50 Years of Classical Studies
at the ANU:
A Celebration hosted by the
Friends of the ANU Classics Museum
Friday 1 September: Public Lecture
Mr Luke Slattery: Andromache's Lament
Preface
It’s a great honour to be able to address you tonight, on such
an occasion. Congratulations to the ANU Classics Program on its 50th
anniversary, and thank you for asking me to speak.
As someone who is passionate about the Classics, but who is by no means
classically trained, I stand here tonight astonished somewhat by my
own audacity. At any minute I expect two gruff gentlemen bearing manacles
to lead me away on charges of impersonating an expert.
My place will be taken by a scholar able to discourse on The Curious
Theology of Bone Marrow in Plato’s Timaeus (the actual subject
of an address at a classics conference at the University of Kentucky);
or Strophe and Anti-Strophe: How the binary opposition of the Classical
Stage subverts the essentialism of the male martial utterance (which
I just made up).
Anyway, enough throat clearing.
The influential French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once wrote
that “the concept of an all-inclusive humanity, which makes no
distinction between races or cultures, appeared very late in the history
of mankind and did not spread very widely across the globe. What is
more, as proved by recent events, even in the one region where it seemed
most developed, it has not escaped periods of regression and ambiguity
(Levi-Strauss was writing a few years after the surrender of the Reich).
“For the majority of the human species,” he went on, “and
for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every
human being on the face of the earth does not exist at all. The designation
stops at the border of each tribe, or linguistic group, sometimes at
the edge of a village.”
Levi-Strauss, I want to suggest tonight, got it wrong. The concept of
an all-inclusive humanity which makes no distinction between races and
cultures, in fact appears very early in the history of mankind - in
Homer’s Iliad. The epic of Ilion, or Ilium, forged in the 8th
or 7th century before the Common Era, was borne across and beyond the
Mediterranean basin by those two great engines of Hellenisation: Macedon
and Rome.
It was, and is, an international story; and in it we find an apprehension
of inclusive humanity, of species solidarity, that is also, by a quirk
– or perhaps gift - of history, uniquely accessible to all descendants
of the Dardanelles campaign of 1915.
I can best explain what I mean by telling a tale. It’s the record
of a personal journey, and a journey of the mind; a journey at once
timeless and temporal.
Andromache’s Lament.
An ageing Turkish car ferry churns the Dardanelles, battling against
currents swift and unseen. From the upper deck of the “feribot”,
as it’s quaintly called, I take in the city of Canakkale. A sprawl
of faceless and charmless concrete apartments, it looks like something
thrown up in a day, left unfinished, and inhabited simply because it
was there. Two Ottoman forts on either side of the narrows - one heart-shaped,
as if designed by a Persian poet - are the only treat for the eye. But
of course they have a darker purpose, as reminders of war in a region
rich in blood-soaked soil.
Battles have been fought here from the age of bronze-greaved warriors
with boars’ tusk helmets and throwing spears, to the time of subterranean
trench cities, howitzers and suicidal bayonet-charges. The years have
barely suppressed the clamorous battle cries, the clash of metal on
metal - on flesh, on bone.
The ruins of the ancient fortified town of Hisarlik, believed by many
to be Homer's Troy, lie a few kilometres south of Canakkale. Behind
me, on the Gallipoli peninsula, are the broken remains of 44,000 Allied
soldiers and twice that number of Turks - put to the slaughter in 1915.
The shades of the dead cry out from both sides of the Dardanelles, known
to the ancients as the Hellespont. Here at the juncture of East and
West, the brackish waters of Central Asia spill from the Black Sea into
the ecstatically blue Aegean. Here, at the Hellespont, worlds collide.
It all began in the age of gods, heroes and dreams, at least 13 centuries
before the birth of Christ, when a Greek armada of black warships set
out to crush an Asian town rich in bars of gold, buttressed by massive
ramparts, bolstered by allies from across the East; the original clash
of civilisations. It was a disproportionate, and in many ways still
inexplicable, response to the seduction of a legendary beauty, Helen
of Sparta, by a pretty Trojan prince called Paris; who is also, in some
traditions, known as Alexander.
