In The War That Killed Achilles, author Caroline Alexander makes the same comparison I think of every time I read Book I of the Iliad.

First she quotes Achilles’s speech to Agamemnon. She quotes her favorite translation, by Richmond Lattimore. I will instead use my own favorite translation, by Stanley Lombardo:

Achilles looked [Agamemnon] up and down and said:

"You sorry, 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 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."

Alexander comments:

It is a great gauntlet-throwing speech, particularly remarkable for occurring at the very outset of the epic. What Achilles is challenging is the bedrock assumption of military service — that the individual warrior submit his freedom, his destiny, his very life to a cause in which he may have no personal stake. In modern times, the speech finds its counterpart in Muhammad Ali’s famous refusal to fight in Vietnam:

I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong… No Viet Cong ever called me nigger… I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder, kill and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slavemasters over dark people.

Like Ali’s, Achilles’ words are particularly dangerous in that one can assume he is speaking aloud words that other, less charismatic men had long thought.

From The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War by Caroline Alexander:

When the Roman Empire split in the sixth century A.D., knowledge of Greek, which flourished in Byzantium, or the Eastern Empire, all but vanished in the West. The Iliad itself was forgotten, and in its stead stories about the war at Troy flourished, which, along with romantic sagas about Alexander the Great, formed the most popular "classical" material of the Middle Ages. The primary sources for these post-Homeric renderings of the matter of Troy, as the body of romance came to be called, were the Latin prose works of Dictys of Crete and Dares of Phrygia, dated to the third and fifth or sixth centuries A.D., respectively—both of whom were fancifully believed to have been eyewitnesses to the Great War at Troy. In these Latin renderings, Achilles, the complex hero of Homer’s Iliad, stripped of his defining speeches, devolved into a brutal, if heroically brave, action figure. In the hands of medieval writers, sentiment hardened further against him. The twelfth-century Roman de Troie takes pains, in thirty thousand lines of French verse, to ensure that Achilles is depicted as in all ways inferior, even in martial prowess, to the noble Trojan hero Hektor. Such interpretive touches would remain potent down the ages, arguably into the present time.…

But as knowledge of Homer was disseminated by English translations, as well as by knowledge of the original Greek, the perception of the Iliad’s central hero, Achilles, shifted, and so accordingly did the perceived meaning of the epic. Not only had Achilles been tarnished by the medieval lays, but from the time of Augustan England of the eighteenth century, he was further diminished by the ascendancy of another ancient epic: Virgil’s Aeneid, which related the deeds and fate of the Roman hero pius Aeneas—Aeneas the pious, the virtuous, dutiful, in thrall to the imperial destiny of his country. In contrast to this paragon of fascism, Achilles, who asserts his character in the Iliad’s opening action by publicly challenging his commander in chief’s competence and indeed the very purpose of the war, was deemed a highly undesirable heroic model. Thus, while the Iliad’s poetry and tragic vision were much extolled, the epic’s blunter message tended to be overlooked. Centuries earlier, tragedians and historians of the classical era had matter-of-factly understood the war at Troy to have been a catastrophe…

But now, later ages marshaled the Iliad’s heroic battles and heroes’ high words to instruct the nation’s young manhood on the desirability of dying well for their country. The dangerous example of Achilles’ contemptuous defiance of his inept commanding officer was defused by a tired witticism—that shining Achilles had been "sulking in his tent."  

From The Economist January 21, 2010 print edition:

Absolutely

Power corrupts, but it corrupts only those who think they deserve it

Reports of politicians who have extramarital affairs while complaining about the death of family values, or who use public funding for private gain despite condemning government waste, have become so common in recent years that they hardly seem surprising anymore. Anecdotally, at least, the connection between power and hypocrisy looks obvious.

