Assorted Quotes
They purify themselves with other blood as if one were
to step into mud in order to wash off mud. Heraclit (of the Orphics)
Through several instances of sexual intercourse by which
Hades is in turn identified with Zeus.
‘Come pure from pure’
‘I belong to your blessed race’
‘I have paid the penalty for unjust deeds’
Kore: ‘You shall be a god instead of a mortal’
Beside the house (House of Hades) and a white cypress,
the person will find a spring, which he or she must avoid while instead
approaching another spring from the Lake of Memory.
‘The child of Ge and starry Ouranos’
While claiming to be thirsty and perishing.
Committed to injustice, Achilles has no choice but to
inflict it or undergo it himself. ~Rachel Bespaloff
Beauty is not a promise of happiness here; it is a burden
and a curse. At the same time, it isolates and elevates; it has something
preservative in it that wards off outrage and shame. ~Rachel Bespaloff
(of Helen)
There is Hera with her big stupid eyes, her obstinacy
more brutish than evil, and the real genius she shows while subjecting
Zeus to a successful “war of nerves,” from which she always comes off with
the honors. There is Aphrodite, all smiles and whims, enchanting and futile
in her weakness, yet not so defenseless as she seems. There is Pallas
Athena, a warrior with a man’s muscles, expert and treacherous, who can
send Ares rolling to the ground with the force of a single blow, who knows
how to harbor a grudge and let rancor steep within her until her revenge
is brewed. ~Rachel Bespaloff
What he exalts and sanctifies is not the triumph of victorious
force but man’s energy in misfortune, the dead warrior’s beauty, the glory
of the sacrificed hero, the song of the poet in times to come—whatever
defies fatality and rise superior to it, even in defeat. In this respect,
Homer’s eternity, which centers around the will of the individual, is opposed
to Tolstoy’s eternity, in which the split of individualization has been
abolished. ~Rachel Bespaloff
It would be possible to see in Achilles the Dionysiac
strain, a passion for destruction growing out of a hatred for the destructibility
of all things; and in Hector, the Apollonian part, the will toward preservation
growing out of love for human achievements in their vulnerability.
~Rachel Bespaloff
Friendship and music are Achilles’ only deliverance.
But is it deliverance he really wants? The glory he has chosen
in preference to a long life is the immortality of omnipotence, not the
immortality of the soul. ~Rachel Bespaloff
It is almost incomprehensible to Achilles to have Being
without significance. He may ponder the intrinsic value of life deprived
of honor when he is excluded from the battlefield, but the call to achieve
significance is far more numinous than life without significance to a young
warrior educated, as Achilles was, to always be “the best”. As the
Iliad unfolds, Achilles grows to comprehend the tragedy that he can achieve
his significance only by sacrificing his very being. Yet, in sacrificing
his being for honor, Achilles discovers that he has also irreparably damaged
his honor. To be transformed into an imperishable theme in epic song is
the best compromise that Achilles can hope for as his prize for sacrificing
both his honor and his life.
In Helen’s case, the terms are reversed. She enjoys
an amazing degree of freedom from the constraints that bind other humans.
She is not inhibited by the social code, nor will she suffer any serious
retribution for her transgressions of that code, including the final retribution,
death. This is to graze the very border of Being. But the price for
this privilege is that Helen must forgo honor.
~Norman Austin
Sparta, as portrayed in the Odyssey, bears resemblances
to the underworld, as scholars have remarked, and Helen bears resemblances
to Persephone. The drug that Helen drops into the win at Sparta has
the power to purge the past of all its negative emotions—shame, fear, guilty,
hatred.
~Norman Austin
Achilles and Helen—the two occupy a position of supreme
privilege in Homer’s world, she as the daughter of Zeus, and he as the
son of Thetis. She is the fairest of the Achaeans, and he is the
best.
~Norman Austin
Both Helen and Achilles, situated exactly where morality
grazes immortality, are thus marginalized and made to observe the action
from the spectator’s seat. Sequestered, each learns to sublimate
life into art, as they each watch their own being drained from them to
render them into icons for posterity.
