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."  

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

My granddad used to read chapter books at the dinner table to his two daughters. My mother says she’d sneak into the library after dinner and read the next chapter.

When granddad brought his family over from Britain, the first things he read to them were The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

"You can’t get much more American than Dorothy Gale and Tom Sawyer," I said to my mother on the phone the other night.

"That’s why he chose those books," she replied.

L. Frank Baum’s choice of a little girl as his protagonist was influenced by Alice in Wonderland: "The secret of Alice’s success," he wrote, "lay in the fact that she was a real child, and any normal child could sympathize with her all through her adventures."

"But," writes Michael Patrick Hearn in The Annotated Wizard of Oz, "Dorothy is not an English child."

"Both are independent, brave, and practical little girls," noted novelist Alison Lurie in "The Fate of the Munchkins" (The New York Review of Books, April 18, 1974), "but Alice, as an upper-middle-class Victorian child, is far more concerned with manners and social status. She worries about the proper way to address a mouse, and is glad she doesn’t have to live in a pokey little house like Mabel. Dorothy already lives in a pokey little house. Demographers would class her among the rural poor, but she takes for granted her equality with everyone she meets."

Dorothy is American through and through. And she embodies not only America but the West as well. Baum firmly believed in "the superiority of western women in usefulness over their eastern sisters. … What a vast difference between these undesirable damsels [of the East] and our brave, helpful western girls! … Here a woman delights in being useful; a young lady’s highest ambition is to become a bread-winner. And they do." They "have more energy and vitality than those of the east, and … there is no nonsense or self pride in their constitutions and they cannot brook idleness when they see before them work to be done which is eminently fitted to their hands." Dorothy embodies this same Western determination and independence in her quest to get back to Kansas.

Another passage from Jim Trelease’s Read-Aloud Handbook:

Before most parents realize it, a growing child is ready, in his own mind at least, to go out and challenge the world. In the last two thousand years, nothing has helped this exploratory need as much as the fairy tale.

I know what you may be thinking. “Fairy tales? Is he kidding? Why, those things are positively frightening. Children see enough violence on television — they don’t need kids pushing witches into ovens and evil spells and poisoned apples.”

Stop for a minute and remind yourself how long the fairy tale has been with us — in every nation and in every civilization. Surely there must be something significant here, an insight so important as to transcend time and mountains and cultures to arrive in the twenty-first century still intact. There are, for example, more than seven hundred different versions of Cinderella from hundreds of cultures. Nevertheless, they all tell the same story — a truly universal story. …

What distinguishes the fairy tale is that it speaks to the very heart and soul of the child. It admits to the child what so many parents and teachers spend hours trying to cover up or avoid. The fairy tale confirms what the child has been thinking all along — that it is a cold, cruel world out there and it’s waiting to eat him alive.

Now, if that were all the fairy tale said, it would have died out long ago. But it goes one step further. It addresses itself to the child’s sense of courage and adventure. The tale advises the child: Take your courage in hand and go out to meet the world head on. According to Bruno Bettelheim, the fairy tale offers this promise: If you have courage and if you persist, you can overcome any obstacle, conquer any foe.

By recognizing a child’s daily fears, appealing to his courage and confidence, and by offering hope, the fairy tale presents the child with a means by which he can understand the world and himself. And those who would deodorize the tales impose a fearsome lie upon the child. J.R.R. Tolkien cautioned, “It does not pay to leave a dragon out of your calculations if you live near him.” Judging from the daily averages, our land is filled with dragons:

[a bunch of horrifying statistics]

To send a child into that world unprepared is a crime.

Similar to the temptation to avoid fairy tales is the tendency of some adults to choose books that will keep the child forever young, books without problems, conflict, or drama. And then all too soon these same parents are asking why their children have lost interest in books. Of all the things we ask our books to be, few are as important as “believable.” Fiction, nonfiction, biographies, fantasies — the good ones work because they are believable. A world that is “forever pink,” … doesn’t work because children eventually realize its fakery.

Two weeks ago, I “tweeted” the following:

Was Jesus a hologram? Or was he a human possessed by a noncorporeal extraterrestrial called Christ? This was the division within Docetism.

I have to say, studying the ancient heresies is the perfect geek hobby. Better than Star Trek. Similar, in some ways, as my Docetism tweet should illustrate. (By the way, the two varieties of Docetism are called phantasmal and separationist respectively.)

And as with any new obsession, once you start to learn the ins and outs, you start seeing it everywhere. Recently, I’ve been seeing signs of the heresies in Doonesbury:

(click to enlarge)

This distinction between God and His son smacks of Arianism. I suspect a lot of present-day Christians are Arian heretics without realizing it.

