Trojan Horses

Saving the Classics from Conservatives

Page DuBois

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780814719466
• eBook ISBN: 9780814769898
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

A passionate reexamination of the ancient world and the lessons we can draw from antiquity

In today's turbulent cultural moment, it is all too common for conservatives to invoke the wisdom of the ancient Greeks in the name of timeless virtues. At the same time, critics have charged that multiculturalists have hopelessly corrupted the study of antiquity itself, and that the teaching of Classics is dead.

Trojan Horses is Page duBois's answer to scholars and theorists—such as Camille Paglia, Allan Bloom, and William Bennett—who have appropriated antiquity in the service of a conservative political agenda. She challenges cultural conservatives' appeal to the authority of the Classics by revealing their presentation of ancient Greece as simplistic, ahistorical, and irreparably distorted by their politics. In its devastating critique of these pundits, Trojan Horses presents a more complex and more accurate view of ancient Greek politics, sex, and religion. In her incisive examinations of figures such as Daedalus and Artemis, duBois eloquently conveys their complexity and passion, but also unearths actions and beliefs that do not square so easily with today's conservative values. As duBois writes, "Like Bennett, I think we should study the past, but not to find nuggets of eternal wisdom. Rather we can comprehend in our history a fuller range of human possibilities, of beginnings, of error, and of difference."

In these chapters, duBois offers readers a view of the ancient Greeks that is more nuanced, more subtle, more layered and in every way more historical than the portrait many of today's scholars strive to display in our classrooms. Sharp, timely, and engaging, Trojan Horses portrays the richness of ancient Greek culture while riding in to rescue the Greeks from the new barbarians.

1
Whose Greeks?

What can’t be exhausted is the always-new adjustment every age makes to the classical world, measuring itself against it. If we set the classicist the task of understanding his own age better by means of antiquity, then his task has no end.

—Nietzsche, “We Classicists”

I believe that reading ancient Greek art and culture can illuminate and enrich our present circumstances, but also that the Greeks were far stranger, more complicated, and more ambiguous than they might appear in much that circulates about them in the current climate. There is more to know, and much more to say about our relationship to the past of classical antiquity. The interpretation of the Greek and Roman classics, rather than dead, as some alarmists claim, remains as always a contested field, one in which conflicting interpretations clash, one about which I want to have my say here.

Americans are witnessing a resurgence of interest in the classics. Garry Wills discussed this phenomenon in an article in the New York Times Magazine (February 16, 1997), calling attention to a rising tide of books, films, and television programs devoted to the ancient Greeks and Romans. We have seen the success of a television series on the deeds of the mythological Greek hero Hercules, and a miniseries version of Homer’s Odyssey. The television program “Xena, Warrior Princess,” features a heroine modeled on the ancient myth of the Amazons, like Wonder Woman before her. Disney has released an animated feature film on Hercules, and followed it with stage shows and spectacles at various Disneylands and-worlds. Best-sellers recount the myths and legends of classical antiquity. Self-help books point to the ancient gods and goddesses as timeless paradigms of human character. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, people continue to be fascinated by the remnants of the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, two millenia distant in time.

Enrolled in my course in classical mythology are students of literature and the classics, but also students majoring in political science, animal physiology, cellular biology, art history, general biology, structural engineering, physics, economics, human development, history, ecology, media, and anthropology. These students come from many cultural and ethnic backgrounds. They don’t have to take this course; it doesn’t fulfill requirements for their majors. But they are nonetheless curious about the stories of ancient Greek heroes and gods, of Helen, of the wooden horse that smuggled the Greek heroes into the city of Troy, of Herakles—as the Greeks called Hercules—and of Persephone, the daughter of Demeter seized by the god of the dead, who ate a pomegranate seed in the underworld and was required forever to spend a third of the year with her husband in the world of the dead, while her mother mourned above and brought winter to the earth.

I want to share with contemporary readers, many of whom read the myths of the ancient Greeks in school long or not so long ago, the variety within ancient Greek culture, its fascinating practices in the domains of politics, sexuality, and religion. There is much new scholarship in these fields, some of which is listed at the end of this book, and I would like more people to know another version of the Greeks from that often promoted in the popular press. Among other things, some of these Greeks thought women had dangerously powerful sexual drives, that the public allusion to sexual positions was comic, and that homoeroticism was one of the gifts of Aphrodite. These Greeks participated in a radical democracy, one in which each citizen had a right to speak and vote without being represented by an elder or a better, and in which the citizens themselves made all political decisions. These Greeks inhabited a world full of gods, where Hermes protected the boundaries of their property and their states, and guided them into the underworld when they died, where the god Dionysos was in the wine they drank, where drinking wine, Dionysos’s gift to human beings, was an act of worship, and where the actors in the dionysiac theater were possessed by the god.