~Norman Austin
Achilles would serve as the icon of glory, and Helen
as the icon of shame.
~Norman Austin
Irony comes late to Achilles, but Helen was born to it.
Achilles never hazards the possibility that the sole reason for his life
was that he should figure in someone else’s story. Until the death
of Patroklos transformed his story into the “Death of Patroklos,” Achilles
could still live in the illusion that his story was his own to shape as
he chose, whether gloriously or ingloriously. Helen is allowed no such
illusions, certainly not at least in the Iliad.
~Norman Austin
Helen, by virtue of her beauty, transcends both ugliness
and disgrace.
~Norman Austin
What better illustration of the extravagance of the libido
than the sight of Helen, for whom grown men die, playing the fairy godmother,
indulging the sexual fantasies of a boy who has never outgrown infantile
narcissism?
~Norman Austin
…and Helen still retains her awesome power to determine
men’s significance. Even the resourceful Odysseus needs Helen to
enhance, if not determine, his significance.
~Norman Austin
An uneasy awareness prevails in the Iliad that Helen
is the mistress of daimonic powers; these powers are made visible and active
in the Odyssey.
~Norman Austin
…since Helen the goddess, whether Spartan or Egyptian,
would seriously interfere with the plot of Helen at Troy. The Odyssey deftly
translated Helen’s magic into a medical skill.
~Norman Austin
Many separate factors lead almost inevitably to the theory
that Helen was once a goddess, but has been heroized, trimmed down from
goddess to virtual goddess, to fit into the scope of the Homeric epic.
~Norman Austin
Helen of the tree, princess of the sun, nurse of the
young…derivation of the Greek Helene from the Indo-European “wel-twist”
that Helen’s name is cognate with Anglo-Saxon “willow”, is almost irresistible….But
if Homer’s Helen is really the same person as the Helen in the cult, her
function as kourotrophos has been translated into her terrifying responsibility
to seduce brave young men onto the path of individualization, which leads,
in the end, to the grave. She is both Aphrodite and Persephone.
~Norman Austin
But why a Helen who was sensitive to her honor would
have been living out of wedlock with Achilles, even if only as ghosts,
is not explained.
~Norman Austin
The hapless Teukros is an anachronism, a relic dragged
willy-nilly from Homer’s world into the sophisticated circles of fifth-century
Athens. His epistemology is hopelessly outdated. He knows nothing
about the unreliability of the senses. He has not read his Parmenides
or overheard Socrates ruminated on the good and the beautiful with the
young athletes in the gymnasium. He is the old-fashioned man in the street,
who believes what he sees, a quaint hero of a bygone age who has unwittingly
stepped into the philosopher’s den.
~Norman Austin
“…that the god of the invisible is not just an abductor
but a lover too.”
~Roberto Calasso
And it was not “because of the girl,” as Achilles childishly
insists, that the whole quarrel began but because of the substitution,
as if the hero sensed that it was this notion of exchange that had tightened
the noose that no hero, nor any generation that came after the heroes,
would be able to loosen.
~Roberto Calasso
Achilles’ companions nicknamed him Pyrrha, the Blonde,
the tawny blonde.
~Roberto Calasso
Instead of a god, who would live longer than other gods,
he became a man who would have a shorter life than other men.
~Roberto Calasso
Achilles is time in its purest state, drumming hooves
galloping away.
~Roberto Calasso
That woman was the closest thing to himself Achilles
had ever come across. But he didn’t find out until a moment after
he had killed her. She was hostile, and dead: everything Achilles
loved in a woman.
~Roberto Calasso (On Penthesilea)
The Eleusinian crisis came about when the Olympians developed
a new fascination for death. Zeus gave his daughter Kore to Hades, Demeter
gave herself to a mortal. To find out more about death, the gods had to
turn to me, death being the one thing men knew rather more about than they
did.
~Roberto Calasso
Which is why Ajax’s father says to his son: “In
battle, fight to win, but to win together with a god.” To which Ajax
replies: “Father, with a god on his side, even a nobody can win;
but I am sure I can achieve glory even without them.” So Athena intervenes
and destroys the hero’s mind, like one of those cities she loves to sack.
