Armand D’Angour's Blog

William Johnson Cory, schoolmaster and poet, wrote the paragraph below, summing up what he saw to be the purpose of education at Eton. It expresses sentiments that nowadays might be more apt to education at university level (at least in places like Oxford and Cambridge where the tutorial system still exists) than to the more inflexible style of schoolteaching required to achieve good results in the league tables.

 The shadow of lost knowledge

At school you are engaged not so much in acquiring knowledge as in making mental efforts under criticism. A certain amount of knowledge you can indeed with average faculties acquire so as to retain; nor need you regret the hours you spent on much that is forgotten, for the shadow of lost knowledge at least protects you from many illusions. But you go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment’s notice a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into another person’s thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage, and for mental soberness. Above all, you go to a great school for self-knowledge.

To this might be added a paragraph from 1) Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of a University and 2) the essay by the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, written in 1950, also entitled The Idea of a University. 

This process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific trade or profession, or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture, is called Liberal Education; and though there is no one in whom it is carried as far as is conceivable, or whose intellect would be a pattern of what intellects should be made, yet there is scarcely any one but may gain an idea of what real training is, and at least look towards it, and make its true scope and result, not something else, his standard of excellence; {153} and numbers there are who may submit themselves to it, and secure it to themselves in good measure. And to set forth the right standard, and to train according to it, and to help forward all students towards it according to their various capacities, this I conceive to be the business of a University.

2. Oakeshott:

Ode in Ancient Greek for Michael Wood and Rebecca Dobbs

April 2022

At a Gala Auction held in late 2021 to raise money for Classics for All, Michael Wood and Rebecca Dobbs made a substantial bid and won the prize of a Greek Ode to be composed in their honour. This is the result, in English and Greek verse. A commentary is appended.

TELL, MUSE, of many-sided Michael Wood,

famed on account of Troy and other things;

Rebecca too, who with him oft has stood,

for of their partnership one gladly sings.

But where to start and where to end my song?                 5

For, like Odysseus, Michael’s done it all,

while she who’s journeyed with him far and long

strong-willed Penelope bids us recall.

They’ve seen the ways that people live and roam,

and many moving pictures have unrolled,                              10

so that enraptured viewers can at home

watch marvellous documentaries unfold.

He’s told the tales of China and of Greece,

of Alexander’s footsteps in the sand;

of Britain’s coasts resounding without cease;                       15

and of the greatest poets of each land.

We learn of India’s wonders, and the quest

to shine a light on centuries of gloom,

of conquered folk in far-off southern climes,

and whence the towers of Ilium came to doom.                 20

These histories and more he loves to share;

and then, with friends and family in tow,

and daughters (Jyoti, Mina) chattering fair,

to their much-cherished Amorgos they go.

With music, since guitar too Michael plays,                           25

I’ll gladly celebrate my brilliant friends:

may music, love, and friendship fill your days,

so that life’s sweet adventure never ends!

ʽΥληέντα μοι ἄνδρα πολύτροπον ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα,

ὃς μέγα κῦδος ἔχει Τροΐης ἕνεκ’ ἠδὲ καὶ ἄλλως,

τῆν δὲ φίλην ἑτάρην, ἣ πολλὰ βέβηκε μετʼ αὐτοῦ·

τῶν γὰρ όμοφροσύνην ἀΐων ἥδοιτʼ ἂν ἀοιδός.

ἀλλὰ τί μὲν πρῶτον, τί μοι ὕστερον ἔστιν ἀείδειν;            5

ἢ γὰρ ὅπως ʼΟδυσεὺς ὅδʼ ἄρʹ ἄσπετα ἔργʼ ἐτέλεσσεν,

ἣ δὲ συνεργὸς ἔουσα πολὺ τληθεῖσα καὶ αὐτή

ἥρωος γαμέτῃ μοι ἐοίκεν Πηνελοπείῃ.

τώδε γὰρ ἀνθρώπων τε νόμους ἠδʼ ἄστεʼ ἰδόντε

πολλά τότʼ ἐξεφέροντο θοῶν κινήματα μορφῶν              10

ὄφρα τά κεν πολλοῖς φανέοιτʼ οἴκοι περ ἔουσιν

θαυμάζοιντο τε πάντες ὅταν ξενὰ ἔργα ἴδωσιν.

μυθέεται γὰρ ἔθη Σείρων, πρηχθέντα τ´ʼΑχαιῶν,

ᾗπερ ʼΑλεξάνδρος ψάμμῳ πόδας αὐτὸς ἔθηκε,

ἢ γαίας Βρετανῶν ἀκτὰς τηλοῦ ψοφοέσσας,                     15

ποιητὰς δʼ ἐπέων τόθι τʼ ἀλλόθι τʼ ἔξοχʼ ἀρίστους.

ἰστέα δʼ ἔστʼ ʼΙνδῶν ὅσα θαύματα, καὶ τάδε δʼ αὖτε,

αἰῶνας μὲν ὅπως σκοτίης φαίνοντας ἴδωμεν,

χώροις δʼ ἐν νοτίοισ᾽ ἀνθρώπους δουριαλώτους,

ἧς τε χάριν Τροΐη ποτʼ ἐπέρθετο ὀφρυόεσσα.                    20

ἄλλα τε καὶ ταῦτʼ αὐτὸς ἔωθε διδάσκεμεν ἥρως·

αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα φίλοις τε θυγατράσι τ´ᾤχετʼ ἄρ’ ἄλλῃ,

ταὶ δʼ ἄρ’ ʽἰὼ τί θέλει; τί μιν ἀλγέει;ʼ ὡς λαλέουσαι

ἦλθον ἅμʼ οἷσι τέκουσι, φίλην δʼ ἐς ʼΑμοργὸν ἵκοντο.

χρῆ δʼ ἔμε καὶ κιθάρας μὶν ἐπιστάμενον μάλʼ ἐπαινεῖν    25

ὡς σοφὸν ἄνδρ’, ἄλλους τε καὶ ἄσμενος ὑμνήσαιμι.

ὑμῖν δʼ εἴη πᾶσα χάρις φιλίη τε μέλη τε,

ὡς ἄρα μήποθʼ ἵκητε πέρας γλυκεροῖο βιοῖο.

Notes and Commentary

Introduction

At a Gala Auction held in late 2021 to raise money for Classics for All, Michael Wood and Rebecca Dobbs made a substantial bid and won the prize of a Greek Ode to be composed in their honour. I decided that the Ode should be composed in epic verse (Homeric hexameters) since Michael is a hero to many who know him and his work. The opening line of the Odyssey (“Tell me, Muse, of a much-travelled man”) seemed an apt point of departure: In Search of the Trojan War was one of MW’s most popular series, beloved of a generation of classicists and viewers. Jointly, Michael and Rebecca recall the “like-mindedness” (homo­phrosynē) of Odysseus and his clever, resilient partner Penelope. The listing of key episodes in the couple’s life and work also suggested a later genre in the same metre, the Homeric Hymns.

Michael’s work as a historian, presenter, and documentary maker, with Rebecca as his constant support and occasional producer or editor, had to form the bulk of the poem. Knowing the couple as I do, their close and loving family, their delight in their regular visits to Amorgos, and their love of both listening to and (in Michael’s case as guitarist in an amateur band) playing music also had to form part of the tribute. While the Ode touches on only a fragment of Michael and Rebecca’s varied lives and achievements, I hope it reflects the affection and esteem in which they are widely held, as well as the warmth and admiration that I personally feel for them, for what they have achieved, and for all they continue to do.

Commentary on selected lines:

1

Tell, Muse / ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα     The words imitate the opening line of Homer’s Odyssey, with the same words in a different order. Homer calls on the Muse to tell of a man ‘of many turns’ (πολύτροπος), an epithet connoting mental as well as geographical versatility.

Wood / ὑλήεντα   The Greek version of the name is the adjective for ‘wooded’, used by Homer of places such as the island of Zakynthos (modern Zante); here it qualifies ‘man’, ἄνδρα.

2

Troy / Τροΐη   Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey tell of the 10-year siege and eventual destruction of Troy by Greek chieftains including Odysseus. The historical and archaeological background of the story was the subject of MW’s documentary In Search of the Trojan War (1985).

3

has stood / βέβηκε     The latter syllables of the word approximate to the sound of ‘Becky’ (as Rebecca is called by family and friends) in classical pronunciation.

4

partnership / όμοφροσύνην     The ‘like-mindedness’ of Penelope and Odysseus in the Odyssey is the subject of enchanting chapter by J. J. Winkler, “Penelope’s Cunning and Homer’s” (in The Constraints of Desire, 1991, 158).

5

where to start / τί μὲν πρῶτον     The Homeric bard asks the Muse for a starting point (e.g. Iliad 1.8, Hymn to Apollo 19, 207).

6

done it all / ἄσπετα ἔργα     Apparent hiatus due to an original digamma in ϝέργον, (which etymologically underlies English ‘work’) is often, though not invariably, found in Homer; also here in line 12, ξενὰ ἔργα.

9

they’ve seen the ways / νόμους ἠδʼ ἄστεʼ ἰδόντε     An allusion to line 3 of the Odyssey, where Homer says that Odysseus “saw the cities of many people and learned their minds” (πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω).

10

moving pictures / θοῶν κινήματα μορφῶν     Literally “movements of swift shapes”.

13

China / Σείρων     The Story of China (2016) was produced by RD (the book of that title was published in 2020). MW also made How China Got Rich (2019).

14

Greece…Alexander / Ἀχαιῶν…Αλεξάνδρος     In Search of the Trojan War (1985) was followed by In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great (1997); also Alexander’s Greatest Battle (2009). The series and book In Search of Myths and Heroes (2005) traced the legendary journey of Jason and the Argonauts, starting in Anafi, moving from Volos to Lemnos and Samothrace, then through the Bosphorus and along the Black Sea coast of Turkey to Colchis in Georgia. MW tackled modern Greek history in Greece: The Hidden War (1986).

15

Britain / Βρετανῶν     The Great British Story: A People’s History (2012) and King Alfred and the Anglo Saxons (2013). MW has also published Domesday: A Search for the Roots of England (1988) following the 1986 documentary of that title.

16

poets / ποιητάς     In Search of Shakespeare (2003), In Search of Beowulf (2009), Ovid: The Poet and the Emperor (2017), Du Fu: China’s Greatest Poet (2020).

17

ʼΙνδῶν / India     Television: Darshan: An Indian Journey (1989), The Story of India (2007). Books: The Smile of Murugan: A South Indian Journey (1995), India: An Epic Journey Across the Subcontinent (2007). MW and BD’s two daughters were given Indian names, Jyoti and Minakshi.

18

αἰῶνας…σκοτίης / centuries of gloom     Television series In Search of the Dark Ages (1979–81), with the book of that name (new edition 2022).

19

conquered folk / άνθρώπους δουριαλώτους     Conquistadors (2000), television series and book.

20

whence / ἧς τε χάριν     At the end of In Search of the Trojan War, MW memorably observes “In the archaeological record love leaves no trace”. The Greek literally means ‘for whose (fem.) sake’, an allusion to Helen of Sparta (just as ‘towers of Ilium’ alludes to Marlowe’s lines on Helen: “Is this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?”).

22

daughters (Jyoti, Mina) / ʽἰὼ τί θέλει; τί μιν ἀλγέει;ʼ     The Greek words contain the sound of their names, and has them ‘chattering’ (λαλέουσαι) “Oh, what does he want? What’s bugging him?” as if they are teasing an impatient parent.

22-4

ᾤχετο, ἦλθον, ἵκοντο     The aorist tense is used here to indicate repeated activity.

25

κιθάρας / guitar     The Greek word kithara is the ancestor of ‘guitar’ via Spanish guitarra.

26

celebrate / ὑμνήσαιμι     A spondaic final word, as found in roughly one in twenty lines of Homeric epic.

Musica linguae, lingua musicae

A talk given in Latin as part of a cultural panel at the Delphi Economic Forum, April 2022.

Dear hosts, friends and colleagues:

It is a pleasure to speak to you today, in the presence of colleagues and friends whose praises I sing for their work and efforts to restore the status of ancient languages, both Latin and Greek, so that everyone, not least pupils and youngsters, can learn to speak them eloquently and accurately. In this time of great pain and destruction suffered by friends and colleagues in Ukraine, it feels as much of a duty as ever for scholars and for all who have the privilege of living in peaceful and democratic countries to uphold the values of learning, truth, beauty, and excellence. These are all eternal values espoused in the highest degree by the leading lights of ancient Greek culture – by poets, philosophers, and educators.

What I want to remind you of in particular is the fact that ancient Greek, at the earliest times in which we know of it, contains its own kind of music, which is often neglected. If we pay close attention, we may understand not only the metres and rhythms of Greek correctly, but can also hear how melody is ingrained in its words and sentences. There is, in other words, a music inherent in the Greek language, musica linguae. In addition, Greek has from the times of Homer and Pythagoras given to the world a language of music (lingua musicae), that is, ways in which we may think and speak of everything to do with the ideas embraced by ‘music’.

You will all know that the word ‘music’ comes from Greek mousikê, which means ‘the arts of the Muses’. That is, not only songs, instrumental sounds, and dances, but poetry and literature, and everything that might be thought to be educational, edifying, memorable, and life-enhancing. The Muses were divine beings for the ancient Greeks, because they were the daughters of Memory and presided over all forms of knowledge and beauty. Even in the darkest times these are values that make life worth living and striving for.

