Hello everyone. I'm Keith DeStone and
this is
the first Office Hour session of v14
of HeroesX, andIi'm here as always
such a pleasure with Greg Nagy and Sarah
and Janet and Hélène.
i can't wait for all of our
conversations here
and i'll just jump right in the Hour 1
discussion question.
It is... and it was written by Greg... "In the
story of Herakles
as retold by Agamemnon it seems as if
life is unfair to this hero
and certainly the goddess Hera was
unfair to him
but this unfairness makes him a hero.  Why?"
It seems like such a simple question.
I know, and 
i still don't have a unified answer,
probably never will.
But whatever
answers we struggle with
can be organized answers.
That's the beauty of Greek mythology
which is the special way of speaking
about
heroes and their relationships with
gods.
I know the discussion forums have been
particularly active
in this v14 this version of HeroesX
so yeah Sarah, Janet, Hélène,  what
questions and comments can you channel
for us
from the discussion forum? Yeah indeed
lots of comments
and questions. So one of them,  is is it
fair
to question whether any man
can be a greek hero without a god behind
him
working for him and with him?
Well I don't have
a simple answer for that, and I should
I should offer one 
friendly amendment, that it's not just he
and him,
it's also she and her,
and for that matter the divinity
can be either male or female
and the divinity doesn't have to match
in gender
the gender of the 
of of the hero.
The word "behind"
that's tricky too isn't it? Yeah I was
thinking about that word and "with."
And "with." As we...
go ahead.  Maybe we could add other
prepositions there.
Yes. Since this is Hour 1 I know
that
the three characteristics of a hero are
relevant here
as you lay them out, Greg, with Achilles
and Herakles as examples.
Yes. One of them is this
relationship
of antagonism, though, with a god. Yes,
but in the same breath you can say
antagonism
with the god or goddess
but at the same time there can be—
I use that biologists' term—
symbiosis. 
There can be antagonism in, shall we say
one dimension,
and and then cooperation,
may I say even condominium,
in other ways.
So i think that's a great way of
thinking about it that this participant
is on to, to pay close attention to
the
relationship between the god or goddess
and the hero
or heroine. Yes.
that's always very very interesting: to
me it's maybe the most interesting facet
of hero— cult hero— stories.
And we're going to see so many
variations on that,
so I hope that participants
are steeling themselves for
lots and lots and lots of varieties of
human experience
with  the superhuman. Notice I didn't
say supernatural because that's another
problem we have
with ancient greek song culture in
general or
myth making in general, which is that
unlike what we see in English where
supernatural
applies to 
the world beyond our human world, that's
not going to work
for Ancient Greek ways of thinking,
in the sense that the gods and goddesses can be very
natural.
In fact they can embody nature, so
why say supernatural?
Superhuman I can understand. Yes.
There is another comment about the hero
being an
exception. How do you see the
relationship
between being an exception and
being unseasonal? Ah, yes, well
exception to what?  Again
I see so many open-ended
problems, and that's good for for this
course.
It doesn't mean that 
answers will be arbitrary, because
answers can easily be organized
by way of the organization that the myth
presents us. But when it comes to this
wonderful question about exceptionality
or
exceptionalism— I know that that second
way of saying things is maybe
overly politicized these days—
I just have to keep coming back to
a counter question: exception to what?
Is it exception to our everyday
expectations? Is it an exception
to the way other characters who belong
to
the category of heroes are?
Or the way they behave?
I love the question but
I think it requires another
question.
Well, one of the participants is thinking
about this in terms of
kleos, and perhaps, you know, the idea of
scripting your own death,
giving Herakles as an example, as well
as
thinking about the
free will or, as our participants
been discussing,
the agency that heroes
claim or
you know enable in themselves— so
connecting those concepts.
Yes, well 
I could see that the way you're
channeling our wonderful participant
is getting us possibly into trouble when
when we start thinking about
free will
which which our our mentality today
is...
our mentalities today... I 
could be very worried about, as opposed
to
as opposed to fate, destiny.
And then the question is, who decides
what happens to you?
