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Those Dead White Men, you just can’t get rid of them
I find this at Wikipedia:
Richmond Alexander Lattimore (May 6, 1906—February 26, 1984) was an American poet and translator known for his translations of the Greek classics, especially his versions of the Iliad and Odyssey, still considered superior despite their age.
Hmm, if it’s noteworthy, perhaps even an oddity, that Lattimore’s great translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey, published in the 1950s, are still considered superior despite their age (about 50 years!), then a fortiori Wikipedia’s article on Homer ought to begin:
Homer (circa eighth century B.C.) was a Greek Ionian epic poet, known for composing the epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey, still considered superior despite their age.
But after all it’s true. As someone once said of The Iliad, the first work of European literature is also the greatest.
* * *
To give a flavor of Homer, here is the opening and closing of Achilleus’ great, but also tragically over the top, speech to the delegation led by Odysseus in Book IX of the Iliad, in which he rejects the staggering gifts Agamemnon has offered as an inducement to him to forget his anger at Agamemnon’s terrible insult and return to the fighting. At one point Achilleus says that even if Agamemnon gave him gifts as many as the sand or the dust is, not even so would he let go of his anger. (I would have given the whole speech, but I can’t find Lattimore’s Iliad online to copy it.)
Then in answer to him spoke Achilleus of the swift feet:
‘Son of Laertes and seed of Zeus, resourceful Odysseus,
without consideration for you I must make my answer,
the way I think, and the way it will be accomplished, that you may not
come one after another, and sit by me, and speak softly.
For as I detest the doorways of death, so I detest that man, who
hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another.
But I will speak to you the way it seems best to me: neither
do I think the son of Atreus, Agamemnon, will persuade me,
nor the rest of the Danaans, since there was no gratitude given
for fighting incessantly forever against your enemies.
Fate is the same for the man who holds back, the same if he fights hard.
We are all born to a single honor, the brave with the weakling.
A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much.
Nothing is left to me, now that my heart has gone through its afflictions
in forever setting my life on the hazard of battle.
For as to her unwinged young ones the mother bird brings back
morsels, wherever she can find them, but as to herself it is suffering,
such was I, as I lay through all the many nights unsleeping,
such was I, as I toiled through the bloody days of the fighting,
Striving with warriors for the sake of these men’s women….
Of possessions
Cattle and fat sheep are to be had for the lifting
And tripods can be won, and the tawny high heads of horses,
But a man’s life cannot come back again, it cannot be lifted
Nor captured again by force, once it has crossed the teeth’s barrier.
For my mother Thetis the goddess of the silver feet tells me
I carry two sorts of destiny toward the day of my death. Either,
if I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans,
my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting,
but if I return home to the beloved land of my fathers,
the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be a long life
left to me, and my end in death will not come to me quickly.
And this would be my counsel to the others also, to sail back
home again, since no longer will you find any term set
on the sheer city of Ilion, and its people are made bold.
Do you go back therefore to the great men of the Achaians,
And take them this message, since such is the privilege of the princes,
that they think out in their minds some other scheme that is better,
which might rescue their ships, and the people of the Achaians
who man the hollow ships, since this plan will not work for them
which they thought of by reason of my anger.’
- end of initial entry -
James W. writes:
I never fully appreciated Aristotle’s comment, “Men regard it as their right to return evil for evil, and if they cannot, feel they have lost their liberty,” until I read your post of the speech of Achilleus.
I have often found much in certain of the Greek philosophers that prepares the way for Jesus and his understandings.
Adela Gereth writes:
A forceful reminder that from Homer’s time until quite recently, one of language’s primary purposes was to convey the narratives people used to explain their history, traditions and hopes to themselves and to their children in ways that were always memorable and often majestic.
Language was once routinely used to uplift, comfort, console, exalt, persuade and convince. Everyday speech was utilitarian but there was a universal sense that language was a crucial aspect of all public occasions, both sacred and secular. When addressing the public, one’s language was supposed to reflect and respect the momentousness of the occasion. The notion that language might ever be used in its meanest and most vulgar aspects deliberately to shock or to signal the writer or speaker’s putative superiority to those who find vulgarity distasteful was unimaginable, until quite recently.
The rules of grammar and rhetoric worked together with logic and reason to construct arguments of a sophistication and soundness virtually unknown today. The crudity, shoddy reasoning not even worthy of the name, and reliance on demagogic speech evident would have shocked not only the ancients but even those educated a mere century ago.
I am glad I am old enough to remember when it was otherwise.
LA writes:
Achilleus’ moral crisis is similar to that of modern man from whom all moral hierarchies and all meaning of life have been removed. He says:
there was no gratitude given
for fighting incessantly forever against your enemies.
Fate is the same for the man who holds back, the same if he fights hard.
We are all born to a single honor, the brave with the weakling.
A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much.
Nothing is left to me, now that my heart has gone through its afflictions
in forever setting my life on the hazard of battle.
