Virtue and Knowledge

An Introduction to Ancient Greek Ethics

William J. Prior

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315522036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Originally published in 1991, this book focuses on the concept of virtue, and in particular on the virtue of wisdom or knowledge, as it is found in the epic poems of Homer, some tragedies of Sophocles, selected writings of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers.

The key questions discussed are the nature of the virtues, their relation to each other, and the relation between the virtues and happiness or well-being. This book provides the background and interpretative framework to make classical works on Ethics, such as Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, accessible to readers with no training in the classics.

1
Before Philosophy: Some Literary Portraits of Virtue

Greek thought about virtue, knowledge, and the good life begins, not with philosophy, but with literature. Understanding the historical origin of a concept is often vital to understanding its meaning; it is particularly important in this case, for at the beginning of Greek literature and thought stand the two great Homeric epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, whose influence on later Greek thought is unparalleled.

When the ancient Greeks thought about virtue, they were more likely to think of examples of virtuous individuals than abstract principles or rules of virtuous conduct. These examples may have been drawn from history, but they were more often taken from poetry. The poetic examples which would have sprung first and foremost to the mind of the ordinary Greek were those of the great heroes of the Homeric poems: Achilles in the Iliad and Odysseus in the Odyssey. We may say, in fact, that these characters serve as paradigms of virtuous conduct for the Greeks: they are primary examples of virtue, and any theory of virtue would have to consider them seriously and not simply dismiss them.

The Iliad and the Odyssey are among the classics of Western literature. The Greeks regarded these poems, and in particular the Iliad, as the greatest literary works their culture had produced. They did not, however, simply look on these poems as literary masterpieces. They used them as the primary texts in the education of their youth, and drew from them much of their theology, their ethics, and their understanding of their culture.

The ancient Greeks never attained national political unity. The main unit of social organization in classical times was the self-governing city-state, or polis. These Greek city-states were fiercely independent; they were often, as in the case of Athens and Sparta, political rivals. Despite this fragmented political situation, however, the ancient Greeks shared a common culture. Consider religion: though each city had its own protective deity (in Athens it was Athena, the goddess of wisdom), all Greeks recognized the same twelve Olympian gods, today the still-familiar subjects of books and courses on "Greek mythology."

The Homeric poems give definitive form to this Olympian religion. These poems present to the reader a world in which the gods interact with humans and display many human qualities. The gods get angry with people and with each other, they take sides in human conflicts, such as the Trojan War, they seduce and deceive both mortals and immortals, and they cause human deaths. Though they are also shown as responsive to human needs on occasion, the portrait of the gods in these poems is not a flattering one. They seem, to the modern reader at any rate, less noble and admirable than the great human heroes of the poems, Achilles and Odysseus and the Trojan prince Hector.

Despite the fact that these poems do not depict the gods in the most favorable light, they formed the basis of much later Greek religious thought. Most Greeks, it seems safe to say, accepted Homer's picture of the gods as true, and thought of these poems as in some sense divinely inspired. (Homer invokes the muses, Greek goddesses of poetry and art, at the start of each poem.) Nor was the influence of Homer limited to theology. It is often said that the Iliad and Odyssey were regarded much as the Bible has been regarded throughout most of Western civilization: as the source of knowledge about human conduct and the world in general as well as about the divine. There are of course differences: the Greeks were not concerned to establish the authority of Homer as a sacred text as Christians were in the case of the Bible. If, however, one thinks of the way in which the people and stories of the Bible became for centuries the common coin of Western civilization, structuring our view of our origins, nature and history, one will have a fairly close analog of the influence of Homer on the ancient Greeks. As Adam and Eve, Noah, Moses and David shaped the imaginations even of non-believers, so Achilles, Odysseus and Agamemnon provided models of human conduct for the Greeks.

About Homer we know virtually nothing. The Greeks regarded him as the composer of both the Iliad and the Odyssey, but they also possessed little information about him as a person. Scholars in this century have discovered that the poems were the last stage in a long tradition of oral composition, to which many poets may have contributed. The Iliad and Odyssey achieved their present form sometime in the eighth century BC, but they contain material that is centuries older than that; some of it may date back to the Trojan War itself, which probably took place in the twelfth or even the thirteenth century. How much of these poems is based on historical occurrence and how much is invention, how much is due to a single poet who put them into final form and how much to his many predecessors who contributed material to the final synthesis, and even whether the two poems are the work of the same final composer — these are things we shall never know with certainty. Fortunately, our uncertainty about the authorship of the poems has little effect on our evaluation of their content.

