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Western Classical Thought and Culture. 2 . The Homeric Moral Outlook. 1. The Ideal Person and the Ideal Life. The Homeric moral outlook is most easily understood from its conception of the ideal person. Some of a person's goodness is outside his control.
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Western Classical Thought and Culture 2. The Homeric Moral Outlook
1. The Ideal Person and the Ideal Life The Homeric moral outlook is most easily understood from its conception of the ideal person. • Some of a person's goodness is outside his control. • A good person must have been born into a good family, and must himself be rich and strong. • The hereditary, social, and material components of a person's goodness are so important that, if you have them, you remain a good person, even if you behave badly. A Good Person Heredity Social Status Wealth
Some aspects of a person's goodness are in his control. • A hero is expected to display his excellence in his actions, characteristically and ideally the actions of a warrior and leader. • A good man excels in battle, and his characteristic virtues are strength, skill, and courage. • The hero is individualistic, in so far as he is concerned primarily with his own success and reputation; he does not aim primarily at some collective goal that includes the good of other people, or of a whole society.
An example: Achilles • Birth • Achilles was the son of the nymph Thetis and Peleus, the king of the Myrmidons. • His mother, Thetis is a sea nymph or known as the goddess of water. • when Achilles was born Thetis tried to make him immortal by dipping him in the river Styx. However, he was left vulnerable at the part of the body by which she held him, his heel. • He was taught by Chiron, an intellegent Centaur who was known for his knowledge and skills with medicine.
Achilles' parents: Thetis and Peleus (Attic red-figured kylix 460 BC)
Achilles in the Trojan War • Achilles' father sent him to Troy "always to be best and to excel the others". • Achilles is the "best of the Achaeans", above all because he is the strongest, the bravest, and the most skillful. • Achilles and Agamemnon quarrel at the beginning of the war, because Agamemnon takes Briseis, who is Achilles' prize, and so slights Achilles' honour. Honour, as Homer conceives it, includes, primarily, other people's good opinion, and, secondarily, the material and social "honours" that are both causes and effects of this good opinion.
2. Self and Others • The hero is certainly not indifferent to others. • Thetis is concerned about her son Achilles Thetis and attendants bring armor she had prepared for him to Achilles, an Attic black-figure hydria, c. 575–550 BC
Hector is concerned about his wife and son. • Hector's last visit to his family before his duel with Achilles: Astyanax, on Andromache's knees, stretches to touch his father's helmet. red-figure column-crater, 370–360 BC
A hero of superior strength and power has inferiors who depend on him, and he is expected to defend them. • A good husband, such as Hector, cares about his wife. • Achilles does what is expected of the greater hero, and cares about his friend and dependant Patroclus. • Odysseus appeals to the common interest of the group in his attempt to persuade Achilles to give up the quarrel with Agamemnon. Odysseus: was a legendary Greek king of Ithaca and the hero of Homer's epic poem the Odyssey.
Apart from these specific expectations of particular people in special relations to the hero, people in general expect him to be moved by common human feelings. • Achilles displays callous indifference in his dishonouring of Hector’s corpse. • He finally outgrows this attitude when he meets Priam: when he thinks of his own father, he understands Priam’s feelings and is moved by them. Priam begs Achilles to pity him, saying "I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before — I put my lips to the hands of the man who killed my son."
Triumphant Achilles: Achilles dragging the dead body of Hector in front of the gates of Troy, painting, 1892
Priam Asking Achilles to Return Hector's Body, painting, 1824
The interests of other people are important to a hero, but a hero’s attitude to these interests is not a prominent part of his goodness. • A hero is criticized if he is as indifferent to them as Achilles is. • Achilles loses none of his heroic virtue by being selfishly indifferent to others. • He remains the best of the Achaeans, and no one so much as suggests that his selfish indifference might damage his reputation for goodness. • If he had been captured by pirates and sold into slavery, he would have lost half his virtue.
3. Difficulties in Homeric Ethics • The Homeric outlook creates conflicts for those who accept it. • Some of the conflicts arise for the individual himself. • Achilles knows that honour is unstable and transitory, and in any case does not matter much to someone when he is dead. • However, his shame at the dishonour he suffers from the death of Patroculus forces him back into the batter, even though he knows his own death will be the result.
Homeric ethics creates the conflict within an individual, but it also creates it within a society. • Each hero wants his own honour and fights for it with others. When everyone tolerates this system, it may be bad for everyone. • Example: Penelope’s suitors. Their selfish and parasitic behaviour is bad for the whole community. But from one point of view, it is heroic, since it promises considerable rewards in honour and status for the lucky one who marries Penelope.
Thersites’s criticism Thersites was a soldier of the Greek army during the Trojan War. He is a brash, obstreperous, and ugly rabble-rouser. He denouces the kings as selfish parasites wasting the resources of the community. He is beaten by Odysseus for his insolence.
