Classics v. Classics

The furious debate about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey has revealed an unexpected fact: Many people take Homer seriously, very seriously. Modifying the canonical epic in the least detail, it appears, pushes our entire civilization to the edge of a cliff.

For some, I suspect this seriousness is a recent acquisition, not to say a pose. Certainly they take Homer far more seriously than the classical tradition they claim to champion. Hollywood didn’t invent Homeric revisionism. Virgil inverted the order of Homer’s epics and relocated the Iliad to Latium. Dante’s Ulysses isn’t Homer’s Odysseus (among other things, he’s in the Christian hell). And what are we to do with Tennyson’s Victorian-adventurer Ulysses or Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles,” a twentieth-century recasting of Homer’s ecphrasis, not to mention Joyce’s Dublin odyssey?  

Shakespeare is the greatest offender. Troilus and Cressida, his one foray into Homeric territory, is a burlesque on a popular medieval tale of Troy. Troilus and Cressida are star-crossed lovers living in Troy during the Greek siege. Through the machinations of Cressida’s uncle Pandarus, they spend a night together. This being Shakespeare, the course of their love must run rough. Cressida’s father, the Trojan priest Calchas, who has defected to the Greeks, arranges an exchange to bring his daughter to him. Troilus sneaks into the Greek camp but finds Cressida just in time to see her give herself, and a pledge of love, to Diomedes.

All the while, the Trojan War staggers on. Hector kills Patroclus. Ulysses tries to lure the grieving Achilles back into the field by pitting Ajax against Hector in single combat. That fight ends inconclusively when Hector and Ajax discover they’re kin. In spite of Achilles’s threats and Cassandra’s warnings, Hector returns to the battle and is killed. Like the Iliad, the play ends with the Trojans mourning their fallen hero.

Throughout, Shakespeare deflates Homer. The prologue promises heroic action, but the play is all talk, talk, talk about why the war has ground down to a stalemate. In his final battle with Hector, Achilles sits back and sends his men to maul and mutilate the Trojan hero while he’s unarmored. Helen is a silly ditz who, with Paris, thinks of nothing but sex, and Cressida accepts Diomedes with a speed that drives Troilus mad. As he closes the play, Pandarus addresses the audience as “traitors and bawds” to whom he promises to bequeath “my diseases.” In an Augustinian vein, Shakespeare unmasks Homeric honor as pride. Hector knows Paris was wrong to abduct Helen, knows it’s futile to continue fighting, yet vows to keep Helen and fight on: “I propend to you / In resolution to keep Helen still, / For ’tis a cause that hath no mean dependance / Upon our joint and several dignities.” Heroes on both sides seem bent on suicide, use “honor” as a disguise for violence and revenge, “love” as a cover for lust and whoredom. Humanity turns cannibalistic, ruled by “appetite, a universal wolf.” 

Ajax’s slave, Thersites, stands at the center of this deflation. In his eyes, Greek heroism is “patchery, juggling, knavery,” and he regards the Trojan War as a squalid marital dispute: “All the argument is a whore and a cuckold.” Pouting and preening Achilles is an “idol of idiot-worshipers.” Though Thersites isn’t the voice of the playwright, it’s clear that Shakespeare isn’t overawed by his source. He’s detached enough to see that the great epic of the ancient world is, from one angle, nothing but tawdry “war and lechery.” 

Shakespeare’s interests are Renaissance interests: mutability and order. Time dissolves both honor and love. Great deeds are forgotten; hot passions cool. Time and change divide souls: Troilus is “not himself,” and Cressida is divided between “Troilus’s Cressida” and “Diomedes’s Cressida.” In response to Achilles’s offended question, “What, are my deeds forgot?” Ulysses says time devours good deeds “as fast as they are made.” Hierarchy, order, degree are fortresses against humanity’s chaotic and suicidal tendencies, but order too is vulnerable. When degree is vizarded, love, honor, constancy, and even identity die with it. Untune the string of order, and behold what discord follows.

Long before Christopher Nolan, “woke” Will Shakespeare deconstructed one of Western civilization’s founding stories. But that’s what “the classics” do: plunder, rewrite, subvert, and twist earlier classics. Cervantes takes down medieval romance, Henry Fielding parodies high-minded Samuel Richardson, Austen gently mocks the Gothic romances she loved to read, Mark Twain blames Walter Scott for the American Civil War. Harold Bloom got something right. The great writers of the Western tradition don’t offer solemn homage to impeccable predecessors. Western literature is more like a transcript of the struggle to exorcise the ghost of Homeric influence.