The Persian King Xerxes many centuries later, in 480 BC, had to bridge
this narrow neck of restive water before he could march on Greece. “When
he saw all the Hellespont covered with ships and all the shores and
plains ... full of men, then Xerxes declared himself a happy man,”
writes Herodotus. Shortly afterward, the king bursts into tears. Drying
his eyes, Xerxes reflects on the shortness of the life of a man –
“here are all these thousands and not a one of them will be alive
a hundred years from now.”
Alexander the Great, a century and a half later, launched a retaliatory
conquest of Persia by crossing the Hellespont, west to east, at the
head of 160 triremes and many more merchant ships. Springing ashore
not far from Troy in a full suit of armour, the young Macedonian king
announced his intentions by spearing the Asian shore. The 2nd-century
chronicler Arrian reports that Alexander “built an altar on the
spot where he left the shore of Europe and another where he landed on
the other side of the strait, both of them dedicated to Zeus, the lord
of safe landings, Athena and Heracles”. Thoroughly schooled in
the Iliad, and keen to invoke the shimmering past at every turn, Alexander
had no sooner finished propitiating his expedition than he went to bow
before the tomb of Achilles, most glamorous of the Greek heroes. He
found weapons there - preserved, so it was said, from the Trojan War
- including a “sacred shield” which he took as a souvenir
and had carried into battle by a bodyguard. Alexander not only revered
the gods and heroes of antiquity, he saw himself as a rival to the godlike
Achilles and a personal favourite of Zeus.
Mytho-poetic vapours, not quite as intoxicating as those that filled
the head of the young Alexander, yet emanating from the same source,
clouded many a mind during the Dardanelles campaign of 1915. Young hoplites
from Britain, France and the dominions were sent into battle against
walls of flying metal because this place was also an ideal; to the west
lay the “holy land” of Attica; to the east the Ottoman scourge.
When the time came to address his troops before their first blooding,
the romantically minded Commander-in-Chief of the expeditionary force,
General Sir Ian Hamilton, invoked the eternal fame of the Homeric heroes.
“You will hardly fade away until the sun fades out of the sky
and the earth sinks into the universal blackness,” he declared,
“for already you form part of that great tradition of the Dardanelles
which began with Hector and Achilles. In another few thousand years
the two stories will have blended into one…”
At school the officer corps had imbibed the Iliad and the Odyssey. Patrick
Shaw Stewart, combatant and classicist, took an old copy of Herodotus
on the boat to Gallipoli. “The flower of sentimentality expands
childishly in me on classical soil.” he wrote. “It is really
delightful to bathe in the Hellespont looking straight over to Troy.”
He died in action in 1917, and his reputation as a war poet rests on
a posthumously published work building steadily to these lines:
Was it so hard, Achilles,
So very hard to die?
Thou knewest and I know not –
So much the happier am I.
So I will go back this morning
From Imbros over the sea;
Stand in the trench, Achilles,
Flame-capped, and shout for me.
To Shaw Stewart and other sentimental classicists of his ilk, the Homeric
heroes were at once gods of war and comrades in arms. So much for W.B
Yeats; this was a Second Troy. The much-loved Rupert Brooke, en route
to the Dardanelles - he was to die of an infected mosquito bite two
days before the dawn landings pictured the impending battle in the colours
of a glorious past:
They say Achilles in the darkness stirred ...
And Priam and his fifty sons
Wake all amazed, and hear the guns,
And shake for Troy again.
The officers and soldiers of the Australian Imperial Force were hardly
immune to the resonance of their surroundings. An Australian contingent,
pushing out their trenches at Gallipoli, chipped away at the buried
remains of an ancient settlement; but there was no time for amateur
archaeology, and enemy fire propelled them on. Charles Bean, the classically
educated war correspondent and official military historian, later kicked
at the dirt and uncovered a coin of ancient provenance.
The Anzacs may not have penned war poetry of lasting merit, but this
piece of waggish Aussie doggerel offers a distinctively ironic counter
to the high-toned romance of war:
An then ol’ Joe – ‘e was a well read chap –
Starts tellin’ us about a ten years scrap
They ‘ad in Troy which wasn’t far away
So Joe made out, from where we were that day.
