What were people like before personalities?

It might seem strange that I've just begun thinking about ancient concepts of personality, considering that I'm 50 pages into a novel narrated by a Mycenaean Greek. But it's true -- my protagonist has just set sail for Troy, and I find myself wondering what he would have thought about for those ten years, and what would have motivated him to commit war atrocities like flinging children off of towers. 

Historical fiction is based on the premise that you can 'know' people from the past -- understand their lives and motives well enough to want to read about them for pleasure. How strange were people from the past? How could they do some of the awful things they did, and still think of themselves as good? Did they care about thinking of themselves as good people? If not, how did they want to see themselves? When questions like this start coming think and fast, I know my fiction writing is going to be stalled for a bit.

Many years ago I remembered reading- or hearing about - somebody who argued that the archaic Greeks formed their self-concept based on what other people said about them, which is why Hector fights in order to avoid "feeling shame before the Trojans and the Trojan women with trailing garments." I think the idea originated with Bruno Snell, but I can't find the passage. His chapter "Homer's View of Man" seems to be building towards some such point through a discussion of how Homeric Greek sees spirit, mind and psyche as separate entities, self-contained like any other bodily organ. 

How do you write about someone like that? What do that person's thought processes look like? I had little trouble showing Odysseus at home in Ithaca and marrying him off. These are universal, uncontroversial experiences. But leading soldiers in the Trojan war is an experience utterly unique to that (mythical) place and time, and so the character's motives become harder to imagine. There's the added difficulty of dirus Ulixes, the scarily detached and cruel Odysseus of the Iliad who seems so at odds with the intellectually curious explorer and dedicated husband of the Odyssey. If his spirit, mind and psyche operate separately, that might make it easier for him to commit atrocities like the betrayal of Dolon or the killing of Astyanax. On the other hand, where is the 'real' person in all this, the individual with whom a modern reader can sympathize? A tentative answer in my next post.

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Where's Egbert Bakker when you need him?

Many weeks ago, before an unscheduled hiatus from blogging, I read Mary Beard's post on defending the traditional lecture. Her main point is that lectures are about "changing minds and attitudes" rather than conveying information. She expands on this point in an anecdotal kind of way appropriate to a blog entry.

Now, I'm in favor of keeping the traditional lecture because it's usually the laziest students who want you to put more stuff online, plus PhDs are screwed over enough without suddenly making it possible for one part-timer to teach thousands of students. And it's still true, even in these degenerate days, that face to face teaching creates an intellectual alchemy that can't be found elsewhere.

If a more formal defense of the traditional lecture is offered, I wonder if classicists who specialize in archaic performance culture could contribute something. After all, they constantly write and think about oral performances and the formation of culture. A 2008 essay by Anna Bonifazi on how performances of the Iliad and Odyssey engaged the audience in a process of "shared visualization" is a perfect example: ? argues that audiences and the poet were familiar with more versions of the Trojan cycle than could be covered in a single performance, and that the performer used certain Greek words beginning with au- to direct the audiences' 'gaze' to particular scenes, characters and episodes. If it could be demonstrated that a similar process takes place in a college lecture hall, it would be a perfect example of how the in-person lecture goes far beyond content delivery.

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Loki grants stupid wishes

the Lokistone

So I love Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes so much I haven't finished it yet, because I have been limiting myself to one story a day. I read it aloud and the spouse and I laugh so hard we cry and the toddler laughs too, out of sympathy (we abbreviate/spell non-family friendly words, naturally).

The best part, so far, are the stories from Norse mythology, mostly because Loki (the Norse trickster god), Thor and Frejya have such a 'Three Stooges' thing going on. An example, from 'Thor Gets Jacked':

And Thor's like SOMEONE STOLE MY HAMMER."

And Loki is like "Wow. I actually seriously am not responsible for once"….

So they go see Freyja

and Freyja is like "Hey, Thor, what's good?"

And Thor is like "SOMEONE STOLE MY HAMMER. WAAAAHHHHH."

And Freyja is like "Shut the f*** up, man.

We can solve this mystery.

Loki, did you steal the hammer?"

And Loki is like "Nope."

And Freyja is like "Well, I'm out of ideas."

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