Her?

How do you keep a thousand ships worth of men on a foreign beach for a decade? How do you convince fathers, sons, and brothers to abandon their families, farms, duties, and other personal ambitions to risk their lives and lay siege to a city whose walls were reportedly built by Poseidon himself and would never, by divine decree, be breached by an adversary? Was Helen really that beautiful? Her? I’d like to think I admire the female form as much as the next guy, but the idea that an entire nation would mobilize for a decade because she was so very beautiful is laughable. Guys are pretty dumb, but that story stretches credulity. What then?

I’ve promised not to get into the oath of the quartered horse, and I won’t except to say that the ancient Greeks told a story that demonstrated the strategic thinking of Odysseus years in advance of the war that created a NATO style alliance that ultimately demanded the participation of so many in the expedition. Maybe that oath was powerful enough to get the whole the whole thing started, but 10 years? I kinda doubt it. Also NATO style alliances are fragile, and prone to disruption by volatile leaders and a personality like Agamemnon’s might have shattered such an alliance years before the consequences of the oath came into play.

Then there is the idea that the abduction of and refusal to return Helen were representative of an egregious violation of the cultural concept of Xenia that merited an extreme response. The ancient Greeks, similar to other ancient peoples, had specific expectations and ritualized behaviors regulating the bond between host and guest. Folks familiar with the Old Testament will recall Genesis 18: 1-15 and 19 for tales of how these types of relationships should or should not be conducted. Abraham does it right and is rewarded, the inhabitants of the cities of the plain, not so much. 

The  interaction between Glaucus and Diomedes mentioned in my last essay is worth considering in more detail. Diomedes is in the midst of his aristeia and has become a one man wrecking crew dispatching men into swirling darkness with frightening efficiency and sending gods and goddesses packing off to Olympus. He encounters Glaucus and introductions are made. If you’re going to win glory on the battlefield you want to be able to brag about who you’ve killed so it’s only natural to take a moment to exchange genealogies and prior feats of renown before engaging in combat. As Glaucus and Diomedes exchange hero origin stories they realize they share a multi-generational guest-host relationship because Diomedes’ grandfather hosted Glaucus’ grandfather during an earlier war when they were on the same side of the conflict. Consequently, they realize they cannot fight one another, and they go so far as to exchange armor before heading their separate ways.

So now I am your host and friend in the heart of Argos, you are mine in Lycia when I visit in your country. Come, let us keep clear of each other’s spears, even there in the thick of battle. Look, plenty of Trojans there for me to kill, your famous allies too, any soldier the god will bring in range or I can run to ground. And plenty of Argives too—kill them if you can. But let’s trade armor. The men must know our claim: we are sworn friends from our fathers’ days till now!” Both agreed. Both fighters sprang from their chariots, clasped each other’s hands and traded pacts of friendship. 6:224-233

 It’s not even a fair exchange as Glaucus’ armor is gold and worth 100 oxen and Diomedes’ armor is bronze and worth only 9, but that’s the sort of gesture that seals bonds lasting generations. In this moment and others like it Homer shows how culturally similar the Greeks and Trojans were. This war is not founded upon fear or hatred. Homer does not make the Trojans into an inscrutable “other”. In so doing it is reasonable for the audience to assume that Paris was not treading on unknown custom when abducting Helen.

It seems the beliefs manifested here regarding the relationship between hospitality, loyalty, and reciprocity were shared across multiple cultures and were a very big deal. The chapters referenced earlier from Genesis suggest Yahweh takes these practices seriously. Benefits and blessings derived from the proper practice of Xenia are scattered throughout the Old Testament ranging from Deuteronomy 10:17-18, to Kings 17 and more. It was a cultural assumption of Jesus of Nazareth and the Apostles (Mark 6:6-11). Jesus’ disciples were instructed to travel without money and expected to be taken in and hosted in foreign cities. There’s even a passage (Matt 10:13-15) that always struck me as antithetical to the Christian message that says those who reject the apostles have something worse coming than the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah. This passage only makes sense to me if the a lack of hospitality is considered an affront to common decency and the associated punishment is not specific to Jesus’ message. The parable of the Good Samaritan certainly falls within this vein. In Norse mythology Odin often traveled Midgard as a wandering beggar testing the virtue of hospitality. In ancient Greece, Zeus was the patron and enforcer of Xenia. Ovid’s Metamorphoses describes an incident when Zeus (Jupiter) and Hermes (Mercury) are turned away by many wealthy people, but a poor elderly couple Baucis and Philemon take them in. After they unwittingly offer gracious, if comically impoverished, respite to the gods they’re blessed with a beautiful eternal fate that has inspired artists for thousands of years (Ovid 8:611-724). 

