The Greeks and the Irrational Read online

  On this analogy, the Erinys should be the immediate agent in Agamemnon's case. That she should figure at all in this context may well surprise those who think of an Erinys as essentially a spirit of vengeance, still more those who believe, with Rohde,33 that the Erinyes were originally the vengeful dead. But the passage does not stand alone. We read also in the Odyssey34 of "the heavy ate which the hard-hitting goddess Erinys laid on the understanding of Melampus." In neither place is there any question of revenge or punishment. The explanation is perhaps that the Erinys is the personal agent who ensures the fulfilment of a moira. That is why the Erinyes cut short the speech of Achilles' horses: it is not "according to moira" for horses to talk.35 That is why they would punish the sun, according to Heraclitus,36 if the sun should "transgress his measures" by exceeding the task assigned to him. Most probably, I think, the moral function of the Erinyes as ministers of vengeance derives from this primitive task of enforcing a moira which was at first morally neutral, or rather, contained by implication both an "ought" and a "must" which early thought did not clearly distinguish. So in Homer we find them enforcing the claims to status which arise from family or social relationship and are felt to be part of a person's moira:37 a parent,38 an elder brother,39 even a beggar40 has something due to him as such, and can invoke "his" Erinyes to protect it. So too they are called upon to witness oaths; for the oath creates an assignment, a moira. The connection of Erinys with moira is still attested by Aeschylus,41 though the moirai have now become quasi-personal; and the Erinyes are still for Aeschylus dispensers of ate,42 although both they and it have been moralised. It rather looks as if the complex moira-Erinys-ate had deep roots, and might well be older than the ascription of ate to the agency of Zeus.43 In that connection it is worth recalling that Erinys and aisa (which is synonymous with moira) go back to what is perhaps the oldest known form of Hellenic speech, the Arcado-Cypriot dialect.44

  Here, for the present, let us leave ate and its associates, and consider briefly another kind of "psychic intervention" which is no less frequent in Homer, namely, the communication of power from god to man. In the Iliad, the typical case is the communication of měnos45 during a battle, as when Athena puts a triple portion of menos into the chest of her protege Diomede, or Apollo puts menos into the thumos of the wounded Glaucus.46 This menos is not primarily physical strength; nor is it a permanent organ of mental life47 like thumos or Rather it is, like ate, a state of mind. When a man feels menos in his chest, or "thrusting up pungently into his nostrils,"48 he is conscious of a mysterious access of energy; the life in him is strong, and he is filled with a new confidence and eagerness. The connection of menos with the sphere of volition comes out clearly in the related words "to be eager," and "wishing ill." It is significant that often, though not always, a communication of menos comes as a response to prayer. But it is something much more spontaneous and instinctive than what we call "resolution"; animals can have it,49 and it is used by analogy to describe the devouring energy of fire.50 In man it is the vital energy, the "spunk," which is not always there at call, but comes and goes mysteriously and (as we should say) capriciously. But to Homer it is not caprice: it is the act of a god, who "increases or diminishes at will a man's (that is to say, his potency as a fighter)."51 Sometimes, indeed, the menos can be roused by verbal exhortation; at other times its onset can only be explained by saying that a god has "breathed it into" the hero, or "put it in his chest," or, as we read in one place, transmitted it by contact, through a staff.52