When Achilles, the greatest fighter in Homer’s Iliad, retires from battle and killing, he ‘soothes his spirit’ by singing to the accompaniment of the lyre. Homer knew well what such singing was, because he himself was singing his epic, and invoking the Muse whom we identify with Calliope, “she of the lovely voice”, to entertain and enthral his listeners. Homer’s contemporary Hesiod was the first to name the nine Muses, and scholars in Alexandria some centuries later determined their different functions. They are the daughters of Memory, because their over-arching function is to help us remember and celebrate the past, and to bring it to life in the present.

Among the Muses are Erato, muse of love songs; Klio, muse of history; Melpomene, muse of tragedy; Ourania, muse of astronomy; and Thalia, muse of comedy. The whole range of human thought and emotion are expressed by these domains. To them may be added harmonious bodily movement presided over by Terpsichore, muse of dance, worship promoted by Polyhymnia, and the beautiful sounds of musical instruments that was the domain of Euterpe.

Euterpe is the Muse to whom, some time in the second century AD, a musician called Seikilos dedicated a short song that will be well known to you, ΟΣΟΝ ΖΗΣ ΦΑΙΝΟΥ. It is inscribed in Greek with musical notation on a marble column which miraculously survives to be rediscovered in 1883. Seikilos added his signature to the song, and though the end of the text is lost, what was written there was, I think, ΣΕΙΚΙΛΟΣ ΕΥΤΕΡΠΗΙ, which means that Seikilos intended his dedicatee to be none other than the Muse herself. The song demonstrates beautifully how Greek continued to be the language of music – a thousand years after Homer invoked his Muse to help him sing his masterpieces, Iliad and Odyssey.

Seikilos composed the melody with superb skill to conform precisely with the pitch accents of Greek. In earlier times the accents indicated a rise, or a rise and fall, in pitch: thus when Seikilos sets melody to the words télos and chrónos, the first syllable is higher in pitch than the second, and when he writes the words lupoû and zên, the circumflex is faithfully represented in the melody. In addition, Seikilos made his tune represent the character, or ethos, of the sentiment the song expresses, which is that expounded by the Hellenistic philosopher Epicurus: life is short, so be happy while you are alive. When Seikilos urges us to ‘shine’ ΦΑΙΝΟΥ, the pitch of the musical line rises optimistically. When he reminds us that life is short, πρὸς ὀλίγον ἔστι τὸ ζῆν, the words and music run quickly in short syllables. When he asks us to accept that in the end we die, the melody falls dejectedly. We understand this music, because it is fundamentally our own music. These tropes, found in much earlier Greek documents, make clear that Greek music, later filtered through Rome and the Holy Roman Empire, underlies the subsequent European musical tradition

All the lines of the Song are in a standard iambic metre, but Seikilos has also used assonance in each couplet. This shows us how the pronunciation of Greek in the 2nd century was much the same as it is today, since we are required to rhyme ζῆν and ἀπαιτεῖ. The Song beautifully illustrated how cultural forms advance through both continuity and variation. I will now sing the song in three languages, Greek, Latin, and English, to words that imitate the original in rhythm and rhyme.

Ὅσον ζῇς φαίνου!
μηδὲν ὅλως σὺ λυποῦ.
πρὸς ὀλίγον ἔστι τὸ ζῆν
τὸ τέλος ὁ χρόνος ἀπαιτεῖ.

Dum vivis, splendeas!
Tu nihilo doleas.
Hominibus est brevis lux:
Tempore quaeritur exitus.

While you live, shine bright!
Don’t let sorrow you benight.
Short is the time we have to spend:
To everything Time demands and end.
 

In a preface to the song. Seikilos writes that it will provide ‘a long-lasting marker of eternal memory’, μνήμης ἀθανάτου σῆμα πολυχρόνιον. The wordplay on πολυχρόνιον is evident, since chrónos also means a musical beat. Seikilos has given us many chrónoi, even if the song must quickly come to an end.

The result is indeed an eternal memory; and it cannot be an epitaph, as it is often said to be. Rather it is an advertisement of the composer’s professional and musical excellence, ἀρετή. The column was found in an area of Asia Minor where there is inscriptional evidence for music being taught professionally. I believe that Seikilos was so proud of his skilful composition that he had it inscribed for posterity on marble, perhaps even to be placed at the entrance to a school where he taught music.

The Song of Seikilos reminds us how music, beauty, and skill transcend the ages and even defy death. At the base of the column is the single word ZHI, used to indicate that the author of the text is still alive. Just as Seikilos is eternally alive when we remember and sing his song, so is the beauty, excellence, and skill that his music demonstrates. These are ancient Hellenic and indeed universal values, which transcend individual lives and sustain our human journey through good times and bad, for future generations. They permit us to say, with hope, Long live Ukraine, Long live Greece, and long live Beauty, Truth, and Excellence.

Cari hospites, collegae, et amici:

summo cum gaudio hanc oratiunculam apud vos habeo, nam inter collegas et amicos versor ad quos laudes maximas dare velim pro operis et laboribus suis per quos linguas antiquas, et Latinam et Graecam, assidue restituere et praeferre petant ut in labros omnium, necnon discipulorum iuvenumque, pulchre et accurate exprimi possint. Iam vero amicis et collegis Ucrainiis terribili maerore et ruina afflictis homines docti et omnes qui, qua sumus fortuna, pace et libertate fruimur, mores humanas sicut eruditionem, veritatem, venustatem, in fine summas virtutes quae ab illustribus Graecorum poetis philosophis praeceptoribus in primis fovebantur, extollere et adfirmare debemus.

quod autem hodie praecipue vobis memorare velim est quod lingua Graeca antiqua, quali in temporibus antiquissimis Graeci quantum nobis scire licet uterentur, musicam certam in se habet quae licet saepe a multis neglecta sit, si intente illae animadvertimus non solum metra et rhythmos recte percipere possumus, set etiam suavitatem melodiae sicut musicam linguae in verbis et sententiis Graecis insitam audire possumus. Quo addendum est eandem Graecam de aetate Homeri Pythagoraeque linguam et sermones ad artes musicas exponendas nobis dedisse, ut cum de musica loquimur propria vocabula omnino habeamus.

Nam quis non novit vocabulum ipsum ‘Musica’ de verbo Graeco pervenisse et ‘artes Musarum’ significare, id est non solum sonos vocum et lyrae tibiarumque, non solum saltus chorosque, sed etiam poesin et litteras et omnes partes institutionis per quas mentes nostras et memoriam et vitam ipsam revivescamus et meliores efficiamus? Musae enim apud Graecos vera numina erant quae ut filiae Memoriae scientia et artibus praesidebant omnibus quae in rebus secundis nec minus caecis adversisque colendae essent ut vitam laetam optatamque persequamur.

Ille enim Achilles heros in Iliade fortissimus cum de bello luctuque se excipit ‘animam’ ut dicit Homerus ‘mulcet’ cum lyra canendo, nec ignorabat noster poeta qualis esset cantus huiusmodi quia carmen ipse cantabat Musam invocans quam Calliopen vocamus ut ‘vocem pulchram’ adhibentem, ut audientes undique captaret et blandiretur. Sed non Homerus ipse verum coaevus Hesiodus nomina Musis primus adiecit, ut docti apud Alexandriam nonnullos post saeculos sua quibusque propria regna proponerent. Quae Musae filiae Memoriae videntur esse quia praesertim nos res gestas memorare et celebrare et in praesens tempus usque renovare permittunt.

Quae inter numina Erato amorum, Clio historiae, Melpomenen tragoedie, Uraniam astronomiae, Thaliam comoediae Musas numeramus, quarum in facultatibus cuncta hominum cogitata et cuncti affectus includuntur; quibus autem motus corporis dilectos penes Musam chororum Terpsichoren adiungamus, religionem quoque pietatemque penes Polyhymniam, denique voces dulces lyrarum tibiarumque quos fovet Musa Euterpe.

Illae quidem Musae Euterpei in saeculo secundo musicus quidam nomine Sicilus carmen breve dedicavit bene vobis notum, id est Hoson Zes Phainou. Quod quidem Graece cum signis musicis in stela marmorea inscriptum anno millesimo octingentesimo octogesimo tertio sub terra repertum miro modo adhuc superest. Carmini ipsi addidit Sicilus suum nomen, et quamquam ultima linea partim perisse videtur, mea sententia ibi scriptum fuit ‘Sicilus Euterpei’, et hoc indicare non solum auctorem Musae ipsi hoc carmen dedicasse, sed etiam linguam Graecam licet mille annos postquam Homerus in suis summis operibus Musam invocaverit tamquam linguam musicae mansisse.

Noster enim Sicilus melodiam summa arte composuit ut melos cum tonis Graecis accurate adaptetur. qui autem toni in priscis temporibus elationem vel forte ascensum et descensionem vocis significabant, ut cum auctor verbis telos et chronos melodiam addit syllabam primam altiorem quam secundam efficiat, et qua lupou et zen inveniuntur perispomena propria in melodia fideliter audiantur. Nec minus effecit Sicilus ut ethos carminis praestare posset, scilicet illud Epicuri quo dicitur vita quia brevis est oportet nos viventes laetari. Ergo cum Sicilus nos urget ut niteamus, phainou, accentus apud propriam syllabam surgit; cum dicit vitam brevem esse, pros oligon esti to zen, et verba et melodia syllabis brevibus constituuntur. Cum poscit ut agnoscamus quod in fine omnes mortem obimus, melos ipsum quasi tristitia affectum desuper cadit. Nos autem talem speciem musicae bene intellegimus quia denique nostra est, et quia formae quae in scriptis Graecis inveniuntur nos sane docent hanc musicam, scilicet per aetates Romanas et multas postea perfluerit, formas musicas omni Europae suppeditasse.

Omnes carminis versus iambice rite componuntur, verum Sicilus in distichis adsonantia quoque utitur, ex quo certi fieri possimus vocem Graecam in saeculo secundo similem hodiernae fuisse, quippe zen et apaitei adsonare videntur. Itaque hoc carmen nobis et traditionem et variationem morum antiquorum bene monstrat. Nunc igitur tribus linguis usus, Graece et Latine et tandem Anglice, vocabulis rhythmum et modos carminis imitantibus, carmen cantare ipse temptabo.

Ὅσον ζῇς φαίνου!
μηδὲν ὅλως σὺ λυποῦ.
πρὸς ὀλίγον ἔστι τὸ ζῆν
τὸ τέλος ὁ χρόνος ἀπαιτεῖ.

Dum vivis, splendeas!
Tu nihilo doleas.
Hominibus est brevis lux:
Tempore quaeritur exitus.

While you live, shine bright!
Don’t let sorrow you benight.
Short is the time we have to spend:
To everything Time demands and end.
 

Antequam incipit carmen ipsum scribit Sicilus id ‘signum duraturum memoriae aeternae’ fore, mnemes athanatou sema poluchronion. Certe videmus eum cum verbo poluchronion ludere, quippe chronos non solum tempus sed etiam durationem musicam, id est moram, significat. Etenim multas nobis moras Sicilus hic dedit, etsi carmen mox et sine multa mora ad finem advenire debet. Quod autem eventum est haud dubio memoriae est aeternae; nec enim epitaphium ut saepe dicitur esse potest, sed potius monumentum artis auctoris eiusque excellentiae, id est arete. Quo plus animadvertamus stelam in Asia inventam esse, qua in terra hoc tempore optimi musici (ut aliis in inscriptionibus legere possumus) operam suam gerebant. Credo igitur equidem Sicilo tam gratum fuisse suum ipsum ingenium in hoc carmine componendo ut curavit ut in marmor pro hominibus sequentibus inscribatur, fortasse etiam ut in atrio scholae qua artes musicas ipse docebat adponatur.

Carmen Sicili nos memores efficit musicam et pulchritudinem et artem ultra vitam hominum supervolare et mortem ipsum oppugnare. Ad partem inferiorem huius stelae invenitur vocabulum unicum ZEI quod solet significare auctorem inscriptionis adhuc vivum esse. Sicut enim cum carmen Sicili memoramus cantamusque in aeternum vivit homo ipse, vivunt nihilominus in musica eius insita ars, excellentia, et ingenium. Quae eadem cum Graecorum antiquorum tum hominum universorum sunt mores, qui supra vitam hominum superstant et iter humanum per res secundas et adversas regunt ut ad nepotes ultro perveniant. Ergo licet nobis optima sperare cum iam una dicimus “Vivat Ucrainia, Vivat Graecia, vivant Venustas, Veritas, et Excellentia”.

It may be tempting to think we already know Socrates, the Athenian philosopher whose most famous dictum remains that he was wise only insofar as he was aware of his own ignorance. Although Socrates never published anything of his own, his student Plato presents him in numerous dialogues as a smart and talented (if somewhat pedantic) interrogator who never tired of examining the opinions of his fellow citizens on a range of topics, including such weighty matters as the nature of justice, virtue, knowledge, and love. Plato and several other prominent ancient writers – most notably Xenophon and Aristophanes – depicted Socrates as ‘an extraordinary and original thinker who was always poor, always old, and always ugly’.

This image of Socrates has endured to the present. Armand D’Angour’s Socrates in Love reveals new sides to the historical figure: Socrates as young man, private citizen, soldier, and – as the title suggests – lover. D’Angour draws on a range of mostly minor ancient sources that have not received the attention they deserve in reconstructing the historical figure of Socrates. With great skill and mastery, D’Angour teases out the kind of information this evidence reveals about heretofore unmapped territory in the life of the ancient philosopher.