A bloke ‘ad pinched a bonzer tabby, then
‘Er own bloke came to get ‘er back again,
An all ‘is cobbers came to see fair play,
An’ in the end they got ‘er safe away.
But Bill ‘e didn’t think a scrap could start
And last 10 years about a blanky tart;
No Jane ‘e’d ever met was worth a brawl.
There must be something else behind it all.
Within a few years of the homecoming the Anzac experience of blood,
mud and gore was burnished with the much more brilliant Anzac legend;
the hard-bitten Australian digger was openly likened to both the Greek
citizen-soldier and the Homeric warrior of myth. For the author of “The
Trojan War 1915”, a member of the Australian Field Ambulance on
Gallipoli, the digger was a reincarnated Greek hero:
Homeric wars are fought again
By men who like old Greeks can die;
Australian backblock heroes slain,
With Hector and Achilles lie.
Today the bones of those “backblock heroes” rest in mass
graves along the European coast of a Muslim country upon which a secular
state has been grafted; an uneasy hybrid of East and West. Canakkale,
like much of modern Turkey an architectural expression of budget modernism,
is the gateway to the mythic battlefields of Troy and the very real
killing fields of the Gallipoli peninsula. Tours of both Troy and Gallipoli
set out most days from the city, and upon it each year descends the
annual Anzac pilgrimage. The locals are awakened on April 26 by the
moaning of the muezzin to find the town drunk dry, its hotels silent
but for the snoring of young Australians and New Zealanders.
Nationalism and pacifism, pathos and pride, ancestor worship and Christian
solace: these are the mixed messages of our Anzac Day as it has evolved
into a form of public theatre. But there is a larger, universal lesson,
and it has never been more relevant. It was cruelly imparted on the
tawny heights beyond Anzac Cove, where entrenched Australian and Kiwi
battalions faced the Turks at close range.
It was there that the Australian forward posts found a way to befriend
the enemy; it was there that the dehumanising distinctions that sanction
human destruction - distinctions between “my tribe” and
“my enemy”, human and non-human - were broken down as the
days wore on and the death toll on both sides mounted to grotesque proportions.
As Bean wrote in his diary: “It is extraordinary how the men have
changed in their attitude towards the Turks. They were very savage the
first day because they found some of their wounded (or dead) mutilated;
but since the slaughter of May 19 [the night of a failed Turkish assault]
and since they have seen the wounded lying about in front of the trenches
they have changed entirely. They are quite friendly with the Turks;
anxious to get in the wounded if they can - give them cigarettes. The
Indians with the mules down here also take the prisoners chocolates
- they give our men some also.”
In an age of assassins and jihads, terrorism and counter-terrorism,
this is the most urgent legacy of the Anzac tragedy. Humanist in essence,
universal in scope, it is an open challenge to the psychology that begets
war and sustains it. That this humanist lesson can also be extracted
from the Trojan War, as sung by Homer, might surprise. But just as the
full significance of the Anzac legend embraces both jingoism and pacifism,
the Iliad is an epic of many parts.
The poet draws our gaze to the beguiling and inventive dance of death
before revealing, in an altogether fresh and humane tone, its consequences
for the living. Much of the story is concerned with what bodies do to
bodies; how they kill and how they die; how they vanquish and how they
fall. The distinguished Harvard classicist Emily Vermeule took the trouble
of cataloguing Homer’s stomach-churners. They include the “unforgettable
moment when Archelochos, Antenor’s son, is hit so hard in the
neck that his head, mouth, and nose thump to the ground in front of
his standing legs and knees. There is Phereklos the carpenter who builds
Paris’ ships, pierced through the buttocks and bladder and dropped
screaming to his knees. Meriones the Cretan specialises in this blow,
which stretches a man like a worm on the ground…The bronze feels
cold in Pedaios’ mouth when the spear blade crashes through his
teeth and cuts under his tongue. Teeth and tongues carpet the poetic
ground, or rattle in the head while the eyes fill with blood, eyes also
pop out on spearpoints like poppy flowers, or plop in the dust at one’s
feet…
“Agamemnon prefers to cut off arms and legs, and roll the limbless
trunk through the crowd, or sever a head, just as Ajax and his brother
roll Imbrios’ head like a ball to Hector’s feet, three famous
scenes. This black and ornamental wit offers pictures of the brain running
out through the eyehole along the spearshaft, the bone marrow spurting
from the cut spinal column, Oinomaos clawing the dust with his entrails
hanging out, or Polydoros, Priam’s son, catching his bowels in
his hands.”
