#tim whitmarsh

[helenofnowhere]

Desire, in its narrative form, is generated by distance. According to one ancient etymology (false, it hardly need be said), desire (pothos) pertains not to that which is present, but to that which is elsewhere (allothi pou) and distant (apontos). We might think of Musaeus’s Hero and Leander, with its story of the separation of the two young lovers by the Hellespont. That narrow strait is the physical materialisation of the narrative requirement for distance. But such boundaries are not just physical: they are symbolic too. In Hero and Leander and Achilles’s Leucippe and Clitophon alike, the young female lover is kept separate from others by parental sequestering. It is a social norm, not brute geography, that interposes the gap between the inception and the consummation of desire. In Chariton’s Callirhoe, the fathers of the two lovers are political enemies, in the manner of Romeo and Juliet. In such cases there is no physical barrier, but there are barriers all the same.

[…] In erotic narratives, desire is usually dangerously dislocated: the Greeks spoke of an atopos pothos, an ‘out-of-place yearning.’ What is distinctive about novels, I submit, is that they resist succumbing to the temptation simply to judge and condemn this ‘dirty’ love, and offer instead something more complex, empathic and challenging. In a novel, a figure like the Iliad’s Helen would become a more rounded character than Homer’s ‘cold, evil-contriving dog’ whose union with Paris was responsible for the suffering of male warriors. Certainly, the poetic tradition could offer a more positive, even celebratory account of transgressive passions. Already in Sappho’s lyrics we find a Helen endowed with agency, will and purpose; her pursuit of her own desires is presented as an exemplum for the poet to follow, and thus implicitly legitimised according to the poem’s moral scheme. But the female poet is also aware of how outrageous she is being, and the male lyric tradition quickly reverts to aggressive condemnation of Helen. In tragedy, those experiencing transgressive desires are given room to express themselves, often with sensitivity (e.g., Phaedra in Euripides’s Hippolytus) but all the same, transgressive desires inevitably lead to disastrous outcomes.

— Tim Whitmarsh, “Dirty Love: The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel” (2018)

[winedarkwords]

When Homer envisioned Achilles, did he see a black man? | Aeon Essays

The Greeks didn’t have modern ideas of race. Did they see themselves as white, black – or as something else altogether?

[helenofnowhere]

Love stories are dangerous in part because they can corrupt the souls of their listeners. Erotic stories fuel the appetite, says Achilles Tatius’s Clitophon, explaining why a song about Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne stimulated his desire for Leucippe. A whole tranche of Stoic philosophy, to which Plutarch’s How to Listen to Poetry is the heir, was dedicated to teaching young men how to listen to fanciful stories without corroding their souls through psykhagōgia, ‘spiritual distraction.’ It took a lot of careful instruction to teach the young not to take such tales at face value, and to see the moral truths that lay beneath the superficially titillating surface. Constantine’s law makes it very clear that the souls of the young were held to be particularly vulnerable to such distractions.

Yet they threaten also because of their content. Erotic stories often involve dislocation and disruption. Dirt, as Mary Douglas has shown, offends because it disturbs the taxonomy of social order. Shoes are not dirty in themselves, but they are when placed on a table. Food is not dirty, but it is when it is on one’s clothing. Stories, similarly, become (as we say) ‘dirty’ when they involve desires that are deemed socially inappropriate and threaten the crossing of established Social boundaries. The Greeks did not think of eroticism itself as foul, at least until the arrival of Christianity (at which point stories began to be called impure simply because they contained sex). Individuals were not dirty, nor were their genitalia. Problems only arose when they (the individuals or the genitals) met in improper combinations: it was this that made the stories about them aiskhra (‘disgraceful’) or akolasta (‘licentious’).

