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."  

1978:

Stephen Mitchell’s translation of Gilgamesh is mesmerizing and moving. As far as I can determine by looking at other translations, it is true to the tablets. But somehow it manages to be hypnotic and beautiful, while the other translations read like homework assignments.

There is a really great audio version of Mitchell’s translation, also.

The Gilgamesh Trilogy by Ludmila Zeman, which I’ve blogged about, is a stunningly illustrated children’s version, but it takes huge liberties with the text. It doesn’t just obscure the naughty bits or soften the violence; it changes the story — changes the point of the story.

Gilgamesh the King by Geraldine McCaughrean is a beautifully written version that will appeal to children and adults, but its illustrations are few and, with a couple of significant exceptions, pretty boring.

I’d love to have McCaughrean’s book illustrated by Zeman.

Finally, there’s The Buried Book by David Damrosch, which is not so much about Gilgamesh or Enkidu, but rather about (as the subtitle puts it) “The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh.”

The Buried Book ranges from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to 19th-century archeology (which is a whole lot more exciting than it might sound) to the 7th-century BC Assyrian King Ashurbanipal (who might have been the first literate king in history) and on back to 4,000 years ago, back to the “original” poem.

The Audible version is also excellent.

From Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, p. 50–51:

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

… the triple Hecate’s team

The play within a play ends with a dance and with its audience amused and ready for bed.

Nothing remains but the final bit of entertainment, supplied by the fairy band. Puck comes on the stage alone to say that with the coming of night once more the fairies are back:

… we fairies, that do run
By the triple Hecate’s team,
From the presence of the sun
Following darkness like a dream,
Now are frolic.

– Act V, scene i, lines 385–89

Hecate was supposed to be one of the Titanesses in Greek mythology, but in the struggle that resulted in their supplanting by Jupiter (Zeus) and the other later gods, Hecate sided with Jupiter and remained in power. She was probably another personification of the moon.

There were three common goddesses of the moon in the later myths: Phoebe, Diana (Artemis), and Hecate. All three might be combined as a "triple Hecate" and Hecate was therefore frequently portrayed with three faces and six arms.

Later mythologists also tried to rationalize the difference in names by saying that Phoebe was the moon goddess in the heavens, Diana on earth, and Hecate in the underworld.

This connection with the underworld tended to debase her and make her a goddess of enchantments and magic spells, so that the fairies in following "triple Hecate’s team" were following not only the pale team of horses that guided the moon’s chariot (hence were active at night rather than by day) but also shared her power of enchantment and magic.

Her enchantments and magic made her sink further in Christian times until Hecate finally became a kind of queen of witches, and she appears in this guise in Macbeth…

See “Why Our Great-Grandparents were Happier Than We Are…” for many more examples of what Scott Lahti calls “pictures of freedom lost.”

From the Museum of Hoaxes:

The standing portrait of Lincoln (left) was created soon after the American Civil War. Although it hung in many classrooms, Lincoln never posed for it. Instead, an unknown entrepreneur created it by cutting-and-pasting a headshot of Lincoln taken from a photograph by Mathew Brady (middle) onto a portrait of the Southern leader John Calhoun (right). This was done because there were hardly any appropriate ‘heroic-style’ portraits of Lincoln made during his life. In the Calhoun image, the papers on the table say “strict constitution,” “free trade,” and “the sovereignty of the states.” In the Lincoln image, these words have been changed to read, “constitution,” “union,” and “proclamation of freedom.”

References:

MacDougall, C. (1958, 2nd ed.). Hoaxes. Dover Publications: 80.

Mitchell, W.J. (1992). The Reconfigured Eye. MIT Press: 204–208.

h/t Mrs.

“In 1918, the Soviet Union became the first country to promise universal ‘cradle-to-grave’ healthcare coverage, to be accomplished through the complete socialization of medicine. It didn’t turn out well.”

FULL ARTICLE by Yuri N. Maltsev, senior fellow of the Mises Institute. Maltsev worked as an economist on Mikhail Gorbachev’s economic reform team before defecting to the United States. He teaches economics at Carthage College.

On the Mises Blog, William Anderson has an interesting review of Krugman’s latest (and more insidious than usual) apology for economic fascism, but what really caught my attention was this comment from “Adam I.”:

You know what I’ve realized about these guys? It’s true for pretty much all American foreign policy thinkers too.

History begins in 1930. There are five historical events:

• The Crash of ‘29 and the Great Depression
• The Rise of Hitler
• WWII
• The Cold War
• 9/11

That’s it. That’s history. Economists seem to stop paying attention in the 1950s anyway, so their list is even shorter.

This is by H.W. Brands via LRC:

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “but not to his own facts.” Samuel Butler, the nineteenth-century English author, wrote that “though God cannot alter the past, historians can.”

Whether modifying facts or opinions, historians have been fiddling with history since Herodotus proclaimed his goal of “preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory.” Herodotus divorced history from Homeric myth; he consulted written sources, traveled and conducted interviews, and explained to readers what he knew and what he only inferred. But he rarely let informational accuracy get in the way of a good story, and he had a purpose beyond glorifying the past—namely demonstrating the superiority of Greek self-government to Persian despotism.

Subsequent historians followed his lead. Thucydides strove for balance in his treatment of the Peloponnesian War, or said he did; but he admitted to having made up speeches of his heroes based on “what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation.” Plutarch was unabashedly moralistic, drawing lessons from the lives of the Greeks and Romans he portrayed in parallel. Julius Caesar justified his conquest of Gaul as a way of legitimating his conquest of the Roman state. The Venerable Bede infused his history of the English church with miracle stories that revealed the hand of God behind the whole development. Edward Gibbon, by contrast, blamed Christianity for undermining the Roman Empire; he concluded his magnum opus acidly: “I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion.” Karl Marx generalized generously in declaring that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

Even when they aren’t motivated by politics or ideology, historians muddle what really happened. They have to: reality is too unruly to fit between the covers of one (or several) volumes. The historian picks facts the way a mountaineer finds a route across a boulder field: one fact leads to another and then another and yet another, allowing the historian to cross the ground in reasonable time. Important boulders are inevitably bypassed; rocks of lesser significance are included on the route for what they lie between.

Histories, moreover, require plots—the networks of causality that distinguish histories from mere chronicles. But causality, beyond the most trivial kind, is nearly impossible to prove. Most of us like to think we are rational, at least some of the time, and perhaps we are. But often rationality is a polite name for rationalization, and the stories we tell ourselves about our motives are simply that: stories. “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature,” Benjamin Franklin observed, “since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.” A. J. P. Taylor put the same point differently. “History is not another name for the past, as many people imply,” the British historian explained. “It is the name for stories about the past.”

I’m enjoying my wife’s current project editing Turgot.

Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781)

Here’s the latest, cross-posted to blog.Mises.org:

It is this advance and this continual return of capitals which constitute what one must call the circulation of money — that useful and fruitful circulation which gives life to all the labors of society, which maintains movement and life in the body politic, and which is with great reason compared to the circulation of blood in the animal body. For if, by any disorder whatsoever in the sequence of expenditures on the part of the different classes of society, the undertakers [entrepreneurs] cease to get back their advances with the profit they have a right to expect from them, it is evident that they will be obliged to reduce their undertakings; that the amount of labor, the amount of consumption of the fruits of the earth, the amount of production, and the amount of revenue will be reduced in like measure; that poverty will take the place of wealth; and that the common workmen, ceasing to find employment, will fall into the extremest destitution. (Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth)

(See also “Economics in 2 Paragraphs.”)