Wisdom in Classical and Biblical Tradition Michael C Legaspi All Chapter

Wisdom in Classical and Biblical
Tradition Michael C. Legaspi

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Page 2 of 2
Preface
reaches, and its highest ambitions. In other words, it is fitting to inquire into its
wisdom.
(p.x) I did not get very far in this endeavor before realizing that the traditional
pursuit of wisdom took its distinctive shape, to a great degree, from ideas and
perspectives identified with classical and biblical texts. Though the pairing of
classical and biblical is a familiar one, a common trope in the study of Western
civilization, it nevertheless bears asking why the two were held together over
time in the way that they were. It may have been a historical accident, but it was
not a historical necessity. A new look at old texts that have gone into the making
of this remarkable synthesis shows that there is more to the pairing than simple,
culturally expedient correlation. There is a deep affinity between the two, a
tensive and dynamic relation that resists easy characterization. To describe them
as opposites in a binary relation or as twins sharing a single view of the world
would be to misrepresent what is certainly a richer and more complicated
reality. I believe it is better to construe the relation dialectically and to try to
hear in a fresh way some of the voices that animated the ancient conversation.
Accordingly, the book aims more at thematic exposition than critical analysis
(though the latter is, to some extent, unavoidable). The goal here is not to offer
an apology for classical and biblical tradition as much as to understand its
beginnings and in doing so to shed light on its spectral presence in modern
culture. Related to this goal is the belief that it is possible (and valuable) to
understand the tradition in terms of certain moral, intellectual, and religious
aspirations. Others are surely more qualified than I am to describe the social,
political, and material conditions for the development of a classical-biblical
cultural synthesis in late antiquity. Instead of pursuing that kind of history, I
have sought to present the tradition, one might say, ideologically—that is, in
terms of what important texts and figures tell us about distinctive ways of
looking at the world. Whether or not this is itself a wise undertaking, it is
nevertheless the goal of this book.
I first began looking into wisdom some years ago as a researcher for the
Defining Wisdom project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation and hosted
at the University of Chicago. I gratefully acknowledge the support of this
initiative and the opportunity to think with others about the concept of wisdom
and its contemporary relevance. More recently, I benefited from support from
Eric Hayot and the Center for Humanities and Information at Penn State
University. They too have my sincere thanks. The University provided me with
time and resources to work on the manuscript at various points over the last
three years. I thank the College of Liberal Arts, the Department of Classics and
Ancient Mediterranean Studies, and the Jewish Studies Program at Penn State
for making my work possible. I would also like to thank Penn State colleagues
for their help with various aspects of this project. (p.xi) Mark Munn took an
interest in my work and cotaught a course with me on wisdom in the ancient
world, an experience that proved very helpful. Aaron Rubin generously provided
Page 2 of 3
Preface
help with philological and linguistic questions, despite a cordial and refreshing
indifference to the formal study of wisdom. I thank Daniel Falk, Jonathan
Brockopp, Mark Sentesy, Christopher Moore, and John Jasso for their collegiality
and help in thinking about many things pertaining to the study of wisdom.
Colleagues at other institutions have also provided help, encouragement, and
opportunities to discuss and present aspects of this work. I thank Ann Blair,
Rusty Reno, Walter Moberly, Janet Soskice, Will Kynes, Jennie Grillo, Michael
Azar, and Darren Sarisky, as well as Gabriele Boccaccini and the Enoch Seminar.
I owe my interest in the book of Job largely to Peter Machinist and the
opportunity to serve as a teaching fellow for his legendary course on Job and the
Joban tradition at Harvard. For this formative experience and much more, he has
my deepest gratitude. Tom Hodgson contributed more to this study than he
knows. Four years at his side taught me much about goodness, knowledge, and
intellectual midwifery. He is living proof that Socratic wisdom exists today. I
would also like to thank Cynthia Read at Oxford University Press once again for
interest in and support of this work. The anonymous readers whom she found for
the manuscript provided me with many helpful criticisms and suggestions, which
I have incorporated into the present version. They too have my thanks.
Finally, I would like to thank my family. I am grateful to my parents, Luciano and

Candelaria Legaspi, and to my father-in-law and mother-in-law, Bryan and Becci
Crist, for unfailing love and innumerable kindnesses. Though research and
writing exert a constant pull on my time and energies, I hope my children know
that I would rather be with them than at my desk. They are a constant source of
joy and satisfaction. The four of them correspond (perhaps not coincidentally) to
my fourfold definition of wisdom: Josiah who considers the cosmic, Olivia whose
work gives form to the metaphysical, Ana who embodies the ethical, and Cato
who thrives on the social. They have my love and gratitude. My wife, Abby, has
seen this entire project grow from a fleeting thought in 2007 to a fleeting
volume many years later. I thank her for her patience, encouragement, love, and
support throughout this period and in the many happy years leading up to it. She
has done me the great honor of believing in me and in my work. Through Abby I
came to know and admire her grandmother, Lois Crist, whose long and beautiful
life remains a stronger testimony to wisdom than anything I will ever do or
write. This book is dedicated, with love and appreciation, to her memory. May it
be eternal. (p.xii)
Page 3 of 3
Introduction
everything else such that “all” can be named in the singular: the cosmos, the
world, the universe. What makes wisdom a difficult thing, however, is that the
scope and nature of this totality are elusive. We have a difficult time articulating
what unites the disparate realms of human concern that correspond to aspects
of life in the world. We find it hard to say, for example, what exactly holds
intellectual insight and moral commitment together, what (if anything) ties the
pursuit of individual happiness to forms of religious satisfaction, and what
consequences scientific knowledge of the world ought to have for specific ethical
deliberations. Given this uncertainty, it is not surprising that wisdom is a word
very often held in construct with nouns having to do with seeking: thus, the
“search for wisdom,” the “quest for wisdom,” or the “pursuit of wisdom.”
Wisdom in the Western intellectual tradition contains two elements. It includes

the belief that life in the world is, in some sense, a meaningful totality. That the
word “wisdom” has taken on a somewhat antique, musty air in modern culture is
perhaps one index of the decline in our collective (p.2) ability and willingness
to articulate the wholeness of understanding to which wisdom classically
aspires. Yet whether wisdom is named or not, the contemporary search for
meaningful connection between deeply held beliefs and hard-won knowledge, or
between questions of social and political order and fundamental moral
commitments, indicates that something of the old quest for wisdom is still with
us. Whether one considers the allure that a “theory of everything” has for
modern physicists, or whether one regards William Butler Yeats’s dark
premonition that the cultural “centre cannot hold,” one sees that the specter of
unitary thinking haunts the modern moral and scientific imaginations. Second,
wisdom as we commonly conceive it concerns action as well as belief. It is
animated specifically by the notion that life’s meaning can be sought and (at
least partially) discerned by humans who pursue it correctly. Once gained,
wisdom functions as a guide for living well and preserving the good life over
time. It is thus not surprising that modern environmental movements, for
example, have found wisdom language to be congenial to the cultivation and
promotion of “sustainable” forms of life.
Despite the fact that wisdom remains an influential cultural component, we are
uncertain about what it is and how it works. We are unsure, too, whether (or to
what extent) advocating a coherent intellectual-ethical program—a particular
path to wisdom—might be incompatible with contemporary religious, cultural,
and philosophical pluralisms. As the epigraph from Cicero shows, uncertainty,
perplexity, and even an aversion to wisdom are not specifically modern attitudes.
Doubts and questions surrounding wisdom are not entirely new. In order to shed
light on these and other questions, it is necessary to see that wisdom has a
history. To a great degree, our notions of wisdom are inherited ones, imprinted,
as it were, by earlier attempts to frame the pursuits of knowledge, goodness,
and happiness as a single, unitary endeavor. Historical perspective brings
wisdom into view as a cultural attitude that is intellectually fruitful and ethically
Page 2 of 17
Introduction
compelling; yet it also shows that the pursuit of wisdom, for all of its appeal, was
also attended by many of the epistemological and moral difficulties familiar to
contemporary wisdom-seekers.
This book, then, is a study of wisdom that offers precisely this sort of historical
perspective. It begins with the recognition that the roots of modern culture lie in
ancient soil and, more specifically, in the dialectical relation between the
legacies of ancient Greek civilization on the one hand and theological
perspectives based on the Jewish and Christian scriptures on the other. Later
periods—the late antique, medieval, and early modern—attest to the (p.3) fact
that, despite essential differences, Greek philosophy and biblical interpretation
formed a lasting cultural synthesis. Part of what made this synthesis possible
was a shared outlook, a common aspiration toward wholeness of understanding
that refuses to separate knowledge from goodness, piety from prosperity, virtue
from happiness, cosmos from polis, divine authority from human responsibility.
As that which names this wholeness, wisdom features prominently in both
classical and biblical literatures as an ultimate good. If the “classical” and the
“biblical” are indeed the “twin pillars” of Western culture as is commonly
claimed, then wisdom is the subject and inspiration of the relief sculpture on the
great frieze supported by the two. This book considers the basic elements of the
composition we find there; it proposes to examine texts and figures that mark
out its most salient features.
In doing so, this book enters a long-standing conversation about various aspects
of the classical-biblical dialectic in Western culture. In many of the older
treatments, the dialectic is characterized as an essentially competitive one. One
of the more famous examples of this attitude is Matthew Arnold’s essay Culture
and Anarchy, which appeared in 1869. Arnold writes of “Hebraism” and
“Hellenism,” noting that they represent two fundamental human orientations
and yet have the same “final aim,” namely, “man’s perfection or salvation.”1
What interests Arnold, though, is the fact that they present two alternative ways
to reach this end. Arnold’s essay is an ode to the redemptive powers of
Hellenism, its ability to embrace the full range of human abilities and thereby
overcome the coarseness and narrowness of a society oriented primarily toward
moral duty and a Hebraic “strictness of conscience.” With its love of reason and
beauty, its “sweetness and light,” Hellenism perfects Hebraism by investing life
“with a kind of aerial ease, clearness, and radiancy.”2 Arnold’s essay is a work of
cultural criticism for which “Hebraism” and “Hellenism” were useful rhetorical
devices, but even scholarly treatments have been animated by a sense that the
classical and the biblical stood in a competitive relation to one another. Two
works bearing the same title, Christianity and Classical Culture, illustrate the
point.3 The first, a masterful study of the first four centuries of the Common Era
by Charles Norris Cochrane (1957), is a historical account of the vicissitudes of
the Christian church under Roman rule and in the decades following the
conversion of Constantine. For Cochrane, the rise of the Roman Empire is
Page 3 of 17
Introduction
essentially a prelude to the triumph of the church. The empire that Augustus
built is answered—and surpassed—by the kingdom that Augustine proclaims.
The second is a work based on the Gifford Lectures presented by Jaroslav
Pelikan at Aberdeen (1993). Responding to the observation that the “Christian
(p.4) East” has no Augustine of its own, no singular “theological-philosophical
genius” of virtuosic rank in the fourth century, Pelikan proposes to treat the
Cappadocian fathers as an eastern analogue to Augustine.4 And just as
Cochrane’s Augustine clinches the triumph of Christianity over pagan Rome, the
Cappadocians carry off a successful transformation, a “metamorphosis” of
natural theology in the Greek philosophical tradition. The rivalry of Christianity
and classical culture, though more muted in Pelikan’s work, is nevertheless
structurally significant.
In other works, however, one observes a rather different orientation. One

striking feature of some of the more recent treatments is the emphasis placed
not on a rivalry between the two but on what the two have in common. Attention
paid to concepts, vocabulary, and perspectives in both classical and biblical
sources brings them into view as distinctive voices, certainly, but also as voices
within a single, shared cultural discourse. Why similarities have become salient
in this way is difficult to say, but it may have something to do with our cultural
position. Just as neighboring objects seem closer and more similar to one
another the farther one moves away from them, so too do the ancient
components of Western thought seem to us closer to one another and more alike
the more distant we, as denizens of late- or post-modern culture, find ourselves
from them. The pairing of classical and biblical is no longer fraught in the way
that it was for those who viewed the two-sided tradition as presenting, in some
sense, a set of live intellectual-ethical options. In older discussions of the
classical and the biblical, as I have suggested, authors were much more sensitive
to the contest of traditions, such that the choice between them seemed to be the
central matter of concern. But some of the more recent treatments suggest that
the significant contrast lies not between the classical and the biblical but
between the classical-biblical and the modern.
For Christine Hayes, author of What’s Divine about Divine Law?, the classical
and the biblical, taken together, structure and furnish an intellectual
“inheritance” at the foundation of modern, Western debates concerning the
nature and purpose of law.5 At the center of this inheritance is what Hayes
characterizes as an opposition between a Greek conception of divine law—
rational, truthful, universal, unchanging—and the biblical understanding of
divine law as something rooted in God’s will, subject to written form, and
“expressed in history rather than nature.”6 Over the course of the book, Hayes
provides a rich and detailed map of “discourses” that address features of divine
and human law in Greek, Roman, and biblical sources. Using these discourses as
points of reference, Hayes explains how essential differences among Jewish
interpreters like Philo, Paul, and the rabbis are ultimately intelligible in terms
Page 4 of 17
Introduction
(p.5) of the ways that each individual or group, aware of classical discourses,
articulated the divinity or humanity of the Mosaic Torah. If one takes Hayes’s
firm distinction between classical and biblical attitudes toward law in heuristic
rather than strictly historical (or historiographic) terms, then the book offers, I
believe, valuable insight into the ways that bearers of the biblical tradition
exploited and responded to the tensive, binary character of law in the ancient
world. The result, in each case, is a creative understanding of biblical law that
not only is intelligible in “classical” categories but, as Hayes shows, is capable of
challenging the very categories themselves. In this way, Hayes’s work opens a
window on the internal dynamics of the classical-biblical tradition, through
which parallel modern debates may also be fruitfully regarded. Though Hayes
indeed poses a distinction between the classical and the biblical, she does so,
specifically, in view of the fact that modern debates about law form the
counterpart or continuation of a coherent, ancient discussion of law.
Recent works by Dariusz Karłowicz and Yoram Hazony argue in a similar vein
that classical and the biblical authors are better understood in dialogue with one
another, as participants in a common conversation rather than as
representatives of irreconcilable personalities. In Socrates and Other Saints,
Karłowicz argues that, despite reputations as champions of faith, Christian
apologists like Tertullian never repudiated reason. They may have criticized
philosophy, but “the relationship of Christianity to philosophy, and its relation to
reason, are two entirely different things.”7 And provided one understands
philosophy expansively, in Pierre Hadot’s sense, as a way of life rather than just
a system of beliefs, one sees that pagan philosophers and their Christian
counterparts relied on both faith and reason. Both groups insisted on the “need
for conversion and spiritual transformation,” and both sought ways to order
“lives, desires, habits, and limitations so that the act of conversion [would] last”
and become a “stable disposition” of body and spirit.8 The classical and the
biblical thus aim at the same thing, albeit in different ways. By titling his book
The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, Hazony signals his claim that the Hebrew
Bible deserves to be read in the way that ancient Greek texts are typically read:
as works addressing the human capacity for reason rather than as a revelation
that offers “miraculous knowledge” and “requires the suspension of the normal
operation of our mental faculties.”9 In a programmatic, wide-ranging analysis of
texts in the Hebrew Bible, Hazony argues that a putative reason-revelation
distinction is alien to the Hebrew Bible (but, he argues, one nevertheless
appropriate to the attitudes of Christians like Paul and Tertullian) and that the
Hebrew scriptures should therefore be taken seriously as an internally diverse
anthology engaging perennial questions in ethics, (p.6) political philosophy,
epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. Hazony is not so much
concerned to articulate a single and singular perspective (the philosophy of the
Hebrew Bible) as to vindicate the Hebrew Bible’s character as an assemblage of
genuinely philosophical writings (the philosophy contained in the Hebrew Bible).
Page 5 of 17
Introduction
According to Hazony, the polarities that we use to organize the foundational

texts of Western culture—revelation versus reason, faith versus reason, religious
versus secular—have prevented the Hebrew Bible from receiving its due as a
serious contributor to our intellectual heritage. In this way, Hazony, like
Karłowicz, attempts to soften the line between the classical and the biblical by
assimilating the biblical, in important ways, to what we traditionally identify and
prize within the classical.
For Rémi Brague, the coherence of ancient thought is not discerned primarily in
its continuity with modern culture; its coherence is seen rather in its capacity to
offer an alternative to it. In his stimulating book The Wisdom of the World,
Brague turns to classical and biblical sources.10 He explicates their shared
interest in cosmology in order to demonstrate the impoverishment of modern
moral thought, which has severed the connection between human experience of
the world and the wisdom by which humans live. To the ancients, the connection
was strong and generative; to moderns, the nature both of the world and of
human situatedness within it bears no connection to human moral aspiration.
Brague charts the development of ancient and medieval understandings of the
cosmos and the crucial roles that various cosmologies played in larger ethical
and intellectual programs. Brague identifies in ancient thought four distinct
ways of relating a particular cosmology to the wisdom by which humans, in light
of this cosmology, are obligated to conduct their lives: the Platonic, the
atomistic, the Abrahamic, and the Gnostic. Despite the fact that the four differ
from one another in essential ways, Brague maintains that they “form a system”
in which “the intrinsic ontological value of the world” is the touchstone for
ethics and philosophical anthropology.11 This is, for Brague, an important
observation precisely because modern culture, by contrast, draws no connection
between moral philosophy and cosmic understanding; thus, “an entire aspect of
man—namely, his presence in the world—remains lacking in ethical
relevance . . . we can no longer determine what relationship there is between
ethics and the fact that man is in the world.”12 Brague argues that modern
refusal to acknowledge a “given” world ultimately dehumanizes us, giving rise at
various points to an “outrageous idealism,” to perilous revolutionary and
totalitarian schemes that consider natural limits to be “unbearable,” and to
moral philosophy that turns human beings into denuded, Kantian rational agents
or bare instances of Heideggerian Dasein.13 (p.7) In offering a “wisdom of the
world,” Brague argues, the ancients offered a wisdom that, in being more
worldly, was, at the same time, more human as well.
Of the works surveyed here, this book is most similar to Brague’s. Though it
does not lay special emphasis on cosmology in the way that Brague’s work does,
it resembles Brague’s in marking a contrast between the holism of ancient
wisdom and the atomisms of modern thought. Some, however, may argue that
the attempt to place the classical and the biblical together under a single
“ancient” umbrella is wrongheaded. One recent work, for example, argues
Page 6 of 17
Introduction
against a synthetic understanding of ancient schools of thought.14 Whereas

