“These kind of things belong to poets; we, moreover, want to be philosophers, masters of facts not fables. And yet, these gods of poetry, if they know that these things would be ruinous for their children, would be considered to have sinned in conferring a favor.
It is just as if, according to that thing which Aristo of Chios used to say, that philosophers hurt their audiences when the things they say well are interpreted badly (for it was possible still to leave Aristippus’ school as a profligate or Zeno’s school bitter and angry).
If it is this way, and those who have heard them leave with twisted minds because they understand the philosophers’ arguments incorrectly, then it befits philosophers more to be quiet than cause their audiences harm. In this way, if people pervert the capacity for reason which was given by the gods to provide good council and used it instead for fraud and harm, then it would have been better if it had not been given to the human race at all.”
Poetarum ista sunt, nos autem philosophi esse volumus, rerum auctores, non fabularum. Atque hi tamen ipsi di poetici si scissent perniciosa fore illa filiis, peccasse in beneficio putarentur. Ut si verum est quod Aristo Chius dicere solebat, nocere audientibus philosophos iis qui bene dicta male interpretarentur (posse enim asotos ex Aristippi, acerbos e Zenonis schola exire), prorsus, si qui audierunt vitiosi essent discessuri quod perverse philosophorum disputationem interpretarentur, tacere praestaret philosophos quam iis qui se audissent nocere: sic, si homines rationem bono consilio a dis immortalibus datam in fraudem malitiamque convertunt, non dari illam quam dari humano generi melius fuit. Ut, si medicus sciat eum aegrotum qui iussus sit vinum sumere meracius sumpturum statimque periturum, magna sit in culpa, sic vestra ista providentia reprehendenda, quae rationem dederit
Internet pugilists take the following things very, very seriously. Form triumphs over content!
Marble portrait heads of four philosophers in the British Museum. From foreground: Socrates, Antisthenes, Chrysippos, Epicurus. All are Roman copies after Hellenistic originals.
As I write in the first post on book 15, action of the book is split into two basic movements: Zeus’ conversations with the gods to threaten or cajole them and the resulting actions taken to rally the Achaeans. The book is in part about resetting the disorder introduced in book 15 and preparing us to return to the main plot of the Iliad: Achilles’ anger and the conflict between the Achaeans and the Trojans.
The process is not as simple as I imply in that earlier post. Hera doesn’t simply accept Zeus’ return and reversal of events. After the other gods have been upbraided, she makes sure that Ares learns about the death of his own son, Askalaphos.
Iliad 15.113-122
“I expect right now that Ares, at least, is feeling some pain: For his son, the dearest of men, died in battle— Askalaphos, the one strong Ares claimed as his own” So she spoke, and Ares pounded on his powerful thighs, Working his hands into them, and he spoke a word in mourning. “Don’t you criticize me, all of you who have Olympian homes, Because I pay back the murder of my son who went among the ships of the Achaeans, Even if it is my fate too to be struck by Zeus’ lightning And to lie there in the blood and dust among the corpses.” So he spoke, and he called for his horses Fear and Rout To be yoked and he put on his shining armor himself Then there would have been another harsh anger [kholos] And rage among the immortals from Zeus and rage [mênis] too…”
Hermes, Athena, Zeus with thunderbolt seated on block, Hera, Ares seated; Beazley Archive Pottery Database 301672
Hera really ‘tweaks’ Ares a bit here by dropping the information in this way and, perhaps, by casting some doubt on the parentage. It works because Ares gets upset and gets ready to go to war. What really stands out for me in this passage is the contrafactual that anticipates two kinds of anger
A scholion reports that these words are “parallel and possessing the same meaning” (Ariston. <χόλος καὶ μῆνις:> ὅτι ἐκ παραλλήλου ὡς ἰσοδυναμοῦντα τὸν χόλον καὶ τὴν μῆνιν.) The doublet (and the passage) reminds me of the alternate version of the proem of the Iliad
“Tell me now Muses who have Olympian homes How in fact rage and anger overtook Peleus’ son And the shining son of Leto…for he was angry at the king”
As Lenny Muellner shows in his book, mênis is marked as divine anger over a cosmic rupture. For Achilles in the Iliad, mênis indicates that his anger is super-charged (because he is semi-divine) and also emerging from a breakdown in social/political organization equivalent to a transgression against the basic assumptions of individual rights and place in the community.