There is most certainly this Homer; connoisseur of death. But there
is at least one more face to the poet, or poets. For let us not forget:
the Iliad is a martial epic that concludes as a domestic tragedy. It
opens with the “rage” of Achilles; it closes with the suffering
of the Trojan King Priam’s people as they bury their champion
Hector, “tamer of horses”. In the Iliad, war is beautiful;
and war is monstrous.
Who was Homer? Was he blind? Was he one man, or two, or perhaps the
corporate brand-name of a workshop or guild? The traditional Homeric
question goes to the poet’s identity. A more interesting variation
is reflected in the query: what do we mean by the adjective Homeric?
What are Homeric values? How is it that the Iliad’s heroes, at
once humane and inhuman, godlike and barbaric, came to be celebrated
in the Greek and Roman worlds, and in a living tradition since the Christian
pre-Renaissance, as illustrious ancestors, first men in the chain of
Western civilisation? With these questions in mind, I went one morning
from Canakkale to the supposed site of Troy itself.
Mustafa Askin, a former economist born and raised at Hisarlik, less
than an hour’s drive south of Canakkale, is our guide. Childhood
conferred the perfect apprenticeship for the role. Riding his donkey
through ripening fields, slashing at stray heads of wheat with a sword
snapped from a sapling, he was Hector come to drive the Achaeans into
the sea. When school broke for the day he would run for the ruins with
his friends – for a playground they had a 5000-year-old archaeological
site. In his retirement, Askin has returned to this place of first dreams.
And as we drive across a bare landscape caressed by a cool white morning
light, he stands up in the cramped minibus and begins a set-piece narration.
Askin begins with stories that feed into the Iliad - tributaries of
a larger mythic cycle. Hecuba, wife of Priam, has dreamt that her second
son will bring devastation on Troy, and so after his birth the infant
Paris is exposed on nearby Mount Ida. Suckled by a she-bear, he not
only survives, he thrives. So dazzling is the young rustic’s beauty
that it comes to the attention of Zeus. Who better, he thinks, to adjudicate
on a recent quarrel between Aphrodite, Hera and Athena over the title
of goddess most beautiful? Athena offers him victory in war, while Hera
tempts him with “universal dominion”, or power. The golden
Aphrodite, for her part, bribes him with the hand of Helen, queen of
Sparta and daughter of Zeus. His lips moisten, and he nods.
So Paris sails to Sparta to work his god-given charms, and by the 10th
day has persuaded the feckless Helen to abscond to his ancestral home
of Troy. Some say she left behind a nine-year-old daughter, taking as
much treasure as she could store in the folds of her flimsy chiton.
Not an auspicious start for the world’s first beauty pageant.
Askin turns to a sleepy teenager propped beside his father. “What
would you prefer: wisdom, power or beauty?” He takes his time:
“Power.” “A few years older,” reflects Askin,
“and he would have said beauty.”
The entrance to the site known as Troy is garlanded with evocative classical
orders - remnants of a Greco-Roman town built atop the ruins of a much
older settlement - and guarded by a kitsch contemporary wooden horse
some 15 metres high. The Trojan Horse story, the original Greek ruse,
is a kind of appendix to the Iliad not actually found in the body of
the poem. “There is debate about the wooden horse,” offers
our guide. “But children love it.”
The kids in the minibus climb into this vast equine belly – legendary
repository of the city’s destroyers – to smile and wave
back at their parents' digital cameras. While it helps to pull the tourists
and to brand the otherwise unremarkable site, it seems a little too
Disney: welcome to Troyland!
The site was inhabited from the early Bronze Age to Roman times, and
contains, like a collapsed multi-level carpark, some nine layers of
settlement. The excavation site helps us to see the Iliad as the sum
of its many layers - compounded, warped, and emulsified by time. This
may in fact be the best working metaphor to explain the intimate co-existence
in the same coherent text of implacable savagery and the spark of something
like universal empathy. The stones of Hisarlik offer us a new way of
looking at the Iliad: archaeologically.