Is it your decision, and then
the consequences of your decision or set
of decisions, or is it
something that is decided by
the gods. And I love to play with the
fact that
um
especially German classicists — I'll
translate
the way they would say it— 
will talk about double determination
in in the sense that we have to worry
about the will of the gods
and the will of humans and how those
two sets of desires
or plannings 
interact. And
you can't really separate the two from
each other
in in the narratives
we're going to be seeing. Do you like the
word
"narratives," dear participants? I
have to say say it that way because if I
say
myths some of you may start thinking: ah,
it's stories that are not true.
And in fact the English word story the
way we use it
is oftentimes
going in that direction isn't it? That "oh,
it's a story
it's just a story." And then
the word "myth," oh my goodness we have
even more trouble with that
in in the medium
that we're studying, and especially
in the medium of epic as represented by
the Homeric Iliad
and Odyssey it's fair to say that
mūthos, which is the word that gives us
the word myth, is
cosmic truth.
It certainly gets destabilized
even in the history of Greek thinking
as as we go forward in time from the
most ancient to the less ancient,
and certainly for somebody like Plato in
the fourth century [BCE] myth
is unstable. But
in Homeric ways of
looking at things, that is to say in the
Iliad and the Odyssey,
mūthos, which i don't even want to
translate as
myth, is cosmic truth.
Do you like do you like the way i use
the word "cosmic?"
It's a way for me to make
all of us more comfortable as speakers
of the English language
with divine will versus
free will. Free will would be
our human will if you think of it in
terms of the cosmos rather than
personalize it too much:
oh, it's a specific god
or goddess who wants something to happen.
And our comfort level increases
just a little bit, don't you think?
Well you were talking about... we've
been talking about the
interaction with with the cosmic
forces as
exemplified by the gods— perhaps we can
put it that way—
and again in terms of the kleos,
 we're thinking, we've talked, and
looked at the kleos that the hero gets,
but the gods
are interwoven in the narratives as well
so
you know, to what extent does the kleos
also belong to the god?
Yes. Oh, totally. I think that insight is  something we
should really hold on to
as as we keep
coming across one problem after
another.
After all this medium is interested in
the human condition.
It's not just interested: it's 
deeply invested in the human condition.
And so questions have to keep coming
thick and fast. May i share with the
participants already now
as something that i learned only in the
last few years
and as the result of dialogues like this—
dialogues that I'm having with you
four wonderful people directly and I
hope
indirectly with all the participants
with their beautiful questions that we
are
that we're grappling with here— and that
is
that in the age
in the age of myth, in the era,
even if it's about cosmic truth
that doesn't mean that
what happens is 100 percent moral.
And what we're going to have to start to
expect
is that even gods, that is to say
male and female divinities,
have their moments of moral
lapses.
But that was then in the era of
myth. In in the here and now—
and let's pretend the here and now is ... 
what would you like dear friends? ...
5th century [BCE] where we have a lot of
information about
how Homeric poetry was performed for the
body politic.
I don't hear any objections, so let's
just start with the 5th century BCE.
Back then
people had a very
comfortable feeling about 
the order, the orderliness,
of the way we think about the gods in
the present.
And Greg's word for this will be the
world of ritual.
And we can we can spend a lot of time in
meetings to come
trying to define ritual or at least give
a working
definition of ritual. But let's take
ritual as
how we think about the gods and heroes
in our own present, and again just for
the sake of the argument
let's start with the 5th century BCE
because we know a lot about
what people were like then, and so they
had a pretty good feeling about the gods
and how they are. They— the
divinities— are guarantors of the cosmos,
of the social order,
and everything is okay in the here and
now.
But in the there and then [of epic] even
gods were dysfunctional, not just us
humans— well, we humans back then
were of course larger than life and
we used to be heroes when we were humans
back in the world of myth. And
and in the 5th century you and
I are not heroes any more; we're just
ordinary people. Sometimes
extraordinary people who can trace
themselves back to heroes
20 generations ago— Spartan kings can do
that; most of us
even then couldn't do it.
So circling back to my point
is: don't expect the world of myth
to be morally functional all the time.
It's a zone where
where morality is tested over and over
and over again.
And that's what disturbs us as well as
reassures us when we think about
that dysfunctional past in terms of the
present,
where everything's okay... everything's
okay when it comes to the cosmos,
not necessarily human behavior.