In the alternate proem we can imagine the doublet as characterizing both Achilles’ and Apollo’s responses to the events of Iliad 1: the social anger of kholos describes the onset of anger from the breakdown of expected practices, while mênis conveys Apollo’s rage over the dishonoring of his priest as well since the rights and honors given to the gods are part of the stability of the Olympian realm. Thomas Walsh has argued that kholos indicates anger that is socially motivated, generally among peers. In book 1 of the Iliad, according to Achilles, kholos overtakes Agamemnon (1.387) because Achilles took action and called for them to propitiate the god in response to the plague. In the combining of the two, I suggest we see both a complementary pair (one is universal and capacious, the other is local and capricious) but also a doublet that anticipates compounding outcomes.
Let me try to explain this through doublet in book 15 and the doublet that appears in the alternative proem: they suggest that there are different kinds of anger and that they have different consequences. The initial kholos may indicate the conflict itself, the manifestation of anger that is violence. The subsequent mênis is an anticipation based on who is part of the conflict. Were Ares to challenge Zeus, it would have cosmic implications: the death of Ares would disrupt the distribution of goods and rights among the gods and promise future conflict (especially between Zeus and Hera). I think there is some confirmation here of the difference implied by Athena’s intervention. She rushes down from Olympus and warns Ares not to engage in this destructive behavior. When she asks him directly to put his anger down, she says “I am thus asking you now to put aside the kholos over your son” (τώ σ’ αὖ νῦν κέλομαι μεθέμεν χόλον υἷος ἑῆος, 15.138). The kholos-anger here is over the loss of a mortal child, whose presence or absence from the divine perspective cannot have cosmic relevance unless Ares challenges his father (or the other gods) over it.
As I have explored before, the Iliad presents some shared language between Ares and Achilles. When Ares challenges Zeus in book 5 and Zeus dismisses him there are echoes that could lead some audience members to imagine Ares as Achilles and Agamemnon as Zeus. The parallels are incomplete and jagged, to an extent, but the cast each conflict as one that has the potential to destroy the communities that depend upon their kings and leading warriors. But in each case, there is the chance that anger (kholos) can slide into a paradigm shifting/shattering rage (mênis) if the players do not understand the stakes of their own stories.
Ares between Castor (left) and Pollux (right) fighting the Giants. 5th Century BCE. Archaeological Museum of Athens
A (way too) Short bibliography
Christensen, Joel P. 2012. “Ares: ἀΐδηλος: On the Text of Iliad 5.757 and 5.872.” Classical Philology 107.3, 230-238.
“Aristonomos the son of Demostratos hated women and used to have sex with a donkey. After some time, the donkey gave birth to an extremely beautiful girl named Onoskelis. Aristokles reports this in the second book of his Unbelievable Things.
Fulvius Stellus used to have sex with a horse because he hated women. Eventually the horse gave birth to a fine-looking girl and they named her Epona. She is a deity who focuses on horses. This is according to Agesilaus in the third book of his Italian Matters.”
“Let the memory of murderer and gladiator be destroyed; have the statues of the murder and the gladiator be destroyed. Let the memory of the disgusting gladiator be destroyed. Send the gladiator to the butcher-block. Listen, Caesar: have that killer dragged with the hook. Have that senate-slayer dragged with a hook in the custom of our ancestors.
More of an animal than Domitian, more unclean than Nero: May he suffer what he did to others. Preserve the memories of the innocent. Restore the place of the innocent. We beg you: drag the body of the murderer with a hook. Drag the body of the gladiator with a hook. Put the gladiator’s body in the slaughterhouse. Call the vote, Call the vote: we all believe that he needs to be dragged with the hook.”
