Teaching Company does The Odyssey

UPDATE:Ophelia Benson offers some interesting thoughts at CLIOPATRIA

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Some time ago, Michael Blowhard recommended the Teaching Company Lectures. Good advice; I took it and ordered Professor Vandiver's talks on the Odyssey of Homer. I listened to them in the past few days on a long holiday drive. They were excellent. Superb. Gave me an entirely new perspective (not that I had much before) on Odysseus and his world. I had listened to the Robert Fagles audio version of The Odyssey several years ago and while I enjoyed it quite a bit, I realize now that I didn't really hear very much. Vandiver really does bring the book alive; that Homer was quite a teller of tales.

But one thing that struck me was Vandiver's depiction of ancient Greece as a place where there was no law, where justice was private vengeance, where there was no state to claim a monopoly on the use of force to punish. A true libertarian world, I thought. I remember hearing --- this was 30 or more years ago so it's possible I heard him incorrectly --- the son of a famous economist explain how we would all be better off if we had no public police i.e. the police should all be privately-hired, so they would be more accountable etc etc.

I wonder if he had been reading Homer.

Comments

[Thrasymachus]

I own Robert Fagles' translations of both the Illiad and the Odyssey (in book form). Both are tremendous, although I enjoyed his Illiad more.

Far more than the Odyssey, the Illiad, whose theme is the end of city and civilization at the hands of barbarism, seems to me to be a parable of Hobbes 'state of nature.'

Of course, the Icelandic Sagas are more libertarian than anything of the Greeks. No law, only private justice – plus independence by small landholders from the kings of Norway. Also, there is a clear individual concept of right and wrong propping up society that is not truly present in Greek (or Oriental) thought.

The most striking thing to me about this literature is the wide gap between the ancient and the modern conception of strength. Nietzsche probably wrote best on it. I sometimes reflect on just how much social capital and tradition is invested in restraining our impulses for taking whatever we are powerful enough to grab. It is no use to say that we live better now. In those societies, the strong and lucky made out like bandits. Were bandits often. It is hard to be totally unaffected by that worldview.

[Ophelia Benson]

The ancient Greece that was without a state monopoly on force must mean Homeric Greece, right? (That is to say either the Greek world Homer described or the one he lived in some five centuries later. Or both.) Because that doesn't describe 5th century Athens very well, or even Sparta (except from the point of view of the helots). Or the rest of Hellas, at least not if Thucydides is anything to go by.

Libertarians do argue that though. I heard one say that just the other day. Yup, hire our own police, that'll work just fine.

[David Sucher]

Yes, Homeric Greece, which I assume actualy means the times 300 years before Homer, approximately 1200 BC when the Trojan War is thought to have happened. Professor Vandiver's statement did puzzle me, however, as it must be remembered that Odysseus was in fact himself a King. So for Athena to have intervene to prevent the dead suitors' relations from seeking vengeance against Odysseus must mean that Odysseus had been acting outside the law in killing them. I mean what is the ultimate reason to have a king --- except to keep order? From both external enemies and within? So I am still a bit puzzled.

As to Thrasymachus' remark -- what a wondrous way of looking at the Illiad: "...the end of city and civilization at the hands of barbarism." And I mean that sincerely. It is a much more difficult work, I think, than the Odyssey...(like Hamlet versus Macbeth.)...and I got absolutely nothing out of it from Professor Said's class. And me, an urbanist! I am astonished that I have for these many years missed the big, obvious thing about the Illiad: that it is about the destruction of urban life! It's kind of comical, really.

[Ophelia Benson]

Well, that's one thing it's about. I tend to think it's also very much about forgiveness, and pain and grief, and rage, and the way pain and grief and rage somehow end up, albeit very precariously, in forgiveness. Temporarily.

Odysseus wasn't really a king in the way we understand it now though, was he? More like the largest local landowner. And Ithaca's such a small, unimportant place. I think of him as just the biggest guy on the island, rather than a legal king - to the extent that kings ever are legal.