Some thoughts about the origins of "Greek ethics"

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 5, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 3-20

  Smith, Nicholas D ^a  

^a LEWIS AND CLARK COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

"Aret "; "Eudaimonia"; Aristotle; Excellence; Homer; Justice; Plato; Socrates; Virtue

Indexed keywords

EID: 72749123945     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1011460723395     Document Type: Article

References (14)

1. I say "attributed to Homer," to avoid the question - as essentially irrelevant to my project in this paper - whether the two surviving "Homeric" epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were written or composed by the same person. M. I. Finley thinks it is certain that they were not (The World of Odysseus, Second Edition, New York: Penguin Books, 1979, p. 15).
2. The opposite view is argued in Seth L. Schein, The Mortal Hero (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 37-38.
3. A detailed and very balanced discussion of the question, which concludes that it was a single author, is given by Maurice Bowra in "Composition, " Chapter 3 in A.J.B. Wace and F.H. Stubbings (eds.), A Companion to Homer (New York: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 38-74. By the time of the classical Greeks, of course, the authorship of these works (and others, now lost, as well as of the Homeric Hymns) was given to Homer, about whom virtually nothing was known, and about whom only legends and hearsay were available.
4. I say "portrayed in Homer" and refer to "the Homeric heroes" because I am not at all confident that Homer himself - whoever he was - shared the moral views we would associate with his characters. Indeed, as I will try to show in this paper, I think that Homer actually does much to show the failings of his characters' views, thus pointing the way to the later philosophers' positions. My suspicion is that Homer's own views would be much closer to those of the philosophers than to those of the heroes his work immortalizes. But that requires a different argument, which I must leave for another day. A view of the Iliad that is similar in many ways to mine in this paper, and which almost certainly has colored every aspect of my view of the Iliad is given in Simone Weil's The Iliad of Poem of Force (trans. Mary McCarthy) originally published in the November 1945 issue of Politics, and reprinted in pamphlet form by Pendle Hill, Wallingford, Pennsylvania, 1956.
5. E.g. at Iliad 1.244, 1.412, 16.21, 16.271, 16.274, 19.216. For a careful discussion of this description of Achilles, see Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans, Second Edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), Chapter 2, pp. 26-41.
6. Lattimore's translation of Iliad I.1: "Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus"; Fagles's translation does better, I think: "Rage-Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles."
7. For a particularly apt discussion of this point, see Finley, p. 117.
8. So Finley, p. 117: "[N]ot once did Homer or Agamemnon or Odysseus charge Achilles with anything so anachronistic as public responsibility."
9. A.W.H. Adkins, From the Many to the One (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1970), p. 30, speaking about "The Homeric world," puts it this way: "Other qualities, such as justice and self-control, are less highly valued by this society. A wronged individual sets a high value on obtaining redress for himself; but society in general sees so much more need for the success-producing qualities of the agathos than for his justice and self-control that the latter are no part of his aretê." This, I claim, is one of the great "paradigm shifts" achieved by the Greek philosophers. See Weil, p. 15, for a similar claim about responses in later Greek thought to themes raised in Homer.
10. See Finley, p. 118: "The Iliad in particular is saturated in blood, a fact which cannot be hidden or argued away, twist the evidence as none may in a vain attempt to fit archaic Greek values to a more gentle code of ethics."
11. And not just Achilles. As the author of the Odyssey explains it, the same is true of all of the heroes of the Iliad: "You remind me of the sorrow we, the irresistible sons of the Achaeans, endured in that country, all we suffered in our ships wandering over the murky sea in search of plunder wherever Achilles led us, and all the fighting round the city of Priam; there, in time, all our best men were killed. There lies warlike Ajax, there Achilles, there Patroclus, peerless counsellor, and there my own dear son, strong and noble, Antilochus, a swify runner and a brave fighter. And many other troubles we endured besides: what mortal man could tell them all?" (Odyssey 3: 103-114, trans. Colin Macleod).
12. Macleod comments, "And where there is most glory, doom is most present: the greatest victors of the poem - Patroclus, Hector, and Achilles - all not only take precious lives, but are fated to lose their own soon afterwards, as Homer reminds us in their moments of triumph. In short, as the scholion on the first line of the poem succinctly puts it: 'he invented a tragic proem for a series of tragedies' " (p. 8 of "Homer on Poetry and the Poetry of Homer," in Colin Macleod, The Collected Essays of Colin Macleod (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 1-15.
13. A cogent account of how Achilles' story in the Iliad calls "heroic values" into question may be found in C. R. Beye, Ancient Greek Literature and Society (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1975), pp. 72-74.
14. My own interpretation of Socrates' view of the unity of the virtues may be found in Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, "Socrates and the Unity of the Virtues," The Journal of Ethics 1 (1997), pp. 311-324.