Culture shapes us long before we have anything to say about it. Expectations soak in through language, habit, ritual, and silence. Before we make choices, we inherit stories. Before we speak, we are spoken of, for, and about.
Any moral compass—formed by culture—precedes our ability to question it.
Today, ours is deeply influenced by what our founders feared: the factionalism of politics that demands loyalty on either side of the divide.
Loyalty tests, left and right, have become the substance of political speech. The current administration makes outrageous claims to see who is with them and who is not. The previous administration denied signs of cognitive decline and remained loyal even when the trajectory was clear.
Rejuvenation must cultivate new ways to re-energize our moral compass.
The American Moral Compass
We have always had a precarious moral compass in the US. Without an established church, monarchy, or hereditary elite, we have often cast the presidency as our default guide to right and wrong.
We therefore face a unique danger when the presidency becomes concerned only with its own power and prestige. As we saw during the Vietnam War, this mode of moral leadership entrenches what the Federalists feared: ‘the violence of faction’.1
When faction drives our behavior as citizens, our compass erodes.
For the Federalists, democracy was fundamentally fragile because it requires a strong moral compass from its citizens and its leaders.
Today I’m following the Federalists into this fragility by reaching back, as they did, to ancient Greece—a time when the moral compass of democracy was nascent, when the very possibility of its existence was not a sure thing.
Reading Homer’s Iliad puts us in direct contact with this precarious birth.
Our moral compass can find energy in reading it anew.
The Iliad and Moral Crisis
In times of moral and political crisis, the Iliad has been a source of rejuvenation. Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff turned to it as fascism was remaking Europe in the last century. Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam warns us of the destruction of moral character in war. Edith Hall has most recently read the Iliad as the experience of environmental catastrophe.2
Much of the Iliad’s power resides in the clarity of the mirror it held up to its time. With nearly every verse, we find men motivated either by the activation of revenge or the mollification of one who threatens to unleash it.
The Iliad narrates time as a chain of loyalty-driven vendettas that we retrospectively call the Trojan War. Even during its ‘golden age’ of democracy (400’s BCE), Greece vibrated between calm and rage.
The Federalists sought to overcome democracy’s volatility with our Constitution.3
Cataclysmic Wrath
Weil starts her essay with ‘The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force.’ We can be more precise. The true subject is mēnis, the epic’s famous first word.
Mēnis is translated sometimes as rage, sometimes as anger. Emily Wilson’s beautiful new translation renders it as ‘cataclysmic wrath’. Leonard Muellner’s study of mēnis, The Anger of Achilles: Mēnis in Greek Epic, defines it as the threat of indiscriminate havoc that is designed to keep everyone in line, ‘innocent and guilty alike’.
Its defining feature is the fury and scope of its willingness to use violence and cruelty to enforce blind loyalty to a leader. It reaches well beyond the punishment of a single offender. It ‘brings drastic consequences on the whole community’ for any perceived slight to a leader’s status.4
This cataclysmic wrath is the mirror that Homer held up to his time.
We misunderstand mēnis when we think of it only as an emotional or psychological state. Its scope is social, not just individual. It starts as the slighting of a leader but turns into factional violence as the leader sorts everyone into ‘for me’ and ‘against me’.
In mēnis, we can begin to see the ‘violence of faction’ as the vengeful hatred of one group for another. Personal resentment channels into collective polarization, and vice versa.5
It sorts everyone into factions and demands loyalty. Scapegoating intensifies.
Homer takes us on a journey into the many dimensions of mēnis, including its traps and escape hatches. This is the power and the beauty of the Iliad for our time.
Holding Back
We must be careful in seeing mēnis as only active and unhinged rage—as when Apollo is shooting fiery, plague-infested arrows into the Greek encampment, or when Achilles is slaughtering Trojans at such a rate that the river Scamander is blocked up with bodies.6
The moral focus of the Iliad is in holding back wrath when it is triggered. This is, in fact, how Achilles’ mēnis moves through Book I: as he draws his sword to kill his own commander, Agamemnon, for taking his war prize, ‘fair-cheeked Brisêis’, Athena intervenes saying,
Listen to me. Hold back. (I.214)
This leads to Achilles’ withdrawal from battle, knowing that his absence will doom his fellow Greeks.
The vast majority of the Iliad takes place in this held back state of Achilles’ wrath as he ‘sat still beside his ships and seethed with mēnis’ (I.489).
In this held back state something remarkable happens. Homer shows us the barest hint of a human moral compass that can choose which way history goes.7
Fate and Choice
As Achilles rests in his own dormant wrath, he contemplates two fates laid out for him:
My silver-footed goddess mother Thetis
says that there are two ways my death may come.
If I stay here and fight, besieging Troy,
my chance of ever going home is lost,
but I shall have a name that lasts forever.
Or if I go home to my own dear country,
I lose my glory but I gain long life. (IX.410-16, Wilson trans.)
Time is deeply out of joint in this scene.
