On the Iliad by Rachel Bespaloff

I picked this book up at a used book store.  Professor Bespaloff is typical of the wise academics of the mid to late 20^th century.  As usual I find myself in disagreement on many points presented in the work, notably her slavish devotion to the accepted “titans” of 20^th century “scholarship”. 

When writers use words I do not know I am challenged:

1.      First I am forced to question the extent of my own knowledge.

2.      I am inspired to explore – to learn the new words and the insights they give.

3.      However, I often find myself questioning the motives of the author; did he just use that “that word” to show off?  Did he just use that word to show off, is he searching for the careful nuance that demands specifics.

Below is a list of words that gave me pause.  The first four are from the introduction, the rest from the body of the book by Bespaloff.

Syntactical - of, relating to, or according to the rules of syntax

Existentialism/existentialists -is a 20^th Century philosophical movement that views human existence as having a set of underlying themes and characteristics, such as anxiety, dread, freedom, awareness of death, and consciousness of existing. Existentialism is also an outlook, or a perspective, on life that pursues the question of the meaning of life or the meaning of existence. It is this question that is seen of paramount importance, above both scientific and other philosophical pursuits.

Hypertrophic - excessive growth or accumulation of any kind.

Fecund - intellectually productive or inventive to a marked degree fecund imagination>

Obdurate – unmoved by persuasion, pity, or tender feelings; stubborn; unyielding.

Consubstantial – Of the same substance, nature, or essence.

Insouciance – lack of care or concern; indifference.

Plaint – An utterance of grief or sorrow; a lamentation.

Vicissitudes – the quality or state of being changeable : mutability.

Impalpable – incapable of being felt by touch : intangible

Parcae – In ancient Roman religion and myth, the Parcae (singular, Parca) were the female personifications, often called the Fates in English.

Disabused – to free from a falsehood or misconception.

Demiurge – a Platonic subordinate deity who fashions the sensible world in the light of eternal ideas.

Fatum – the god of destiny; originally the word 'fatum' meant 'the word of god' and in Greek religion it came to include the divinities of destiny, e.g., the Moirae, Parcae, and Sibyls; near the rostra in Rome stood statues of the Fata, the three Sibyls.

Plaint – An utterance of grief or sorrow; a lamentation.

Pathos – an element in experience or in artistic representation evoking pity or compassion.

Ethos – The moral element in dramatic literature that determines a character's action rather than his or her thought or emotion.

Immanent – Naturally part of something; existing throughout and within something; inherent; integral; intrinsic; indwelling.

Eudaimonism – The good composed of all goods; an ability which suffices for living well; perfection in respect of virtue; resources sufficient for a living creature.

Acerbity – sourness, with roughness or astringency of taste; harshness or severity, as of temper or expression.

I do not agree with many of the quotes that follow, others appear to be insightful.  I present them here to be considered and as a source of contrasts to my own ideas concerning The Iliad.  I cannot resist occasionally commenting, and have done so in brackets and italics. [example]

Quotes:

1. Art Defined:  “But although the artist’s problem seems to be mainly technical, his real imp0ulse goes beyond this—it goes to universe; and the true piece of art, even though it be the shortest lyric, must always embrace  the totality of the world, must be the mirror of that universe, but one of full counterweight.”  p. 12 (intro.)

2. Art, myth, and mathematics: “And this explains the connection—at first surprising to us—between myth and mathematics.  For every real approach of man to the universe can be called a presentiment of the infinite.  Without this, not mathematics, nor myth, nor art, nor any other form of cognition would exist.”  p. 14 (intro)

3. Myth is the archetype of all thought:  “Myth is the archetype of every phenomenal cognition of which the human mind is capable.  Archetype of all human cognition, archetype of science, archetype of art—myth is consequently the archetype of philosophy too.”  pp. 15-16 (intro)

4. When Myth becomes religion:  “Myth becomes religion when the mythical model of the universe, hitherto merely cognate or expressed in certain visible forms (of art, etc.) passes into the act of man, coloring his entire behavior, influencing his daily life.” p. 16 (intro)

5. On the Gods:  “Indeed, Homer’s humanization of the gods goes a step farther.  It is true that they are not stripped of their abstract, mythical character; what they were they remain—mere names of the gigantic forces they represent, forces which keep in motion the model of the world and the struggle of man.” pp. 18-19 (intro)

6. Homer’s Greeks already an ancient people:  “But the “Saffron Gatherer” of the eighteenth century B.S. already indicates the free naturalistic culture of a ripening age, characterized by the liberation of human personality, and the following period is that of the luxurious palace of Knossos, contemporaneous with the romantic mysticism of Ikhnaton’s Egypt.” p. 24 (intro)

7. On Hector as Hero:  Hector, “man and among men a prince,” is subject to apocalyptic mood of his time and, therefore, affectionately recognizes the peaceful achievements of the civilization for which he is ready to fight and to die.  P. 25 (intro)

8. On Homer and the existence of Homer:  “Whether Homer existed or not, he is described as a very old man, blind as Milton, blind as Bach, blind as Fate; the style of old age in all its greatness, coolness, and abstract transparency is so obvious in his work that people had necessarily to conceive him in this form.  He himself became myth, and since behind almost every myth stands some historical reality, we ought not to ask whether he existed or not, but should simply accept him as the mythical old man, the eternal paradigm of an epoch which demands the rebirth of myth.”  p. 26 (intro)