~Roberto Calasso
“they announced that if any of the helots considered
that during the past wars they had given the best possible service to Sparta,
they should come forward with their evidence. Once this had been
examined, it could lead to their being set free. But really this was a
test, for those who, out of pride, considered themselves most deserving,
were also those who would be most likely to rebel. About two thousand were
selected. Crowned with garlands they went about from temple to temple under
the impression they had been freed. Not long afterward, the Spartans did
away with them and no one ever knew how they were all killed.
~Roberto Calasso
Sparta understood, with a clarity that set it apart from
every other society of the ancient world, that the real enemy was the excess
that is part of life…forbidding writing and luxury was in itself enough
to do away with everything that escaped the state’s control.
~Roberto Calasso
Trojans are seen, as soon as they appear in the poem,
as gorgeous, frivolous, noisy; Achaeans, by contrast, are serious and grim…Trojans
propose duels, Achaeans win them.
~Griffin
The Achaeans win the war because their discipline is
better, as we are told explicitly; their silence and obedience to their
commanders go with this.
~Griffin
But we see from Helen’s conempt for Paris and Andromache's
love for Hector that what a woman really wants in a man is the strength
to resist her and go among the flying spears.
~Griffin
nor can it be tragic, as is the story of Achilles, recipient
of divine arms, who knows even as he receives them that he is doomed to
die; and in Homer both sides pray to the same gods, and Zeus loves Hector
and Troy no less than Agamemnon and the Achaeans.
~Griffin
The pursuing of revenge goes beyond death; as Achilles
cries that ‘even if the dead forget in Hades’ halls, yet I will remember
my dear companion even there’ (22.389), so his persistence in abusing the
‘dumb earth’ that was his enemy marks the same vehement refusal to accept
even the universal leveler, death. Achilles, the greatest and most
passionate of heroes, is consistently characterized in both.
~Griffin
The unsophisticated audience, reading the Iliad for the
first time, has generally no doubt that the characters in the poem are
clearly differentiated and recognizable. As a sixth-form boy I had no difficulty
in recognizing the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles as a glorified
version of the quarrels and contentions in any gang of young men, in which
the leader and the most daring spirit were not the same person. The
contrast is made, elegantly and suggestively, in the first naming of the
two: ‘The son of Atreus, king of men, and god-like Achilles’—the
one identified by his titles and rank, the other by his personal quality.
~Griffin
The wily Odysseus well lives up to his reputation, deceiving
the captive without actually lying to him.
~Griffin
The manner of his death brings out the character of his
opponent. Menelaus was kind-hearted but indecisive; Agamemnon is
ruthless and unreflective; Achilles kills in a passionate revenge, but
not in blind ferocity. He sees his action in the perspective of life and
death as a whole, the perspective which puts slayer and slain on a level,
so that it is more than a mere colloquialism that he calls Lycaon ‘friend’
as he kills him.
~Griffin
Achilles, who himself always speaks from the heart, is
aware that others do not.
~Griffin
His more passionate nature makes it impossible for him
to accept compensation which would satisfy other heroes; his refusal, when
offered the compensation, forces him to a degree of introspection beyond
that of the others, because he is in a peculiar position. His passionate
rejection and his deeper insight thus belong together. They are not
simply an accumulation of characteristics in principle separate.
And the focus of this, the most interesting personality in the Iliad, is
on the central question of this poem: the meaning and significance
of heroic life and death.
~Griffin
If the hero were really god-like, if he were exempt,
as the gods are, from age and death, then he would not be a hero at all.
~Griffin
She (Helen) is aware that the dress will have special
value because of its maker, and refers to herself in the third person,
as a figure in history; any bride will be flattered to wear what the legendary
Helen has made. And Helen is a legendary figure not for her great
achievements, not even for her womanly virtue like Penelope, but for her
guilt and suffering.
~Griffin
But Achilles, who has duly chosen the heroic path, is
filled with bitterness as he broods on Agamemnon’s treatment of him.