In a world without hotels and other professional travel services a code of conduct with universal penetration enforced by the highest and most powerful gods has obvious advantages for allowing people to venture out and maintain filial bonds. It even greases the wheels of commerce. A world without these values is darker and more dangerous. In this context we can ask: what is to be done when a son of one of the richest and most powerful cities flagrantly defies these customs and steals his host’s treasure and wife? Such a flagrant abuse of a widely accepted custom might provoke a coalition to launch an armada in defense of common values and basic decency. We are familiar with this justification with war in our own time. This sort of thing might have inspired thousands to get on the ships, but would defending principle then keep them there for 10 years? The U.S. spent over a decade in Vietnam, and two decades in Afghanistan, so its not unheard of, but those transoceanic wars demanded sophisticated logistical abilities and enormous amounts of money. I suspect the Greeks learned the truth of a certain parable about getting involved in land wars in Asia while camped out on the beach. Based on the social chaos that greets the Achaeans upon their return home, I suspect that even an important value like Xenia would be insufficient to endure a protracted siege. Principles are powerful, but we all know an even more powerful motivator of human behavior.

What about money? Troy sat near the Dardanelles. In fact Aeneas, a cousin of Hector, was a Dardan prince and by claiming him as an ancient predecessor of Augustus in The Aeneid the Romans radically altered the ending of the Trojan war. Rome conquered Greece therefore in the very long run, according to Virgil, the Trojans actually won. Returning to the point, the Dardanelles remain among the narrowest waterways navigated in international maritime trade. This natural choke point offers an obvious opportunity to control and tax trade between the Mediterranean and Black Seas. 

It places Troy as both a known neighbor: the Trojans and Aecheans apparently speak the same similar enough languages that they communicate with ease and worship the same gods in The Iliad. Yet there are a few foreign elements that distinguish them: Priam practiced polygamy and the Trojans dressed differently from their Achaean foes. Might the abduction of Helen, the abuse of Spartan xenia, and the enforcement of social norms have been a cover for the desire to acquire the immense wealth of Troy and place the control of the flow of money and goods through the Dardanelles in Achaean hands?  We are familiar with this rationale for war as well. Was the Trojan War actually just Operation Trojan Storm? Maybe.

The traditional date of the fall of Troy according to the ancient Greeks, 1185 BCE, happens to coincide nicely with what is called the Bronze Age Collapse which appears to have been a multifactorial affair with significant and far reaching effects. I’d never heard of it until like 2 years ago, and now I feel like its fingerprints are all over the history and texts we know so well. Was the Trojan war epic an elaborate tale based upon a vague cultural memory of a greater regional wave of conflict and migration driven by social and environmental factors now lost to history? We’ll never fully know the motivations for the fictionalized or real life conflict that happened on the Troad in the Late 13th or Early 12th century BCE, but Homer offers us many examples of at least one more reason thousands of men might willingly take an extended hiatus from their real lives to go assault an unassailable city. Timé and Kleos.

Timé and Kleos are often translated as honor and glory respectively. I neither speak nor read ancient Greek, so I’m operating totally in the realm of what others make available, but it is my understanding that the concepts conveyed by these words are foreign enough to our context that there isn’t actually a good single word translation for them.

