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Imprimis, On Line -- March, 1993
Imprimis, meaning "in the first place," is a free
monthly publication of Hillsdale College (circulation
435,000 worldwide). Hillsdale College is a liberal arts
institution known for its defense of free market
principles and Western culture and its nearly 150-year
refusal to accept federal funds. Imprimis publishes
lectures by such well-known figures as Ronald Reagan,
Jeane Kirkpatrick, Tom Wolfe, Charlton Heston, and many
more. Permission to reprint is hereby granted, provided
credit is given to Hillsdale College. Copyright 1992.
For more information on free print subscriptions or
back issues, call 1-800-437-2268, or 1-517-439-1524,
ext. 2319.
---------------------------------------------
"Modern Values and the Challenge of Myth"
by Stephen Bertman Classicist,
University of Windsor
---------------------------------------------
Volume 22, Number 3
Hillsdale College, Hillsdale,
Michigan 49242
March 1993
---------------------------------------------
Preview: Myth, whether it is the myth of the ancient
Greeks and Romans or the myth of the Jews and
Christians, is about truth and universals. It is about
good and evil, virtue and vice. It is about the shared
experiences of the human condition -- from pain, fear,
cruelty, and defeat to joy, heroism, love, and triumph.
As Stephen Bertman argues, many of the myths we
have inherited from the past still have the power to
profoundly affect our ideals and shape our lives. His
remarks were delivered during Hillsdale College's
Center for Constructive Alternatives September 1992
seminar on ancient myth.
---------------------------------------------
Aeneas and Ulysses:
Ancient Heroes for a Modern World
Eastward across the sea from Greece lay the ancient
citadel of Troy. Legend tells how a thousand ships once
sailed there carrying an invading army. Besieged by
Greek warriors, the fortified city finally fell after a
decade of war.
The last battle took place inside the city walls.
Having penetrated its defenses by guile, Greek
commandos put the city to the torch. In the final
struggle many Trojans heroically laid down their lives.
The casualties would surely have included a Trojan
prince named Aeneas. But the gods, we are told, kept
him from throwing his life away in a cause they knew
was lost. Instead, they urged him to flee, gathering up
as many of his fellow citizens as he could find and
commandeering ships for their escape. The city in
flames, its sanctuaries violated, Aeneas moved through
the ruins, leading the survivors to the shore.
The gods promised Aeneas that they would lead him
to a new homeland, but ten years of searching,
struggle, and sacrifice lay ahead until it was found.
Surviving many perils and temptations, Aeneas at last
led his people to Italy, where they were destined to
found the nation of Rome.
At the very time that Aeneas was searching for a
homeland, another veteran of the Trojan War was also
sailing the seas. Ulysses, an enemy of Aeneas, was
trying to get back home to Greece with the Greek
soldiers he had commanded at Troy. Like the Trojans,
Ulysses and his men would face countless trials and
tragedies on their homeward way.
The goddess Calypso offered to make Ulysses divine
if only he would stay with her. Likewise, Aeneas was
tempted to remain forever with Dido, the sensuous queen
of Carthage. But both heroes felt compelled to continue
their journeys. Aeneas was fulfilling a vow to found a
new nation, and Ulysses was returning home to help the
wife and son he had left behind 20 years ago before,
loved ones who now desperately needed him. Both heroes
chose hardship over ease, danger over security and, in
Ulysses' case, death over immortality.
From Legend to Literature
Today we know the ancient stories of Aeneas and Ulysses
from Vergil's Aeneid. and Homer's Odyssey. Along with
the Iliad, Homer's epic poem came to serve as the bible
of classical Greece, and similarly, Vergil's became the
national epic of Rome. But literary classics are like
mountains. Because their venerable outlines are so
familiar, we look upon their presence as benign,
ignoring the immense seismic pressures primordially
responsible for their form.
The Odyssey and the Aeneid, which were legends
long before they became literature, arose out of
extended periods of social turmoil. The Odyssey was
created between the 12th and 9th centuries B.C., during
the Dark Ages of Greece when political and economic
chaos followed the Heroic Age. Though this Greek epic
portrays a world of palaces and feudal splendor, it
actually depicts a culture that had ceased to exist. To
a nostalgic audience that ached for order, the Odyssey
held out the hope of a life restored. You can go home
again, it argued, if -- like Ulysses -- you exert every
fiber of muscle and every sinew of mind. Even those who
know the poem well often fail to realize that more than
half of the story deals not with maritime adventure but
with the moral reconstruction of domestic society.
In like fashion, in the first century B.C., the
Roman poet Vergil took pre-existing tales and used them
to compose a sermon to inspire his people. The Romans
had endured a century of class struggle, revolution,
and civil war, terminating in the fall of the Republic.
Through Aeneas' example, Vergil showed his fellow
citizens that they had a special destiny, one that they
could fulfill by imitating their heroic ancestor's
virtues of dedication and self-sacrifice.
The Power of the Past
In sailing through the turbulent waters of their time,
the ancient Greeks and Romans could draw strength not
only from legend and literature, but from the temporal
perspectives of their respective cultures. In facing
the perils of an uncharted future, they were sustained
by a firm hold on the past.
The value the Greeks and Romans assigned to the
past is symbolized by two figures from classical
mythology. Achievements in the arts, the Greeks
believed, were inspired by divine powers they called
Muses (hence the word "music"). Mnemosyne, whose name
means "memory," was the mother goddess of the Muses and
the arts. Underlying this relation was the conviction
that creativity in the arts requires an understanding
of tradition. In a larger sense, the tree of
civilization cannot flourish unless its roots draw
nourishment from the past.