I’m alarmed because I see in the popular press these same Greeks and their stories travestied by those who want to justify their political platform for America by means of a slanted, polemical appeal to the Western past, by a reductive, one-dimensional, shallow interpretation of Greek and Roman civilization. I think of William Bennett’s Book ofVirtues and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, among others. These contemporary writers use the Greeks to argue for their views. Their positions lend implicit support to politicians and religious leaders who advocate so-called family values, restriction of women to their homes and the requirement of obedience to their husbands, and the dissolution of separation between Christianity and the state, while arguing for homophobia, militarism, xenophobia, and the restriction of immigration. Still other scholars sound the death knell of the study of antiquity, blaming those they call “multiculturalists,” that is, all those who disagree with them about politics in the present. I fear not only that such arguments will succeed in communicating their monolithic and polemically reductive ideas of the ancient world to readers, but also that classics as a field will wither like Egyptology because of its association with such reactionary ideas. As a friend of mine said, “They’re right that we should read the Greeks, but for all the wrong reasons.”

Let me begin with the story of Daedalus, the first human being to fly, whose story is, like so many Greek myths, full of violence, bestiality, and strangeness:

The mythical Daedalus descended from Hephaistos, god of smiths. Once upon a time Hephaistos conceived desire for the virgin goddess of Athens, Athena, and tried to rape her. She fought him off, and in the process he ejaculated on her cloak. Athena brushed off her garment with a bit of wool, let it fall to the ground, and thus fertilized the earth, the goddess Gaia, with the smith god’s seed. From this union were born the Athenian people. The storytellers trace the lineage of Daedalus back to this scene; the Athenians come from this moment of violence, and belong to their own land in a way like no other people. They called themselves “autochthonous,” born from the earth itself. The Greeks named Daedalus’s own father both “Eupalamus,” “Skilled of hand,” and Metion, “Man of cunning intelligence,” to mark Daedalus’s ingenuity and dexterity. The Athenian Socrates, teacher of Plato at the very beginnings of philosophy, himself the son of a stonemason, traced his family line back to Daedalus.

According to legend, Daedalus killed his nephew, perhaps jealous because the nephew, who invented the saw, was even more skillful than he. After that, Daedalus fled Athens and moved to the island of Crete, situated in the middle of the Aegean Sea between mainland Greece and Africa, to serve its king. Daedalus had already become the maker, the first human being to invent and fashion many beautiful and useful things that enable and adorn civilization—elaborate jewelry, statues, weapons, and armor. He created marvels on Crete. His name first appears in Homer’s Iliad as the maker of a dancing floor for Ariadne, daughter of King Minos of Crete. His story here gets tangled up in the plentiful store of legends concerning this Mediterranean island, a center of civilization long before the Greeks became powerful, an island marked by its ancient connections with Asia and Africa.

King Minos of Crete was a descendant of Zeus, greatest of the Olympian gods. Zeus, in one of his many unions with mortals of both sexes, seduced Europa, daughter of the king of Tyre, in Asia Minor, appearing before her on the beach in the form of a charming little white bull. Europa was so enchanted by the beauty of this bull that she mounted on his back, “his softness fooling her,” as the poet Charles Olson says. Zeus carried her off to Crete, where she gave her name to the continent of Europe. There she gave birth to Minos, who in his turn married Pasiphae, daughter of the sun, and she bore him several children, among them a daughter, Ariadne. One day Minos prayed to Poseidon, god of the sea, who sent another beautiful bull from the sea, this time for sacrifice; Minos found the bull so lovely that he could not kill it, even to please the god. Poseidon, in revenge for this slight, caused Minos’s wife Pasiphae to conceive lust for this bull. She appealed to Daedalus, and he constructed an elaborate disguise for her, so that the bull, believing her to be a cow, mounted the queen and had intercourse with her. Impregnated by the bull, Pasiphae gave birth to the Minotaur, a monster, half bull and half human. Horrified, the Cretans asked Daedalus to hide this hideous offspring away forever from human sight. He built a maze, the infamous labyrinth, and concealed the Minotaur at its heart.