Timé is more than just the appreciation or acclaim one garners for heroic exploits in combat. Timé is the word used to describe gifts sacrificed to the gods. It is the physical embodiment of the respect and esteem a warrior has earned from his comrades manifested by how plundered property is distributed to him. One knows exactly how well one is esteemed by one’s peers by the quantity and quality of war bounty one is given. How much of the gold seized in the last raid did you get? Did that really beautiful vase end up in your pile? Which of the women is now your slave? You and everyone around you can see the Timé you’ve been granted. As such it is a zero sum game. There is a limited quantity of Timé and the more one has, the less there is to go around. This system would appear to offer motivation on two fronts: the physical gifts would enrich the recipient, and the visible, public adoration it represents would surely please the ego and fire off some dopamine in reward centers in the brain and the lack thereof would be distressing.

Ajax was a warrior second only to Achilles in terms of physical ability and bravery, and after Achilles’ death, he was the natural choice to receive his armor as a symbol of the Timé he held among his fellow Achaeans. Odysseus suggested Agamemnon allow the rank and file to vote and as fate would have it, they elected to give the armor to Odysseus. In the Sophoclean drama Ajax this slight drives the eponymous character temporarily insane. The combined shame of being denied Timé by his comrades and the acts he commits during a bout of enraged insanity drives him to suicide. Clearly, Timé was a well developed cultural concept in ancient Greece and represented a powerful motivating force. 

Like Timé, Kleos is not glory in some figurative sense of happiness or personal satisfaction following victory or personal accomplishment. I’m told the most literal translation of the word is “loud” or what others hear. Kleos is the glory achieved by others talking about you and your exploits. Once again it is a semi-quantifiable thing that must be won through individual behavior, but is bestowed by others. There is a hypothesis that Kleos has very ancient roots as it has cognates across several disparate indo-european languages. It has been proposed that words as diverse as “Sravas” in Sanskrit, “Low” in Armenian, “Slava” in Old Slavonic, and “Clu” in Old Irish all derive from a Proto-Indo European word “Klewos”. How one has any idea what language was spoken before any culture developed writing is beyond me, but the fact that many disparate cultures shared a similar concept described by words that bear some resemblance if one squints at a distance is an interesting observation. 

Within the context of Homeric epic the idea of Kleos Aphthiton or eternal glory is the type of Kleos being pursued. Returning to a discussion of mortality in the Homeric context; if your time on this planet is short, and there is nothing of great import following one’s death, then the only viable path to a form of immortality is to have others remember and describe your glorious deeds long after you’ve died. The cultural format in ancient Greece for recalling and sharing great deeds of the past was epic poetry. The logic here is a bit circular, but the end to which everyone whose lives, deaths, and deeds are described in The Iliad is striving, was to have their lives, deaths, and deeds described in an epic poem like The Iliad. Congratulations guys! You made it! As silly as it sounds, one apparent assumption of The Iliad is that the way you keep an army in the field for a decade, is the desire for men to be rewarded with shiny prizes by their peers and to be sung about and remembered by others forever in an epic poem.

If you balk at this explanation, take a moment to consider how pervasive, universal, and persistent these concepts of Timé and Kleos are throughout human history. Do you know who won the 1994 NBA Finals? How about Super Bowl XXXIII? What movie won the Oscar for best picture in 1998? How many times has Meryl Streep won best actress? How many oscars have been given to Daniel Day-Lewis? Why is it that some folks get so animated about giving out participation trophies? Why do shouting matches break out about who “should have won” an award? Should certain victories carry an asterisk? Humans constantly bestow ribbons, patches, medals, pennants, trophies and countless other awards to those who demonstrate excellence in a field. For almost every pursuit imaginable, there is an organization whose purpose is to recognize and arbitrate greatness. If humans were not motivated by Timé how does one account for this phenomenon? How does one account for the fact that millions of spectators travel great lengths or tune in from around the globe to see just how fast Usain Bolt can run 328 feet? Very few with dreams of becoming highly paid professional performers achieve the pinnacle they seek, but the human appetites for winning and bestowing Timé appear insatiable and thus one can reasonably expect to see the pattern emerge regardless of the specifics of the culture or subculture. I see no reason to believe we will ever stop honoring swift runners like Achilles, so why would humans stop pursuing that form of honor? 

