The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Classics: Justice of Zeus

Taking up and extending the argument of Hugh Lloyd-Jones’ The Justice of Zeus, William Allan argues that, contrary to common opinion, there si no real contrast between the operations of justice in the two Homeric epics.  Nor is “popular picture of ‘amoral’ or ’frivolous’ Homeric gods” accurate.

He argues that “simply to say of ‘divine justice’ in the Homeric poems that ‘this seems an unlikely role for the ‘time-seeking Olympians’ risks creating a false dichotomy, since the gods can be (and are) interested both in their own time and in wider issues of justice. Indeed, . . . any attempt to separate matters of time from wider issues of justice, whether among gods or humans, represents in itself a false dichotomy. . . . This is particularly true of such institutions as the oath and guest-friendship, where the gods’ concern for their own time is simultaneously a concern for justice.”  He argues further for “basic continuity between divine and human values: as social beings shaped by the relations among themselves, the gods value justice as much as humans do and are equally ready to assert a basic entitlement to honour and fair treatment, and to support the sanctions that ensure justice and punish its violation. Thus values such as justice are . . .  socially constituted on both the divine and human planes, and each level displays not only a hierarchy of power (and the resulting tensions), but also a structure of authority.”

Classics: Limited justice

In a 1982 article on justice in the Oresteia in the American Political Science Review, Peter Euben observes that the dualism of passion and action, violence adn renewal, obliteration and revelation that stymies politics and ethics in Argos seem to be overcome in the just city of Athens: “Certainly the Athens we see on stage at the end of the Eumenides shows (or at least indicates) men and women as partners in sustaining a whole which gives identity and dignity to each, rather than as victims of each other’s actions. Similarly young and old are not warring factions but mutual participants in a collectivity that communalizes the burdens of action while providing object and limit for passion. In Athens the deeds of children do not murder those of parents but enlarge them.  Freed from the mechanical cycle of revenge and the life-destroying passins which paralyzed action in the Agamemnon, these Athenians will participate in framing their own destiny in conjunction with the gods.”

But this is only a partial victory: “Yet even a just city is composed of mortals and thus of potentially warring forces.  Athens too must rely on those passions and actions whose destructiveness we have seen in the Agamemnon. Though the just polis does offer respite from injustice and corruption it is only a respite. Even if it can turn ruinous forces toward good, the dual capacity of passion and action remain.   That is why all resolution is but temporary.”  This is the best Aeschylus can offer; there is no city of the blessed, no permanently just city, no city of God.

Classics: Shame and Guilt

Ruth Benedict gave classic formulation to the contrast of shame and guilt cultures: “True shame cultures rely on external sanctions for good behavior, not, as true guilt cultures do, on an internalized conviction of sin.  Shame is a reaction to other people’s criticism.  A man is shamed either by being openly ridiculed and rejected or by fantasying to himself that he has been made ridiculous.  In either case it is a potent sanction.  But it requires an audience or at least a man’s fantasy of an audience.  Guilt does not.  In a nation where honor means living up to one’s own picture of oneself, a man may suffer from guilty though no man knows of his misdeed and a man’s feeling of guilt may actually be relieved by confessing his sin.”

Douglas Cairns (Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature) is skeptical.

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Classics: Women and Honor

In the Greek honor system, men prove themselves honorable and virtuous by defending women.  Explaining Achilles’ reaction to Agamemnon, Peter Walcot writes that “The law of reciprocity applies: when insulted or injured the man of honour must retaliate in at least equal measure if his personal prestige is to be upheld, and the man of honour is at his most sensitive when a woman from within the family group is in any way threatened.  Athenian law, for example, regarded homicide as justified if a man engaged in illicit sex and was caught in the act with a wife or even with other female dependents . . . of the killer.”

Crucial as women are to the honor system, the system is constructed in a way that excludes women from a share of honor.  Honor is won in competitive settings.  Walcott notes: ““Greek society was intensely competitive at every level, whether those engaged in competition were athletes, dramatists, statesmen, or soldiers.  And it was the relentless pursuit of honour, often at other’s expense, that made society so agonistic and, therefore, unstable.”  These agonistic settings are precisely the settings in which women have to place.  Honor is publicly bestowed; it is bestowed on public actions, and women cannot act in public.  For women, virtue is not found in honor but in shame.  Not even a woman’s name should come up in the public world of men: “Women especially must exhibit shame, keeping well out of the way of men: the great glory of a woman, Pericles claims in the Funeral Speech, is to be least talked about by men whether they are praising or criticizing her.”