  I think we should not dismiss these statements as "poetic invention" or "divine machinery." No doubt the particular instances are often invented by the poet for the convenience of his plot; and certainly the psychic intervention is sometimes linked with a physical one, or with a scene on Olympus. But we can be pretty sure that the underlying idea was not invented by any poet, and that it is older than the conception of anthropomorphic gods physically and visibly taking part in a battle. The temporary possession of a heightened menos is, like ate, an abnormal state which demands a supernormal explanation. Homer's men can recognise its onset, which is marked by a peculiar sensation in the limbs. "My feet beneath and hands above feel eager says one recipient of the power: that is because, as the poet tells us, the god has made them nimble .53 This sensation, which is here shared by a second recipient, confirms for them the divine origin of the menos.54 It is an abnormal experience. And men in a condition of divinely heightened menos behave to some extent abnormally. They can perform the most difficult feats with ease that is a traditional mark of divine power.56 They can even, like Diomede, fight with impunity against gods57—an action which to men in their normal state is excessively dangerous.58 They are in fact for the time being rather more, or perhaps rather less, than human. Men who have received a communication of menos are several times compared to ravening lions;59 but the most striking description of the state is in Book 15, where Hector goes berserk he foams at the mouth, and his eyes glow.60 From such cases it is only a step to the idea of actual possession ; but it is a step which Homer does not take. He does say of Hector that after he had put on Achilles' armour "Ares entered into him and his limbs were filled with courage and strength";61 but Ares here is hardly more than a synonym for the martial spirit, and the communication of power is produced by the will of Zeus, assisted perhaps by the divine armour. Gods do of course for purposes of disguise assume the shape and appearance of individual human beings; but that is a different belief. Gods may appear at times in human form, men may share at times in the divine attribute of power, but in Homer there is nevertheless no real blurring of the sharp line which separates humanity from deity.

  In the Odyssey, which is less exclusively concerned with fighting, the communication of power takes other forms. The poet of the "Telemachy" imitates the Iliad by making Athena put menos into Telemachus;62 but here the menos is the moral courage which will enable the boy to face the overbearing suitors. That is literary adaptation. Older and more authentic is the repeated claim that minstrels derive their creative power from God. "I am self-taught," says Phemius; "it was a god who implanted all sorts of lays in my mind."63 The two parts of his statement are not felt as contradictory: he means, I think, that he has not memorised the lays of other minstrels, but is a creative poet who relies on the hexameter phrases welling up spontaneously as he needs them out of some unknown and uncontrollable depth; he sings "out of the gods," as the best minstrels always do.64 I shall come back to that in the latter part of chapter iii, "The Blessings of Madness."

  But the most characteristic feature of the Odyssey is the way in which its personages ascribe all sorts of mental (as well as physical) events to the intervention of a nameless and indeterminate daemon65 or "god" or "gods."66 These vaguely conceived beings can inspire courage at a crisis67 or take away a man's understanding,68 just as gods do in the Iliad. But they are also credited with a wide range of what may be called loosely "monitions." Whenever someone has a particularly brilliant69 or a particularly foolish70 idea; when he suddenly recognises another person's identity71 or sees in a flash the meaning of an omen;72 when he remembers what he might well have forgotten73 or forgets what he should have remembered,74 he or someone else will see in it, if we are to take the words literally, a psychic intervention by one of these anonymous supernatural beings.75 Doubtless they do not always expect to be taken literally: Odysseus, for example, is hardly serious in ascribing to the machinations of a daemon the fact that he went out without his cloak on a cold night. But we are not dealing simply with an "epic convention." For it is the poet's characters who talk like this, and not the poet:76 his own convention is quite other—he operates, like the author of the Iliad, with clear-cut anthropomorphic gods such as Athena and Poseidon, not with anonymous daemons. If he has made his characters employ a different convention, he has presumably done so because that is how people did in fact talk: he is being "realistic."

  And indeed that is how we should expect people to talk who believed (or whose anc
estors had believed) in daily and hourly monitions. The recognition, the insight, the memory, the brilliant or perverse idea, have this in common, that they come suddenly, as we say, "into a man's head." Often he is conscious of no observation or reasoning which has led up to them. But in that case, how can he call them "his"? A moment ago they were not in his mind; now they are there. Something has put them there, and that something is other than himself. More than this he does not know. So he speaks of it noncommittally as "the gods" or "some god," or more often (especially when its prompting has turned out to be bad) as a daemon.77 And by analogy he applies the same explanation to the ideas and actions of other people when he finds them difficult to understand or out of character. A good example is Antinous' speech in Odyssey 2, where, after praising Penelope's exceptional intelligence and propriety, he goes on to say that her idea of refusing to remarry is not at all proper, and concludes that "the gods are putting it into her chest."78 Similarly, when Telemachus for the first time speaks out boldly against the suitors, Antinous infers, not without irony, that "the gods are teaching him to talk big."79 His teacher is in fact Athena, as the poet and the reader know;80 but Antinous is not to know that, so he says "the gods."