— Tim Whitmarsh, “Dirty Love: The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel” (2018)

[wholesomeobsessive]

The history of atheism matters. It matters not just for intellectual reasons-that is, because it behooves us to understand the past as fully as we can—but also on moral, indeed political grounds. History confers authority and legitimacy. This is why authoritarian states seek to deny it to those they do not favor, destroying historic sites and outlawing traditional practice. Atheist history is not embodied in buildings or rituals in quite the same way, but the principle is identical. If religious belief is treated as deep and ancient and disbelief as recent, then atheism can readily be dismissed as faddish and inconsequential. Perhaps, even, the persecution of atheists can be seen as a less serious problem than the persecution of religious minorities. The deep history of atheism is then in part a human rights issue: it is about recognizing atheists as real people deserving of respect, tolerance, and the opportunity to live their lives unmolested.

Battling the Gods by Tim Whitmarsh

[wholesomeobsessive]

There were, then, manifold ways in which humanity could achieve kind of divinity. This is the context in which we should locate the phenomenon of theomachy, of humans battling against the gods. Jealousy of divine privilege was not "sinful": early Greece had only a weak idea of what was "sinful" because there were no god-sent commandments to break. (The Greek translators of the Bible had to adapt a rare word, aliterios, to express this fundamentally alien idea.) Rather, stories of theomachy explored the perfectly natural tendency of humans to yearn to better themselves, to procure for themselves a happier life, a life that they associated with divinity. If theomachy was "wrong," that was not because it contravened any heaven-sent rule book but because it was (at least in myth) a horrible misjudgment of the odds.

Battling The Gods by Tim Whitmarsh

[wholesomeobsessive]

The heavenly bodies are, for both thinkers, non-supernatural. Anaximander thought that the Earth is surrounded by a ring of fire that is largely veiled from our sight; what we see as stars are the gaps in the veil. Anaximenes thought that the stars were pieces of Earth that had been borne aloft on evaporated moisture and had subsequently caught fire. Even the creation of human life had a non-supernatural cause. In an eerie presentiment of modern evolutionary biology, Anaximander claimed that primeval life originated from water; the original aquatic animals emerged onto land from the sea, containing other kinds of creatures (rather mysteriously) within them. Humans are thus latecomers to the animal kingdom. These theories are of course fanciful when judged by modern standards: if they occasionally approximate to what we know from science this is a matter of luck rather than intuition. But modern standards are the wrong standards to apply: in sixth-century terms, what Anaximander and Anaximenes were doing was trying to account for the world in new terms, using explanations drawn from the world around them rather than mythological deities. Everyone knows what fire, rock, air, clouds, and water are like, and we know that strange things happen when various combinations of them occur. These two thinkers tried to explain the sum of existence by extrapolating from tangible, observable reality

Battling the Gods by Tim Whitmarsh

[wholesomeobsessive]

Like the Milesians, he based his understanding of the world instead on the observation of physical reality. The fragments of his works that survive tell repeatedly of his captivation with natural phenomena: he speaks of the heating of the Earth, of caves, rain, of multiple solar systems, of the saltiness of the sea, of the fossilization of marine life, and much more. He explains meteorological phenomena through physical causes and had a particular fascination with clouds: the sun and the moon are burning clouds; lightning comes from the flash of clouds as they move; rainbows too are made of clouds; even comets, shooting stars, and the nautical phenomenon known as Saint Elmo's fire can be elucidated in this way. As with the Milesians, the important point is not how scientifically accurate he was (the only tools at his disposal being the naked eye, an enquiring mind, and a cloud fixation), but how he positioned himself against the prevailing wisdom of the day. Once again, the desire to acount for lightning and rainbows seems calculated to undermine mythological stories about Zeus and Iris."

Battling The Gods by Tim Whitmarsh

[wholesomeobsessive]

Here Plato takes the cosmic god of the pre-Socratics and transforms him into an active, designing, anthropomorphic deity. The demiurge forged the universe in a perfect, orderly way, with every element fitting together harmoniously. He created the celestial bodies, the world, the gods, time, animal life, and a superior race of human beings. Each human soul is paired with a star. If a man lives ethically, on death he returns to his star, but if not he is reborn as a woman (!). A badly behaved woman is then reincarnated as an animal.

Battling The Gods by Tim Whitmarsh