The Homeric hero

The Homeric poems are set in the period of the Trojan War. This war, which the ancient Greeks at any rate regarded as an historical event, provided the material for much later Greek literature. According to tradition, the cause of the war was the abduction of Helen, the wife of the Spartan king Menelaus, by Paris, the son of the Trojan king Priam. Menelaus and his brother, Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, assembled an armada of ships from other Greek cities and led a vast army against Troy (a city on the coast of Asia Minor). This combined force besieged Troy for a decade. Unable to capture it by force, the Greeks resorted to the deception of the Trojan horse to gain entry to the city, which they then destroyed. Their return to Greece was marked by more tribulations; Odysseus, the last to reach home, took another ten years to do so.

Homer does not attempt to tell the lull story of the war or its aftermath. Instead, he focuses in the Iliad on a brief period in the last year of the war, and in the Odyssey on the final days of Odysseus' wanderings and his return home. In the course of describing these brief episodes, however, Homer gives us a picture of the life of an entire civilization.

Society, as depicted in the Homeric poems, is highly stratified. At the top are the great kings, Agamemnon among the Greeks and Priam among the Trojans. They are the leaders of loose alliances with other states; the kings of these states are independent, yet honor the authority of Agamemnon or Priam, whom they treat as "first among equals." Beneath the great kings and their noble allies are the mass of ordinary soldiers (in the Iliad) and citizens (in the Odyssey), about whom we hear very little from Homer. At the bottom of the social order are slaves, who often are women of free or even noble birth who had the misfortune to be captured in war. Homer devotes a good deal of attention to the portrayal of female characters in the two poems; this should not conceal from us, however, the fact that women in Homeric society derive their social status from that of their fathers and husbands. People who perform certain valuable ceremonial, religious or socially useful functions, such as heralds, prophets and doctors hold an intermediate rank, not honored as the kings or nobles, but having privileges not possessed by ordinary men. Between individuals of whatever rank there are rules of conduct which are derived from their respective status. Heroes must behave in a certain way toward their king, in another toward heralds and prophets, and in a third toward ordinary men. These standards of conduct are sanctified by tradition and are well known to everyone in Homeric society.

The heroes of the Homeric poems live for one thing above all else, glory. In war, the primary means of attaining glory is through success in combat. The measure of glory is the honor one receives from one's fellow nobles, and honor is not simply an abstract concept, but something reflected concretely in the distribution of the spoils of war. The pursuit of glory is what unites the heroes on both sides in the Trojan War. Homer is not unaware of the fact that the Greeks are at war with the Trojans because of Paris' theft of Helen, and he makes it clear in Book VI of the Iliad that Hector, the greatest of the Trojan warriors, is fighting in defense of his home and family, but one feels that such motives, important as they are, are less important to the Homeric hero than the pursuit of glory. If combat is the arena in which the heroes of the Iliad win glory, it is also the arena of death. Death and glory go hand in hand, and one of the surest ways to win glory is to die in heroic combat. The heroes of the Iliad are aware of this relationship, but in general they accept the goal as worth the risks; their attitude is exemplified by the hero Sarpedon, a Trojan ally, when he says to his companion Glaukos

Glaukos, why is it you and I are honoured before others
with pride of place, the choice meats and the filled wine
cups
in Lykia, and all men look on us as if we were
immortals...?
Man, supposing you and I, escaping this battle,
would be able to live on forever, ageless, immortal
so neither would I myself go on fighting in the foremost
nor would I urge you into the fighting where men win glory.
But now, seeing that the spirits of death stand close about us
in their thousands, no man can turn aside nor escape them,
let us go on and win glory for ourselves, or yield it to others.

(Iliad XII, 310—12, 322—8; Lattimore's translation)

The hero is expected to display certain virtues in his pursuit of glory. The virtues of primary importance are those characteristics that lead to success in combat, and these include physical strength and speed as well as courage. Since war is not merely an arena for solitary combat, however, loyalty to the cause for which one is fighting is also a virtue, and so is wisdom, here manifested in the concern of the wise man for maintaining the unity of the army and conducting the war well. In the Iliad Nestor and Odysseus manifest this kind of wisdom on the Greek side, while Poulydamas offers sage advice to the Trojans. Achilles, Hector and Agamemnon bring tragedy on themselves as a direct result of ignoring this wise advice. For the most part, however, wisdom plays a fairly minor role in the attainment of heroic status. No one attains this status by virtue of wisdom alone, and no hero in the prime of life, not even wily Odysseus, is known entirely for wisdom and not for the martial virtues as well. It is no accident that Nestor, the character in the Iliad most closely associated with this virtue, is beyond fighting age, and even he notes that he was the equal or superior of the current generation of heroes in his youth.

