“And I certainly seem to be experiencing the fate of Ibykos’ horse, a prize-winner who, even though old, was about to compete in the chariot race and was trembling because of experience at what was about to happen. Ibykos compared himself to him when he said that he too was old and was being compelled to move towards lust”
[Scholiast] Here is the saying of Ibykos the lyric poet:
τὸ τοῦ μελοποιοῦ Ἰβύκου ῥητόν·
“Love again, gazing up from under dark lashes,
Throws me down with every kind of spell
Into the Cyprian’s endless nets.
In truth, I tremble at this arrival,
Just as a prize-winning horse on the yoke in old age
Goes into the contest with his swift wheels, but not willingly.”
“If I saw you shining with dark hair
Or at another time with blond locks, mistress,
The same grace would gleam from both.
Love will make its home in your hair even when it’s gray.”
Some say a force of horsemen, some say infantry
and others say a fleet of ships is the loveliest
thing on the dark earth, but I say it is
the one you love
It is altogether simple to make this understood
since she whose beauty outmatched all,
Helen, left her husband
a most noble man
And went sailing to Troy
Without a thought for her child and dear parents
[Love] made her completely insane
And led her astray
This reminds me of absent Anaktoria
I would rather watch her lovely walk
and see the shining light of her face
than Lydian chariots followed by
infantrymen in arms
“Solon the Athenian, the son of Eksêkestides, when his nephew sang some song of Sappho at a drinking party, took pleasure in it and asked the young man to teach it to him. When someone asked why he was eager to learn it, he responded: “So, once I learn it, I may die.”
“Come, listen to my stories: for learning will certainly improve your thoughts.
As I said before when I declared the outline of my speeches,
I will speak a two-fold tale. Once, first, the one alone grew
Out of many and then in turn it grew apart into many from one.
Fire, and Water, and Earth and the invincible peak of Air,
Ruinous strife as well, separate from these, equal to every one,
And Love was among them, equal as well in length and breadth.
Keep Love central in your mind, don’t sit with eyes in a stupor.
She is known to be innate to mortal bodies,
She causes them to think of love and complete acts of peace,
Whether we call her Happiness or Aphrodite as a nickname….”
“But mortals truly have a different kind of love,
One of a just, prudent, and good soul.
It would be better if it were the custom among mortals,
of reverent men and all those with reason,
To love this way, and to leave Zeus’ daughter Cypris alone.”
“As I was walking from the Peiraios beset
By troubles and despair, philosophy came over me.
And all the painters now seem to me to be ignorant
About love, and, to put it simply, so is everyone else
Who fashions images of him as a god.
For he is neither female nor male, and again,
He is not a god or mortal; nor is he foolish
Or wise, but he is drawn together from everywhere
And carries many shapes in one form.
For he has a man’s boldness with a woman’s restraint;
he has the senselessness of madness
But the reason of a thinker; he has a beast’s ferocity,
The toil of the unbreakable, and the avarice of a god.
Indeed, by Athena and the gods, I do not understand
What love is, but still it is the type of thing
I have said only without this name.”
“I will begin to praise first what people see first—the way everyone recognizes you, your beauty, the complexion by which your limbs and your whole body shines. When I search for something to compare it to, I see nothing. But it remains my right to ask those who read this speech to look at you and witness this so that I may be forgiven for providing no comparison.
What similarity could someone offer when something mortal fills its witnesses with immortal desire, whose seeing never tires, and when absent stays remembered? How, when this has a nature in human form yet worthy of the gods, so like a flower in its good form, beyond even a whiff of fault? Truly, it is not possible to seek out even those things in your appearance which have marred many others who had their share of beauty. For either they have disturbed their natural form through some tremor of character or because of some bad luck they have undermined their natural beauty to the same end.
No, we couldn’t find your beauty touched by anything like this. Whoever of the gods planned out your appearance guarded so earnestly against every type of chance that you have no feature worthy of critique—he made you entirely exceptional. Moreover, since the face is the most conspicuous of all the parts that are seen, and on that face, the eyes stand out in turn, here the divine showed it had even more good will toward you.
For not only did he provide you with eyes sufficient for seeing—and even though it is not possible to recognize virtue when some men act–he showed the noblest character by signaling through your eyes, making your glance soft and kind to those who see it, dignified and solemn to those you spend time which, and brave and wise to all.
Someone might wonder at this next thing especially. Although other men are taken as harsh because of their docility, or brash because of their solemnity, or arrogant because of their bravery, or they seem rather dull because they are quiet, chance has gathered these opposite qualities together and granted them all in agreement in you, just as if answering a prayer or deciding to make an example for others, but not crafting just a mortal, as she usually does.