9. On the recognition of true Art:  “Thus it is only natural that there came to be a mood of deep distaste for this kind of art [Iliad], and even for art at all.  This distaste is felt neither by the general public which, though sometimes bored, consumes what it is served, nor is it felt by the pseudo-artist who accepts success as a proof of his quality, but it is felt by the few genuine artists, and by those who know that art which does not render the totality of the world of art.  If art can or may exist further, it has to set itself the task or striving for the essential of becoming a counterbalance to the hypertrophic calamity of the world.  And imposing such a task on the arts, this epoch of disintegration imposes on them the style of old age, the style of the essential, the style of the abstract.  pp. 27-28 (intro)

10. Man and the individual in the “modern world”:  “Man as such is our time’s problem; the problems of men are fading away and are even forbidden, morally forbidden.  The personal problem of the individual has become a subject of laughter for the gods, and they are right in their lack of pity.  The individual is reduced to nothing, but humanity can stand against the gods and even against Fate.”  pp. 31-32 (intro)

11. Concluding BUNK – Homer, Jesus, and Hitler; the problem of relativism:  “Hitler thought to establish the new myth by forbidding the personal problems of men to exist.  But his was pseudo-myth, for the real myth lives in the problem of human existence, the problem of man as such.  However, if God has to exist, the devil eventually has to serve Him , and it is just the Nazi terror which may still ripen humanity for the ethical theogony [reference to the poems of Hesiod] in which the new myth will receive its being: if this happens, Fate again will be humanized, and presumably it will be not only human, as was Homer’s Force, but also humane, in so far as it is in accord with Europe’s Christian tradition  homer’s Force was to have been supplanted by Jehovah’s justice, Jehovah’s justice by Christ’s love, “Through cruelty force confesses its powerlessness to achieve omnipotence.”” P. 32 (intro)

12. Hector described:   “In the crowd of mediocrities that are Priam’s sons, he stands alone, a prince, born to rule.  Neither superman, nor demigod nor godlike, he is a man and among men a prince.  He is at ease in a kind of unstudied nobility that permits neither pride in respect to the self nor humbleness in respect to the gods.  Loaded as he is with favors, he has much to lose; and there is something in him that sets him above the favors, the natural endowments—his passion for defying destiny.”  p. 39

13. Power of Andromache’s plea:  “It is on Andromache’s account, more than on his people’s, his father’s, his brothers’, that the thought of the future tortures him.  The very image of the brutal fate that awaits her makes him wish for death. . . The pain of this leave-taking does not modify his decision which has already been made. “  p. 40

14. The final flight and fight between Achilles and Hector – example of Bespaloff’s miss-reading of The Iliad:  “. . . Hector feels weakness seize him; when he catches sight of his leaping adversary, he is no longer master of his terror.  Time after time he [Hector] has turned the tide of battle, he has taken the measure of Ajax and the very bravest of the Achaians; yet now he, the dauntless, “leaves and takes to flight.”  Homer wanted him to be a whole man and spared him neither the quaking of terror nor the shame of cowardice.  “Ahead flees a brave man, but braver still is he who pursues him at top speed.”  . . . he turns and faces his enemy, having first mastered himself.  [Actually Justice, Athena, had to trick him into combat once Apollo had deserted him.]  “I no longer wish to flee you [he lies], son of Peleus. . . . It is over. . . . I will have you or you will have me.”  What he fled from, what he now confronts, is not the gigantic Achilles,” but his own destiny [Justice]; he meets the appointed hour when he will be sent to pasture in Hades.  At least he will not die without a struggle, and not without glory.  Dying, he begs Achilles for a last time not to give his body to the dogs.  And for a last time his conqueror, drunk with cruelty, [NO!!! impelled to do justice at the cost of his own life.], is obdurate [unyielding] to his plea.”  p. 42

15. On Justice and the deaths of Hector and Achilles:  “Hector has to pay for Patroclus’ inglorious death, just as Achilles, later on, will pay for the death of Hector.   [Wrong – Hector was a murderer; he killed an unarmed prisoner of war who was wounded, helpless, and naked.  Achilles, on the other hand, gave himself a sacrifice on the Alter of Justice.”  To compare Hector’s death to Achilles is like comparing Hitler’s to Paton’s – it approaches the obscene.] p. 43

16. The Iliad as tragedy – not a romance: “Who is good in the Iliad?  Who is bad?  Such distinctions do not exist; there are only men suffering, warriors fighting, some winning, some losing.”  p. 48

17. Some thoughts on Thetis:  “Zeus, after all, outraged the goddess in her by delivering her to Peleus, whose bitter old age weighs heavy on her immortal youth.  She does not forget the injury, and she remains much less the wife of Peleus that the Sea’s daughter and Achilles’ mother.”  p. 54

18. On the return of Hector’s body:  “And in the end, it is to Thetis that Zeus turns to get this madman to come to his senses and restore Hector’s remains to Priam.  On this mission, she is al tenderness and consolation.  “She sits down beside him and caresses him with her hand and speaks to him, calling him by all his names.”  Achilles submits to the gods’ command, conveyed to him by his mother: the untamable is tamed; in obedience he finds for a moment the serenity that is always eluding him.”  [Bunk – the decision was Achilles, he was not lulled into some mood by the caresses of his mother but chose to act in accordance with Justice, and in obedience to the Natural Law that is the gods.]  p. 55

19. On the love of Achilles for Patroclus:  “For Achilles, self is at the center of love.  What he adores in Patroclus is his own reflection, purified—in Thetis, the sacred origin of his line.  [More obscene bunk – If all Achilles loves in himself why would he give away his life and future happiness to obtain Justice?]  p. 56

