Christopher Rush

Content Summary

In what was once a landmark exploration of Homer and the Iliad (I say that not derogatorily), Gilbert Murray analyzes a vast amount of material related to ancient Greece, the nature of ancient stories and books, the construction and minutiae of the Iliad, and its reception and place in history.  In the four prefaces, one for each edition, Murray has different things to say, mainly about the changing nature of Homeric interpretation during the first half of the twentieth century, when his book was being re-edited and re-released.  Despite the changing nature of the then-current geo-political world, however, Murray’s book did not seem to undergo many revisions.  At best, he seems to have added only some footnotes regarding newer critical works and some appendices.

Murray’s introduction attempts to situate the reader into the nature of the Greece of the Iliad as well as its poetry, commenting on differences in the known Greece with its portrayal in the Iliad, as well as cultural differences between the poem and the world of Murray’s present reader.  His next major section is on “The People,” first the people who became the Greeks (the Achaeans of Homer’s poem and the Greeks of Homer and his followers), secondly some of the major beliefs of the people in the poem and the disintegration caused by wars and migrations.  His second, and longer, major section is “The Literature,” first providing for the reader an understanding of what a book was in Homer’s day and how it is completely unlike what present readers think of as a book.  Next he begins to address the Iliad more specifically (almost one-third of his way into his exploration), highlighting how it fits his earlier definition of a “traditional book,” evidencing it with expurgations, peculiarities, and almost minutiae to support his points.  He then addresses the historical content of the Iliad before assessing whether or not it is a “great poem.”  To close his work, Murray returns to more peripheral arguments such as Homer’s connection to Ionia and Attica, and final comments on what is known and unknown about Homer, the poem, its place, and reception in antiquity.  His appendices are like extended footnotes regarding various issues he addresses throughout the body of his exploration, and he refers the reader to them as needed.

Author’s Perspective and Purpose

Though I referred to “Homer” when summarizing the content of The Rise of the Greek Epic, one of Gilbert Murray’s major points which he makes several times (at least in the first half of the work), is that he believes “Homer” to be almost as fictional as Zeus or Apollo.  Murray believes the Iliad and the Odyssey (though his evidence is mostly concerning the Iliad) to be the work of composite poets and emendators over many years, if not centuries.  That is the essence of his argument in the “nature of the traditional book” section — a traditional book or story was not created to be read, but was kept hidden until the poet could recite it; also, Murray cites several examples of line inconsistencies throughout the Iliad, such as different kinds of armor, to point to multi-generational editorship on the base poem.  The Iliad is too long to be recited as well and must be a composite of different poets/editors over time to produce what we now know as the Iliad.  Much of his support is given in Greek, so those who are not familiar with the language must take his word for it.

Murray’s title is almost the opposite of what his intention seems to be: for most of the work, Murray details what the Iliad is not, almost to the point at which his title should be the fall of the Greek epic — at times it seems he comes to bury Homer, not to praise him.  Murray focuses on many details and incidents whose connection to the poem does not seem readily apparent until much further on, and even then, his purpose is not always clear.  It is evident overall that he wants to accurately ground his audience in what he perceives to be an accurate historical understanding of the nature of the events and culture of the peoples depicted in the Iliad, and the nature and times of the people writing, emending, and receiving the poem — since there are many according to Murray.  Unfortunately for Murray, as he himself must admit toward the end of his exploration, “the argument has rested chiefly on analogies and general considerations, not on documents: it has had to be very cautious, aiming at probability, not certainty, constantly suggesting, not professing to demonstrate” (282): hardly the most persuasive kind of argument, but necessary when dealing with an ill-documented antiquity.

Critical Response and Evaluation

I very much wanted to enjoy Murray’s book more than I did.  His analytic introduction appeared to offer a profundity of Homeric scholarship untouched by the fads and fancies of twentieth-century theory.  Frustratingly, The Rise of the Greek Epic was, for the most part, unsuited to my main purpose for reading them while composing my Master’s thesis in examining the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid: the nature of epic heroes.  Among the issues Murray addresses, the actual characters in the poem are given very little attention.  As mentioned above, Murray spends much more time dissecting apparent historical inconsistencies such as bronze armor, the nature of shields, and what is not in the poem.  Much of Murray’s comments on Homeric expurgations are, as the above quotation admits, mere arguments from absence: because something is not in the copies that exist today, they must have been elided by some editor after the first poets had it in their versions of the poems.  This sort of argumentation was, as I said, frustrating at times, though it was nice to read Murray’s almost-apologetic admission that he was dealing with mostly speculation.

