Vulgar envy and spite: Cleon, Socrates, and Aristophanes.

In 425 BC, seven years into the Peloponnesian War – far nearer the beginning than the end of that sprawling contest – Cleon, “a popular leader of the time and very powerful with the multitude”, stood up in the Athenian assembly and damned his city’s generals as a bunch of slackers and cowards.

A small force of Spartan and allied infantry was being blockaded by the Athenians on a tiny island near Pylos, on the far side of the Peloponnese. In an effort to retrieve their men, the Spartans some months before had come to Athens to offer a peace treaty; but the assembly, thanks in part to Cleon’s influence, had sent the envoys packing, hoping by the outright capture of the Spartans to extract more favourable terms.

However, despite being short of food and fresh water, the men on the island had shown no inclination to surrender, and the blockade was proving to be ruinously expensive to maintain. Now, with winter coming on, it appeared that the operation would soon have to be abandoned, the Spartans permitted to escape, the Athenian advantage squandered.

Just as the assembly seemed ready to bow to this necessity, Cleon hopped up, and

pointing at Nicias, son of Niceratus, then general, whom he hated, he tauntingly said that it would be easy, if they had men for generals, to sail with a force and take those in the island, and that if he had himself been in command, he would have done it.

Nicias, despising his accuser in turn, primly replied that Cleon was welcome to step up and lead the expedition himself. Cleon dismissed this as mere rhetoric, until Nicias upped the stakes by publicly resigning his generalship. The assembly, out of faith in Cleon’s competence or delight at the prospect of his humiliation, roared him into accepting the command.

Making the best of it, he blustered that within twenty days he would take the island and bring the Spartans home as prisoners. “The Athenians,” we are told, “could not help laughing at his fatuity.”

Yet after a brief and triumphant campaign – whose success Thucydides attributes to a combination of dumb luck and the talent of Cleon’s co-general Demosthenes – Cleon fulfilled his promise, returning from Pylos with 292 prisoners, among them 120 members of the Spartan elite who could be used as hostages to deter future hostile actions.

It ought to be remembered that Thucydides, the source of the above account, had himself been a general in the war, and was banished from Athens, during the period of Cleon’s greatest influence, for his botched defense of Amphipolis. So perhaps he can be forgiven for the apparent tone of satisfaction with which he recounts Cleon’s death a few years later in the attempt to recapture the very town he’d lost. As he describes it,

Cleon, who from the first had no thought of fighting, at once fled and was overtaken and slain by a Myrcinian targeteer[.]

Yet it’s unclear why, if Cleon “had no thought of fighting”, he kept on volunteering for these extremely high-risk missions, when he could easily have stayed home, talking tough in the assembly.

***

Any attempt to rehabilitate Cleon’s reputation will of necessity focus on his actions at Pylos and Amphipolis – his second and third appearances in Thucydides’ narrative. His first appearance the modern reader will find harder to defend.

This concerns his participation in the debate over the fate of Mytilene, a city which had revolted from Athenian rule, finally surrendering after a long siege. Cleon’s faction, insisting that the Mytileneans must be punished brutally to deter revolts by other subject cities, called for all the adult males to be put to death, and the women and children sold into slavery.

The Athenian assembly at first agreed, and then, having second thoughts, reconvened the following day to reopen the debate. Cleon condemned their soft-heartedness and argued strongly against the reversal of the death sentence.

In light of his reputation, you might expect Cleon’s speech to have been a mere thuggish cry for revenge. Thucydides introduces him into his narrative as “the most violent man at Athens”; Plutarch, writing four centuries later, would dismiss him as “a fellow remarkable for nothing but his loud voice and brazen face”, and deplore his lack of refinement:

Among other things, he destroyed all the decorum of public speaking; he was the first who ever broke out into exclamations, flung open his dress, smote his thigh, and ran up and down whilst he was speaking[.]

It must therefore be admitted, in support of Thucydides’ objectivity, that he put in the hated Cleon’s mouth a clear-headed, even compelling justification of rule by terror. The Mytileneans, he pointed out, had revolted willingly:

Consider therefore! if you subject to the same punishment the ally who is forced to rebel by the enemy, and him who does so by his own free choice, which of them, think you, is there that will not rebel upon the slightest pretext; when the reward of success is freedom, and the penalty of failure nothing so very terrible?

Perhaps with a bit more thigh-smiting and running up and down, Cleon might have won his point; but despite his efforts, Athens voted to execute only a thousand or so of the “prime movers in the rebellion”.

As the war dragged on, hearts grew harder. Six years after Cleon’s death, when the Athenians captured Melos – a town heretofore neutral – they did to its defenders what they had recoiled from doing at Mytilene.

***

The Peloponnesian War is perhaps the greatest refutation of the cliché that history is written by the victors. With characteristically Laconic disdain for fine words and braggartry, the Spartans left no account of their triumph. Our knowledge of the war comes almost exclusively from Thucydides and Xenophon, both men of Athens, although not overly partisan ones: Thucydides is archetypally even-handed, while Xenophon, if anything, had pro-Spartan sympathies.

In his introduction to the 1951 edition of The Complete Writings of Thucydides, John H. Finley mentions that,

It is on first glance astonishing that the Athenians, who invented democracy, on the whole speak so badly of it.

Xenophon and Plato openly preferred Sparta’s militarized aristocracy. Aristotle’s view was more nuanced, but hardly an endorsement of letting the yokels have their way. The three great tragedians, fixated on the legendary deeds of kings and heroes, addressed the dramas of modern Athenian statecraft allegorically, if at all; while Aristophanes, in The Knights, portrayed the demos as an easily duped old gentleman:

Proud, O Demus, thy sway.
Thee, as Tyrant and King,
All men fear and obey,
Yet, O yet, ’tis a thing
Easy, to lead thee astray.
Empty fawning and praise
Pleased thou art to receive ;
All each orator says
Sure at once to believe ;
Wit thou hast, but ’tis roaming ;
Ne’er we find it its home in.

Among the major Athenian writers, says Finley, the one who wrote most sympathetically of democracy was Thucydides. But his idea of democracy was the forty-year supremacy of the “Olympian” Pericles, who by his personal charisma restrained and guided the Athenian mob. After his death, vain adventurers like Alcibiades and social climbers like Cleon arose and led the city to catastrophe.

In his 2009 book Thucydides: The Reinvention of History, Donald Kagan makes the case that Pericles’ hypercautious strategy could only have led to bankruptcy and defeat in a war lasting more than a couple years, and that populist leaders like Cleon were probably correct to push for a more aggressive posture after his death. Right or wrong, Kagan says,

we must understand that in each case Cleon won the support of the Athenians, and that he spoke to them honestly and directly, without deception or deviousness. Though he is often referred to as the first of the Athenian demagogues, he did not flatter the masses but addressed them in the severe, challenging, realistic language sometimes used by Pericles himself. Moreover, he put his own life on the line, serving on the expeditions he recommended and dying on the last one. [1]

Cleon’s sleazy reputation was cemented thanks to Thucydides and, especially, Aristophanes, who in The Knights portrayed him as a slave, “the greatest rogue and liar in the world”, who rules his master Demus through promises and flattery. Cleon’s fellow slaves Nicias and Demosthenes, tired of his antics, enlist a passing sausage-seller, even more coarse, stupid, and unscrupulous, to win over Demus and put an end to their rival’s tyranny.

It wasn’t for his ruthlessness that Cleon was despised: Mytilene is mentioned just once in The Knights, in reference to a bribe he supposedly elicited from the citizens of that city. Why they were bribing the man who’d been advocating their mass slaughter a couple of years before is unknown.

Pylos, however, is alluded to more than a half-dozen times. Aristophanes’ main complaint against Cleon, apart from his being an uncouth arriviste who came up through the leather trade, is that he dishonourably claimed credit for another man’s victory: Demosthenes complains that when he “baked a rich Laconian cake at Pylos”, Cleon snuck in and stole it, presenting it to their master as his own.

To his contemporaries, Cleon’s offenses were ill breeding, rapacity, and self-aggrandizement. His “kill all the Mytileneans” policy, though a tad audacious, was well within the Overton window.

At any rate, Aristophanes’ dung-flinging did nothing to diminish the popularity of Cleon and other so-called demagogues. As John Williams White concedes in his introduction to the Loeb edition of Aristophanes’ plays,

he drove no one of them from power; there is little evidence, indeed, that he damaged their influence or even disturbed their brazen self-confidence.

Perhaps that’s because Athenian playgoers knew not to take his attacks quite seriously.

Quoting some slanderous wisecracks made against Pericles by the comic writers of his time, Plutarch observes,

And how can one wonder at any number of strange assertions from men whose whole lives were devoted to mockery, and who were ready at any time to sacrifice the reputation of their superiors to vulgar envy and spite […] ? So very difficult a matter is it to trace and find out the truth of anything by history, when, on the one hand, those who afterwards write it find long periods of time intercepting their view, and, on the other hand, the contemporary records of any actions and lives, partly through envy and ill-will, partly through favour and flattery, pervert and distort truth.

In fact, there is reason to believe that Plutarch, in his Life of Pericles, mistook the plot of a lost farce by Hermippus for an account of a real-life court case involving Pericles and his lover Aspasia – a mistake which has ever since distorted our understanding of the beginnings of the Peloponnesian War. [2]

If Plutarch could make such a boner after the passage of a mere four centuries, are we likely to have more luck digging out the truth after the passage of an additional twenty, when many of the writers to whom the ancient historians refer are now lost to us, except through the snippets said ancients chose to preserve? At best, we can reassess the limited and contradictory facts available to us in light of our own assumptions about what constitutes vulgarity and respectability, cravenness and courage, virtue and wickedness.

***

It’s curious that so many readers have been prepared to accept as basically truthful Aristophanes’ caricature of Cleon in The Knights, while balking at accepting his caricature of Socrates in The Clouds.

The difference is that in the latter case we have, to place alongside Aristophanes’ satire, Plato and Xenophon’s worshipful depictions, whereas our opinion of Cleon has been shaped exclusively by the writings of those who detested him. A volume of Cleon’s Table Talk, if any of his partisans had taken the trouble to produce one, would no doubt prove edifying – maybe even entertaining: Plutarch, no sympathizer, alludes to the demagogue’s “nimble wit” and “bold jests”, contrasting them with Nicias’ more plodding style. [3]

Says I.F. Stone in his 1988 book The Trial of Socrates,

[T]he bits and pieces that survive from the Old Comedy, as it is called, of fifth-century Athens indicate that to his fellow citizens [Socrates] was long regarded as an odd — even lovable — eccentric, a town “character”. This is how his contemporaries saw him, and not as we see him in the golden haze of the Platonic dialogues.

In The Clouds, a father harassed by creditors determines to take his son to Socrates to be taught “the unjust Logic / That can shirk debts”.

Arriving at the school, we discover the students with their faces pressed to the earth to “seek things underground” while their assholes, turned to the heavens, simultaneously study astronomy. Socrates descends in a basket from above, where he has been walking on air, he says, and contemplating the sun. He informs the father that there is no Zeus, and that in his school only three gods are acknowledged: Chaos, the Clouds, and the Tongue. [4]

After a great many fart jokes and yet more abuse of Cleon, the son completes a course in Socratic “humbug and circumlocution”. The father, confident now in his son’s ability to win any lawsuit that might arise, insults and chases away his creditors.