20. On Achilles’ motivation:  “Destiny, he knows, can “carry him off to death,” by two quite different routes.  He has chosen the steep road that ends on the edge of the abyss.  He will sacrifice home-coming, reunion with his father and his son, for the pleasure of massacring the Trojans, avenging Patroclus, and watching bot friends and foes quake at the sight of him.”  [Bunk, Bunk, BUNK – This is the greatest show of Professor Bespaloff’s ignorance and bias.  Achilles did not sacrifice all he and his mother worked so hard to provide him with, the love of his grandchildren, for the rubbish Bespaloff opines.  He, as Socrates explained in his apology, sacrificed his life for Justice.  To condemn Achilles for making war on Hector brings dishonor on any hero who gives his life for a just cause.  Every soldier who died to defeat the Nazis of turn back the monsters of Marxism is thus disrespected. ]  p. 57

21. On Helen:   “Of all the figures in the poem she is the severest, the most austere.  Shrouded in her long white veils, Helen walks across the Iliad like a penitent; misfortune and beauty are consummated in her and lend majesty to her step.  For this royal recluse freedom does not exist; the very slave who numbers the days of oppression on some calendar of hope is freer than she.  What has Helen to hope for?  Nothing short of the death of the Immortals would restore her freedom, since it is the gods, not her fellow men, who have dared to put her in bondage,  Her fate does not depend on the outcome of the war: Paris or Menelaus may get her, but for her nothing can really change.  She is the prisoner of the passions her beauty excited, and her passivity is, so to speak, their underside.”  [I will let Euripides’ tragedy, The Trojan Women, speak for me on this.  Hecuba explains to the scheming Helen, that her” lust became her Cyprus.”]  p. 61

22. Aphrodite, Cyprus, rules Helen:  “Aphrodite rules her despotically; the goddess commands and Helen bows, whatever her private repugnance.”  [See my comment in 21 above.]  p. 62

23. How Homer presents beauty:  “Homer carefully abstains from the description of beauty as though this might constitute a forbidden anticipation of bliss.  The shade of Helen’s eyes, of Thetis’ tresses, the line of Andromache’s shoulders—these details are kept from us.  No singularity, no particularity is bought tour notice; yet we see these women; we would recognize them.  One wonders by what impalpable means Homer manages to give us such a sense of the plastic reality of his characters.”  p. 67

24. Priam blames the gods for his own failings – this is his excuse and Bespaloff’s opinion of it:  Here—and this is unusual—the poet himself, speaking through Priam, lifts his voice to exonerate beauty and proclaim it innocent of man’s misfortune.  “I do not blame you.  I blame the gods, who launched this Achaian war, full of tears, upon me.”  The real culprits, and the only ones, are the gods, who lie “exempt from car,” while men are consumed with sorrow.  The curse which turns beauty into destructive fatality does not originate in the human heart. The diffused guilt of Becoming pools into a single sin, the one sin condemned and explicitly stigmatized by Homer: the happy carelessness of the Immortals.”  p. 68

25. All war is the war for Helen:  “Meanwhile Helen stands helplessly watching the men who are going to do battle for her.  She is there still, since nations that brave each other for markets, for raw materials, rich lands, and their treasures, are fighting, first and forever, for Helen.”   p. 69

26. More blaming of the gods while praising heroes:  “Everything that happens has been caused by them [gods], but they take no responsibility, whereas the epic heroes take total responsibility even for that which they have not caused.”  p. 74

27. On the goddesses and the judgment of Paris:  “But here, again, truth to human experience somehow moves this marital farce to a plane of more substantial reality.  There is Hera with her big stupid eyes, her obstinacy more brutish than evil, and the real genius she shows while subjecting Zeus to a successful “war of nerves,” from which she always comes off with the honors.  There is Aphrodite, all smiles and shims, enchanting and futile in her weakness, yet not so defenseless as she seems.  There is Pallas Athena, a warrior with a man’s muscles, expert and treacherous, who can send Ares rolling to the ground with the force of a single blow, who knows how to harbor a grudge and let rancor steep within her until her revenge is brewed.  These are the three goddesses involved in the judgment of Paris, and each in her own way reveals the other side of the eternal feminine whose tragic purity is embodied in Andromache, Helen, and Thetis.”  p. 76

28. Homer portrays war as it is:  “Homer and Tolstoy have in common a virile love of war and a virile horror of it.  They are neither pacifist nor bellicist [one who advocates war]. They have no illusions about war and they present it as it really is, in its continual oscillation between boisterous animal spirits that break out in spurts of aggressiveness and the detachment of sacrifice in which the return to the One is consummated.”  p. 83

29. The death of a soldier:  “He tumbled, as an oak tree tumbles, or a poplar, or a slender pine tree that carpenters with freshly ground axes lay low on a mountain top to make a ship’s keel.  Even so he lies, measuring his length on the earth, before his horses and chariot, moaning and clawing the bloody dust.”  p. 84 (Homer’s own words)

30. What we fight for:  “In the same way, during the perilous attack on the wall that protects the Achaian ships, Hector, as he reassembles the Trojans and the Allies for the assault, weighs the force that each individual has in reserve for the defense of his “goods”: an earth and a sky, loved ones, things long cherished that have dissolved into the very substance of life.  “One omen is best, to fight for one’s country,” he tells Polydamas.   . . . The necessity imposed on the individual by the threat of slavery or annihilation forces him to endure these truths, but it does not dissolve his personality in the anonymous mass; it denudes him but at the same time it exalts him.”  pp. 86-87

