Sappho

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead—or almost
I seem to me

1. How does Sappho’s presentation of love differ from Homer’s? Compare the loving discourse between Odysseus and Penelope to that which Sappho writes. Are these differences significant? If so, how?
   
   For Homer, love has a specific narrative function and serves the themes of the work they take place in. So in the Iliad, the interactions between Hector and Andromache epitomize the tension between husbands who need to give their life to protect their state, and their wives who rely on their husbands for their livelihood. Both feel conflicting emotions: duty against fear, the personal against the communal, and the union of marriage ironically severed by the need to protect it. Lastly, and most importantly, H & A are parents, and Astyanax's reaction to his father's armor reflects these tensions above, just as the babe's death is a proxy for Troy's destruction.
   
   Odysseus and Penelope likewise embody themes from the Odyssey. Their reuniting, taking place at the climax of the epic, putting marriage and its symbol (the deeply rooted marriage bed) as the apex of civilization, are book-ended with scenes where the couple first tests each other's faithfulness and then give each other counsel. They are halves to the same whole, and when combined bring order to the universe.
   
   While Sappho has themes too, these are reflections of love as they're really experienced, and appear less constructed and more natural than the scenes Homer paints us. Love doesn't serve some larger point but is an end onto itself, fueled by passion and controlling the "story" more than the other way around. She has poems where love is unrequited and brings a flood of emotions whose only purpose is to bring attention to themselves: desire, lust, sadness, regret, elation, with each of these reflected physically instead of just held internally. This isn't the careful script of Homer, but a description by Sappho as to what's actually lived-through. Or so it seems.
   
   
2. Choose three poetic tropes that Sappho makes use of and analyze their occurrences. What tropes are most common in her poetry? How does she employ them? What tropes are strikingly absent from her work?
   
   Setting aside the use of metaphors and symbols--which are ubiquitous in literature--the three tropes Sappho employs most often are hyperbole, invoking the gods, and rhetorical questions. None of these are particularly unique in ancient literature, and hyperbole is a pleasant mainstay in love poetry to this day. However I'm not that interested in how she wields them, and don't see much to write about. The only trope worth celebrating--now tame by today's standards--is her focus on homosexual love, about which I don't have anything new to say.
   
   Instead I'm fascinated by what tropes are missing. Almost entirely absent from Sappho's poems are other love cliches: star-crossed lovers, fabricated conflicts, and consummated desires. No where do we see two darlings pine for each other but unable to meet for whatever reason. Nor do we see them overcome that whatever reason and revel in each other's blaze. Instead we see a relationship after it's ended, a woman jealous of her friend (or her friend's partner), an old woman lamenting her age, an invocation to Aphrodite to engineer rape (!), and other atypical romantic states with the same beauty and intensity that's normally reserved for more conventional scenes. The closest we get to the typical are Sappho's marriage songs which, while lovely, feel a little too commercial.
   


3. What is Sappho’s essential understanding of love as revealed in these works? To what degree is it a passion, and to what degree is it an intellectual state? Is love good or bad? What other passions are most commonly associated with love?
   
   The heavy shadow draping over these poems is the tyranny of love.  Its ability to grant euphoria or anguish, against one's will, with no indication of length or outcome, tortures Sappho as a curse worth having. In fact there's an almost perverse reliance on Aphrodite that superbly reveals the god's power, so often tossed aside in other Greek myths. Perhaps then these poems are an attempt by Sappho to control that power, which so clearly controls her. Viewed in that light these are less poems than spells, meant to heal a broken heart or quench a clawing thirst.
   
   The associated passions that flow from this are also threatening: longing, hope, sadness, jealousy, and--most dangerous--bliss. Thus love cannot be identified as good or bad, but an endlessly mixed bag of emotions and desires roiling inside Sappho, with all the intensity and adventure of a Greek epic.
   
   
4. What is Sappho’s conception of the gods? Are they active or passive? Are they good or bad? How does this conception of the gods compare to Homer, Gilgamesh, and the ancient Egyptians? Is there a central, unifying understanding?
   