Alas, he soon discovers that the verbal tricks of Socrates can be turned just as easily against him – the son assaults the father, and then blandly justifies his violence, declaring:

How sweet it is these novel arts, these clever words to know,
And have the power established rules and laws to overthrow.

Plutarch tells us that Socrates took this raillery in good humour, comparing it to being roasted at a dinner party. [5] Plato, too, depicted Socrates and Aristophanes as pals sharing a boozy all-night bull session in The Symposium.

And yet in the Apology, which depicts Socrates’ defense at his trial on charges of impiety and corrupting the young, Plato has his hero complain that his most formidable opponents are not the accusers who have brought the charges against him, but his “first accusers” – those who years earlier taught the public to sneer at him:

You have seen this yourself in the comedy of Aristophanes, a Socrates swinging about there, saying he was walking on air and talking a lot of other nonsense about things of which I know nothing at all.

I.F. Stone doubts that the Athenians were so simple as to take Aristophanes’ absurdities literally:

But only a humorless pedant can believe that the joshing of the comic poets led to the trial of Socrates. … To blame Socrates’ fate on the comic poets is like blaming a politicians’ defeat today on the way he has been “misrepresented” by newspaper cartoonists.

Stone’s argument is not that Socrates’ prosecution was deserved – Stone was a leftist of the old school who believed in protection even for subversive or dangerous speech – but that in their fictionalized accounts of his trial, Plato and Xenophon deliberately obscured the real and justified reasons the Athenians had for fearing his influence on the youth. The Trial of Socrates was written, Stone says,

to give the Athenian side of the story, to mitigate the city’s crime and thereby remove some of the stigma the trial left on democracy and on Athens.

***

Anytus, the most prominent among the three accusers who brought Socrates to trial, had like Cleon derived his modest fortune from the leather business. No doubt like Cleon he had rankled at snobbish comments about his being tainted with the stench of the tannery.

In her 1956 historical novel The Last of the Wine, Mary Renault imagines her protagonist, a young man of Socrates’ circle, being buttonholed by Anytus and scolded for his association with the philosopher:

“That man,” said Anytos, “ever since I remember, has been seen about with rich young idlers, flaunting their privilege of leisure, and frittering away their best years when they might have been mastering an honest trade. Can you deny that Kritias was his pupil? Or perhaps you would rather say his friend? What is more, ever since the democracy was restored, he has mocked at it, and undermined it.”

Critias was the former follower of Socrates who, after the fall of Athens at the the close of the war, headed the short-lived oligarchical dictatorship known as the Thirty. In I.F. Stone’s view, it was Socrates’ association with Critias and his followers – who, even after Critias’ death and the restoration of democracy, were still regarded as a threat – that led to his prosecution.

This was what was meant by the indictment in which Socrates was accused of “corrupting the young”: not that he had turned idle upper-class Athenians against their fathers or the gods, but that he had turned them into dangerous anti-government radicals. Stone has no trouble digging out quotes from Plato and Xenophon to illustrate that Socrates’ acolytes, or at least some of them, were contemptuous of Athenian democracy. [6]

Whether Socrates shared his acolytes’ views is less clear. In Xenophon’s (and Mary Renault’s) telling, it wasn’t political differences that had caused Critias and Socrates to fall out, but Critias’ habit of groping attractive boys: Socrates had publicly scolded him once for rubbing himself up against a certain youth like a pig against a stone.

In revenge, Critias when in power passed a law making it illegal “to teach the art of words”; which in practice meant, he oilily informed his former mentor, that it was forbidden for Socrates to “hold any converse whatever with the young”.

The prosecution of Socrates may likewise have had its roots in a personal grudge. Here Renault’s fictional Anytus, while barking down an attempt to explain how he has misunderstood the philosopher’s teachings, lets slip the real cause of his animus:

“Quibbles!” he said. “Everlasting quibbling, eating away the decent principles every man’s instinct should tell him are true. How does he get this hold over young men? By flattering them, of course; making them think they have a mission in life to be something out of the way, like that head-in-the-air young fellow [Plato] who was sneering at the Demos just now: teaching them that to work at a good trade, where they could learn the meaning of true democracy in give-and-take with their mates, is a waste of their precious souls; that unless they can dawdle about with him all day in the colonnades, talking away everything sacred, they will turn to clods—just like their poor fathers, who have only sweated blood that they might live as citizens and not as slaves.”

It seems that Socrates had at one time been acquainted with Anytus’ son – a boy “not lacking in firmness of spirit”, and therefore worthy in the philosopher’s eyes of elevation above the “servile occupation” that was the source of his father’s wealth.

Ever after, Anytus resented Socrates for commenting that he “ought not to confine his son’s education to hides.”

***

In Plato’s Apology, Socrates tells the jury that he believes it to be his duty to fulfill his “philosopher’s mission” and go on making a public nuisance of himself, even at the risk of his own life – just as it was his duty to remain where his generals placed him during the battles of Potidaea, Amphipolis, and Delium.

There are well-known anecdotes concerning Socrates’ heroics at Potidaea and Delium, but nothing is known about his involvement at Amphipolis – where, if you’ll recall, he would have served under the doomed generalship of Cleon.

Judging by the percentage of the comedians’ barbs that were directed at them, Socrates and Cleon must have been two of the most famous men in Athens. The Clouds had been produced the year before Amphipolis, The Knights the year before that. In their off hours, did these two soldiers ever get together to compare Aristophanic arrow wounds?

We don’t know anything about Cleon’s leadership style – Thucydides doesn’t give him a pre-battle speech, as he does the opposing Spartan general – but we can speculate that, as a radical democrat, he would have striven for an easy camaraderie with his troops. If so, it’s far from clear that the hoplites – many of them aristocrats who would have looked down on their “new money” commander – would have responded with warmth to his egalitarian outreach.

As for Socrates, I’m sure he would have made a show of friendliness. How could he have resisted the opportunity to poke a few finger-holes in Cleon’s sense of self-satisfaction? He might easily have driven his thin-skinned general into a rage, if not by philosophizing rings around him then by dropping some jerky comment about his background in the trades. But it’s just possible that Cleon with his “nimble wit” would have held his own.

***

If it’s not quite true that history is written by the victors, it’s obviously true that history is written by those who write the histories. They tend not to be pragmatic middle-class men like Cleon and Anytus, who are busy tending to their affairs, but the kind of dreamers condemned by Anytus as “rich young idlers, flaunting their privilege of leisure”.

We see ancient Athens through the eyes of the men who had the time and inclination to fritter away their days yakking about the nature of justice and virtue. They weren’t all rich, by any means, and they weren’t all idle, at least as far as their intellects were concerned. Nevertheless, their writings tended to reflect the preoccupations and prejudices of their social class: they had a high regard for their own intelligence, they scoffed at the commonplace, and they resented the system that subordinated their preferences to those of the working stiffs who kept their city running.

The commonplace men who elevated Cleon and Anytus to positions of influence would be startled, no doubt, at the topsy-turvy picture of their society communicated to the future by men they dismissed as zanies. No doubt our own zanies are busily compiling a history of our own times which would startle us, too, if we lived long enough to see it accepted as truth.

M.

1. Kagan mentions that Cleon’s great rival Nicias, after his death in the misbegotten Sicilian expedition of 415-413, was omitted from the stone commemorating the war dead because, Pausanias tells us, he had surrendered in what the Athenians deemed an ignominious manner. Cleon’s name, however, his countrymen continued to honour, placing it “at the head of those who fought at Amphipolis”. (So says Kagan. As far as I can tell, Pausanias only specifies that that “those who marched with Cleon” were thus honoured. The Greek version can be consulted here.)

2. The likelihood that Plutarch mistook the plot of a lost satire on Pericles for actual history is mentioned by I.F. Stone in The Trial of Socrates. He refers us to this note in the 1927 edition of the Cambridge Ancient History.

3. Unfortunately, Plutarch provides just one example of Cleon’s humour: showing up late to a sitting of the Athenian assembly, a garland perched ostentatiously on his head, Cleon mock-piously informed the crowd that he’d been kept busy with his sacrifices and was now late for a dinner date, so would they mind adjourning till tomorrow? – “Whereupon the Athenians, laughing, rose up, and dissolved the assembly.” That the gag isn’t all that funny bespeaks the fondness the people must have held for him.

4. I find it helpful, reading Aristophanes, to have multiple translations of the play open: one in verse, for euphony; one in modern prose, for comprehension; and one with detailed notes. Which is why I’ve quoted from three different versions of The Clouds.

5. Regarding Socrates’ broad-minded reaction to Aristophanes’ abuse, Todd M. Compton writes in Victim of the Muses:

[Plutarch’s anecdote] does portray a Socrates unruffled by Aristophanes’ play. But it also portrays a friend of Socrates who is clearly shocked at the extent of the abuse (“all manner of abuse … in every possible way”) directed at his friend. In addition, this fits into the familiar genre of Socratic stories in which he is seen as an extraordinarily wise man (it is prefaced by an explanation that wise men can control their anger). The point of the story is that one would expect Socrates to be upset, but he reacts with wisdom, self-control, and urbanity.

6. I.F. Stone knows enough not to take Aristophanes’ lampoons too seriously, yet he elects to interpret Plato’s thought experiments as literal blueprints for the design of a functioning state. He dismisses in an incredulous aside the view held by, among others, Allan Bloom, that the regimented, thought-controlled, eugenic state described in The Republic is, as Stone puts it, “a satire by Plato on his own utopianism!”

Here’s Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind expressing the viewpoint that Stone finds so risible:

What is so intolerable about The Republic, as Plato shows, is the demand that men give up their land, their money, their wives, their children, for the sake of the public good, their concern for which had previously been buttressed by these lower attachments. The hope is to have a happy city made up entirely of unhappy men. Similar demands are made today in an age of slack morality and self-indulgence. Plato taught that, however laudable justice may be, one cannot expect prodigies of virtue from ordinary people. Better a real city tainted by selfish motives than one that cannot exist, except in speech, and that promotes real tyranny.

—

As I mentioned in my essay on literary eunuchs, Mary Renault in The Last of the Wine makes Socrates’ real-life disciple Phaedo a survivor of the Athenian massacre at Melos. I’ve never written about Aristophanes before, but I did drop a reference to Lysistrata into this exploration of accents, clothing, and class in the movies. And, oh yeah – Cleon, meet William Jennings Bryan: “He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits.”

Strategic capitulation and the Last Man.

In Second Game, a 1958 novella by Charles V. De Vet and Katherine MacLean, a human spy visits an isolationist alien planet to see what he can learn about the natives. He discovers a prideful, scrupulous, single-minded race who resent the human federation’s poking around in their star system uninvited.

When the spy is captured, his interrogators are unable to grasp his protestations of peaceful intentions. Their honour has been insulted. To refrain from war now would dishonour both sides.

Escaping captivity, the spy spends some time wandering around the aliens’ capital city. He comes to admire the natives:

I felt kin to them, as if these people had much in common with myself. And I felt that it was too bad that life was not fundamentally so simple that one could discard the awareness of other ways of life, of other values and philosophies that bid against one another, and against one’s attention, and make one cynical of the philosophy one lives by, and dies for. Too bad that I could not see and take life as that direct, and as that simple.

It is a “universal law”, declared Friedrich Nietzsche, that “a living thing can only be healthy, strong, and productive within a certain horizon.”