31. The power of Priam’s plea:  “In insisting on his right to pity, the vanquished is not bowing down to destiny in the person of the mane he is entreating.  The unheard-of ordeal he inflicts on himself, equal to the love that sustains him, has nothing base about it”  p. 98

32. Miss-statement of Achilles nature:  The perfect conformity of his [Achilles] nature to his vocation of destroyer makes him the least freeperson there is; but it give him in return a bodily freedom which is in itself a magnificent spectacle.”  [The truth is that Achilles is the most free man on the field, he alone choses for himself his fate.]  pp. 99-100

33. Miss-statement of Achilles choice:  “The glory he has chosen in preference to a long life is the immortality of omnipotence not the immortality of the soul.”  [Achilles chose to go home and live in peace – he only goes to war to answer the crimes of Hector, to fight for justice, to defend the self-evident truth].  p. 105

34. Reason and Myth (Faith): When reason can go no further, he [Plato] lets myth take over”  p. 116

35. A claim that law is man-made – BUNK:  “Law is an altogether human work, a fragile bridge more durable, however, than it looks, as the swell of the passions sweep it without submerging it.  IF it falls to pierces, the great lawmaker is there, ready to do it over and perfect it.  He is working on the foundations of the just city, trying to make them solid.  The harshness of Creon is as alien to him as Antigone’s intransigence; he negotiates with life, knowing it suppleness and inflexibility.  He tries to blend it to the commandment of justice, and justice to the commandment of necessity.  He deals in compromise, to be sure, but hold compromise between two colliding absolutes.  [What a relativist rant – an unreasonable claim.  Two truths cannot contradict each other.] p. 122

36. Solon and Athenian Justice:  “She [the Earth] will bear witness well for me before the seat of Justice, grandmother of the Olympian gods, black Earth whose boundaries I have just now lifted, planted on all sides, a slave formerly and now free. . . I have written laws that are the same for the miscreant and for the upright man, ordering for all a very straight justice.”  pp. 124-125

37. More relativist equivocation on Truth and Justice:  “But what could be more Greek, more essentially Athenian, than this solidarity of justice and joy on the earth set free by free men?  Transcendent justice and justice immanent in life do not always coincide; the lawmaker’s takes is to reduce the interval that separates them to a minimum.  pp. 125-126

38. Christianity the synthesis between Judaism and Hellenism:  Christianity effected a tremendous synthesis between messianic religion and the mystic philosophies that were prevalent in Greece at a time when the distance between Judaism and Hellenism was most considerable.”  p. 126

 I disagree with much of what I read and hear – it is a man’s duty.  I read this book with growing skepticism.  The attempt to impose the Bible into the Iliad was troubling and the constant relativist point of view disconcerting. I believe gave me much food for thought and plenty of points to rail against when I finally get around to writing my book, Re-righting Achilles.

 

Plato - Second Alcibiades

Second Alcibiades:  A discussion on weather men know what is really good or not.  On the nature of actions directed by truth.

1. The Best Prayer Ever:   “King Zeus, whether we pray or not, give us what is good for us                                                                 What is not good for us, give us not, however hard we pray for it.”

2. It is best to know what is best:  “SOCRATES: So what we want is the person who knows one or other of these things [any how-to knowledge such as how to fight or how to give advice] but also has the knowledge of what is best—which no doubt is the same as knowledge of utility. . . So if someone does what he knows, or thinks he knows, and has in addition knowledge of utility, we will judge him a boon both to the state and to himself?”

ALCIBIADES:  Absolutely.”   pp. 604-605

3. “Knowing things “wrong”:  “SOCRATES: There is a verse which fits his case, where the poet complains of someone that “he knew a lot of things but knew them all wrong.”  P. 605

4. On Homer:  “SOCRATES: For you don’t think that Homer, the divinest and wisest of poets—for it is he who says that Margites knew a lot of things but knew them all wrong—didn’t know that it was impossible to know a thing wrong.”  pp. 605-606

5. How the Spartans pray:  “SOCRATES: They [the Spartans] pray the gods to give them first what is good and then what is noble; no one ever hears them asking anything more.”  p. 606

6. God gets to answer our prayers as He sees fit (Thy will be done):  “SOCRATES: Whether we are given what we pray for or the reverse is in the lap of the gods.”  p. 606

7. Homer tells us the Gods are not for sale:  “SOCRATES: In Homer you will find other similar stories.  He tells how the Trojans, when they pitched camp, “sacrificed to the immortals perfect hecatombs [an ancient Greek and Roman sacrifice of 100 oxen or cattle].  And how: The winds carried the delicious smell from the plain up to heaven.  But the blessed gods took none of it, and had no pleasure in it; So deep was their hatred of holy Ilium, and Priam, And the people of Priam of the ashen spear.

. . . For I don’t imagine that it is like the gods to be swayed by gifts, like some low moneylender; we make ourselves sound very silly when we boast that we do better than the Spartans on this score.”   p. 607

8. That which is of value to Gods and men of sound mind:  “SOCRATES: Gods and men of sound mind are more likely to hold justice and wisdom in especial honor; and none are wise and just but those who know how to behave and speak to gods and men.”  

Vocabulary:

Euphemisms - the substitution of a mild, indirect, or vague expression for one thought to be offensive, harsh, or blunt.

Polymath - a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas.

A Criticism of Harlod Bloom's Literary Criticism

A criticism of Harold Bloom’s literary criticism, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found:

This past summer, a Scout Leader gave me a copy of Harold Bloom’s Where Shall Wisdom Be Found.  I am reading it cover to cover, but I can’t wait to “put in my two bits worth” on his chapter 2, “The Greeks: Plato’s Contest with Homer.”