   Sappho articulates two conceptions. The first is perfunctory; in service of the marriage songs that she crafts for others. These are conventional and largely passive. The second is a more personal and active conception. She fittingly invokes female gods (Hera, Artemis, but by far Aphrodite) to protect and guide her and her loved ones.
   
   What's salient is her treatment of Aphrodite. Building on my prior answer, there is a dimension to the goddess of love that's reassuring. She unites people, she grants lustful desires, and when weighing the value of passion it's clear that a life without Aphrodite is not worth living. But by the same token, the unbridled influence that love can have over a person, not merely on their actions but on their psyche, casts this goddess as a tormentor at worst and a gatekeeper to happiness at best. She's even painted as capricious ("spangled mind"), which is no way to handle the most important part of a person's life.
   
   This is really what separates Sappho's religious views from her contemporaries. In other mythologies gods indeed control the world in capricious ways, but these always dealt with the exterior. Property, nations, flesh. It's only Aphrodite who can make or break someone's interior life, and for those who have been oppressively reduced to only their interior, this gives her life-or-death importance. In this way Sappho's appeal to this goddess is tragically sadomasochistic. She both loves and hates a symbol of her chains as well as her freedom. (From here it's impossible not to extend the analysis to her role in society at large, and what kind of pregnant symbolism homosexuality provides.) But to the extent she was leashed in love as well as life, Sappho seems to have at least found freedom in her art.
   

The Book of Job

One day the heavenly beings came to present themselves before the Lord,
and Satan was among them.

Why do we suffer? Why do the wicked profit, and the honest get left behind? Are our fates distributed at random, or is there method to the madness? And where is God when we need him most? These questions have weighed on our minds for thousands of years, but never has the issue been more honestly put than in the Bible itself. Located within the “Poetical and Wisdom” books of the Old Testament, the book of Job is a spectacular and singular debate on the concept of justice in an unjust world.

While written during the Hellenistic period of ancient Judaism, the story is actually one of the oldest in the Bible (pre-Abraham). Job, a man from Edom, is the most prosperous person in the East. He lives a perfect life and is a perfect person, honest and ethical in all things while being true to God. (Strictly speaking Job is not an Israelite and cannot have known or worshiped Yahweh, but we’ll speak in Judeo-Christian terms for simplicity.) One day the angels all get together to chill with God, and Satan is among them. God gloats over creation, particularly men like Job, who is faultless in all things. Satan scoffs at this and points out how it’s easy for Job to be pious when he has everything. To prove Satan wrong God allows him to deprive Job of all his possessions to test his faith. Satan destroys everything Job has and kills his immediate family, yet Job does not despair. Satan then asks to attack Job’s body, and God agrees. Thus Job is afflicted physically, and finally breaks down. He is visited by four friends who attempt to console him, but they instead enter a debate about God’s justice on Earth, and how Job feels he’s been betrayed by the Lord. While he never actually blasphemes—and from this Satan is ultimately proved wrong—Job seriously questions the theological paradigm and demands justification from God.

The debate here is the treasure of the text, and I am astonished at its profundity but also at its critical perception of God. Three of Job’s friends give the standard explanation of Job’s suffering: he must have sinned and God is punishing him. But Job is confident in his innocence and demands a trial to prove it. He is effectively summoning God to court, and legal language is used throughout his argument. His friends point out God’s majesty and power, and Job’s futility in trying to subject him to a human institution. But Job retorts that this is exactly the problem: God can never be held accountable for his actions, which means that we are subject to his whims whether they’re fair or not. And the belief that God only does good is seriously doubted, not only in Job’s case, but in the living reality that the wicked seem to prosper all the time, while innocent people are made to suffer. And if God does not enact justice on Earth, why be good? (It’s important to note there is no concept of heaven or hell in the Hebrew Bible.)