If, then, it were possible to approach your beauty in speech or if these were the only of your traits worthy of praise, we would think it right to pass over no part of your advantages. But I fear that we might not trust our audience to hear the rest and that we may wear ourselves out about this in vain. How could one exaggerate your appearance when not even works made by the best artists could match them? And it is not wondrous—for artworks have an immovable appearance, so that it is unclear how would they appear if they had a soul. But your character increases the great beauty of your body with everything you do. I can praise your beauty this much, passing over many things.”
Simone Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (trans. Mary McCarthy):
Nevertheless, the soul that is enslaved to war cries out for deliverance, but deliverance
itself appears to it in an extreme and tragic aspect, the aspect of destruction. Any other
solution, more moderate, more reasonable in character, would expose the mind to
suffering so naked, so violent that it could not be borne, even as memory. Terror,
grief, exhaustion, slaughter, the annihilation of comrades - is it credible that these
things should not continually tear at the soul, if the intoxication of force had not
intervened to drown them? The idea that an unlimited effort should bring in only a
limited profit or no profit at all is terribly painful.
What? Will we let Priam and the Trojans boast
Of Argive Helen, she for whom so many Greeks
Died before Troy, far from their native land?
What? Do you want us to leave the city, wide-streeted Troy,
Standing, when we have suffered so much for it?
But actually what is Helen to Ulysses? What indeed is Troy, full of riches that will not
compensate him for Ithaca's ruin? For the Greeks, Troy and Helen are in reality mere
sources of blood and tears; to master them is to master frightful memories. If the
existence of an enemy has made a soul destroy in itself the thing nature put there, then
the only remedy the soul can imagine is the destruction of the enemy. At the same
time the death of dearly loved comrades arouses a spirit of somber emulation, a
rivalry in death.
“[in this case] the soul and the body would experience things together, but they would not have the same reactions as one another. But, now, it is entirely clear that one follows another. This is especially obvious from the following. For madness seems to be a matter of the mind; doctors, however, respond to it by cleansing the body with medicines and also by telling them to pursue certain habits in life which may relieve the mind of madness.
So, the form of the body is relieved by treatments to the body at the very same time that the soul is freed from madness. Since they are both relieved together, it is clear that their reactions are in synchrony. It is also clear from this that the forms special to the body are similar to the capabilities of the mind, with the result that all similarities in living things are clear signs of some kind of sameness.”
“I will not be so bold as to defend my lying ways
or to lift false weapons for the sake of my sins.
I admit it—if there’s any advantage to confessing;
Insane now I confront the crimes I’ve confessed:
I hate, and though I want to, I can’t stop being what I hate.
Alas, how it hurts to carry something you long to drop!”
Non ego mendosos ausim defendere mores
falsaque pro vitiis arma movere meis.
confiteor—siquid prodest delicta fateri;
in mea nunc demens crimina fassus eo.
odi, nec possum, cupiens, non esse quod odi;
heu, quam quae studeas ponere ferre grave est!
I cannot read this poem without thinking of this one (Carm. 85):
“I hate and I love: you might ask why I do this–
I don’t know, but I see it happen and it’s killing me.
Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
Anacreon, Fr. 428 (Hephaestion, Handbook on Meters)
“I love and again do not love
I am insane and yet sane too”
Exile, even if it the word derives as I think from exilire or, as Servius has it, from the fact that one goes extra solum (beyond their ground), is yet in my opinion not exile unless it happens to someone against their will. Otherwise, even kings have often been exiles from their own kingdoms, especially when a lot weighed on extending and defending the boundaries of one’s kingdom and on propagating one’s glory. No one dares to call them exiles (unless their own reason has gone into exile), especially since they were never more truly (or more truly called) kings than at that time. Some violence or sadness must intervene in order for it to be true exile.
If you take that, you understand that whether you are an exile or a traveler lies with you. If you went away crying, sad, and dejected, you undoubtedly consider yourself an exile; but if you have lost nothing of your dignity and were not compelled to it, but instead with a happy heart, with the same orientation of both face and soul that you had when at home you obeyed when ordered to leave, then you are definitely traveling, and not in exile.