XIX. Parricidae gladiatoris memoria aboleatur, parricidae gladiatoris statuae detrahantur. impuri gladiatoris memoria aboleatur. gladiatorem in spoliario. exaudi Caesar: carnifex unco trahatur. carnifex senatus more maiorum unco trahatur. saevior Domitiano, impurior Nerone. sic fecit, sic patiatur. memoriae innocentium serventur. honores innocentium restituas, rogamus. parricidae cadaver unco trahatur. gladiatoris cadaver unco trahatur. gladiatoris cadaver in spoliario ponatur. perroga, perroga: omnes censemus unco trahendum. qui omnes occidit, unco trahatur.
Detail of The Emperor Commodus Leaving the Arena at the Head of the Gladiators by American muralist Edwin Howland Blashfield (1848-1936) in the permanent collection of The Hermitage Museum and Gardens in Norfolk, Virginia (USA)
Schol. ad. Od. 8.17 (On why Odysseus is only responsible for the companions in his particular ship)
“According to the proverb “Common ship, common safety”
κατὰ τὴν παροιμίαν “κοινὴ ναῦς κοινὴ σωτηρία,”
Sophocles, Antigone 175–190 (Creon speaking)
“It is impossible to really learn a man’s
mind, thought and opinion before he’s been initiated
into the offices and laws of the state.
Indeed—whoever attempts to direct the country
but does not make use of the best advice
as he keeps his tongue frozen out of fear
Seems to me to be the worst kind of person now and long ago.
Anyone who thinks his friend is more important than the country,
I say that they live nowhere.
May Zeus who always sees everything witness this:
I could never be silent when I saw ruin
Overtaking my citizens instead of safety.
And I could never make my country’s enemy a friend
For myself, because I know this crucial thing: The state is the ship which saves us And we may make friends only if it remains afloat.”
Heraclitus the Commentator, in defending the application of allegorical readings to Homer, argues that allegory is of considerable antiquity—used clearly by Archilochus when he compares the troubles of a war (fr. 54) and by Alcaeus when he compares the troubles of a tyranny to a storm at sea. He writes that Alcaeus “compares the troubles of a tyranny to the turmoil of a stormy sea.” (τὰς γὰρ τυραννικὰς ταραχὰς ἐξ ἴσου χειμερίῳ προσεικάζει καταστήματι θαλάττης, Homeric Problems 5.8)
Alcaeus fr. 326
“I cannot make sense of the clash of the winds
One wave whirls from this side,
Another wave comes from the other, and we in the middle
Are borne in our dark ship
Toiling ever on in this great storm.
The swell has taken he mast
And the sail is completely transparent—
There are great tears through it
And the anchors have broken free…”
Alcaeus, fr. 6a [P. Oxy. 1789 1 i 15–19, ii 1–17, 3 i, 12 + 2166(e)4]
“Now this higher wave comes harder than the one before
And will bring us much toil to face
When it overcomes the ship
Let us strengthen the ship’s sides
As fast as we can and hurry into a safe harbor.
Let no weak hesitation take anyone.
For a great contest is clearly before us.
Recall your previous toil.
Today, let every man be dedicated.
And may we never cause shame
To our noble parents who lie beneath the earth”
Consider this how this could turn out on many ships or even just one: there is a captain of some size and strength beyond the rest of the men in the ship, but he is deaf and similarly limited at seeing, and he knows as much about sailing as these qualities might imply. So, the sailors are struggling with one another about steering the ship, because each one believes that he should be in charge, even though he has learned nothing of the craft nor can indicate who his teacher was nor when he had the time to learn. Some of them are even saying that it is not teachable, and that they are ready to cut down the man who says it can be taught.
They are always hanging all over the captain asking him and making a big deal of the fact that he should entrust the rudder to them. There are times when some of them do not persuade him, and some of them kill others or kick them off the ship, and once they have overcome the noble captain through a mandrake, or drugs, or something else and run the ship, using up its contents drinking, and partying, and sailing just as such sort of men might. In addition to this, they praise as a fit sailor, and call a captain and knowledgeable at shipcraft the man who is cunning at convincing or forcing the captain that they should be in charge. And they rebuke as useless anyone who is not like this.