There’s also this past Sunday’s strip:

(excerpt from this full strip )

All my life, I’ve heard this observed distinction between the Old Testament God of wrath and the New Testament God of love. Without building an explicit theology from it, many modern Christians — especially religious liberals, I suspect — see the old Jewish God and the new Christian God as different gods. This isn’t a new phenomenon. In the 2nd century, Marcion of Sinope, led a very large and influential rival movement to proto-orthodox Christianity. Marcion

argued for the existence of two Gods: Yahweh, who created the material universe, and the Heavenly Father of the New Testament, of which Jesus Christ was the living incarnation. Yahweh was viewed as a lesser demiurge, who had created the earth, and whose law, the Mosaic covenant, represented bare natural justice: i.e., an eye for an eye. Jesus was the living incarnation of a different God, a new God of compassion and love, sometimes called the Heavenly Father. The two Gods were thought of as having distinct personalities: Yahweh is petty, cruel and jealous, a tribal God who is only interested in the welfare of the Jews, while the Heavenly Father is a universal God who loves all of humanity, and looks upon His children with mercy and benevolence. This dual-God notion allowed Marcion to reconcile the apparent contradictions between the Old Testament and the tales of Jesus’ life and ministry. [Wikipedia]

I mention this “lesser demiurge” of the Marcionites in this earlier blog post of Calvin & Hobbes:

When I was kid in an Episcopal choir school, attending services 2 or 3 times a week, I think I was guilty of both Arianism and Marcionite dualism. I was also guilty of the heresy of Patripassionism, the belief that God the Father was incarnate and suffered on the cross. I guess I’ve never grokked the Trinity.

I’ve been looking for PDF scans of old children’s picture books. I found a great collection at the Library of Congress. It’s not hard to tell why some of these fell out of circulation, like this page from Denslow’s Mother Goose:

Bart D. Ehrman, Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend:

One thing that can be said about Pharisees is that the most common stereotype about them is almost certainly wrong. In the dictionary, today, if you look up the word Pharisee you’ll find as one of the later definitions “hypocrite.” This has always struck me as bizarre — somewhat like defining Episcopalian as “drunkard” or Baptist as “adulterer.” To be sure, there are no doubt Episcopalian alcoholics and Baptist philanderers, just as there must have been Pharisaic hypocrites. But as I tell my students, agreeing to commit hypocrisy was not an entrance requirement for the Pharisaic party. There was no hypocritic oath.

One thing we do know about the Pharisees is that they strove to follow God’s law as rigorously as they could. This doesn’t make them hypocrites; it makes them religious. (p. 106)

It seems the cultural equation Pharisee = hypocrite must come from Matthew 23, where Matthew’s Jesus juxtaposes the terms 7 times within 17 lines (13, 14,15, 23, 25, 27, 29). Outside Matthew, the words appear together only once (Luke 11:44), again on Jesus’s lips.

Matthew’s is the most insistently Jewish of the gospels, not just Jewish, but rabbinic Jewish, i.e., Pharisaic. It is also, some have argued, the most anti-Jewish (though I think there are passages in John that might outstrip Matthew for vitriol).

When I was in college, the most venomous attacks I’d hear against black men came from the mouths of black women. If I quoted them to you out of context, you’d take it as racist “hate speech.” The context makes all the difference. I think Christianity becoming a gentile religion ended up taking a lot of this ancient Jewish infighting very much out of context.

At the Charlottesville City Market yesterday morning, I desperately wanted a cup of coffee. I bypassed the nearby coffeehouse thinking I should spend my money with one of the City Market’s weekend merchants. But all I found was “organic fair-trade” coffee. Nope. I’m not tithing to that religion. I like my coffee full of pesticides and produced with maximum exploitation.

Similarly, I like my housing to have maximum environmental impact, and yet, I sure do see the aesthetic appeal of this Welsh environmentalist’s “‘low-impact’ Woodland home,” taken from the pages of JRR Tolkein:

See more. (Thanks, Carolyn.)

Jeffrey Tucker’s great closing line the other day received appreciation and praise:

Yes, it is all about profits. Sorry socialists: this also means that it’s all about people.

It has me wanting to collect great lines about profits and misunderstandings of the profit motive.

Please nominate your favorites. Here’s one of mine:

If maximizing profits means that a man in all market transactions aims at increasing to the utmost the advantage derived, it is a pleonastic and periphrastic circumlocution. It only asserts what is implied in the very category of action. If it means anything else, it is the expression of an erroneous idea.

– Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, p. 243

OK, so you could claim that Tucker’s line is more accessible than Mises’s, but I find Mises’s line just as funny.

Postscript: I found this wonderful example of someone who is

1. interested in language and
2. not especially interested in economics

stumbling on Mises’s line and looking up ever word (and every word necessary to understand what she’d looked up in the first place) before concluding

So pleonastic and periphrastic circumlocution means something like redundant and abundant over using of words! Was the writer joking?

I received this helpful comment from a reader:

This is FYI only. I tried accessing your blog through my office proxy, and this is the message I get:

Somehow your site has been categorised as “Adult Theme”. I know you don’t exactly write kids’ stuff but blocking access seems excessive to me :)

Now, first of all, I do write some kids’ stuff. See, for example,

• “The 3 Austrian Pigs and Their Different Rates of Time Preference” or
• “Goldilocks and the 3 Sovereign Clients of Ursa Mutual”

Secondly, I did get a rather furious denouncement about 4 years ago for posting about “female breasts” (see also “giving offense”), but even if you think I was being sexist, misogynistic, and objectifying, you’d be hard-pressed to identify any images in that post that you couldn’t find at an art gallery, museum, or comic-book store.

Finally, I do have an image folder called “sexy” for my more PG13-rated images, but here’s the lot of them (decide for yourself):

[Read the rest »]

A lowercase liberty classic (aka rerun):

“Is the western liberal tradition a result of clerical celibacy?”