In “The Use and Abuse of History” he describes a man bounded by the assumptions and prejudices of his own time and place, ignorant of broader trends in history, philosophy, or aesthetics, his horizon “as narrow as that of an Alpine valley” – yet nevertheless standing forth “in unconquerable health and vigor, to the joy of all who see him”.

He compares that ruddy-cheeked yokel with his effete, cosmopolitan counterpart, who, with all his subtlety and refinement, is too discombobulated by his “continually changing and shifting” historical horizon to summon the courage to accomplish great things. For, says Nietzsche,

No artist will paint his picture, no general win his victory, no nation gain its freedom, without having striven and yearned for it under those very “unhistorical” conditions.

In his widely mocked, widely misunderstood book The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama elaborated on Nietzsche’s meaning:

For history teaches us that there have been horizons beyond number in the past—civilizations, religions, ethical codes, “value systems.” The people who lived under them, lacking our modern awareness of history, believed that their horizon was the only one possible. Those who come late in this process, those who live in the old age of mankind, cannot be so uncritical. …

The last man at the end of history knows better than to risk his life for a cause, because he recognizes that history was full of pointless battles in which men fought over whether they should be Christian or Muslim, Protestant or Catholic, German or French. The loyalties that drove men to desperate acts of courage and sacrifice were proven by subsequent history to be silly prejudices.

The spy in Second Game is, in effect, an envoy from the End of History. Realizing that war would be pointlessly devastating to all sides, he announces to the surprised aliens his intention to return home and advise his own government to surrender unconditionally.

But the Last Man has the last laugh. The spy has foreseen that the aliens will be judicious overlords. With their vastly smaller population their culture will soon be softened and tamed by contact with their new imperial subjects.

And so it comes to pass. The aliens are turned into Last Men indistinguishable from the humans who submitted to their overlordship.

Fatal enervation.

When I was putting together my Bibliography page a couple months back I was surprised to find that in the twelve years I’ve been blogging, I’ve never mentioned Francis Fukuyama – even though several of my posts deal with Fukuyamian themes in Fukuyamian ways.

I have mentioned Nietzsche, from whose Thus Spake Zarathustra Fukuyama borrowed half the title of his most famous book. I should confess that despite several valiant efforts I’ve never made it all the way through Zarathustra, which hasn’t stopped me from quoting (in a review of a C.P. Snow novel) the passage where the paradise of the Last Men is described:

One no longer becomes poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wants to rule? Who still wants to obey? Both are too burdensome.

No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wants the same; everyone is the same: he who feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse.

“Formerly all the world was insane,” — say the subtlest of them, and they blink.

They are clever and know all that has happened: so there is no end to their derision. People still quarrel, but are soon reconciled — otherwise it upsets their stomachs.

They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.

“We have discovered happiness,” — say the Last Men, and they blink.

Writing in 1992, Fukuyama wondered whether the collapse of the Soviet Union marked the final triumph of the Last Men. As Rod Dreher put it in a blog post reflecting on “the victory of liberal capitalist democracy over communism”:

It turns out that liberal democracy is not an end point, but a means to an end. What is that end? Freedom? Okay, but freedom for what? Progress? Fine, but where are we going? Towards a world of radical individualism, of self-actualized hedonistic shoppers?

For thirty years, critics of Fukuyama’s book – many of whom seem not to have actually read it – have caricatured it either as a self-satisfied blurt of American triumphalism, or as a woolly-minded declaration of the dawning of a yuppie Age of Aquarius. Here’s the conservative polemicist Mark Steyn unflatteringly comparing it to P.D. James’ The Children of Men, which came out in the same year:

While Fukuyama was cooing that the collapse of the Soviet Union marked “the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”, Lady James discerned, at the very moment of triumph, a fatal enervation in the “free world”.

Three decades on, The End of History is too ridiculous to read, while The Children of Men endures as a meditation on the west at sunset.

Actually, far from “cooing”, Fukuyama’s tone is sombre, even fatalistic:

When Nietzsche’s Zarathustra told the crowd about the last man, a clamor arose: “Give us this last man, O Zarathustra!” “Turn us into these last men!” they shouted. The life of the last man is one of physical security and material plenty, precisely what Western politicians are fond of promising their electorates. Is this really what the human story has been “all about” these last few millennia? Should we fear that we will be both happy and satisfied with our situation, no longer human beings but animals of the genus homo sapiens? Or is the danger that we will be happy on one level, but still dis-satisfied with ourselves on another, and hence ready to drag the world back into history with all its wars, injustice, and revolution? [1]

Thymotic anger.

“In the Beginning,” – to quote one of Fukuyama’s chapter titles – was “a Battle to the Death for Pure Prestige”.

Fukuyama wonders whether the liberal-democratic doctrine of equality can fully satisfy man’s desire for recognition, a drive he traces back to Hegel’s “first man” – a kind of aristocrat in animal skins, ready to go club-to-club with his fellow first men to force them to acknowledge his superiority. [2]

The strain of liberalism descending from Hobbes and Locke emphasized the necessity of constraining men’s sanguinary urges through the adoption of a social contract – a mutual agreement among the combatants to lay down their clubs and submit to be governed. In exchange they would enjoy security and the freedom to engage in mutually profitable economic activities. The desire for recognition – the cause of wars and civil disorder – would wither away, or be redirected into benign pursuits, like science, the arts, and the piling up of material wealth.

Fukuyama stresses the radicalism of this line of thought:

In the civil society envisioned by Hobbes, Locke, and other early modern liberal thinkers, man needs only desire and reason. The bourgeois was an entirely deliberate creation of early modern thought, an effort at social engineering that sought to create social peace by changing human nature itself.

As attempts to engineer human nature go, the liberal experiment was unusually successful. We live amid its results; hence, its radicalism is invisible to us. The bourgeois revolution has nevertheless provoked opposition over the years from thinkers like Hegel who believed that it had severed us from an essential part of our humanity.

Fukuyama discusses several of these thinkers, most of them familiar already to anyone who browses the kind of websites where the neuroses of modern liberalism are diagnosed. The Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, for instance, who in his essay “The Power of the Powerless” imagined an apolitical greengrocer signalling his conformity to communist doctrine by hanging a sign in his shop window declaring “Workers of the World, Unite!”:

Let us take note: if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient,” he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth. The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity.

Havel goes on to imagine that “one day something in our greengrocer snaps” and he begins to express his true feelings. He is swiftly demoted from manager to warehouse drudge, his children’s futures are threatened, he is persecuted by co-workers who care no more than he does about the unity of the workers of the world.

Nevertheless, by his rebellion the greengrocer has “enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth.” A regime is propped up by the willingness of ordinary people to accept its baloney; when enough greengrocers rebel, the regime totters. As Fukuyama points out,

The man of desire, Economic Man, the true bourgeois, will perform an internal “cost-benefit analysis” which will always give him a reason for working “within the system.” It is only … the man who feels that his worth is constituted by something more than the complex set of desires that make up his physical existence … who is willing to walk in front of a tank or confront a line of soldiers.

In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis regretted the emergence of “Men without Chests” – men governed by their brains and their bellies, lacking that intermediating element, seated in the chest, which is the source of magnanimity, and sentiment, and virtue, and courage:

It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.

In Fukuyama’s view, it is this irrepressible “middle element” – borrowing a term from Plato’s Republic, he calls it thymos – that drives history in the direction of democracy. Ultimately, people won’t put up with being kicked around by communists or fascists or theocrats. They’ll rise up, kick back at the bullies, and set up a government that respects the dignity of each individual citizen – which is to say, a liberal democracy.

But the thymotic anger of greengrocers was only half the story of communism’s collapse in Eastern Europe. The other half was the unwillingness of the communist leadership to follow the example of their predecessors in unleashing the army against uppity demonstrators:

Once the Soviets indicated they would not intervene to prop up local allies in Eastern Europe, the only surprising outcome was the totality of the demoralization of the communist apparatuses in all of the Eastern European countries, and the fact that hardly anyone in the old guard was willing to lift a finger in self-defense.

Fukuyama implies that the communists’ horizons had been widened through exposure to contending ideas of the good. Like the risk-averse future humans in Second Game, they were no longer willing to engage in “pointless battles” over what form of government should prevail.

But communists share with Fukuyama the belief that history has a direction – that it moves inexorably towards a more just and rational form of social organization. They merely disagree about what conditions constitute justice and rationality.

Those communists who pragmatically switched sides in 1989, reinventing themselves as democratic socialists, might easily have rationalized their apostasy as a strategic capitulation. Perhaps they saw Eastern Europe’s apparent repudiation of their beliefs as nothing more than a switchback on the winding path leading onward and upward to the End of History.

30 years on from “the decisive collapse of communism as a factor in world history”. Source.

“History is bunk.”

Turning my copy of The End of History and the Last Man edgewise, I notice that the little coloured Post-Its I use to mark interesting passages – including most of the ones quoted in this essay – are concentrated in the last third of the book.

That’s the section where Fukuyama wonders whether the End of History would be a fit place for humans to live, or whether its inhabitants might “drag the world back into history” out of sheer exasperation.

Jumping back, the first section lays out Fukuyama’s argument that history has a direction – that however events play out in different parts in the world, in the long run all human societies will converge toward a single outcome, determined by innate human psychological drives and by the possibilities opened up by scientific advances.

In the second section, the one I find shakiest, Fukuyama lays out the conjecture that liberal democracy is the final form of government towards which history has been moving.

No doubt this seemed more plausible in 1992. But Fukuyama’s own thesis posits technological change as one of the factors that determines historical progress. Why shouldn’t future advances in technology drive new forms of social organization?

Consider the big-data-driven Social Credit system coming into shape in China, which will permit the government to pry ever more deeply into its citizens’ communications, financial dealings, and private thoughts, and penalize whatever the Party deems to be antisocial activities. Those with high Social Credit ratings will find their way through life smoothed, while those who persist in visiting the wrong websites, or interacting with the wrong friends, will be inconvenienced in subtle ways whenever they attempt to find work, to travel, or to make everyday purchases.

Fukuyama brings in another old friend from the anti-Woke comment threads, Alexis de Tocqueville, to predict how a democratic people – “an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives” – might submit willingly to a novel form of tyranny:

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood. … [I]t provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

Rod Dreher has been arguing that such a despotism is under construction in the western democracies – not, or not yet, under the direction of the state, but bit by bit through the actions of gigantic corporations devoted to “protecting” their users from contentious ideas. He calls this “soft totalitarianism”, and compares it to the antiseptic, chemically-pacified, sexually liberated future described in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World:

In fact, a college literature professor told me that when he teaches Brave New World, few of his students recognise it as a dystopia at all.

I can believe that. I recall how, as a teenage leftist in the early 1990s, I first encountered the chapter in which World Controller Mustafa Mond extolled the virtues of the society over which he ruled. I thought, “This all sounds okay, actually:”

“The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or loves to feel strongly about; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there’s soma.”

When John the Savage, refugee from one of the few remaining domains of unconditioned humanity, contends that such a narcotized, conflict-free life seems to him unbearable, the World Controller cheerfully concedes his point:

“Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”

Compassionate Mustafa Mond. His punishment of the novel’s heroes for instigating a riot is not imprisonment, not torture, merely banishment to an island where, he reassures them, they’ll dwell comfortably among others of their own kind – “people who aren’t satisfied with orthodoxy, who’ve got independent ideas of their own”. John the Savage he permits to live freely, despite his violent tendencies; the stability of the regime is not threatened by the presence of a lone Shakespeare-quoting madman.