The result is an original account that, at its best, reads like a detective story looking for new yet unrecognised clues in the ancient evidence, piecing together a case that calls existing scholarship on Socrates into question. D’Angour revises our picture of the philosopher. Socrates was not, as is frequently assumed, a member of the lower classes. He grew up in a wealthy and reputable family. At least up to his forties, Socrates was vigorous, physically attractive, and fit; he participated in several important military campaigns of his day. He once even risked his life – and those of fellow fighters – by breaking ranks to rescue the wounded Alcibiades from certain death on the battlefield.

D’Angour’s account of Socrates’s life prior to his philosophical career is speckled with detail illuminating a side with which few will be familiar. We learn that Socrates stood up during the performance of Aristophanes’s Clouds at Athens to out himself as the comedy’s infamous protagonist – and remained standing for the rest of the play. He was married to a woman called Myrto before he wed the fierce Xanthippe. He had three children. He had a habit of stopping in his tracks and standing motionless for hours on end to think things through. Of course, one could be tempted to dismiss this sort of information as entertaining but ultimately inconsequential; yet it raises larger questions concerning the link between the philosopher’s earlier life and his contribution to the later philosophical tradition – questions that give Socratic philosophy a new grounding.

The case the book builds concerns the question of what may have instigated Socrates’s turn away from worldly matters to the path of a thinker and intellectual. D’Angour argues that it was a love affair with Aspasia of Miletus – a beautiful, intelligent, eloquent woman who ended up marrying the famous Athenian statesman Pericles – which eventually turned cold, inspiring Socrates to embrace the idea of ‘Platonic love’ and what came to be known as ‘the Socratic method’ of investigation.

This is a book about a specific historical person. Yet it also speaks to larger questions concerning the principles and practices of the historical imagination and the challenges we face when trying to reconstruct a life lived millennia ago. As D’Angour provocatively asks, ‘When can a source be trusted to be telling us the historical truth, and when can it not be?’ Even if the author’s historical reconstructions occasionally border on speculative, the general reader will take away much in terms of answers to these important questions.

Moreover, in addressing such issues up front, D’Angour has created a deeply personal account taking us both back to classical Athens and forward in time to the intimate setting of an Oxford University supervision during which students reimagine the Socrates of Aristophanes’s comedy Clouds. It is in these sections that D’Angour’s own voice rings through, adding a further dimension to the story: the historian who mediates between the past and the present.

Why does this book matter? Socrates is a key figure credited with having started a whole new way of philosophy that has had a lasting impact on the later philosophical tradition. He turned the focus away from questions about the cosmos and towards an enquiry into all things human. Socrates in Love offers a better understanding of the person behind the ideas, as well as of the kind of influences that may have directed Socrates along this path. It is a must-read for all who are philosophically inclined, for those with an interest in the principles and practices of the historical imagination, and also those who merely enjoy a good story.

Julia Kindt is Professor of Ancient History in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney.

The Frogs Chorus in Aristophanes Frogs: competing with Dionysus

Dionysus is rowing across the lake of the Underworld to a steady rhythm when he is interrupted by the frog chorus, singing to the accompaniment of the aulos (a double pipe, not a banjo) – standardly the instrument used to accompany the dramatic chorus, and also used by the keleustēs (controller) to set the rhythm for rowers in Athenian triremes. The frogs in the underworld (i.e. ex-frogs) refer to brekekekex koax koax as the song they used to sing ‘in the marshland up above’ — but they are singing it at a pace too fast for Dionysus’s comfort.

Eventually Dionysus realises the only way to assert his own rhythm is to remove the aulos from the keleustēs. He snatches it, leaving the frogs tuneless. Without music, their utterance has far less power, but they attempt to assert their rhythm by chanting unmusically. Dionysus is able to defeat the frogs (who clearly represent aulos-players because of the way their cheeks inflate) by chanting over them at his own slower pace until they are silenced.

This translation renders the Greek text in verse, abridged and re-cast in a manner that works for performance in English.

FROGS singing at a fast pace

♫   Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax,             

brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax!      

We children of the fountain and the lake,

let our full-throated chorus come awake!

Hear the aulos blaring out

to the loud and piercing shout

of the song we used to love,

in the marshland up above.

Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax,             

brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax!     ♫

DIONYSUS speaking at a slower pace

Oh dear, oh dear, I do declare

your beat’s too fast for me to bear.

Shut up with your infernal hum,

I’m getting blisters on my bum.

You rowdy disrespectful lot,

it seems that you don’t care a jot!

FROGS singing to a fast beat

♫   Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax,             

      brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax!   ♫

  

DIONYSUS speaking at slow pace

Damn you, and your ko-axing too,

it’s nothing but ko-ax with you.

My hands are chafed and blistered sore;

my cheeks below are bursting more,

and something’s coming through the cracks —

FROGS

♫   Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax,             

     brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax!       ♫

 

DIONYSUS

O tuneful frogs, don’t do this, don’t!

Please curb your song.

FROGS

♫ Tough luck, we won’t!

Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax,

brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax!    ♫

DIONYSUS – seizes the aulos from the frog-aulete

Look, now I’ve seized your song from you.

FROGS speaking fast

This action means the end of us!

Can’t we some compromise discuss?

DIONYSUS  in slower rhythm    

Far worse for me my day would go

if I exploded while I row!

Your music’s gone, your cupboard’s bare,

you croak away, for all I care.

FROGS croaking fast

Fine, we’ll croak and croak our hearts out,

all day long we’ll croak our hearts out!

DIONYSUS asserting his slower pace

That isn’t going to win the day,

for I will croak and croak away.

Bre-ke-ke-kex ko-ax ko-ax!

Bre-ke-ke-kex ko-ax ko-ax!

The frogs fall silent.

 

At last those pesky frogs are making tracks!

I had to put an end to their ko-ax.

A full elaboration of this explanation (with Greek text and musical and metrical suggestions) can be found in my chapter, ‘The Musical Frogs in Frogs’ (2020), in Ancient Greek Comedy eds. A. Fries and D. Kanellakis (De Gruyter), 187-198.

Kaineus always knew he was meant to be a girl.

Growing up amid the hills and vales of Thessaly in what is now northern Greece, he had been given a name – not Kaineus, which came later – reflecting the family trade. His father Elatos, whose name means ‘fir-tree’, was a woodworker, a member of the Lapith tribe. The child was strong and sinewy, and was surely destined to become a fine woodworker and a good fighter. But he didn’t feel like a boy. Dressed in traditional long, soft, tunics by his doting, horse-loving, mother Hippeia, and happily tinging his lips with the juice of red berries, he waited for the day to come to renounce his maleness. At the age of six he went to his mother and told her that he was a girl.

Hippeia did not disagree. The child’s features and slim figure were undoubtedly feminine. She went to Elatos and said “We have a daughter. By the will of the gods, she has always been a girl”. They changed the child’s name to Kainis, a name that means ‘born anew’. Henceforth Kainis would grow up as a young woman, the apple of her parents’ eyes.

When Kainis was sixteen, a rough sailor called Poseidonios who had arrived at the port of Iolkos spied her walking alone by the seashore. Aroused by the girl’s lithe figure, he ran and seized her from behind. As she shouted and struggled, Poseidonios carried her into a clearing surrounded by trees and raped her, discovering to his pleasure and to her horror that she was both girl and boy.

The assault had a terrible impact on Kainis. Returning home, she told her parents that she would reclaim her masculine status. Henceforth Kaineus, would prepare himself to be a warrior, never again to be taken advantage of by any man. Kaineus trained himself in the art of fighting, intent on wreaking personal vengeance on those who sought to attack the Lapiths. His strength was unyielding, and his warrior skills came to the notice of the king of Iolkos, Jason, who persuaded him to join the expedition on the ship Argo to the Black Sea.

In the course of his travels, Kaineus discovered the new and deadly kinds of weaponry used by the inland tribes of the Asian hinterland: swords and spears made of iron. Returning to Thessaly, Kaineus was summoned to southern Greece, where a ferocious boar had been ravaging settlements near the town of Kalydon in Aitolia. Along with other fierce companions, they hunted down and killed the boar. Though many members of the heroic band involved lost their lives, the iron spearpoint of Kaineus inflicted a fatal blow on the dangerous beast.

Kaineus and his fellow-Lapiths had reason to be concerned about enemies closer to home. A fierce tribe in the area, the Kentauroi, were known for fighting on horseback with wooden clubs and stakes. They had tamed the wild horses that inhabited the plains of Thessaly, and used the creatures to shattering effect in battle. So unusual at the time was the sight of men on horseback that later generations would think of the Kentauroi as creatures who were half-men and half-horse: Centaurs. The hostility between the Lapiths and Kentauroi came to a head at a wedding party, at which increasingly drunken Kentauroi started to make aggressive advances on Lapith women. A brawl turned into a battle, with both sides sending for reinforcements.

The horsemen of the Kentauroi thunder across the plain to do battle with Lapith warriors, the most effective of whom is Kaineus. Some of the Kentauroi recognise the warrior who was once a girl, and taunt him for it. But their fate is sealed. The wooden stakes of the Kentauroi cannot match the iron weapons with which the Lapiths are armed. As the staunchest warriors and their horses fall to the Lapith spears, a group of Kentauroi surround Kaineus. They bludgeon him to the ground, and try to smash his iron weapon to pieces with their clubs. Finding it impossible to do so, they hammer the offending iron spear, like a nail, into the earth.

Kaineus does not die. Buried in the ground, he remains alive. A boy that has been a girl, a woman that has become a man, she remains ready to fight for eternity: to fight for his name, for her honour, for their intertwined identity.

Kaineus is rising.

Judgment and Misjudgment in Ancient Greece

Paper delivered to the New Imago Forum, 15 September 2019

There’s a joke about a rabbi who was greatly respected for his judgment. Two neighbours had a dispute and came to him to adjudicate. The rabbi hears the first man present his case, nods gravely, and says, “You’re right.” The man beams with satisfaction. The other neighbour then explains his view of the situation. The rabbi hears him out, nods gravely again, and says, “You’re right.” It’s the second man’s turn to be pleased. The two neighbours leave together on good terms, but the rabbi’s attendant who has been standing by says “Rabbi, surely they can’t both be right?” The rabbi looks at him, nods gravely, and says “You’re right.”

As the joke illustrates, being judicious may not always involve making a judgment. But when should one judge? In the earliest great story of European literature, Homer’s Iliad, questions of judgment play a central part. Agamemnon, leader of the Greek expeditionary force camped on the shores of Troy, initiates a series of catastrophic misjudgments by angering his best fighter, Achilles. In proudly demanding his right to Achilles’ war-booty, the girl Briseis, he leads Achilles to withdraw from the fighting. The result is a terrible slaughter of the Greek army by the triumphant Trojans. This consequence of his action eventually leads Agamemnon to see the error of his ways. ‘The gods stole my wits on that day,’ he laments, ‘and my judgment was clouded’. The Greeks did not suppose that blaming the gods or fate was a cop-out or denial of personal responsibility, but simply a recognition that human beings are not always in command of their responses – or even of their own character. The latter is a key determinant in our judgments. As the philosopher Heraclitus stated ‘A human being’s character is their destiny’. The word for ‘destiny’ here is daimōn, which also means ‘divine guide’ – the unaccountable element that determines a human being’s fate and fortune.

In Agamemnon’s case, he’s destined to be a poor judge of character and of situations. Rather than going himself to apologise to Achilles and to try to appease his anger, he sends a delegation led by Odysseus to ask Achilles to return to the battlefield. But although he’s prepared to offer ample compensation, Agamemnon still insists that Achilles should recognise his superiority. When the wily Odysseus presents the offer to Achilles, he shrewdly omits Agamemnon’s claim to superiority, but Achilles is not fooled. He glowers at Odysseus and memorably retorts ‘I hate that man like the gates of Hell who says one thing with his mouth and hides another in his heart’. Clearly Achilles is a better judge of character than Agamemnon. At the end of the Trojan war, Agamemnon returns victorious to Argos, where his wife Clytemnestra has been plotting with her lover in his absence to kill him on his return. Clytemnestra greets him with false and flattering words of celebration, which he swallows wholesale. This time his misjudgment proves fatal. Too self-regarding to see that Clytemnestra harbours unrelenting hatred towards him, he allows her to lead him over a path of precious tapestries into the palace, where she stabs him to death in his bath.

As the tragedian Aeschylus was to show with unparalleled dramatic brilliance, the killing of Agamemnon is just the culmination of a series of actions stemming from a much earlier judgment that faced the king. Ten years earlier, the Greek forces under his command had assembled at the coastal city of Aulis to cross the Aegean for their expedition to Troy. But the goddess Artemis, who had taken offence at an earlier manifestation of Agamemnon’s arrogance – his ill-judged claim to be a better hunter than she – had becalmed the winds so that the fleet could not set sail. The seer Calchas prophesied that for Artemis to be appeased so that the fleet could sail Agamemnon must sacrifice Iphigenia, his eldest daughter by Clytemnestra. Did Agamemnon really have a choice? Could he have exercised his judgment to save his daughter and abandon the Trojan expedition? For the Greeks the answer was no, since not only was the fall of Troy destined by fate, but in Aeschylus’s depiction it would have been completely out of character for the king to choose to lose face in front of his heroic allies rather over sacrificing his daughter and ensuring his glorious conquest of Troy. But the choice to kill Iphigenia was what led inexorably to Clytemnestra’s plan to wreak her deadly vengeance upon Agamemnon on his return.