Such men are unaware what a true helmsman is like, that he must be concerned about the time of year, the seasons, the sky, the stars, the wind and everything that is appropriate to the art, if he is going to be a leader of a ship in reality, how he might steer the ship even if some desire it or not, when they believe that it is not possible to obtain art or practice about how to do this, something like an art of ship-steering. When these types of conflicts are occurring on a ship, don’t you think the one who is a true helmsman would be called a star-gazer, a blabber, or useless to them by the sailors in the ships organized in this way?
“Tyranny happens—even though it is so great an evil in scope and kind—from nothing else but lawlessness. All people who think incorrectly believe that tyranny develops from some other cause and that people lose their freedom without being responsible for it because they were forced by the tyrant who came to power. But they do not reason correctly.
Whoever believes that a king or tyrant arises for any other reason than a disregard for the laws and greed is a fool. Whenever everyone focuses on base motives, then this is how it turns out. It is impossible for people to live without laws and justice. When these two things are neglected by the majority of the people—the law and justice—then their oversight and safety is transferred to a single person. For how could a monarchy fall to a single person unless the law which was common and advantageous to all were removed?”
“Turoknêstis: a cheesegrater. A type of knife. There is also a proverb: “I will not position myself like a lioness on a cheese-grater”* This means “in the way a lioness would”, and it is a shameful and whorish sexual position.
A cheese-grater is a knife. On the hilts of some kitchen knives lionesses used to be carved out of ivory, in a squatting position, so that their feet might not be broken off as they might be if they were made standing up. So, the speaker is saying I will not position myself like a prostitute awaiting a man, the way a lioness is positioned on a cheese-grater.”
Patroklos leaves Achilles in book 11 to go investigate the wounded Achaeans and does not return until book 16. When he appears, he is described as weeping. And we hear two similes to describe how he weeps, one from the narrative and another from Achilles himself.
Homer, Iliad 16.1-11
“That’s how they were fighting around the well-benched ship. Then Patroklos stood right next to Achilles, shepherd of the host, Letting warm tears fall down his face as a dark-watered spring would, One that pours murky water down a steep rock face. When Achilles saw him, he pitied him And spoke to him, addressing him with winged words. “Patroklos, why are you crying just like a girl, A young one, who rushes after her mother asking to be picked him, Always grabbed her clothes and holding her back as she rushes— She looks at her mother while crying so she will pick her up. Patroklos, you’re shedding a tender tear like her.”
The first simile is a repetition of sorts (and may be formulaic): Agamemnon is said to be crying like a stream before he speaks at the beginning of book 9 (14-15). The second part is somewhat more remarkable: from my experience, readers often infer the kinds of misogynistic statements that are typical in Homer (e.g. “Achaean women, not Achaean men, since you are cowards!…”) and in our own time (“fight like a girl”). One could be forgiven for assuming a kind of emasculation intended here on Achilles’ part.
The language outside the simile, however, may countermand such a reading. The narrator tells us that Achilles is pitying Patroklos (ᾤκτιρε) and the ‘winged words’ speech introduction often includes speech-acts that try to do things (although the fill intention of this speech is unclear). The content of the speech may have surprised ancient audiences as well: a scholion reports that Aristarchus preferred θάμβησεν (“felt wonder at”) instead of pitied. The scholia also question whether or not it is strange for Achilles to mock Patroklos for crying when Achilles himself was lamenting over losing a concubine (ἄτοπός ἐστιν αὐτὸς μὲν ἕνεκα παλλακίδος κλάων (cf. Α 348—57), τὸν δὲ Πάτροκλον κόρην καλῶν ἐπὶ τοιούτοις δεινοῖς δακρύοντα, Schol. bT ad Hom. Il. 16.7 ex).