Honor is the source of value and meaning for Achilleus, honor which consoles and comforts him against his knowledge of his fated short life. If that honor is stripped from him, as happened through Agamemnon’s outrageous behavior, there’s nothing left. There’s no difference between a great fighter and a nobody. If all things are equal, there’s no point in pursuing excellence and fame, no point in doing anything.
Mark K. writes:
Is there a poem somewhere commemorating us, something along the lines of “Ode to the Dead White Man?”
In years to come, as we are swamped and marginalized and we become just a memory, perhaps they will erect a museum to honor our accomplishments—the Museum of the Dead White Man. Or a memorial in some public park, our epitaph inscribed on a simple stone slab—“They developed a civilization, they raised families and they taught their children.” Or just a moment of silence (unofficial of course) in schools for kids to honor our memory?
Perhaps there will be a Proustian novel written, In Remembrance of White Men Past (A la recherche des hommes blancs perdue). Or a Hemingwayesque novella The Dead White Man and the Sea. Bob Dylan may contribute the “Ballad of the Dead White Man.”
In his old age Jorge W. Bush, from his rocking chair, may utter an encomium, “Yeah, that old dead white man sure had a big heart, he just loved everybody who was down, I miss the old feller.” Tony Blair reminiscing will muse, “Yes, they were a funny lot, I passed in and out of them from time to time.” Al Gore will assert, “They had their day but their time had come.”
There may even be “revivals” and festivals (such as we have Medieval Days today). A small town in Colorado may host a “Dead White Man” weekend getaway. The city of New Orleans may have a Dead White Man week long party in which people will come dressed as males wearing white masks.
Sage McLaughlin writes:
You said in your thread concerning Dead White Men that, “If all things are equal, there’s no point in pursuing excellence and fame, no point in doing anything.” This may be the most persuasive practical point against relativism.
Allan Bloom’s famous opening movement of Closing of the American Mind contained this insight, and that was the first place I encountered it. Contrary to the claims and wishes of the intelligentsia, relativism was not only failing to instill genuine curiosity about other cultures in American students, but it was bound to do so. If one culture is no better than another, then one cannot have anything really interesting to learn from the study of alien peoples, beyond the satisfaction of some involuntary curiosity. If a man believes that all cultures are equal, he will become ignorant not only of his own historic civilization, but also of the very possibility of civilization as a meaningful enterprise. Relativism does not move people to study Christian art, but it leaves them no special reason to study Native American folk music either—unless it is to prove the case that all art is of equal value, which academics most assuredly have not done.
Those smug leftist intellectuals who affect dismay at the apparent indifference of young Americans to the outside world—a deficiency recited most often by self-loathing liberal students, actually—ought to ask themselves on what grounds they might encourage any other attitude.
LA replies:
As C.S. Lewis said in The Abolition of Man, liberals geld men, then demand that they be fruitful.
Adela Geerth writes:
Mark K. writes, with plaintive wit: Is there a poem somewhere commemorating us, something along the lines of “Ode to the Dead White Man?”
Yes, there is, and it’s one of my favorite poems for just the reason we’re having this discussion: Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”. And Housman addresses a subset of Dead White Men in his “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries”.
But any modern commemoration is likely to be along the lines of a Michael Moore documentary, “Not A Moment Too Soon: The Disappearance of the Dead White Men”.
Anna writes:
Starting at square one, my interpretation of the quoted phrase “still considered superior despite their age” brought to mind the classics, not the translator’s work.
Maybe clumsy, but similar to …
… a chef known for his preparation of delectable historic French dishes, especially his offerings from Georges Auguste Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire, still considered superior despite their age.
I later clicked on your “I find this” and found this …
… especially his versions of the Iliad and Odyssey, which are generally considered as among the best translations available.
Someone is paying attention.
LA replies:
So, someone read my remark about the Wiki article, and decided to change it. In this case it’s a good change, but I am at a loss to understand how Wiki can be minimally stable, readable, and worthwhile, when anyone can change, delete, destroy its contents on a whim. But somehow it is—very much so.
Mencius Moldbug writes:
I’m amazed that no one’s mentioned Mr. Lattimore’s better-known brother, Owen Lattimore.
LA replies
In fact, I noticed it when reading the article on Richmond Lattimore, it was something I hadn’t known, but it didn’t seem relevant to my post so I didn’t think of including it.
LA writes (March 10):
Based on a reader’s e-mail, it’s possible the point of the initial entry was not entirely clear. My point was the silliness of the Wikipedia article when it said that the Richmond Lattimore translation of the Iliad was still considered tops “despite its age,” the implication being that in the normal course of things, a 50 year old translation would no longer be highly regarded. I then humorously projected that attitude onto the Iliad itself, and imagined a Wikipedia article stating with surprise that the Iliad was still considered tops, despite its being almost three thousand years old.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 08, 2008 01:42 PM | Send
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