Classics: Jenson on Greeks

In the first volume of Jenson and Braaten’s Christian Dogmatics 2 Vol Set, Jenson highlights five features of Hellenistic religion, which he says also characterizes Greek philosophy.  Of course, for Jenson, the central issue is time.

First, the crucial question is, “Can it be that all things pass?”  The myths (Hesiod) told of Chronos devouring his children, but the myths told of the overthrow of Chronos by later gods, ultimately by Zeus who establishes justice, order, fixity.  “Their religion was the determination that ‘Time;’ not be supreme, that he be overthrown by a true ‘Father of gods and men.’  Greek religion was a quest for a rock of ages, resistant to the flow of time, a place or part or aspect of reality immune to change.”  The one thing that distinguished gods from men is their “immortality, immunity to destruction.”  So too philosophy: Aristotle assured Athens that “Being as such neither comes to be nor perishes.”  Both mythically and philosophically, there’s something that resists the flow of time.

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Classics: Greek Purity

We typically think of Greeks as Apollonian and rational.  We don’t think of Greeks as people concerned with pollution and purity.  Like all ancient peoples, though, they were, as Robert Parker details in his wonderful Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Clarendon Paperbacks).

Early on, Parker cites from Hippocrates (the physician), who wrote a book On the Sacred Disease, and said this about Greek religion: “we mark out the boundaries of the temples and the groves of the gods, so that no one may pass them unless he be pure, and when we enter them we are sprinkled with holy water, not as being polluted, but as laying aside any other pollution which we formerly had.”  Greeks, in other words, mapped out the world into sacred and profane, permitted only the pure to cross into sacred territory, and used washing rites to cleanse pollution.

Since the Greek city was a religious as well as a civic order, purity and sanctity rules also governed the approach to the sacred city center.  Parker writes:

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Classics: Quiz

Who is being described: “a man of abnormally emotional temperament, with a solicitous goddess for a mother and a comrade to whom he is devoted,” who “is devastated by the latter’s death and plunges into a new course of action in an unbalanced state of mind, eventually to recover his equilibrium.”  Through his experience, he is “brought face to face with issues of life and death, railing against mortality but coming to understand and accept it.”

Achilles?  Yes, but as M.L. West points out (The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth), also Gilgamesh.  West argues that “the Gilgamesh complex . . . accounts for major elements in the Iliad‘s plot, structure, and ethos.”

Did Homer read Gilgamesh?  Did Plato read Moses?

Classics: Odysseus’ wisdom

The idea of Odysseus as a hero of mind or thought has an ancient pedigree.  The Pythagoreans interpreted Odysseus as a thinking man who passed through the underworld on a path of denial of the flesh and escape from the eternal round of reincarnation.

Proclus wrote, “Many are the wanderings and circlings of the soul: one among imaginings, one in opinions and one before these in understanding. But only the life according to nous has stability and this is the mystical harbor of the soul to which, on the one hand, the poem leads Odysseus through the great wandering of his life, and to which we too shall draw ourselves up, if we would reach salvation.” (The harbor of soul is Odysseus’ inland journey after his return to Ithaca.)

That doesn’t get the genius of the Odyssey, the great humanist epic that begins with the word andra and tells the story of the hero’s progress toward humanity in this world.  There is no transfiguration.  His road leads home toward wife, father, family, kingdom, and, ultimately, death.  It is the deepest wisdom, and the broadest humanity possible – in a world without resurrection.

Classics: Why We Needed Nietzsch

Jane Harrison begins her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Mythos Books) with a quotation from Ruskin regarding the “genius of the Greeks”: “there is no dread in their hearts; pensiveness, amazement, often deepest grief and desolation, but terror never. Everlasting calm in the presence of all Fate, and joy such as they might win, not indeed from perfect beauty, but from beauty at perfect rest.”