Fair-minded Mustafa Mond. Even as he censors a “dangerous and potentially subversive” scientific theory, he reflects that it is a “masterly piece of work”, and quite possibly true. A pity; but the happiness of the people must be considered.

Clear-eyed Mustafa Mond, who in the well-known words of Our Ford proclaims that “History is bunk”, and waves his hand:

and it was as though, with an invisible feather whisk, he had brushed away a little dust, and the dust was Harapa, was Ur of the Chaldees; some spider-webs, and they were Thebes and Babylon and Cnossos and Mycenae. Whisk, whisk — and where was Odysseus, where was Job, where were Jupiter and Gotoma and Jesus?

What is there in the above to offend the 21st-century progressive sensibility? True, we haven’t yet abolished family, though modern sentiment encourages us to apply the word to any close-knit group, related or not. We don’t yet sneer at love, though the high priests of progressivism declare that one can love any number of partners, successively or concurrently. We haven’t yet arrived at the free distribution of soma, though we do have cheap and ever-more potent marijuana; and for those who get themselves addicted to the harder stuff, enlightened opinion declares that the state should supply their substances free of charge, to ensure the addicts’ well-being.

Most importantly, we continue to exalt individuality – up to the point that an expression of individualism interferes with a less privileged individual’s feeling of security.

In “The Use and Abuse of History” Nietzsche described the attractive life of a herd of grazing animals, well-fed and content, knowing nothing of “the meaning of yesterday or today”:

Man cannot see them without regret, for even in the pride of his humanity he looks enviously on the beast’s happiness. He wishes simply to live without satiety or pain, like the beast; yet it is all in vain, for he will not change places with it.

The horror that we might someday abandon the human “pride” that sets us apart from the animals, and regress to a state of herbivorous contentment, has been a recurring theme of the dystopian imagination from Nietzsche to Wells to WALL-E. Some of these fictions portray a rebel arising to jolt humanity out of its rut; others conjecture that once we’ve bartered away our thymos, it’s gone for good.

In the non-fiction realm, the Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève – whose Introduction to the Reading of Hegel seems to have been Fukuyama’s main source of inspiration – thought that the diminishment of humankind to a species of domesticated animal was really nothing to worry about, if you took a sufficiently broad view:

The disappearance of Man at the end of History, therefore, is not a cosmic catastrophe: the natural World remains what it has been from all eternity. And therefore, it is not a biological catastrophe either: Man remains alive as animal in harmony with nature or given Being. What disappears is Man properly so-called—that is, Action negating the given, and Error, or in general, the Subject opposed to the Object. …

(Fukuyama suggests he’s being ironic there, but who can tell?) In Kojève’s view, the End of History meant the end of war – but also the end of art, the end of philosophy, even the end of wisdom. He was fine with it. After the Second World War he gave up the academic life and spent the remainder of his years, as Fukuyama puts it,

working in that bureaucracy meant to supervise construction of the final home for the last man, the European Commission. [3]

Fighting dragons.

Fukuyama was never a radical. These days he seems to be a resolute centrist, happy to help a Guardian reporter fulfill his weekly quota of anti-Trump gibes. Although in The End of History and The Last Man he’s ambivalent about liberal democracy’s prospects for delivering human satisfaction, he never really entertains the possibility that some other form of government might prove to be superior.

But suppose you’re a bit gloomier. Suppose you look ahead and foresee democracy degrading either into factional chaos or into “soft totalitarian” torpor.

Suppose you start to wonder whether Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, for the people” is actually all it’s cracked up to be. As Curtis Yarvin puts it (dismissing the “of the people” part of the phrase as a mellifluous redundancy):

Suppose government by the people cannot actually deliver government for the people? Suppose we just have to choose?

What would government for the people look like? We, the people, seem to desire the life of Zarathustra’s Last Man – nothing more than the assurance of our “little pleasures for the day”. But is a government that satisfies all our lazy desires really governing for us?

We see that early in a democratic period, the real power of democracy (the power of the mob) greatly exceeds its formal power. Late in the cycle, this disparity inverts: the formal power of democracy exceeds its real power. Its peaceful, apathetic voters are not only not a mob—they are not even a crowd. These “last men” are too soft to even lift the swords of the primitive and violent ancestors who created their powers.

So those powers must and will be taken from them. In a monarchy where the king is weak, the king will be managed. In a democracy where the voters are weak, the voters will be managed.

In the next paragraph, he goes on to quote Tocqueville: “No form or combination of social polity has yet been devised, to make an energetic people out of a community of pusillanimous and enfeebled citizens.” As you can see from the above, Yarvin – better known under his old pseudonym Mencius Moldbug – works from many of the same sources that inspired Fukuyama. But he arrives at the conclusion (premature, I hope) that liberal democracy is beyond saving; that it is incapable of securing our freedom either in the narrow sense – our freedom to think, speak, and worship as we please – or, more broadly, our freedom to be fully human beings.

Therefore we might as well start planning for whatever will replace it after its inevitable collapse. I’m a little fuzzy on what that’s supposed to be: Gray Mirror, the book which will supposedly lay out Yarvin’s political philosophy, is still being released, one long, long, loooong chapter at a time.

In the most recent installment, Yarvin riffs on Cicero’s dictum “Salus populi suprema lex”, or the health of the people is the supreme law—

the original and correct principle of all government, famous for millennia, never changed and never improved on.

But what is this slippery thing, the salus populi? Does it refer only to physical health – the guarantee of ample food, warm clothing, and medical care?

Or should the definition be expanded to include psychological health – in which case, perhaps, the government would be justified in removing statues, books, ideas, and if necessary, disagreeable people, if by their presence other people are made unhappy?

Or is there a still more comprehensive definition of salus? One that encompasses not only the stomach and the mind, but C.S. Lewis’ “middle element”?

Yarvin indulges in a sci-fi thought experiment that might be held up against other dystopian visions of the End of History. He imagines the bored, aimless citizens of the near future voluntarily migrating into “sealed villages” – windowless buildings which might be located anywhere – therein to spend the remainder of their lives participating in fully immersive virtual reality adventures. These adventures would be characterized by their intensity:

It is not a coincidence that virtual worlds so often select premodern European social, political and technical parameters—and the older and more fantastic, the better. The most basic human sociology is that all human beings prefer, all things being equal, to live in guilds that fight dragons for a living.

The game designer, in this scenario, bears much the same responsibility for the salus of the virtual villagers as a government bears for its citizens. Yes, bug burritos could be pneumatically delivered to the villagers’ haptic VR pods to keep them in good physical health; drugs could be squirted into their nostrils to keep them pacified. But if their virtual lives are to be an improvement over their unsatisfying real-world lives, the villagers must be enabled to live in a fully human way – which entails the possibility of enduring setbacks, experiencing physical pain, even dying, in the course of their virtual adventures:

When we accept the realization that humanity is not and cannot be in a healthy, manlike condition in the absence of pain, violence and death—not a new revelation, not even a Nietzschean revelation, but one of the oldest ideas in Western philosophy—we are forced to accept the general realization that the human experience is in every way shaped by essential difficulty. In hedonomic jargon, humans need disutility. … According to the principle of salus, our bodies must be exercised; our minds must be challenged; our characters must be tested; or we will be less human than we could be.

This thought experiment implies that if humanity should ever conquer all its difficulties, it may be necessary for whoever governs us – whether in virtual villages or in the real world – to devise artificial difficulties, to test our characters and give our lives meaning.

But what chance is there, really, that we’ll ever conquer our difficulties? Even in the unlikely event that all the world’s remaining tyrannies are overthrown, all the banana republics raised to western levels of democratic stability, all the pirates pacified, all the terrorists successfully won over to the doctrine of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – how long will that happy state endure? One last quote from Fukuyama:

Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in a previous generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.

Is that not exactly what we’ve been seeing of late? Conservatives like Rod Dreher are right to observe that their values and beliefs are under attack. Young people are no longer willing to live within the cultural horizon that bounded and oriented their ancestors’ imaginations.

Once the rebels have successfully smashed down the boundary markers and levelled the landscape, we’ll begin to discern the outlines of the new horizon, which will shape the deeds and imaginations of the next generation – their morality, and their sense of beauty, and their acts of courage.

This is the horizon which future rebels will struggle to transcend – and in struggling, we can hope, prove themselves human.

M.

1. If you missed the link above, Aris Roussinos’ article in UnHerd says everything I would’ve liked to say about Fukuyama’s conservatism, if I weren’t handicapped by my own discursiveness:

In his aristocratic distaste for the world summoned into being by the temporary triumph of liberalism, his Nietzchean disgust at the Last Man it has created, and his awareness of the stronger and more meaningful passions aroused by the prospect of struggle, sacrifice and glory, Fukuyama is widely at variance with the worldview ascribed to him. Were he writing in today’s more hysterical climate rather than in the early 1990s, he would more likely be accused of meandering towards fascism than of liberal triumphalism.

2. I should clarify that Fukuyama’s take on Hegel is, as he admits, heavily influenced by Alexandre Kojève, who uses the snappier “first men” in place of Hegel’s “modes of Consciousness that have not risen above the bare level of life”.

3. This essay is already bloated with quotes, but I can’t resist cramming in this fine piece of invective from the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton. The subject is the respected interpreter of Hegel and engineer of European unity, Kojève:

This man was, in my view, a dangerous psychopath, who brought with him from Russia the same kind of nihilistic fervour that had inspired the Bolsheviks, and who took an exhilarated joy in the thought that everything around him was doomed. He could not set eyes on any human achievement without relishing its future ruin. He lived in a Götterdämmerung of his own imagination, wishing meanwhile to create the kind of post-historical, universal and bureaucratic form of government that would extinguish all real human attachments and produce the only thing he really cared for: the last man, the loveless and lifeless homunculus which he knew in intimate detail since he knew it in himself.

—

Last month, a bit of fruitless research for this essay led me to consider how the desire for recognition might manifest in a willingness to crowd fellow pedestrians off the sidewalk. Some months earlier, H.G. Wells’ dystopian classic The Sleeper Awakes inspired some thoughts on 19th, 20th, and 21st century morality. Since I’ve elected not to pass comment on today’s American presidential election you might be interested in what I was thinking on the eve of the previous one.

Two literary eunuchs.

In this retrospective on the 20th anniversary of Gladiator, that film’s co-star Djimon Hounsou says something odd:

The initial script had me being the head of slaves during that time and I said, “I shouldn’t be the definition of slavery.” Slavery didn’t exist back then, so, what are we talking about, really? We’re talking about using humans to do that sort of fighting entertainment and all those people were considered slaves.

Now, English isn’t Hounsou’s first language, so he might have misspoken, or been misheard. Or perhaps he subscribes to some esoteric definition of “slavery” that somehow excludes the Roman variety. But on the surface it appears that one of the stars of Gladiator­­ – a movie about slavery in ancient times – came away from it believing that there was no slavery in ancient times.

Speaking of fictional depictions of slavery…

***

“Two literary eunuchs” would be a good title for a bitchy essay about a pair of insufficiently virile male authors. Tolkien and Lewis, maybe? Auden and Isherwood? These nerds? But I’m not sufficiently virile to write such an essay.

Instead I’ll be talking about two actual eunuchs from literature – and from history – the narrators of Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy and Robert Graves’ Count Belisarius.