Fate is often thought of as an unavoidable cosmic sanction that imposes an iron necessity on time. But in this moment, fate is a mortal’s choice—home or battle?
Of course, a quiet, unexceptional life at home is no match for what Gregory Nagy calls the major goal of the ancient Greek hero: ‘to have his identity put permanently on record through kleos [an epic song such as the Iliad].’8
The culture has shaped Achilles’ choice long before this moment. Necessity weighs heavy, and he will return to battle.
But his decision is not automatic: Homer suspends Achilles’ choice in mid air. In the midst of mēnis held back, as the violence of war rages outside the tent, Homer shows us a mortal contemplating the possibility of not doing what his culture—and its factional gods—demand.
With no other option, mēnis must become active for the Iliad to do its work. Mēnis will move from the tent to the battlefield as it exits its holding back phase to become unhinged wrath.
It will pause only momentarily—twelve days, to be precise—in shared grief, as Achilles and Priam (the Trojan king) meet to mourn and momentarily transcend the decade-long cycle of vengeance, fractured allegiances, and loyalty tests.
In their grief, they question the value of the gods.
The gods have spun for all unlucky mortals
a life of grief, while nothing troubles them. (24.525-26, Wilson trans.)
Is Homer asking, ‘Can’t we find a better way to live together than what this culture demands of us?’9
The Long Shadow
To stare into Achilles’ tent is to think that fate might be something we choose.
To be sure, Achilles’ tent is a deeply violent space. Brisêis’ lament over the death of Patroclus (Achilles’ best friend) and her insistence on his kindness during her captivity reveals, if only in contrast, the sexual violence of the warrior ethic.
We should not be deluded: we will rarely, if ever, find ourselves in a morally purified space.10
Many generations down the road, Plato and Aristotle will provide more systematic answers. Both will use the figure of Achilles as they elaborate on the moral compass.
The Federalists will continue staring into that tent seeking better answers to our propensity ‘to fall into mutual animosities’ and ‘the violence of faction’ (No. 10).
These questions should not be lost on us today. We ought not squander this opportunity to rejuvenate our moral compass for our time out of joint.
Learning to suspend the weight of culture and to assess its expectations and demands—left and right—is a place to start.
The Federalist Papers (1787-88) can be read as a prolonged effort to imagine how a ‘well-constructed Union’ might contain factional violence: ‘Among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.’ (Federalist No. 10, James Madison)
English translations of both essays are in War and the Iliad, New York Review Books, 2005. Edith Hall’s Epic of the Earth: Reading Homer’s Iliad in the Fight for a Dying World has just been published this year by Yale University Press. For a connection between the Vietnam War and the Iliad, see Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. For an unflinching view into how violent this treatment actually was, see Pat Barker’s novel The Silence of the Girls and Edith Hall’s discussion of it in The Epic of the Earth, 33-36.
The Federalists were well aware of the violence of that time. Hamilton, in No. 9, tells us how the Greeks ‘were kept perpetually vibrating between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy’, and any moments of peace were ‘soon to be overwhelmed by the tempestuous waves of sedition and party rage.’ For a compelling narrative of the unstable history of Athenian democracy, see Christian Meier’s Athens: A Portrait of the City in Its Golden Age.
The Anger of Achilles: Mēnis in Greek Epic, Cornell University Press 1996, page 8. See also Gregory Nagy, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours, page 13 where he cites Muellner’s definition. See Nagy’s ‘An Outline of the Homeric Iliad’ for a summary of the epic and a discussion of the role of mēnis. See also a recent post by Classical Wisdom describing the different modes of anger in ancient Greek and Roman thought.
Muellner insists on the social dimension over the psychological: ‘For us emotions are primarily individualized and internal, and their social dimension are semantically secondary. With mēnis, however, its social dimension is neither secondary to its emotional one nor divisible into inner and outer aspects’ (138).
While the opening lines promise a tale of Achilles’ mēnis, the first manifestation of it is from the god Apollo (Book I, line 75). For the blocking up of the river Scamander, see Book XXI.
Jonathan Shay emphasizes this moment of withdrawal in his discussion of mēnis. Unlike Achilles, American soldiers could not ‘withdraw physically from combat. They did, however, have the freedom to withdraw emotionally and mentally from everything beyond their small circle of combat-proven comrades.’ The moral effects endure well beyond the war. Mēnis, in Shay’s analysis, leads to a ‘choking off of the social and moral world’ as ‘An us-against-them mentality severs all other attachments and commitments’ (Achilles in Vietnam, 21-3).
The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours, Hour 1, page 39.
In my last essay, I discussed how Lucretius’ universe is not devoid of gods but simply moves them into a position where humans can call on them for moral orientation in a crisis—Venus or Mars. At the end of the Iliad we have the beginning of Lucretius’ universe: the gods are being pushed aside and human autonomy is becoming visible.
Briseis’ lament is in Book XIX, lines 282-302. See also Hector’s envisioning of his wife Andomache’s future after he is inevitably killed, and ‘some bronze-armored Greek leads you off’ (Book VI, line 455).