This is only a taste, as Job posits a number of fascinating ideas. He argues for the value of suicide when our quality of life reaches a low point (countering the belief that all suffering is “healthy”). He points out the impossibility of appealing to a higher power other than God, or even attempting to argue against God as he’s judge and jury, or also because God could convince you with a false argument if he wanted to, such is his power. Given Job’s situation, either his suffering came from God or it didn’t; if it didn’t, then life is chaos and God is of little use, but if it did, then God is capricious and there is unfortunately no escaping him. Job believes in the objectivity of his innocence, distinct from God’s acknowledgement, and is confident he could find a witness in heaven (other than God) to defend him. He argues for the rights of mortals against the divine. Job is the first, to my knowledge, to speak against the practice of making children pay for their parent’s crimes: a standard in ancient religions. He asks that if he has sinned out of ignorance or omission then God should clearly communicate that to him instead of make him guess. He suggests God set dates and times for visits to Earth to answer questions or administer justice, instead of acting needlessly enigmatic. He explains how appealing to God’s power as reply to his questions is a fallacy. And lastly, Job holds allegiance to his purity against God’s cruelty. It’s the only thing God cannot take from him.

As incredible as these points are, there are a few common themes pulsating underneath. The biggest is the conflict between doctrine and experience: Job’s suffering directly challenges scripture and he wants to know why. He's also fundamentally asking for a new theology based off divine justice, something that was not traditionally expected of religions (God in fact denies it) but was growing more common over time. And one way religions have been able to address Job’s arguments while claiming divine justice is through the invention of the afterlife in Christianity and Islam. But what Job is really doing is arguing for logical consistency in divine action, or at least, an explanation. This is also contested by God, but Job accepts the reply without agreeing to it. Finally, and my favorite, is Job’s allegiance not necessarily to God, but God’s expected morality. God is only worth loving if he is good; again a relatively new idea. But again God says this is mistaken.

Before we examine God’s reply let’s first hear the devil’s advocate, as it were. The three friends I mentioned above gave a rather lame and typical reply to Job, which failed utterly. But the fourth friend, ironically the youngest, does make some good counter-points. He stresses being good for goodness sake, regardless of being rewarded or not. If Job expects payment for his honesty then he’s simply greedy (and proving Satan correct), but if he’s not then he shouldn't complain about his current condition as it’s not contingent on his goodness. The friend points out the inherent order of the cosmos, countering Job’s points about a chaotic world, and asks why would God create the universe and lord over it only to be capricious? Also God doesn’t have to answer empty claims against him, and Job’s are not valid enough to warrant explanation. Lastly, people aren’t simply ‘good’ or ‘evil.’ They’re both, and are subjected to ups and downs, and Job should try and make the best of a bad situation.

But then, rather anticlimactically, God comes down and tells everyone to shut up ‘cause he’s gonna lay down the law. God’s argument, in essence, is that he’s all powerful and everyone else is ignorant. Job in response maintains his innocence, but yields the indictment against God. Bafflingly God then says Job was right all along, his friends were wrong, and gives Job a new family and twice as much money/land/animals/whatever. And he lives happily ever after.

This ending seems, in comparison to the richness of the debate, rather lame. God does not answer any questions and uses the same arguments the friends do, while simultaneously telling us that argument is wrong. He gives back Job twice as much (suggesting he has robbed him), which interestingly undermines Job’s argument (the correct one, remember) by administering divine justice. This, to me, is why the book of Job is not more popular. It explicitly challenges religious views and the ending is both confusing and unsatisfactory. A possible explanation is that the debate uses modern and sophisticated arguments, while the ending draws upon traditional religious beliefs: the universe is not just and gods are indeed capricious.

But this is precisely what makes the story so incredible. From a secular point of view, we realize that there is no satisfactory explanation for why suffering exists. There are no easy answers. Even if an all knowing, all powerful deity came down and told us the ultimate Truth, we would still not be happy, because the problem is more profound than any truth can fix. We may live in an arbitrary universe (reflected in the arbitrary bet God makes in the prologue) but that shouldn’t undermine our emotions experiencing it.