For centuries before they were fixed in writing, both the Iliad and
the Odyssey were oral epics transmitted from master to apprentice, generation
to generation. One of the defining features of inherited oral epic is
its heavy reliance on set-piece formulas - “bronze-greaved Achaeans”,
“wine-dark sea”. These are aids to memory; verbal building
blocks fashioned to fit precise metrical requirements. Their presence
tells us something about the poem’s composition and its transmission;
a process, according to historian Oswyn Murray, that encourages the
“survival of descriptive elements long after they had ceased to
exist in the real world”. The result is a coherent literary work
that is nevertheless composed of verbal sediments, broken and re-composed,
fired in the mythic imagination by the epic muse.
The Iliad does not only record, in a mixed-up way, the strata of history;
it traces the evolution of man’s inner life. Homer’s world
was recovering from the material and intellectual poverty of its Dark
Ages, just setting out on the journey that would culminate four centuries
later in the glories of the Athenian golden age. Though materially poor
it had become, on the evidence of Homer and his near contemporary Hesiod,
verbally rich. And into this new written language - an artificial literary
language - the first seeds of humanism were sown. Homer’s epic
certainly entertained its listeners with a celebration of the competitive
warrior ethos and a precise, balletic, at times darkly comic, rendering
of death. And yet it also preserves in song the pressure of a new sensibility;
in the words of the great Cambridge classicist, Moses Finley, a “new
religion”.
In the course of his narrative Homer seems to dismantle the crude emotional
scaffolding upon which the battle scenes have been erected, as famously
announced in the opening lines: “Rage - Goddess, sing the rage
of Peleus' son Achilles.” Achilles ultimately submits to the entreaties
of King Priam, to return the corpse of his son Hector. And with this
act - even though a ransom is involved - the sulking hero's humanity
is restored. A man appears from behind the mask.
Achilles has not only killed Hector to avenge the death of his beloved
Patroclus, he has trussed up the corpse and dragged it behind a chariot
around the tomb. Priam stills the wrath of Achilles, and departs in
dignity with the body of his son. But not before the redoubtable old
king and the doomed hero have showered the ground with tears. Priam
begs Achilles for pity in the name of the gods and his own father, and
he receives it. And then:
both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely
for man-killing Hector, throbbing, crouching
before Achilles’ feet as Achilles wept himself,
now for his father, now for Patroclus once again,
and their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house.
The tears not only bind the two adversaries, they alchemise brutal
Achilles into a compassionate prince whose generosity of spirit is all
the more remarkable given his impending death. With little time left
to him he values all the more the life in others. Achilles counsels
Priam:
Let us put our griefs to rest in our own hearts,
rake them up no more, raw as we are with mourning.
What good's to be won from tears that chill the spirit?
The warrior-hero with the unbridled death lust is, suddenly and surprisingly,
in complete control of his emotions. Achilles seems to have come through
the fire of vengeance to embrace the virtues of temperance. He orders
his servants to bathe and anoint Hector's body, if only to spare Priam’s
feelings:
He feared that, overwhelmed by the sight of Hector,
Wild with grief, Priam might let his anger flare
and Achilles might fly into fresh rage himself.
At the sight of Hector's body, the Trojan citizenry succumbs to grief.
The imperatives of vengeance dissolve into clear-eyed and unsentimental
sympathy. Hector's wife, “white-armed” Andromache, gently
cradles her husband's head and beats out a lament for herself and the
child Astyanax:
Oh my husband...
Cut off from life so young! You leave me a widow,
lost in the royal halls - and the boy only a baby,
The Trojan hero was no man of mercy. And his son, Andromache fears,
will be hurled from the battlements by some Greek because “Hector
once cut down his brother”. There is no unsullied heroism in such
a war - only death and heartbreak. Andromache's lament is hard-won wisdom,
in the best Greek sense. Hector's widow foresees the “horror”
of abandonment. Would that Hector had died in bed or with some last
word from the heart. Instead she is left to lament the future - “always,
weeping for you through all my days and nights.” With this an
aperture opens in the archaic masonry. And civilisation shines through.