Yeah, that's a very important point. That was an earful, but
it in my old age I comfort myself
thinking of how dysfunctional the world
of myth can be. 
i used to think, oh why am Ieven
in this area of study where
in myth so many horrific things happen
that do
and really must repel us
in our own moral sensibilities,
such as they are. Yeah, heroes aren't
always who we want them to be
Oh, no no. No, no. I'll leave it at
that.
We'll leave it at that for now! Good
person to
think of when we think of larger than
life
both good and bad. I'm sorry, Keith, I
interrupted you.
No, it's okay: I'm just going to go to the
Hour 2 Discussion Question here.
Okay, it goes like this:  "In Scroll 1
of the Homeric Iliad
at the very beginning of the narration
the master narrator
invokes a goddess who is a muse in the
ancient world. This muse was generally
understood to be Calliope.
This Calliope, myth has it, was mother of
Orpheus,
a singer who was thought to predate
Homer.
"hy do you think that the master
narrator of the Iliad invokes this one
muse in Scroll 1
and not the many muses who are invoked
later in Scroll 2?
In shaping your answer to this question,
consider the heroic world that is
narrated by Homer,
who is generally understood to be the
master narrator of the Iliad."
One muse versus many muses.Yes, my
goodness.
And so many answers to this
as well ... so
can you wonderful 
people talking with me now
channel some of the reactions?
Yeah there was one question: "does the
singularity of the muse
express the uniqueness of the Iliad's
main character Achilles?"
Oh i like it. And
maybe not just the uniqueness of
Achilles but the uniqueness of the Iliad
as distinct from other
epic traditions. After all
there would have been hundreds, thousands,
of
different epic traditions and
eventually streamlining it in the course
of Greek
history into two dominant ones.
But but having said that
I agree with the participant that
 if you're going to say that the Iliad
is unique,
then what makes it unique is the way
Achilles,
the number one hero of the Iliad, is
unique.
So I can have it both ways I think!
So there have also been some discussions—  and I'm
distilling some of the
discussion from several participants— 
they're picking up on
the idea of the ancestry Calliope has
as
an ancestor of the narrator and
of the hero; they're also bringing in
analogies between
Herakles being a model hero for Achilles
and Orpheus as a model singer for Homer, 
or the Homeric tradition we might say.
Oh, I love it.
That is so perceptive.
I confess 30 years ago
I would have winced at the idea that
Orpheus— say it this way— precedes Homer.
But certainly a a great intellectual
like
Plato in the 4th century before our era
understands that— the common
understanding
is— that
first there was Orpheus, then there was
Musaeus, 
then there was Hesiod, and then there
was Homer. So Homer is only the fourth
of
the greatest assembly of poets that you
can imagine.
So, yeah, I just love the symmetry
that our participant is sketching.
But in the world of classics,
professional classicists I'd say 30 years
ago
would have said, "Nah, Orpheus is
just an invention
and then a retrojection, and that
only Homer is really ancient, and Orpheus
is
not ancient."  And actually 
Herodotus, the so-called father of
history,
in the 5th century [BCE] would have said
that too, not just
not just later thinkers
like Aristotle in the 4th century [BCE], the
student of Plato.
But Plato, even though goodness knows
what he
really thought about Orpheus, but he's
perfectly
happy to
remind us of a very old tradition, and
he has Socrates himself staged
to say this: that first there was Orpheus
then Musaeus, then Hesiod, and then
Homer.
Whatever Plato himself personally
thought
that's certainly something he
he has Socrates saying in traditionalist
contexts.
It's not as if we can build an exact
lineage or genealogy and
that inspiration is coming through in
different forms perhaps in
at slightly different periods, or
evolving in different ways,
shaping themselves, so they're all
notionally
ancestors. Yes, I couldn't agree more.
Yes I think that would be
a lovely way to think about 
it.  And
one other thing about Calliope is that
she, Calliope, is
the muse of kings, so
there's also this flavor
of— shall we say...
how shall i put it?
— sort of royalty-centered ways of looking
at the universe,
and then a more diluted, not necessarily
royalist, way of looking at the universe.