Between 1969 and 1981 Mary Renault wrote a biography and a loose trilogy of historical novels about Alexander the Great. I can recommend them all, but especially the middle chapter of the trilogy, The Persian Boy, from 1972, which describes the most eventful period of Alexander’s career from the perspective of a eunuch slave boy who is taken into his personal service.

In Renault’s telling, Bagoas is the child of a Persian aristocrat who, during the dynastic manoeuvrings that brought King Darius to the throne, was killed on the orders of the previous king’s vizier (also named Bagoas, to the confusion of later students of history). Marked for death, the handsome ten year old is instead carried off by one of his father’s murderers:

He did not keep me long, being in need of money. In the dealer’s courtyard at Susa, city of lilies, I stood stripped naked, while they drank date wine out of little cups, and haggled over my price. […]

The dealer’s house was strong as a prison, with courtyard walls fifteen feet high. On one side was a shed, where they did the gelding. They had purged and starved me first, which is thought to make it safer; I was led in cold and empty, to see the table with the knives, and the frame with splayed-out legs to which they bind you, with old black blood on it and dirty straps. Then at last I threw myself at the dealer’s feet and clasped them crying. But they made no more of it than farmhands of the bawling bull-calf.

The newly-made eunuch spends two quiet years as a page-boy to the wife of a local merchant, but as he grows older and his good looks attract the eyes of the men in the bazaar, his owner decides to make a little extra cash pimping him out to his customers. The boy proves so popular that he comes to the attention of the agents of the royal household, and at age thirteen Bagoas is sold again, to begin his training in “the rites of the bedchamber”.

I wonder whether Renault’s book could be published in the current climate of hypersensitivity about depictions of underage sexuality. While Bagoas begins his royal service traumatized by his experiences as a child prostitute, he reluctantly finds himself enjoying his “training” at the hands of an older eunuch. He soon graduates to service in the royal bedchamber, where the ageing Darius handles him gently, kissing and dandling him “like a doll”, but:

In all the time I was with him, he gave no sign of knowing a eunuch can feel anything. One does not tell such things to the King of Kings, if he does not ask.

***

In an Author’s Note, Renault adds that while the real Bagoas’ backstory is unknown,

the conjecture that he was of good birth is not fanciful. Such boys, whose looks had been taken care of and not spoiled by malnutrition or hardship, once enslaved were always at the highest risk of prostitution. Sokrates’ disciple Phaidon (Phaedo) is the best-known case.

Phaedo – the namesake of one of Plato’s best-known dialogues – appears in Renault’s earlier novel The Last of the Wine, set among the young followers of Socrates during the Peloponnesian War. She makes Phaedo a native of Melos, an island besieged in 416 BC after defying Athenian demands for tribute. Wounded in the defense of his city, the boy is recuperating in bed when starvation obliges the defenders to submit:

[T]he gates were opened and the Athenians marched in. Presently he heard a great shrieking of women, and the death-cries of men. Soldiers ran in, dragged him from his bed to the Agora, and threw him down among a crowd of young lads and children, who had been herded into the sheep-pound. Just across the square was a pile of corpses newly killed, and still being added to; sticking out of the midst of it was his father’s head. [1]

Purchased in the slave-market by the manager of an Athens bathhouse, Phaedo soon “learned the arts of his calling, and commanded a high price”.

The narrator attempts to befriend the shy, skittish boy who is accustomed to sit in silence at Socrates’ feet. (In the dialogue named for him, Phaedo describes himself sitting on a low stool while Socrates “stroked my head and pressed the hair on the back of my neck, for he was in the habit of playing with my hair at times”.) Phaedo’s new friends are unaware that he is a slave, a fact he conceals not only out of shame, but to protect others from the ignominy of being associated with a bathhouse boy. When he reveals his secret, he is careful to explain that he met Socrates not as a client, but while on an unauthorized break from his trade – he has learned the trick of locking the door so that his manager will think he has a customer, and going out through a window to roam the city.

Later some members of Socrates’ circle send one of their number to the bathhouse to invite Phaedo to a dinner party. This leads to an awkward moment:

“In due course I knocked, and Phaedo opened. All he had on was the paint on his face. I knew then I shouldn’t have come. The next moment he slammed-to the door. He was almost too quick for me, but being rather stronger I managed to hold it. ‘Next room,’ he said through the crack, ‘I’m engaged’ – ‘Wait, Phaedo,’ I began. Suddenly he flung open the door so that I nearly fell inside. He stood there laughing. He looked like something you might come upon in a dark wood. ‘Come in, Lysis,’ he said. ‘Honour the threshold. Who am I to turn away trade?'”

Phaedo is eventually bought by one of Socrates’ friends and set free. He never discusses his past clients, but occasionally the narrator will notice him “watching with irony in his dark eye” as some citizen pontificates about morality.

Luckily for Phaedo, at this time it wasn’t the Greek custom to make eunuchs of their slaves, a practice they regarded with disgust – though as Bagoas states in The Persian Boy, set almost a century later,

[S]o long as they sold boys young into the brothels, I did not think the Greeks had so much to boast of.

***

To resume the narrative of The Persian Boy: After King Darius ignominiously flees Alexander’s army at Gaugamela, Bagoas joins his slow retreat northward through the mountains, faithfully serving his master while his generals and courtiers scheme to depose him. When the coup comes, and the remnants of Persian resistance scatter, the boy finds himself masterless and alone, with no choice but to offer his services in the camp of the pursuing Macedonians:

I waited by the fidgeting horses, while the Macedonians looked at me. Among Persians, the eunuch knows himself marked out at sight by his lack of beard; it was most strange to be in a crowd where no young man had one. Alexander had shaved from his youth, and liked his fashion followed. Persian soldiers would have had any man’s blood, who told them to make themselves like eunuchs; but I don’t think this had even occurred to the Macedonians. They had no eunuchs. I was the only one.

Accustomed to the formal rigours of the Persian court, Bagoas is at first repelled by the easy manners of the Macedonians – “uncouth westerners” who drink heavily, banter playfully with their king, and exercise shamelessly in the nude. They in turn detest him as a “spayed catamite” and resent his “fawning barbarians ways”.

The young king, whom Bagoas find surprisingly courteous “for someone reared in the wilds”, is more receptive to eastern customs. Appreciating his new servant’s elegant manners and remarkable beauty, he employs him as a personal attendant, and later as a Persian language instructor, but declines to invite him to his bedchambers. It is Bagoas who first falls in love with Alexander, and eventually succeeds in seducing him.

Bagoas appears again in Renault’s Funeral Games, set amid the struggles for succession at the time of Alexander’s death. The general Ptolemy watches as Bagoas tenderly nurses the dying king:

At first Ptolemy had disliked this exotic presence haunting Alexander’s living-quarters, encouraging him to assume the trappings of Persian royalty and the manners of a Persian court, having his ear day and night. But he was a fixture one had grown used to.

In Renault’s telling Bagoas became not only Alexander’s lover but one of his nearest confidantes, inspiring his vision of his new empire as a synthesis of the best of eastern and western civilizations. In practice this meant that the relatively democratic norms of Macedonia were supplanted by the pomp and rigidity of Persia.

As word got back to Greece about Alexander’s eastern pretensions – like expecting visitors to prostrate themselves before him – his political enemies began to incorporate Bagoas, in the character of a conniving oriental courtier, into their “anti-Macedonian agitprop”. In her 1975 biography The Nature of Alexander, Renault compellingly refutes the story that Bagoas fabricated a charge of tomb-robbing against a satrap who had insulted him. As relayed by the Roman historian Quintus Curtius:

On one side Bagoas, on the other those whom he had suborned, filled the king’s ears with false charges. Before Orsines suspected that he was being accused he was delivered into bondage. Not content with the punishment of an innocent man, the eunuch laid his hand on him as he was about to be executed. Orsines with a glance at him said: “I had heard that women once reigned in Asia; this however is something new, for a eunuch to reign!”

In The Persian Boy Renault makes Orsines genuinely guilty of various crimes, including complicity in the murder of Bagoas’ family.

***

Unluckily for generations of boy slaves, Alexander’s policy of fusionism led to the adoption of many Persian practices in the west. In a 1937 poem Robert Graves imagined some soldiers of the Byzantine Empire, posted on the eastern frontier, sneering as Alexander’s uncouth Macedonians might have at the decadence of big city customs:

We can know little (as we care little)
Of the Metropolis: her candled churches,
Her white-gowned pederastic senators,
The cut-throat factions of her Hippodrome,
The eunuchs of her draped saloons.

By the time of the Emperor Justinian – we’re now in the 6th century AD – eunuchs were an integral part of Byzantine court life. Eugenius, the narrator of Graves’ 1938 novel Count Belisarius, though a slave himself, takes a certain pride in the influence of his fellow eunuchs:

It is a principle first learned by our Emperors from the Persian Court that eunuchs, since they are ineligible for sovereignty and incapable of founding dangerously powerful families, can safely be honoured with the royal confidence and used as a bulwark against the possible usurpation of the Throne by a conspiracy of powerful nobles. Eunuchs on the whole make milder and more loyal and more industrious officials than their unstoned colleagues, and their pettiness in routine matters – I do not deny the pettiness – is a strong conservative force. It has therefore long been the practice of rich middle-class families who have enough male children to carry on the line, deliberately to castrate one of the younger ones and dedicate him to a profitable career in the Civil Service. The bastard sons of Emperors too, or of their sons and daughters, are regularly castrated, in order to make useful citizens of them and prevent them from aspiring to the Throne. […]

Thus, to be a eunuch is, in the worldly sense at least, more of an advantage than a disadvantage, as may also be seen by a comparison of slave-market prices. A eunuch house-slave fetches three times the price of an unstoned one; he is worth only a little less than a trained house-physician or a skilled artisan. But a eunuch is seldom a happy man, because the operation has almost always been performed on him before the age of puberty, and he secretly imagines that to be a whole man is something very fine; if only because whole men are apt to jeer at eunuchs and to swear that they would rather be blind or dumb or deaf, or even all three of these things together, than debarred from the sweet and wholesome act of love. Naturally, the eunuch has a ready answer to such boasting: that sex is a madness and never brought anyone much luck. But secretly, as I confess, he is apt to envy the man who can take a woman to bed with him and do more than embrace her as a sister and chastely kiss her eyes.

Unlike Mary Renault, Graves evinces not the slightest interest in the sex life of his eunuch narrator. The passage above occurs during the introduction of the eunuch court chamberlain Narses – another real historical figure – who despite appearing in only a handful of scenes emerges as a more complete character than Eugenius.

When we meet him, Narses is already well advanced in years, a survivor of innumerable palace intrigues, a “dwarfish and repulsively ugly figure” acutely sensitive to slights, who harbours an unlikely aspiration to be taken seriously as a warrior. Antonina, wife to the celebrated general Belisarius, is one of the few to humour the ugly little man when he prattles about military tactics.

To widespread amusement, Narses later convinces the flighty Emperor Justinian to send him as general to Italy, to reinforce Belisarius in his war there against the Goths:

That he was dwarfish and big-buttocked and had a squint and a twisted lip had not seemed very ridiculous when he was gliding along the Palace corridors. … But to see Narses, who had already long passed the grand climacteric of his years, strutting about in the latest fashion of plate-armour … trailing a full-sized sword which was continually catching between his legs and tripping him up – that I assure you was a sight to raise a smile on the face of a man dying of the cholera.

