Tuesday, October 26, 2010

For Honor and Glory

So, picking up where I left off a month ago...

The Greek gods are terrible people. While they are occasionally just and even gracious, their modus operandi is to do whatever they feel like and to comply with the whims of their favorite mortals, often by killing hundreds of others; e.g., Achilles and Thetis. It seems to me that the only thing that separates them from mortals is their power. They are not more just or wise. They are not more loving or merciful. They are not omnipotent, omniscient, or omnipresent. And they certainly are not love. They are simply the powers of this world personified.

These gods display a good deal about the Greek mentality. If Plato is to be believed, they, through the poets writings about them, had an enormous impact on the Greek mores. One of the most striking differences between Greek and modern American mores is the value of human life.

10.1 "[Jove] was thinking how to do honor to Achilles and destroy much people at the ships of the Achaeans. In the end he deemed it would be best to send a lying dream to king Agamemnon."

So this seems to be the line of reasoning: Thetis saves Zeus when the other gods try to overthrow him; Achilles decides to be whiny and asks Thetis to kill the people he is pouty at; Thetis goes to Zeus for help and Zeus decides to kill a bunch of the Achaeans to honor the whining Achilles. Did I miss something or did he just decide that Achilles' honor is more important than the lives of hundreds or thousands of Achaeans and Trojans? There is the fact that Agamemnon did something wrong and that it makes some sort of sense for him and his followers to suffer for their wrongdoing, but this is never mentioned particularly not as Zeus' motivation for killing them all. The issue is not the action that caused Achilles to lose honor (Agamemnon stole his woman) but the fact that Achilles lost honor at all.

It is hard for my modern American mind to grasp this preference for the honor of one (undeserving) man over the lives of hundreds. I suppose I should have learned more from Pericles.