All this brings us back to Satan, and his seemingly strange inclusion in the heavenly pantheon. He is there to test humanity in God’s eyes. Job’s inclusion in the Bible is strikingly similar: it seems to be a work questioning its religion’s own internal logic. And best of all it provides no clear answers. God is ultimately unable to answer Job, and from that we must draw our own conclusions. For this and many other reasons I feel the work is a masterpiece; it’s the crown jewel of the Old Testament and arguably the best book of the Bible. Job doesn’t abandon its beliefs but subjects them to critical introspection, under the guise of intellectual debate. It’s the rare example in the Bible of a story holding its allegiance not to God, but to goodness itself. Not to the claims of religion, but to the rights of man.

The Odyssey

So, you ask me the name I am known by, Cyclops?...

Nobody—that’s my name.

Nobody—so my mother and father call me, all my friends.

Where one arms themselves for reading the Iliad, enduring its battles and grit, a different approach is needed for the Odyssey, Homers second masterpiece. It is better to say one launches upon the epic. We’ve left the beaches of Troy for the vast Mediterranean, with its diverse peoples and hostile monsters. The Trojan war is over—the Achaeans have won and return home. This second epic follows Odysseus journey back to Ithaca, which ends up taking an agonizing ten years. He is flown off course due to misfortune and the gods, and when he finally returns home he finds his estate ravaged by rude guests pining for his wife, Penelope. He murders them all and they live happy ever after.

While similar in language and mythology to the Iliad, the Odyssey is different enough to warrant a suspicion that Homer did not edit it. If he had, it must certainly have been in twilight years where the intensity of youth gave way to the nostalgia of old age. Regardless, the text acts as a marvelous twin to its predecessor: one celebrates courage in the face of death, the other intelligence in the face of life. One is local and magnified, the other is cosmopolitan and reductive. One restores hearth and family, the other destroys it. But the books also challenge each other somewhat, particularly in the Odyssey’s best chapter: Kingdom of the Dead. Here Odysseus chats with the shade of Achilles, who regrets his condition and wishes for life. Thus the deal fate gave to Achilles—fame or old age—is one Odysseus didn’t have to make. He got both. That scene put the entire epic in perspective for me, which I’ll expand on a bit.

The first half of the text is exquisite storytelling. We first follow Telemachus, Odysseus son, as he searches for his father, then we segue into Odysseus’s flashbacks as he recounts his epic travels to the Phaeacians, finally catching up to present tense once our hero gets back to Ithaca. These platforms frame the different episodes with appropriate lighting: Telemachus, both like his father and the readers, is lost and embarks on a quest to set things to right; Odysseus’ stories are set in a mythical fairyland past, hyperbole withstanding, which corresponds nicely with their content; and the reality dawns just in time for the present issue—Penelope’s plight—where the patriarch will assert himself and return order to the kingdom. This is an intricate and impressive narrative technique that lays the foundation for all future adventure/travel tales. Homer uses the text as the vehicle to explore the world, and though his geography is a bit off it’s still one of the most important perspectives of the “other” in early literature. Herodotus, for all his enchantment, has nothing on Homer.

Once we defeat the Cyclops and witches and sirens and monsters we finally encounter the most dangerous foe alive: wealthy bachelors. The second half of the epic follows Odysseus’ return to his country and estate—both in jeopardy and without a leader—and his method for setting things straight. He dons various disguises to test the faithfulness of his servants and survey the extent of the damage before deciding to act. The significance of the conceal-and-reveal tactic that repeats throughout the work escapes me. I guess one reason owes to Odysseus’ subtly in conjunction with his martial skill. I also see the value of viewing the common place under a foreign guise: fresh perspective is gained this way. But perhaps Homer is making a statement about perception. What we see is not necessarily what we get, and in this tale of discovering creatures both hostile and friendly we cannot base our judgments off of looks alone. Achilles may have hated one “who says one thing but hides another in his heart,” but that is reality’s norm. Odysseus understood this, and so adopted and excelled in this trait. Fighting isn’t the only answer, sometimes nuance is needed.

