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Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2014.07.17
Gregory Nagy, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours. Cambridge,
MA; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2013. Pp. xvi, 727. ISBN 9780674073401. $35.00.
Reviewed by Nina C. Coppolino, University of Connecticut, Storrs
(nina.coppolino@uconn.edu)
Preview
This book is based on over a generation of Gregory Nagys teaching of Greek texts,
first in a course called Concepts of the Hero in Greek Civilization, now renamed
The Ancient Greek Hero. The book is organized into five parts, around the
concept of the Greek hero and mortality: (I) in epic and lyric poetry; (II) in prose
media; (III) in tragedy; (IV) in Plato; and (V) in salvific heroism. Each of the main
sections is divided into hours of varying length and quantity. This review aims, in
its synopses throughout, to show the gist and the virtuosity of the exegesis, first on
the Homeric Iliad, with brief questions in follow-up; selectively then too on
Aeschylus Oresteia, Euripides Bacchae; Platos Phaedo, and the hero as savior.
In the introduction, Greece is characterized as a constellation of competing city-
states (3), in which humans achieve their ultimate potential within society. The
polis operated in the classical period under the cultural and political impulse of
Panhellenism, seen already in the archaic works of Homer and Hesiod that
provided, according to Herodotus, the basics of education for all Hellenes. The
basics are primarily in terms of religion: practices in which myth (saying things in a
sacred way) and ritual (sacred doings and sayings) interact, in the worship of both
gods and heroes (5).
In Panhellenic Homeric poetry, however, where the mortality of heroes is the
dominant theme, the focus is not hero worship or immortalization in ritual, which
would be localized phenomena; instead Homeric poetry more broadly is understood
to express deep concerns about the human condition (12), via portraits of heroes.
Ultimately the song culture of the Greek world sets the heros prize: life eternal in
the imperishable glory in song. h!r" is seasonality, which is guarded by h#r" for the
h#r!s, who is on-time at the hour of death but unseasonal during his lifetime. The
exegesis on the embedded micro-narrative on Heracles (Iliad XIX 76-138)
concludes then that without the disequilibrium brought about to him by the
persecution of Hera through the mere social superiority of king Eurystheus,
Heracles would never have achieved the equilibrium of heroic immortality via the
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kleos of song (44); hence Achilles, as the greater hero in the macro-narrative, is
constrained by the mere social superiority of Agamemnon to endure the taking of
Briseis (39). On the empathy evoked by total recall in song, the micro-narrative on
Phoenix (Iliad IX 550-605) shows that Achilles must rejoin his comrades in war,
persuaded by the story of Meleagros and his wife Kleopatra to identify with those
who are philoi, near and dear (66). The explication alternates with brief
fundamentals on the master Narrator and the omniscient Muses, the form of epic
poetry, the researches of Parry and Lord, and Austins formulation of the speech-
act.
Comparative studies pepper the exegesis. For instance in the poetics of lament as
both singing and crying, there is a typological comparison of laments to Kodly
(78) and modern Korean film (84); and here too is Achilles as Roberta Flack (88).
With reference to texts of Sappho and Pindar, as well as cognate Indic formulation,
Achilleskleos aphthiton is ultimately rendered unwilting glory, which results
from the negation of his homecomingthe choice he makes not to return home to
Phth$# (105). In the Homeric text, Achilles own singing of the klea andr!n holds
Andromaches pain, through the lyre of Etion, along with the grief of Kleopatra as
halcyon, and the song of Patroklos, her names reverse (88-89).
When mortals become equals to the gods in Homeric poetry, in short they die from
their fatal attraction. The warrior is daimoni $sos, or equal to superhuman force, at
the climactic moment of death, or near-death. The discussion is focused
comparatively around linkings of the doomed warrior in death with the wedded
couple in lyric, and the merged identity especially of the bridegroom with Ares and
Achilles, who in myth is cut down (in the Epic Cycle) by War/Ares (134), but in
ritual is the eternal bridegroom in an eroticized beautiful death (140-41). The
literary exegesis identifies Apollo, also Achilles implicit antagonist, as the
embodiment of the authority of poets, transcending genres (144).
Patroklos is the other self of Achilles, his therap!n, or ritual substitute, and as
such he is doomed to die. The Anatolian origins of therap!n indicate that a ritual
substitute expels pollution from the person to be purified and transfers it, in this
case, to a person, who can be identified as closely as possible with the human self
(150). Patroklos is the nearest and dearest comrade of the primary hero, and in a
sacral context he attends or cares for Achilles (164). therapeuein is linked with
philos, here at a sacral and unsurpassed level of intimacy (167). Patroklos short-
circuits evil by absorbing suffering and refusing to pass it on (168).