Harrison comments sardonically that “the Greek, the favoured child of fortune yet ever unspoilt, was exempt from the discipline to which the rest of mankind has been subject, never needed to learn the lesson that in the Fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom.”

Ruskin shows that if there had been no Nietzsche, we’d have to invent him.

Classics: Cult of the Greeks

David Gress’s excellent From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents shows that classics programs, the discipline of classics, great books programs, are founded on a highly questionable “grand narrative” of Western civilization. According to this narrative, Western history is a series of magic moments, beginning with Athens, the “magic moment of magic moments,” and that it is a continuous development from that Athenian beginning.

Gress finds this unconvincing for several reasons:

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Classics: Libido dominandi

David Potter confirms Augustine’s claim that the foreign wars of Rome were an extension of a lust for domination and honor: Roman “thinking [about the outside world] involved terms such as gloria, the glory that was won in battle, the ability to compel a foreign people to do something. That which was to be preserved was decus, or ‘face,’ fastigium, dignity, or the maiestas, ‘majesty’ of the empire. Foreign peoples who challenged the gloria or decus of Rome suffered from superbia, or arrogance, which led them to do iniuriae, injuries, to Rome, which needed, above all, to be avenged.”

Classics: Early Archaeology

David Stone Potter again: “Homeric archaeology did not begin with Calvert or Schliemann.  It was a feature of life in the second and third centuries AD, when ancient monuments were recognized as such and attached to the world of the poems.  There is no reason to doubt that the scepter of Agamemnon that Pausanias reported as being the most revered object at Chaeronea in Boeotia was still there in the time of Philstratus, or that the spear of Achilles had departed from its privileged position at Phaselis in Lycia.  So too we may well suppose that the letter that Sarpedon sent from Troy to Xanthus and Lycia was just as readily available for inspection by famous people as it had been in the first century AD, when Vespasian’s associate, Mucianus, saw it.”

Everything fit perfectly: “The spear that was at Phaselis was of bronze, and so was the sword of Memnon that was in the temple of Asclepius at Nicomedia, proving that Homer was correct to say that the heroes fought with bronze weapons.  The tomb of Ajax in the Troad was huge, as befitted the hero, and the tomb of Agamemnon said to be within the ruined walls of Mycenae was said to be rich in gold.”

Classics: Magnanimity

Aristotle defined magnanimity or “great-mindedness” as a proper estimate of one’s merits: “The Great-minded man is then, as far as greatness is concerned, at the summit, but in respect of propriety he is in the mean, because he estimates himself at his real value (the other characters respectively are in excess and defect). . . . Honour then and dishonour are specially the object-matter of the Great-minded man: and at such as is great, and given by good men, he will be pleased moderately as getting his own, or perhaps somewhat less for no honour can be quite adequate to perfect virtue: but still he will accept this because they have nothing higher to give him. But such as is given by ordinary people and on trifling grounds he will entirely despise, because these do not come up to his deserts: and dishonour likewise, because in his case there cannot be just ground for it.”

For Aristotle, “this virtue of Great-mindedness seems to be a kind of ornament of all the other virtues, in that it makes them better and cannot be without them; and for this reason it is a hard matter to be really and truly Great-minded; for it cannot be without thorough goodness and nobleness of character.”

Christians continued to use the word, but radically redefined it.

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Classics: Holding Hands

Judith Evans Grubbs notes that the Antonine Roman emperors pursued a pro-family agenda, employing pro-family numismatic symbols for that purpose: In addition to the use of the goddess Pudicitia, “also celebrated on Antonine coins is the concordia (sense of harmony, agreement) shared by the emperor and his wife, symbolized by the dextrarum iunctio (joining of hands) of the imperial couple.  Previously employed to represent political agreement between male members of the ruling family, from the second century on the dextrarum iunctio came to symbolize marital concord especially.  Many sarcophagi of the late second and third centuries portray the deceased standing hand in hand with his or her spouse, sometimes in an iconographic context suggesting the marriage ceremony itself.”

Classics: Athens’s success

Danielle Allen has a fascinating review of Josiah Ober’s Democracy and Knowledge in the TNR (3/18).  Allen notes that eighteenth century thinkers, including the American founders, considered Athenian democracy a failure, and concluded that “pure democracy devolved into either anarchy or rule by a corrupt managerial elite.”  