  A similar distinction between what the speaker knows and what the poet knows may be observed in some places in the Iliad. When Teucer's bowstring breaks, he cries out with a shudder of fear that a daemon is thwarting him; but it was in fact Zeus who broke it, as the poet has just told us.81 It has been suggested that in such passages the poet's point of view is the older: that he still makes use of the "Mycenaean" divine machinery, while his characters ignore it and use vaguer language like the poet's Ionian contemporaries, who (it is asserted) were losing their faith in the old anthropomorphic gods.82 In my view, as we shall see in a moment, this is almost an exact reversal of the real relationship. And it is anyhow clear that Teucer's vagueness has nothing to do with scepticism: it is the simple result of ignorance. By using the word daemon he "expresses the fact that a higher power has made something happen,"83 and this fact is all he knows. As Ehnmark has pointed out,84 similar vague language in reference to the supernatural was commonly used by Greeks at all periods, not out of scepticism, but simply because they could not identify the particular god concerned. It is also commonly used by primitive peoples, whether for the same reason or because they lack the idea of personal gods.85 That its use by the Greeks is very old is shown by the high antiquity of the adjective That word must originally have meant "acting at the monition of a daemon"; but already in the Iliad its primitive sense has so far faded that Zeus can apply it to Hera.86 A verbal coinage so defaced has clearly been in circulation for a long time.

  We have now surveyed, in such a cursory manner as time permits, the commonest types of psychic intervention in Homer. We may sum up the result by saying that all departures from normal human behaviour whose causes are not immediately perceived,87 whether by the subjects' own consciousness or by the observation of others, are ascribed to a supernatural agency, just as is any departure from the normal behaviour of the weather or the normal behaviour of a bowstring. This finding will not surprise the nonclassical anthropologist: he will at once produce copious parallels from Borneo or Central Africa. But it is surely odd to find this belief, this sense of constant daily dependence on the supernatural, firmly embedded in poems supposedly so "irreligious" as the Iliad and the Odyssey. And we may also ask ourselves why a people so civilised, clearheaded, and rational as the Ionians did not eliminate from their national epics these links with Borneo and the primitive past, just as they eliminated fear of the dead, fear of pollution, and other primitive terrors which must originally have played a part in the saga. I doubt if the early literature of any other European people—even my own superstitious countrymen, the Irish—postulates supernatural interference in human behaviour with such frequency or over so wide a field.88

  Nilsson is, I think, the first scholar who has seriously tried to find an explanation of all this in terms of psychology. In a paper published in 1924,89 which has now become classical, he contended that Homeric heroes are peculiarly subject to rapid and violent changes of mood: they suffer, he says, from mental instability (psychische Labilität). And he goes on to point out that even to-day a person of this temperament is apt, when his mood changes, to look back with horror on what he has just done, and exclaim, "I didn't really mean to do that!"—from which it is a short step to saying, "It wasn't really I who did it." "His own behaviour," says Nilsson, "has become alien to him. He cannot understand it. It is for him no part of his Ego." This is a perfectly true observation, and its relevance to some of the phenomena we have been considering cannot, I think, be doubted. Nilsson is also, I believe, right in holding that experiences of this sort played a part—along with other elements, such as the Minoan tradition of protecting goddesses—in building up that machinery of physical intervention to which Homer resorts so constantly and, to our thinking, often so superfluously. We find it superfluous because the divine machinery seems to us in many cases to do no more than duplicate a natural psychological causation.90 But ought we not perhaps to say rather that the divine machinery "duplicates" a psychic intervention—that is, presents it in a concrete pictorial form? This was not superfluous; for only in this way could it be made vivid to the imagination of the hearers. The Homeric poets were without the refinements of language which would have been needed to "put across" adequately a purely psychological miracle. What more natural than that they should first supplement, and later replace, an old unexciting threadbare formula like by making the god appear as a physical presence and exhort his favourite with the spoken word?91 How much more vivid than a mere inward monition is the famous scene in Iliad 1 where Athena plucks Achilles by the hair and warns him not to strike Agamemnon! But she is visible to Achilles alone: "none of the others saw her."92 That is a plain hint that she is the projection, the pictorial expression, of an inward monition93—a monition which Achilles might have described by such a vague phrase as iv&irvevae And I suggest that in general the inward monition, or the sudden unaccountable feeling of power, or the sudden unaccountable loss of judgement, is the germ out of which the divine machinery developed.