I checked out the Harold Bloom.   Very impressive.  A Professor at Yale with 20+ books published and engaged in arguments with a lot of people.   The quote from the "New York Times Book Review" on the back cover of my 2005 paperback edition of Where Shall Wisdom Be Found ends: “. . . the best thing about Harold Bloom is that he would be disappointed if we did not resist.”  Well, I don’t want to disappoint him. 

I will not challenge his other chapters; which continue comparing and contrasting “great” writers of history.  But Ancient Greece and Rome are my special interest, Plato my “task at hand” [I am reading  Plato, Complete Works cover to cover.], and Homer my passion.  In this small corner of Professor Bloom’s opinionating, I will resist.

I will begin by taking exception with Bloom’s claim that the Torah is older that the Iliad.  Perhaps the scribes that final put down the first five books and “many later insertions during the Babylonian exile” did their work before “Homer lived and died.” p33, but Bloom’s error is to assume that the epics these hard to identify and date transcribers of oral tradition contrived predate the oral version of the Iliad.  There is little doubt that the story of Achilles had its first telling sometime shortly after, perhaps even during, the Trojan War in the 1200’s BC, a time at which the Children of Israel were wandering and dying in the wilderness. 

Some things about Bloom’s book annoy me that don’t directly relate to his critique of Homer and Plato. 

1. Bloom’s use of BCE rather than BC in his book is a painful example of a political agenda superseding scholarship. 

2. He capitalizes the word God when referring to the Hebrew version but not the Greek. 

3. He invents a female identity as the writer of several books in the Old Testament even though no one knows what captive Hebrew set down these oral traditions in the libraries of Babylon.  The most plausible explanation for Bloom’s biased assumption that is was a woman is the undeniable fact that all the other authors considered throughout his book are men.  

I am annoyed at Bloom’s habit of cherry picking material from Homer and Plato to further his agenda; completely abandoning context that would negate his positions.

1. Bloom claims that Plato is somehow at odds with Homer even though he admits that, “Plato is so subtle an ironist that we cannot know when the prince [Hamlet or, in other words, Shakespeare] and the philosopher [Plato] speak what they mean, or quite mean what is said.”  Pg. 32 The problem I have is that Bloom, time and time again, claims he knows exactly what Plato means.

2. Although Bloom will contradict himself later in his book where he references other dialogues of Plato that celebrate Homer, in this section – obsessively on Plato’s relationship with Homer – Bloom almost exclusively references The Republic.  The Republic is not all of Plato or of Socrates. 

3. Although the Chapter is titled “Plato’s conflict with Homer”, Bloom drags in other contenders in his phony war.  He turns to Shakespeare in an attack on Greek Drama, claiming that, “only Shakespeare has men and women who are both comic and tragic” and he asserts that “in Athens there was no such playwright.”  p. 40.  This is a perfect example of how Blooms personal agenda overwhelms the truth.  I often observe this in teachers and professors who have read about things and had classes on things but have no firsthand knowledge in the things they present to their students.  As a big fan of Sophocles Antigone, I take exception to Bloom’s diminishing of Greek drama – to which Shakespeare was heir.  What of the “common man” in Sophocles’ tragic masterpiece?  A wonderful comedian!  And this is only the most obvious contradiction to Blooms assertion. 

Bloom claims that Socrates wants to, “exile Homer and Hesiod” from his life.  p. 41  Bloom can only declare this by the pickiest cherry picking of bits of the Republic.  The truth is that Socrates quotes Homer all the time, and finds in Achilles the inspiration for the sacrifice of his own life in service to his fellow citizens of Athens.    Here I quote at length from The Apology:

“Some will say: And are you not ashamed, Socrates, of a course of life which is likely to bring you to an untimely end? To him I may fairly answer: There you are mistaken: a man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong – acting the part of a good man or of a bad. Whereas, upon your view, the heroes who fell at Troy were not good for much, and the son of Thetis [Achilles] above all, who altogether despised danger in comparison with disgrace; and when he was so eager to slay Hector, his goddess mother said to him, that if he avenged his companion Patroclus, and slew Hector, he would die himself – ‘Fate,’ she said, in these or the like words, ‘waits for you next after Hector’; he, receiving this warning, utterly despised danger and death, and instead of fearing them, feared rather to live in dishonor and not to avenge his friend. ‘Let me die forthwith,’ he replies, ‘and be avenged of my enemy, rather than abide here by the beaked ships, a laughing-stock and a burden of the earth.’ Had Achilles any thought of death and danger? For wherever a man’s place is, whether the place which he has chosen or that in which he has been placed by a commander, there he ought to remain in the hour of danger; he should not think of death or of anything but of disgrace. And this, O men of Athens, is a true saying.

Strange, indeed, would be my conduct, O men of Athens, if I who, when I was ordered by the generals whom you chose to command me at Potidaea and Amphipolis and Delium, remained where they placed me, like any other man, facing death – if now, when, as I conceive and imagine, God orders me to fulfill the philosopher’s mission of searching into myself and other men, I were to desert my post through fear of death, or any other fear; that would indeed be strange, and I might justly be arraigned in court for denying the existence of the gods, if I disobeyed the oracle because I was afraid of death, fancying that I was wise when I was not wise."