The trail of judgments and misjudgments goes back yet further. The reason that the Greeks had assembled their forces under Agamemnon’s control was to avenge the theft of Helen, wife of Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus, who had been seduced by the Trojan prince Paris and whisked away with him to Troy. The complicity or otherwise of Helen was the source of intense debate among the Greeks. Did it make sense that they had waged all-out war on Troy for her sake? The historian Herodotus reported that the Persians with whom he discussed the matter were dismissive. If the abduction of Helen was the reason for the expedition, they said, the Greeks were sorely lacking in judgment; making off with a women was the act of a scoundrel, but going to war over her would be the act of a fool. In any case, they ungallantly added, no woman could be abducted unless she consented to it; so the judicious course of action would have been to do nothing about it.

On this view the rape of Helen was at least as much her fault as Paris’s. But the fifth-century Sicilian orator Gorgias turned the tables by proposing that Helen should not be blamed at all. In his showpiece speech In Praise of Helen, he argued that she had either been abducted by physical force, or she had been overcome by some other irresistible power such as that of Eros (Love) or of Peitho (persuasion). Gorgias thus argued to exonerate Helen, but of course it was at the cost of denying any kind of judgment or agency to the woman herself, who ends up being depicted solely as a victim of quasi-divine external forces.

Gorgias’ arguments for Helen’s innocence may appear somewhat contrived, but we should remember that the mythical origins of Helen’s abduction lie yet further back in the most famous judgment of all: the Judgment of Paris. The story of the Trojan War stems from that moment when the three goddesses, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, present themselves to the Trojan prince for judgment. Paris had been chosen by Zeus to decide who was the most beautiful of the three on account of his fair adjudication of a previous dispute. Somewhat surprisingly, however, the myth relates that Paris did not judge the goddesses on their looks, but on the inducements that each had to offer. Hera, queen of the gods, offered him kingly power over Europe and Asia; Athena, goddess of craft and battle, offered him wisdom and skill in war; while Aphrodite, goddess of Love, offered him the pleasure of sex with the world’s most beautiful woman, Spartan Helen. How else could a young man choose? The Greeks, and even the beleaguered Trojans, could hardly blame Paris for judging Aphrodite the winner so that he might enjoy the opportunity of sleeping with Helen. Once again, though, as in Agamemnon’s case, Paris’s choice was seen to depend on his character. In the Iliad Paris is depicted as a vain and self-serving prince, who is prone to put the inducements of sex and physical pleasure before his duty to his city and his comrades.

But if judgment depends on character, how does one acquire one’s character? The Greeks understood inheritance as well as experience played a part, but since one can’t choose one’s ancestors, being born with a foolish or a judicious character is ultimately a matter of luck. This is consistent with Heraclitus’s dictum quoted earlier, that character is an individual’s daimōn or tutelary divinity. Aristotle was later to observe that while character is a natural, inborn disposition, there are ways of educating and improving it, techniques of acquiring practical wisdom through, for instance, study, experience, and the acquisition of knowledge so as to become, in the modern jargon, the ‘best version of oneself’. For the philosopher the question of how to be eudaimōn – a word commonly translated ‘happy’ but literally connoting ‘endowed with a good daimōn’ – was the central question of ethics, and the subject of his most famous book of that title. In fact eudaimonia is better translated ‘wellbeing’ than ‘happiness’, since it describes a state of human flourishing rather than just a state of mind.

In his Ethics Aristotle proposes that the path to eudaimonia is to acquire excellence by acting according to the Golden Mean, the point of moderation between extremes of feeling and behaviour. Courage, for example, is the mean between cowardice and recklessness; generosity is the mean between stinginess and profligacy; friendliness is the mean between obsequiousness and ill-temperedness. In articulating this model for attaining virtue and thence eudaimonia, Aristotle was elaborating a version of the age-old Greek maxim ‘Nothing in excess’. But though the idea of acting and living moderately makes intuitive sense, the doctrine of the Golden Mean falls far short of offering guidance about what is to count as virtuous conduct in practice. In fact, as a guide to making assured judgments about one’s own or other people’s behaviour, it is effectively worthless.

Aristotle himself was clearly aware of the inadequacy of the doctrine, because his treatise on Ethics ends by recommending not the pursuit of the Golden Mean but (rather strangely to our minds) the contemplation of pure mathematical truths. This conclusion reflects an intellectualist tendency that is deep-rooted in Greek thought; but it’s obvious to us that happiness – no less than judgment – is not solely a function of knowledge. However, perhaps the most obvious Greek equivalent to ‘judgment’ (though there are other close synonyms, such as euboulia) is sophia, which means wisdom derived from skill or experience. It was this kind of wisdom that was attributed to the so-called Seven Sages, among whom numbered the natural scientist Thales and the statesman Solon of Athens. It was ultimately impossible for the Greeks to divorce the notion of judgment from that of knowledge, though they had ample understanding that clever people did not always show good judgment. In the case of Thales, whose reputed brilliance made his name equivalent to that of Einstein, he was said to have fallen down a well while studying the stars. He was an early instance of the scientific boffin who knows a lot but is prone to practical mishaps thanks to his single-minded search for knowledge.

Though wisdom was valued, in the religious context of ancient Greece, good judgment tended to be attributed to those who showed a pious recognition of their place in the cosmos, particularly in relation to the power of the gods. This pious outlook is reflected in the other famous Greek maxim, ‘Know thyself’, which was inscribed along with ‘Nothing in Excess’ on Apollo’s temple at Delphi. Greek poetry and tragedy is replete with advice to characters to recognise their limitations, and not to overstep the mark and offend the higher powers. When Hippolytus, for instance, in Euripides’ tragedy of that name, fails to honour the goddess Aphrodite (i.e. among other things, insists on celibacy), his attendant fearfully cautions him – ultimately to no avail –‘you should do as other mortals do’. In Euripides’ Bacchae, when the king Pentheus scornfully dismisses the claims to divinity of the stranger Dionysus whose worshippers have arrived at Thebes, the chorus warns that ‘cleverness is not good judgment, nor is having thoughts in excess of one’s mortal nature’. In the greatest drama of all, Oedipus Tyrannus, the king who is famed for his cleverness as the solver of the Sphinx’s riddle fails signally in judgment, first by supposing he can outwit the oracle that has predicted his fate, then by succumbing to the road rage that leads to his unknowingly killing his own father, and eventually by violently browbeating Creon and the seer Tiresias when they try to confirm to him the truth about his fate as enunciated by the god of Delphi.

But these examples all pose a crucial problem, which is the central issue I would like to consider in this paper. Since the tragic fates of Hippolytus, Pentheus, and Oedipus are inevitable, it surely makes no difference whether any of them were in fact individuals of great judgment or of none. After all, their fate is ultimately sealed not by their judgment, but by their luck – or lack of it. The sobering truth was already recognised and articulated by the 7th century BC wisdom poet Theognis, when he wrote [161-4] ‘Many people have poor judgment and good luck [literally, a good daimōn], and in their case things look unfavourable but turn out well. Others suffer the burden of having good judgment but bad luck, and their end (telos) does not correspond to their actions’. Theognis here draws a clear distinction in principle that allows the quality of good judgment to be attributed to people, even if in the final event they happen to come unstuck. But in practice such figures are curiously hard to identify, because people are most commonly judged on the outcome of their actions. How easily can one attribute good judgment to an investor or businessman who loses money? To a general who initiates and loses a battle? To a politician who proposes a policy and fails to achieve its fulfilment? Retrospect is a harsh judge, and it mainly judges on outcomes. The saying goes that success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan; and success is all too often taken to be the sole guarantee of someone’s possession of judgment.

Winston Churchill, for instance, was a notoriously fallible politician for much of his career. Many still doubted his political judgment when finally at the age of 65 he led Britain in his implacable opposition to Nazism, rather than seeking to appease Hitler as Neville Chamberlain had proposed. Imagine in what light Churchill’s judgment in that regard would have been viewed had Britain been defeated, and how judicious Chamberlain’s attempt to do an early deal with Hitler would in retrospect have seemed. The Greek historian Thucydides does occasionally suggest that politicians who possess judgment might not succeed and vice versa. He attributes sound judgment to Athens’ leader Pericles, for instance, even though the latter initiated the disastrous Peloponnesian War. And he clearly thought the playboy-politician Alcibiades had no judgment beyond his zeal for self-advancement, even though the latter succeeded not only in persuading Athenians to attempt a calamitous invasion of Sicily, but in being treated as a hero even though he had signally contributed to Athens’ downfall.

One of those credited by the ancient Greeks as having the soundest judgment of all was the 6th-century statesman I’ve mentioned, Solon of Athens. Solon was said to have enhanced his wisdom by travelling the world and observing people of different kinds and status; a verse of his survives that runs ‘As I age I’m constantly learning a multitude of things’. His most famous advice is reported by the historian Herodotus as the statement ‘Look to the end (the telos)’. This had a particularly poignant significance in the story of Croesus, king of Lydia. Croesus was the wealthiest and, in his own view, the most fortunate man of his time when Solon visited him in his gold-rich capital, Sardis. Croesus was furious with the Athenian for warning him that, as with Oedipus at the height of his fortune, he could not be judged fortunate until his life was complete. However, following Solon’s visit, Croesus proceeded to judge mistakenly that he would succeed in conquering the Persians under Cyrus the Great. Once again it was the Delphic oracle, mouthpiece of the god Apollo, that knew and predicted what the outcome of war with Persia would be. Croesus, however, mistakenly heard the oracle’s ambiguous words – ‘If you make war on Cyrus, a great empire will fall’ – as affirming his own wishful judgment, taking the words to refer not to the downfall of his own empire but to that of Cyrus. Eventually captured by Cyrus and placed on the funeral pyre to be burned, he called out the name of Solon in anguish, berating his own folly for not crediting the wisdom of his erstwhile guest.

For the Greeks, then, judgment was more closely related to luck than we are inclined to suppose, largely because it depended on outcomes which could not be predicted accurately. Secondly, it was seen as the expression of individual character, the possession of which was also to a large extent a matter of luck. But this leaves some vexing questions: is it right, for instance, that a person whose life is marked by positive actions and outcomes should be considered devoid of judgment simply because their life is overturned by a spectacularly unlucky incident towards its close? Surely there are grounds other than the final outcome for judging whether someone has sound judgment or not? If we judge actions only by their consequences and not by the reasons and considerations that lead to their being taken, we would surely have a very impoverished view of judgment. How, then, is one to judge whether others, our political leaders for instance, have good judgment?

One possible approach to squaring the circle – that is, of harmonising the notions of luck and judgment – is suggested by Plato, when he makes Socrates say in Republic Book 10 (604cd) “The way to think about life is how we act with the fall of dice. We must arrange our affairs with reference to how the dice have fallen, intelligently considering the best course of action, and not stumbling around like children, shocked at the outcome and crying over spilt milk. We should prepare our mind for what has happened as quickly as possible so as to redress any failures and disappointments”. This suggests that while good judgment does depend on a host of anterior factors – we might list the experience of dealing with people and events, the educated assessment of a situation, the rational understanding of consequences, and so on – it also somehow needs to be tailored to outcomes, which may be simply a matter of luck, like the fall of the dice. True judgment, like good leadership, requires a constant flexibility of thought and action.

I will end by illustrating the point using a couple of my favourite jokes, since as always there is truth in humour. The judicious rabbi’s attendant would often marvel that his employer had a stock of wonderful stories, and that he always seemed to find the perfect parable for any particular situation. ‘How is it possible, rabbi’, he asked one day ‘that you can find a story to fit every scenario you’re presented with?’ ‘Well,’ said the rabbi, ‘I’ll answer with a story. When he was travelling in Mongolia, Marco Polo came across a village whose residents had supernatural skill at archery. Polo tried to fire an arrow at a bullseye marked on a rock face hundreds of yards away, but try as he might he could barely succeed in touching the outer circle. Yet the rock face was covered with targets, and in every case the villagers’ arrows had landed in the very centre. He approached the village chief, and offered him a sack of gold to divulge the secret of the villagers’ skill. The chieftain took the gold and said: ‘You see, the way we practise archery is different from yours. You create a target and try to reach it. We fire our arrows at random, and wherever they land we draw the target around them so that the arrow sits in the centre’. So it is with my stories, said the rabbi. When I’m presented with a case, I don’t look for the perfect parable to explain it; I simply create stories to fit the case at hand’.

In one such story, Joe goes to his tailor to pick up an expensive new suit for his imminent wedding. To his alarm it barely fits. He tries on the jacket and says ‘it’s too tight’. ‘No, it’s fine,’ urges the tailor ‘you just need to hold your tummy in a bit’. ‘But the sleeves are too long’ Joe says, ‘they cover my hands’. ‘Just push your arms forward a bit’, advises the tailor ‘so your hands are free of the sleeves’. ‘The trouser-legs are different lengths’, Joe exclaims. ‘So bend your right leg slightly’. Joe does as he’s told and leaves. A friend heading to the wedding sees Joe staggering along the street, apparently breathing with difficulty, his shoulders hunched over and his leg askew. He films him on his phone and sends the video to a mutual friend, texting ‘WTF is the matter with Joe?’ The friend watches the clip and texts back ‘Looks like he’s had a stroke. But hey, he’s got a great tailor, that new suit fits him like a glove’.

