Inferno

Inferno
created 14th century Dante Alighieri
translated © 2002 Anthony Esolen
528 pages

If Dante's Inferno is to be believed, Hell is mostly populated by Italians.  The first piece in the Divine Comedy, Inferno takes the reader down into the depths of the infernal abyss,  through ring after ring of the damned. Fire is the exception, not the rule down here;  Hell is a vast geography of misery.  The ground is rocky and steep, the air filled with cold and lashing rain, or noxious fumes.  The reader, taking Dante's place as he wanders off the straight roads of life into the wilderness, is guided through Hell in safety by Virgil -- the greatest of all classical poets.

 Inferno contains two things in abundance:  classical allusions and Italian politics.  The world of the Inferno is peopled by characters, beasts, and places that draw on the rich vocabulary of the classical tradition. We see here not only the 'virtuous pagans' hanging around a medieval version of the Asphodel Plains, denied entry into paradise but not damned either, but more than a few heroes of the canon. Odysseus is here, condemned as a liar -- and so is Brutus, a traitor in the gnawing maw of an angry devil.  My original intent was to read the Inferno as part of a series of medieval history and medieval literature -- and considering the amount of Florentine politics here, that may have been helpful. Dante can't so much as move without tripping over a corrupt pope, an exposed friend, or some hapless Florentine giving a  dire warning about impending civil war. (And I do mean tripping -- people are stuck into the ground head first, or trapped in a frozen river with only their heads exposed..) The ranks of the traitors are especially Italian-rich. A little familiarity with medieval cosmology helps in understanding the text -- the idea that the universe is a series of spheres, each level nesting inside the other.  Dante also displays an intriguing imagination, creating poetic punishments. (Schismatics who create division within the church or society are themselves divided with an axe to the head.) At the bottom of the pit is a frozen wasteland, with the greatest of traitors entrapped by darkness and ice. The artic winds that create the ice are created by Satan's wings, constantly beating in his eternal attempt to rise.

When the year's young in season, 
and the spray washes the sun beams in Aquarius
and the nights dwindle south toward half a day
When the frost  paints a copy on the ground
of her white sister's snowy image, but
Her feather's sharpness doesn't last for long [...]   (Canto 24)

 Esolen errs on the side of accuracy rather than rhyme with his translation,  but he does achieve a certain lyric quality and uses footnotes judiciously, creating a text neither confusing nor cluttered. Esolen's appendices are unusually rich, containing textually similar lines from The Aenid, text from the non-canonical "Vision of St. Paul", which describes different  degrees of punishments for sinners, and theological writings from Aquinas and Boniface that would have informed Dante's view.  More extensive notes follow the end of Canto XXXIV, but of course that's not the end of the story -- it continues on the mount of Purgatory.

One by one

In the past few days I’ve knocked out several categories for the 2015 Reading Challenge, including:

A Book Older than 100 Years:  Beowulf,   the story of a hero from another land who conquers a monster,  his mother , and his own fear of death against a horde-guarding dragon.  I used Seamus Heaney’s translation, which seemed to be the best judging by reviews, and found it far shorter than I expected.

A Book You Were Supposed to Read in High School:  Grendel is a mid-20^th century retelling of Beowulf through the eyes of the fearsome beast our doughty Geat  rendered ‘armless.  This was assigned to me in 12^th grade English, though we never read it because the teacher was a Guardsman and we were taught by a series of substitutes.  I never gave away the book, though, because I paid $12 for it, and when a book is assigned to me reading it becomes a point of honor. Anyhoo, Grendel was a curious choice for my teacher. As it turns out the fearsome beast is a teenager:   clumsy, chronically mired in an existential crisis, and fairly miserable on the whole.  Aside from a few philosophical conversations with the dragon, Grendel spends the book crashing through the woods, spying on the Danes, feeling sorry for himself, and occasionally screaming at the heavens. Though I endured this in the hope that Beowulf would show up and put him out of his misery, I must say the ending line did make me feel…almost sorry for him. Almost.

