Rambling on heroes

Another Friday Saturday now – time flies when buried in books. The Western Lit course I am teaching for the community college requires me to revisit old friends Achilles and Hector, Odysseus and Penelope, Aeneas and Dido. I feel a little guilty claiming to have “work” to do, when it is so pleasurable. I’m embarrassed to admit I had forgotten how rich these works are, full of insights on purpose and duty, passion and longing, betrayal and fidelity.

For class discussions, we’ve been focusing on the characteristics of a hero and the perils that impede the fulfillment of destiny and reflecting on the concepts of arête and sophrosyne. I hadn’t thought about how appropriate those concepts of human excellence or living up to your potential and of self-control and prudence can be even to the vocation of motherhood.

As a guide for teaching, I’ve been consulting a former professor’s book: Divine Purpose and Heroic Response in Homer and Virgil by John Alvis. I had Dr. Alvis for American Lit and remember more his gravelly Texan voice, which my cousin compared to John Wayne’s, than his comments in class. His book is full of excellent reflections on the struggle in the soul and in society between passion and duty. Probably would be good reading for all those congressmen who are trying to decide our fate today. Like the gods warring, they forget the consequences for us small folk trying to live life without too much interference from them. If the gov’t goes on furlough, I suppose the positive will be that we won’t have to pack out of here as quickly as we anticipated, but the negative is that the commissary might close! I don’t know what other consequences are real or rumors floating around facebook.

So back to the Greeks and Romans: first I admire Penelope’s restraint – who doesn’t love reading about her cleverness and self-control? And the happy reunion:

"But the royal couple, once they'd reveled in all/ The longed-for joys of love, reveled in each other's stories, / The radiant woman telling of all she'd borne at home, ... And great Odysseus told his wife of all the pains/ he had dealt out to other men and all the hardships / he'd endured himself - his story first to last - and she listened on, enchanted . . .' Sleep never sealed her eyes till all was told."

Just like the punch of recognition in the exchange between Andromache and Hector, reading this scene as a military wife has a much stronger resonance than it did as a college student.

But I also love reading about Medea’s meltdown. I had forgotten the power of these Greek dramas. So affecting. Here’s Medea who has sacrificed her family and her homeland to preserve and assist Jason, and he’s throwing her over for a younger girl with better connections. And Jason tries to tell Medea that his decision is common sense and in the best interest of the children, and that she makes too much of the affairs of the bed. Does his betrayal merit her horrific acts of retribution? Medea’s mistake was letting love overrule the connections of family and society in the first place: “Love is a dangerous thing: Loving without any limit.”

The question the chorus raises about whether people are happier without children is an interesting problem – being a parent is full of trials, and the joys are often ineffable. From the fifth choral ode:

 “That people without the function of parent

Are happier than the begetters of offspring.

The childless man has no way of telling

Whether he misses a curse or a blessing.

Nevertheless, the childless person 

Certainly misses many a burden."

This passage reminded me of a conversation with a guy who had to enter my request for maternity care into the computer for government health care. I was just pregnant with my fourth, and he was amazed we were having so many children. He and his wife had decided not to have any children because children were so much trouble and expense. This couple wanted eventually to buy a boat and travel and retire on an island. But here he was doing data entry, and he was older than I was by at least a decade. As he was talking I had this image of my grandparents and holiday dinners and the overflowing pleasure they used to take in having all these children around. What would this guy do for joy when he was too old to go out on his boat with his wife? What if she left him?

You have to wonder if the chorus is being ironic, deliberately ignoring the implication of The Odyssey that great joy and wisdom come only after great suffering, which is the other theme of our class discussions of the heroic journey. Hence, Aristotle’s argument that tragedy is the highest form of imitation. Everyone likes a good, gut-wrenching plot: “Over the years, you know, /a man finds solace even in old sorrows, true, a man/ who’s weathered many blows and wandered many miles,” says the faithful swineherd Eumaius.

One of the journal assignments which I borrowed from another teacher who gave me her syllabus was to compare your life story with the heroic journey.  Some interesting responses.  I suppose you could make the argument that the urge to write and read blogs fulfills the same desire to apply narrative structure and to give heroic dimensions to our own stories.

Another good quote from the translator of my copy of Medea, Paul Roche: “Translations, it has been said, are like wives: the beautiful are seldom faithful, and the faithful are seldom beautiful.” While I enjoyed the translation of Stanley Lombardo’s Iliad in the Norton Anthology, Roche’s translation of Medea is much more affective than the Anthology’s by Rex Warner. That such different poetry can be made of the same work says something about the inexhaustibility of the creative spirit.

Fortuitously, I happened to hear the song "You Lie" by The Band Perry on the country music station on the way to class. It could be Medea's theme song, and it's a great example of similes in the epic style: “You lie like a Persian rug on a rich man’s floor, you lie like a coon dog sunning on my front porch, you lie like a penny on the parking lot of the grocery store.” Say what you will about country music; these are some great images.


This class lasts only six weeks. One of my biggest challenges is picking and choosing what to read from the text. The next section is Eastern writings, which requires me to do a little more research. But even what little I’ve read so far, seems familiar. How similar the teachings of wise men. Why do people need to hear these directions over and over, and yet still fail to walk that narrow way? Back to Medea and her passions.