Bloom claims that Socrates, like Hamlet, lacks love.   “Rather dazzlingly, Vlastos [a scholar of ancient philosophy, and author of several works on Plato and Socrates.] indicts Socrates for a failure to love, which startles me [Bloom] into the analogy of Hamlet’s lack of love for everyone, himself included.” p. 41  Here Bloom and Vlastos are really stretching. Consider, as just evidenced above, that  Socrates so loved the men of Athens that he laid down his life for them, his friends.  And even Bloom should admit that Hamlet loved his father.

Bloom’s machinations on Homer and Plato are dominated by a pervasive misunderstanding held by modern monotheists: the seemingly intentional misapprehension held by Jews, Christians, and Muslims concerning Religions that predates their theology.  The comprehension of the immutable powers of the universe, which is the foundation of the Greek pantheon, is an elegant, reasonable, and human way of attempting to comprehend deity.  There are powers everywhere evident that are beyond man’s comprehension and power, indeed they dominate and control him.  Consider the majesty of a mighty storm, the awesome power of a great beast, the force of an earth quake.  The sea and the sky fill us with wonder.  Our souls are conquered, often against our will, by love and hate.  We recognize justice and beauty and understand that we have no power over them; we cannot even determine what they are; just recognize and adore.

In this chapter on the Greeks, examples of Bloom’s misapprehension of the “Gods” of ancient Greece are everywhere evident:

1. Bloom quotes Andrew Ford’s  [a scholar of ancient philosophy, and author of several works on Plato and Socrates.], The Origin of Criticism which, in turn, quotes Xenophon‘s criticism of the epics.   “Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods every kind of behavior that among men is the object of reproach: stealing, adultery, and cheating each other.” p. 35  Here is my resistance.  Men are driven to excesses and saved from them by forces outside themselves.  Why should it matter whether these powers are called lust and wisdom or Aphrodite and Athena.  It is odd enough to find Xenophon chastising the behavior of all of the Greek Gods, but it is silly for Ford, and hence Bloom, to do so in light of the malfeasance of the Hebrew God which Bloom’s Torah and Ford’s Bible reveal as far more delinquent.  Not only is He, by His own admission, angry and jealous but consider how He: 1) drowned the entire population of the earth save one family and a boat load of paired animals, 2) dumped fire and brimstone on the children of Sodom and Gomorrah, and 3) slaughters the first born of every creature in Egypt after a dust up with the “God Pharaoh”.  In a more universal sense: if the existence of evil is the will of God then He too must be a God of stealing, adultery, and cheating.  That He is a killer, no one can deny. 

2.  Bloom presents a Plato in contention with Homer where “Plato’s Socrates wants the gods to be devoid of personality: free of lust, fury, envy, and everything else that interests us in Homer’s Zeus, much of the time.”  p. 44 This is a very narrow reading of Plato.  I recall how Socrates, upon hearing the report of Apollo’s pronouncement that there ‘is no man wiser than Socrates’, accepts it as a challenge from Zeus to a debate, which Socrates inevitably loses, with God himself.  This is hardly the act of a Deity devoid of personality, rather one looking for an argument and eager to give His “child” a chance to learn.  The Aphrodites presented in the Symposium seem a ruckus pair, and even if presented in jest, the passions they portray are hardly devoid of personality.

3. Bloom diminishes the Ancient Gods through an assertion he quotes from a modern American translator of ancient Greek texts   “As Richmond Lattimore observes, Homer’s Olympians are primarily immortal men and women, no better than the rest of us, and only rarely are they paradigms of wisdom.”  P. 46  Not only does this contradict Bloom’s (or Xenophon’s or Ford’s noted in 1 above) claims about the lack of personality of the Greek Deities, it make one wonder which of Homer's writings Lattimore has been translating.  When Zeus weighs the sin sodden soul of His beloved Hector, finds it wanting and mournfully sends forth justice (the Goddess Athena) to enforce morality, He is both wise and transcendent.

4. Bloom’s miss-underestimation of the Greek Gods is nowhere more evident than in his misunderstanding of Athena:  “There are no neutral gods in Homer, where Athena supports the Greeks against the Trojans.”  Justice cannot be neutral – it never is in the face of wrong.  The Trojan cause is unjust.  They support the abduction of Helen in the face of the oaths of the Achaean kings, and when offered terms, the Trojans launch a war as a means to world domination.  Hector is a murder of the worst kind.  He has killed a wounded and unarmed solider in the very act of surrender.  The American justice system would never disregard such perfidy in a warrior even though the perpetrator was in his countries service.   Yet Bloom condemns the “slow grinding wheel of Justice” and the Gods’ lack of neutrality.  I say, thank God!

5. Bloom goes so far as to claim that Plato misunderstands the Goddess Athena.  Quote: “Though she personifies Athens, she wins no approval form Plato. The patroness of Achilles is not what Plato means by a spiritual path to the achievement of wisdom.  In the Republic, Homer is indicted, together with Hesiod and other poets. For composing false stories about the gods warring and plotting against one another, thus destroying Olympian religion.” p. 55 Here we have Bloom’s bias not Plato’s wisdom speaking.  His Plato is out of context.  After all, are not the immutable forces of the universe, the Gods themselves, constantly in opposition?  Gravity and centrifugal force balance the heavens; anger and love temper the hearts of men. 