Brague sees a fruitful contrast between ancient and modern thought, Kavin
Rowe is provoked by a different (though related) disjunction, one that ultimately
prompts him to reject as futile all attempts to synthesize the classical and the
biblical. In doing so, Rowe takes a highly principled stand not only against
classical-biblical commonality as such but also against a mode of scholarship,
rooted in the Enlightenment, that places commonalities (and differences) within
the framework of an objective, progressively expanding, encyclopedic knowledge
of human cultures. According to Rowe, who relies here on the work of Alasdair
MacIntyre, the modern encyclopedic endeavor reflects the conceit that
individuals who possess “the translucifying power of scholarly reason” can
produce general knowledge about ancient religions and philosophies while
abstaining from the conflicts about which they write.15 Despite the fact that the
positivistic model of scholarly objectivity on which encyclopedic inquiry is based
has long since been discredited, Rowe argues, scholars continue to treat ancient
cultures, philosophies, and religions as sources of data to fill out purportedly
universal categories. What this approach to the ancient world fails to recognize
is that particular practices and beliefs coinhere within distinctive forms of life,
according to distinctive, historically situated rationalities. In sharp contrast to
encyclopedic inquiry, then, Rowe endorses a form of understanding that
acknowledges the deep incommensurability of ways of life, respecting them as
“rival traditions” that make exclusive claims on people’s loyalties. Each tradition
is “an existentially structuring pattern, a trajectory of living the one and only life
we can live in the midst of time.”16 One does not understand traditions, then, by
eliciting from them formal answers to generic questions that one poses to them
second- or third-hand. Traditions are wagers that one chooses to make with
one’s “one and only life.” To the extent that Christianity, for example, demands
one’s whole life, it is the one who wagers Christianly who understands what the
Christian wager is, what it ultimately involves.
(p.8) By speaking of early Christianity and stoicism as rival traditions in this

specific sense, Rowe does justice to a key feature of many religions or
philosophies in the ancient world: namely, the exclusive claim to truth. Rowe’s
argument ought to give pause to anyone seeking to arrange ancient traditions on
a smorgasbord for modern intellectual or cultural consumption. For when
traditions appear in that setting or in that form, they do so only as scholarly
objects and not, as proponents of the tradition insist they are, serious calls to
change one’s life. Because scholarly analysis does not engage Stoicism or
Christianity as a summons to a different kind of life, it runs, in a sense,
perpendicular to them. Scholars create from living traditions lifeless facsimiles
that are useful, perhaps, in the modern project of cultural replenishment but
unhelpful in coming to terms with traditions as they understand and present
themselves. As Rowe demonstrates, the knowledge that one gains from them
apart from personal commitment is not enhanced by “objectivity” but rather
Page 7 of 17
Introduction
distorted by it. This is because the disengaged knower is forced to make sense of
things that are fully intelligible only and precisely when one is existentially
engaged with that tradition. As Stephen Prickett has astutely noted, “to study
any tradition is inevitably to place oneself in relation to it.”17 In my judgment,
Rowe is correct to criticize studies of ancient religion or philosophy that take for
granted what the ancients themselves denied: namely, that knowledge may be
separated from life. To the extent that lived traditions unify all that we associate
with them, any attempt to isolate elements of traditions and equate them with
other things (in order to argue for historical influence, for example, or to
demonstrate a certain conceptual identity) risks distortion and superficiality.
As cogent as Rowe’s criticism is on this score, matters become more difficult

when we consider what, in Rowe’s treatment, counts as a tradition. Following
MacIntyre, Rowe defines a tradition (or tradition of inquiry) as a “morally
grained, historically situated rationality, a way of asking and answering
questions that is inescapably tied to the inculcation of habits in the life of the
knower and to the community that originates and stewards the craft of inquiry
through time.” Christianity and Stoicism, he adds, qualify as “traditions” in this
sense.18 The trouble comes in specifying the scope of a tradition so defined. With
some two thousand years of history and over two billion living adherents,
Christianity, for example, surely contains within it forms of life that have
functioned or continue to function as discrete, irreducible traditions. The long
history of Christian conflict and division today and in the past bears witness to
this. To point this out is not to deny that Christianity counts as a tradition but to
raise the possibility that the concept of tradition is, so to speak, scalable; it is to
suggest that traditions may exist (p.9) within larger traditionary
configurations. Put differently, to use the lens of “tradition,” one must still
decide at what level of magnification, wide-angle, close-up, or something in
between, to focus the lens. Employed at a certain distance—in Rowe’s case,
certain parts of the Roman Empire in the decades spanning the first and second
centuries—the lens of tradition indeed brings Christianity and Stoicism into
focus as “rivals.” But it is possible, in my view, to “zoom out” and discern the
parameters of a larger tradition that includes, among other things, the study,
preservation, and intensive reading of both classical and biblical texts over
several centuries. Western intellectual culture from Socrates to Aquinas, as both
MacIntyre and Rowe allow, constituted a tradition.19 From the late antique to
the early modern period, Western societies played host to a classical-biblical
tradition of inquiry that was indeed morally grained, historically situated, tied to
personal virtue, identified with intellectual craft, and carefully stewarded over
time.20 Though it is beyond the scope of this book to chart the later history of
this tradition, it will suffice to note that cultural ideals connected to the study of
old texts retain at least a vestigial presence in the modern academy.21 It is the
persistence of this Western intellectual tradition, I believe, that makes it possible
to understand the classical and the biblical in meaningful relation to one
Page 8 of 17
Introduction
another. It is also what enables Rowe, a Christian, to write insightfully and

reliably about Stoicism. If tradition indeed worked in the inflexible and atomistic
way that Rowe argues it does, he would have nothing valuable to say about
Stoicism. Consistency demands this conclusion, and Rowe indeed offers the startling
confession that he is “unable to understand certain Stoic things—perhaps even
central patterns of reasoning” because he is “a Christian who reads as a
Christian.”22 Yet, in spite of this intellectually honest concession, it is clear that
Rowe understands Stoicism well enough at least to discuss it as a rival tradition
to Christianity (or else the central argument of his book fails). It is precisely
because modern scholarship is part of a tradition that bears the imprint of
sustained engagement with the classical and the biblical together that Rowe and
others are able to address contemporary questions to ancient texts in this way.
The tradition in view in this book, then, is one at the roots of Western intellectual
culture. It is a two-sided tradition staked on Greek civilization on the one hand
and Judaism and Christianity on the other. That there are, in fact, more than two
“sides” or traditionary streams within the larger set of developments designated
by the term “Western thought” or “Western culture” is, I think, obvious. “Two-
sidedness,” then, is not a bare factual description of texts from the ancient
Mediterranean world but a specific, deliberate (p.10) way of organizing them.
The terms I use here to indicate two-sidedness, namely, “classical” and
“biblical,” are not neutral, self-evident designations. Rather, they are words that
reflect long and complex processes of canon formation and cultural
consolidation that stretch from Greece’s classical period to the era of the
Hellenistic kingdoms and into the Roman imperial age, late antiquity, the Middle
Ages, and beyond. To a significant degree, the meanings of “classical” and
“biblical” remain fluid, problematic, and opaque even today.23 It also bears
remembering that the dualism arises primarily from the “Jerusalem” side of
Tertullian’s Athens-Jerusalem binary. That is, the dualism reflects the
perspective of early Jews and Christians, for whom pagan writings constituted a
kind of problematic, theological “other” outside the bounds of God’s covenantal
dealings with Israel and (secondarily) with the lowly and despised people who
first received the Christian message.24 The dialectic, first visible in the writings
of (Alexandrian) Hellenistic Jews like Aristobulus, Philo, and the author of the
Letter of Aristeas, took on a new form in the work of second-century Christian
apologists like Tertullian and Justin Martyr. It featured prominently in the
thought of Augustine in the fourth century and was formalized into a classical-
biblical educational program by Boethius in the declining days of the western
Roman Empire. A slightly later figure, Cassiodorus, famously referred in 580 to
the combination of classical learning and Christian theology as a single “braid”
woven from ancient tradition.25 Guy Stroumsa offers a similar image when he
refers to the intertwining of biblical writings (the Old and New Testaments) and
the remnants of Greek and Latin culture in late antiquity as a “double helix” at
the core of “European medieval and early modern culture.”26
Page 9 of 17
Introduction
That there is sufficient historical warrant for speaking of a “classical and biblical
tradition” is, I hope, clear. To the extent that it is indeed a tradition, Rowe’s
observations concerning the incommensurability of traditions are pertinent. A
tradition, he argues, is a whole-life proposition, an entire “pattern of being in the
world” that is “to be taken whole or not at all.”27 What Rowe does not explain is
how he (or MacIntyre) has come to understand that this is in fact what a
tradition is. If there is indeed no Archimedean point from which to describe
cultural phenomena in encyclopedic fashion, no single, self-evident rationality by
which to understand life and thought, then all analytic categories—including the
category of “tradition”—must come from somewhere. In other words, Rowe’s
concept of tradition is not a given. I propose that Rowe’s way of thinking about
Christianity and Stoicism as traditions is itself the product of tradition. More
specifically, it is a way of thinking about human ethical and intellectual life that
has come down to us as a legacy, very (p.11) specifically, of the two-sided
classical-biblical discourse. To study the history of Greek philosophy or the rich
variety of Judaisms in the Second Temple period is to understand that there
were a number of competing proposals for how people ought to live their lives.
Yet it is also to see that what allows discrete ways of life to rival or compete with
one another is that each vies to occupy the same existential space in the life of
the individual and the community. Proposals are incommensurable. The
important point here, though, is that the incommensurability of proposals
presupposes formal similarity (a common shape) at the same time that it
manifests material differences (disagreements about how to fill the shape in). To
see one’s whole life as a response to a whole-life proposition and to live
according to an irreducible set of beliefs, practices, and dispositions that
corresponds to one’s rightful place in the world—these are customary
expectations that give traditions within the larger classical and biblical tradition
their basic form.
This is where wisdom comes in. In seeking to identify the correct “pattern of
being in the world” or the ideal “trajectory of living the one and only life we can
live,” classical and biblical authors did not aim at “tradition.” They aimed at
wisdom. Wisdom thus names the coherence by which human life is best lived.
Accordingly, this book has two central aims. The first is to explain in formal
terms what wisdom is. As I have intimated, what makes wisdom difficult to
analyze is its scope. Though it involves matters of practical judgment affecting
the life of the individual and the social sphere, it has also been identified with an
understanding of the world and of ultimate realities that frame, direct, and give
meaning to human thought and action. In addition to knowing what to do, the
wise person also knows why a specific course of action ultimately makes moral
and rational sense, why it “fits” the particular world that we inhabit. What I
propose, then, is to explain how, in its traditional form, wisdom was understood
to unify and govern a variety of endeavors: intellectual, social, and ethical. Put in
slightly different terms, wisdom is a program for human flourishing that is
Page 10 of 17
Introduction
ordered to a holistic, authoritative account of reality in its metaphysical, cosmic,

political, and ethical dimensions. Equipped with a four-dimensional account of
the form of wisdom, I pursue a second aim: to examine, in a substantive way,
figures and texts that have yielded and shaped the traditional understanding of
wisdom. To the extent that this book offers something distinctive, it does so by
using this formal description of wisdom to illuminate the discourse at the heart
of the classical-biblical dialectic in Western culture.
Homer, the subject of chapter 1, is the starting point. The writings of Homer
were an important source of wisdom in antiquity. This chapter (p.12) examines
books 1 and 2 of the Iliad and significant portions of the Odyssey with a view to
understanding how the epics’ presentation of heroes ultimately portrays wisdom
as something by which character, intellect, and piety are coordinated to yield a
worthy, satisfying form of life. In chapter 2, I turn to the Hebrew Bible.
Alongside the Homeric corpus, the Hebrew Bible must be counted as a
foundational anthology in the history of wisdom. This chapter looks specifically
at Genesis 1–3, select portions of Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes in order to show
how wisdom in the Bible is explicated as a guide to life that, in light of historical
and existential realities, replaces knowledge as the most appropriate form of
human understanding. Chapter 3 takes up the book of Job. This chapter offers a
fresh reading of Job, arguing that personal integrity (Heb. tummah) and cosmic
“fit” are crucial to the book’s distinctive presentation of wisdom. What emerges
from this reading of Job is a profound vindication of piety, subjectivity, and
personhood as components of wisdom. Socrates, the greatest exemplar of
wisdom in classical antiquity, is the subject of chapter 4. This chapter examines a
selection of Platonic dialogues (Ion, Euthyphro, Apology, Gorgias) and argues
that the famous “negative” understanding of wisdom identified with Socrates
(i.e., wisdom is knowing that one does not know) should be understood with
reference to Socrates’s particular notion of piety, such that wisdom is staked (as
in Job’s case) on a form of integrity that allows humans to withstand insuperable
deficiencies in knowledge.
Chapter 5 begins with a concise summary of wisdom as presented in the writings

of Plato and Aristotle. Their influential writings on wisdom connected it to
knowledge and virtue in ways that biblical writings did not, yet, as this chapter
shows, their emphasis on wisdom as a form of ruling knowledge encouraged
later figures like Theophrastus and Hecataeus of Abdera to “nationalize”
wisdom, to treat it as something that belongs not only to individuals but also to
cultures, societies, and groups of people such as the Jews. Chapter 6 turns to
Hellenistic Jewish writings. Jewish writers appropriated the Greek wisdom
discourse in new attempts to explain and commend the Jewish way of life. This
chapter examines the fragmentary writings of Aristobulus and what became the
period’s most influential text, the Wisdom of Solomon. It argues (against certain
scholarly opinions) that Aristobulus and the author of the Wisdom of Solomon
did not “Hellenize” Judaism by making it “universal”; they claimed instead that
Page 11 of 17
Introduction
Judaism was the fulfillment of Greek attitudes already attuned to the pious and
nationally particular character of wisdom. Chapter 7 turns, finally, to Christian
tradition and the texts of the New Testament. In contrast to familiar treatments
of New Testament wisdom that focus on attempts by New Testament authors (p.
13) to portray Jesus as the embodiment of wisdom, this chapter focuses on the
prominence of the newly formed Christian collective as the venue for a kind of
antiwisdom that unifies human and divine life in ways that are opposed but
analogous to earlier classical and biblical versions of wisdom. The conclusion
draws together the various portraits of wisdom presented in the book’s seven
main chapters, revisits the distinction between classical and biblical, and
considers briefly the modern legacy of wisdom’s textual foundations.
Classical and biblical authors attempted to coordinate wisdom’s four realms of

concern. That they did this in diverse ways virtually goes without saying. The
book surveys a range of wisdom accounts arising from foundational texts that
extend in time from the period of Homer to the destruction of the Second
Temple. Surveys of this type must strike a balance between schematization and
exposition. When overdone, schematization creates frameworks or taxonomies
marked by artificiality and oversimplification. On the other hand, some
schematization is necessary to prevent the exposition of texts from degenerating
into a pointless restatement of their contents. In addition to the fourfold
definition of wisdom provided above, the book attends to a set of common
themes that give wisdom in classical and biblical tradition a distinctive shape:
(1) holism, or the refusal to isolate knowledge from life; (2) personhood as an
achievement marked by integrity, self-mastery, rationality, and responsibility; (3)
metaphysical vulnerability as the inescapable condition out of which wisdom
arises; (4) wisdom as a counterpart to knowledge, especially when knowledge is
unavailable; (5) wisdom as something that is socially distributed and nationally
particular; (6) happiness or blessedness as the aim of a wise life; and (7) the
central importance of piety to wisdom. Though I have applied a formal definition
of wisdom to both classical and biblical texts and noted some themes common to
both, I do not seek to harmonize them. That is, I do not mean to say that both
sides of the tradition ultimately converge on a single, substantive account of
wisdom. Nor am I arguing that one can pare away superficial differences and
arrive at a single essential wisdom at the core of classical and biblical texts.
Rowe’s points about the incommensurability of discrete traditions are well
taken. For instance, with reference to the theme of “piety” noted above, it is
important to respect the fact that the same word can denote different things for
different authors. Theos meant something quite different to Paul and to Aristotle.
The fact that they both use this word does not mean that one is safe in
identifying Aristotle’s conception of divinity (or piety) with Paul’s. On the other
hand, the use of similar (Greek) vocabulary—not only with respect to God but
also to a larger set of philosophical considerations related to wisdom—is not a
(p.14) trivial phenomenon. Though I believe that harmonization is
Page 12 of 17
Introduction
wrongheaded, I maintain that the distinctive and incommensurable forms of life