Paper delivered at the New Imago Forum Conference on ‘Money’, September 2015

The uselessness of money and the perversity of unlimit            

A fable of Aesop tells of a man who hid his gold at the foot of a tree in his garden. Every few days he used to go and dig it up and revel in it. A workman who noticed his behaviour dug up the hole and made off with the gold. The next time the miser came to gloat over his treasure, he found nothing but an empty hole. He wept and wailed so loudly that the neighbours hurried around to find out what had happened. He told them how he used to come and visit his store of gold, but now it was all gone.  One of them asked: ‘Did you ever take out any of the gold and spend it?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘I just came to look at it.’ ‘In that case,’ said the neighbour, ‘why don’t you just put a stone in the hole, and come and look at it from time to time? That will do you just as much good.’

Fables that questioned the purpose of money or suggested that there was some perversity in wanting to possess it were common in ancient Greece. To some scholars they have a special edge, because in the period in which they were formulated money was arguably still a relatively recent arrival in the Greek world. While the notion of relative wealth will have been around much earlier, the features of money as we know it – a medium that is both abstract and concrete, serves as a homogenous and universal vehicle of exchange, acts as both a symbolic and material store of value, and seems to be limitless commodity – was, it has been argued, invented by the Greeks in the 6th century BC.

Some years ago I spent a day in the ruins of the ancient city of Gordium, a couple of hour’s drive from Ankara in Turkey. At one period in the first millennium BC it was believed to be one of the wealthiest cities in the world. The city where Alexander the Great was later to cut the ‘Gordian knot’ as he proceeded through Asia is today a parched plain covered by gigantic tumuli, artificial mounds of earth beneath which are concealed the burial chambers of ancient kings. Gordium was the capital of Phrygia in the 9th and 8th centuries BC until it was overrun and destroyed by nomadic warriors, the Cimmerians. It was named after Gordias, father of the city’s last king, the quasi-legendary Midas. When the tombs were excavated in the 1960s, the largest one, the ‘Midas mound’, was found to contain huge quantities of magnificent objects – pottery and bronze drinking vessels, inlaid wood­en furniture, and mountains of silver and gold jewellery.

The ancient Greeks preserved a folk memory of the kingdom of Midas as a land of unlimited gold. The stories they tell about it suggest that they thought its fabulous wealth was both a blessing and a curse – a reward from the heavens, and the cause of Gordium’s eventual destruction. The Roman poet Ovid (Metamorphoses 11.85-145) retells the Midas story as follows. One day the god Dionysus realised that his foster-father, the satyr Silenus, had gone missing. Silenus had got drunk and lost his way, and as he wandered aimlessly he encountered some Phryg­ian peasants who led him to their king. Midas took in Silenus and entertained him hospitably for ten days and nights before sending him home to Dionysus in neighbouring Lydia. In gratitude, the god offered the king the choice of whatever he wished as a reward. Midas greedily asked that whatever he touched should turn to gold. His wish was granted, but – like most ancient Greek myths involving such interactions between gods and mortals – it was a double-edged benefaction. Midas touched a twig and a stone, and seeing both turn to gold he gleefully commanded a feast of celebration. Then he watched in horror as all the food and drink and everything else he touched turned to solid gold. Realising his folly, he begged the god to deliver him from starvation, and his people from a terrible blight. Dionysus instructed him to wash in the river to reverse the malignant power, and when Midas touched the water he lost his power but the river sands themselves turned into gold.

The Midas story, like many Greek myths, is entwined with the Greeks’ historical experience. Thanks to its alluvial deposits, the river Pactolus which flows through Phrygia and Lydia was, the Greeks knew, genuinely rich in gold. The historian Herodotus reports that the Lydians, another famously wealthy people whose capital Sardis bestrode the river Pactolus, were the first to invent coinage, and that the Greeks adopted the practice from them; and modern archaeology confirms that the earliest coins, composed of a natural mixture of gold and silver called electrum, come from Lydia. Lydia’s last and greatest king, Croesus in the 6th century BC, was proverbially wealthy: we still use the phrase ‘as rich as Croesus’. But as was the case with Midas, the vast wealth of Croesus prefigured his tragic downfall. His resources gave him the misplaced confidence to think that he could take on the power of the Persian king Cyrus. Falsely bouyed up by the words of the Delphic Oracle, which had assured him with fateful and characteristic ambiguity that if he fought the Persians he would ‘destroy a mighty empire’, Croesus launched a disastrous campaign. In 547 BC Lydia fell to the conquering Persians, and a ‘mighty empire’ was indeed extinguished, that of Croesus himself.

The unbridled wealth combined with the perceived luxury and extravagance of their Eastern neighbours both impressed and appalled the superstitious Greeks. The fates of both Midas and Croesus proved one of the Greeks’ own golden rules, as inscribed on Apollo’s temple at Delphi: Nothing in Excess. These kings’ excessive riches seemed to be a warning message, and their downfall was a cautionary tale: you can have too much of a good thing, which inevitably courts the envy of heaven – even if, confusingly, wealth must be a gift from the gods in the first place. But the Greeks felt that excess was not only unwise for human beings, it was unnatural. The rule ‘Nothing in excess’ is coupled with ‘Know yourself’, which advises human beings to learn that we are inherently ephemeral creat­ures, who cannot and should not aim to exceed our mortal natures. Associating with the limitless is likely to involve transgression, since what has no limit can only really be appropriate for those whose own existence is limitless – the immortals themselves.

The Midas story cautions that money in its material form, however desirable or attractive, is alien to human nature: we cannot eat or drink it, or even build shelter from it or clothe ourselves in it. Of course we can use money to acquire such goods and services, but there’s a danger of confusing the potential use of money with the thing itself. The exuberant actor Peter Ustinov, who could imitate a huge range of accents, used to tell a joke that makes fun of this confusion. During a military parade in a South American banana republic, the President and his top General are processing solemnly at the head of their military forces, when suddenly the General bends down to pick up a coin from the ground. ‘What are you doing?’ asks the scandalised President, ‘how can you stoop, during a national parade, to pick up a small coin?’ ‘But Presidente, it’s not just any small coin, it’s an American dime! With this American dime you can do many things’. ‘What kind of things?’ ‘Such as, you can make a telephone call’. As they march on stiffly, the President reaches out to take the coin and raises it to his ear. ‘Dígame?’

The Midas myth, however, is less about the uselessness of gold as inert matter as of the danger of desiring it in excess. Significantly it begins, as Ovid tells it, with a different kind of excess, that of the satyr Silenus indulging in excessive behaviour that’s very human but purely temporary – drinking too much and losing his wits. By contrast, what Midas asks for is potentially limitless wealth, which is surely an indicator that his folly is all the greater as he’s letting himself in for a perversion of natural human boundaries. From a psychological point of view, then, might it be that the particular quality of limitlessness that’s argued to characterise money is what leads to the desire for money being felt almost uniquely perverse?

It’s hard to imagine anyone seriously desiring, after all, endless amounts of food or drink. The bizarre notion of endless gluttony is raised in another ancient myth, that of Erysichthon, as again told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. Erysichthon king of Thessaly, unlike Midas and Croesus, is not an admirable character, but a picture of autocratic excess. He sacrilegiously orders the trees in the grove of Demeter to be cut down to build his palace, thereby dishonouring the goddess, and his punishment is to be subjected to insatiable hunger. The more he eats, the hungrier he gets. He sells all his possessions to buy food, and even sells his own daughter into slavery. But no amount of food is enough for him: in the end Erysichthon resorts to eating his own body bit by bit, and thus dies a gruesome death.

The logical conclusion of the desire to devour without limit is self-devouring annihilation. It sounds like an uncom­fortable paradigm for the ecological rapacity of the modern world. But myths of insatiable gluttony don’t resonate in our everyday experience as portraying a literal possibility in the way that myths of limitless wealth do. The deleterious consequences of excessive eating or drinking are evident to us, while the astronomical and growing wealth of Gateses, Buffetts and Zuckerbergs and so on are a matter of envious daily report. Endless drink seems pointless, and we’re more likely to find it a source of humour. There’s an old joke about a farmer who catches a leprechaun and is offered the proverbial three wishes to release him. The farmer says ‘I wish to have…a pint of Guinness!’. The drink magically appears and he drinks it, and the leprechaun asks: ‘What is your second wish?’ The farmer says: ‘I wish to have…another pint!’ The leprechaun says angrily ‘Look, you’re wasting your wishes. If you were smart you’d wish for a magic cup that endlessly fills up with Guinness as soon as it’s empty.’ ‘I wish for that, then,’ says the farmer in delight, and the cup magically appears. He downs a draught and the cup fills up immediately. He gulps it down and then says with a cunning look, ‘I’ll have my third wish now’. ‘What is your wish?’ asks the leprechaun. ‘I’ll have another magic cup just like this!’

Limitlessness seems to be something that we can seriously think about – perhaps can’t avoid thinking about – in relation to money, not least because money is applied to a endless range of purposes and can sate a countless host of desires, real or imagined, beyond eating, drinking and so on. The classicist Richard Seaford, who has written a brilliant book on ancient Greek money (adopting a broadly Marxist perspective), argues that limitlessness is an inherent and characteristic feature of money: the nature of money allows and encourages accumulation without limit. Seaford suggests that the emergence of the first truly monetised economy in ancient Greece in the sixth century BC is precisely what led to the abstract philosophical conceptions that appear in early Greek philosophy, of which Unlimit is a notable example. One of the most striking contemporary physical theories of the cosmos, that of Anaximander of Miletus (an important ancient commercial centre), does indeed posit an abstraction called ‘the Limitless’ as the first principle of creation. Equally striking is the use of this notion by another 6th century BC philosopher, Pythagoras of Samos, to whom is attributed a list of oppositions, envisaged as two parallel columns, at the head of which stand the terms Limit and Unlimit. The list continues in a way that makes clear that one side of the opposition is perceived as positive and the other as negative. Thus we have in respective columns the notions of Light and Dark, Straight and Crooked, Wet and Dry, and (I’m sorry to say) Male and Female, along with various other oppositions that are evidently to be considered good and bad respectively.

Because the Pythagoreans believed that everything in the cosmos was an expression of number, Limit is good because it allows numbers to exist in a definite form i.e as whole numbers. By contrast, Unlimit is to be considered a dangerous and unstable notion. A story tells of the expulsion from the Pythagorean sect of a disciple who stumbled on the scandalous truth that the square root of 2 must be an irrational (i.e. unlimited) number. He was cursed into exile, and sailing away from southern Italy where the sect was based, he drowned when his ship capsized in the sea – the source of endless water – thereby proving that it’s fatal for mortals to tangle with anything that has no limits or boundaries.

Despite the discomfort experienced by the Pythagoreans at the fact that numbers (or anything else) might not conform to Limit, they must have been aware that the number series is endless. While there’s no evidence that they formulated any thoughts about infinity apart from warning about its undesirability, the widespread adoption in Greece of coined money in the 6th century would have reinforced the idea of endlessness by making concretely clear that however much money one accumulates, it’s always possible to accumulate a bit more. This notion is given exuberant expression in a comic play of Aristophanes entitled Wealth (lines 182-197). At the beginning of the play, Wealth, personified as a god, comes on stage presented as a blind beggar. Wealth must be blind, of course, because he visits people who clearly don’t deserve to be visited by wealth. The play’s other main characters, a master and a slave, harangue Wealth for the fact that human beings can recognise when they have a surfeit of anything – except money. They start listing things in alternation: ‘One can have too much of all sorts of things’ they say – loaves, says the slave, wistfully – music, says the master – snacks, says the slave – honour, says the master (the different nature of their priorities is clear) – cakes – manliness – figs – ambition – crusty bread – generalship – pea soup…’Yes, all of these’, says the master, ‘we can have too much of. But of wealth no one ever has a glut. If you have ten thousand drachmas you want fifteen thousand, if you have fifteen you covet fifty thousand, then if you can’t be a millionaire you might as well be dead!’ In the words of the rapacious character played by Demi Moore in the 1994 movie Disclosure, ‘Give a man a hundred million dollars, and you create a frustrated billionaire’.

But thinking of the list in Aristophanes’ comedy, might not, in fact, honours, adulation, ambition and so on offer just as much scope for unlimited desire as money? We can imagine people having an insatiable desire for things that may be limited or potentially unlimited, such as fame, sex, drugs, buying books, listening to loud rap music, gambling, computer games, pornography… or even just knowledge. The late Henry Chadwick, a brilliant Cambridge historian, musician and all-round polymath, in an interview I read many years ago, admitted to rising at 4 a.m. every day in order to spend three hours reading and studying before breakfast. He was quoted as saying ‘The pain of not knowing is, for me, greater than the pain of knowing’. On similar lines, insatiable ambition for conquest is well exemplified in the ancient world by Alexander the Great. When Alexander’s friend the philosopher Anaxarchus expounded to him his theory that there are an infinite number of worlds, he allegedly burst into tears because it struck him that he would never live long enough to conquer them all.