Another disappointing component to Murray’s analysis, similar to my disappointment with Joseph Campbell, is his almost preposterous treatment of various Biblical passages for no useful or accurate reason.  I am not arguing against the possibility that the Bible has had various scribes and translators and editors over the centuries, but Murray’s “analysis” of the Old Testament on pages 107-119, supposedly in an effort to prove what was the nature of “traditional books” — i.e., editors come along and change things to suit the fancies of the day, whether or not they create conflicts with other passages of the text — seemed to be substandard scholarship.  Not only was he not proving his point about traditional books and their connection to the Iliad, but he more readily demonstrated his ignorance about them.  Obviously this is a reaction from my particular worldview, but I am baffled by so many scholars who can argue well when it comes to what they know but then resort to Biblical derision when they want to mask their own ignorance about whatever topic they know they must address but cannot do so well.

With such pervasive reactions against Gilbert Murray’s book, it might seem odd that I am including it in this journal.  I am including it because, more than any other scholarly work on the Iliad I have read recently, it has made me want to be a better Homeric scholar.  As I mentioned above, Murray writes with the supposition that his reading audience is fluent in Greek.  That may have been true a century ago, but I did not have that opportunity growing up in American public schooling in the later-half of the twentieth century.  For years, as I have tried to understand these classical works better, I have had the nagging feeling that the only way I can truly improve in classical scholarship is to understand (read at least, if not write or speak) the classical languages.  The same is true for my Biblical interpretation skills: I can only get so far reading John Nelson Darby or a New American Standard version of what was originally in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.  Perhaps Murray was not writing for the average reader for The Rise of the Greek Epic, but his linguistic challenge was effective for me.

That is not the only reason I include it, however.  Murray has several good insights into the poems throughout his work, though “throughout” is a generous concision of “scattered throughout.”  It was not exactly “hit and miss” with Murray, but his good offerings were somewhat sporadic — though, once I found them, they were very helpful.  I do not personally agree with his assessment of a multiplicity of Homers, but that might be my classical scholarship nascence (i.e. utter ignorance) talking.  My own argument in my thesis focuses on what the poems say about heroes, not whether or not the poems are a hodge-podge of multiple insertions, deletions, and revisions.  Even so, Murray’s work provides helpful ideas and a challenge that more recent Homeric criticism does not.

Christopher Rush

Content Summary

Heroes of the City of Man addresses eight works of classical Greece, four epics and four dramas: Hesiod’s Theogony, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid; Aeschylus’ Eumenides, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, Euripides’ Bacchae, and Aristophanes’ Clouds.  Peter Leithart gives about equal time to all works, since his overarching premise is not to praise one literary form above the other.  Leithart gives each a working subtitle, each designed to highlight what Leithart supposes is that work’s major theme: the Theogony is the “Pagan Genesis,” Iliad is “Fighters Killing, Fighters Killed, Odysseus is the “Son of Pain,” and the Aeneid is “Patria and Pietas.”  Of the dramas, the Eumenides is a tale of “Blessings of Terror,” Sophocles’ first play in the Oedipus trilogy is “Riddles of One and Many,” the Bacchae is “The Contest of Fetters and Thyrsus,” and Aristophanes’ Clouds is about the “Sophist in the City.”

As a college professor, Peter Leithart always has higher and continued education in mind, in not only this but his other works I’ve read and own.  He divides each work into sections, usually along thematic lines that fit with his overarching subtitle for the work, and after each section gives “review questions” and “thought questions,” to help the reader remember and analyze what he or she has just read.  At the end of the book, Leithart has an “Additional Reading” section, a bibliography (not annotated) of recommended works to continue the reader’s analysis of the classical Greek epics and plays.

Author’s Perspective and Purpose

The subtitle is a clear indicator of Leithart’s religious and philosophical perspective in approaching the works he analyzes in his book.  For the better read reader, however, his very title is an initial indicator of his approach: the “city of man” epithet is obviously taken from Augustine’s City of God, a classic work of Christian thought that categorizes much of life as either part of the city of God or the city of Man — Leithart clearly associates the works of ancient Greece as distinct from the “city of God.”  This is not surprising since Homer, Hesiod, and the rest do not claim to know or associate their stories with the monotheistic God of Augustine.  Unlike other critics, however, (and by “other” my experience so far means “almost all”) Leithart does not treat the members outside his particular religious and philosophical framework as deficient, unworthy, or haphazard.  Instead, Leithart has great respect for the originality, skill, tragedy, humanity, and beauty found within the works of the classical pagan Greeks.  Most (for lack of a better word) secular critics I’ve read in my years of study who approach the works of Homer or Virgil seem to find ways to bring up the Bible (usually for no justifiable reason) as a “straw man” to knock down and disparage in an attempt to distract readers from flaws or perceived shortcomings in the hoped-to-be superior non-Biblical works.