After a time the Athenian hero Theseus arrived on Crete, one of an annual shipment of twelve Athenian youth, six boys and six girls sent as tribute to the Cretans, who planned to sacrifice them to the Minotaur. But Theseus escaped death by winning the heart of Ariadne, Minos’s daughter, the girl of the Homeric dancing floor. She persuaded Daedalus to help her save Theseus from being devoured by the monster. The maker of the maze gave her a thread, which she passed on to Theseus, telling him to fasten it at the mouth of the labyrinth, and to unwind it as he moved inside. He found the Minotaur at its center, killed him, then wound the thread back to the entrance.

Daedalus, with his ingenious schemes aiding the women of Minos’s house, had angered the king, who imprisoned him on the island along with his son Icarus. Unhappy in his subjection, Daedalus hatched a plan for the two of them to escape from Crete. In the Roman poet Ovid’s account of his story, Daedalus says that King Minos blocked his escape on land and sea, but the sky still remained open: The king was unable to control the sky above them. In Ovid’s telling, Daedalus changed the laws of nature by taking to the air. He laid out feathers, attached them in graduated sizes with thread and wax, bent and curved them so that they resembled the wings of birds. Before take-off he warned his son Icarus to fly a middle course between the sun and the water, and they rose on their brilliant wings and flew. Those below, a shepherd and a plowman, looked up in amazement at their flight. But Icarus daringly flew too close to the sun, the wax melted, his feathers failed, and he fell into the sea and drowned.

When Vergil’s great hero Aeneas, survivor of the ruined city Troy and founder of Rome, arrived in Italy, he found a set of doors made by Daedalus in the land of the Cumaean Sibyl. They marked the spot where Daedalus first landed on his solo flight from Crete, having lost his son to the sea. The architect had built a great temple to Apollo there, in thanks for his own safe arrival, and left his marvelous wings as an offering to the god. He depicted his own story on the temple’s doors, in a version that recalls Aeneas’s own disastrous dalliance in Africa with the queen of Carthage, Dido:

Here can be seen the loving of the savage bull and Pasiphae laid out to receive it and deceive her husband Minos. Here too is the hybrid offspring, the Minotaur, half-man and half-animal, the memorial to a perverted love, and here is its home, built with such great labor, the inextricable Labyrinth. But Daedalus takes pity on the great love of the princess Ariadne and unravels the winding paths of his own baffling maze, guiding the blind steps of Theseus with a thread.

In Vergil’s account, the mourning artist Daedalus had tried to depict the fall of his son Icarus on this work of art, but his hands had fallen, helpless. Soon Aeneas himself descended into the labyrinth of the underworld, into the land of the dead, in order to encounter past and future, to visit his dead father and see Dido and his heirs still to be born. He carried a marvelous golden bough as a talisman to protect him and guarantee his safe return to the land of the living.

The legendary Daedalus was the first human artisan, carpenter, sculptor, engineer, architect, builder, pilot, and artist. The adjective associated with his name, daidaleos, probably the root and origin of his name, was associated from earliest times with highly worked armor, jewels, vessels, musical instruments, ships, and furniture. The Greeks and Romans admired him as the inventor of carpentry, of the axe, the auger, glue, and the masts of boats; he was said to have built many of the most ancient temples in the Greek world, and to have made wonderful wooden statues capable of opening their eyes, walking, and moving their arms. His genius made him almost divine, capable of turning inanimate wooden images into animate, mobile creatures.

Poets in antiquity retold the story of Daedalus countless times. It was passed on to our own day in the visual arts as well as in literature by, among others, the painter Brueghel, who showed the fall of Icarus in a painting’s background, with a heedless plowman at the center of his canvas. This painting in turn inspired the twentieth-century poet W. H. Auden, who described that fall in his poem “Musée des Beaux Arts.” Auden wrote about how the “Old Masters,” painters like Brueghel, understood suffering, which “takes place/While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” Auden describes Brueghel’s Icarus, how the plowman hears the splash and the cry of Icarus’s fall, but how “for him it was not an important failure.”

… the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

The poem uses the painting’s record of Icarus’s fall as an emblem for everyday life’s indifference to martyrdom and suffering or the miraculous human flight, great dramas witnessed casually by human beings going about their mundane and necessary business. In the twentieth century the story of Daedalus inspired many interpretations and rewritings. The hero of James Joyce’s autobiographical novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Stephen Daedalus. This Daedalus also moves through a single day of Dublin life in Joyce’s labyrinthine masterpiece Ulysses.