Lekyth (oil flask) depicting a mother holding up her little boy who reaches out to her. c. 460 BC (inv. 15002)
But how does our reception of this scene change if we don’t focus on the routine misogyny? One crucial thing the structure of the speech does for us–in addition to providing us a framework that shows this is not straight invective–is provide the contrast between how the narrator asks us to view Patroklos and how Achilles does. The narrator provides a repeated somewhat bland comparison to a fountain. But Achilles enlivens and personalizes the comparison. We cannot forget that in this simile, Achilles makes himself the mother.
One of my favorite takes on this comes from Celsiana Warwick’s great article “The Material Warrior: Gender and “Kleos” in the Iliad”. Warwick combines this with Achilles’ description of himself in book 9 as a mother bird trying to bring food to her chicks. In that simile, Achilles compares the whole army to the chicks looking to him for food. Warwick writes:
The image of the mother ignoring the needs of her child represents the way in which Achilles at this point in the poem is ignoring the needs of the Achaeans, whom he described as his children at 9.323–7. Achilles’ use of this simile here should thus not be regarded as incidental, but rather as part of his larger pattern of maternal identification. In Book 9 the mother bird is self-sacrificing, directing all of her attention towards her chicks. In the second simile, a change has taken place in Achilles’ conception of himself as a mother; now he has turned his back on the child and moves away from her. The scene, although domestic and familiar rather than destructive or threatening, highlights Achilles’ refusal in Book 16 to take up his protective role. It foreshadows the destructive consequences of this refusal, especially when juxtaposed with the simile of the mother of the chicks. The gender dynamics of this image are also intriguing; although the comparison of Patroclus to a foolish girl appears to be negative, Achilles does not seem to impugn his own masculinity by associating himself with the mother.
Greek; Votive relief fragment with goddesses, mother, nurse, and infant; Stone Sculpture MET 5th Century BCE
By situating this image along with other comparisons to women in Homer–e.g. Heroic pain compared to women in childbirth, or heroes compared to animal mothers and offspring–Warwick argues that maternity is associated with protection in Homer, implying, perhaps, an obligation to shelter others that yields a greater level of pain and suffering when warriors fail to do so. Consider the existential pain felt by Thetis in response to her inability to save her son or the emphasis Andromache puts on imagining her son’s (impossible) futures. The language of each simile, moreover, strengthens these connections: As Casey Dué demonstrates, Achilles’ similes resonate with women’s laments in the epic tradition. In a way, they are proleptic, priming an audience that already knows the events of the story to see Achilles’ actions in a certain way. The associations may be broader than this too–Cathy Gaca has suggested that the simile recalls the image of a mother and child fleeing a warrior during the sack of a city.
This associative framework is especially effective for exploring Achilles’ actions because he fails in his role as a protector. Warwick adds, “It is particularly appropriate for Achilles to compare himself to a mother because maternity, unlike paternity or non-parental divine protection, is closely linked in Homeric poetry with the mortal vulnerability of human offspring.” Achilles becomes a “murderous mother” who is a direct cause of Patroklos’ death.
This simile and Achilles’ own self-characterization increases the pathos of his story. This is echoed and reinforced–as Emily Austin argues well in her article (Grief as ποθή )–when Achilles’ grief over Patroklos’ death is compared to a mother lion’s sorrow over the loss of her cubs. In addition to these powerful connections between women and the life cycle, these images also underscore the impact that heroic violence has on familial relationships. The Achaeans at Troy do not have their families with them (with some exceptions): the consequences of war fall most heavily on women and children. This simile can both humanize Achilles and vilify him. The greater we understand his feelings of love and responsibility for Patroklos, the more horrifying it is when we understand that Achilles himself ultimately prayed for his own people to die.