This is the big difference between Homer’s two works. The Iliad deals with destructive beauty, so grand and impressive it consumes itself in blazing glory. The Odyssey deals with quiet beauty: learning about others, seeing the world, constructing meaning from experience, the relationship between men and women (the Odyssey is in many ways a feminist work), restoring peace to your home, investing in family, and putting down the sword for a plowshare. Don’t get me wrong, Odysseus fights a lot in the text, but often it seems to make matters worse. Even in the spectacular climax where he murders Penelope’s suitors, their families come together to exact retribution on Odysseus. It takes a Deus ex Machina to finally restore peace and end the epic. I’m not sure what to make of this ending, and I daresay it undermines its own hero. But maybe that’s the goal. War must be curbed at some point so life can go on. We must protect what we love, but compromise and even ethical ambiguity are necessary to do so. The unrelenting pride that imbues these heroes must slack for civilization to progress. Thus future generations will lament for the end of the “heroic age,” even as they recognize their survival was contingent on its death.

But there’s a positive aspect of all this civil duplicity: the art of fiction. What I love about Odysseus is how he’s a story-teller. He constantly weaves narratives—both ‘true’ and ‘false’—to enchant and deceive his audience. Much like Prospero in the Tempest, Homer’s protagonist is almost conscious of his life’s apparatus. He knows he is in a story; both creating and disseminating it. His name, as with Achilles, is what needs to survive, no less than his country and family. It’s part of his legacy. It’s why I find the epic so inspiring: it depicts a man who navigates life’s difficulties with intelligence, meets challenges with bravery, and ultimately invests in civilization. Odysseus doesn’t let fate or the gods rule him; he pushes on, both with an eye on the past (root meaning of ‘nostalgia’ is ‘love of home’) and mind to the future. It’s because of him that we coin all great adventures odysseys.

The Iliad

Bird-signs! Fight for your country—that is the best, the only omen!

The Iliad is peculiar. It's the greatest story of ancient Greece (though it predates their golden age), was the envy Rome (they attempted to match it—and failed), has become one of the most well-known and celebrated stories of western culture (though few read it), and stands as one of mankind’s greatest masterpieces (though it was composed three thousand years ago by illiterate barbarians). The parenthetical statements express my confusion with the text’s status in our society: celebrated but not read, studied but not replicated, ancient but not obsolete. What's the best way to approach this famous-yet-remote tale?

Let’s begin by summarizing the story. “The Song of Ilium,” or Troy, actually only focuses on about ten days out of a 10 year war. Paris, a prince of Troy, steals the wife of Menelaus, King of the Spartans, and brings her back to his home city. Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon rally the tribes of Greece (collectively called the Achaeans) and sail to Asia Minor where they siege the city for 10 years, eventually conquering it with a ruse. The ten-day period the Iliad covers concerns Achilles, the greatest hero of the Greeks, who gets mad at Agamemnon for stealing his girlfriend. Achilles withdraws from the fighting until Hector, the greatest hero of the Trojans, kills his cousin. Achilles returns and kills Hector, desecrates his corpse, but eventually returns the body to Troy after the father of Hector implores Achilles for mercy. The tale ends with Hector being buried.

Historically speaking the tale is fiction. A league of Greek tribes did siege the city of Troy around 1200 BCE, though this was probably due to the control of the Hellespont rather than love. Following the death of so many adult males coinciding with devastating fires of capital cities, Greece submerged into a dark age. Here the “Trojan War” was preserved and transmuted within an oral tradition that bound the communities together. Homer, a chief bard and editor of the Iliad, helped the story get written down around 800 BCE. We know that this was only one of a few epics circulating around this time, but all we have are Homer’s. Greece was to draw inspiration from these works for centuries to come, eventually holding the epics as golden standards of art. They’ve retained a similar status ever since.

Does the Iliad still live up to its reputation? Absolutely. Written as a long poem in elevated (“heroic”) language, the story is primarily a war drama. Horrific yet beautifully rendered fight scenes litter the book, and I have yet to find their superior. Homer’s masterful use of similes, where combat is contrasted with analogues of peace, gives poise to senseless butchery:

Patroclus rising beside him stabbed his right jawbone,
ramming the spearhead square between his teeth so hard
he hooked him by that spearhead over the chariot-rail,
hoisted, dragged the Trojan out as an angler perched
on a jutting rock ledge drags some fish from the sea,
some noble catch, with line and glittering bronze hook.