The ancient story remains rich in significance for understanding classical civilization. It responds to questions the ancients asked themselves, the implications of which endure in Western culture. How did human beings come into existence? Are we the descendants of gods, born from the earth, autochthonous, like plants? Who invented all the techniques, the skills, and sciences that separate us from the animals? Why is it that some human beings have what seem incredible, almost inhuman talents? How is it that most of us have sex only among ourselves, and not with animals? What civilizations preceded the Greeks’ and the Romans’? The story points to connections between the Greeks and Asia, the Near East of Tyre, and between the Greeks and Romans and Africa, so close to the southern coast of Crete, so crucial to Roman history. The story presents the passage of ancient Greek culture westward, from ancient Tyre, home of Minos’s mother, to Crete, to Italy. It touches on the theme of the extraordinary man, the person of uncommon skill, and also on the anonymity of thousands of craftsmen, architects, and sculptors, workers whose names will forever be lost to history and for whom Daedalus stands. Daedalus’s story reminds us of both the generosity and the indifference of the ancient gods. It recalls the special status of the Athenians, born from the artisan god Hephaistos and the primeval goddess Earth, and the invention of philosophy in Athens. The daring of Icarus reminds us of the classical Athenians’ fears, expressed in Greek tragedy, of those who strove and achieved too much, likening themselves to gods, in danger of attracting the gods’ jealous attention, and in need of control by their fellow citizens. The myth touches on the theme of paternal authority, the vexed relationship between fathers and sons echoed in other myths like that of Oedipus. The story includes murder, adultery, bestiality, the impossibility and the even more fantastic possibility of human flight, the relationship between master and servant, king and architect, the death of a son and the father’s responsibility for the risks that led to this great loss, mourning and recovery from mourning. It is a celebration of human ingenuity and a meditation as well on the costs of that ingenuity.

And yet, in the best-seller The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories, tales for those destined to be trained in his conception of virtue, William Bennett tells a painfully narrow and reduced version of the story of Daedalus, this first artist. Most of the story is elided in Bennett’s account. Bennett retells only the story of Daedalus’s and Icarus’s flight, which he glosses ponderously; in his view, the point of this great and elaborate myth is that Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, was disobedient, a bad boy who deserved his unhappy fate.

After recounting the episode of the flight and fall, he concludes:

This famous Greek myth reminds us exactly why young people have a responsibility to obey their parents—for the same good reason parents have a responsibility to guide their children: there are many things adults know that young people do not…. Safe childhoods and successful upbringings require a measure of obedience, as Icarus finds out the hard way.¹

Bennett underlines his moral with this praise of obedience coupled with a threat of disaster for the disobedient. The elaborate mythical narrative, so abundant in themes of significance for understanding the Greeks and ourselves, is reduced to a moralizing parable and subordinated to Bennett’s message about hierarchy and so-called family values: The son must obey the father. Bennett stresses obedience to authority in this text, yet fails to acknowledge that Daedalus in his turn exhibited disobedience as he defied the commands of his master King Minos. Even the truncated mythic episode explores the limits of authority and of paternalism. And it also celebrates the yearning for free flight even as it expresses anxiety at the prospect of flying free. In Bennett’s account there is no awareness of the wealth of meanings in this reduced fragment of the myth, of the story’s exploration of human beings’ paradoxical needs for freedom and security, no mention of the celebration of human skill and ingenuity, questions of power, audacity, and genius, of the father’s disobedience of King Minos, and of Daedalus’s great loss and mourning. Even as an interpretation of this tiny morsel of the myth of Daedalus, Bennett’s moral appears strikingly inadequate. In Bennett’s book, full of stories mostly “drawn from the corpus of Western civilization” (15), the “great moral story” of Daedalus and Icarus appears in the section called “Responsibility,” one of those traditional values that the former drug czar and Secretary of Education seeks to instill in Americans. Responsibility, resembling his other categories Work, Perseverance, and Self-Discipline, requires first and foremost obedience to one’s superiors.

In a further development of his pedagogical mission, Bennett’s stories, reissued in a special edition for children, have been shown in animated form on television. And on PBS, often the target of Bennett’s vigorous fulminations against its public funding: “When I learned about [the PBS involvement], I chuckled, because people know that I’m a critic of public funding of television.”² The television program is pre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Whose Greeks?
• 2 Their Greeks
• 3 Aliens
• 4 Sex
• 5 Democracy
• 6 Gods
• Notes
• More Reading
• Index
• About the Author