The level-headed Antonina foresees that Narses might prove “a capable officer in spite of his age”, but warns her husband that his touchy personality will demand delicate handling. Her warning proves justified: the eunuch promptly quarrels with Belisarius and sows contention among the other generals, until Justinian is forced to recall him.

A dozen years later, after Belisarius has retired to Constantinople, Narses is again sent out by Justinian against the Goths, and by a series of brilliant victories reconquers Italy. Still later, annoyed once again over private slights, Narses intrigues with the Lombards, who go on to invade northern Italy, putting an end to Byzantine rule there.

***

Whereas Narses has plans and ambitions of his own, the narrator Eugenius is defined primarily by his utter devotion to Antonina, whose servant he has been since she was a child.

In creating his narrator, Graves had even less material to work with (or to constrain his imagination) than Renault did with Bagoas. In fact Eugenius appears only once in the historical record, in the lurid Secret History written by Procopius, who served as private secretary to Belisarius.

In that episode, Eugenius is enlisted in avenging an insult by some unfaithful slaves:

And they say that [Antonina] first cut out all their tongues, and then cut them up bit by bit, threw the pieces into sacks, and then without ado cast them into the sea, being assisted throughout in this impious business by one of the servants named Eugenius…

Note that Procopius never identifies Eugenius as a eunuch – that was Graves’ extrapolation. In fact, in the early stages of the writing of Count Belisarius, Antonina was intended as the narrator. Graves was convinced by his mistress and sometime collaborator Laura Riding to rewrite the early chapters in the slave’s voice, inspiring some prurient eyebrow-waggling over the parallels to the author’s own sex life:

It is often observed that Graves was in effect the devoted slave of Riding, which raises the possibility that he was Eugenius to her Antonina. … [I]t is known that Graves had embraced a life of celibacy for Riding. [2]

At any rate, Eugenius in Graves’ telling, like Bagoas in Mary Renault’s, is innocent of the atrocity attributed to him. Just as Alexander was libelled by jealous Greeks, so was Belisarius by his jealous secretary, Procopius:

Sometimes he told the truth, sometimes he distorted the facts, sometimes he lied – according to his vindictive purposes. (Even I, Eugenius, was introduced into this farrago: for example, I was supposed to have assisted my mistress in the murder of the maid Macedonia: whose tongue, he said, was cut in little pieces and cast into the sea.) [3]

However, Eugenius makes no bones about his involvement in another murder – that of a bishop, whose assassination he succesfully pins on an old rival of Antonina’s. In gratitude, Antonina offers to give him his freedom and a hefty reward besides. He humbly demurs:

“What is money but bodily comforts, which I already possess? What is ‘freedom’ but to be well considered, as I already am?”

Eugenius should have taken his freedom and retired somewhere far from the capital’s “cut-throat factions”; for not long afterward, the scandalous manuscript of Procopius comes to light, full of vile gossip not only about Belisarius and Antonina but about the Emperor Justinian. (In Graves’ interpretation, all the tales about his hero and heroine are malicious distortions, but all those about Justinian are true.)

To save his own skin, Procopius is induced to give false evidence against Belisarius, whom the emperor detests for his own petty reasons. Belisarius is charged with treason, and his household servants are seized and put to torture.

For a slave in such a situation, Eugenius knows, defiant silence is not a winning strategy:

Andreas died under the torture, but in order to vex [the public prosecutor] he did not utter a single cry. I yelled and screamed without ceasing. I knew that to do so would either satisfy the officer of the torture chamber or else disconcert him, so that he would say to the slave: “Enough for the moment, fellow: relax the cords, unscrew!” All my cries were: “Long life to his Gracious Majesty!” and “I know nothing, nothing.” So I escaped. Of the bodily injuries I received that day I shall not trouble you. I am a person of no importance.

M.

1. The real Phaedo, known as Phaedo of Elis, was – as you might suppose – from Elis, which fell to an alliance of Sparta and Athens a few years before Socrates’ death in 399 BC. In The Last of the Wine Renault moves Phaedo’s enslavement over a decade backward in time, to the middle of the Peloponnesian War, and makes him a victim of the most famous instance of Athenian ruthlessness in that conflict.

2. For more about Graves’ decision to make Eugenius and not Antonina his narrator, see “Count Belisarius – Genesis, Gender, and Truth” by Shaun Tougher. For Graves’ turbulent relationship with Laura Riding – “a woman of gargantuan and zany self-esteem who rivals the best of Dickens’ comic monsters in the splendor and variety of her awfulness” – this snappy book review by Thomas M. Disch covers the essentials.

3. Elsewhere in Count Belisarius, Eugenius denies his involvement in the murder of Antonina’s servant in slightly different words:

That my mistress with my help pulled out Macedonia’s tongue, cut her in pieces, and threw the pieces into the sea is a lie told many years later by the secretary Procopius to discredit her.

Whereas in the passage quoted above, it’s only Macedonia’s tongue that is chopped up. I can’t read the original Greek – which you can consult here – but I gather there’s some ambiguity in Procopius’ phrasing on this point. I can find three translations online:

It is said that she first cut out their tongues, and then ordered them to be hewn in pieces, put into sacks and thrown into the sea.
—Athenian Society, 1896

She first cruelly cut out their tongues, it is said, and then cut their bodies into little bits which were put into sacks and thrown into the sea.
—Richard Atwater, 1927

And they say that she first cut out all their tongues, and then cut them up bit by bit, threw the pieces into sacks, and then without ado cast them into the sea…
—H.B. Dewing, 1935

—

In January I referred to Robert Graves’ I, Claudius in a discussion of Max Beerbohm and posterity. Years ago while reading The Last of the Wine I noticed that Mary Renault seemed to be the only person puzzled (like me) by the story of the Spartan boy and the fox. And speaking of “depictions of underage sexuality”, in 2018 I had some surprisingly deep thoughts about the Netflix cartoon series Big Mouth.

Dwarf descending.

I’ve been writing a lot lately, more than I have since wrapping up my novel a couple years back, but my blogging frequency hasn’t increased. I’m holding in reserve a dozen or so essays on contentious topics: immigration, electoral reform, Vancouver transit planning. A couple of them, I think, are pretty good; yet I hesitate to share them.

It’s not that I doubt whether my opinions matter: I know very well they don’t. I don’t keep up this blog in the hope of influencing anyone else’s opinions. The possibility that I might accidentally change someone’s mind about something makes me more reluctant to post, not less.

In an 1822 essay entitled “On Effeminacy of Character”, William Hazlitt scorned wishy-washy writers like me:

They alter what they write, not because it is, but because it may possibly be wrong; and in their tremulous solicitude to avoid imaginary blunders, run into real ones. What is curious enough is, that with all this caution and delicacy, they are continually liable to extraordinary oversights. They are, in fact, so full of all sorts of idle apprehensions, that they do not know how to distinguish real from imaginary grounds of apprehension[.]

By contrast, says Hazlitt,

There is nothing more to be esteemed than a manly firmness and decision of character. I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it; who sees at once what is to be done in given circumstances and does it.

But what about the well-meaning fool who sees at once what is to be done, does it, and discovers too late that his action was ten times more destructive than inaction would have been? What percentage of our gravest problems have been made graver still by the interventions of manly characters who insisted that the time for debate was over, that circumstances required a bold and immediate response?

Which isn’t to deny that inaction, too, has led to grave results. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that inaction is action: that the decision to forbear is as consequential as the decision to act.

Most people find such haverings contemptible. They’re certain that they can distinguish right action from wrong, truth from falsehood, wisdom from folly. In my youth, before I knew much of anything, I too had such confidence. The way forward was so obvious! How could these idiots not see it? How could they be taken in by such transparent nonsense?

I understand, therefore, the impulse to choose a side. What I don’t understand is why so many people, having made their choice, seem so much angrier at squishes like me than they are at their declared opponents.

I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.
So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.

Granted, that’s stern, sword-in-his-mouth Revelation Jesus, not easy-going Sermon on the Mount Jesus. But you’d think even Revelation Jesus, while chastising the lukewarm, would still rank them higher than the downright cold.

No doubt my inability to grasp this paradox is connected with my lack of religious feeling. But speaking as a chilly-hearted atheist, wouldn’t Jesus rather have the spiritual-not-religious types sitting by neutrally, instead of actively working against him? Doesn’t his vituperation risk turning them from neutrals into hostiles?

In a somewhat less exalted vein:

Monty, by Jim Meddick.

In this case, Dehlia has correctly diagnosed Moondog as not so much undecided as apathetic. But why is she so confident that if she can get him into the voting booth, he’ll pull the right lever? [1] He has only the bleariest grasp of the issues. If he has a preference at all it’ll be due to something trivial, like a candidate’s gaffe, or more likely a campaign ad misrepresenting a decontextualized comment as a gaffe.

Suppose by some infinitesimal chance the election came down to Moondog’s single vote. Does Dehlia really want questions of life or death, war or peace, prosperity or ruin, to be determined by which memes happened to be in her lowbrow friend’s Facebook feed on election day? Is it fair to pile so much responsibility on his sloped shoulders?

Thankfully, there’s practically no chance of it being decided by one vote, so it’s safe to throw Moondog’s half-assed opinion into the mix. If Dehlia really feels so strongly about getting undecideds to vote, a better strategy may be to reassure them that their participation won’t make the slightest difference.

***

I used to make certain assumptions: that high intelligence correlated with good judgement; that I was highly intelligent; that therefore I could trust my judgement.

Where did those assumptions come from? Before I was old enough to reason, I absorbed from my elders, my friends, and the media certain preconceptions about what intelligence looked and sounded like. I accepted the arguments made by the people who looked and sounded that way, and sneered at the arguments of those that didn’t. I taught myself to act and talk and write like the people whose arguments I’d accepted. I knew I’d chosen the right side because, after all, wasn’t I highly intelligent? I must be, because the intelligent people all agreed with me.

One of the things intelligent people did, I gathered, was read books. So for a while I pretended I’d read a lot of books, even though I hadn’t. I knew this was fraudulent, but I figured I could scrape by on my natural intelligence, which as yet I’d seen no reason to doubt. But since my pretense occasionally exposed me to the danger of being shown up by people who actually had read the books, I thought I’d better start reading them for real.

Immediately I noticed two things. The first was that I forgot ninety-nine percent of what I read within a day or two of having read it. This made me question whether I was as intelligent as I’d previously thought. It also made me wonder whether all those other intelligent people, who made such a big show of having read so many books, had absorbed much more of them than I had.

The second thing I noticed was that the authors I read, particularly those from different cultures and eras than my own, had very different ideas about what constituted good judgement. In fact, many of the ideas they lampooned as transparently foolish were the very ideas that the intelligent people of my own time and place lauded as unquestionably correct.

Not that there was much uniformity of belief among the authors. Hazlitt and George Eliot and George Orwell and C.S. Lewis all started from different assumptions and arrived at different conclusions. Yet they were clearly as smart as any modern writer; in fact, judged solely by the quality of their prose, far smarter. As for the quality of their reasoning, it appeared to be at least equal to, probably superior to my own. Beyond that, how was I to say?

If any two thinkers who in my shaky estimation seemed equally intelligent could reason their way to opposite conclusions about the truth; if their opposite conclusions could appear equally plausible; then on what basis could I choose between them?