After Alexander’s death a series of tales grew up about him, collectively known as the Alexander Romance, many of which offer moralising lessons that contrast his enormous conquests with his mere mortality. In one episode Alexander is in India, where he visits the Brahmins to learn their wisdom. An Indian sage tells him:

“You surround yourself with many possessions and take pride in them, but gold doesn’t sustain the soul or feed the body! We Brahmans are observant about what nature provides: when we’re hungry we feast on fresh plants and vegetables, when thirsty, we drink water from the river. Gold doesn’t quench thirst or allay hunger, heal wounds or cure disease. Not only does it not satiate greed, but it aggravates that desire which is alien to nature. When a man drinks water his thirst is over, and when he’s hungry and has eaten he’s satisfied and no longer desires food. Every human desire ceases when it’s satisfied because this is inherent in nature, but the desire for wealth knows no satiety because it’s against nature.”

The specific critique of the desire for gold and money shifts to a diatribe against desire in general, a position well known from the philosophy of Epicurus, which was formulated around the time of Alexander’s death. The Brahmin goes on to say:

“Desire is the mother of penury. It’s miserable because it never finds what it seeks, is never content with what it has, but is tortured with lust for what it does not have.”

This suggests that we might modify the view that the desire for money is perverse or pathological because it’s specifically related to that object’s limitlessness: insatiable desire for any object seems bound to be equally perverse.

So what do we mean by ‘perverse’? In psychoanalytic theory there’s no consistent formulation of perversity, but its application is essentially sexual. Freud designated the infant’s unfocussed libidinal drives as ‘polymorphously perverse’, visualising normal development as leading to adult sexual behaviour that fell within socially accepted norms. Fetishistic behaviour constitutes a deviation from such norms. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) Freud equates perversion with sexual activity which, in his words, ‘extends in an anatomical sense beyond the regions of the body designed for sexual union’. However, he adds ‘it seems that no healthy person can fail to make some addition, which might be called perverse, to the normal sexual aim. The universality of this finding is enough to show how inappropriate it is to use the word ‘perversion’ as a term of reproach.’

In broader terms, psychoanalytic thinking tends to view lack of structure as akin to mental disorder. The very word ‘disorder’ obviously connotes an absence of or transgression of a normative ‘order’ of some kind. Lack of structure and lack of limit are closely connected if not co-extensive, and both are characteristic of the Freudian ‘id’. In the id, Freud writes ‘contrary impulses exist side by side…we use analogies and call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations. It has no organization, only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of instinctual needs, subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.’ [New Introductory Lectures, 1933]. In the Future of an Illusion (1927), he speaks of boundlessness in similar terms when he refers to the ‘oceanic’ feeling, which designates the sense of unboundedness that makes individuals feel a connection to or oneness with the external world, as regularly found in descriptions of religious devotion or ecstasy. Freud suggests that such a feeling recapitulates the primitive experience that precedes the creation of the ego, the time when the infant is subject to the unstructured passions of the id and doesn’t recognise its separateness from the breast, i.e. before it learns that there are other persons in the world. While Freud doesn’t explicitly say that the oceanic feeling is a perverse form of thinking in adults, his alignment of it with the id, the driving force of the pleasure principle, does imply that it’s a regressive form of mental functioning. Each step the infant taken towards establishing limits and boundaries is a painful loss of what Freud calls the ‘megalomania’ of infancy. To succumb to the id as an adult is to privilege the pleasure principle over the reality principle and indulge in the fantasy of omnipotence. The psychic mechanisms that lead to ‘oceanic feelings’, or other kinds of what Klein would call ‘paranoid-schizoid’ fantasies, are flights from reality. In the real world nothing is wholly black and white, good or bad, or evil or virtuous in the way the Pythagorean table of opposites bids to understand the world.

The psychoanalytic approach usefully generalises, in my view, the question of whether limitlessness is indeed a feature of money per se or just of the desire for money. An object of desire need not have the property of limitlessness in the way Seaford and others suggest in the case of money; as I’ve indicated, all sorts of things might be perceived as inexhaustible or endlessly desirable. I’m reminded that the earliest use of the epithet ‘unquenchable’ in Western literature is Homer’s application of the word to laughter – asbestos in Greek. It helps, however, if the thing for which one has inexhaustible desire either looks as if it may be inexhaustible itself, or is something onto which we can project a quality of limitlessness which is then reflected in our desire for it. Think of a magnificent buffet which seems to offer an inexhaustible supply of delicious food, thereby compelling hapless diners to lose our natural restraints and eat far more than we usually would and than can possibly be healthy for us. The sad fact is that we won’t enjoy it more just because there’s more of it to enjoy – usually the opposite is the case.

In the modern world, many more things are susceptible to such projections than might have been the case in the ancient world. Clicking onto Google to discover an endless archive of knowledge, pornography, music or anything else comes close to fulfilling a fantasy of omnipotence. Life itself is now being extended by medical interventions, and fantasies of achieving immortality seem increasingly prevalent. But since limitlessness is something over which one can ultimately have no control, it ends up controlling those who desire it. The depression that is now widely attested as a side-effect of over-use of the internet must partly be a reaction to the inevitable failure of the omnipotent fantasy held out by such ready access to the limitless.

Limitlessness is associated with the notion of living for ever, because how else could any individual fully embrace what is unlimited? But Greek myths make clear that immortality is for gods alone, and even those human beings who are granted it will suffer – again, the gods’ benefaction will always be double-edged. Tithonus, the story went, was a beautiful young man who kindled the desire of the goddess of Dawn. Dawn snatched him from the earth and made him immortal, but she omitted to make him ageless as well. So Tithonus grows older and older, continues to age for ever, having turned into a shrivelled cricket with its endless rasping chatter. Another cautionary would-be immortal was Tantalus, a Phrygian king like Midas, who wanted to eat and drink with the gods so that he too could become godlike. In his zeal he served them up a delicious stew consisting of his son (perhaps a folk memory of much earlier times when human sacrifice was practised). When they discovered the gruesome contents, the gods gave him immortality all right: he now suffers for eternity in the Underworld, tormented by hunger and thirst, standing in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches, with the fruit ‘tantalisingly’ beyond his grasp and the water always receding before he can drink it.

‘Only seek from the gods’, advises the poet Pindar ‘what is appropriate for mortals, and don’t crave immortality; rather, use to the full the resources of what is possible’ (3rd Pythian Ode, lines 61-2). In the end, I suggest that the desire for money in its apparent limitlessness is a ready projection of omnipotent fantasy, but only one of many potential projections of this kind. What is arguably regressive and perverse, as well as something to which we all succumb from time to time, is the insatiable desire that such a fantasy can breed. To end, I will tell a story set in India (in homage to Ardu Vakil, who has read us so many entertaining stories of India at these forums), which is often told in business fora and nicely sums up the perversity of endlessly chasing after material wealth.

An American businessman on holiday in a small village on the coast of Kerala watches as a little fishing boat dock at the shore and the fisherman disembarks with a sack of fish. ‘’You caught all those in just 20 minutes’, he says. ‘Yes, the sea is full of fish’, says the fisherman. ‘So why not stay longer and catch more?’ he asks. ‘I have no need, this is enough to feed me and my family’, says the fisherman. ‘So what do you do with the rest of your time?’. ‘I sleep late, spend time with my family, rest under the coconut trees, see my friends, have a drink, listen to music… I could live like this for ever.’ The businessman says, ‘But you’re missing out on a great opportunity. If you caught those extra fish you could sell them. Then you could buy a bigger boat, and catch a lot more fish. You could eventually build up a fishing fleet, and set up a fish supply company, and work out of fancy offices in Mumbai.’ The fisherman asks ‘But how long would all that take?’ ‘Maybe 20 years’, says the consultant. ‘But after that you could float your business on the Stock Market and make millions!’ ‘And then what?’ ‘Then you could put your millions in the bank, and move to a small village by the sea. You could sleep late, spend time with your family, rest under the coconut trees, see your friends, have a drink, listen to music – you could live like that for ever!’

Fables of Aesop, tr. Handford (Penguin 1964), no. 180 (adapted).

Herodotus, Histories 1.94.

Ovid Metamorphoses Book 8.777-842.

Richard Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind (Cambridge 2004).

See my Greeks and the New (Cambridge 2011) 90-92.

See my article ‘Drowning by Numbers: Poetry and Pythagoreanism in Horace Odes 1.28’, Greece and Rome 50, p. 216.

Plutarch, On Tranquility of Mind 4.

Horace Odes 1.28, a meditation on the need for limit in art, mentions the fates of both Tantalus and Tithonus; see my article cited in n. 6 above, 206-19.

Addendum 27 Feb 2019. Peter Jones has drawn my attention to a story of identical import told by the 1st-2nd century AD biographer Plutarch (in Pyrrhus 14) about the general whose name is known for the phrase ‘Pyrrhic victory’. Peter summarises as follows:

When the people of Tarentum invited the highly rated general Pyrrhus in 280 bc to help them drive the Romans out of South Italy, his wise adviser Cineas asked him what he would do if he conquered the Romans.

‘Why,’ said Pyrrhus, ‘conquer Sicily.’

‘And what next?’

‘Take Libya and Carthage.’

‘And next?’

‘Recover Macedon and Greece.’

‘And next?’

‘Take it easy, drink every day and talk to our heart’s delight,’ replied Pyrrhus.

‘If that is the ultimate aim of all this effort,’ replied Cineas, ‘then what is stopping us enjoying it now? We can do it at once, without any bloodshed, toil and danger of the sort you propose, which will entail harm for others and much suffering for ourselves.’

Pyrrhus, we are told, saw the point but ‘could not bring himself to abandon his ambitions’.

The inspiration behind Vivaldi’s composition of his famous Four Seasons appears to be sonnets that he composed himself. In preparation for a Trio Recital, I undertook to make a poetic translation of these lovely sonnets. I share my efforts here.

LA PRIMAVERA – SPRING

Giunt’ è la Primavera e festosetti

La salutan gl’ augei con lieto canto,

E i fonti allo spirar de’ zeffiretti

Con dolce mormorio corrono intanto.

Vengon’ coprendo l’aer di nero amanto

E lampi, e tuoni ad annuntiarla eletti:

Indi tacendo questi, gl’augelletti

Tornan’ di nuovo al lor canoro incanto.

E quindi sul fiorito ameno prato

Al caro mormorio di fronde e piante

Dorme’l caprar col fido can’ à lato.

Di pastoral zampogna al suon festante

Danzan ninfe e pastor nel tetto amato

Di Primavera all’apparir brillante.

Springtime has now arrived, and full of cheer

The birds greet her return with festive song,

And streams caressed by breaths of western breezes

With gentle murmuration flow along.

Casting a dark mantle over heaven,

Come thunder, lightning, harbingers of spring:

They die away to silence, and the songbirds

Take up their tuneful strain once more and sing.

Now in the lovely meadow, filled with flowers,

Under the branches rustling overhead

The goat-herd sleeps, his faithful dog beside him.

Led by the festive sound of rustic bagpipes,

The nymphs and shepherds lightly dance and sing

Beneath the brilliant canopy of spring.

L’ESTATE – SUMMER

Sotto dura staggion dal sole accesa

Langue l’huom, langue’l gregge, ed arde il pino;

Scioglie il cucco la voce, e tosto intesa

Canta la tortorella e’l gardelino.

Zeffiro dolce spira, mà contesa

Muove Borea improviso al suo vicino.

E piange il pastorel, perche sospesa

Teme fiera borasca, e’l suo destino;

Toglie alle membra lasse il suo riposo

Il timore de’ lampi, e tuoni fieri

E de mosche, e mosconi il stuol furioso!

Ah, che pur troppo i suo timor son veri:

Tuona e fulmina il ciel’ e grandinoso

Tronca il capo alle spiche e a’ grani alteri.

In the hard season, sweltering in the sun

Man languishes, flocks languish, pine-trees burn;

We hear the cuckoo’s voice – hear how intensely

Sings now the turtledove and finch in turn.

The Zephyr stirs the air, but threateningly

The North Wind sweeps it suddenly aside.

The shepherd cries out quivering, and facing

The stormy onset fears for his own hide.

His limbs, exhausted, are deprived of rest,

From terror of the lightning and fierce thunder

And from the furious swarms of gnats and flies!

Alas, what’s more, his fears are justified:

The heavens thunder loud with hail-filled rain

Which cuts the heads from stalks of wheat and grain.

L’AUTUNNO – AUTUMN

Celebra il vilanel con balli e canti

Del felice raccolto il bel piacere,

E del liquor de Bacco accesi tanti

Finiscono col sonno il lor godere.

Fà ch’ ogn’ uno tralasci e balli e canti

L’aria che temperata dà piacere,

E la staggion ch’ invita tanti e tanti

D’ un dolcissimo sonno al bel godere.

I cacciator alla nov’ alba à caccia

Con corni, schioppi, e cani escono fuore;

Fugge la belva, e seguono la traccia;

Già sbigottita, e lassa al gran rumore

De’ schioppi e cani, ferita minaccia

Languida di fuggir, mà oppressa muore.

The peasants celebrate, with songs and dances,

The pleasure of a harvest wide and deep,

And warmed up thoroughly by Bacchus’ liquor,

Full many end their revelry in sleep.

They all forget their cares, and dance to greet

The air that is with joy and pleasure filled,

The season that holds out to all and sundry

The sweetest slumber with delight instilled.

The hunter at the break of dawn goes hunting,

With horns, and guns, and dogs keen on the trail;

The animal runs off, with them in tow;

In terror and half dead from the commotion

Of guns and dogs, the beast, now wounded, tries

To flee, but harried and exhausted, dies.