Leithart, however, has no problems in approaching and analyzing the ancient works for what they are, not what he hopes them to be.  Certainly his perspective is “biased,” in that he is approaching them from a Christian worldview — not one in which they were constructed; but this does not mean that critics who approach Homer or Hesiod or Aristophanes from a “secular” worldview are not biased — on the contrary, they have their own secular biases, not the least of which is not being a contemporary of the authors, bringing nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first century hermeneutical penchants to the ancient texts.  With the freedom to make no apologies for either what the texts say (or appear to say) or his personal interpretational framework, Leithart does not hesitate to discuss what other critics might timorously deem controversial or ambiguous, such as the moral issues involved with Odysseus’s affairs while claiming to be faithful to his wife.

Critical Response and Evaluation

Leithart’s work has been very influential to me, since, as you know, our classes together often (“always” would be overly generous) focus our analyses of ancient literature from a Christian perspective (which has myriad definitions and sub-interpretations, but a precise designation of what that entails at least at our school is peripheral to the main argument here).  Part of what makes Leithart’s work so useful is that he treats his subjects with overt respect, both analytically and aesthetically.  He is a Christian scholar (not an oxymoron) who noticeably enjoys the works from the “city of man” almost as much as he does from the “city of God.”

It is no accident, either, that Leithart and I appreciate the works from the “city of man,” while approaching them from a Christian perspective.  We both teach at classical schools, which is more than just different curriculum compared to government-mandated knowledge.  He finds great value in the works and ideas of those who believe differently than he does, completely unlike the secular critics I have read who trot in the Bible (or, more accurately, their masqueraded versions of what is supposedly the Bible) to deride and ridicule.  Leithart does none of this, even with passages he does not personally enjoy.  He does not scorn Homer for creating a poem centering on a selfish hero, though he does not hesitate to call Achilles a selfish hero: these are not contradictory statements.

In his introduction, Leithart formulates his reasoning behind his analysis of these classic works in the guise of a response to Tertullian’s question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”  As the renaissance of Classical Christian schooling can attest, quite a lot.  Fortunately, though, unlike many lesser-skilled critics regarding recent pop culture fads (such as Harry Potter or the Lord of the Rings movie adaptations), Leithart does not blindly embrace everything about these classics as “close enough to Christian” — Odysseus is not a type of Christ (nor are Harry Potter and Gandalf, despite the claims of recent pseudo-intellectuals) to Leithart.  Even with his admiration and appreciation for the classics, Leithart maintains an appropriate distance from them, as he makes clear in the following paragraph:

Heroes of the City of Man is a book about Athens by an author who resides contentedly in Jerusalem.  One of the foundational assumptions of this study is that there is a profound antithesis, a conflict, a chasm, between Christian faith and all other forms of thought and life.  Though I appreciate the sheer aesthetic attraction of classical poetry and drama, I have no interest in helping construct Athrusalem or Jerens; these hybrids are monstrosities whose walls the church should breach rather than build.  Instead, I have attempted to view Athens from a point securely within the walls of Jerusalem (14).

Part of the utility of Leithart’s work is his synthesis of and expounding upon other key critics.  His analysis of Cedric Whitman’s understanding of the Iliad’s chiastic structure has been helpful to me for years, even before I first read Whitman for myself.  Likewise, Leithart’s analysis of Odysseus’s process of revelation at the close of the Odyssey has been a helpful way to maintain the interest of students as we wrap up the great story.

Some critics might conceive of Leithart’s analysis and categorizing of these classical works as too much Christian revisionism, but they would be mistaken.  I have read other authors who try to imprint Christianity too much onto other works (like Tolkien and Harry Potter as mentioned above), but Leithart does not do that.  He unabashedly analyses these classical works from a Christian perspective, but he does not make of them what they are not.  Instead, he provides an excellent companion to these ancient works for anyone, whether he or she resides in either the city of Man or the city of God.