I began to suspect that my judgements were no better than a coin flip, and that I should probably refrain from taking any action where there might be a danger of negatively affecting other people.

If I this was as stupid a conclusion as it seemed, then my reasoning must have broken down somewhere – which meant that I was even less intelligent than I thought, and even less qualified to judge.

***

I can imagine how my intelligent peers, if confronted with such doubts, would reassure me. Yesterday’s geniuses, while enlightened by the standards of their times, simply couldn’t have known what we know now. Had Nietzsche seen the workings of a modern welfare state he would have chucked all that will-to-power stuff. Had H.G. Wells witnessed the condition of modern Venezuela he would have been more skeptical of centralized economic planning. Had Chesterton had access to the Sayings of Justin Trudeau he would have realized that all faith traditions contribute equally to our wonderful multicultural mosaic.

Though ignorant in their various ways, these authors all did their part to raise us to such intellectual heights. We are dwarfs standing on giants’ shoulders, standing in turn on other giants’ shoulders, stacked giant-atop-giant all the way back to the first groaning behemoth sunk nostril-deep in the ancestral mire. We honour those giants – who couldn’t possibly have dreamt how far and how clearly we’d someday see – by pulling their books off the shelf occasionally, revisiting their obsolete arguments, chuckling fondly at their innocent errors; but not by taking them too seriously. No doubt they’d find our current beliefs strange and disorienting. Well, wouldn’t we be disoriented if we were somehow raised to the dizzying level of some far-future dwarf poised a thousand giants above us? Wouldn’t the habits of that future dwarf seem to us foreign, inexplicable, even horrific? Our vision is as yet too narrow to take in such galaxy-spanning vistas!

Could be. But here’s how unintelligent I am: while struggling through, for example, The Republic, I never once found myself thinking, “Ah, Plato, poor simpleton. If only he could have lived to see how successfully we moderns had answered all his primitive fears.”

I thought instead: “Uh-oh. What if this old kook was right?”

What if democratic rule devolves inevitably into tyranny? What if certain stories, melodies, and rhythms breed effeminacy of character? What if common myths are essential to preserving social stability?

Our common myth is that all the above propositions are untrue; and maybe it’s irresponsible of me to dabble with them. As Plato’s hero Socrates modestly admits:

[T]o carry on an argument when you are yourself only a hesitating enquirer, which is my condition, is a dangerous and slippery thing; and the danger is not that I shall be laughed at (of which the fear would be childish), but that I shall miss the truth where I have most need to be sure of my footing, and drag my friends after me in my fall.

Suppose that in the dwarf-on-dwarf quarrel on the giant’s shoulder, the wrong dwarf prevailed? Suppose that rather than stretching up to the stars, that dwarf stepped blindly into the void, dragging the others after him? Suppose this has happened any number of times in our intellectual history, that it’s happening right now, and that instead of a triumphant climb heavenward, all we really have is a vast swamp littered with heaps of dead dwarfs?

M.

1. In a subsequent installment of Monty, Dehlia confronts the likelihood that Moondog’s vote will cancel hers out.

—

Fourteen years ago, when I was still full of whimsy, I wrote this short dialogue between Plato and his pupil Dion. Last year I described first encountering the famous line about standing on the shoulders of giants in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. In April I undertook a preliminary survey of the domain of epistemic muddle that is now my permanent home.

The Odyssey: Mostly non-odyssey.

It was with some embarrassment that last month, a few weeks shy of my forty-first birthday, I finally got around to reading the Odyssey.

I feel a little better after finding in the New Yorker this account of how Daniel Mendelsohn’s father encountered the poem at the age of eighty-one, sitting in on a fifteen-week undergraduate seminar taught by his son.

I’m sure the elder Mr. Mendelsohn, having been educated in a more rigorous age, was better acquainted than I was with the storyline going in. I recall learning about Odysseus’s adventures as part of an overview of Greek mythology lasting two weeks or so in in ninth grade English. Of those two weeks we spent maybe a day discussing the highlights of Homer’s epic – the lotus-eaters, Polyphemus, Circe, the Underworld, the sirens, Scylla and Charybdis. Just enough to enable us to pick up the most common references pop culture might throw at us in later life.

I knew that, just as the Iliad consists of a fairly brief episode in the Trojan War, the Odyssey covers a few weeks at the end of the hero’s wanderings, with the most exciting incidents already behind him. But I didn’t realize how small a part of the big-O Odyssey – at most a third, maybe as little as 20% or so – is devoted to Odysseus’s little-O odyssey.

The poem consists of 24 books of generally equal length, most running between 400 and 500 lines. The titular hero doesn’t really appear in books 1-4, which concern the activities of his wife and son. Odysseus is introduced in book 5 and arrives home in Ithaca midway through book 13. Which means that the odyssey part of the Odyssey – that is, the part concerning Odysseus’s voyages – consists of just eight books, with most of the seafaring action compressed into books 9-12, where Odysseus recounts his misfortunes at the court of King Alcinous, the last stop on his homeward journey.

Post-seminar, Mendelsohn and his dad took an educational cruise around the Mediterranean, visiting the purported sites of the events Homer describes. During their stop on the island of Gozo, site (per local legend) of Odysseus’s imprisonment by the nymph Calypso, the claustrophobic son elected not to descend into Calypso’s cave:

“What are you talking about?” my father exclaimed when I told him. “You have to go! Seven-tenths of the Odyssey takes place there!”

“Seven-tenths?” I had no idea what he was talking about. “The epic is twenty-four books long–”

“Math, Dan! Math. Odysseus spends ten years getting home, right?”

I nodded.

“And he spends seven years with Calypso, right?”

I nodded again.

“So, in theory, seven-tenths of the Odyssey actually takes place there! You can’t miss it!”

According to the unabridged Oxford Dictionary at my local library, the word “odyssey” in the figurative sense of “a long series of wanderings to and fro; a long adventurous journey” dates back only to the late 19th century in our language. The French “odyssée” goes back another hundred years, with a usage recorded in 1798.

Did the Greeks ever use “odyssey” to mean a long voyage? Not as far as I can tell (based on an hour of clumsily searching the Perseus Digital Library database). But my Oxford Companion to Classical Literature mentions that Odysseus’s tale in books 9-12 “became proverbial among later Greeks for a long story”. That seems to be how it’s used in Plato’s Republic, where Socrates introduces the lengthy fable of Er, which closes book 10, with the comment “Mind you, I’m not going to tell you an Alcinous’s tale…”

So it’s possible to imagine a world where “odyssey” came to mean “a long-winded story”. But I think any reader who came to the Odyssey without preconceptions, if asked to summarize what it was about, would say not “a voyage” but “a homecoming”.

***

A summary of the non-odyssey parts of the Odyssey:

Books 1-4. On Olympus, the gods are feeling sorry for Odysseus, stranded far from his wife and son. They decide that while Poseidon is away doing god-business on the far side of the world – Poseidon being the one who holds a particular grudge against the hero – they’ll take the opportunity to help Odysseus get home.

Although it’s unclear how this is at all relevant to the objective, Athena flies down to Ithaca and convinces Odysseus’s grown son Telemachus to go on a journey for news of his missing father. Telemachus sails to the Greek mainland to visit Nestor, Menelaus, and Helen, who reveal what they’ve been up to since the events of the Iliad. Meanwhile the suitors – the young rowdies who, believing Odysseus to be dead, have taken up residence in his palace to compete for the attentions of his wife, Penelope – devise a plot to intercept and murder Telemachus on his way home from the mainland.

Book 5. Back to Olympus. Athena frets that not only is Odysseus still stranded, now Telemachus’s life is in danger too. Zeus reminds her that they’re gods and they already know how this story is going to play out. But to get his daughter off his back he sends Hermes down to earth to order the nymph Calypso, who’s been holding Odysseus captive in her desert island sex cave, to let him go. Which Hermes does. Calypso grudgingly assents, and strolls out to give Odysseus the news.

Here we finally meet our hero, sitting on a rock, staring moodily out to sea. Calypso tells him he’s free to go and directs him to a grove of trees suitable for raft-building. Odysseus builds his raft and pushes off, but by bad luck Poseidon, happening that moment to return from his business trip, notices his impertinent escape and summons a storm to smash the raft. However, a passing sea-nymph takes a shine to the drowning hero and helps him get to shore.

Books 6-8. The daughter of the king of Phaeacia finds Odysseus naked on the beach. Attracted to the stranger – whose natural sex appeal Athena has magically enhanced – the princess gives him clothes and brings him home to her parents. King Alcinous takes in the unlucky traveller, tactfully declines to press him for his identity, and promises to help him on his way. At a festival thrown in his honour, the stranger out-discus-throws a local loudmouth, proving his superior quality. Afterward, during the feast, Alcinous notices his guest weeping into his cloak while his minstrel sings a song about the legendary Odysseus’s exploits in the Trojan War. The king stops the music and asks his guest outright – who are you?

Books 9-12. Odysseus announces himself and tells the tale of his wanderings – cyclops, sirens, and all the rest – concluding with the death of his crew and his arrival on Calypso’s island.

These four books contain practically everything the average person thinks of as “the Odyssey”.

Book 13. Alcinous arranges a ship to take Odysseus back to Ithaca. It arrives without incident, and Odysseus is deposited – in his sleep! – on his native shore, along with all the pricey gifts the Phaeacian nobles bestowed on their famous visitor. The ship heads back to Phaeacia. Poseidon wants to punish the kingdom for assisting Odysseus, but Zeus haggles him down to merely turning the ship and its crew to stone.

Odysseus wakes up on an unfamiliar beach and, prickly after years of mistreatment by the gods, assumes he’s been robbed and marooned on yet another desert island. Athena shows up and tells him he’s home on Ithaca, but he can’t return to his palace because the suitors might kill him. She disguises him as an old beggar and directs him to the hut belonging to his trusty swineherd.

Books 14-16. Odysseus is taken in by the swineherd, but once again elects not to reveal his true identity. He spins an elaborate fake story about how he’s definitely not Odysseus but he did run into Odysseus and knows he’s still alive. The swineherd assumes the old beggar is pulling his leg.

Athena visits Telemachus, who’s been dallying in Menelaus’s palace this whole time, and tells him to head home. Arriving safely at Ithaca, Telemachus stops by the hut to see what’s been going on since he left. He doesn’t recognize his father in his old beggar disguise, but Athena drops the enchantment temporarily and Odysseus reveals himself to his amazed son. They make plans to murder the suitors.

Books 17-21. Odysseus installs himself as a beggar in his own hall, where the suitors mock and abuse him. Penelope is kind to him, but he makes no attempt to confide in her, instead spinning another elaborate deception about how, no, he’s positively not Odysseus, although now that she mentions it people have told him they look alike, and by the way he happens to know Odysseus is alive and headed home at this very moment.

Penelope gives directions for her guest to be bathed by an old slavewoman who, by chance, recognizes her master by a scar on his thigh. The old woman turns to shout the good news but Odysseus roughly warns her to put a sock in it before she blows his whole operation. The old woman agrees to keep quiet, and to rat out any servant girls who’ve been consorting with the suitors.

Penelope, resigning herself to marrying one of these jerks, brings out her husband’s old bow and challenges the suitors to an archery contest with herself as prize – but not one of the soft-living suitors can so much as string the bow. The old beggar proposes to take a crack at the challenge himself. The suitors make nervous wisecracks but Penelope is willing to indulge him. Telemachus tells her to pipe down, he’s the man of the house and he’ll decide who gets to take part in the contest to marry her. His mother trots obediently off to her chambers, where Athena puts her to sleep until the massacre is over. Telemachus orders that the bow be given to the beggar.

