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.

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."  

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.

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.

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.

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.