Beyond the conferral of awards and prizes for performance, consider other superlatives. Ask a teenager which channel on YouTube dot com has the most subscribers. Who is the richest human alive? We confer Timé upon these folks vying for immortality not only by what we give them, but what we refuse to take from them. If you’re very good at making money, we ask for a lower percentage of your wealth than those who are not as good at it. Income is taxed at higher rates for those of us who work for a living, than for those whose wealth is generated by the labor of others. There are many more ways for a modern human to pursue Timé than in the past, but we certainly haven’t abandoned the concept as a culture. 

In the same vein, what type of people feature most prominently in our histories? In the opening sentence of his Histories, Herodotus specifically states his rationale for undertaking the exercise: “This is the display of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that things done by man not be forgotten in time, and that great and marvelous deeds, some displayed by the Hellenes, some by the barbarians, not lose their glory”. The word he uses that’s translated as glory? Kleos. The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Epic of Sundiata, Joshua, David, Beowulf, and I’m sure a more educated person could make a longer list of ancient texts, are all meant to preserve the great deeds of the past. Consider the names most humans know from history: Sargon, Ramses, Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, William, Napoleon. What do they have in common? Who led the Colonial troops in the American Revolution? Who commanded allied troops in the first Gulf War? The story we tell about ourselves is overwhelmingly populated by militaries and their leaders. Despite the fact that every glorious conquest stands atop a mountain of death and human misery, we immortalize the victors. We are so inclined to give Kleos for the business of death that you don’t even have to win, or be on the side of right to have immortality conferred upon you. Ever wonder why it is controversial to remove statues of Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson? Why are they there in the first place? Why exactly do we have public monuments to traitors to the republic? While millions, perhaps billions, of anonymous soldiers and civilians have suffered and died as a result of military conflict, we humans nonetheless consistently confer Kleos Aphthiton upon a select few warriors. 

Like Timé, the options for obtaining Kleos have expanded in the intervening three millennia since the time of the Trojan war. Books, audio and visual recording media, and the technology to store, organize, search, and recall those records has greatly expanded the breadth of behavior that may garner eternal glory for a human being. However, the necessity of documenting one’s exploits to have one’s glory preserved is clearly expressed by the maxim “pics, or it didn’t happen”. Is Instagram the new Homer?

Is the prospect of these types of rewards powerful enough to induce humans to sacrifice their lives pursuing them? Ask the parents and children who continue to play tackle football despite the association with CTE and potential for early death. Ask the generations of actors, actresses, and athletes who have endured physical, emotional and sexual abuse from coaches, trainers, producers, and directors while pursuing their dreams. Ask the graduate students and researchers toiling in obscurity. Ask the hopeful social media influencers carefully curating their “brand” desperately seeking to “go viral”. Ask the politicians neck deep in delusion about their ability to affect real change within a system that rewards ideological purity, sound bites, and unadulterated tribalism. Ask the folks who cast votes by text message to kick people off the island. Ask the adult men whose mood is disproportionately influenced by the performance of teenagers handling a ball. Humans spend a surprising amount of our time seeking or conferring Timé and Kleos.

I don’t mean to imply that all human endeavor is aimed at pursuing glory and honor in a bid for immortality. I believe that we are complex and our motivations are multifaceted. I think soldiers in volunteer armies, especially in an age where the terrors of war are well advertised, are motivated by love of country and loyalty to comrades and a cause greater than themselves. I think many athletes and performers derive genuine happiness and internal satisfaction from the excellence they achieve. The sense of well being, flow, that comes from operating within, but near the edge of one’s capacity is a real thing. Beethoven lived a life full of abuse, rejection, disappointment, physical pain, and frustration, there must have been something more than the applause he could not hear that drove him to write Ode To Joy.

The point I’m trying to make is that full comprehension of the complexity of human behavior has been and remains beyond our abilities, but we know Dopamine is one hell of a drug and every culture has its ways of splashing it on the nucleus accumbens. Lab rats have been shown to endure significant stress to get a hit of dopamine, perhaps humans aren’t so very different and Homer knew it.