The register of the poem shifts markedly as we advance from the battle
books and the crisis of Achilles the anarchist hero, through the gates
of a living community to observe its confrontation with individual and
collective extinction. The original audience for the epic understood
the fate of Priam’s clan - the widow, the fatherless child, the
family felled by grief, and the extended family doomed by the loss of
its champion and protector - as a universal story at once Greek and
Trojan. (How much more powerful would the poem have been to an Athenian
audience, immured within the city’s long walls, during the long
war with Sparta? How rich must the literary and contemporary echoes
have been for the audience of Euripides' The Trojan Women, which fulfills
the dark forebodings voiced by Andromache?)
The Christian mystic Simone Weil, in an influential essay on the Iliad,
saw its dreadful modernism in the unsentimental vision of man as a thing
either conquering or conquered. “The true hero, the real subject,
the core of the Iliad, is force,” she wrote in 1939. “The
force that is wielded by men rules over them, and before it man's flesh
cringes. The human soul never ceases to be transformed by its encounter
with force - is swept on, blinded by that which it believes itself unable
to handle, bowed beneath the power of that which it suffers. Force makes
a thing of its victims. There where someone stood a moment ago, stands
no-one.”
All this is certainly true of the Iliad as war music, but not so of
the epic as narrative; it is true of the set-piece battle scenes, but
not of the poem's domestic, and predominantly Trojan, grace notes, its
lingering tones of loss and lamentation. Weil alluded to this too, when
she wrote of the “extraordinary equity” of the poem –
it was “impartial as sunlight…”
The Iliad shows us not only how force throws the living down to Hades;
it reveals how the same force transforms and ennobles the living, both
Greek and Trojan, through submission to bitter necessity. The same yoke
is shared by all. The poem opens with the rage of Achilles and closes
with Andromache’s grief; it ascends the scale of human emotions
and engraves a distinctively humanist – a universalist –
signature on the hearts of its readers. The true hero, the true subject
of the Iliad, is man’s journey from savagery to civilisation.
For the German-born philosopher Hannah Arendt the precondition of full
humanism – or “impartiality” – first springs
from the Homeric world. Impartiality is reflected in the golden chambers
of Olympus, where even the gods are divided over the fate of Troy. “I
think it [impartiality] can be traced to the moment when Homer chose
to sing the deeds of the Trojans no less than those of the Achaeans,
and to praise the glory of Hector, the foe and the defeated man, no
less than the glory of Achilles, the hero of his kinfolk,” Arendt
wrote. “This had happened nowhere before; no other civilisation,
however splendid, had been able to look with equal eyes upon friend
and foe, upon success and defeat.”
Homeric impartiality, from which springs an apprehension of universal
humanity, is something the Iliad has to rise to; as if struggling for
air. The books that sing of war’s consequences for the living
are undoubtedly aerated by Finley’s “revolution in religion”
– an entirely new creation. This revolutionary religion, humanism,
remains our best protection against human destruction and terror of
all shades. After Homer, Shylock’s Shakespeare offers the canonical
literary expression of humanist universality: “Hath not a Jew
eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections,
passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by
the same winter and summer, as a Christian? If you prick us, do we not
bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not
die?” For Jew read Trojan. Or perhaps Turk.
It’s at the point where the Homeric epic admits these apprehensions
of impartiality and universality that it converges with the message
of Anzac. Homer’s sympathies, like those of the gods who keep
watch on the battle, intervening at will, fall with equal weight between
Trojan and Greek; neither side is more beautiful, more courageous, more
worthy of our sympathy and respect. In some ways the Trojan Hector,
defender of family, home and tribe, is the real hero of the poem and
its emblem of civilising virtue. His span of free will is even more
tightly circumscribed than Achilles’; Hector has no choice but
to fight.
At the poem’s close Homer compels us to sympathise with the vanquished
- for all victims - and to see fate as a form of knowing surrender to
bitter death. All are ruled by the same family of gods.
When the Anzacs cooled their rage and called across the trenches to
“Johnny Turk” they were echoing Homer's song. They were
anglicising the Turk, just as Homer had Hellenised the Trojan. This
strand of the Anzac story - the discovery of humanising affinity within
the jaws of enmity - speaks to us from the war of 1914-18 in a distinctly
modern tone. It counsels us to cleave to tribe or nation without surrendering
our identity to the group. And in doing so it inoculates against the
dictatorship of “identities that kill”, to use the phrase
of Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf. “We blithely express sweeping
judgements on whole peoples,” he says, “calling them ‘hardworking'
and 'ingenious', or 'lazy', 'touchy', 'sly', 'proud', or 'obstinate'.