We also have to attend to the impact on Patroklos: if Achilles is trying to do something with this speech, what is it? Jonathan Ready suggests that Achilles is letting Patroklos know that he is there and, like a mother, will eventually take care of her child. I like this reading, but I wonder if there isn’t a clash between Achilles’ belief that he can comfort Patroklos and the image itself which remains unresolved. The child in the simile goes on, tugging, wanting to be picked up, but never fully heard. We must imagine, I think, that Achilles sees these actions as being completed outside the simile when he listens to Patroklos and responds. As Rachel Lesser suggests, Patroklos is not fully heard. Patroklos’ “appeal represents a challenge to [Achilles’] will” (175). Achilles is troubled and upset by his friend being upset; but he is also conflicted by what he asks. Like a frustrated, harried mother who finally picks up the persistent child, Achilles concedes to Patroklos, but with demands and limits that will make neither of them happy.
I think this passage provides a great sample of how hard it can be to interpret Homer and how many different ideas need to be balanced at once. The scholars I have mentioned weigh cultural ideas about gender and relationships against what actually happens in the Homeric poems and generate a series of responses that point to the sensitivity and open-endedness of the simile. Achilles frames himself and Patroklos as a matter of expressing their relationship to one another, his view of the situation, and, perhaps more deeply, a troubled sense of responsibility. The lack of resolution in the simile and the striking image itself draws the audience’s attention to the moment, encouraging us to think through the image and make sense of it on our own.
Harvard Museums 1960.342 440 BCE Hydria with Family scene
A short bibliography on this simile
Austin, Emily. “Grief as ποθή : understanding the anger of Achilles.” New England Classical Journal, vol. 42, no. 3, 2015, pp. 147-163.
Dué, Casey. “Achilles, mother bird: similes and traditionality in Homeric poetry.” The Classical Bulletin, vol. 81, no. 1, 2005, pp. 3-18.
Gaca, Kathy. 2008. “Reinterpreting the Homeric Simile of Iliad 16.7–11: The Girl and Her Mother in Ancient Greek Warfare.” AJP 129: 145–71.
Lesser, Rachel. 2022. Desire in the Iliad. Oxford.
Mills, Sophie. 2000. “Achilles, Patroclus and Parental Care in Some Homeric Similes.” G&R 47: 3–18.
Pratt, Louise. 2007. “The Parental Ethos of the Iliad.” Hesperia Supplements 41: 25–40.
Ransom, Christopher. 2011. “Aspects of Effeminacy and Masculinity in the Iliad.” Antichthon 45: 35–57.
Ready, Jonathan. 2011. Character, Narrator, and Simile in the Iliad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Warwick, Celsiana. “The maternal warrior: gender and « kleos » in the « Iliad ».” American Journal of Philology, vol. 140, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1-28. Doi: 10.1353/ajp.2019.0001
“There is, moreover, no private property naturally, but it develops either through ancient possession—as when people came into empty territory long ago—or through conquest—as when people possess it in war—or through law, contract, purchase, or lot. This is why the land of Arpinas are said to be of the Arpinates and the Tusculan lands of the Tusculans. The assignment of private property is much the same. For this reason, because what had been communal property by nature because the possession of an individual, each person should take hold of what has come to him—but, if he desire anything else beyond this, he will transgress the law of human society.
But since, as Plato has famously written, we are not born only for ourselves, but our country takes a part and our friends take a part, and since, as the Stoics maintain, everything which develops from the earth has been created for human use, and we human beings are born to be of use to other human beings, that we may in some way be able to help one another, we ought to make nature our leader in this, to produce common good by an exchange of favors, by giving and receiving….”
Sunt autem privata nulla natura, sed aut vetere occupatione, ut qui quondam in vacua venerunt, aut victoria, ut qui bello potiti sunt, aut lege, pactione, condicione, sorte; ex quo fit, ut ager Arpinas Arpinatium dicatur, Tusculanus Tusculanorum; similisque est privatarum possessionum discriptio. Ex quo, quia suum cuiusque fit eorum, quae natura fuerant communia, quod cuique obtigit, id quisque teneat; e quo si quis sibi appetet, violabit ius humanae societatis.
