Warriors and Heroes-Leaders and Thugs and the Rapacious Wrath of Clytemnestra
A Current Commentary
I can not sleep. This night is almost gone. This night, like the nights in Homer was mysterious, powerful but more importantly, aloof, unyielding and raging. There are no rosy fingers of dawn...not yet, it is still deep winter. I can not sleep.
The illustrious book club and a selected few others are reading Homer's Iliad aloud turning the dark months. The incandescent translation of Emily Wilson was a call to arms for us. We decided to sit around the fire, with only water, and read for two straight hours, absorbed in the cadence and the text. Sure...five weeks in and its Arnold Palmers at noon and light snacks and chatter in between key moments of text.
"Ares, Ares, destroyer of men, reeking blood, stormer of ramparts, why not let these mortals fight it out for themselves? Let Zeus give glory to either side he chooses.” (Athena)... read with passion
"Could someone pass the cookies to this end of the table?"...said with a need to raise up some blood sugar.
You get the picture....DRAMA and drama
The Mask of Agamemnon is a gold funerary mask discovered at the Bronze Age site of Mycenae in southern Greece. The mask, displayed in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, has been described by the historian Cathy Gere as the "Mona Lisa of prehistory".
Hephaestus making armor for Thetis, by Giulio Romano, ca. 1492-1546
She gives it to her son, Achilles
Gods rushing to the aid of the Trojans
I have never read the entire Iliad until now. We translated sections of it in high school. I was vaguely interested but not captivated by it as I was reading, Electra or The Trojan Women.
This time, I am besotted by it. The inherent, universal violence is relaxing, cathartic, a distraction from the global winter from hell. It is like putting a puzzle together, the matching of the Who's Who, both ancient and current.
Who is the Hero and who is the Warrior? On Friday, Alexiei Navalny was murdered. It was an assumed death from the moment he returned to Russia in 2021...a Hero? without question...and a martyr, screaming into the wind like Cassandra and sacrificed. The difference is that the world is watching, not soon enough to save him as his death was foreshadowed over and over again, but his martyrdom will not be wasted.
There is a scar tissue in my heart that is a long held grief for earlier martyrs of my life time. I did not think that I could ever feel the depth of that sorrow again till last Friday. Scar tissue can be ripped open again. Not since the death of Robert Kennedy, in my home town, in 1968, have I felt the intense grief like Andromache and an unquenchable rage like that of Clytemnestra A 47 year old man has given his life for what he believed in. Robert Kennedy was 42. Martin Luther King was 39. When MLK died in January of 1968, I had just turned 18. Kennedy did not learn that King was dead until his plane landed in Indianapolis. According to John J. Lindsay, Kennedy "seemed to shrink back as though struck physically" and put his hands to his face, saying "Oh, God. When is this violence going to stop?"[8] Robert Kennedy addressed a crowd in the African, American ghetto of Indianapolis. "He quoted the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, with whom he had become acquainted through his brother's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy."
"Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
47...Navalny is the age of my students from my last kindergarten class. Their 5 year old faces ran on a loop in the dead of the night. Alexei Navalny could have been my son or my kindergarten student. Dave and I refer to our students as the kids because we see them as they were. But last night, I saw them as middle aged adults, battered and sacrificed.
Like Hector in The Iliad, these men knew, as though foretold by a prophet, that an early death was in the game plan. They were fighters, warriors for right, not in the sense of Achilles, who is good at his job and a vengeful child, but warriors cum heroes. They battled the thugs with their rhetoric. They raged against injustice. They paid the ultimate price.
Agamemnon, the warrior thug, is filled with a blood lust for bounty and wealth and power. I can read The Iliad with ease, knowing that his day belongs to his wife as she slides him into the tub and finishes him off. It is a literary satisfaction that fills me with a desire to make a list of abject, immoral, sociopathic leaders and officials and others, who have landed in my "thug pile." It sounds black and white, doesn't it? Is there no room for redemption? Perhaps not. The black and white is the inherent evil of domination, slavery and destruction that must be subdued and slaughtered in the bath like Agamemnon. The new rage of Clytemnestra is the rage of Yulia Navalnaya.
"If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong." Alexei Navalny
I close with the Requiem Mass "Manzoni Requiem": II. Dies Irae · Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra · State Academic Chorus · Igor Markevitch · Giuseppe Verdi...the Dies Irae-The Day of Wrath
Powerful words, Mary, and so true.