  One result of transposing the event from the interior to the external world is that the vagueness is eliminated: the indeterminate daemon has to be made concrete as some particular personal god. In Iliad 1 he becomes Athena, the goddess of good counsel. But that was a matter for the poet's choice. And through a multitude of such choices the poets must gradually have built up the personalities of their gods, "distinguishing," as Herodotus says,94 "their offices and skills, and fixing their physical appearance." The poets did not, of course, invent the gods (nor does Herodotus say so): Athena, for example, had been, as we now have reason to believe, a Minoan house-goddess. But the poets bestowed upon them personality—and thereby, as Nilsson says, made it impossible for Greece to lapse into the magical type of religion which prevailed among her Oriental neighbours.

  Some, however, may be disposed to challenge the assertion on which, for Nilsson, all this construction rests. Are Homer's people exceptionally unstable, as compared with the characters in other early epics? The evidence adduced by Nilsson is rather slight. They come to blows on small provocation; but so do Norse and Irish heroes. Hector on one occasion goes berserk; but Norse heroes do so much oftener. Homeric men weep in a more uninhibited manner than Swedes or Englishmen; but so do all the Mediterranean peoples to this day. We may grant that Agamemnon and Achilles are passionate, excitable men (the story requires that they should be). But are not Odysseus and Ajax in their several ways proverbial types of steady endurance, as is Penelope of female constancy? Yet these stable characters are not more exempt than others from psychic intervention. I should hesitate on the whole to press this point of Nilsson's, and should prefer instead to connect Homeric man's belief in psychic intervention with two other peculiarities which do unquestionably belong to the culture described by Homer.

&nb
sp; The first is a negative peculiarity: Homeric man has no unified concept of what we call "soul" or "personality" (a fact to whose implications Bruno Snell95 has lately called particular attention). It is well known that Homer appears to credit man with a psyche only after death, or when he is in the act of fainting or dying or is threatened with death: the only recorded function of the psyche in relation to the living man is to leave him. Nor has Homer any other word for the living personality. The thumos may once have been a primitive "breath-soul" or "life-soul"; but in Homer it is neither the soul nor (as in Plato) a "part of the soul." It may be defined, roughly and generally, as the organ of feeling. But it enjoys an independence which the word "organ" does not suggest to us, influenced as we are by the later concepts of "organism" and "organic unity." A man's thumos tells him that he must now eat or drink or slay an enemy, it advises him on his course of action, it puts words into his mouth: he says, or He can converse with it, or with his "heart" or his "belly," almost as man to man. Sometimes he scolds these detached entities usually he takes their advice, but he may also reject it and act, as Zeus does on one occasion, "without the consent of his thumos."97 In the latter case, we should say, like Plato, that the man was he had controlled himself. But for Homeric man the thumos tends not to be felt as part of the self: it commonly appears as an independent inner voice. A man may even hear two such voices, as when Odysseus "plans in his thumos" to kill the Cyclops forthwith, but a second voice restrains him.98 This habit of (as we should say) "objectifying emotional drives," treating them as not-self, must have opened the door wide to the religious idea of psychic intervention, which is often said to operate, not directly on the man himself, but on his thumos99 or on its physical seat, his chest or midriff.100 We see the connection very clearly in Diomede's remark that Achilles will fight "when the thumos in his chest tells him to and a god rouses him"101 (overdetermination again).