that make up the larger “classical and biblical” category can nevertheless be
lived by adherents in ways that evince shared, formal characteristics: in this
case, the identification of wisdom with knowledge of what properly belongs to
the divine realm. Moreover, the historical career of these “braided” traditions
shows that they were often upheld and preserved self-consciously, that is, in full
awareness of a similar but different “other.” This awareness is the source of a
creative tension that is resolved in ways that ultimately furnish the materials of
the classical and biblical tradition.
The themes listed above are not found equally or in all chapters; others not
listed above also emerge within specific discussions. In this book, I have adopted
an approach that tilts more toward the expositional than the schematic. Though
I have sought to keep the formal characteristics and thematic elements of
wisdom in constant view, I also thought it important and necessary to allow the
overall thrust of ancient works to shape an understanding of their contributions
to the broader classical-biblical wisdom discourse. My method, then, has been to
select texts and figures that have been influential in the development of wisdom
thought and then to discuss these in ways that evince their central themes,
rather than attend narrowly to features that correspond to a preconceived
notion of what does and does not belong to wisdom. Though tightly controlled
forms of analysis can be valuable, there is also something to be said for a more
capacious, expositional approach that trusts the reader to see important
connections. In the case of something as large and labile as wisdom, an
expositional approach that respects the rich and diverse backgrounds for
ancient portrayals of wisdom seemed appropriate.
The durable, synthetic character of wisdom as something that belongs, in

modern retrospective, both to “Athens” and to “Jerusalem” warrants a very
specific type of treatment. Academic convention generally requires scholars to
restrict their work to specialized topics. Such a narrowing facilitates
thoroughness and comprehensiveness. In this case, though, the cost of
restricting a study of wisdom to a smaller range of materials is a loss of the
broader perspective demanded by wisdom itself. To understand how one text
portrays wisdom, it is necessary to recreate the larger context in which such a
portrait became culturally useful. To focus only on “Athens” or only on
“Jerusalem” would be to reproduce existing approaches and miss the dynamism,
the two-sidedness, inherent in Western culture’s distinctive pursuit of wisdom.
For this reason, this book is a deliberately capacious inquiry into the topic of
wisdom. Though it attends to terminological issues involved in discussions of (p.
15) wisdom, it is not merely a lexicographic study, one organized around a
particular wisdom word or set of words. The noun sophia (or sophiē), for
example, appears only once in Homer’s epics (Il. 15.412) and not at all in the
Gospel of John or in the Greek version of Genesis 1–3. Yet there is no denying
the importance of these texts for the study of wisdom in Western thought. Thus,
Page 13 of 17
Introduction
the range of materials necessary to a study of this sort cannot be determined by

the use of specific terms. This book also does not adopt a form-critical or
literary-critical approach. It does not explicate in formal terms the sapiential
properties of Homeric epic or Platonic dialogue. Nor does it examine wisdom in
connection with purported genres like the so-called Wisdom literature of the
ancient Near East. As is well known, such studies have grown numerous enough
to constitute a large subfield of biblical studies. As Will Kynes has persuasively
demonstrated, however, even after more than a century of research into the
“Wisdom literature” of Israel and its Near Eastern neighbors, the category
remains circular and ill-defined.28 To understand how and why this is so, one
must understand the modern study of biblical “Wisdom literature” in terms of its
own story.29 The nineteenth-century turn to ancient Near Eastern sources for
examples and parallels of biblical “wisdom texts” was, in some ways, an
extension of a comparative project that has its roots in early modern classical-
biblical erudition; in other ways, though, it was a replacement for it. As the goal
of this book is to “hear” biblical writings in dialogue with classical ones, it does
not consult or reproduce the kind of ancient Near Eastern contextualizations
that have occupied modern specialists in Wisdom literature. Though this book
draws on the work of classicists and biblical scholars, it does not approach
wisdom as a specific lexeme, literary genre, or scribal institution, but rather as a
program for life.
In light of the convergence of the classical and the biblical in Western culture, it
is crucial to keep in view the unity that arose from diversity. What the book
offers, then, is a balanced presentation of ancient wisdom as generating a
discourse at once internally variegated and formally coherent. It was this
combination of sameness and difference that yielded the dynamic, at times
unstable, account of wisdom that was renovated in the early modern period,
reconstructed in the Enlightenment, and radically reevaluated in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. By understanding traditional wisdom appropriately, we
are able to see in later figures the enduring shape of antiquity’s distinctive,
classical-biblical pursuit of wisdom—from the scholastics of the medieval period
to polymaths in the Republic of Letters. Attention to the legacy of wisdom also
captures something important, I believe, about later developments connected to,
for example, the Enlightenment, the rise (p.16) of Romanticism, and the
parsimonious program of analytic philosophy, to name only a few. And what,
finally, is Nietzsche if not a sage shaped by his encounter with the mainsprings
of classical and biblical tradition? Though the modern story is not part of the
account offered in this book, the modern fate of wisdom serves as a background
for this attempt to revisit its beginnings. It takes its bearings from the way in
which ancient texts characterized wisdom and contributed thereby to a cultural
discourse that transcended discrete literary genres and extended well beyond
the biblical period. It aims to show how wisdom was presented in a variety of
foundational texts. In this respect, this study is more akin to a philosophical or
Page 14 of 17
Introduction
intellectual-historical examination of wisdom—one that is backgrounded by the

centrality of wisdom to a specific, deeply persistent cultural attitude. It is offered
in the hope that a new look at some old texts will be useful, not in rehabilitating
wisdom (no one book can do this) but rather in showing why, even after a long
and troubled history, wisdom has proven so difficult to leave behind.
Notes:
(1.) Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1994) , 87.
(2.) Ibid., 90.
(3.) Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of

Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1957); Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The
Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
(4.) Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture, 6.
(5.) Christine Hayes, What’s Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015) , 1.
(6.) Ibid., 2.
(7.) Dariusz Karłowicz, Socrates and Other Saints: Early Christian

Understandings of Reason and Philosophy, trans. Artur Sebastian Rosman
(Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017) , 13.
(8.) Ibid., 13, 58.
(9.) Yoram Hazony, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2012), 1.
(10.) Rémi Brague, The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the
Universe in Western Thought, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003) .
(11.) Ibid., 70.
(12.) Ibid., 218.
(13.) Ibid., 220, 225–227.
(14.) C. Kavin Rowe, One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival
Traditions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016) .
(15.) Ibid., 175.
Page 15 of 17
Introduction
(16.) Ibid., 6.
(17.) Stephen Prickett, Modernity and the Reinvention of Tradition: Backing into
the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 238.
(18.) Rowe, One True Life, 184.
(19.) Ibid.
(20.) The burden of this book is to illuminate the ethical and intellectual
contours of this tradition with respect to foundational texts. Subsequent
chapters will argue that the classical and biblical tradition has a distinctive
shape and coherence.
(21.) On this, see James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern
Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
(23.) See for example the incisive essay of James I. Porter, “What Is ‘Classical’
about Classical Antiquity?,” in James I. Porter, ed., Classical Pasts: The Classical
Traditions of Greece and Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1–
65. On the development of “biblical” authority within early Judaism and
Christianity, see Michael Satlow, How the Bible Became Holy (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2014).
(24.) That there were pagan philosophers conscious of Jewish and Christian
claims—figures like Celsus, Porphyry, and the emperor Julian—indicates that
“Jerusalem” exerted a certain pressure on “Athens.” But this phenomenon is a
secondary response to the apologetic efforts of Christians and Jews who
criticized pagan philosophy.
(25.) Preface to De orthographia, cited in Prickett, Modernity and the

Reinvention of Tradition, 2.
(26.) Guy Stroumsa, “The Christian Hermeneutical Revolution and Its Double
Helix,” in L. V. Rutgers, P. W. Van der Horst, H. W. Havelaar, and L. Teugels, eds.,
The Use of Sacred Books in the Ancient World (Leuven: Peeters, 1998), 9–28; 28.
(28.) See Will Kynes, “The Modern Scholarly Wisdom Tradition and the Threat of
Pan-sapientialism: A Case Report,” in Mark R. Sneed, ed., Was There a Wisdom
Tradition? New Prospects in Israelite Wisdom Studies (Atlanta: SBL Press,
2015), 11–38.
Page 16 of 17
Introduction
(29.) See Will Kynes, “The Nineteenth-Century Beginnings of ‘Wisdom

Literature,’ and Its Twenty-First-Century End?,” in John Jarick, ed., Perspectives
on Israelite Wisdom: Proceedings of the Oxford Old Testament Seminar (London:
T & T Clark, 2015), 83–108.
Page 17 of 17
Homer and the Wisdom of the Hero
and power. They are superior beings who belong to a superior realm. From their
“higher” position, the gods see and affect human life in ways that humans
cannot, and in a manner that humans, for the most part, struggle even to
understand. The presence of the gods as powerful personalities and sources of
knowledge who live above the fray of human life but who nevertheless take an
interest in it must be the starting point for any examination of wisdom and
knowledge in the Homeric epics. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the gods appear to
be everywhere, intervening in affairs in a variety of ways: sending the odd bolt
from the blue, kicking up winds and storms at sea, altering states of mind,
helping heroic offspring in the heat of battle, or, indeed, taking the field
themselves to fight with men. They are essential to what takes place in the
poems, sharing the story with heroic figures and influencing events by their
favor and disfavor, affection and anger, compassion and disdain. Important as
they are to the narrative, they are perhaps even more crucial to understanding
Homer’s moral and metaphysical universe, what might be called the “symbolic
world” of the epics. The question here is not simply who the gods are or what
they do, but rather how they fit into a larger conception of the world. What
significance does Homer’s hierarchic conception of (p.18) being have for the
moral and intellectual dimensions of the epics—questions concerning
knowledge, wisdom, and the quest to lead a worthy life?
If it seems inappropriate to address such questions to a primitive bard, then it

should be remembered that Homer acquired a reputation very early on as a
figure of great wisdom and authority. For the ancients, he was not merely, in
Albert Lord’s famous formulation, a “singer of tales.” In book 10 of the Republic,
Plato acknowledges Homer’s reputation as the “poet who educated Greece” and
agrees that he is preeminent among poets and tragedians (606e–607a). Homer’s
greatness was due in part to the primacy and scope of his achievement: to make
the unknown gods known. According to Herodotus, Homer and Hesiod are to be
credited with overcoming (somehow) a vast collective ignorance and conveying
the names, genealogies, and characteristics of the gods (Hist. 2.53–54). It is not
surprising, then, that Homer was regarded not only as “The Poet” but also, in
time, as “The Theologian” (ho theologos).1 Given Homer’s cultural significance—
his position as a theological authority and the creator of what became the
foundational text of Greek culture—it is also not surprising that his two great
poems have invited comparison with the Bible.2 Though the parallel works at a
general level to indicate their status as authoritative texts that were continually
transmitted by groups who revered them, it also yields another, more specific
similarity. Both superseded other traditional materials and underwent long
processes of codification and canonization that reflected changing cultural and
political contexts. As a result, the Bible and the Homeric corpus became, in
Margalit Finkelberg’s apt phrase, examples of a “manifold text, which carried
within itself both the original message and its re-interpretation in the vein of
later values.”3 And if Homer is compared specifically to the Christian Bible, then
Page 2 of 31
we may note the ultimate emergence, in both cases, of a bifurcated corpus, a

two-tiered arrangement in which the second part is self-consciously a
continuation of the first. What “continuation” means, exactly, and whether it
includes more dynamic notions of development, dialectic, or canonical pressure,
are questions well beyond the scope of this study. It will suffice here to note that
Homer’s “manifold text” is at once a singularity belonging to “Homer” (however
the “true Homer” is construed) and a duality in which Achilles and Odysseus,
wrath and wandering, war and the return from war yield epics with distinctive
themes and theological outlooks.
In what follows, I will examine knowledge and the hierarchical way that it is
created and distributed in the world of Homer. An examination of the “will of
Zeus” in the opening books of the Iliad indicates that knowledge and power lie
with the gods. When it comes to power, humans are subordinate; (p.19) when it
comes to knowledge, they are consumers rather than producers. For this reason,
the human field of action is staked not on knowledge and power but on
character and choice within a much more limited span. This, in turn, brings
wisdom into focus as the ability to understand and inhabit prudently one’s
allotted share. For the “swift-footed Achilles,” who runs swiftly to his death, it is
a brief and glorious life, one granted metaphysical depth by the stake that the
gods have in the war between the Greeks and the Trojans. For the “much
suffering Odysseus,” the demands of justice, carefully enforced by the gods, give
his wanderings a certain moral intelligibility even as they bring out his
distinctive character and form of heroism. As their stories show, to be wise is to
maintain a life of balance and self-mastery within a space circumscribed by
social, characterological, and metaphysical limits.
The Will of Zeus

When it comes to describing the gods, Homer does not scruple to portray them
in human terms, to speak vividly of the injuries they sustain in combat and, as
the author of Peri Hypsous (traditionally Longinus) notes, their “quarrels,
vengeance, tears, imprisonment, and all their manifold passions.” Thus, the
ancient critic observes that Homer “has done his best to make the men in the
Iliad gods and the gods men” (Peri Hypsous 9.7). The parsing of the divine realm
into male and female personalities with distinctive names, histories, roles, and
agendas is certainly Homer’s boldest and most fundamental anthropomorphism.
According to M. I. Finley, the likening of divine lives to human ones formed the
basis for a kind of Homeric humanism, by which humans gained the confidence
to rise above worship of natural forces, make gods in their image, and so take
pride in their humanity.4 But the similarities that gods and humans share as
embodied, rational, and passionate beings also accomplish something else. They
dramatize the disparities that set the two orders of being apart from one
another. Patroklos and Ares, for example, receive the same death stroke, a spear
thrust into the “depth of the belly” (“neiaton es keneōna”; Il. 18.821; 5.857)—
Ares at the hands of Diomedes (and Athena) and Patroklos at the hands of
Page 3 of 31
Hektor. Ares, on being stabbed this way, goes off, sulking, to Olympus and
complains to Zeus about the goddess. After chiding Ares, Zeus softens toward
him and dispatches Paiëon the healer to help him. Ares’s wound closes as
quickly as milk curdles in fig juice; he bathes and takes his Olympian seat beside
Zeus, “rejoicing in the glory of his strength” (Il. 5.902–906). Patroklos, on being
hit, simply falls dead to the ground. Anthropomorphism is a versatile Homeric
strategy that makes the (p.20) gods familiar and accessible, allowing them to
function as characters in a narrative. But it also estranges the gods and makes
them a foil to heroic life that shows what the life of the hero is not: in this case,
immortal. Humans are living beings; so are gods. But the life of a god is of a
higher order. Thus, where human lives are shortened by death, the life of a god
must be indefinitely long. By a kind of theological deduction, then, the gods
cannot sustain fatal injuries. It is left to Homer’s imagination to show how such
an injury in the case of a god is, instead of being fatal, comically trivial.
When it comes to knowledge, however, matters are more difficult. The same kind
of deduction will not work. It is clear in Homer that humans and gods alike are
rational beings capable of speech, thought, perception, and voluntary action.
Because gods are superior, though, they must possess faculties of a higher order.
As the poet says on two different occasions: “always the mind [noos] of Zeus is
stronger than a man’s mind” (Il. 16.688; 17.176). If the human mind is limited,
then it seems the mind of a god is unlimited. The god, or totality of gods, must
possess unlimited knowledge; they must be omniscient. Menelaos expresses this
view when he confesses, simply, that “gods know everything” (“theoi de te panta
isasin”; Od. 4.379, 468). Rather than take the statement of Menelaos as a kind of
straightforward Homeric dogma of divine omniscience, though, it is perhaps
better to understand the statement of Menelaos as an example of the way that
heroes in the epics perceive the great disparity between the gods and
themselves. The knowledge of the gods so far exceeds the knowledge of humans
that it seems, from “below,” to be total and immense. But in the “upper register”
of the epics, where divine intrigues are played out (alliances, rivalries,
jealousies, love affairs), the gods do not know all things. Homer’s tales of the
gods would not work as dramatic stories if they did. In these passages, it is clear
that divine knowledge is constituted in much the same way that human
knowledge is: on the basis of experience, inference, and verbal communication.
The divine field of knowledge, though larger in scope, is thus homologous with
the human, as it includes memory of past events, is subject to limitations of
attention and distance, and is open to change and revision. Knowledge responds
to and is based on experience. An empiricist bias is embedded in the language.
“To know” something in Greek is quite literally “to have seen” it, for the common
verb for knowing (oida) is actually the verb “to see” (eidō) in the perfect tense.5
Knowledge as an intellectual ability to apprehend that which is objectively real—
Plato’s developed sense of epistēmē—does not enter into the epics. And when
epistēmē does appear, as it does in verbal form (epistasthai), it designates the
Page 4 of 31
skill or physical ability necessary to do a particular thing.6 Trojan horses, (p.21)