~Griffin
Superhuman powers, like the miraculous eyesight of Lynceus,
who could survey the whole Peloponnese at a glance, or the winged sandals
of Perseus, or the winged horse of Bellerophon, or the real wings of Calais
and Zetes, are all inconceivable in Homer.
~Griffin
In the Iliad an unkillable warrior would be an absurdity;
every man must face death, and no magical armor can be allowed to exempt
him from that terrible prospect.
~Griffin
all show us that amid suffering and disaster human nature
can remain noble and almost god-like.
~Griffin
“And where do you think, son of Atreus,
You greedy glory-hound, the magnanimous Greeks
Are going to get another prize for you?
Do you think we have some kind of stockpile in reserve?
Every town in the area has been sacked and the stuff
all divided.
You want the men to count it all back and redistribute
it?
All right, you give the girl back to the god. The
army
Will repay you three and four times over—when and if
Zeus allows us to rip Troy down from its foundations.”
Achilles ~Homer, Stanley Lombardo
“You may be a good man in a fight, Achilles,
And look like a god, but don’t try to put one over on
me—
It won’t work. So while you have your prize,
You want me to sit tight and do without?
Give the girl back, just like that? Now maybe
If the army, in a generous spirit, voted me
Some suitable prize of their own choice, something fair—
But if it doesn’t, I’ll just go take something myself,
Your prize perhaps, or Ajax’s, or Odysseus’,
And whoever she belongs to, it’ll stick in his throat.”
Agamemnon ~Homer, Stanley Lombardo
“You shameless, profiteering excuse for a commander!
How are you going to get any Greek warrior
To follow you into battle again? You know,
I don’t have any quarrel with the Trojans,
They didn’t do anything to me to make me
Come over here and fight, didn’t run off my cattle or
horses
Or ruin my farmland back home in Phthia, not with all
The shadowy mountains and moaning seas between.
It’s for you, dogface, for your precious pleasure—
And Menelaus’ honor—that we came here,
A fact that you don’t have the decency even to mention!
And now you’re threatening to take away the prize
That I sweated for and the Greeks gave me.
I never get a prize equal to yours when the army
Captures one of the Trojan strongholds.
No, I do all the dirty work with my own hands,
And when the battle’s over and we divide the loot
You get the lion’s share and I go back to the ships
With some pitiful little thing, so worn out from fighting
I don’t have the strength left even to complain.
Well, I’m going back to Phthia now. Far better
To head home with my curved ships than stay here,
Unhonored myself and piling up a fortune for you.”
Achilles ~Homer, Stanley Lombardo
“To me, you’re the most hateful king under heaven,
A born troublemaker. You actually like fighting and war.
If you’re all that strong, it’s just a gift from some
god.
So why don’t you go home and lord it over
Your precious Myrmidons. I couldn’t care less about
you
Or your famous temper.”
Agamemnon ~Homer, Stanley Lombardo
“You bloated drunk,
With a dog’s eyes and a rabbit’s heart!
You’ve never had the guts to buckle on armor in battle
Or come out with the best fighting Greeks
On any campaign! Afraid to look Death in the eye,
Agamemnon? It’s far more profitable
To hang back in the army’s rear—isn’t it?—
Confiscating prizes from any Greek who talks back
And bleeding your people dry. There’s not a real
man
Under your command, or this latest atrocity
Would be your last, son of Atreus.”
Achilles ~Homer, Stanley Lombardo
“Ha, and think of the names people would call me
If I bowed and scraped every time you opened your mouth.
Try that on someone else, but not on me.
I’ll tell you this, and you can stick it in your gut:
I’m not going to put up a fight on account of the girl.
You, all of you, gave her and you can all take her back.
But anything else of mine in my black sailing ship
You keep your goddamn hands off, you hear?
Try it. Let everybody see how fast
Your black blood boils up around my spear.”
Achilles ~Homer, Stanley Lombardo
“Surrender therefore Argive Helen
And all the possessions that come with her.
We will further assess a suitable penalty,
A tribute to be paid for generations to come.”
Agamemnon ~Homer, Stanley Lombardo
“I can see
That I have no choice but to speak my mind
And tell you exactly how things are going to be.