And notice how I shifted it from "royal"
to
"royalist," and I have to be careful how I
use that word, but
definitely Calliope herself
is a kingly muse
whenever we see her singled out as a
muse.
Following on that, one participant
said if it wasn't Calliope, which
other muse would take her place?
Well,  if you look
at the mosaic that i have here— 
you can barely see it—
there it is: 
there's a muse called Tháleia, or
Thalia we would pronounce it today, who's
the muse of comedy and
pastoral. Well, no wouldn't be that! 
But I'm just saying I have a
mosaic,
or had a reproduction of a mosaic, of
Tháleiia because i love pastoral and i
love comedy, but
no, it wouldn't be that.
Oh... okay, you know
you could have
you could try other muses.
In our group I sometimes
refer to Sarah and Hélène
and Janet as the three muses. Why am I
saying three muses? Because
there are some locales in ancient Greece
where there weren't
nine but three, and you three
happen to be three.
And I don't know what what that makes
Keith, but anyway, 
so
maybe that's as far as I can go! But
anyway,
when it's only three muses,
I love their names—
because we're told what their names were
by
a traveler called Pausanias (more on him
later),
who lived in the 2nd century CE—
and their names are: are you ready?
here goes: Mnēmē, Meletē,
Aoidē, that is to say
Memory, Practice
and Song. By "song" what is obviously meant
is execution of
what you remember and what you practice,
and that is song, so in a sense the third
muse
is an omnium gatherum of the first two
plus the idea of performance.
Now, and I haven't really answered
the question have I? 
But maybe I would like to say, I don't
know, 
how about Mnēmē as a perfectly good
name for a muse that you can invoke
when you're beginning
an epic performance
Yeah, especially after that when you go
into the Catalog of Ships you need all
the memory 
you have! Yes,  and then it's
almost
when you see the Catalogue of Ships it's
the master narrator says, oh this is this
is so intimidating: how can I possibly do
this,
it's physically impossible to 
say something about everybody
who went to Troy; how about I just
restrict myself to
the leaders.
That makes the memory a little easier,
and the performance a little easier.
But it still demoralizes us,
especially new participants. May I just
say this word of
encouragement, which is that when you,
dear participants, if you're
doing  the Iliad for the first time—
did I hear myself saying "doing the Iliad?"— 
when you're experiencing the Iliad for
the first time,
I think one of the real morale problems
happens when you get to the Catalog
of Ships,
because to you all these different
places mean not very much. But
if you think back in to the historical
period
every one of those places was an
anchor for local traditions so
whatever locale you were from you were
just waiting to hear
and what your neck of the woods could
produce
back in the heroic world.
Is there anything else we should
highlight in this
this installment of Office Hours. There's
so much, I know.
Well how about the three muses
highlight for us anything
as a kind of last observation>
Why should I be highlighting? The
participants are doing such a good job
of highlighting.
i was thinking, calling out for the other
muses: it's a
kind of relay of the song.
You have the master narrator and then
the other
singers are ... Oh, I love it.
...getting into it like relaying, and I
really enjoyed that image in my mind.
Well I'm so glad you mentioned relay,
because in a sense
relay is the key to meaning in what
we're
studying, and the participants are
are an essential part of the relay,
because what what we are doing here
is channeling the dialogue
that is ongoing in the minds of all the
people who are reading the Iliad
sometimes for the very first time.
And I'm glad you said dialogue, Greg,
because there is
a lot of interaction between the
participants on the forum, and we'd very
much like to encourage that to
to continue. Yes, absolutely, and
and since 
everybody has a warm feeling about the
Greek word kosmos,
and that's why I say "cosmic," the cosmic
way of things rather than saying, I don't
know, the will of the gods which
starts to threaten us I think.
So we we have our own
kosmos, our own universe and
in ancient Greek a kosmos could also
refer to the beauty of the song itself
that is our universe
that brings us together.
It's beautiful. I love that.
Well, that's the perfect spot to end I
think
on the beauty of the song. To pause! That's true:
to pause before continuing the next time
in our relay, in our relay. Yeah. Exactly.
All right: thanks for joining me, and see
you, see you again.