for example, “know” (epistamenoi) how to run fast over the plain in pursuit and
withdrawal (Il. 5.222). For Homer, then, knowledge is rooted in experience,
whether the knower is human or divine.
This similarity, however, must not be allowed either to annul important

differences in human and divine knowledge or to obscure the dynamic relation
between them. One way to explore this relation is to chart its significance in a
crucial section of the Homeric corpus, books 1 and 2 of the Iliad.7 The
importance of these books cannot be overstated, as they indicate the major
themes of the epic, introduce principal characters, sketch the background, set
the action of the story in motion, and skillfully initiate the reader/hearer into the
two-tiered Homeric universe. As a plague threatens the Greek camp, Achilles
calls on the prophet Kalchas to disclose the reason for the plague. When it is
revealed that the cause is Agamemnon’s refusal to return the captive Chryseis to
her father, a priest of Apollo, Agamemnon agrees to return her, but only on the
condition that he be permitted to take Achilles’s war prize, Briseis, to
compensate for his loss of honor. The demand kindles the wrath of Achilles. For
the sake of the Greeks, Achilles releases Briseis to Agamemnon but vows to stay
out of the fighting and asks his mother, the goddess Thetis, to turn the tide of
war against Agamemnon in his absence. Thetis then supplicates Zeus, who
agrees to her request and, in the divine council, overcomes Hera’s opposition to
the plan. In order to prompt Agamemnon to continue the war without Achilles,
Zeus sends Agamemnon a dream in which he assures him of victory. In a
somewhat strange twist, Agamemnon then gathers the armies and tests them by
telling them that the time has come to give up on the war and go home. Though
the soldiers are eager to do just that, Odysseus convinces the soldiers to stay
and fight. They gather on the plain of Skamandros, and the Trojans, led by
Hektor, muster outside the walls of Troy. By the end of book 2, then, both Greeks
and Trojans are prepared to fight. The stage is set for events to unfold along the
lines that the poet has skillfully laid down.
The perspective in these books alternates between the realm of the gods and the
world of the heroes. This duality of perspective is also apparent in the opening of
book 1, which highlights the wrath of Achilles and its disastrous consequences
for the Greek armies.
Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus

and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished (p.22)
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict
Atreus’ son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus. (1.1–7)
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As these lines make clear, the dramatic story of Achilles’s “wrath,” rooted in
complex interpersonal conflict, is subsumed under a divine drama: the shaping
of the “will of Zeus.” There are at least three ways to understand what is meant
by this phrase. According to one tradition, witnessed in a scholion but not
mentioned explicitly in the Iliad, Zeus used the Trojan War to thin the ranks of
humanity, for “Earth, being weighed down by the multitude of people, there
being no piety among humankind, asked Zeus to be relieved of the burden.”8 The
scholiast goes on to point out that war in this case was an alternative to
destroying burdensome and impious humans by storm or flood—an option taken
by deities in Genesis, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Sumerian tale of Atrahasis.
To judge from Homer, the “war strategy” was certainly effective in killing off
heroes. And the special concern of the Iliad—the role of Achilles’s wrath in
engendering an even greater loss of life—is certainly consistent with the idea
that Zeus’s primary goal was to depopulate the Earth. But this goal is too
general to be of any use in explaining the specific actions and decrees of Zeus in
the epics. A second possibility is that the will of Zeus refers to a general
understanding, voiced by a few characters (Kalchas, 2.323–329; Nestor, 2.350–
353; Agamemnon, 4.163–168), that the will of Zeus is to punish Paris (and fellow
Trojans) for violating laws of hospitality and abducting Helen.9 This option is
consistent with the way the Greek heroes in the epics understand their mission;
it also comports with the ultimate fall of Troy, an event known to Homer’s
audience but beyond the scope of the Iliad. Yet the proem and the immediate
context of Iliad 1.5 make no mention of the punishment of Troy. The poet notes
instead the suffering, devastation, and pain that the Greeks experience while a
wrathful Achilles stays out of the fighting. In this way, Greek loss of life is
ultimately a reflex of what the gods, led by Zeus, have decreed. In the death of
the Greek heroes—the sundering of “strong souls” (iphthimous psychas) from
strong bodies—“the will of Zeus was accomplished” (“dios d’eteleieto boule”;
1.3, 5).
A third option, then, is to see the will of Zeus in more specific terms, as leading
to a Greek catastrophe traceable to the wrath of Achilles and his conflict with
Agamemnon. The will of Zeus, as it takes shape in books 1 and 2, is not a
timeless judgment, an inexorable natural law, or a changeless principle that
determines events wholly from the outside. It is, instead, one possible response
to a specific set of conditions. Described at the level of (p.23) the gods, the
decree of Zeus is contingent rather than necessary. As Laura Slatkin has
explained in her insightful study of Thetis, the mother of Achilles is essential to
understanding the actions of Zeus in the Iliad.10 Drawing on extra-Iliadic
traditions about Thetis, especially those found in Pindar and Aeschylus, Slatkin
supplies the crucial backstory both to the request that Thetis makes of Zeus and
to Zeus’s remarkable willingness to grant it. As Achilles points out in book 1,
Zeus is indebted to Thetis. For she is the one immortal who can claim to have
saved Zeus, warding off “destruction” from him and setting him free from
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“shackles” (1.396–404). The episode to which Achilles alludes here is connected

to another fact about Thetis, namely that she did not accept willingly her union
with the mortal Peleus. Instead, she was, as she says obliquely, made to “endure
mortal marriage” against her will (18.433). Pindar (Isthmian 8) explains that
Zeus and Poseidon both long ago desired to wed Thetis but that Themis, who is
associated with the preservation of law, custom, and good order, intervened.
Themis informed the gods of a prophecy according to which Thetis was destined
to bear a son greater than his father. She then suggested that Thetis be wed to a
mortal so that her offspring would pose no threat to the gods. Thetis complied
and bore to Peleus a semidivine but mortal son, Achilles. In executing the plan of
Themis, Thetis neutralized the prophecy, averted an intergenerational
succession battle among the gods, and preserved the existing Olympian order.11
In this way, Thetis saved Zeus.
For all this, though, Thetis tells Achilles that she is not certain that Zeus will
grant her request to restore the honor of Achilles (1.420). When Thetis reaches
Olympos and makes her request, Zeus himself is uncertain about what to do.
Though willing to heed Thetis, he is reluctant to anger Hera by granting Thetis’s
request (1.518–519). While Zeus sits in silent deliberation, Thetis urges Zeus a
second time:
Bend your head and promise me to accomplish this thing,

or else refuse it, you have nothing to fear, that I may know
by how much I am the most dishonoured [atimotatē] of all gods.
(1.514–516)
It belongs to Zeus to decide the matter. If he decides to “bend his head” in

agreement, then his will not only will be clear to Thetis, it will also become
divine policy and human reality. In a clear allusion to her own story, Thetis
reminds Zeus that he has “nothing to fear.” The threat to Zeus or Poseidon once
posed by the prospect of a “son stronger than his father” has already (p.24)
been neutralized. Thetis has already suffered for their sake, both in enduring the
marriage to Peleus and in becoming the mother of a mighty son who must soon
die. For this reason, Zeus’s decision is free and uncoerced. Adopting the position
of the suppliant, Thetis acknowledges that she has no power over Zeus. She
appeals to him on the basis of honor: if Zeus refuses, then Thetis will know that
she is the “most dishonoured of all gods.” The fact that Thetis as preserver of
“cosmic equilibrium” deserves honor is clear.12 Another goddess who threatened
the cosmic equilibrium, Demeter, was granted her request and honored among
the gods by Zeus.13 Where Demeter had leverage over the gods, though, Thetis
has none. Any decision by Zeus to honor Achilles rests fundamentally on a
decision to honor Thetis for what she has already done. In this way, Zeus’s
decision is conditioned by the past. The will of Zeus, in other words, has a
history.
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Yet even after Zeus nods his assent to Thetis’s request, the matter is not quite
settled. He must still face his fellow Olympians. When Zeus enters the divine
council at the end of book 1, the gods all acknowledge his supremacy and rise to
greet him. At this point Zeus has already nodded his assent to Thetis; his own
agenda, as it were, is set. What remains are further actions that will engender
the cooperation of the other gods. When it appears that Zeus intends to restart
the war in book 1, questions arise. Opposition to Zeus’s will comes, in this case,
from Hera, who complains of Zeus’s plan to destroy her beloved Greeks. Hera is
cowed into submission, however, when Zeus tells her to “sit down in silence” and
threatens her with violence (1.565–567).14 At the end of book 3, both armies
have agreed to let Paris and Menelaos determine the outcome of the war in
single combat. Faced with the possibility that Menelaos’s clear but incomplete
victory over Paris will bring an end to the war, Zeus is forced to devise a way to
restart the fighting. In book 4, Zeus succeeds in engendering the cooperation of
Hera to continue the war. Knowing that she hates the Trojans even more than
she loves the Greeks, he observes that the duel between Paris and Menelaos may
result in a peaceful resolution of the war, with Troy left standing and Helen
restored to Menelaos (4.18–19). Hera takes the bait and pleads for the
opportunity to finish the destruction of Troy. Zeus agrees but makes it seem as
though it is a gracious concession rather than a skillful ploy: though he loves
Troy, he will allow Hera to orchestrate its fall. Through this apparent
compromise, Zeus has cleverly won the support of Hera and the other gods. As
Hera says to Zeus: “come then, in this thing let us both give way to each other, I
to you, you to me, and so the rest of the immortal gods will follow” (4.62–64).
Then Hera, not Zeus, calls for the resumption of hostilities. The war goes on.
(p.25) What is at stake in our understanding of the will of Zeus? What is its
connection to the theme of knowledge? In the world of Homer, a great deal
depends on the gods. Taken together, their interests and purposes, loves and
resentments, words and actions constitute a set of “givens” that constrain and,
to a certain degree, determine human life. From the point of view of the heroes,
the will of the gods is the most significant object of knowledge. It is, of course,
not the only object of knowledge, but it is the highest and most consequential,
encompassing as it does the great and extraordinary events that define the
times, characterize an era. To identify these events with divine personalities as
Homer does is to take a step toward claiming that large-scale events (war, in this
case, and, at the close of the Odyssey, peace) are, if not quite knowable, then at
least dramatically intelligible. It is not the case that things simply happen, that
events occur blindly in an absurd universe. Instead, great events have
metaphysical depth. This profound aspect of life may not be reducible to laws or
principles for Homer, but it can certainly be accessed through poetic language
and stories about the gods. The closest the poet comes to unifying or
essentializing the totality of things that shape the course of events is to subsume
them under the “will of Zeus.” Yet, as I have shown, this will is not a flat or
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fatalistic concept.15 Though the will of Zeus is decided in the meeting with
Thetis in book 1, it does not, from that point on, stand on its own as an
accomplished reality. It continues to depend on the ability of Zeus both to
intimidate and silence those opposed to it and to influence cunningly those who
are directly involved. The ruling Fates who govern the lives of heroes and the
actions of the Olympians are not, in Homer, identical to a fate that determines
divine or human action from the outside. Instead they are tied up with the
personalities and interests of the gods, at times conflicting but ultimately united
in the decree of Zeus, a free and omnipotent being. What books 1 and 2 show is
that the will of Zeus is a constructed or created reality. We are made to see its
creation in the events that lead from the plaguing of the camp to the dishonoring
of Achilles, from the sufferings of Thetis to the destruction of the Greek army.
And as things unfold, the will of Zeus responds to changing circumstances and
relies on cunning and creativity. So the highest or ultimate form of knowledge in
the epics—the thing for which gods and humans alike must account, the great
given with which they must always reckon—is not a fixed, static truth but insight
into a dynamic reality with its own dramatic coherence. For heroes and
Olympians alike, knowledge consists in the recognition of Zeus’s will, character,
and creative power; for Zeus, though, knowledge quite simply is power.
(p.26) Knowledge and Character

It is a relatively simple matter for the gods to ascertain ruling knowledge. They
are told directly what the will of Zeus requires in a particular case, or they
create it themselves by intervening directly in human affairs. Take, for example,
Apollo in book 1. The action effectively begins when Chryses, priest of Apollo,
goes to Agamemnon with a large ransom for his daughter Chryseis. When
Agamemnon contemptuously sends Chryses away, the priest asks Apollo to loose
his arrows against the Greeks. This event precedes what is later revealed to be
the “will of Zeus,” and so the decision whether to heed Chryses or not rests with
Apollo alone. When Apollo unleashes a plague on the Greeks in direct response
to the prayer of Chryses, his intent and his action, taken together, constitute a
fact, a thing that can be known. The situation of the Greeks is thus accurately
described by the statement that “the plague presently afflicting the Greeks is the
work of Apollo, who is acting on behalf of Chryses, a priest contemptuously
spurned by Agamemnon.” To have full knowledge of the situation, one must
understand what is happening to the Greeks in precisely these terms. To offer
any other explanation would be to display a lack of adequate knowledge. It is
likely that many in the camp, especially those who urged Agamemnon to return
Chryseis out of respect for Chryses, guessed correctly the cause of the plague,
but no explicit mention is made of this. Instead, Achilles calls an assembly and
recommends that the Greeks find out from “some holy man, some prophet” why
“Phoibos Apollo is so angry” (1.62, 64). Achilles knows enough to recognize the
handiwork of Apollo but nevertheless seeks a full, public account of Apollo’s
motivation. This, of course, would expose Agamemnon, which is why it is
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significant that Achilles and not some other hero—Nestor or Odysseus, for
example—proposes the inquiry. Nestor is too deferential toward Agamemnon
(1.277–281), and Odysseus seems often to function as Agamemnon’s lieutenant
(1.311; 2.185–187). Only Achilles possesses the strength and independence to
challenge Agamemnon.
Even before the dispute begins, then, there is already an implicit opposition
between Achilles and Agamemnon. When Kalchas the seer steps forward to
reveal the full truth about the plague, he does so as a representative of the
divine realm, a devotee of Apollo, one who knows “the things that were, the
things to come and the things past.” (1.70) Not only does he know the
background of Chryses as a sacrosanct figure (“the things past”) and the offense
against Chryses by Agamemnon (“the things that were”), he also knows that
Apollo will relent if Chryseis is returned (“the things to (p.27) come”). Achilles
is not interested merely in indulging his own curiosity or in analyzing the
situation. He appeals to the divine realm for knowledge, aware that this
knowledge, once revealed, will do something, create a new situation. This is
clear from the fact that Achilles stands ready to protect Kalchas from
Agamemnon if the need arises. The kind of knowledge at issue here is a
knowledge of the divine will that enters the human situation and evokes
characteristic responses. From the moment that it is requested, knowledge is
ethically charged. In initiating this inquiry, then, Achilles is not attempting to
remediate ignorance; he is, rather, staging an intervention. Kalchas lays the
blame on Agamemnon and explains that Apollo will withdraw the plague if the
girl is returned and an appropriate sacrifice is rendered. The prophecy
immediately precipitates a crisis, a point of decision about what to do next. In
the ensuing conflict, Achilles and Agamemnon come into clearer focus as
individuals. Agamemnon is haughty; Achilles is wrathful. Both are jealous for
their honor. The knowledge sought by Achilles and introduced by Kalchas is the
means by which character is made known.
Books 1 and 2 develop this further. Achilles and Agamemnon embody the heroic
ideals of virtue or excellence (aretē) and honor (timē). According to Nestor,
Achilles was taught by his father always to strive for aretē and to excel all others
(“aien aristeuein kai hypeirochon emmenai allon”; 11.783, 6.208). This bit of
advice, which has been adopted as a motto by educators down through the ages,
captures well the heroic ethos.16 In the first instance, aretē refers to martial
attributes: strength, skill, and valor. But Homer’s conception of excellence also
includes the ability to speak well and persuasively, to offer sound advice, and to
prevail in deliberations. A person of excellence is mighty in war and mighty in
counsel. As Phoinix, tutor of Achilles, says, he sought to make the hero both a
speaker of words and a doer of deeds (9.443). This conception of excellence is
fundamentally competitive. Aretē is recognized as such when it is demonstrated
in contests and proven in war. It is essential to the hero, however, that this
recognition take a visible, public form. He must receive timē from others, not
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only in the form of customary respect and verbal acclamation but also in the
form of gifts (geras).17 Honor, then, is concrete and quantifiable. The conflict
between Achilles and Agamemnon is not simply a dispute over Briseis but a
dispute over Briseis as war prize, Briseis as a badge of honor. Agamemnon
insists on taking her precisely to demonstrate his greater status, his superiority
over Achilles (1.184–187). And Achilles resists because Briseis represents the
honor paid to him by his peers. Achilles did not take Briseis unto himself; he
received her. She was, as he says, “a gift of the sons of the Achaians,” given to
him in recognition of the fact that he “laboured (p.28) much” in war (1.162).
Achilles’s intent is not to deprive Agamemnon of honor, for he is willing to
compensate Agamemnon with more booty, with geras befitting his station, as
soon as additional plunder becomes available (1. 122–129). What he resents is
Agamemnon’s attempt to restore honor to himself by stripping Achilles of his.
Agamemnon and Achilles are not at all unusual for wanting to excel others in
displaying virtue and winning honor. These are heroic ideals rather than
personal qualities. As ultimate goods—things considered good in themselves—
virtue and honor are pursued by all the Homeric heroes. Though these goods
explain a great deal about the heroes’ motives, choices, and actions, they do not
explain everything. Another important theme in books 1 and 2 is the role that
knowledge plays in the heroic quest for honor. What comes into view in these
books, once again, is knowledge conceived as an understanding of the gods and
their particular dispositions. Because the heroes are subordinate to the gods and
subject to their will, the most vital form of knowledge in a world saturated by
divine presence is theological knowledge. As I have shown, Kalchas’s revelation
concerning Apollo set the story in motion and initiated the conflict over honor.
When Hera sees that Achilles is ready to kill Agamemnon over the insult to his
honor, she sends Athena to “keep down his anger” (1.192). To keep Achilles in
check, Athena appears to him and him only while he is in the midst of the
assembly. She tells Achilles that he will not remain dishonored forever; instead,
his honor will be tripled: “some day three times over such shining gifts shall be
given you/by reason of this outrage. Hold your hand then, and obey us” (1.213–
214). Achilles spares Agamemnon at that moment, then, not because he no
longer cares about his honor but because the goddess has promised him a better
way to gain it. If Achilles listens to Hera and Athena now, he reasons, then the
gods will look favorably on him later (1.218). Athena does not explain in detail
how his honor will be tripled, but Achilles knows at least one part of the plan:
honor will come to him when Agamemnon and the other Greeks suffer in his
absence. This is what he tells Agamemnon (1.239–244). Yet he cannot be sure
that the war will go badly enough without him to make his words come true.
Following the assembly, then, Achilles supplicates his mother, Thetis, asking her
to secure Zeus’s help in turning the war against the Greeks while Achilles stays
out of it. Thetis cannot guarantee that Zeus will grant her request, but Achilles,
as I have shown, has good reason to believe that she will be successful. Thetis
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instructs him to remain by his ships (1.421), and he keeps this counsel
unwaveringly until Thetis herself tells him, after the death of Patroklos, to
reconcile with Agamemnon and arm himself for battle (19.28–36).
(p.29) Knowledge plays a rather different role in the case of Agamemnon.