Framing violence within scenes of calm and banality has two effects. We are jarred by how identifiable the act is, now that our imaginations have tethered the two activities together. But we also see through the lens of a warrior, whose kaleidoscope vision transforms scenes of war into peace, and peace into war. These two walks of life blur and the dichotomy fades: the world isn’t divided into soldiers and civilians. We’re both. War and civilization are inexorably joined, and both are given equal weight. This is exemplified within Achilles’ famous shield; scenes of destruction live alongside scenes of creation, and though we may favor one over the other, both make up the circle of life.

Achilles (left) slays Hector. From a red-figured volute-krater 

(a large ceramic wine decanter), ca. 500–480 B.C.E.

The tale’s length gives it time to breathe. Every fight, every character, and every speech is equally respected. For being a communal work the unity is incredible; Homer was an excellent editor. The many digressions propel the story’s fated ending ever closer: Hector will die and Troy will fall. There is no suspense in ancient Greece (stories are known well beforehand). But the choices and conflicts that plague our characters are somehow not diminished. Indeed they even know their destinies beforehand. The Iliad has been described as “courage in the face of death,” and I agree. Everyone seems to understand how arbitrary their lives are, yet they’re infused with such pride, such determination. Heroes are unabashed in their beliefs, almost aggressively so. And it’s not as if there’s only one perspective here to celebrate; the wide cast of characters in this drama each have their own unique vision. Achilles is war incarnate, Odysseus marries intelligence with strength, Nestor revels in oration, Hector protects civilized values, Paris embraces love, Helen is beauty incarnate, and even minor characters find time to postulate claims.

But none of it matters. The great conflict in the Iliad—and this is a story of many conflicts—is of barbarism versus civilization. The Achaeans are, if we can use such reductive terms, the bad guys. They siege the walls of hallowed Troy for a woman and their own twisted sense of pride. The Trojans have families, art, allies, technology, temples, wealth, and everything else civilization entails. But it’s not enough; in the end Ilium falls to the wrath of Achilles. It’s not their character, views, or beliefs that doom Troy, simply their inability to defend themselves against aggression. Hector, for all his humanity, could not defeat the Achaeans.

The ending of the epic provides a ray of hope. Achilles’ submission to Priam’s request—his ability to feel empathy for his enemy—is both surprising and puzzling. At first light his decision is of little consequence. Troy will still burn to the ground, Achilles will soon meet his fate, and Zeus will get his way. But amongst all this death and chaos such a small act of kindness, particularly from the cruelest man, means a great deal. A redemptive choice that rebels, even impotently, against fate is heroic. More so than proficiency on the battlefield. Homer both celebrates and insults warfare; with the same breath destroys civilized values and infuses them with meaning. Achilles, by returning Hector, regains some of his humanity. It’ll change nothing, but it’s precious all the same.

This rare tenderness is worlds away from the idiocy of the gods, who rule and play with men’s fate without any regard for their well-being or value. Zues, Athena, Hera, Apollo: these are characters in a story. They are not real or logical; they represent the chaotic forces that destroy or make men’s lives. Their comical antics make the human tragedy that much more painful to experience. They will not be forced to endure the consequences of their decisions. They are incapable of change or loss that would bring significance to their existence. They simply are, and so cannot identify with humanity. It is a good thing both Helen and Achilles shed their destructive selfishness for self-criticism. It is no compliment to be called godlike.

I adore The Iliad: an artistic creation that houses such maddening destruction, with gems of hope and beauty if one is brave enough to look. Homer’s community, slowly reclaiming their civilized life from dark barbarism, poured hundreds of years of hard-earned wisdom into this epic tale. They would not abandon their past, not completely, but they would learn from it. And what they learned was courage in the face of death; art in the face of destruction; and simple human decency in the face of war.