To the Romans, Janus, for whom the month of
January is named, was the god of beginnings. Janus was
one of the most peculiar gods of mythology, for he had
two faces, one which looked ahead and one which looked
back, reminding that every new undertaking depends for
its success on the guidance people can borrow from
experience.
To speak of something as a "myth" today implies
that it never really happened. Yet what we disparage as
mythology the Greeks and Romans would have called their
most ancient history, no less valid for the distance
that separated them from the events their stories
described. Myths embodied truths that transcended time.
As such, they deserved special reverence.
The Burden of Memory
The practice of referring to the past was easier for
the ancients than it is for us. First of all, there was
less past to remember. Events were more comprehensible
because their numbers had been winnowed by tradition,
the precious residue preserved in memory and passed on
orally from generation to generation. The old and the
wise and the storytellers were the keepers of the
legacy, and the telling and retelling of treasured
stories ingrained them in the hearts of the listeners.
As time has gone on, however, more and more
factual information has accumulated in the storehouse
of history. Its sheer bulk makes it difficult to
distinguish what is worth knowing. The printed page,
the flypaper of human thought, attracts and adheres to
itself all the buzzing and expiring minutiae of
experience. The mass production and collection of books
after the invention of the printing press radically
expanded the burden of what can be learned and has made
the task of learning intimidating. Like the player in a
perverse version of the child's game, "I Pack My
Trunk," he whose turn is historically last must
memorize the most.
This explains a fundamental truth that few who
enter the multicultural debate acknowledge: as
creatures of time, we are all multicultural. And like
the DNA that is encoded with our biological past, our
cultural matrix is inscribed with the preferences and
prejudices of earlier times. We may ignore our ancestry
if we wish and elect to be ideological orphans, or we
may search out our parentage. But the latter course is
not easy. Pushing through the crowded terminal of
civilization, we will have to hang on not only to our
own luggage, but to the bulging, clumsy trunks of
previous ages. No wonder so many students, faced with
such a daunting task, resort to hiring Cliff, the
friendly porter, to help carry their load.
But while Cliff's Notes may help a student pass an
exam, they can't help a whole civilization pass the
more challenging test of time. To do that, a people
must have a deeper, historical insight into their own
condition.
Cultural Amnesia
The 18th century historian Gibbon, the author of The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, lived 13
centuries after Aeneas' heirs had been vanquished. We
are only two centuries removed from Gibbon's time, yet
we have forgotten most of what Gibbon knew. Eight
centuries separated the classical Greeks from the
Trojan War, yet they remembered it in profound detail,
just as the Romans remembered it centuries after.
Americans, by contrast, know little of what
happened in their own country only decades ago.
According to a Gallup Poll of college seniors sponsored
by the National Endowment for the Humanities in the
late 1980s, 58 percent didn't know who was president
when the Korean War began, 42 percent couldn't place
the Civil War in the right half century, and 24 percent
thought Columbus landed in America in the 1500s. If
even recent history blurs in the memory, there must be
other factors apart from the passage of time that
explain our gross and progressive cultural amnesia.
One such factor was the industrial revolution,
which, by rapidly gratifying material desires, led to
an increasing preoccupation with the present. A second
factor has been the electronic revolution, which has
placed an even greater emphasis upon immediacy.
Television is the best example of this phenomenon. It
exists from moment to moment. Its instant images appear
and disappear with the speed of light, melting the
distinction between appearance and reality, and
creating the illusion that all things are sensually
accessible.
By contracting time itself until everything seems
short-term, television desensitizes the mind to the
notion of long-term consequences. What was past is no
longer prologue. It is curbside trash.
Almost 50 years ago, Sir Winston Churchill warned
that an "iron curtain" had descended across the
continent of Europe. Today, across America and across
the world, another iron curtain is descending -- an
electronic curtain -- less apparent and more pervasive
than the curtain of Churchill's day. It is a curtain
not geographical but temporal, one that isolates us
from all other times but now.
The Challenge of Myth
As an embodiment of ancient truth, myth challenges this
kind of worship at the altar of the present. And
because myth is enduring, it blatantly defies the law
of disposability that often dictates human
relationships and modern values. Myth proclaims the
continuity of existence and declares that a life lived
only in the present is a life betrayed. It also offers
a definition of what it means to be human -- a
definition that still has the power to move men, even
after thousands of years.
Myth is also, finally, about understanding the
nature of time itself. Through ancient myth, each of us
is a time traveler, journeying from past to future,
oblivious as one melts into the other -- like reveling
passengers on a cruise ship, unconscious in the moonlit
night of the speed at which we cross the ocean swell.
We surrender to time, yielding fluidly to its flow like
marine creatures carried on by an underwater current.
For time is our sea.
---------------------------------------------
Stephen Bertman is a professor of classical and modern
languages, literatures, and civilizations at the
University of Windsor in Ontario. He is the author of
Doorways Through Time: The Romance of Archaeology
(Tarcher/Putnam, 1987, 1991), Art and the Romans
(Coronado Press, 1975), and editor of The Conflict of
Generations in Ancient Greece and Rome (B.R. Grner:
Amsterdam, 1976). His September 1988 Imprimis essay,
"Classical Perspectives on the 21st Century," was
reprinted in Vital Speeches.
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