Instead of receiving reliable knowledge directly from the gods as Achilles does,
Agamemnon is deceived and manipulated by indirect means. With Achilles on
the sidelines, Agamemnon must decide how to proceed without his best warrior,
the one whom Nestor called “a great bulwark of battle over all the
Achaians” (1.284). Somewhat unexpectedly, though, we find Agamemnon
untroubled at the beginning of book 2, at peace with his decision to alienate
Achilles, and enveloped in “immortal slumber” (ambrosios hypnos) such as the
gods enjoy (2.19). Ironically, the greatest immortal, Zeus, is unable to sleep.
Achilles has withdrawn from the fight, but in order for the plan of Zeus to
advance, Agamemnon and the Greeks must be compelled to resume the fighting
without him. Pondering how best to bring this about, Zeus decides to capitalize
on the fact that Agamemnon is sleeping soundly while he (Zeus) is not. Zeus
sends a dream or, more accurately, “evil Dream” (oulon oneiron; 2.6), to
Agamemnon, promising him certain and imminent victory.18 Agamemnon wakes
and swings into action. The strategy apparently goes awry, however, when
Agamemnon decides to test the courage of the army by telling them that he was
told in a dream to abandon the war. To the false knowledge conveyed by Dream,
Agamemnon adds yet more. In a somewhat comic scene, the armies respond to
the test by running away from the plain rather than toward it. They rush to the
ships so quickly that they leave a cartoonish cloud of dust in the air (2.150–
151).19 It falls to others to prevent the army from abandoning the war and
sailing home. Inspired by Athena, Odysseus stops the exodus to the ships,
reassembles the army, and instills fighting courage. Though the test seems like a
near catastrophe, it was apparently the plan all along. For Agamemnon,
anticipating the stampede to the ships, told the leaders beforehand to take
positions and restrain the men with orders (2.75), which is precisely what
Odysseus did. When Odysseus rallied the armies, he did so with Agamemnon’s
scepter in hand. In this convoluted way, the will of Agamemnon and, more
important, the will of Zeus were accomplished.
The contrast between the two illustrates, once again, the role of knowledge in
bringing out character. In responding to instructions from Athena and Thetis,
Achilles is earnest, high-hearted, and respectful of the gods. Agamemnon, for his
part, comes across as devious, greedy, and eager to blame Zeus. But these early
episodes highlight another important feature of knowledge. In the Homeric
economy of knowledge, humans are consumers, not producers. Their knowledge
environment is fragile and impoverished. Occupying a fundamentally passive
position with respect to knowledge, the heroes possess only a limited ability to
effect their wills in the world (p.30) and bring about outcomes consistent with
their intentions. This situation is due, as I have shown, to the role of the gods in
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determining great events. But it is also a result of the fact that humans
themselves are subject to what Homer calls atē (“delusion, infatuation”). Atē is a
temporary state of mind in which sufferers act rashly or irrationally. As E. R.
Dodds wrote in his classic study, “it is, in fact, a partial and temporary insanity;
and, like all insanity, it is ascribed, not to physiological or psychological causes,
but to an external ‘daemonic’ agency.”20 The atē of Agamemnon, for example,
compelled him to strip Achilles of honor and take Briseis. Though, in the
moment, the seizure seemed just, Agamemnon is able, in retrospect, to
recognize that it was a bad thing to do. Actions committed under the influence of
atē are felt, moreover, to result from an inexplicable deviation from what one,
thinking and acting clearly, would normally do—not quite like saying “the devil
made me do it” but something close. Before sending the embassy to Achilles in
book 9, Agamemnon acknowledges the irresistible influence of atē on his actions
(9.115–119). And when he is finally reconciled to Achilles in book 19, he refers to
atē in order to exculpate himself:
This is the word the Achaians have spoken often against me

and found fault with me in it, yet I am not responsible
but Zeus is, and Destiny, and Erinys the mist-walking
who in assembly caught my heart in the savage delusion [agrion
atēn]
on that day I myself stripped from him the prize of Achilleus.
Yet what could I do? It is the god who accomplishes all things.
Delusion [Atē] is the elder daughter of Zeus, the accursed
who deludes all; her feet are delicate and they step not
on the firm earth, but she walks in the air above men’s heads
and leads them astray. She has entangled others before me. (85–94)
Agamemnon is not to blame: Zeus, Destiny (Moira), Erinys, and Atē are. In his
eagerness to locate the source of the disastrous conflict with Achilles elsewhere,
Agamemnon rattles off a list of daimonic agencies, thus overshooting the mark.
In speaking of causes, more is not necessarily better. Agamemnon’s explanation
fails, on one level, because it “overdetermines” Agamemnon’s action.21 It
protests too much.
But it succeeds, on another, in characterizing the human situation. The failure to

act wisely in a given instance is not simply a matter of ignorance, of knowledge
denied or misrepresented to humans by the gods. The exercise of good judgment
is also rendered precarious by the vagaries of human (p.31) consciousness:
dreams, passions, moods, lapses in attention, and even states of drunkenness
(Od. 21291–304). One can stray at any time, for atē “walks in the air above men’s
heads.” The personification of atē in the speech of Agamemnon, however, should
not obscure another fact about the temporary derangements that atē produces.
Though they are felt to come upon the individual from the outside—a force
seizing Agamemnon’s heart in the assembly—they are also (with the possible
exception of wine-induced atē) inherent in the individual. Agamemnon’s atē in
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book 1 is consistent with his character as a great leader jealous for his honor; it
is simply an imprudent, extreme expression of it. This is also true of Achilles.
The atē of Achilles does not figure into books 1 and 2, but takes center stage
later in the Iliad. With the war going badly, Nestor counsels Agamemnon to
appease Achilles, return Briseis, and win him back “with words of supplication
and with the gifts of friendship” (Il. 9.113). Agamemnon admits fault in the
earlier conflict and agrees to Nestor’s plan. The gifts that Agamemnon promises
Achilles are impressive and, all agree, appropriate to Achilles’s great status.
Nevertheless, Achilles rejects, unreasonably, the offer of Agamemnon, going so
far as to claim indifference to any honor he might win by saving the Greeks
(9.607–608). Phoinix warns Achilles that if he spurns Agamemnon this time, his
atē will overtake him and bring him to grief (9.512). Achilles, however, persists
in his anger toward Agamemnon and refuses to join the fighting. When the battle
at last reaches the ships and a Greek defeat seems imminent, Patroklos asks
Achilles to let him wear Achilles’s armor, lead the Myrmidons, and drive the
Trojans back. He desires to be a savior, a “light” for the Danaans (16.39).
Achilles agrees but urges Patroklos to turn back once he has driven the Trojans
from the ships: “let others go on fighting in the flat land” (16.96). Patroklos
fights valiantly and succeeds in driving the Trojans back, but atē eventually
overtakes him. Patroklos ignores Achilles’s instructions and pursues the Trojans
on the plain, foolishly unaware that he draws near to his own death (16.684–
693). Just before succumbing to Hektor, Patroklos suddenly loses the ability to
defend himself: “disaster [atē] caught his wits, and his shining body went
nerveless” (16.805).
The characterization of Patroklos’s inexplicable loss of nerve as the work of atē

skillfully connects the foolhardiness of Patroklos to the stubbornness of Achilles.
Achilles’s refusal to fight leads to a situation in which Patroklos, fighting in
Achilles’s place, overextends himself in battle. One deluded state creates the
conditions for another. Thus, in poetic terms, the atē of Achilles seems to alight
on Patroklos and bring on his death.22 This, however, is not the same as saying,
simply and prosaically, that Achilles is responsible for the (p.32) death of
Patroklos. The Homeric device of atē is subtler. It affirms a causal relationship
between the actions of Achilles and Patroklos. It also suggests that Achilles and
Patroklos both acted stupidly. But the two err in different ways and from
different motives: one refuses to fight, and the other refuses to turn back. As in
the case of Agamemnon, atē here “cooperates” with the personality of the
individual, causing him to experience delusion in a way that is consistent with
his personal traits and affinities. The anger of the quick-tempered Achilles
becomes, under the influence of atē, a mad, implacable hatred for Agamemnon
(9.312, 613–614, 646–647). Under the same influence, the normal heroic desire
of Patroklos to emerge from the shadow of Achilles, prove his virtue, and surpass
fellow heroes becomes fatal foolhardiness.23 In his study of atē, William Wyatt
argues that atē is recognized by sufferers only in retrospect and is better
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understood, therefore, as the feeling of remorse one experiences when one

realizes that one has committed a terrible error. More specifically, it is the
feeling that one has erred by overindulging oneself.24 To connect atē to
overindulgence is to see that it is not only, as Agamemnon suggests, a daimonic
agent (“Delusion”) controlling humans from the outside but also an expression of
individual character. Overindulgence in this context is the failure to live up to
oneself by being too much oneself. To invoke atē is to account for error in a way
that recognizes its extrinsic and intrinsic aspects.
Examining the nature and effects of knowledge in books 1 and 2 of the Iliad, one
sees that, for Homer, knowledge is ancillary to character. That is, what counts as
knowledge (even when clouded by atē) ultimately serves to express the
personality of the knower.25 This is truest of Zeus, since he is able without
significant constraint to orchestrate the events and engender the realities that
become what is known or, at least, what there is to know. A Homeric character
who is “in the know,” then, is one who understands the will of Zeus: that Achilles
will win honor at the Greeks’ expense and then die after killing Hektor; that
Odysseus, in spite of Poseidon and the suitors, will eventually reach home and
reclaim his patrimony. Those who doubt or disbelieve these things are, in the
epics, fools who purchase their folly at a very high price. To understand the will
of Zeus is to know what he has approved and forbidden, whom he likes and
dislikes. There is no real use in speaking of a knowable reality, a fixed, final
truth, apart from divine personality. So too with human knowledge. It never
leaves entirely the orbit of character. Just as correct knowledge brings out
character, so too does atē, a state of delusion particular to oneself. Knowledge
acquired by heroes does not lift them into a new epistemic position from which
to resolve the painful conflicts of existence; it merely dramatizes these conflicts.
Achilles is told by Thetis, for example, that (p.33) he will either fight and die at
Troy and win everlasting fame or return home and endure a long, inglorious life
(Il. 9.410–416).26 Odysseus also receives privileged knowledge from Calypso: if
he stays with her at Ogygia, he will enjoy a blissful immortality; but if he tries to
return home, he will suffer many hardships (Od. 5.203–213). Knowledge
imparted to Achilles and Odysseus sets up choices in which character is
clarified. In choosing glory and revenge, Achilles chooses the heroic path,
although one rendered more tragic by the story of Thetis and the death of
Patroklos. Odysseus, though, appears to be somewhat unconventional among
heroes in leaving Ogygia for Ithaka and passing up the chance for immortality.
Nothing says more about Odysseus’s character than this choice.27 It is not
knowledge but character that ultimately shapes the lives of Homer’s heroes.
According to Werner Jaeger, it is in Homer that we may see the beginnings of a
great effort to understand the mysterious outworkings of personality, one that
culminated centuries later in the famous maxim of Heraclitus—“character is
destiny” (“ethos anthropō daimon”).28 Were “Homer” less fond of epithets and
more given to aphorisms, he may indeed have put the matter this way.
Page 15 of 31
Wisdom and Suffering

I turn now from Achilles and Agamemnon to the figure of Odysseus. The Odyssey
is not so much a sequel or continuation of the Iliad as it is a later, distinctive
adaptation of materials concerned with the aftermath of the Trojan War: the
homecomings or nostoi of the heroes. It presupposes the events of the Iliad but
without duplicating them.29 The opening of the poem announces its own theme.
Instead of Achilles and his wrath, the poet seeks from the Muse a story of
wandering and suffering:
Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways [polytropon], who was
driven
far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel.
Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of,
many the pains he suffered in his spirit on the wide sea,
struggling for his own life and the homecoming of his companions.
Even so he could not save his companions, hard though
he strove to; they were destroyed by their own wild recklessness
[atasthaliēsin],
fools, who devoured the oxen of Helios, the Sun God,
and he took away the day of their homecoming. From some point
here, goddess, daughter of Zeus, speak, and begin our story. (Od.
1.1–10)
(p.34) Odysseus is not named in these opening lines, but it is not difficult to
recognize him. The poet describes a man of diverse skills, broad experience, and
versatile character—a combination of qualities that belongs in an unusually high
degree to Odysseus. His epithets, which include the poly- prefix, reinforce the
idea of a “manifold” man: polytropos (“man of many ways”); polymētis (“crafty”);
polymechanos (“resourceful”). But the proem also points to another essential
feature of Odysseus: his identity as a much-suffering man. One of the more
common epithets for him in both poems is “long-suffering divine Odysseus”
(polytlas dios Odysseus). And though the etymology is uncertain, the very name
“Odysseus” may also mark him as a “son of pain” or a “man of suffering.”30
An important question in the Odyssey is how to understand the many pains,

hardships, and sufferings that Odysseus endures throughout the epic. It is
tempting to see Odysseus as a kind of righteous sufferer akin, perhaps, to Job or
his Babylonian counterpart, the author of the Ludlul bel nemeqi. The proem
places Odysseus in a morally favorable light when it presents his companions as
victims of their own “recklessness” (atasthaliēsin) who perished despite his
valiant attempts to save them. Farther on in book 1, in the famous “theodicy”
passage, Zeus complains that humans unjustly blame the gods for their
sufferings when, in fact, they “by their own recklessness [atasthaliēsin] win
sorrow beyond what is given [hyper moron]” (Od. 1.34). The parade example is
Aigisthos, who ignored warnings from the gods, killed Agamemnon upon his
return, and married Klytaimestra, only to be cut down by Agamemnon’s son,
Page 16 of 31
Orestes. Aigisthos went beyond what was rightful for him to do. He acted hyper
moron (1.35), and he paid a price in sorrow that was correspondingly hyper
moron. Ever eager to aid Odysseus, Athena argues that Odysseus is not at all
like Aigisthos. His homecoming, she says, has been delayed by a goddess even
though he made the appropriate offerings to Zeus before setting out from Troy
(1.60–62). Athena suggests that Odysseus suffers in spite of his pious actions.
Zeus’s response to Athena is shrewd. He ultimately approves her suggestion to
bring Odysseus home, as he is well aware that Odysseus is a prolific sacrificer
(1.65–67). But he is not willing to grant that the sufferings of Odysseus are
unwarranted. Zeus defends his own honor as a just ruler by pointing out that
Odysseus has indeed propitiated the gods handsomely and so deserves due
consideration. Yet the real reason that Odysseus cannot reach home is that
Poseidon, with just cause, prevents it. Zeus reminds Athena that Odysseus
blinded the eye of Polyphemos the Cyclops, the son of Poseidon. Poseidon
opposes Odysseus specifically for this act. Zeus hints that Poseidon’s response is
a punishment that fits the crime. Odysseus did not kill (p.35) Polyphemos, so
Poseidon, appropriately, spares Odysseus’s life: as Zeus says, Poseidon “does not
kill Odysseus, yet drives him back from the land of his fathers” (1.74–75). In
taking the suggestion of Athena, Zeus does not confer on Odysseus the status of
a righteous sufferer or anything of the sort. He has simply decided that
Odysseus has paid his dues, both to Poseidon and to himself, and that it is time
for him to go home.31
Though the proem highlights the offense of Odysseus’s crew against the sun god
Helios (1.8), the gathering of the gods in book 1 points, as I have shown, to the
centrality of Odysseus’s actions and his offense against Poseidon. At the time of
this gathering, the poet places Poseidon far away from Olympos in the land of
the Aithiopians (1.22). Since he is not there to defend his actions, it falls to Zeus
to explain to Athena and the others the case against Odysseus. In doing so, Zeus
mentions both the blinding of Polyphemos and his godlike stature as greatest of
the Cyclopes. Though it appears that Poseidon merely bears a personal grudge
against Odysseus for injuring and insulting his savage, man-eating son, the full
description of the episode later in the epic suggests that something greater was
at stake. In book 9, we find Odysseus among the Phaiakians, in the hall of king
Alkinoös, ready to tell his story to a great gathering of people. After describing
the troubles he and his crew endured when they set out from Troy—many
caused by the foolishness of the crew (9.41–61, 96–104)—Odysseus dwells at
length on his encounter with Polyphemos. Necessity did not drive them to the
cave of Polyphemos; the curiosity of Odysseus lured them there. It was only
because Odysseus wanted to see what kind of people the Cyclopes were that he
and a select crew left a peaceful island full of wild game and crossed the harbor
to the cave of Polyphemos:
The rest of you, who are my eager companions, wait here,