Sed quoniam, ut praeclare scriptum est a Platone, non nobis solum nati sumus ortusque nostri partem patria vindicat, partem amici, atque, ut placet Stoicis, quae in terris gignantur, ad usum hominum omnia creari, homines autem hominum causa esse generatos, ut ipsi inter se aliis alii prodesse possent, in hoc naturam debemus ducem sequi, communes utilitates in medium afferre mutatione officiorum, dando accipiendo,
Like many others, I spent the first year of the COVID pandemic in an fugue state, trying to maintain some semblance of the life that preceded March 2020 (work, family, relationships) while also living as a relentless voyeur of the things going on in the world: the early news reports of the virus, our rapid and misunderstood shutdowns, the #BlackLivesMatter protests in the wake of endless police violence and judicial exoneration, the spectacle of a president both incompetent and insufficiently concerned, and the added drama of a political campaign that was always going to be important, but whose urgency seemed newly inescapable.
At the time, I was preparing for the release of a book I had spent the better part of a decade researching and writing on psychology and the Homeric Odyssey. Much of the theoretical groundwork for this book rested upon cognitive approaches to narrative, perhaps best typified by the work of Jerome Bruner, Mark Turner, and the psychologist Michael White. The paralysis I felt made me think more about the trauma-studies side of my work, how narrative can be used to address traumatic experiences (but also how narrative can produce trauma on its own).
Observing the world as it changed from the vantage of social media while writing to promote The Many-Minded Man, led me to ask a basic question that has no clear answer: does knowing you’re being traumatized provide any benefit against the long-term impact of trauma? This may seem a histrionic question in isolation, but my thoughts were ranging to the cultural level: communities can suffer trauma together and it can fundamentally shift their identities, their relationships to power and language, and their ability to respond to future challenges.
I don’t believe I have sufficiently answered that that question for myself, partly because I went in a different direction. I found myself overwhelmed by the shifts that the stories we were hearing and telling about the world were taking and how they impacted our actions: from our public health response to COVID (which included a broad range of denial, quack-science, and conspiracy theories) and our shifting communal responses to state-sanctioned violence against black people, our real world responses with life-and-death consequences were (and are) informed by ways of viewing the world that can simply be framed as stories (to avoid, for a moment, the issue of fact and fiction).
For years in teaching myth, I had already used DNA as a metaphor for trying to get students to think about how the same kinds of stories were continually reused. My primary emphasis in teaching myth has long been to downplay any notion of which version of a story is ‘correct’ or ‘first’ and instead to encourage students to think about why some details may have been important in one context and not another. Why, for example, is the story of Oedipus in the Odyssey is rather different from the one canonized by Sophocles while still being recognizable the ‘same’? The answer I often have given only partly as an evasion comes from the Muses themselves, when they tell Hesiod at the beginning of the Theogony that “we know how to tell lies that sound like the truth but we can speak the truth when we want to”: fact and fiction are not meaningful categories of narrative. What matters it what a particular narrative says and what it does in the world.
So, for a long time, I had approached the category of myth—a field long dominated by patterns and repetitions—by asking students to entertain the idea that story patterns contain potential meanings like genes in strands of DNA that adapt to the needs of their audiences. Witnessing the impact of counter-narratives during COVID while also working on multiple tasks-forces at my institution where we learned about COVID mutation, transmission, and mitigation, I came to see our communication about the virus as a kind of narrative that was also changing through transmission and having an equal—if not greater—impact on the world. I was already primed to see story in everything, but the ‘new’ thing I saw was that narrative’s negative potential was as great as its redemptive power. This was not really a novel idea for me—I include chapters on the negative impact of Odysseus’ narrative power on marginalized people in the Odyssey in The Many-Minded Man. But I think even this was too limited.
COVID did not, has not ended. And the stories that were shaping our world in 2020 have certainly not abated. I started talking about some of the ideas that eventually showed up in Storylife with Heather Gold in Fall of 2021. We were discussing various possible books and I had offered up some pretty stale proposals when she asked me just to tell her what I had been thinking about. I started to tell her an idea about comparing the structure of Homeric poetry and mythical narrative to DNA and using biological analogies to decenter authorship and design to show how complex narratives can develop from basic structures. I told her that story functions like a virus and is always changing and has no agent driving it and added some examples I had written about before (especially the tale of Kleomedes the Astupalaian). And she, miraculously, asked me how long it would take me to write a proposal and sample chapter.
