confessed at her own arraignment for witchcraft, “I do not know what a witch is.”* When speaking of the Exodus passage in its original context, theologian and occultist Charles Williams reminds us that concepts such as “the Devil”** or even “Good and Evil”*** were vague or non-existent in antiquity. What, then, does the Exodus command actually prohibit? We find one clue in the curious episode of the Witch of Endor in I Samuel, whose primary crime was that she called up the spirits of the dead to tell the fortunes of the living. § However, by the 16 th or 17 th century, literary witches and suspects in Europ...

“Ancient Greece” covers hundreds of years and miles so that talking about a “Greek world view” or “what the Ancient Greeks thought” poses a problem. Nonetheless, scholars have discerned some essential similarities that united Ancient Greeks culturally across time and space in spite of local variations and inevitable dissenters. At rock bottom, the Ancient Greeks viewed reality as an agon , or contest. The strong properly ruled over the weak in a hierarchy of dominator and dominated: victor over vanquished, gods over men, men over women, adults over children, free over slave, human over animal and plant. Following this logic, the Greeks structured their society in a series of contests that proved who was the superior. The most important of these was warfare, but religious games, poetry competitions, dancing competitions, dramatic competitions, and rhetorical debates were also of key importance. To the Greeks, a boxing match or dance contest were not merely entertainments but expressio...