Metis

Metis is one of the most difficult to define Greek words. It's a person, the first wife of Zeus, who he ate -- naturally -- to keep her from bearing a son who would take over. If you're familiar with Detienne and Vernant's book on the subject, you might define it as "cunning intelligence," from the book's subtitle. 

Metis is morally ambiguous: praiseworthy when employed by Odysseus to entrap Trojan spies and strategize a way into Troy, but a negative quality by the time of Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis. Odysseus' metis in Iphigenia is so negatively portrayed that it allows the poet to pin the responsibility for Iphigenia's death on him, rather than on her father, who is to kill her, or her uncle, who started the war that made it necessary.

What's got me thinking about metis is some things I've read lately about the economy and the responsibilities of the younger generation. I see a tendency to expect metis of everyone in this modern world, and it makes our world more fragmented and angry. The Greeks, who invented cleverness and deception in the West, never envisioned a world where everyone would need to second-guess their neighbors and their public institutions on a daily basis. Maybe we should remember that cunning functions best when it's used only when necessary.  

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Noli credere id quod loquitur (Don't believe what people say)

"Wall, I am amazed you don't fall down, since you contain so many scribbles."

I often write here about the real world value of a classics education . I studied classics out of a simple, impractical affection for the subject; its practical value wasn't of interest to me until the affection had worn off a little. 

I've been thinking lately about how important it is *not* to take every statement at face value. Greek and Latin literature, read in the original, is the best education possible in the obfuscatoy power of language. Unless you're thoroughly anti-intellectual, a first glimpse of the 2-inch thick commentary on a 1000 line poem will destroy any notion of 'one word, one meaning. Witnessing an early Imperial poet damn Augustus while singing his praises *at the exact same time* makes you look askance at butt-kissers for the rest of your life.

Which brings me to a recent  NYT essay on disaffected working-class youth. "Young and Isolated" is about the poverty and isolation of working class young adults. Working class poverty is nothing new in the US, but the isolation of young adults is a fairly new issue. I had always naively assumed that one small advantage of a blue collar background is less pressure to move away from your extended family and perhaps even more time to spend with your spouse.

But you can't spend time with a spouse you believe you're too poor to have. From the article:

"Christopher, who was 25, stated simply, “Well, I have this problem of being tricked.” He explained: “Like, I will get a phone call that says, you won a free supply of magazines. And they will start coming to my house. Then all of a sudden I am getting calls from bill collectors for the subscriptions to Maxim and ESPN. It’s a runaround: I can’t figure out who to call. Now I don’t even pick up the phone, like I almost didn’t pick up when you called me.” He described isolation as the only safe path; by depending on no one, Christopher protected himself from trickery and betrayal.

....

Men often face a different challenge: the impossibility of living up to the male provider role. Brandon, who worked the night shift at a clothing store, described what he thought it would be like to be in a relationship with him: “No woman wants to sit on the couch all the time and watch TV and eat at Burger King. I can only take care of myself.”

This may be absurdly utopian,  but I can't help thinking that an acquaintance with classics would at least help with the problems of taking language too literally and having rigid notions of social roles. A standard line is that working class people need more and better vocational educaton, but I can't help thinking that a better appreciation of the subltleties of language, and its capacity for deception, would help Christopher. And Brandon might be amused by Ovid's thoughts

on the "male provider role":

now your beauty can’t captivate my eyes.

Why am I changed, you ask? Because you want gifts.

That’s the cause that stops you from pleasing me.

Once you were innocent, I loved you body and soul:

now your beauty’s flawed by this defect of mind.

Love is a child and naked: without the shabbiness of age

and without clothing, so he’s all openness.

Why tell Venus’s son to sell himself for cash?

Where can he keep cash, he’s got no clothes!

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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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Medieval People Doing Things

Elizabeth Chadwick, one of my favorite medieval fiction writers, blogged this video as one of her 'Friday Favorites' last week:

This is the kind of thing that is going to be roundly mocked by those without a soft spot for the middle ages. I might have liked a few more examples of illuminations from the manuscript, but there's still much to enjoy. I love the low-key, intensely practical daily activities and the 'clutter with a purpose' in the inside rooms: i.e., I have all this crap on a shelf because I'm making all my family's clothes or creating a beautiful book, not because I'm a hoarder.

Plus, toddlers love it. Lots of animals.

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I wish I could lecture like this: Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes

If you love myth, or just wish you could use more colorful language while teaching, check out Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes. A taste:

"… for a long, LONG time, the difference between a good story and a bad story was whether a bard could memorize it well enough to not get eviscerated by a mead hall full of drunken barbarians."

Discussing Cronus:

"So the moral of the story

is that if you are not ready to be a father

consider all of your options

before skipping directly to cannibalism."

I'm still reading it, so I'll no doubt have more quotes to share.

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