A Book Based on a Television Show: Star Trek: Foul Deeds Will Rise,  based heavily on “The Conscience of the King” and touching on another though to name it would give away  the whodunit.

A Book By an Author Who You Love, But Which You Haven’t Read:   Zebra Derby, Max Shulman. Yes, despite saying “anything by Asimov or Wendell Berry” for months now,  last night I spotted my copy of Max Shulman’s Large Economy Size and realized – hey, I’m awfully fond of Shulman, and I haven’t read the third novel in that collection, so why not?  It’s a short bit of postwar satire in which a returning soldier struggles to find his place in the new world. Through his misadventures Shulman pokes fun at door-to-door salesmen, Communists,   psychologists, bureaucrats, and entrepreneurs . It’s not nearly as funny as the soldier’s previous misadventures (Barefoot Boy With Cheek), erring as it does on the side of randomness, but I still like Shulman. 

What's next? Probably either Book on the Bottom of Your To-Read List,  for which I have a nonfiction contender I've been meaning to read for several years now, but have never actually picked up, or A Book with Magic, as I'm  plodding through The Two Towers.   Sure, I could use a Narnia book for the magic, but scavenger hunts are no fun when there's no challenge.

The Odyssey

The Odyssey
© 1884 trans. George Herbert Palmer, original author Homer
313 pages

Three years ago I read The Illiad, and intended to follow it shortly with The Odyssey. Like Odysseus, however, my own attention was blown of course. This is course a classic, second only to the aforementioned Homeric poem in terms of hallowedness. Virtually everyone knows the story;  a veteran of the war against Troy, the architect of its defeat, attempts to return home, only for a quick jaunt across the Aegean into a ten-year journey, full of monsters and the ill will of the gods. An early escape from the monster cyclops Polyphemus earns our hero Odysseus and his crew the enduring wrath of Poseidon, who throws every obstacle he can at them. Fortunately the clever hero is much-loved of Athena, goddess of craft, and she offers able assistance to both the hero and his young son.They'll need it, because while the master of the house is lost at sea, his manor is filled with suitors who want his wife Penelope to wed them. Literally eating him out of house and home, they intend to kill young Telemachus and force Penelope to wed.

I know the Odyssey as Odysseus' story, but his perilous adventures only occupy a fifth of the book. Instead the tale opens with the gods considering his plight, and Athena embarking on a mission to inspire young Telemachus to go searching for news of his father.  A third of the way in, the focus switches to Odysseus, who -- captive by a goddess who wants him to bed her --  makes his escape with a little help from his divine friends. After washing up on one island and massacring its inhabitants without so much as a cross word exchanged between them,  he is driven into the sea and finds refuge among an island of friendly folk who urge him to tell his story. Enter the cyclopes and the rest.  The book by and large consists of a great deal of dialogue, of people making speeches and delivering flourished stories to one another; Odysseus himself seems to use a different name, and invents a different backstory, every time he makes land.  Even after he's home safely, he spins a yarn for his father, seemingly for the pleasure of saying "Just kidding, it's me!"

Although the speeches and such aren't exactly scintillating reading, the language makes up for that a touch;  the Odyssey began as a oral tale, we know, and the expressive language and use of repetition bear that out. Athena is ever the grey-eyed, Odysseus lordly, the dawn rosy-fingered. (In one stance it is also fair-haired.)  The amount of names,  people and place, dropped here is staggering, putting even The Illiad to shame. I'm glad to have finally read the Odyssey, considering its place in western literature, and enjoyed much of it, but I think I have to count The Iliad my favorite of the two.

Who Killed Homer?

Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom
© 1998 Victor Davis Hanson
290 pages

For hundreds of years, the study of the classics was at the heart of a liberal education, thought essential to the cultivation of free men.  Yet today speaking Latin would be regarded as a sign of eccentricity, not erudition. People now attend university for technical  expertise in fields like business, engineering, or nursing, and such a focus is lauded as practical.  A degree in Greek literature would be derided as useless as a degree in art history, the epitome of wasted public finance.  Victor Hanson argues that vocational training is not the point of a university education; an education is not what you know, but how you behave. In Who Killed Homer? he examines the soul-forming virtues of the classical tradition and contemplates their reason for their unnecessary but imminent demise.

