Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths by Emily Katz Anhalt

Author:Emily Katz Anhalt [Anhalt, Emily Katz]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 0300217374
Google: FJYuDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B0747QYVRN
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:38:30.618000+00:00

Cultivating the Humane Imagination

By emphasizing Ajax’s changing relationships and his self-destructive refusal to accept friendships and enmities that can change over time, this play suggests that striving to help your friends and harm your enemies cannot be your highest and most absolute principle. It is irrational, just as the enjoyment of the suffering of your enemies is irrational, since “friend” and “enemy” are not permanent, unchanging categories. They fluctuate with time. Although Ajax’s inflexibility matches Athena’s, she provides no admirable moral example. The code of helping friends and harming enemies works fine for a goddess. Human beings need a better principle.

Tecmessa intuits such a principle, when she insists that Ajax deserves to be lamented even by his enemies (923–924).36 But it takes Odysseus to spell out the logic: we are all human. We will all be weak and vulnerable and dead someday. In the beginning of the play, Athena expects Odysseus to enjoy Ajax’s calamity, but he cannot. Athena invites Odysseus to laugh at his enemy (79). This should be Odysseus’s big moment. He has won the armor; he is at the top of his game. But Odysseus cannot celebrate or revel in Ajax’s suffering and humiliation. Instead, he tells Athena,

I pity him.

He’s altogether wretched, even though he is hostile to me,

because he is yoked together with a ruinous folly,

and I recognize that that could just as easily be me.

For I see that we are all nothing, all of us who live,

nothing except fleeting images, empty shadow. (121–126)

Odysseus feels pity instead of satisfaction, sadness instead of delight. He recognizes that what happened to Ajax could happen to anyone, even to himself. As mortals, none of us has any knowledge or control over miseries the future holds. Later, even the smug Menelaus can see himself in Ajax’s place. He claims, “Before, this man was fiery, violent, and overbearing. But now it’s my turn to have great thoughts” (1087–1088). But this insight fails to make Menelaus compassionate. Unlike Menelaus, however, Odysseus makes the connection. His compassion comes from his understanding that we are all human. Dependency and defeat await us all.37

Odysseus’s compassion derives from a farsighted understanding of his own self-interest. After Ajax’s death, Odysseus insists on the justice of honoring a fallen enemy, explaining, “For I myself will also arrive at this” (1365). Odysseus recognizes that once dead, he too may be vulnerable to his enemies. He will need them to be capable of restraint and respect. Odysseus’s example shows that kindness, compassion, and generosity need not come from any extraordinary, selfless altruism. They are, rather, the logical consequence of thinking things through.38

In defending Ajax’s honor against Agamemnon and Menelaus, Odysseus recognizes that hatred is no longer appropriate, and he is able to give it up. He respects greatness, even in an enemy, telling the sons of Atreus:

Listen to me. By the gods,

don’t dare to throw this man out so cruelly unburied.

In no way let violence conquer you

to hate so much that you trample on Justice.

This man was also once most hateful to me

from the time when I became master of the arms of

Achilles.

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