Anecdote is not science, though. And, more subtly, even if anecdote is correct, it does not answer the question of whether power tends to corrupt, as Lord Acton’s dictum has it, or whether it merely attracts the corruptible. To investigate this question Joris Lammers at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands, and Adam Galinsky at Northwestern University, in Illinois, have conducted a series of experiments which attempted to elicit states of powerfulness and powerlessness in the minds of volunteers. Having done so, as they report in Psychological Science, they tested those volunteers’ moral pliability. Lord Acton, they found, was right.

Read the rest.

(via AC Capehart)

See also Literature and the Economics of Liberty by Paul Cantor and Stephen Cox

Here’s what I wrote 5 years ago about what happened 15 years ago:

Friday, January 07, 2005

Murray N. Rothbard, R.I.P.

I came to libertarianism through taking The World’s Shortest Political Quiz at a gun show in Richmond. (That’s one version of the story. Another is that 10 years earlier, my mother baptized me a libertarian when I told her she wasn’t being liberal and she told me I had the wrong L-word in mind.)

I had already quit the Democrats, but was still voting and calling myself “independent”. Now I joined the Libertarian Party and started handing out the business-card-sized version of the quiz and talking to people about the ethics of economic liberty.

It turns out that around the same time, Murray Rothbard died. I had no idea who he was.

My libertarian reading consisted first of Robert Anton Wilson and later of Wendy McElroy. I can’t remember how I discovered McElroy, but Wilson was one of those writers all the weirdos in college knew and loved — so, true to my established habits, I read his stuff several years after I no longer knew anyone who had heard of him.

Wilson and McElroy (and Ken MacLeod) lead me to Benjamin Tucker and to Individualist Anarchism, which manifested in BlackCrayon.com.

Meanwhile, I was crossing the name Rothbard more and more. Never happily. Who was this “Mr. Libertarian” and how dare he (or his followers, rather) claim himself to be so central to this movement that now defined my life (but about whose history I apparently still knew nothing).

McElroy went so far as to claim that the modern libertarian movement was founded in Rothbard’s livingroom on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — which is more or less where I grew up. The nerve of this man: I’d never heard of him!

MacLeod said that the anarchies in his novel were based on the writings of Murray Rothbard and David Friedman. He also talked in the novel about Ludwig von Mises, some dead old-world economist.

Economics didn’t interest me yet, but I had to read the Friedman and Rothbard books he’d referred to. And I did. And I like them both, but I was clearly a natural-law Rothbardian and not a utilitarian Friedmanite.

I added a Murray Rothbard page to BlackCrayon.com and looked into creating a Rothbard website. But now I learned there were these other websites — Mises.org and LewRockwell.com — seeming to represent the great man’s work. Again, I was put off. Who were these people I had never heard of claiming to represent the legacy of this other guy I had only recently heard of!? Such chutzpah!

(Yes, I know that all this outrage makes me sound like I was in my teens, but I was already in my thirties. Some of us develop slower than others.)

Today, January 7th, 2005, it’s the 10-year anniversary of Murray Rothbard’s death. I’m not positive how long I’ve been part of the movement, but I’ve decided to call it 10 years as well. Nice symmetry that way.

I know that the calendar marks arbitrary units and aggregates of time only roughly corresponding to some combination of our planet’s motion around itself and our star as counted in the number system of our evolved anatomy, but still: a 10-year anniversary has an emotional impact on me. It feels meaningful. I feel sad that he died before I’d heard of him, sad that I never got to meet him. I’m now in correspondence with plenty of people who did know him, and I’m unbelievably envious of them. (See emotional-maturity comment, above.)

On my Murray Rothbard page, I link to the two books I’d recommend starting with, for those of you fortunate and unfortunate souls who don’t know them yet. (They’re also available, gratis, in electronic format here, here, and more generally here.)

To mark the occassion, today’s Daily Article from the Ludwig von Mises Institute (and also the lead article at LewRockwell.com) is here:

The Unstoppable Rothbard

His influence increases, his detractors are confounded.

posted by bkMarcus on Friday, January 07, 2005

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