Either that or sit through endless sessions
Of people whining at me. I hate like hell
The man who says one thing and speaks another.
So this is how I see it.
I cannot imagine Agamemnon,
Or any other Greek, persuading me,
Not after the thanks I got for fighting this war,
Going up against the enemy day after day.
It doesn’t matter if you stay in camp or fight—
In the end, everybody comes out the same.
Coward and hero get the same reward:
You die whether you slack off or work.
And what do I have for all my suffering,
Constantly putting my life on the line?
…[I] brought back heirlooms
By the ton, and handed it all over
To Atreus’ son, who hung back in camp
Raking it in and distributing damn little.
What the others did get they at least got to keep.
I’m the only Greek from whom he took something back.
He should be happy with the woman he has.
Why do the Greeks have to fight the Trojans?
Why did Agamemnon lead the army to Troy
If not for the sake of fair-haired Helen?
Do you have to be descended from Atreus
To love your mate? Every decent, sane man
Loves his woman and cares for her, as I did
Loved her from my heart. It doesn’t matter
That I won her with my spear. He took her
Took her right out of my hands, cheated me,
And now he thinks he’s going to win me back?
He can forget it. I know how things stand.
…So report back to him everything I say,
And report it publicly—get the Greeks angry,
In case the shameless bastard still thinks
He can steal us blind. He doesn’t dare
Show his dogface in here. Fine. I don’t want
To have anything to do with him either.
…Nothing is worth my life, not all the riches
They say Troy held before the Greeks came,
…You can always get tripods and chestnut horses.
But a mans’ life cannot be won back
Once his breath has passed beyond his clenched teeth.
My mother Thetis, a moving silver grace,
Tells me two fates sweep me on to my death.
If I stay here and fight, I’ll never return home,
But my glory will be undying forever.
If I return home to my dear fatherland
My glory is lost but my life will be long,
And death that ends all will not catch me soon.”
Achilles ~Homer, Stanley Lombardo
“He sent me to teach you this—
To be a speaker of words and a doer of deeds.”
Phoenix, to Achilles ~Homer, Stanley Lombardo
“Paris, you desperate, womanizing pretty boy!
I wish you had never born, or had died unmarried…
…Can’t you just hear it, the long-haired Greeks
Chuckling and saying that our champion wins
For good looks but comes up short on offense and defense?”
Hector ~Homer, Stanley Lombardo
“Brother-in-law
Of a scheming, cold-blooded bitch,
I wish that on the day my mother bore me
A windstorm had swept me away to a mountain
Or into the waves of the restless sea,
Swept me away before all this could happen.
But since the gods have ordained these evils,
Why couldn’t I be the wife of a better man,
One sensitive at least to repeated reproaches?
Paris never had an ounce of good sense
And never will. He’ll pay for it someday.
But come inside and sit down on this chair,
Dear brother-in-law. You bear such a burden
For my wanton ways and Paris’ witlessness.
Zeus has placed this evil fate on us so that
In time to come poets will sing of us.”
Helen ~Homer, Stanley Lombardo
Briseis stood there like golden Aphrodite.
But when she saw Patroclus’ mangled body
She threw herself upon him and wailed
In a high, piercing voice, and with her nails
She tore her breast and soft neck and lovely face.
And this woman, so like a goddess, cried in anguish:
“My poor Patroclus. You were so dear to me.
When I left this hut you were alive,
And now I find you, the army’s leader, dead
When I come back. So it is for me always,
Evil upon evil. I have seen my husband,
The man my father and mother gave me to,
Mangled with sharp bronze before my city,
And my three brothers, all from the same mother,
Brothers I loved—they all died that day.
But you wouldn’t let me cry when Achilles
Killed my husband and destroyed Mynes’ city,
Wouldn’t let me cry. You told me you’d make me
Achilles’ bride, you told me you’d take me on a ship
To Phthia, for a wedding among the Myrmidons.
I will never stop grieving for you, forever sweet.”
Thus Briseis, and the woman mourned with her,
For Patroclus, yes, but each woman also
For her own private sorrows.
~Homer, Stanley Lombardo
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