Like Aeschylus and Sophocles, Euripides attempts to understand the quintessential nature of human beings, their motives and their capacity for choice. In Euripides’ world, individuals are alone with their passions and their passions are not easily tamed by reason. Indeed, Euripides thought that reason was relatively impotent in the face of strong passion and wondered whether any rational purpose is to be found in the world of human affairs. Good and evil are not God-given qualities assailing reason from without. Rather, they are part of the defining characteristics of human beings.
Euripides places the responsibility for good and evil actions inside individuals. Passion and knowledge are the two great determining factors; external factors are devalued as deceptive devices used to avoid confronting the sad fact that human beings are individually responsible, through the power of passion and inadequate powers of reasoning, for the good and evil they create. It is therefore important to study the workings of ‘I’ if we are to discover the personal powers which inspire good and evil deeds.
In Euripides’ play, Medea, two themes which loom large in the centuries ahead dominate: the qualities of women and the importance of human motives. In her attempt to win back Jason from another woman, Medea threatens and then proceeds to kill her children. While audiences, ancient and modern, are appalled by her actions, they strive to understand her motives. Medea, for all her crimes, is more human (if not humane) than Homer’s characters because she defies her biological and social conditioning. She rises above everyday feelings to achieve her goals and even though we find her behaviour despicable, we try to understand why she acted as she did.
Medea knows that she is at war with her irrational self. Her tragedy is that she chooses to surrender to the power of her passion, knowing that she can do otherwise. She says that she understands the horror of what she is going to do, but anger masters her resolve. Referring indirectly to the Homeric sense of heroism, she says that a woman is weak and timid in most matters: the noise of war makes her a coward. But touch her right to marriage and there is no bloodier spirit. Women may be useless for heroic purposes but they are skilled practitioners in all kinds of evil. She refuses to allow anyone to think of her as weak or passive: she is dangerous to her enemies and loyal to her friends. To such a life glory belongs.
If we are defined by our ability to transcend our biological and social conditioning, we are very dangerous indeed. We are saved from this danger if we master the power of passion. But Euripides is not sanguine about this; he is convinced that humans can be relied upon to allow their passions to control and guide them on the important matters of living. So long as ‘I’ as psyche is granted the status of the emotional self and the cause of important actions, there seems to be little room for the ‘rational individuals’ who can, with education and intellectual discipline, tame their passions. These individuals were soon to appear on the world stage with the Greek Rationalists, who took the crucial step of identifying psyche or ‘I’ with rational thinking, whose virtue is knowledge. Through the exercise of rational thinking Medea’s problems can be re-defined and managed and the tragic element in human affairs eliminated. This grandiose worldview, based on a new intellectual optimism, was to wage war on Homeric heroism and consign it to an ignoble history.
In the Iliad heroism does not produce happiness: its reward is fame. Yet there is no self-pity in Homer’s heroes. They confront a brutal and dangerous world courageously and without any sense of being depressed by a future which will end in pain and misery. They teach how to live nobly in the face of adversity and death. If we cannot be immortal, we can at least live nobly and die well. Homeric folk resist the impulse to invent a perfect, spiritual world to house its heroes. Homer’s is a realistic philosophy of life in which ‘what you see is what you get’ and nobility means confronting a harsh world without illusion. To confront and accept the tragic element in human life demands a worldview which does not excuse poor performance, or tolerate hand-wringing complainers.
Homer’s men are hardy folk with strong bodies of classical beauty. Their philosophy emphasises all the finer human emotions – love, chivalry, courage, virtue, excellence and justice. The warriors are lusty in company, fearless in a fight and steadfast in friendship. They applaud excellence in battle and in oratory. Faced with a cruel and short life, Homer portrays human existence as more than an insignificant struggle, even though human life is governed by conflict. A philosophy of glorious power is, therefore, an understandable consequence of the need to transform their intolerable, battle-bound lives into a spectacle. We cannot help but wonder how these high-spirited men and women could have found life so enjoyable. To be able to confront a brutal life without self-pity suggests a philosophical worldview which we would do well to study.
Social commentators have noted that we live in a narcissistic culture which screams for freedom without responsibility and happiness without pain. If true, we must seriously question whether we can begin to understand the ancient idea of the heroic. If we pursue ‘happiness’ and ‘quality of life’ we distance ourselves from the heroic life. If we submit to political correctness and the demands of paranoid minority groups, we vote for a dubious democracy which has lost touch with the great aristocratic standards by which greatness is achieved. If we, in our self-pitying haste, seek out counsellors for our minor ills, we deny the virtues of courage and nobility. It is Homer’s genius that he was able to describe the heroic worldview in a way that combined an emphasis on heroic self-assertion with a deep sense of the tragedy of human existence. Homer’s heroes are alive today and deserve respect because they looked squarely at the world and stood firm in the face of its terrors. They have never left Western consciousness and they stride across the stage of history as giants who bow their heads only to their mortality.
2
GREEK RATIONALISTS: Arguing for Argument
Had we lived in the classical age of Greece – Plato’s time – we would have confronted a new cultural hero: the philosopher-king. Homer’s warriors no longer occupy the higher reaches of human achievement: they have been replaced in the heroic pantheon by philosophers. This period is characterised by the first great transformation in Western thought, or what Nietzsche called ‘the genuine antagonism’. Had we been educated in Plato’s Academy we would have been told to ignore Homer’s Iliad and commit ourselves to Plato’s Utopia (described in The Republic). An odd development, one might say. And Nietzsche did say so, but that was over 2000 years later and most philosophers disagree with him in any case. Nietzsche thought that Homer was a glorifier of life and Plato a slanderer of life: a man who had to lie himself out of reality. Nietzsche was a naturalist and believed with Homer that there is only one world and this is it. Plato was a spiritualist and, in opposing two worlds to Homer’s single natural world, created fascinating philosophical problems.
Plato and his followers replace Homer’s emphasis on physical power and heroic action with the importance of logos: thinking and reasoning about the world. Those who dedicate themselves to logos are led to sophia – wisdom – and those who love (philo) wisdom are philosophers. Plato transcends Homer’s world because he replaces mythos – thinking about a God-driven world – with logos. The Homeric idea that man is Homo natura is replaced by the idea that man is Homo sapiens: man the knower, or man the truth-seeker. Plato thus creates a new cultural hero, replacing the sophisticated fighting animal with the truth-seeker. Virtue is transferred from the physical to the intellectual plane and the physical world is progressively devalued in favour of the spiritual world.
The first great transformation in Western thinking is a movement from one world to two – from this material world to a second, immaterial world. In the sixth century BC philosophers took seriously the idea that there are two worlds: a physical world accessible to the senses, and a metaphysical