6. Bloom’s claim that the Gods of the Iliad are not participating in the action is not only stupid; it is contradicted by his own charge against their lack of neutrality discussed above, and by the Iliad itself.  Within ten pages of telling us that Homer’s Gods take sides, Bloom claims, “The Olympians at best are an audience looking at human beings as so many victims playing roles upon a great stage of fools.  W. K. C. Guthrie [Scottish author of six volumes on the history of Greek philosophy], in his The Greeks and Their Gods (1950), emphasizes the authority of Homer for the Greeks, so that “a great deal in later Greek religion is only a development of Homeric ideas.”  One of Guthrie’s sentences haunts me, since it makes clear the strong differences between Homeric and Hebraic religion, and also between Homer and Plato: “What made the gods approach our level was an element of human nature in them, not a hint of the divine in us” (page 120).” ”  pp. 67-68  First, one must remember that the only time the Gods of Homer’s epic are off the battle field, thus appearing  neutral, is when Zeus has ordered their withdrawal.  When this prohibition, symbolic I believe of the loss of direction and motivation suffered by all armies slogging through long conflict, is lifted, they rush back onto the field.  It is not until Apollo is forced to abandon Hector that the Trojan can face justice, not until Hermes bears Zeus's decree to Achilles that the body of Hector can be restored.  If Homer recognized more keenly the link between men and Gods than Bloom or Guthrie, it is not Homer or the Ancient Gods that should be discounted. 

7. Bloom puts forward the God of the exiled Jews as a model of how a God should act.  “Yahweh is the source of the blessing, and Yahweh, thought frequently enigmatic in J, is never an indifferent onlooker.  [He does seem rather indifferent to non-Hebrew humans.] No Hebrew writer could conceive of a Yahweh who is essentially an audience, whether indifferent or engrossed.  Homer’s gods are human—all too human—particularly in their abominable capacity to observe suffering almost as a kind of sport.  The Yahweh of Amos and the prophets after him could not be further from Homer’s Olympian Zeus.”  pp. 77-78  Bloom’s argument is not based on the actual content of the Iliad.  Once again, that the fate of Hector, Achilles, the Trojans, and the Achaeans is the will of Zeus and in the hands of the Gods is obvious to anyone who reads the Iliad without prejudice.  Bloom’s problem is he is a Judeo-Christian centric bigot, who projects his opinion of what God is, a concocted bias rarely challenged in his college classes I am sure, onto all the Gods he encounters in literature.  I have already cited examples of Yahweh’s abominable capacity to observe suffering.  Or did He “hide His face” when opening the fountains of the deep or dumping fire on cities full of innocent children as punishment for the sins of their fathers.   I wonder what Yahweh was thinking as His priests propped up Moses's arms so Israel’s armies could continue thrashing their foes.  There is also the time where He stopped the movement of the heavens so the Israelites could continue slaughtering the armies of the nations they were dispossessing of their homeland.   

Indeed, Bloom is obsessed by the bogus canard that the western ideal is based on some kind of Judeo-Christian ethic:

1. Bloom cuts up the human soul into chunks that can be manipulated by this or that philosophy.  “And yet our cognition—science and technology, as well as philosophy—is Greek, as is our aesthetic, though not altogether.  Religion and morality, despite the long tradition of Christian Platonism, will remain Hebraic-Christian-Islamic, though perhaps increasingly Platonized.”  pp. 50-51  The truth is that Christianity is different from Old Testament Judaism because of the influence of the Greeks.  The New Testament was written in Greek, by Greek thinkers.  Islam is a hodgepodge creed and, like Bloom’s search for wisdom, driven by an antithesis to classical religion based on misinunderstandings.  It is odd to think that cognition has any origin other than humanness and all humans recognize beauty.

2. Bloom claims that, “We have no ways of thinking that are not Greek and yet our morality and religion—outer and inner—find their ultimate source in the Hebrew Bible.” p. 72  The human way of thinking is reason, the divine power shared by Gods and men.  As for morality, what is Bloom talking about?  What source and what morality?  Where in the west of today do the uniquely biblical commandments dominant?  Does the Constitution of any enlightened Western nation forbid the crafting of images, prohibit giving reverence to Gods other than Yahweh, sensor the abuse of any God's name, or insist on the veneration of Saturday?  Just a quick aside – Saturday is named after a Classical Roman God.  Is Western Morality, human morality, based on a God who favors one person and his decedents over all the rest of mankind?  What morality is based on the God of Abraham who systematically engineers the extermination of seven nations of the Amorites to free up land for His chosen people?  What kind of morality is this?  I prefer a God "whose temple is the whole universe” as Cicero says, and who also, as again pointed out by Cicero, shares His Divine reason with all mankind.  Before I am chastened for reference a Roman rather than a Greek, I will explain that Cicero was a devotee of Homer and Plato; had very little, if anything at all, to do with Hebrew wisdom; and lived and died before there was a single Christian or Muslim born.

3. Bloom is also determined that the God of the Babylonian Captives is somehow superior in majesty to the Gods of the Iliad.  “When Yahweh roars, in the prophets Isaiah and Joel, the effect is very different, [than Athena’s shout in support of Achilles], though He too cries out “like a man of war.”  The difference is in Homer’s magnificent antiphony [hymn] between man and goddess, Achilles and Athena.  Isaiah would not have had the king [David] and Yahweh exchanging battle shouts in mutual support, because of the shocking incommensurateness [not proportionate or on the same level as] that does not apply to Achilles and Athena. ” pp. 80-81 It is incongruent to compare David, a son of Jessie, with Achilles who is a son of a goddess.  A better fit would be to match him with Jesus.  That Bloom diminishes the effect of divine parentage, if the "divine" is a female, is rather chauvinistic.   Achilles does have reportage with Justice on the battle field, even as Jesus speaks poetry in his garden prayer, after which God sends angles to comfort His son.  And as Jesus cries out on the cross the whole world trembles in answer.  Were Bloom to retreat into the defense that he is only speaking of the “God” of a few books put down in Babylon would only diminish them and weaken his argument.  Is the God that debates with Satin and reasons with Moses any more incommensurate to man that the Mind of Zeus, which is Athena, Wisdom and Justice?