The longest, single hour on Homeric poetry (169-234) is on visual as well as
verbal art, as they explain the heros sema, or sign or tomb, embodying
remembrance of cult heroes. There is a comparison of nineteen well-reproduced
images, mostly on Greek vases, and most of which depict scenes from Greek myth
that include the sign of the hero at a chariot race, which is both the physical marker
of the turning point in the course and ultimately his tomb, here of both Patroklos
and Achilles. Most of the images are said to show a consistent story about the
furious retaliation of Achilles in response to the killing of Patroklos by Hector,
corresponding with the retaliation as told in the Iliad, especially in that the fury of
Achilles will be assuaged and he will show pity (207). The difference between the
pictures and the Iliad is in the apobatic moment of the images, in which Achilles
leaps out of the chariot and runs along side it, as the charioteer drives, unlike the
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portrayal in the Iliad of Achilles as the driver himself. The argument, based on the
garments of the charioteers, is that the pictures showing the dragging of the corpse
are really depicting an athletic event. Achilles is running like an athlete in apobatic
chariot racing, which was part of the Athenian Panatheneia, except that his event
is ultimately being polluted by his cruel behavior (211), which will need to be
eternally purified by succeeding generations of ordinary humans who participate in
the same seasonally recurring ritual practice, in acts of compensation (240-42).
The kleos of Homeric poetry is in its own right a seasonally recurring ritual event,
since it was performed at the Panatheneia, in competitions of rhapsodic relays that
are parallel to the athletic competition of the apobatai (247). In the psychology now
of the heros sign, the mentality of reenactments expands this idea, in that poetry
is not only myth, but ritual in the re-enactment in performance (m$m#sis), which
leads to a ritual process of purification or katharsis of emotions, especially the
Aristotelian pity and fear, here even in the witnessing of brutality (273). While
Achilles and Patroklos share one ps%kh# and s#ma as each others selves, what is
most important and what lives forever in them as cult heroes is klea andr!n h#r!!n,
or epic itself (264, 257); the breath of life or ps%kh#, which after death is reunited
with the body after a transition through Hades into a paradisiacal setting, is the
mystical reunion that drives the idea of heroic immortalization, essential to this hero
cult (250).
For this reader the incisive discussion of Homeric heroism prompts questions back
upon Greek civilization and the human condition. If institutionalized practices of
athletics and warfare were originally viewed as parts of one single ritual continuum
(265), how might the heros propensity for the ordeals of war reflect societys own
propensityfor better or worse? The author, while not at all essentializing the
horrors of war, observes that warfare was a fact of life in pre-modern times and was
so ritualized (265); the human who fights in war is undergoing a ritual ordeal that
re-enacts the mythical ordeals of heroes, and in the context of ritual and myth, there
is a mentality of not distinguishing between human experience and heroic
experience, in ordeals of both war and athletics (270). Fundamentally were the
Greeks then in favor of wars competitive arena for achievement here and hereafter,
as much or more than they were against wars brutality, and what might the Iliad
show in this respect?
In tragedy the argument is that the audience experiences the synchronization of the
world of heroes with the world of the individuals present day society (459). In
Aeschylus Libation Bearers, concerning honor paid to a superhuman force by way
of cult (484), there is crystalline insight upon the ultimate libation to the Furies of
the blood of Aegisthus himself. In the Eumenides, Nagy emphasizes well the
establishment of the process of justice for civil society, in the law-court instead of
vendetta, and in the acculturation of the kindly ones. One perhaps asks again what
this synchronization may mean about the character of justice in civilized society? If
the process is the justice (493), is the basis of Athenas specific judgment to break
the jurys tie (male is dominant) facile or irrelevant, and does this reflect upon the
process? In Euripides Bacchae, Pentheus experience of suffering is in the form of
dismemberment by the women of Thebes; this is his ag!n (575-76), and his death
leads to his kleos as the victim of his antagonism with a god (581). In connection
with society, the ghastly dismemberment of the body yet holds hope for the ultimate
re-assembly of the body politic (599), in beautiful membership among the near and
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dear to the god.
In another type of reversal, the swan-song of Socrates (Phaedo 84d-85b) is not a
lament but ultimately is the living word he perpetuates by his eternal, dialogic quest
for the truth (624), right into his hoped-for afterlife; moreover, in temporal society
Socrates words, in his own heroic fight, are those that start the dialogue on truth, to
be continued by others of succeeding generations, forever (638). Here the
immortalization is not of the body or soul but of the living word of philosophic
dialogue (646). As a hero who can promote salvation then, Socrates final
instruction to sacrifice a rooster to the healer Asklepios (Phaedo 118a) does not
mean that death is a cure for life but rather that after overnight sleep/incubation
there will be an awakening call of living words (682). So too the hero Achilles,
whose bones buried in a golden amphora in a tumbos on the Hellespont, will be
visible shining forth from afar for men at sea now living and those that are born
hereafter (Odyssey XXIV 83-84); showing the way to salvation is the light that
emanates from the heros tomb, as sailors lost at sea yearn to be reunited with loved
ones (672). With the idea of the hero alive, the word about him is alive, and the
hero thus lives on (683).
This book is not a 24-hour crash course. Detailed arguments are shaped gradually,
often with recapitulation, and with references back in the discussion and forward to
awaited development. There is a core vocabulary of key Greek words, and a full
bibliography of scholarly references. There is an index of cited primary texts but
not a general index. In the main body, selections of Greek are rendered in English
with occasional transliterations, and all original Greek is provided in accompanying
footnotes; full English texts are on-line in a companion sourcebook. In sum the
material is instructive, learned and vintage Nagy, in a book on the Greek hero that is
worth the time.
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