Hansen begins by arguing that the greatest virtues of western civilization have their origin, and sustaining permanence, in the Greek tradition.  Drawing from philosophical treatise (to the Greeks, a category broad enough to cover politics, science, and more) in addition to extant literature, Hanson reviews a spectrum of values with origins in Greece.  These range from concepts given overt legal protection (consensual government and the open criticism thereof, armies subordinate to civil power, free enterprise, etc) to ideas understood at a deeper level, and contributing to the others.  These more fundamental appreciations include the belief that every polis' wellbeing depended on the average middling citizen, not the aristocracy or the mob, and that the world was fraught with meaning. Mysterious yet rational, the world was a place imbued with limits -- limits that extended to man. Part of the Greek heritage are more obvious than others; the very shape of US government structures bears witness to their past, and most histories of science will begin with the Greek enterprise. Other appreciations have been forgotten;  like the belief that man was nothing without the polis;  only the power of culture and threat of sanction by others kept the human animal from behaving worse than beasts.  It is in civilization than man finds salvation from his own destruction. This is a hard lesson given an obscene and brutal summation by Hanson: "Man is nothing without the state."  Ultimately, classical education imparted a cohesive view of the world in which science, politics, and philosophy were knit together, a part of the whole.

If these truths are indeed timeless, how have they fallen by the wayside during the 20th century? Hansen lays the blame solely at the feet of the Classicists, who have thrown away the responsibility of their tradition in the pursuit of status and fortune. They ought to know better, and here Hanson's attitude reveals how seriously he takes his belief that education was the moulding of character, not acquisition of knowledge. To Hanson,  those who have committed themselves to knowing the Greek mind, who have studied it in earnest, bear responsibility for practicing it. Just as we expect a minister to conduct himself with greater care than the average parishioner, so to does Hanson expect classicists to be, if not moral champions, at least contenders;  he expects them to live the values of the Greeks, to take their place in the hoplite ranks of the mind and defend what is theirs, to rise to the challenge of revealing the classics' enduring relevance. Instead,  they focus on increasingly more pointless esoterically in pursuit of esteem,  viewing fellow classicists as competition to be beat for choice university positions in which they can focus on their 'research' and leave the actual teaching to grad students, producing not keen minds but papers on mathematical relationships governing the use of similes in The Illiad.  The comprehension of the whole is lost, and insult is added to injury when said scholars apply tortured modern interpretations,laying waste to The Odyssey by accusing it of being the wellspring of western sexism. Instead of defending and advancing the Greek way, classicists have allowed it to become the scapegoat for every moral self-doubt of the west. After outlining his case against his colleagues, Hanson proposes ways to put the focus back on the meaning of the classics,  in part by forcing classicists to teach."Publish or perish" is anathema to this professor who sees his primary vocation as  giving young people a structured education, not advancing his own  prestige. The work ends on a bitter note, however, as he does not expect the modern world's slide into the moral abyss to be arrested. Instead,  we will probably have to wait for civilization to collapse and demand strong men again, men who will rediscover the Greek truths.

That final bitter retort casts a pall over a strongly-argued book already shadowed by contempt for the modern world, especially ideologies like multiculturalism and relativism. The Greeks understood nuance, but in Hanson's view they stood by everlasting truths. Hanson's own stand is strident at times, to the point that he's less a Pericles calling forth citizens to stand with him and more a Leonidas rallying the troops before a final stand. His appraisal of Greek contributions is surpassed by the analysis of why classical studies have faltered, but Who Killed Homer does double duty as a traditionalist critique of modernity and a passionate appraisal of how much value the tradition still holds, even for moderns overawed by their own cleverness. As a classical partisan myself, I found it invigorating, but Hanson's zeal may spook the unconvinced.

Related:

• The Echo of Greece, Edith Hamilton
• The Way of the Greeks, Edith Hamilton
• Greek Ways, Bruce Thornton
• The Life of Greece, Will Durant