while I, with my own ship and companions that are in it,
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go and find out [peirēsomai] about these people, and learn what they
are,
whether they are savage and violent [hybristai], and without justice
or hospitable to strangers and with minds that are godly. (9.172–176)
It is easy to overlook the ethical import of this passage and to imagine that
Odysseus here merely acts on an innocent desire for information or pursues an
idle fancy.32 Yet it would be a mistake to think of Odysseus as a kind of cultural
anthropologist eager to do some fieldwork. What Odysseus proposes to do is to
find out by testing (peirao) how well the Cyclopes measure up to ethical ideals:
order, justice, and piety. To appear among humans and try them in this way is
the prerogative of the gods.33 What may seem to us a laudable (p.36) (or
harmless) pursuit of knowledge is better understood, in Homeric terms, as an
arrogation of divine authority. The attainment of knowledge requires that
Odysseus assume a godlike position with respect to the Cyclopes. Yet, ironically,
it is Polyphemos who has divine parents and godlike stature, not Odysseus. To
the extent that hubris is rooted in the desire to demonstrate one’s superiority
over another, Odysseus’s adventure with Polyphemos is hubristic ab initio, in its
very conception. In seeking to investigate the hubris of the Cyclopes, he ends up
demonstrating his own.
Once in the cave, Odysseus and his companions learn that Polyphemos and the
Cyclopes do not fear the gods or honor the conventions of guest-friendship
(xeinia). When Polyphemos promptly eats two of Odysseus’s men, they realize
they are in a death trap. Odysseus now has the answers to his anthropological
questions; facing death, he now has knowledge. The story of the men’s ingenious
escape, cunningly devised by Odysseus, is well known. The scheme to intoxicate
Polyphemos, blind him in his sleep, and escape while hanging upside down from
the male sheep (who are not milked) is brilliant in every way. The added device
of telling Polyphemos beforehand that his name is “Nobody” (ou tis) ensures that
any plea for help from fellow Cyclopes becomes a sullen rejection of help. In
great pain and distress, Polyphemos exclaims: “Nobody is killing me by force or
treachery!” (9.408) Before the puzzled Cyclopes outside the cave leave
Polyphemos to his misery, they unwittingly indicate the theme of the story: “no
one [mē tis] does you violence [biazetai]” (9.410). With this famous wordplay,
Homer punctuates the victory of Odysseus’s mētis (“cunning”) over the biē
(“force”) of Polyphemos. Mētis is an essential feature of Odysseus’s character.34
Though the story of Polyphemos is perhaps the best example, other feats of
mētis figure importantly in the tales of the Trojan War, notably the night raid on
the Thracian camp (Il. 10.332–542) and the scheme to infiltrate Troy in a wooden
horse (Od. 8.498–520). These and other stories built Odysseus’s reputation as
the cleverest and most cunning of all the heroes. As Telemachos reports,
Odysseus has “the best mind among men for craft [mētis],” and there is “no
other man among mortal men who can contend” with him (Od. 23.125–126).
Mētis is essential to Odysseus’s particular heroic excellence, his form of aretē.
Page 18 of 31
Intellectual curiosity might seem to be a natural accompaniment to this sort of

excellence; one who relies on his wits surely has some stake in “knowing” things
and applying lessons learned from experience. Yet the story of Odysseus
suggests that, while mētis is essential to heroic virtue, profound knowledge and
godlike understanding are not.35 Mētis is much closer to being a skill or ability
than it is to being a form of knowledge. The exercise of mētis, in fact,
presupposes a situation that it is indeterminate, unstable, and open-ended, one
in which knowledge as a (p.37) form of ultimate understanding is either
impossible or unavailable. To one who lives by mētis, the world is not derivable
from some fixed and final reality; the goal is not to pierce or sweep aside the veil
of illusion and realize a fundamental truth. The goal of mētis is not
understanding but success. One who relies on mētis already has some goal in
mind and now intends to reach it by cunning and deceit. According to Marcel
Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, mētis takes for granted that things are in flux,
shot through with contingency, but that the possessor of mētis is himself stable
and resolute:
[I]n order to reach his goal directly, to pursue his way without deviating
from it, across a world which is fluctuating and constantly oscillating from
one side to another, he must himself adopt an oblique course and make his
intelligence sufficiently wiley and supple to bend in every conceivable way
and his gait so ‘askew’ that he can be ready to go in any direction.36
The goal, then, is not to arrive at knowledge but to exploit changing

circumstances, to produce a particular outcome in spite of perplexing variability.
If the story of Polyphemos illustrates the mētis of Odysseus, it also illustrates his
hubris. The initial bid for godlike knowledge of the Cyclopes is hubristic. Yet it is
not until Odysseus escapes from the cave that the full extent of his hubris is
evident. In the cave, Odysseus is placed in a humiliating position. He watches
helplessly as Polyphemos eats six of his companions, and he endures
imprisonment in the cave while his prestige as a leader dwindles with every
passing moment. The opportunistic Odysseus, though, takes notice of small
things (an olive branch lying on the floor, the male sheep in the cave rather than
in the pen outside) and improvises a brilliant escape. For Odysseus to carry off
the plan, though, he has to negate himself by giving up his name, his onoma
klyton (9.364), on which his “honour and glory are fastened”; he has to become a
“nobody.”37 Odysseus has to accept the indignity of being temporarily thought by
Polyphemos a weak, small, and ineffectual person. When the plan succeeds and
Odysseus and his companions reach their ship, he cannot resist the temptation
to taunt Polyphemos and reassert his own status as a great hero. He takes up his
heroic name once again, revealing his true identity as “Odysseus, sacker of
cities,” son of Laertes, and native of Ithaka (9.504). He also extends the taunt to
Poseidon himself, claiming that even he will not be able to heal the eye of
Polyphemos (9.525). The taunts allow Polyphemos to pray specifically against
Page 19 of 31
Odysseus and to curse his homecoming, while the gratuitous insult of Poseidon
foreshadows great troubles at sea. Odysseus also offends Zeus here. Odysseus’s
mistake is to claim that, in being blinded, (p.38) Polyphemos now suffers the
justice of “Zeus and the rest of the gods” (9.479). By this claim, Odysseus
portrays his defeat of Polyphemos as a “victory of the Olympian order,” a just
punishment of Polyphemos’s gross violations of hospitality.38 But Odysseus had
no right either to test or to punish any of the Cyclopes in the name of the gods.
Odysseus’s triumph was, in fact, a fortunate escape from an ill-advised
adventure in which he acted entirely on his own and took vengeance on
Polyphemos for his own personal humiliation. For Odysseus to claim a divine
mandate in this case is hubris.
But in the case of the suitors—who devour the estate of Odysseus, hound his
wife, Penelope, and plot against his son, Telemachos—Odysseus is in fact an
agent of divine justice. The suitors act with “recklessness” and, by Zeus’s logic
in book 1, bring destruction on themselves. When the gods meet in council to
reaffirm the plan to bring Odysseus home, Athena makes specific mention of the
suitors (5.18), and Zeus affirms her plan: “Odysseus shall make his way back,
and punish those others” (5.24). With the support of Zeus, Athena swings into
action. Though absent from Odysseus’s early adventures, Athena plays an active
role in Odysseus’s story after he has lost everything. She takes on the tasks of
getting Odysseus home when he has neither ship nor crew, returning him in
honor when he has lost his prizes at sea, and destroying all the suitors when he
is badly outnumbered. She appears, in other words, precisely when her specialty
—mētis—is required.39 Odysseus arrives at Ithaka alone but with all of the gifts
he received from the Phaiakians. Athena appears in the guise of a stranger, and
Odysseus, ever wary, tells her a false story about who he is and where his
massive treasure has come from. Taking clear delight in his knavery, Athena
reveals herself and notes the special affinity between herself and Odysseus:
But come, let us talk no more of this, for you and I both know
sharp practice, since you are far the best of all mortal
men for counsel and stories, and I among all the divinities
am famous for wit and sharpness; and yet you never recognized
Pallas Athene, daughter of Zeus, the one who is always
standing beside you and guarding you in every endeavor.
And it was I who made you loved by all the Phaiakians.
And now I am here, to help you in your devising
of schemes [mētis], and to hide the possessions which the haughty
Phaiakians
bestowed—it was by my thought and counsel—on you, as you started
for home, and tell you all the troubles you are destined to suffer
in your well-wrought house; but you must, of necessity [anankē],
endure (p.39)
all, and tell no one out of all the men and women
that you have come back from your wanderings, but you must endure
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much grief in silence, standing and facing men in their violence

[bias]. (13.296–310)
In this enjoyable scene, the trickster gets tricked. Though Odysseus thinks he is
skillfully misdirecting a stranger by quickly concocting an elaborate story, it is
he who labors under a false impression. He cannot tell that he is in Ithaka and
that it is Athena who addresses him. Were it more competitive, it might be
described as a contest of mētis. Athena does not deign to challenge Odysseus’s
attempt at a ruse: she simply smiles, lays a friendly hand on him, and says, in
effect, “how very like you to resort to trickery” (13.287–295). She goes on to
explain that she has been working behind the scenes all along to set up a hero’s
return. Because of her machinations, the Phaiakians have now brought him to
Ithaka with more booty than he could ever have taken from Troy (13.137). On
this point, though, Athena is clear: though Odysseus may have won a hero’s
return, he will not receive a hero’s welcome. Though he has reached home, he
is, in fact, entering hostile territory.
For him to regain control of his house, Odysseus will have to obey Athena. He
understands that he will have to bring his own crafty nature, his mētis, under
the control of Athena’s equally crafty nature, her mētis. As he says to her: “Come
then, weave the design [mētis], the way I shall take my vengeance upon
them” (13.386). From this point on, Odysseus obeys Athena fastidiously. The
shift in Odysseus’s character from one that is proud, independent, and
resourceful to one that is, apparently, slavishly obedient to a goddess may seem
problematic.40 But if one sees Athena as Odysseus’s divine counterpart (13.296–
299), the goddess of mētis who stands by the hero of mētis, then the obedience
of Odysseus comes into view, not as an effacement of human intellect and
personality but rather as an extension of them. Though Odysseus wins through
by obeying Athena’s crafty plans, it is difficult to imagine any other Homeric
hero succeeding in following them in the way Odysseus does. They suit him
uniquely, and so he is enlarged rather than diminished by his cooperation with
Athena. Athena’s plan, moreover, involves the same elements that were part of
Odysseus’s cunning escape from the cave of Polyphemos. She tells Odysseus that
he will be constrained by “necessity” (anankē) in his “house.” He will find
himself in a life-and-death situation in his own halls, just as he, hemmed in by
necessity, faced imminent death in the “house” of Polyphemos. He will once
again have to lay aside his identity, his great heroic name, and tell no one who
he is and all that he has done. He will sink to the status of a (p.40) “nobody,”
this time in his own land. As such, he will have to bear “grief in silence,” endure
the abuses of the suitors and even some of the servants in his own house, just as
he suppressed his own desire for valor and bided his time in the cave of the
disdainful Cyclops. And, finally, Athena tells him that he will have to stand and
face violence, the biē of a numerically superior force. As in the cave of
Page 21 of 31
Another random document with
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would have served to strengthen and rest him. But how to come by
so much now? How?
The character of the places frequented by the coolies, bhisties
(water-carriers), hadjis and even beggars like Ibn, while without any
of the so-called luxuries of these others, and to the frequenters of
which the frequenters of these were less than the dust under their
feet, were still, to these latter, excellent enough. Yea, despised as
they were, they contained charpoys on which each could sit with his
little water-chatty beside him, and in the centre of the circle one such
as even the lowly Ibn, a beggar, singing his loudest or reciting some
tale—for such as they. It was in such places as these, before his
voice had wholly deserted him, that Ibn had told his tales. Here,
then, for the price of a few anna, they could munch the leavings of
the khat market, drink kishr and discuss the state of the world and
their respective fortunes. Compared to Ibn in his present state, they
were indeed as lords, even princes.
But, by Allah, although having been a carrier and a vendor himself
in his day, and although born above them, yet having now no voice
nor any tales worth the telling, he was not even now looked upon as
one who could stand up and tell of the wonders of the Jinn and
demons and the great kings and queens who had reigned of old.
Indeed, so low had he fallen that he could not even interest this
despised caste. His only gift now was listening, or to make a pathetic
picture, or recite the ills that were his.
Nevertheless necessity, a stern master, compelled him to think
better of his quondam tale-telling art. Only, being, as he knew, wholly
unsuited to recite any tale now, he also knew that the best he could
do would be to make the effort, a pretense, in the hope that those
present, realizing his age and unfitness, would spare him the
spectacle he would make of himself and give him a few anna
wherewith to ease himself then and there. Accordingly, the hour
having come when the proffered services of a singer or story-teller
would be welcomed in any mabraz, he made his way to this region of
many of them and where beggars were so common. Only, glancing
through the door of the first one, he discovered that there were far
too few patrons for his mood. They would be in nowise gay, hence
neither kind nor generous as yet, and the keeper would be cold. In a
second, a little farther on, a tom-tom was beginning, but the guests
were only seven in number and but newly settled in their pleasure. In
a third, when the diaphanous sky without was beginning to pale to a
deep steel and the evening star was hanging like a solitaire from the
pure breast of the western firmament, he pushed aside the veiling
cords of beads of one and entered, for here was a large company
resting upon their pillows and charpoys, their chatties and hubbuks
beside them, but no singer or beater of a tom-tom or teller of tales as
yet before them.
“O friends,” he began with some diffidence and imaginings, for well
he knew how harsh were the moods and cynical the judgments of
some of these lowest of life’s offerings, “be generous and hearken to
the tale of one whose life has been long and full of many unfortunate
adventures, one who although he is known to you—”
“What!” called Hussein, the peddler of firewood, reclining at his
ease in his corner, a spray of all but wilted khat in his hand. “Is it not
even Ibn Abdullah? And has he turned tale-teller once more? By
Allah, a great teller of tales—one of rare voice! The camels and
jackals will be singing in Hodeidah next!”
“An my eyes deceive me not,” cried Waidi, the water-carrier, at his
ease also, a cup of kishr in his hands, “this is not Ibn Abdullah, but
Sindbad, fresh from a voyage!”
“Or Ali Baba himself,” cried Yussuf, the carrier, hoarsely. “Thou
hast a bag of jewels somewhere about thee? Now indeed we shall
hear things!”
“And in what a voice!” added Haifa the tobacco-tramp, noting the
husky, wheezy tones with which Ibn opened his plea. “This is to be a
treat, truly. And now we may rest and have wonders upon wonders.
Ibn of Mecca and Jiddah, and even of marvelous Hodeidah itself, will
now tell us much. A cup of kishr, ho! This must be listened to!”
But now Bab-al Oman, the keeper, a stout and cumbrous soul,
coming forth from his storeroom, gazed upon Ibn with mingled
astonishment and no little disfavor, for it was not customary to permit
any of his customers of the past to beg in here, and as for a singer or
story-teller he had never thought of Ibn in that light these many
years. He was too old, without the slightest power to do aught but
begin in a wheezy voice.
“Hearken,” he called, coming over and laying a hand on him, the
while the audience gazed and grinned, “hast thou either anna or
rupee wherewith to fulfill thy account in case thou hast either khat or
kishr?” The rags and the mummy-like pallor of the old man offended
him.
“Do but let him speak,” insisted Hussein the peddler gaily, “or
sing,” for he was already feeling the effects of his ease and the
restorative power of the plant. “This will be wonderful. By the voices
of eleven hundred elephants!”
“Yea, a story,” called Waidi, “or perhaps that of the good Cadi of
Taiz and the sacred waters of Jezer!”
“Or of the Cadi of Mecca and the tobacco that was too pure!”
Ibn heard full well and knew the spectacle he was making of
himself. The references were all too plain. Only age and want and a
depressing feebleness, which had been growing for days, caused
him to forget, or prevented, rather, his generating a natural rage and
replying in kind. These wretched enemies of his, dogs lower than
himself, had never forgiven him that he had been born out of their
caste, or, having been so, that he had permitted himself to sink to
labor and beg with them. But now his age and weakness were too
great. He was too weary to contend.
“O most generous Oman, best of keepers of a mabraz—and thou,
O comfortable and honorable guests,” he insisted wheezily, “I have
here but one pice, the reward of all my seekings this day. It is true
that I am a beggar and that my coverings are rags, yet do but
consider that I am old and feeble. This day and the day before and
the day before that—”
“Come, come!” said Oman restlessly and feeling that the custom
and trade of his mabraz were being injured, “out! Thou canst not sing
and thou canst not tell a tale, as thou well knowest. Why come here
when thou hast but a single pice wherewith to pay thy way? Beg
more, but not here! Bring but so much as half a rupee, and thou shalt
have service in plenty!”
“But the pice I have here—may not I—O good sons of the Prophet,
a spray of khat, a cup of kishr—suffer me not thus be cast forth! ‘—
and the poor and the son of the road!’ Alms—alms—in the name of
Allah!”
“Out, out!” insisted Oman gently but firmly. “So much as ten anna,
and thou mayst rest here; not otherwise.”
He turned him forth into the night.
And now, weak and fumbling, Ibn stood there for a time,
wondering where else to turn. He was so weak that at last even the
zest for search or to satisfy himself was departing. For a moment, a
part of his old rage and courage returning, he threw away the pice
that had been given him, then turned back, but not along the street
of the bazaars. He was too distrait and disconsolate. Rather, by a
path which he well knew, he circled now to the south of the town,
passing via the Bet-el-Fakin gate to the desert beyond the walls,
where, ever since his days as a pack servant with the Bedouins, he
had thought to come in such an hour. Overhead were the stars in
that glorious æther, lit with a light which never shines on other soils
or seas. The evening star had disappeared, but the moon was now
in the west, a thin feather, yet transfiguring and transforming as by
magic the homely and bare features of the sands. Out here was
something of that beauty which as a herdsman among the Bedouins
he had known, the scent of camels and of goats’ milk, the memory of
low black woolen tents, dotting the lion-tawny sands and gazelle-
brown gravels with a warm and human note, and the camp-fire that,
like a glowworm, had denoted the village centre. Now, as in a dream,
the wild weird songs of the boys and girls of the desert came back,
the bleating of their sheep and goats in the gloaming. And the
measured chant of the spearsmen, gravely stalking behind their
charges, the camels, their song mingling with the bellowing of their
humpy herds.
“It is finished,” he said, once he was free of the city and far into the
desert itself. “I have no more either the skill nor the strength
wherewith to endure or make my way. And without khat one cannot
endure. What will be will be, and I am too old. Let them find me so. I
shall not move. It is better than the other.”
Then upon the dry, warm sands he laid himself, his head toward
Mecca, while overhead the reremouse circled and cried, its tiny
shriek acknowledging its zest for life; and the rave of a jackal,
resounding through the illuminated shade beyond, bespoke its desire
to live also. Most musical of all music, the palm trees now answered
the whispers of the night breeze with the softest tones of falling
water.
“It is done,” sighed Ibn Abdullah, as he lay and wearily rested.
“Worthless I came, O Allah, and worthless I return. It is well.”
VII
TYPHOON
I NTO a singularly restricted and indifferent environment Ida Zobel