Finally, what is most disagreeable in Bloom’s chapter on Homer is his complete misrepresentation of Achilles, the archetypical western hero whose example is the foundation of western culture and the shield of freedom.

Once more, in Bloom, I find a “scholar” who has misread, his Homer.  He speaks of “Achilles’ unwisdom.”  p. 43  I believe that no one is wiser than Achilles, who chooses life and grandchildren as his fate and then gives these up to preserve Justice.  Achilles was the motivation of Socrates's wisdom, as Socrates tells us in his own words in his Apology to the 501 citizens who would decide his mortal fate. 

1. Bloom’s Achilles is a complete fabrication. “What did Plato make of Homer’s Achilles, who destroys men as part of a private war against death itself, even as a child might mangle an already wounded kitten?”  p. 45 Or again: “Achilles is a killing machine because he desires a god’s immortality. . . “ p. 61  How silly these claims seem in the light of the fact that Achilles choice was not fame or immortality.  He choose to pass back to the Father Land he loves and disappear into the love of his grandchildren, and then sacrifices this dream to fight for Justice.

2. Bloom, goes on to demonstrates that  Achilles is a concoction to his miscomprehension.  He says, “Xenophon’s Socrates has most of the Homeric virtues: he is the best of the Greeks, whether in war or in argument, and is a match for Achilles in honor and for Odysseus in precise propriety when encountering difficult occasions.”  P. 61 Why would Xenophon and Bloom match to Socrates a monomaniacal killer of kittens, as he, a few pages earlier, described Achilles.

3. One wonders where Bloom gets the Achilles he describes as he compares Achilles to David.  “But Achilles, sulking in his tent, is palpably a child, with a wavering vision of himself—inevitable, since his vitality, his perception, and his affective life are all divided form one another as Bruno Snell [German Classical Psychologist] demonstrated." p. 75  Anyone who has actually read the Iliad knows that Achilles is in his tent as an act of civil disobedience against the unjust rule of the tyrant Agamemnon.  Achilles knows exactly what he is up to.  He is awaiting Agamemnon’s request for him to rejoin the battle so he can refuse and sail home safe to Grandchildren yet unborn.  Lucius Junius Brutus (Founder of the Roman Republic), George Washington, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King would approve.   The David whom Bloom describes as: “David, even as a child, is a mature and autonomous ego, with his sense of life, his vision of other selves, and his emotional nature all integrated into a new kind of man, the hero whom Yahweh had decided not only to love but also to make immortal through his descendants, who would never lose Yahweh’s favor.” p. 75 This David is also a fabrication, yanked out of context. 

The Biblical David was the murdering wife thief, who had sex with many women, and murdered his king, his best friend, and his son. It was Achilles, not David, who, like Jesus, sacrificed himself for the good of all mankind. 

4. Bloom claims that, “Jesus . . . can only be the descendant of David, and not of Achilles.  Or to put it most simply, Achilles is the son of a goddess, but David is a Son of God.” p. 75 The chauvinism and folly of Bloom is in black and white.  It is indeed Achilles who is the type, if not the ancestor, of Jesus.

5.  Bloom claims that “In Homer, you fight to be the best, to take away the women of the enemy, and to survive as long as possible, short of aging into ignoble decrepitude.  That is not why you fight in the Hebrew Bible.  There you fight the wars of Yahweh . . .” p. 78 And what is the Biblical motivation of the wars of Yahweh?  The God of Battles, who drowns the armies of Pharaoh, commands the conquest of Canaan, the genocide of the Amorites, the slaughter of the Philistines.  The God of Abraham launched a Jihad that continues to this day; giving, through concocted misrepresentation, motivation to all sides in the wars of the 21^st century. Saul lost his throne for refusing to kill prisoners of war whose blood was demanded by Yahweh.  Achilles gave his life to avenge just such a murder.  It is this justice that the Old Testament never comprehends but that Homer makes the central theme of his creation. 

6. Bloom does not understand the role of Justice in the Iliad, but he presents it, “Exalted and burning with Athena’s divine fire, the unarmed Achilles is more terrible even that the armed hero would be.  It is his angry shouts that panic the Trojans, yet the answering shout of the goddess adds to their panic, since they realize that they face preternatural powers.”  pp. 80-81 Achilles does speak for justice, he, not David, sings the song of God.  

Bloom’s passion for resistance finds a voice when he quotes Shelly.  Shelly has probably actually read the Iliad and clearly understands Homer better than Bloom.

 “Homer receives accurate tribute: The poems of Homer and his contemporaries were the delight of infant Greece; they were the elements of that social system which is the column upon which all succeeding civilization has repose.  Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verse were awakened to an ambition of becoming like Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses: the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to their depths in these immortal creations: the sentiments of the auditors must have been refined and enlarged by a sympathy with such great and lovely impersonations, until from admiring they imitated, and from imitation they identified themselves with the object of their admiration. Nor let it be objected, that these characters are remote from moral perfection, and that they are by no means to be considered as edifying patterns for general imitation.” P. 63

I agree.

Bloom treats his readers the way many professors and teachers treat their classes.  Saying anything they want and then telling their student what they meant by saying it.  Such lectures and such writing have value only when challenged.  I am grateful that Bloom has given us this opportunity.