And sometimes this ends in bloodshed.”
The Anzac campaign, for Turkey and Australia, is a keystone of modern
statehood and national identity. But the nationalist mythology has served
its purpose, the nation-building has been done. The humanist lessons
of Gallipoli, on the other hand, are increasingly urgent.
The day after visiting the site of Troy, I join a tour to the Gallipoli
battlefields, taking the ferry back across the narrows. Spring, on my
first day in the peninsula, had seemed an impossible age away. But while
the earth is cold underfoot today, the sun is sweet and warm. An earnest
Kiwi couple, a laddish Brit, a French girl who isn’t quite sure
why she’s here, and two Australians scramble up one of the scrubby
hills at Ari Burnu. Leading the way is Ali, a retired naval captain
in his late sixties. He stops half way up the track and yanks at a loop
of rusted wire - a battle trophy unveiled by winter rains.
From the top of this scrubby hillock we survey the terrain. No photograph
adequately conveys the menace of this naturally castellated coastline,
no two-dimensional reconstruction will ever do justice to its bleak
and brooding countenance. It demands to be experienced physically, at
the human scale. Only then can it be embraced imaginatively as a theatre
of human loss. Ali scans the ruddy cliffs behind. “Like a fortress
defending itself,” he says. After a pause he repeats the phrase.
He needn't have.
Ali turns out to be an almost excessively able guide. He is full of
stories; some of them extrapolations from the historical record, not
all entirely true. “If I talk too much just say, ‘Stop talking
Ali’,” he says with a boyish grin. It's a rhetorical request.
Nothing will staunch his chatter, which fills all but five minutes of
our time at the Lone Pine cemetery. I resolve to return here and to
walk the trenches alone - there is simply not enough space for the sympathetic
imagination. We walk as a group a little further on from Lone Pine,
to a place where the time-worn Turkish and Australian trenches are separated
by the width of a country track.
Ali has been peppering his discussion with remarks about the hatefulness
of war. It has seemed a little rehearsed, a little formulaic. His narrative
now softens. It is coming from somewhere else; from memory. The old
man’s sincerity commands attention. With one foot in an eroded
Anzac trench and the other on its crumbling crest, Ali tells his story.
“My grandmother was left alone with a small child after the death
of my grandfather here, at this place,” he begins. “But
tell me to stop if I talk too much.” Ali eyes his audience imploringly.
Silence. He continues. “That child was my father. The men in my
village fought with great courage - they were protecting their families
from the invaders. But after the war my grandmother was alone, alone
for many years. She never re-married. My father found a wife, and here
I am.
“As a young boy I noticed that my grandmother, with no-one to
share her life, would often look at the sky. It is not polite in our
culture to ask the elderly personal questions, but one day I did ask
her about this habit.
“When I look at the sky,' she said, 'I am looking for my man."
For once there is much that Ali doesn't explain. His is an intimate
story much larger than tribe, clan, nation, friend or enemy. A story
about a woman, her fatherless child, and her “husband, cut off
from life so young ...”
It is Andromache's lament.
Postscript
In 2004 I finished writing Dating Aphrodite, from where much of the
material for the above discussion is sourced. The book had a long genesis,
going back to childhood and an intense fascination with myth. It benefited
from many journalistic rehearsals, columns and feature stories about
the revival of interest in the classics; a revival that seemed to have
picked up in the late 1990s, when Penguin published Robert Fagles’
highly accessible Iliad, and is still snowballing today.
I’m not a particularly canny salesman, and can remember pitching
to a publisher the idea behind Dating Aphrodite in something like these
vague terms: it’s an attempt to strike fire from antiquity, to
trace the threads of the classical world in the fabric of the contemporary.
But the book turned out to have a stronger and clearer purpose than
that: it morphed into an extended essay about, among other things, the
ways in which we need the ancient world.