was born. Her mother, a severe, prim German woman, died when
she was only three, leaving her to the care of her father and his
sister, both extremely reserved and orderly persons. Later, after Ida
had reached the age of ten, William Zobel took unto himself a
second wife, who resembled Zobel and his first wife in their respect
for labor and order.
Both were at odds with the brash gayety and looseness of the
American world in which they found themselves. Being narrow,
sober, workaday Germans, they were annoyed by the groups of
restless, seeking, eager, and as Zobel saw it, rather scandalous
young men and women who paraded the neighborhood streets of an
evening without a single thought apparently other than pleasure. And
these young scamps and their girl friends who sped about in
automobiles. The loose, indifferent parents. The loose, free ways of
all these children. What was to become of such a nation? Were not
the daily newspapers, which he would scarcely tolerate in his home
longer, full of these wretched doings? The pictures of almost naked
women that filled them all! Jazz! Petting parties! High school boys
with flasks on their hips! Girls with skirts to their knees, rolled-down
stockings, rolled-down neck-bands, bare arms, bobbed hair, no
decent concealing underwear!
“What—a daughter of his grow up like that! Be permitted to join in
this prancing route to perdition! Never!” And in consequence, the
strictest of rules with regard to Ida’s upbringing. Her hair was to grow
its natural length, of course. Her lips and cheeks were never to know
the blush of false, suggestive paint. Plain dresses. Plain underwear
and stockings and shoes and hats. No crazy, idiotic finery, but
substantial, respectable clothing. Work at home and, when not
otherwise employed with her studies at school, in the small paint and
color store which her father owned in the immediate vicinity of their
home. And last, but not least, a schooling of such proper and definite
character as would serve to keep her mind from the innumerable
current follies which were apparently pulling at the foundations of
decent society.
For this purpose Zobel chose a private and somewhat religious
school conducted by an aged German spinster of the name of
Elizabeth Hohstauffer, who had succeeded after years and years of
teaching in impressing her merits as a mentor on perhaps as many
as a hundred German families of the area. No contact with the
careless and shameless public school here. And once the child had
been inducted into that, there followed a series of daily inquiries and
directions intended to guide her in the path she was to follow.
“Hurry! You have only ten minutes now in which to get to school.
There is no time to lose!”... “How comes it that you are five minutes
late to-night? What were you doing?”... “Your teacher made you
stay? You had to stop and look for a blank book?”... “Why didn’t you
come home first and let me look for it with you afterwards?” (It was
her stepmother talking.) “You know your father doesn’t want you to
stay after school.”... “And just what were you doing on Warren
Avenue between twelve and one to-day? Your father said you were
with some girl.”... “Vilma Balet? And who is Vilma Balet? Where does
she live? And how long has it been that you have been going with
her? Why is it that you have not mentioned her before? You know
what your father’s rule is. And now I shall have to tell him. He will be
angry. You must obey his rules. You are by no means old enough to
decide for yourself. You have heard him say that.”
Notwithstanding all this, Ida, though none too daring or aggressive
mentally, was being imaginatively drawn to the very gayeties and
pleasures that require courage and daring. She lived in a mental
world made up of the bright lights of Warren Avenue, of which she
caught an occasional glimpse. The numerous cars speeding by! The
movies and her favorite photographs of actors and actresses, some
of the mannerisms of whom the girls imitated at school. The voices,
the laughter of the boys and girls as they walked to and fro along the
commonplace thoroughfare with its street-cars and endless stores
side by side! And what triumphs or prospective joys they planned
and palavered over as they strolled along in their easy manner—
arms linked and bodies swaying—up the street and around the
corner and back into the main street again, gazing at their graceful
ankles and bodies in the mirrors and windows as they passed, or
casting shy glances at the boys.
But as for Ida—despite her budding sensitivity—at ten, eleven,
twelve, thirteen, fourteen—there was no escape from the severe
regimen she was compelled to follow. Breakfast at seven-thirty sharp
because the store had to be opened by her father at eight; luncheon
at twelve-thirty, on the dot to satisfy her father; dinner invariably at
six-thirty, because there were many things commercial and social
which fell upon the shoulders of William Zobel at night. And between
whiles, from four to six on weekdays and later from seven to ten at
night, as well as all day Saturdays, store duty in her father’s store.
No parties, no welcome home atmosphere for the friends of her
choice. Those she really liked were always picked to pieces by her
stepmother, and of course this somewhat influenced the opinion of
her father. It was common gossip of the neighborhood that her
parents were very strict and that they permitted her scarcely any
liberties. A trip to a movie, the choice of which was properly
supervised by her parents; an occasional ride in an automobile with
her parents, since by the time she had attained her fifteenth year he
had purchased one of the cheaper cars.
But all the time the rout of youthful life before her eyes. And in so
far as her home life and the emotional significance of her parents
were concerned, a sort of depressing grayness. For William Zobel,
with his gray-blue eyes gleaming behind gilt-rimmed glasses, was
scarcely the person to whom a girl of Ida’s temperament would be
drawn. Nor was her stepmother, with her long, narrow face, brown
eyes and black hair. Indeed, Zobel was a father who by the very
solemnity of his demeanor, as well as the soberness and
practicability of his thoughts and rules, was constantly evoking a
sense of dictatorship which was by no means conducive to
sympathetic approach. To be sure, there were greetings,
acknowledgments, respectful and careful explanations as to this, that
and the other. Occasionally they would go to a friend’s house or a
public restaurant, but there existed no understanding on the part of
either Zobel or his wife—he never having wanted a daughter of his
own and she not being particularly drawn to the child of another—of
the growing problems of adolescence that might be confronting her,
and hence none of that possible harmony and enlightenment which
might have endeared each to the other.
Instead, repression, and even fear at times, which in the course of
years took on an aspect of careful courtesy supplemented by
accurate obedience. But within herself a growing sense of her own
increasing charm, which, in her father’s eyes, if not in her
stepmother’s, seemed to be identified always with danger—either
present or prospective. Her very light and silky hair—light, grayish-
blue eyes—a rounded and intriguing figure which even the other girls
at Miss Hohstauffer’s school noticed and commented on. And in
addition a small straight nose and a full and yet small and almost
pouting mouth and rounded chin. Had she not a mirror and were
there not boys from her seventh year on who looked at her and
sought to attract her attention? Her father could see this as well as
his second wife. But she dared not loiter here and there as others
did, for those vigorous, bantering, seeking, intriguing contacts. She
must hurry home—to store or house duty or more study in such
fields as Zobel and his wife thought best for her. If it was to run
errands she was always timed to the minute.
And yet, in spite of all these precautions, the swift telegraphy of
eyes and blood. The haunting, seeking moods of youth, which
speaks a language of its own. In the drugstore at the corner of
Warren and Tracy, but a half-block from her home, there was at one
time in her twelfth year Lawrence Sullivan, a soda clerk. He seemed
to her the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. The dark, smooth
hair lying glossed and parted above a perfect white forehead; slim,
graceful hands—or so she thought—a care and smartness in the
matter of dress which even the clothing of the scores of public school
boys passing this way seemed scarcely to match. And such a way
where girls were concerned—so smiling and at his ease. And always
a word for them as they stopped in on their way home from school.
“Why, hello, Della! How’s Miss McGinnis to-day? I bet I know what
you’re going to have. I think pretty blonde girls must like chocolate
sundaes—they contrast with their complexions.” And then smiling
serenely while Miss McGinnis panted and smiled: “A lot you know
about what blonde girls like.”
And Ida Zobel, present on occasion by permission for a soda or a
sundae, looking on and listening most eagerly. Such a handsome
youth. All of sixteen. He would as yet pay no attention to so young a
girl as she, of course, but when she was older! Would she be as
pretty as this Miss McGinnis? Could she be as assured? How
wonderful to be attractive to such a youth! And what would he say to
her, if he said anything at all? And what would she say in return?
Many times she imitated these girls mentally and held imaginary
conversations with herself. Yes, despite this passive admiration, Mr.
Sullivan went the way of all soda-clerks, changing eventually to
another job in another neighborhood.
But in the course of time there were others who took her eye and
for a time held her mind—around whose differing charms she
erected fancies which had nothing to do with reality. One of these
was Merton Webster, the brisk, showy, vain and none too ambitious
son of a local state senator, who lived in the same block she did and
attended Watkins High School, which she was not permitted to
attend. So handsome was he—so debonair. “Hello, kid! Gee, you
look cute, all right. One of these days I’ll take you to a dance if you
want to go.” Yet, because of her years and the strict family
espionage, blushes, her head down, but a smile none the less.
And she was troubled by thoughts of him until Walter Stour, whose
father conducted a realty and insurance business only a little way
west of her father’s store, took her attention—a year later. Walter
was a tall, fair complexioned youth, with gay eyes and a big,
laughing mouth, who, occasionally with Merton Webster, Lawrence
Cross, a grocer’s son, Sven Volberg, the dry-cleaner’s son, and
some others, hung about the favorite moving-picture theatre or the
drugstore on the main corner and flirted with the girls as they passed
by. As restricted as she was still, because of her trips to and fro
between home and school and her service as a clerk in her father’s
store, she was not unfamiliar with these several figures or their
names. They came into the store occasionally and even commented
on her looks: “Oh, getting to be a pretty girl, isn’t she?” Whereupon
she would flush with excitement and nervously busy herself about
filling a customer’s order.
It was through Etelka Shomel, the daughter of a German neighbor
who was also a friend of William Zobel, that she learned much of
these boys and girls. Her father thought Etelka a safe character for
Ida to chum with, chiefly on account of her unattractiveness. But
through her, as well as their joint pilgrimages here and there, she
came to hear much gossip about the doings of these same. Walter
Stour, whom she now greatly admired, was going with a girl by the
name of Edna Strong, who was the daughter of a milk-dealer.
Stour’s father was not as stingy as some fathers. He had a good car
and occasionally let his son use it. Stour often took Edna and some
of her friends to boathouse resorts on the Little Shark River. A girl
friend of Etelka’s told her what a wonderful mimic and dancer he
was. She had been on a party with him. And, of course, Ida lent a
willing and eager ear to all this. Oh, the gayety of such a life! Its
wonders! Beauties!
And then one night, as Ida was coming around the corner to go to
her father’s store at about seven-thirty and Stour was on his favorite
corner with several other boys, he called: “I know who’s a sweet kid,
but her daddy won’t let her look at a guy. Will he?” This last aimed
directly at her as she passed, while she, knowing full well who was
meant and how true it was, hurried on all the faster. If her father had
heard that! Oh, my! But it thrilled her as she walked. “Sweet kid.”
“Sweet kid”—kept ringing in her ears.
And then at last, in her sixteenth year, Edward Hauptwanger
moved into a large house in Grey Street. His father, Jacob
Hauptwanger, was a well-to-do coal-dealer who had recently
purchased a yard on the Absecon. It was about this time that Ida
became keenly aware that her normal girlhood, with its so necessary
social contacts, was being set at naught and that she was being
completely frustrated by the stern and repressive attitude of her
father and stepmother. The wonder and pain, for instance, of spring
and summer evenings just then, when she would stand gazing at the
moon above her own commonplace home—shining down into the
narrow, commonplace garden at the back, where still were tulips,
hyacinths, honeysuckle and roses. And the stars shining above
Warren Avenue, where were the cars, the crowds, the moving-
picture theatres and restaurants which held such charm for her.
There was a kind of madness, an ache, in it all. Oh, for pleasure—
pleasure! To go, run, dance, play, kiss with some one—almost any
one, really, if he were only young and handsome. Was she going to
know no one—no one? And, worse, the young men of the
neighborhood calling to her as she passed: “Oh, look who’s here!
Shame her daddy won’t let her out.” “Why don’t you bob your hair,
Ida? You’d be cute.” Even though she was out of school now, she
was clerking as before and dressing as before. No short skirts,
bobbed hair, rolled-down stockings, rouge.
But with the arrival of this Edward Hauptwanger, there came a
change. For here was a youth of definite and drastic impulses—a
beau, a fighter, a fellow of infinite guile where girls of all sorts were
concerned—and, too, a youth of taste in the matter of dress and
manner—one who stood out as a kind of hero to the type of youthful
male companions with whom he chose to associate. Did he not live
in a really large, separate house on Grey Street? And were not his
father’s coal-pockets and trucks conspicuously labelled outstanding
features of the district? And, in addition, Hauptwanger, owing to the
foolish and doting favor of his mother (by no means shared by his
father), always supplied with pocket money sufficient to meet all
required expenditures of such a world as this. The shows to which
he could take his “flames”; the restaurants, downtown as well as
here. And the boat club on the Little Shark which at once became a
rendezvous of his. He had a canoe of his own, so it was said. He
was an expert swimmer and diver. He was allowed the use of his
father’s car and would often gather up his friends on a Saturday or
Sunday and go to the boat club.
More interesting still, after nearly a year’s residence here, in which
he had had time to establish himself socially after this fashion, he
had his first sight of Ida Zobel passing one evening from her home to
the store. Her youthful if repressed beauty was at its zenith. And
some remarks concerning her and her restricted life by youths who
had neither the skill nor the daring to invade it at once set him
thinking. She was beautiful, you bet! Hauptwanger, because of a
certain adventurous fighting strain in his blood, was at once intrigued
by the difficulties which thus so definitely set this girl apart. “These
old-fashioned, dictatorial Germans! And not a fellow in the
neighborhood to step up and do anything about it! Well, whaddya
know?”
And forthwith an intensive study of the situation as well as of the
sensitive, alluring Ida Zobel. And with the result that he was soon
finding himself irresistibly attracted to her. That pretty face! That
graceful, rounded figure! Those large, blue-gray, shy and evasive
eyes! Yet with yearning in them, too.
And in consequence various brazen parades past the very paint
store of Zobel, with the fair Ida within. And this despite the fact that
Zobel himself was there—morning, noon and night—bent over his
cash register or his books or doing up something for a customer. And
Ida, by reason of her repressed desires and sudden strong
consciousness of his interest in her as thus expressed, more and
more attracted to him. And he, because of this or his own interest,
coming to note the hours when she was most likely to be alone.
These were, as a rule, Wednesdays and Fridays, when because of a
singing society as well as a German social and commercial club her
father was absent from eight-thirty on. And although occasionally
assisted by her stepmother she was there alone on these nights.
And so a campaign which was to break the spell which held the
sleeping beauty. At first, however, only a smile in the direction of Ida
whenever he passed or she passed him, together with boasts to his
friends to the effect that he would “win that kid yet, wait and see.”
And then, one evening, in the absence of Zobel, a visit to the store.
She was behind the counter and between the business of waiting on
customers was dreaming as usual of the life outside. For during the
past few weeks she had become most sharply conscious of the
smiling interest of Hauptwanger. His straight, lithe body—his quick,
aggressive manner—his assertive, seeking eyes! Oh, my! Like the
others who had gone before him and who had attracted her
emotional interest, he was exactly of that fastidious, self-assured and
self-admiring type toward which one so shy as herself would yearn.
No hesitancy on his part. Even for this occasion he had scarcely
troubled to think of a story. What difference? Any old story would do.
He wanted to see some paints. They might be going to repaint the
house soon—and in the meantime he could engage her in
conversation, and if the “old man” came back, well, he would talk
paints to him.
And so, on this particularly warm and enticing night in May, he
walked briskly in, a new gray suit, light tan fedora hat and tan shoes
and tie completing an ensemble which won the admiration of the
neighborhood. “Oh, hello. Pretty tough to have to work inside on a
night like this, ain’t it?” (A most irresistible smile going with this.) “I
want to see some paints—the colors of ’em, I mean. The old man is
thinking of repainting the house.”
And at once Ida, excited and flushing to the roots of her hair,
turning to look for a color card—as much to conceal her flushing face
as anything else. And yet intrigued as much as she was affrighted.
The daring of him! Suppose her father should return—or her
stepmother enter? Still, wasn’t he as much of a customer as any one
else—although she well knew by his manner that it was not paint
that had brought him. For over the way, as she herself could and did
see, were three of his admiring companions ranged in a row to watch
him, the while he leaned genially and familiarly against the counter
and continued: “Gee, I’ve seen you often enough, going back and
forth between your school and this store and your home. I’ve been
around here nearly a year now, but I’ve never seen you around much
with the rest of the girls. Too bad! Otherwise we mighta met. I’ve met
all the rest of ’em so far,” and at the same time by troubling to touch
his tie he managed to bring into action one hand on which was an
opal ring, his wrist smartly framed in a striped pink cuff. “I heard your
father wouldn’t even let you go to Warren High. Pretty strict, eh?”
And he beamed into the blue-gray eyes of the budding girl before
him, noted the rounded pink cheeks, the full mouth, the silky hair, the
while she trembled and thrilled.
“Yes, he is pretty strict.”
“Still, you can’t just go nowhere all the time, can you?” And by now
the color card, taken into his own hand, was lying flat on the counter.
“You gotta have a little fun once in a while, eh? If I’da thought you’da
stood for it, I’da introduced myself before this. My father has the big
coal-dock down here on the river. He knows your father, I’m sure. I
gotta car, or at least my dad has, and that’s as good as mine. Do you
think your father’d letcha take a run out in the country some
Saturday or Sunday—down to Little Shark River, say, or Peck’s
Beach? Lots of the fellows and girls from around here go down
there.”
By now it was obvious that Hauptwanger was achieving a
conquest of sorts and his companions over the way were
abandoning their advantageous position, no longer hopefully
interested by the possibility of defeat. But the nervous Ida, intrigued
though terrified, was thinking how wonderful it was to at last interest
so handsome a youth as this. Even though her father might not
approve, still might not all that be overcome by such a gallant as
this? But her hair was not bobbed, her skirts not short, her lips not
rouged. Could it really be that he was attracted by her physical
charms? His dark brown and yet hard and eager eyes—his
handsome hands. The smart way in which he dressed. She was
becoming conscious of her severely plain blue dress with white
trimmings, her unmodish slippers and stockings. At the same time
she found herself most definitely replying: “Oh, now, I couldn’t ever
do anything like that, you know. You see, my father doesn’t know
you. He wouldn’t let me go with any one he doesn’t know or to whom
I haven’t been properly introduced. You know how it is.”
“Well, couldn’t I introduce myself then? My father knows your
father, I’m sure. I could just tell him that I want to call on you, couldn’t
I? I’m not afraid of him, and there’s sure no harm in that, is there?”
“Well, that might be all right, only he’s very strict—and he might
not want me to go, anyhow.”
“Oh, pshaw! But you would like to go, wouldn’t you? Or to a picture
show? He couldn’t kick against that, could he?”
He looked her in the eye, smiling, and in doing so drew the lids of
his own eyes together in a sensuous, intriguing way which he had
found effective with others. And in the budding Ida were born
impulses of which she had no consciousness and over which she
had no control. She merely looked at him weakly. The wonder of
him! The beauty of love! Her desire toward him! And so finding heart
to say: “No, maybe not. I don’t know. You see I’ve never had a beau
yet.”
She looked at him in such a way as to convince him of his
conquest. “Easy! A cinch!” was his thought. “Nothing to it at all.” He
would see Zobel and get his permission or meet her clandestinely.
Gee, a father like that had no right to keep his daughter from having
any fun at all. These narrow, hard-boiled German parents—they
ought to be shown—awakened—made to come to life.
And so, within two days brazenly presenting himself to Zobel in his
store in order to test whether he could not induce him to accept him
as presumably at least a candidate for his daughter’s favor.
Supposing the affair did not prove as appealing as he thought, he
could drop the contact, couldn’t he? Hadn’t he dropped others?
Zobel knew of his father, of course. And while listening to
Hauptwanger’s brisk and confident explanation he was quite
consciously evaluating the smart suit, new tan shoes and gathering,
all in all, a favorable impression.
“You say you spoke to her already?”
“I asked her if I might call on her, yes, sir.”
“Uh-uh! When was this?”
“Just two days ago. In the evening here.”
“Uh-uh!”
At the same time a certain nervous, critical attitude toward
everything, which had produced many fine lines about the eyes and
above the nose of Mr. Zobel, again taking hold of him: “Well, well—
this is something I will have to talk over with my daughter. I must see
about this. I am very careful of my daughter and who she goes with,
you know.” Nevertheless, he was thinking of the many coal trucks
delivering coal in the neighborhood, the German name of this youth
and his probable German and hence conservative upbringing. “I will
let you know about it later. You come in some other time.”
And so later a conference with his daughter, resulting finally in the
conclusion that it might be advisable for her to have at least one
male contact. For she was sixteen years old and up to the present
time he had been pretty strict with her. Perhaps she was over the
worst period. At any rate, most other girls of her age were permitted
to go out some. At least one beau of the right kind might be
essential, and somehow he liked this youth who had approached him
in this frank, fearless manner.
And so, for the time being, a call permitted once or twice a week,
with Hauptwanger from the first dreaming most daring and
aggressive dreams. And after a time, having conducted himself most
circumspectly, it followed that an evening at one of the neighborhood
picture houses was suggested and achieved. And once this was
accomplished it became a regularity for him to spend either
Wednesday or Friday evening with Ida, it depending on her work in
the store. Later, his courage and skill never deserting him, a
suggestion to Mr. Zobel that he permit Ida to go out with him on a
Saturday afternoon to visit Peck’s Beach nine miles below the city,
on the Little Shark. It was very nice there, and a popular Saturday
and Sunday resort for most of the residents of this area. After a time,
having by degrees gained the complete confidence of Zobel, he was
granted permission to take Ida to one or another of the theatres
downtown, or to a restaurant, or to the house of a boy friend who
had a sister and who lived in the next block.
Despite his stern, infiltrating supervision, Zobel could not prevent
the progressive familiarities based on youth, desire, romance. For
with Edward Hauptwanger, to contact was to intrigue and eventually
demand and compel. And so by degrees hand pressures, stolen or
enforced kisses. Yet, none the less, Ida, still fully dominated by the
mood and conviction of her father, persisting in a nervous
evasiveness which was all too trying to her lover.
“Ah, you don’t know my father. No, I couldn’t do that. No, I can’t
stay out so late. Oh, no—I wouldn’t dare go there—I wouldn’t dare
to. I don’t know what he would do to me.”
This, or such as this, to all of his overtures which hinted at later
hours, a trip to that mysterious and fascinating boat club on the Little
Shark twenty-five miles out, where, as he so glibly explained, were to
be enjoyed dancing, swimming, boating, music, feasting. But as Ida
who had never done any of these things soon discovered for herself,
this would require an unheard-of period of time—from noon until
midnight—or later Saturday, whereas her father had fixed the hour of
eleven-thirty for her return to the parental roof.
“Ah, don’t you want to have any fun at all? Gee! He don’t want you
to do a thing and you let him get away with it. Look at all the other
girls and fellows around here. There’s not one that’s as scary as you
are. Besides, what harm is there? Supposing we don’t get back on
time? Couldn’t we say the car broke down? He couldn’t say anything
to that. Besides, no one punches a time clock any more.” But Ida
nervous and still resisting, and Hauptwanger, because of this very
resistance, determined to win her to his mood and to outwit her
father at the same time.
And then the lure of summer nights—Corybantic—dithyrambic—
with kisses, kisses, kisses—under the shadow of the trees in King
Lake Park, or in one of the little boats of its lake which nosed the
roots of those same trees on the shore. And with the sensitive and
sensual, and yet restricted and inexperienced Ida, growing more and
more lost in the spell which youth, summer, love, had generated. The
beauty of the face of this, her grand cavalier! His clothes, his brisk,
athletic energy and daring! And with him perpetually twittering of this
and that, here and there, that if she only truly loved him and had the
nerve, what wouldn’t they do? All the pleasures of the world before
them, really. And then at last, on this same lake—with her lying in his
arms—himself attempting familiarities which scarcely seemed
possible in her dreams before this, and which caused her to jump up
and demand to be put ashore, the while he merely laughed.
“Oh, what had he done that was so terrible? Say, did she really
care for him? Didn’t she? Then, why so uppish? Why cry? Oh, gee,
this was a scream, this was. Oh, all right, if that was the way she
was going to feel about it.” And once ashore, walking briskly off in
the gayest and most self-sufficient manner while she, alone and
tortured by her sudden ejection from paradise, slipped home and into
her room, there to bury her face in her pillow and to whisper to it and
herself of the danger—almost the horror—that had befallen her. Yet
in her eyes and mind the while the perfect Hauptwanger. And in her
heart his face, hands, hair. His daring. His kisses. And so brooding
even here and now as to the wisdom of her course—her anger—and
in a dreary and hopeless mood even, dragging herself to her father’s
store the next day, merely to wait and dream that he was not as evil
as he had seemed—that he could not have seriously contemplated
the familiarities that he had attempted; that he had been merely
obsessed, bewitched, as she herself had been.
Oh, love, love! Edward! Edward! Edward! Oh, he would not, could
not remain away. She must see him—give him a chance to explain.
She must make him understand that it was not want of love but fear
of life—her father, everything, everybody—that kept her so sensitive,
aloof, remote.
And Hauptwanger himself, for all of his bravado and craft, now
nervous lest he had been too hasty. For, after all, what a beauty! The
lure! He couldn’t let her go this way. It was a little too delicious and
wonderful to have her so infatuated—and with a little more attention,
who knew? And so conspicuously placing himself where she must
pass on her way home in the evening, at the corner of Warren and
High—yet with no sign on his part of seeing her. And Ida, with
yearning and white-faced misery, seeing him as she passed.
Monday night! Tuesday night! And worse, to see him pass the store
early Wednesday evening without so much as turning his head. And
then the next day a note handed the negro errand boy of her father’s
store to be given to him later, about seven, at the corner where he
would most surely be.
And then later, with the same Edward taking it most casually and
grandly and reading it. So she had been compelled to write him, had
she? Oh, these dames! Yet with a definite thrill from the contents for
all of that, for it read: “Oh, Edward, darling, you can’t be so cruel to
me. How can you? I love you so. You didn’t mean what you said. Tell
me you didn’t. I didn’t. Oh, please come to the house at eight. I want
to see you.”
And Edward Hauptwanger, quite triumphant now, saying to the
messenger before four cronies who knew of his present pursuit of
Ida: “Oh, that’s all right. Just tell her I’ll be over after a while.” And
then as eight o’clock neared, ambling off in the direction of the Zobel
home. And as he left one of his companions remarking: “Say,
whaddya know? He’s got that Zobel girl on the run now. She’s writing
him notes now. Didn’t ya see the coon bring it up? Don’t it beat hell?”
And the others as enviously, amazedly and contemptuously
inquiring: “Whaddya know?”
And so, under June trees in King Lake Park, once more another
conference. “Oh, darling, how could you treat me so, how could you?
Oh, my dear, dear darling.” And he replying—“Oh, sure, sure, it was
all right, only what do you think I’m made of? Say, have a heart, I’m
human, ain’t I? I’ve got some feelings same as anybody else. Ain’t I
crazy about you and ain’t you crazy about me? Well, then—besides
—well, say....” A long pharisaical and deluding argument as one
might guess, with all the miseries and difficulties of restrained and
evaded desire most artfully suggested—yet with no harm meant, of
course. Oh, no.
But again, on her part, the old foolish, terrorized love plea. And the
firm assurance on his part that if anything went wrong—why, of
course. But why worry about that now? Gee, she was the only girl he
knew who worried about anything like that. And finally a rendezvous
at Little Shark River, with his father’s car as the conveyance. And
later others and others. And she—because of her weak, fearsome
yielding in the first instance—and then her terrorized contemplation
of possible consequences in the second—clinging to him in all too
eager and hence cloying fashion. She was his now—all his. Oh, he
would never, never desert her, now, would he?