Ober’s volume, the capstone of a trilogy on Athenian democracy, argues otherwise, and asks why made Athens a success.  One question Allen raises is why the American Founders seem to have gotten Athens so badly wrong.  Her answer is that “the entire evidential base for this discussion has changed in the last two hundred years.”  We simply know a lot more about Athens than they did, and that’s because of sustained classical study on a number of fronts:

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Classics: Greek and ANE

Classics: Epicurean indifference revisited

Wes Callihan writes, in response to my brief quotation from Lucretius:

“Possibly, however, Lucretius wouldn’t consider the indifferent watcher from the porch outside Pompeii a true Epicurean. Doesn’t the very next line go on to say something about how the pleasure is *not* in the other person’s suffering but in recognizing your own safety? And that seems to be the context in which we should take his conclusion, that it’s with this kind of pleasure that the philosophical man should look down from his citadel of wisdom on those struggling in ignorance below — not pleasure in their ignorance but in his own rescue from it. And isn’t the entire poem evidence that Lucretius himself is not indifferent, but interested in raising others up to his safe height by teaching them the nature of things?

“Of course, if he’s right about the nature of things, why shouldn’t we be indifferent, and why should try to elevate others to understanding…

“Since Lucretius describes the cosmos as merely the result of unaccountable veerings and bonkings-together of the ever falling atoms, my students like to call it the Great Swerve, and unfortunate occurences are ‘bad swerve’ and good occurences are ‘good swerve.’  ‘Good swerve on your test tomorrow!’ ‘I’m sorry you stubbed your toe — bad swerve.’”

Classics: Lucretian wisdom

Book 2 of De rerum natura begins with “It is sweet on the great sea to watch from the shore other people drowning.”

The words were found on a wall on a house in Pompeii.  Perhaps someone sweetly watched from a perch opposite Vesuvius as the lava flow swallowed up the town, and that house.  Such are the ironies of Epicurean indifference.

Classics: Roman Death

Andrew Feldherr writes in the TLS that Romans were known by the way they died, as well as how they killed.  Not only individual Romans either: “The Romans as a people ‘decline and fall’; and their collective role as the West’s memento mori continues in the stream of recent books that imply the collapse of American society merely by comparing it to Rome.”

Feldherr is reviewing Catherine Edwards’s recent Death in Ancient Rome (Yale), which argues that Romans considered death a contest and a victory rather than a defeat.  As Feldherr says, “The identity of winner and loser that results from claiming death as a contest becomes a perfect figure for the paradox that it takes a Roman to beat a Roman.  And it is in this context that suicide, the most immediately active form of death, becomes a particularly Roman art, epitomizing, but also displacing, the events of the battlefield.”

Edwards sees continuity between the Roman way of death and Christian martyrdom, which she argues owes much to “the Roman calculus of death as victory.”  Feldherr disagrees, saying that Christian teaching changed everything by preaching “a creed that denies the reality of death itself.”  Well, no.  It’s a creed that preaches the grim reality of death but also the victory of resurrection.

Classics: Gratitude in ancient thought

Griffin begins her essay: “The exchange of beneficia – gifts and services – was an important feature of Greek and Roman society at all periods. Its prominence was reflected in the number of philosophical works that analyzed the phenomenon. From the fourth century B.C. onwards, euergesia and charis became subjects of moral discourse. Xenophon, particularly in his Socratic works and the Cyropaideia, and Aristotle, in his rhetorical and ethical writings, already anticipate much of what the Hellenistic schools were to elaborate. One of Aristotle’s followers gave the first clear formulation we have of the idea that ‘the giving and interchange of favours holds together the lives of men.’ Aristotle’s successor Theophrastus wrote the first treatise we know of to deal wholly and specifically with the subject of charis. His On Gratitude . . . had a long line of successors, including Epicurus’s On Gifts and Gratitude . . . and Chrysippus’ Stoic treatments of the subject, both as part of a general work On Duties . . . and in a separate work On Favours.”

Unfortunately, only two of these many treatises survive – Cicero’s de Officiis and Seneca’s de Beneficiis.

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