L’INVERNO – WINTER

Aggiacciato tremar trà nevi algenti

Al severo spirar d’ orrido vento;

Correr battendo i piedi ogni momento;

E pel soverchio gel batter i denti;

Passar al foco i di quieti e contenti

Mentre la pioggia fuor bagna ben cento,

Caminar sopra il giaccio, e à passo lento

Per timor di cader girsene intenti;

Gir forte sdruzziolar, cader à terra

Di nuove ir sopra ’l giaccio e correr forte

Sin ch’ il giaccio si rompe, e si disserra.

Sentir uscir dalle ferrate porte Sirocco,

Borea, e tutti i venti in guerra:

Quest’ é ’l verno, mà tal, che gioja apporte.

In icy snow we tremble from the cold,

Caught by the bristling wind with its harsh breath;

We run and stamp our feet at every moment,

With teeth a-chatter, cold as very death;

Or by the fire we sit content and happy

While outside pours down a torrential squall,

And tread across the ice with careful footsteps,

Cautious from fear that we might trip and fall;

We turn abruptly, slip, and crash down earthwards,

Then rising, hasten on across the ice

In case the surface cracks and breaks apart.

Through bolted doors we hear the winds competing,

Sirocco, North Wind, all the winds at war:

It’s winter, but it brings us joy for sure.

A paper delivered to the New Imago Forum (psychoanalysts and academics) in Oxford on 10 Sep 2016.

There’s a joke about a man who’s shipwrecked on a remote desert island in the Pacific. Robert makes a home for himself, finds that he can live quite well, and begins to enjoy a good life despite missing his girlfriend and feeling bereft of companionship. One day he sees someone floundering far off shore and swims out to the rescue. It’s a woman who has fallen off a yacht, and on rescuing her and bringing her safely to shore he realises she’s the famous supermodel Claudia, for many years his fantasy object. Thrown together with him on the island, Claudia falls for Robert, and he feels that his wildest dreams have come true. He has to pinch himself: can it really be true that Claudia is his lover? But after a few weeks, she notices him occasionally looking wistful. He tells her that she’s the woman of his dreams, but there’s just something he misses that would make his life complete. She swears she’s prepared to do anything to make him happy, so he thinks hard and eventually asks her: would she play-act at being his old friend Terry, and come down the pub with him for a drink? She unhesitatingly agrees, and they set about creating the scene in their island hut, setting up a table with pints of beer, pinning a dartboard on the wall, and so on. They sit down and Rob lifts his glass and says ‘Terry, mate, how’s it all going?’ ‘Not bad, Rob’, she replies, in the gruffest voice she can muster, ‘How’s it going for you?’ ‘Pretty good, mate’, he replies heartily, then leans up close and says in a confidential voice: ‘You’ll never guess who I’m shagging!’

This joke is clearly a dig at a certain aspect of male psychology and the compulsion to publicise success, and I tell it to draw a contrast with a story from the ancient world which has a similar premise but for which the issue of sexual shame is central, and indicative of the cultural relativity of what counts as shameful. Some time around 700 BC, according to the Greek historian Herodotus (Histories Bk 1), Candaules the king of Lydia became obsessed by his wife’s sexual allure. (The standard translation of the passage in Greek and the word ērasthē, which has puzzled and amused generations of students, reads ‘Candaules fell in love with his own wife’ or ‘Candaules was infatuated with his own wife’, somehow suggesting that such a thing should be a matter of surprise – his own wife! But a better translation is that he was ‘erotically obsessed’ with her). The king had a trusted bodyguard called Gyges, whom he daily regaled with his feelings. But extolling his good fortune wasn’t enough for Candaules. One day he said that Gyges must confirm his wife’s beauty for himself and that he would arrange for him to see her naked. ‘Now, for the Lydians and for most non-Greeks’, comments Herodotus, ‘even for a man to be seen naked is a matter of great shame’. (Nakedness is of course the first ‘shame’ for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden). Gyges was naturally scandalised, and protested to the king that such things should remain private. ‘When a woman takes off her dress’ he says to the king, ‘she removes her shame (the Greek word is aidōs) with it’. But Candaules insists that he’ll arrange things so that Gyges can spy on his naked wife completely undetected.

On the appointed day he has Gyges hide behind his bedroom door so that he can spy on the queen undressing. Gyges watches as she removes her clothes and walks entirely naked towards the bed, then he slips out of the chamber just as the king has instructed. But the queen sees him out of the corner of her eye, and is furious – though she doesn’t let on – that she’s been made an object of shame by her husband. The following day she summons Gyges and says: ‘I’ve been put in a position of intolerable shame by my husband, so now I give you a choice. Kill Candaules and marry me yourself. If you refuse, I will order my soldiers to kill you now’. Gyges pleads with her not to force him to make such a terrible choice, but she’s adamant: either he or Candaules must die. So he sensibly chooses the latter route and kills the king. He then marries the queen and becomes king of Lydia, inaugurating a dynasty that will go on to rule over wealthy Lydia for five generations until the reign of Croesus, the richest man in the world.

For Herodotus, a key aspect of the tale was the difference in customs between Greeks and non-Greeks with regard to what might be perceived as shameful. The relativity of notions of shame is one of the themes that I will pursue in this paper. The public nudity that was such a mark of shame for a Lydian – to the point that a king had to be killed and and a royal house destroyed – was of little consequence to the Greeks. They were long familiar with the sight of athletes and gymnasts competing entirely in the nude (the word gymnos at the root of ‘gymnast’ means ‘naked’), a practice that in Sparta extended to women as well as men, and they were surrounded by images and sculpted figures of gods and goddesses, men and women, in all their unabashed nakedness. In Herodotus’ time a drama on the theme of the Gyges story had been composed and staged in the theatre, and the dramatic way that Herodotus recounts the tale in his Histories, complete with dialogue and action, suggests that the stageplay (which we no longer have) was in his mind’s eye when he wrote the story down in his opening book. It’s likely that in the play the notion of shame or disgrace, aidōs, was the subject of some discussion by the characters or chorus, as it’s a theme that, as we will see, is broached elsewhere in Greek tragedy. In fact, a fragment of ancient drama survives on papyrus on which the names ‘Gyges’ and ‘Candaules’ appear. Its authorship is unknown, but its style and subject-matter are reminiscent of the work of the playwright Euripides.

Euripides was the most avant-garde and psychologically-minded tragedian of the fifth century BC – many of you will know his Medea and his Bacchae, both of which have plots which are quite shocking and deal with issues of great psychological power. In a play now lost Euripides put a line into a character’s mouth that seemed so scandalous to the audience of the time that the verse has been preserved out of context. It ran: ‘Nothing is shameful unless it seems that way to the person who does the act’. This sentiment takes the relativisation of shame further than Herodotus, by seeming to make it a matter of moral relativity and individual choice rather than just one of cultural difference. The mostly traditional-minded audience of ancient Athens would have found it deplorable that a person or even a mythical character should deny that some evidently dreadful deed was truly shameful on the basis that, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet was to put it two millennia later, ‘there’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’. For appearing to promote this kind of sentiment – and Greeks were very literal-minded in conflating a poet’s words with that poet’s own views – Euripides was censured as immoral by his contemporaries, and was disapprovingly associated with the progressive, ethically inquiring thinkers of the age who are generally grouped under the rather derogatory appellation ‘sophists’ (from which we get the words ‘sophistry’ and ‘sophisticated’).

Prime among the sophists was Protagoras of Abdera, who coined the famous saying ‘Man is the measure of all things’. This was considered by moralistic critics such as Plato to be a dangerously atheistic and relativistic proposition, but it was the kind of sentiment that was closely aligned to the world-view Euripides’ characters. The line ‘Nothing’s shameful unless it seems that way to the person who does the act’ was actually preserved by a commentator writing in the margin of an ancient comic play, Frogs by Euripides’ contemporary, Aristophanes. The context in that comedy is not one of sexual shame, but of the shame attached to breaking a promise. Aristophanes had an intense literary relationship with Euripides, regularly mimicking and adapting his tragic style, scenarios, and verses, and creating from them many hilarious moments of comic parody – often by having characters utter Euripidean lines out of context. In Frogs, his most successful comedy produced in 406 BC, the cast of characters centrally include the tragedians Aeschylus and Euripides himself, who were two of the great tragic playwrights of the era and were both then dead. But while Aeschylus had long been dead, Euripides had died just two years earlier than the production of Frogs.

The main character of Frogs is the god Dionysus, the god of wine and drama, who at the beginning of the play claims to be desperate because, he says, there are no smart playwrights left in Athens, and he feels an enormous craving for Euripides. So he swears he will go down to the Underworld to bring Euripides back, just as in the myth Orpheus had descended to Hades to bring his beloved Eurydice back from the dead. When he gets down to the Underworld, Dionysus finds Euripides and Aeschylus on the point of staging a debating contest. They are each staking a claim to the Chair of Tragedy in the Underworld, so Dionysus himself takes on the role of umpire – reasonably enough, given his role as the god of theatre. In the course of the debate Aeschylus argues for the good old-fashioned style of drama that he represents, and slams Euripides’ modernism and immorality; while Euripides derides Aeschylus’ antiquated bombast and solemnity, and defends his own outrageously modernist plots and music, not least on the grounds that they are more ‘democratic’ (in that they both dealt with, and presumably appealed to, non-elite groups). The two playwrights battle it out hammer and tongs, misquoting and misrepresenting each others’ plays to hilarious effect. One might imagine a contemporary version of the comedy using William Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw debating their claim to be the best dramatist on similar lines, and in fact in 1974 Stephen Sondheim created a musical of the Frogs using those very authors as the main characters.

After a long debate with lots of twists and turns, Aeschylus and Euripides come out neck and neck. Both have obvious virtues, and both have evident defects. So it’s left to Dionysus to decide who the winner should be. His inclination is towards Aeschylus, but he guiltily remembers that his original promise was to bring back Euripides. His solution to this quandary is a brilliant side-step. He part-quotes another notorious line from Euripides’ Hippolytus: ‘My tongue has sworn, but my mind remains unsworn’. So Dionysus says ‘My tongue has sworn, but I choose – Aeschylus’. Euripides reproaches Dionysus bitterly, saying that it’s shameful that he should go back on his word. At that point Dionysus blithely retorts with that other line of Euripides – ‘Nothing is shameful, unless it seems that way to the person who does the act’. Euripides has been hoist with his own petard. But is it true that one can simply choose whether or not to be ashamed?

Plato was in his early 20s when the Frogs was staged, and was deeply disapproving (as only a moralistic young man can be) of the ethical decadence such sentiments appeared to espouse. When he later wrote his great work of political theory, the Republic, he argued that in an ideal state both comedy and tragedy should be banned for representing lies and immorality. In the Republic Plato also gives his own version of the Gyges story, using it as a thought-experiment to consider whether anyone would in fact restrain themselves from doing something wrong or shameful if there were no prospect of being found out. In Plato’s fictional version, an unnamed ancestor of Gyges is a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia. One day an earthquake reveals a cave in the mountainside where he’s feeding his flock. Entering the cave the shepherd discovers that it’s a tomb in which a giant corpse has been laid. On the corpse’s hand he sees a golden ring, which he removes and slips onto his own hand. He soon discovers that by manipulating the ring he can make himself invisible. Using his power of invisibility, he proceeds to seduce the queen of Lydia, kill the king, and take the throne for himself. The story of ‘Gyges’ Ring’ is told by Plato’s brother Glaucon, who uses it to argue that if people could ‘get away with murder’, literally or figuratively, they wouldn’t hesitate to do so.

‘Imagine’, Glaucon says, ‘someone with the power of invisibility never doing any wrong or stealing or seducing. He’d be considered a fool. People would only praise him for his stance out of fear of what he might do to them.’ (So much for Harry Potter and his virtuous cloak of invisibility). Socrates, however, goes on to argue against Glaucon, saying that this reasoning is quite mistaken. His argument is that wrongdoing in itself is what makes a person unhappy, because (in a nutshell) it distorts the psyche by allowing desire or appetite to overcome reason. Reason must rule if a soul is to be truly harmonious, and only a harmonious soul can be happy. So in Socrates’ view it would always be in one’s best interest to avoid wrongdoing and to choose to be fair and just even if one could get away with all kinds of criminality.

Socrates’ answer to Glaucon, then, cuts across the distinction between outward appearance and inward feelings in relation to morally charged actions. This distinction has been famously related to the difference between ‘shame-cultures’ and ‘guilt-cultures’. These terms were first coined by the anthropologist Ruth Benedict to describe the difference she perceived between Japanese and American attitudes to shame and guilt. In a shame-culture, she suggested, what matters is essentially how one is viewed for one’s actions; in a guilt-culture what counts more is how one feels internally about one’s moral status. The distinction was adopted by the classical scholar E.R. Dodds in his study The Greeks and the Irrational, to characterise the difference between the way the early Greeks, and in particular Homeric heroes, express and act on their notion of honour, compared with that of later, arguably more sophisticated moral theorists such as Socrates and Christian thinkers.

Dodds did not apply the distinction as bluntly as some scholars who cite his use of the notion have done. Even Homeric heroes, as he recognised, may be thought to be driven by an internal (or internalised) sense of what’s right and wrong, honourable or shameful. However, it’s true that much early Greek literature emphasises the concerns of characters who commit crimes largely in terms of how others will view them and the punishments they will undergo in consequence of their actions, rather than how it makes them feel about themselves. So, for instance, the Homeric hero Ajax, who fails in his claim to be the best warrior at Troy after Achilles when he loses out in a contest with Odysseus that is rigged against him, sets out to slaughter his former comrade and commanding officer because he feels he has been dishonoured and humiliated by them. When he’s foiled in this murderous attempt and duped, even more humiliatingly, by the gods into slaughtering a herd of sheep instead of his intended victims, he’s depicted by Sophocles as not in the least guilty or remorseful for hatching his shameful plan, but furious and defiant for not having succeeded. He kills himself because he feels that his failure to fulfil his murderous aims – rather than the fact that he has made such a disgraceful plan at all – is what puts him to shame in the eyes of both his supporters and his enemies.