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Wisdom in Classical and Biblical

Tradition Michael C. Legaspi

by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate

Unless otherwise indicated, scriptural quotations are from the New

You must not circulate this work in any other form

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

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Finally, I would like to thank my family. I am grateful to my parents, Luciano and

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Wisdom in the Western intellectual tradition contains two elements. It includes

In other works, however, one observes a rather different orientation. One

According to Hazony, the polarities that we use to organize the foundational

against a synthetic understanding of ancient schools of thought.14 Whereas

(p.8) By speaking of early Christianity and stoicism as rival traditions in this

As cogent as Rowe’s criticism is on this score, matters become more difficult

another. It is also what enables Rowe, a Christian, to write insightfully and

ordered to a holistic, authoritative account of reality in its metaphysical, cosmic,

Chapter 5 begins with a concise summary of wisdom as presented in the writings

Classical and biblical authors attempted to coordinate wisdom’s four realms of

wrongheaded, I maintain that the distinctive and incommensurable forms of life

The durable, synthetic character of wisdom as something that belongs, in

the range of materials necessary to a study of this sort cannot be determined by

intellectual-historical examination of wisdom—one that is backgrounded by the

(2.) Ibid., 90.

(3.) Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of

(4.) Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture, 6.

(7.) Dariusz Karłowicz, Socrates and Other Saints: Early Christian

(8.) Ibid., 13, 58.

(9.) Yoram Hazony, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge

(11.) Ibid., 70.

(12.) Ibid., 218.

(13.) Ibid., 220, 225–227.

(15.) Ibid., 175.

(18.) Rowe, One True Life, 184.

(22.) Rowe, One True Life, 205.

(25.) Preface to De orthographia, cited in Prickett, Modernity and the

(27.) Rowe, One True Life, 244.

(29.) See Will Kynes, “The Nineteenth-Century Beginnings of ‘Wisdom

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If it seems inappropriate to address such questions to a primitive bard, then it

we may note the ultimate emergence, in both cases, of a bifurcated corpus, a

The Will of Zeus

skill or physical ability necessary to do a particular thing.6 Trojan horses, (p.21)

This similarity, however, must not be allowed either to annul important

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus

“shackles” (1.396–404). The episode to which Achilles alludes here is connected

Bend your head and promise me to accomplish this thing,

It belongs to Zeus to decide the matter. If he decides to “bend his head” in

(p.26) Knowledge and Character

(p.29) Knowledge plays a rather different role in the case of Agamemnon.

This is the word the Achaians have spoken often against me

But it succeeds, on another, in characterizing the human situation. The failure to

The characterization of Patroklos’s inexplicable loss of nerve as the work of atē

understood, therefore, as the feeling of remorse one experiences when one

Wisdom and Suffering

An important question in the Odyssey is how to understand the many pains,

The rest of you, who are my eager companions, wait here,

Intellectual curiosity might seem to be a natural accompaniment to this sort of

The goal, then, is not to arrive at knowledge but to exploit changing

much grief in silence, standing and facing men in their violence

I NTO a singularly restricted and indifferent environment Ida Zobel

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