From these remarks there emerges a picture of the typical Homeric hero: he is a person of noble rank who functions in a highly stratified society according to a strict code of conduct. He lives for glory, which he achieves by the display of virtue or excellence, particularly excellence in combat, and which is accorded to him by his fellow heroes in the form of gifts and renown. Wisdom, reflected in military counsel, is one form of virtue, though not the primary one for a hero in the prime of life. We can already see functioning here the general framework of Greek ethics I spoke of in the Introduction: a goal (the heroic life or the life of glory) to which the virtues, including wisdom in its own way, contribute.

Achilles

Achilles, the preeminent hero of the Iliad, is far from the typical hero. He is unique among the Homeric heroes in that he manages to violate most, if not all of the traditions in his society; yet he does not lose the status of a hero by so doing. Achilles is the finest warrior among the Greek and Trojan armies. This is a fact recognized by everyone, including Achilles himself; only Hector at times questions Achilles' prowess, and this is a sign of Hector's self-deception. Despite his superior physical strength, speed of foot (he is customarily referred to as "swift-footed Achilles"), military skill and courage, however, he is not the military leader of the Greeks, that position is reserved for Agamemnon, in his capacity as king. From this fact stem all the troubles of the Iliad.

The Iliad begins with a quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon. Agamemnon has refused the request of a priest of Apollo to return his daughter Chryseis, who has become Agamemnon's "prize of war" or concubine. Apollo has accordingly stricken the Greek army with a plague. Achilles has called an assembly to discover the cause of the plague. When the prophet Calchas, with Achilles' promise of protection, has revealed that Agamemnon is responsible, Agamemnon finally agrees to give back the girl, but demands another as compensation. When Achilles quarrels with Agamemnon over this demand, Agamemnon threatens to remove Achilles' "prize," Briseis. Achilles is so furious that he considers killing Agamemnon on the spot, but on the advice of the goddess Athena, who offers him "shining gifts" to compensate for his humiliation, he instead withdraws from the fighting.

This unfortunate series of events is only possible because of the division of power between Achilles and Agamemnon. Had Agamemnon been the greatest warrior among the Greeks as well as king, no one would have dared to stand up to him. Certainly no other hero of the Greek army would have taken it upon himself, as Achilles does, to call the assembly, offer his protection to Calchas, and upbraid Agamemnon in public. Even Achilles, however, finally balks at murdering Agamemnon, showing the power the office of king and the traditions of his society have even over a warrior powerful enough to kill with impunity. Agamemnon no doubt reacts harshly to Achilles because he sees his actions as a threat to his royal power; in a sense, Achilles brings his punishment upon himself. Yet because Achilles is the greatest Greek warrior, Agamemnon cannot simply kill him or expel him from the army, as he might a lesser warrior; Achilles is too powerful to kill, and the army needs him.

Without Achilles to aid them, the Greeks are defeated by the Trojans under Hector. In Book IX Agamemnon, at the prompting of Nestor, agrees to send an embassy to Achilles, apologizing and offering many gifts, including the return of Briseis, if he will return to battle. This was the result predicted by Athena in Book I; the conventional wisdom suggests that Achilles should accept Agamemnon's offer. As I noted above, the glory of a Greek hero is measured by the gifts with which he is honored. Agamemnon had dishonored him by taking away his female companion, he now attempts to restore and in fact to increase his honor by the return of his lost prize and more.

As he did in Book I, when he challenged Agamemnon, however, Achilles again behaves unconventionally. When Odysseus relates Agamemnon's offer, Achilles treats it with contempt. He refuses the gifts and rejects Agamemnon's apology: "1 hate his gifts. I hold him light as the strip of a splinter" (IX, 378). Why does he do so? In part it is because his anger at Agamemnon still burns within him. Briseis, he says, was more to him than a prize; he loved her (340—3). When Aias chides Achilles for the hardness of his heart in refusing compensation in this case, whereas others accept it even in case...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: virtue, knowledge, and happiness
• 1 BEFORE PHILOSOPHY: SOME LITERARY PORTRAITS OF VIRTUE
• 2 THE SOPHISTS AND SOCRATES
• 3 PLATO'S MORAL PHILOSOPHY: THE REPUBLIC
• 4 ARISTOTLE'S NICOMACHEAN ETHICS
• 5 EPICUREANISM AND STOICISM
• FURTHER READING
• INDEX OF PASSAGES CITED
• GENERAL INDEX