In Andromache’s Lament I argue that the Iliad contains the germs
of a kind of universalism that dissolves the artificial barriers between
east and west, human and non-human, and is hugely relevant today. The
second source of ancient wisdom that I feel very much as a contemporary
need is polytheistic tolerance: if we could somehow place all the globe’s
rivalrous gods under the one roof, as the pagans had done, we might
avoid much bloodshed. I don’t really mean this literally; I mean
it to be a kind of thought experiment; an exercise in cultural memory.
The third is a source of urgent wisdom that issues from the great therapeutic
schools of the Hellenistic age: Epicureanism and Stoicism. Stoicism
has plenty of champions: it survives in the modern rational emotive
therapy movement, the enduring meditations of Marcus Aurelius, emperor
and Stoic sage; and in the efforts of Martha Nussbaum to revive a practical
politics of compassion by recuperating Stoic and Peripatetic wisdom.
Epicureanism has not fared so well, in part because so little of Epicurus
himself survives: just a few epistles and sayings, to be augmented hopefully
by a late harvest from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. The cosmology
of Stoicism, which conceived of a presiding world spirit at the helm
of the universe, could be easily assimilated to Christianity; not so
Epicureanism, which is in essence atheistic. The Epicurean submits to
no god. Rather, he aspires to live like one.
The great Epicurean poem of Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, does
not have the same life in the Anglophone world as Marcus Aurelius’
earnest “notes to self”. Epicureanism seems to have a more
vivid presence in the French tradition, through Montaigne and Rousseau
(Jean-Marie Guyeau's’s La Morale D’Epicure, first published
in 1874, can be found in a handsome new edition published by Encre Marine).
I sometimes wonder to what extent the Stoic ideal has influenced the
British stiff upper lip; while the Epicurean exhortation to a life of
pleasure has definitely inspired the Gallic table.
But of course Epicurus, though a hedonist, was no gourmand, let alone
a Bacchanalian; and one of the longest-standing errors in the history
of thought, the confusion of Epicureanism with unbridled pleasure, is
as pervasive now as it was in the first few centuries after the triumph
of Christianity, when the calumny was used to suppress this supposed
philosophy of the flesh. Epicurus, in fact, is a profoundly spiritual
thinker. This is his counsel: to change your life you must first of
all change the nature of your desires. He wants to banish from our minds
fear of death; to free us from neurotic attachment to the objects of
desire; and re-connect us with nature as realised in the famous Epicurean
garden. Epicurean pleasure is really a pleasure of the soul, a state
of ataraxia, or freedom from disturbance, attained by mastering, or
husbanding, the desires of the flesh, the will and the ego.
Epicurus: “He who understands the limits of life knows how easy
it is to procure enough to remove the pain of want and make the whole
of life complete and perfect.”
A radical social critique issues from this fraternal – Epicurus
placed great store on the importance of friendship - and medicinal creed.
It is not a matter of adopting this dogma tout court, but of learning
from it. In amongst the wisdom of Epicurus there is much that is anachronist
and, well, plain nutty. The so-called Master thought the sun no bigger
than an orange, because that is how it looked to him.
The Stoics, too, were quick to point out flaws in the Epicurean moral
philosophy: are not some moral virtues – courage for one –
attained in the teeth of pain?
I think of Epicureanism, nevertheless, as a fruitful source of practical
wisdom that has suffered somewhat from Christian anathematising; textual
poverty; and perhaps cultural bias. We live, as Al Gore has starkly
reminded us, upon the troubled surface of a warming globe. Among the
various threats to the sustainability of the so-called global village
are rampant energy consumption, pollution and urbanisation; poverty
remains a reality of life for more than half the world’s population;
conspicuous, excessive consumption blights the other half. We sail ahead
under the full steam of either greenhouse pollution or nuclear power
and its attendant risks.
No system of thought since the death of Marxism offers a coherent critique
of the post-industrial Catherine wheel. But Epicureanism, the philosophy
of the garden, of self-mastery and simple pleasures, can I believe illuminate
the contemporary world and point to some eminently sane solutions.
But as I am also, as well as your guest, a representative of the Australian
Financial Review, I have probably said enough about the ills of consumerism
and the Epicurean balm.
Thank you. Good night. And best wishes for the conference.