What’s at stake in this kind of shame-culture, then, is not a sense of responsibility in the face of a consciousness of wrongdoing, but a culturally specific demand for respect and honour. It’s important that the individual who makes the demand is already conscious of his status as, say, a warrior, king or queen, or just as a good and honourable person. The earliest Greek literature, the epics of Homer and Hesiod, explicitly speak about different kinds of shame as depending on status and even class. Both poets have verses in which they say that shame – aidōs – can be either a good or a bad thing, both harmful and beneficial, and, more specifically, that it’s something that tends to be harmful to the poor or lowly man and of benefit to the noble or rich man. This duality has given rise to varied interpretations. The context of Hesiod’s poem, Works and Days, is an exhortation to his lazy, distracted brother to stop wasting his time and get down to the hard work of farming and tending his land. In this case, then, the so-called ‘bad shame’ that harms the poor man seems to refer to the disgrace of being seen not to undertake the necessary steps to make a respectable living. Conversely, the ‘good shame’ that benefits the rich nobleman seems to mean the sense of shame, based on due self-regard for status, that drives such a man to seek to maintain or improve his situation and to be successful in the eyes of his peers.

Claims to honour and status are also central to the dual notion of shame that’s raised in the main text I will now consider, Euripides’ brilliant tragedy Hippolytus. The play is set in the town of Troezen where Theseus, king of Athens, has left his wife Phaedra and his illegitimate son, Hippolytus (a young man in his 20s), while he serves out a year’s exile from his home. At the start of the play Aphrodite, goddess of love and sex, appears and explains that Hippolytus has sworn himself to chastity and refuses to revere her. Instead, he exclusively honours Artemis, the virgin Goddess of the hunt. This slight to her honour has led Aphrodite to initiate a plan of vengeance against him, for which she’s using his stepmother Phaedra simply as a pawn. When Hippolytus had visited Athens two years earlier, Aphrodite had inspired Phaedra to fall in love with him, her own stepson; shame and tragedy must inevitably follow.

When Hippolytus appears with his throng of male followers from a hunting party, he shows exaggerated reverence to Artemis and none to Aphrodite. His pious attendant warns him about slighting the love-goddess, but Hippolytus is far too proud and refuses to listen – ‘I don’t honour those whose work is done under cover of night!’ The chorus, consisting of young married women of Troezen, now enter the theatre and describe how Phaedra hasn’t eaten or slept for three days. Phaedra herself then appears, accompanied by her nurse, and gives a soliloquy on pleasure and on shame which I will discuss further. She eventually confesses why she’s sick: she’s in love with her stepson Hippolytus. She knows it will bring terrible shame on her if Theseus finds out the nature of her desire, which she acknowledges to be a kind of madness (l. 241 f.). The nurse and the chorus are shocked by her admission, but Phaedra explains that she intends to starve herself to death to keep her honour intact. The nurse then changes her mind and tells Phaedra that Love cannot be resisted, and that she knows of a magical charm to cure her condition.

Phaedra allows herself to be persuaded. The nurse goes to Hippolytus, and after extracting an oath of silence from him tells him of Phaedra’s desire, and suggests that he might consider yielding to her. He reacts with a furious, misogynistic tirade and threatens to reveal all to Theseus. When the Nurse reminds him of his oath, the most binding utterance that an ancient Greek can make, he pronounces the scandalous line ‘My tongue has sworn, my mind remains unsworn’. In the event, he will scrupulously keep his oath; but Phaedra, who hears the altercation offstage, is not to know that. She can only assume that disaster will ensue, and determined to preserve her honour, she hangs herself. Theseus returns to discover her dead body together with a letter in her handwriting falsely asserting that she was raped by Hippolytus. In furious rage he curses his son to death and exile, calling on the god Poseidon, who had once granted him three wishes, to fulfil his curse. Hippolytus enters and protests his innocence, but can’t say what the true story is because of his oath. Theseus forces him to go into exile, and Hippolytus departs on his chariot.

A messenger then enters and describes a terrible scene; as Hippolytus was driving along the coast, the sea reared up in the shape of an enormous bull, terrifying the horses, who dashed the chariot among the rocks and dragged Hippolytus behind them. Theseus reacts coldly in the belief that Hippolytus has been duly punished for his crime, until the goddess Artemis appears in person and tells him the brutal truth. Theseus is devastated, and of course prostrate with guilt, as Hippolytus is carried in physically battered and barely alive. They exchange tender words and Hippolytus forgives Theseus before he dies.

The initial shame – aidōs – with which the story deals, then, is the lack of reverence paid to Aphrodite. The goddess of love is of course a personification of sexual desire. So we might interpret this as indicating that it should be counted a matter of shame – in a man’s world as was ancient Greece – for a handsome, able-bodied young man such as Hippolytus to deny his sexual desire to such an extent that he altogether refuses sex and the company of women. However, far from showing due shame and reverence, he doesn’t even listen sympathetically to his concerned servant’s pleading. His single-minded, proud, devotion to the virgin goddess, rather like his rant against women in general, are surely meant to be understood as excessive to the point of hubris – the kind of excessive pride that goes before a fall. The more central shame of the drama, however, is that of Phaedra herself, who has been afflicted by her unseemly desire for Hippolytus. Despite the absence of any blood relationship between stepmother and stepson, it was felt by the Greeks that it would be unnatural for a stepmother to sleep with or even desire her stepson: family structure marked it as incestuous and taboo.

Phaedra expresses both a sense of guilt at the betrayal of her absent husband and a sense of shame at the thought of her illegitimate desire. She hasn’t actually done anything, just thought it, but she speaks of her incestuous desire as if it were itself a deed of shame. When she first addresses the women of Troezen, she posits a distinction with these words: (380 f.)

We know and understand very well what is virtue and what is evil but, unfortunately, we fail to act virtuously. Some of us do so because we are lazy, others because we give priority to pleasure rather than virtue. Life has many pleasures: lengthy and idle chats, for example, and indolence, a pleasurable vice.

And then there’s shame, which has a double face: one, to be sure, is not an evil thing to possess; but there’s the other shame, whose weight crushes whole households. And if the good and the bad shame were easy to distinguish, the word describing them would not be the same.

This passage has caused much perplexity, and I can only touch on some of the varying interpretations it has elicited. First of all, why does Phaedra list ‘shame’ as one of life’s pleasures, here the third in a series of pleasures after ‘long chats’ and ‘indolence’? And secondly, how can we explain the one kind of shame that is not a bad thing to possess and the other that allegedly can destroy whole households?

There is no scholarly unanimity about either question, but I will suggest some tentative answers. Phaedra’s distinction of two kinds of shame clearly recalls, in my view, the one previously mentioned, the distinction raised by Homer and Hesiod. If so, it’s possible that the pleasure of which she speaks refers to the kind of pleasurable aidōs the earlier poets identify as the good shame, the one which encourages successful people to acquire and maintain their success. In this respect, a feeling of aidōs can be called a pleasure because it implies due reverence, almost of a religious nature, for one self and for others. To be respected and to show due respect are ways of affirming one’s privileged status, which is itself a source of pleasure. One might also recall Gyges’ comment that when a woman casts off her clothes she casts off her aidōs. The clear implication of that statement is that aidōs is a good thing, something that a person with self-respect should seek to retain.

What about the bad shame that destroys households and families? I think it’s too simplistic to assume, as some have suggested, that Phaedra just means something that brings disgrace on a family, i.e. a deed of shame. Although this could be a possible translation of aidōs, it would make her statement a purely semantic quibble; a bit like saying of a brazen liar ‘he has no shame’ and being corrected ‘oh, but surely he shames himself by lying? That means he’s full of shame’. I would argue that what Phaedra must be talking about when she speaks of the destructiveness of shame is a feeling, not a deed (though as we have seen she equates her shameful feeling with a shameful deed). By contrast to the shame that ensures due reverence and thereby brings pleasure to those who have it, she seems to mean that there’s a more negative sense of shame.

Given that at this stage of the story Phaedra is still fully resolved to kill herself to preserve her honour, presumably she could be referring to the shame that is felt in the face of one’s own shocking deed or scandalous thought that will in turn lead to a self-destructive act. The sense that one has overstepped the bounds of acceptability and must pay the price for it may even be pleasurable, since it allows an actor to assert their autonomy in the face of a terrible dilemma. It can also, of course, wreck a family or household as surely as it did in the case of the Homeric hero Ajax mentioned earlier, whose shame at his failure led not only to his suicide but to the abandonment to an unhappy fate of his wife, child, and comrades. It has also been suggested that Phaedra is here not only hinting at the prospect of her own death and its sad consequences for her family, but unconsciously foreshadowing the terrible tragedy that her desire to retain her honour will unleash on her innocent stepson.

But it’s a further puzzle in relation to the play that she should go on to wreak vengeance on Hippolytus by laying out a vicious falsehood about his having raped her, knowing that her deathbed statement will be bound to be believed by Theseus and cause terrible consequences. Surely this vengeful act is itself an act of shame, diminishing or even annulling any honour that she might have preserved by killing herself? It’s an interesting historical perspective that the surviving play Hippolytus was the second of Euripides’ attempts to tell the story of Phaedra. In an earlier version, perhaps composed and staged a decade earlier, he had portrayed her as a brazen seductress, determined first to seduce Hippolytus and then to take revenge on him for spurning her – the so-called Potiphar’s Wife motif (from the biblical story of Daniel and Potiphar). That first play had not been a popular success, whereas this one was approved of by the audience and awarded the first prize for tragedy. The reason for its success, we are told, is that it presented Phaedra in an ‘honourable’ light.

The surprising literalness of Greek audiences meant that if the character in a drama was seen to be good, the drama itself could be considered good – and vice versa. But though the dishonourable and destructive act of Phaedra’s dying falsehood might clearly have suited her character better in the earlier version of the story – which is one scholarly solution to the question of her honour being preserved – why did Euripides think it could be retained in the revised version? I think an understanding of the psychological dynamics of shame and guilt can help to suggest why Phaedra’s deathbed misdemeanour doesn’t entirely cancel out her attempt to preserve her honour. Shame as she experiences it involves a purely narcissistic syndrome: what matters in her sense of shame is that she feels bad about how her actions have diminished or will harm herself. Guilt, by contrast, requires that one has a sense of psychological discomfort in knowing that one’s actions have harmed or will harm another. In Phaedra’s case, Euripides has correctly portrayed the way her sense of shame about her own feelings, her own narcissistic self-regard, has completely driven out any prospective guilt in relation to the harm she may wreak on both Theseus and Hippolytus.

Shame, then, may be construed as largely a matter of self-regard. In this respect the saying that ‘there’s nothing shameful unless it seems so the person who does the act’ can acquire a less morally dubious meaning than it was heard to have, and simply sound like a statement of fact. I will finish with a story from a different cultural context which highlights that, as in the story of Gyges and Candaules’ wife, under certain conditions what might seem of little concern to some can seem debilitatingly shameful to the person who ‘does the act’. This is the bittersweet story of Abu Hasan told in the One Thousand and One Nights, a compilation of Arabian and Indian fables that go back to the 8th century AD but were first translated into English in 1706.

Abu Hasan was wealthy, clever and generous, and the most eligible bachelor in Baghdad. When his friends would reproach him for remaining single, he would reply: “I am free, why must I become a slave?” But eventually he agreed to wed and everyone rejoiced. A fabulous ceremony was prepared, the greatest Baghdad had seen in years. Tables were laden with chickens stuffed with pistachios, whole roast goats with fresh dates, pastries with walnuts and cream, and sherbets and sweets of all varieties. Abu Hasan and his friends reclined on silk cushions smoking pipes of honey tobacco. The bride came forth wearing the first of seven dresses, a turquoise gown dripping with gems and silver, and each following dress was more lovely than the last. She retired to the chamber to await her husband, who entertained his guests with a great store of wit and fable. At last, when his duties as host had been fulfilled, Abu Hasan bid his guests good night. But he had eaten and drunk so heavily that as he rose from his cushions he released a thunderous fart that echoed from wall to wall and silenced every voice in the room.

The guests at once began talking, pretending they hadn’t noticed, but Abu Hasan was covered with unbearable shame. He slipped out of the house, saddled his horse and rode to Basra, where he boarded a ship bound for India. There he soon secured himself a position in the services of a Rajah, and came to be loved and respected by all in the court. But he was never seen to smile, and every evening he would climb to the highest tower to gaze in the direction of his homeland. After ten years had passed, he packed up his belongings and set sail back to his native country. Once on land, he rode to Baghdad and paused at the outskirts of the city, hoping to find out whether anyone remembered him any more. Eventually he passed a hut where a mother was putting her daughter to sleep. He heard the girl ask: “Mother, what year was I born?” “Oh, that’s easy to remember, dear,” her mother replied, “You were born in the year that Abu Hasan farted.” Hearing these words, the shame returned and all hope died in Abu Hasan’s heart. He fled the country, never to be seen again.