Odysseus strings the bow and, to the amazement of all, nails the trick shot. Bow in hand, he turns to confront the suitors.

Books 22-24. With the backing of Telemachus, the swineherd, and one other trusty servant – and with Athena providing magical protection – Odysseus butchers everyone. The slavegirls that have been fingered as untrustworthy are forced to haul out the corpses and mop up the gore before being killed by Telemachus. Penelope and Odysseus are tearfully reunited.

Down in the Underworld, Achilles and Agamemnon are swapping tales about their Trojan War days. Seeing a crowd of healthy young souls come shuffling in, Agamemnon asks the newcomers what happened, was there a shipwreck or something? The suitors moan about how badly they were treated first by Penelope, who kept them dangling for years, and then by Odysseus, who was entirely uncool about them crashing at his place while he was away. Remembering his own less-than-warm welcome home, Agamemnon says Odysseus is lucky to have such a faithful wife.

Back in Ithaca, Odysseus goes to see his aged father, where for no reason at all – he just can’t help himself! – he launches into yet another lie about being Odysseus’s friend visiting from overseas. He feels guilty and drops the lie quickly enough though.

Odysseus and his father, son, and allies fend off an attack by the suitors’ aggrieved relatives, before Athena appears to put a stop to the fighting. Abruptly, The End.

M.

—

Update, July 28, 2020: Added book cover image and linked to Bibliography page.

Crossing over: Allan Bloom, Saul Bellow, and Christopher Hitchens.

Recently, over breakfast, my girlfriend and I chatted about some of the TV programs that she, having come to consciousness only in the mid-’90s, never had a chance to experience. She’s seen enough Cheers reruns to get the gist, but Family Ties, Night Court, and Newhart, among others, she knows only by reputation.

I told her how, in the final scene of the final episode of Newhart, it was revealed that the whole series had been dreamed by Bob Newhart’s character from his earlier The Bob Newhart Show. This reminded me of St. Elsewhere, and I summarized for her the Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis: In outline, since all the events of St. Elsewhere were revealed in that show’s final episode to be the daydreams of a snowglobe-clutching autistic child named Tommy Westphall, and since characters from St. Elsewhere crossed over to a number of other TV shows, including Mash, Cheers, and Homicide: Life on the Street, implying that those shows took place in the same fictional reality, and since characters from those overcrossing shows in turn crossed over to a whole bunch of other shows, it can be argued that the events of all these other shows were also daydreamed by Tommy Westphall. The Tommy Westphall Universe turns out to encompass everything from Mission: Impossible to Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper.

Somehow this got me thinking of the connections among some of the books I’ve been reading lately. For instance, Christopher Hitchens in his memoir Hitch-22 crosses over with his old friend Martin Amis in his memoir Experience, providing complementary versions of the evening when Hitchens was introduced to Amis’s “literary father” Saul Bellow. [1]

As Hitch tells it:

Martin offers a slightly oblique and esoteric account of a trip on which he took me in 1989, to visit Saul Bellow in Vermont. On our buddy-movie drive up there from Cape Cod – he’s almost word-perfect about this bit – he made it clear that I wasn’t to drag the conversation toward anything political, let alone left-wing, let alone anything to do with Israel. (“No sinister balls,” which was our colloquialism for a certain kind of too-easy leftism.) I knew I was being greatly honored by the invitation, not just because it was a huge distinction to meet Bellow but because, second only to an introduction to his father, it was the highest such gift that Martin could bestow. I needed no telling that I should seize the opportunity to do more listening than talking.

And yet it’s true, as he reports, that by the end of dinner nobody could meet anyone else’s eye and his own foot had become lamed and tired by its under-the-table collisions with my shins.

We learn that Bellow had provoked Hitchens by calumniating his friend, the erudite Palestinian radical and literary critic Edward Said (who was later to fall out with Hitchens as they drifted to ever more irreconcilable positions on the morality of Western intervention in the Arab world, and violent Arab reactions thereto). Hitchens’s defense of his friend had inevitably veered into a lengthy diatribe – “a blue streak of sinister balls”, Amis says – about the misdeeds of Bellow’s beloved Israel. Afterward, Hitchens regretted embarrassing his friend, but:

[Amis] suffered more agony than he needed to, because Bellow as an old former Trotskyist and Chicago streetfighter was used to much warmer work and hardly took offense at all. He later sent me a warm letter about my introduction to a new edition of Augie March.

Bellow makes several other appearances, besides that awkward dinner party, in Amis’s memoir. We hear for instance how Bellow nearly died of a rare neurological infection he picked up dining on a red snapper on a visit to the Caribbean, a story that appears in slightly fictionalized form in Bellow’s Ravelstein.

That novel is about the death of Bellow’s friend Allan Bloom, the professor, philosopher, and author of The Closing of the American Mind. As Amis says,

I know Bellow’s novel far, far better than I ever knew Bellow’s friend. Yet Ravelstein comes close to persuading me otherwise. This book is numinous. It constitutes an act of resuscitation, and in its pages Bloom lives.

In the novel, Bloom-as-Ravelstein importunes the narrator, the Bellow stand-in, to write about him after his death.

“I’m laying this on you as an obligation. Do it in your after-supper-reminiscence manner, when you’ve had a few glasses of wine and you’re laid back and making remarks. I love listening when you are freewheeling about Edmund Wilson or John Berryman or Whittaker Chambers when you were hired at Time in the morning and fired by him before lunch.”

We learn in Hitch-22 that Hitchens, in real life, heard the Whittaker Chambers story from Bellow, on the evening of the awkwardness over Edward Said:

Offered a job as book critic for Time magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to give his opinion about William Wordsworth. Replying perhaps too quickly that Wordsworth had been a Romantic poet, he had been brusquely informed by Chambers that there was no place for him at the magazine. Bellow had often wondered, he told us, what he ought to have said. I suggested that he might have got the job if he’d replied that Wordsworth was a once-revolutionary poet who later became a conservative and was denounced by Browning and others as a turncoat. This seemed to Bellow to be probably right.

Speaking of the “after-supper-reminiscence manner”: both Ravelstein in Ravelstein and his model Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind refer to Plato’s Symposium, that famous gathering of Athenian intellects where Socrates, Alcibiades, and Aristophanes and their friends got drunk and declaimed on the nature of love. Taking a poke at modern critical theory, Bloom writes (paraphrasing Nietzche):

[A]fter the ministrations of modern scholarship the Symposium is so far away that it can no longer seduce us; its immediate charm has utterly vanished.

But for non-scholars, the Symposium will always be seductive because it shows us our heroes just as we want to imagine them – hanging out forever in a Valhalla of the intellect, joshing and quipping and making each other spray wine through their noses.

Which brings us to the Friday lunch. Hitch-22 devotes a few pages (and Experience a passing mention) to the boisterous weekly get-together that Hitchens and Amis shared through the 1970s and ’80s with Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Clive James, and illustrious others. Hitchens identifies James as the “chief whip” of the gatherings: “He needed an audience and damn well deserved one.”

It’s James who gives us the vividest picture of the Friday lunch, in his memoir North Face of Soho, showing us how Amis could improvise a tall story, sustaining the massed laughter with “the economical stroke of the whip that did just enough to keep the top spinning”, while Hitchens’s specialty was the interjection of sarcastic asides:

[I]f someone was being straightforward, he could make them funny, and if someone was being funny, he could make them funnier.

The actual content of the proceedings, as repeated by James and Hitchens, isn’t quite the stuff of a modern Symposium­. Hitchens gives a few examples of the wordplay and concedes that there were “long interludes of puerility”; James credits, or blames, the illustrator Mark Boxer for “discouraging the anecdote as form – he wanted the flash of wit. … Nobody was allowed to take his time …” It sounds like a riot, in the sense that it must have been obnoxious and nerve-jangling, each man contending to make the biggest smash. [2]

Speaking of that lunch, which Hitchens says has “become the potential stuff of a new ‘Bloomsbury’ legend” – the legend would gain momentum more quickly if it had a catchier name than “the Friday lunch”, which is what Clive James also calls it in his memoir. James reports that when he kickstarted the gathering, he liked to refer to it mock-conspiratorially as the “Modish London Literary World”, a dig at the Cambridge critic F.R. Leavis, who apparently believed such a conspiracy explained why his favoured authors kept getting bad reviews. Unfortunately the Modish brand never caught on. Before they all shuffle off to trade zingers with Aristophanes and Allan Bloom, can we agree on a name for this cohort of legendary British wits? (As with Bloomsbury, MacSpaunday, and the Algonquin Round Table, it’ll help future generations to keep them sorted.) In its heyday the group convened at the Bursa Kebab House; occasionally James calls it the Kebab House lunch. How about the Kebab House Group?

In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom mentions a student who fretted to him, after reading the Symposium, that “it was impossible to imagine that magic Athenian atmosphere reproduced” in his own place and time. Bloom disputes this: “such experiences are always accessible”; his student “had brains, friends, and a country happily free enough to let them gather and speak as they will”. Most of us will never enjoy after-dinner discussions quite as stirring as the Symposium, or as riotous as the Kebab House lunches. But as Bloom consolingly reflects,

This student did not have Socrates, but he had Plato’s book about him, which might even be better.

M.

1. Amis says of Bellow, “I am not his son, of course. What I am is his ideal reader. I am not my father [Kingsley]’s ideal reader, however. His ideal reader, funnily enough, is Christopher Hitchens.”

James mentions in passing, in his essay collection Cultural Amnesia,

On the whole, writers find other writers hard to be enthusiastic about, even when the other writers are safely dead. It takes security in one’s talent on top of generosity of soul. … Martin Amis’s praise of Saul Bellow is especially valuable because the younger writer is continually faced, when reading the older one, with things he himself would like to have said.

2. Hitchens and James both note the absence of a restraining female presence at the Friday lunch: “It was a very competitive scene, though,” James writes, “and therefore very male.” This naturally brings to mind Hitchens’s famously shit-stirring Vanity Fair article on why women aren’t funny. His argument boils down to: because they don’t have to be.

M.

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In previous entries I’ve discussed Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia and Martin Amis’s relationship with his father.

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Update, July 27, 2020: Added cover images and linked to Bibliography page.

Herodotus, Plato, and Plutarch in the Archive.

This is a landing page for archived posts about Herodotus, Plato, and Plutarch.

Some very belated thoughts on 300.
June 26, 2008

After reading a scathing review of 300 I tried to imagine how Herodotus’ account of the siege of Thermopylae could be rendered more flattering to leftist sensibilities in the George W. Bush era.

Plato and Dion: A play.
November 18, 2004

Plato doesn’t want to be Secretary of Education in this goofy 2004 playlet inspired by Plutarch’s “Life of Dion”.

Birds falling from the sky: Iraq and the ’04 election.
November 1, 2004

I crammed in an anecdote from Plutarch’s “Life of Flamininus” to give the appearance of erudition to these deep thoughts about the occupation of Iraq.

Plato’s Republic.
April 13, 2004

“Plato is alright when he’s talking about concrete things, like countries and wars and women, but I haven’t got much patience for the abstract discussions of Justice and Truth and how the Four Virtues correspond, in some elaborate way, with the different aspects of the human spirit.” …