For in all of the other kinds of things we fear you will find that no one is miserable unless they have made themselves miserable. Thus, it is not a lack of things but a cupidity for them which makes a man poor. Thus, in death (which is a lot like exile), the asperity of the thing itself doesn’t hurt as much as fear and the perversity of opinion.† Remove those things, and you will see many people dying not just with equanimity, but even happily and with a certain degree of felicitation. Thus we understand that the evil of death is not necessary but willed, nor is it entirely placed in the thing itself, but in the bent understanding of mortals. Were it not so, there would never be such a disparity of mental reactions to the exact same danger.
I see the same argument holding good for exile as for everything else. That by which we are conquered lies not in the thing, but in ourselves.‡ To be sure, once opinion has bent a little bit away from the truth, is soon tossed about by innumerable errors so that it returns to the truth only with the greatest difficulty and unless it receives much help, does not straighten itself out to look upon the majesty of its actual origin.
† cf. Hamlet:
Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
‡ cf. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar:
Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Exilium, etsi ab exiliendo tractum rear vel, ut Servio placet, ab eo quod quis extra solum eat, non tamen exilium esse nisi invito accidat, annuerim. Alioquin, sepe a regnis suis reges exulant, eoque maxime tempore quod prorogandis tuendisque regni finibus et propagande glorie impenditur; quando nemo illos exules dicere audeat, nisi a quo ratio omnis exulaverit, quippe cum nunquam verius et sint et dicantur reges. Aliqua ergo vis dolorque aliquis interveniat oportet, ut exilium verum sit.
Id si recipis, iam cernis in tua manu situm, utrum exul an peregrinus sis: si lacrimans, si mestus, si deiectus exivisti, exulem te proculdubio noveris; si vero nichil proprie dignitatis oblitus neque coactus, sed libens et eodem habitu frontis atque animi quo domi fueras, iussus exire paruisti, peregrinaris profecto, non exulas.
Nam et in ceteris formidatarum rerum generibus invenies neminem esse miserum nisi qui se miserum fecit; sic pauperem non rerum paucitas sed cupiditas facit; sic in morte, que exilio simillima est, non tam rei ipsius asperitas, quam trepidatio et opinionis perversitas nocet, quibus amotis, multos aspicies non modo equanimiter, sed lete etiam ac feliciter morientes. Ex quo nimirum intelligitur non esse necessarium, sed spontaneum mortis malum, nec in re ipsa sed totum in obliqua mortalium existimatione repositum; quod nisi ita esset, nunquam in periculo pari tanta esset imparitas animorum.
Eandemque rationem exilii video quam ceterorum omnium; non in illo, sed in nobis esse quo vincimur: opinionem scilicet, que ubi paululum a veritate deflexerit, mox innumerabilibus iactatur erroribus ut ad verum difficillime redeat seque, nisi multum adiuta, non erigat ad intuendam proprie originis maiestatem.
Johannes Haubold, Homer’s People, Cambridge 2015, 20
“Failure of the shepherd is the rule not the exception.”
Xenophon, Mem. 3.2.1
“When he met a men who had been selected general, Socrates said why do you think that Homer call Agamemnon the shepherd of the host? Do you think that it is because it is right that he take care as a shepherd that his sheep be safe, that they have what they need, and that the reason they are raised will turn out well—that a general must act so that his people are safe, they have what they need and that they will obtain why they became an army? They went on an expedition so that, by overcoming their enemy, they might be happier?
…For a king is selected not so that he may care for himself well, but so that those who chose him may do well because of him. And all go to war so thet their life may be as good as possible, and they choose generals for this reason, so that they might have leaders to this end.”
My dear Livy, I chide you often for your Republican and Pompeian sympathies; and though I tease you out of affection, I am sure that you have understood that there is an edge of seriousness in my scolding. You came to manhood in the northern tranquillity of Padua, which had for generations been untouched by strife; and you did not even set foot in Rome until after Actium and the reform of the Senate. Had the chance occurred, it is most likely that you would even have joined with Marcus Brutus to fight against us, as our friend Horace did in fact do, at Philoppi, those many years ago.
What you seem unwilling to accept, even now, is this: that the ideals which supported the old Republic had no correspondence to the fact of the old Republic; that the glorious word concealed the deed of horror; that the appearance of tradition and order cloaked the reality of corruption and chaos; that the call to liberty and freedom closed the minds, even of those who called, to the facts of privation, suppression, and sanctioned murder. We had learned that we had to do what we did, and we would not be deterred by the forms that deceived the world.
If I spared my fatherland,
And I wasn’t criticized for tyranny and unending violence,
And my reputation wasn’t tarnished and dishonored,
I have no cause for shame, then.
In this regard, I think I’ll rank above everyone.