Storylife certainly would not have been written without the COVID pandemic; It might not have happened at all if I hadn’t gotten COVID too. My family avoided getting sick until the Omicron phase of COVID. We stayed pretty isolated for 2020 and 2021 once we found out my wife was pregnant with our third child. We kept our kids home from school when their classmates returned, saw very few people, and tried to avoid any exposure. I was the first to show symptoms and was sick the longest, needing the 10 days home to be able to leave the house and showing symptoms for months after (it was over three months until I stopped feeling the impact of aphasia daily; I went from running under an 8-minute mile with ease for over an hour to struggle to finish one under 10).
I wrote the sample chapter (most of what is now chapter 5) while recovering from a fever and convalescing at Homer. To be honest, I remember the story of writing the chapter that I told after far more than the actual writing itself. (But this doesn’t concern me overmuch: in retrospect, my recall of writing anything seems to be pretty limited. My unconfirmed theory is that the focused activity of writing itself may limit how memories of around it form.) I’ve joked before that the novel coronavirus should be credited as a co-author, but I definitely wrote other chapters in various degrees of health. Once the manuscript was accepted, I wrote in hour or two blocks carved out of the day—producing quickly, but still delivering the manuscript a half-year late.
I started Storylife as a provocation to address both our blinkered view of poetic creation and our willful denial of the impact that narratives have on our lives together. Nothing I have seen since I finished Storylife has changed my essential convictions. The most recent presidential election, our inaction on climate change, the assault on higher education, our inability to acknowledge the truth of the horrors unfolding around the world to support our interests—everything we do together is framed and mediated by narrative. Narrative is steroidal in the information age. It moves faster than we can handle, and twists the way we understand. But it also allows us to see a different world, to imagine something better. Story retains the potential to help us realize a far kinder world with grander expectations for lives of meaning and comfort for every human being. But we need to be the kinds of audiences who want to hear this tale.
Post-script: Communities write books
One of the central theses of the book is that we as human beings are cognitively disinclined to think in the aggregate and to see ourselves as part of collective endeavors rather than individuals sealed off to the world physically and psycho-emotionally. (This is cognitive and cultural too.) The ideas in this book were shaped by countless conversations, presentations, questions, objections, editing, and more. At some level, I can’t take credit for something so many others were involved in. Here are the other creators I can remember.
From the acknowledgements: –
Particular parts of the book were improved in talks given at the Greek Literature and the Environment Workshop, UCSB, the University of Chicago Rhetoric and Poetics, Homer Lecture, and work presented at the Brandeis Psychology department colloquia series… Some of the ideas and passages also appeared in pieces for The Conversation or Neos Kosmos.
I owe a debt to many for help with bibliography and subjects beyond my expertise, including Joseph Cunningham, Sophus Helle, Prasad Jallepalli, Dan Perlman Seth Sanders, Claudio Sansone and Mario Telo. I cannot thank Eric Blum, Becca Frankel, and Talia Franks enough for editing and bibliographical assistance. Among the many friends who have supported my flights of fancy over the years, I would be remiss not to thank Lenny Muellner, Mimi Kramer, Justin Arft, Elton Barker, Celsiana Warwick, Julio Vega-Payne, Anna Hetherington, Paul O’Mahony, Sarah Bond, and Larry Benn, all of whom read drafts of or discussed various parts of this book and provided needed encouragement. Special thanks are due to my editor Heather Gold who provided the focus and the framework to help turn a half-baked idea into a full manuscript. Elizabeth Sylvia also provided invaluable editorial support,, and Susan Laity’s careful eye improved the book’s prose and style immeasurably.
And, as always, my spouse, Shahnaaz, deserves the final word—my belief in the future and any confidence I have starts with her.
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