Sticks and Stones

The second in a series in which Leo examines the modern uses and abuses of certain words from the Greek lexicon.

The Oxford English dictionary tells us:

/kyoodos/

• noun praise and honour.

— USAGE Despite appearances, kudos is not a plural form: there is no singular form kudo, and use as a plural, as in he received many kudos for his work, is incorrect.

— ORIGIN Greek.

The fact that it is singular is contained in the definition so I don’t need to say anything more about that.

The more significant abuse is the trivialised use of the word. In Greek, kudos is more than just honour. It is fame, undying glory. To better understand this one has to have a brief understanding of heroic culture.

One of the best examples of the heroic attitude is Achilles, who chose a short life with glory and fame over a long life at the end of which he would be unknown - almost a ‘Live Fast, Die Young’ sort of philosophy. The ancients believed that a man could achieve some degree of immortality by being remembered and talked about after their death. Compare these lines from the Roman poet Horace:

Non omnis moriar multaque pars mei
vitabit Libitinam

“I shall not wholly die, and a part of me will survive the grave”

Kudos refers to undying fame as acquired by the greatest men in the world. The greatest warrior of the Greeks in the Trojan War, Achilles, achieved it by killing the greatest warrior of the Trojans, Hector. Hector, meanwhile, before his death, told his wife that he had to risk death (which would result in the death of his son, father and brothers and the enslavement of his wife, mother and sisters, as well as the destruction of his city) in order to achieve kudos for himself and his father (Iliad VI).

Kudos is not even fame in the sense that we would think of it. Who will know Amy Winehouse’s name in a hundred years, let alone 2,500? Hector is still a boy’s name (albeit a somewhat unfashionable at the moment) although the man, if he ever existed, died around 3,000 years ago: that is kudos. That is undying glory. Very few can claim it in the last few years: Napoleon perhaps? Mozart, Shakespeare?

Whatever the case may be, kudos should not be used lightly to refer to getting something in the bin from across the room, or completing a level of Guitar Hero III. The fact that we still talk about Homer, Horace and Shakespeare is a great testament to their genius, and this form of immortality should be respected.

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The first in a series in which Leo examines the modern use and abuses of certain words from the Greek lexicon.

The Oxford English dictionary tells us:

/hyoobriss/

• noun excessive pride or self-confidence.

— ORIGIN Greek, originally denoting presumption towards or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis.

This is a fairly accurate definition of hubris, but, like all dictionary entries, it misses several dimensions of a very deep and universal concept. Broadly speaking, the word tends to be translated as “insult”, and it is not, as implied above, restricted to offences against the gods. The English word, however, that most closely corresponds to hubris is, I would argue, arrogance (or, as the OED suggests, self-confidence). In order to explain why, I shall expound upon one of the most famous examples of it in literature: Oedipus.

As one of the best-known plot-lines in history, many of you will be familiar with Oedipus the King, who killed his father and married his mother. Despite the fact that he did all of this unwittingly - the whole point of the story is that he was unaware of what he was doing - he suffers terribly. This seems unjust, and many commentators dismiss such a judgment as imposing modern values on an ancient story.

The answer, however, is that he is not being punished for what he did, but why he did it. He acted out of hubris.

Having heard the oracle that warned him of his fate, one would have thought the answer was simple: don’t kill anyone old enough to be your father, and don’t marry anyone old enough to be your mother.

Oedipus, however, makes the critical mistake of thinking he is in charge of his destiny. He runs away from the people he believes to be his parents, and as a result feels that he has outwitted the fates - such is his arrogance that he actually commits the murder of his father on the very journey on which he has just left his would-be parents.

That is hubris - the mistaken belief that we, as mortals, can manipulate fate. Oedipus was at his most hubristic when he thought that he had cleverly avoided the Fate which he had been informed awaited him, and consequently he has culpability for his actions. Therefore we can see that hubris is the arrogance that comes from the delusion that one is in control, while forgetting that everyone is subject to the Fates.

This is not merely an ancient idea. We may not believe in Fate with a capital ‘F’ anymore, but we all recognise the fact that there are forces beyond human control. What the story of Oedipus and the Greek concept of hubris teach us is this: that when we think that we know where we are, where we are going and where we have come from, what will happen and what is happening, who and what we are, that is when we are at our most vulnerable.

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For those of you not familiar with Aeschylus’ Oresteia (dubbed by Cambridge’s Professor Simon Goldhill the “finest work of literature ever”) or Sophocles’ Electra, and one would have thought that that included pretty much everyone, both concern the story of the House of Atreus, and I would like to talk about each writer’s interpretation of the story. The basic story is as follows:

King Agamemnon returns home from the Trojan War, only to have his head hacked off in the bath by his wife, Clytemnestra, who has since shacked up with his nemesis, Aegisthus, and who is still bitter about her husband’s murder of their daughter, Iphigenia. This act leaves daughters Electra and Chrysothemis in grief and misery, but they retain hope that their brother, the exiled Orestes, will return and rescue them. He does this, killing his mother and step-father in the process.

As is common in Greek literature, however, the two authors have their own interpretations of the common myth, and these idiosyncrasies reveal vastly different expositions of the main themes of the texts. What I would first like to examine is the presentations of the characters of Orestes and Electra, who are the two main revenge-seekers in the play.

Notably, Aeschylus named his play (trilogy, as it happens) after the male, masculine, male, manly, male archetypal hero, Orestes, while Sophocles’ play is named for the female character of Electra. Indeed, while Orestes is the main character for Aeschylus, in Sophocles version he is barely seen, sidelined to brief appearances at the beginning and end of the play, with pretty much non-stop Electra in between.

(more…)

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“Ignorance is the cause of my annoyance.” As a classicist, I have had to put up with the adolescent sneer of my contemporaries, in whose eyes the study of the Greek and Latin languages, culture, history, literature, philosophy, politics, sociology, art and architecture and mathematics (pretty much just Pythagoras, to be honest) are not worth serious and dedicated study. To these philistines, the subject serves no purpose, is a waste of time, belongs in the dusty past.

Yet I feel no compulsion to explain myself in the face of such a cretinous attitude: if some dolt or other decides that Mozart is rubbish, without ever having heard a note, and consequently abstains from listening to some of the most beautiful and sublime music ever written, it in no way impedes or mitigates my enjoyment of, say, Don Giovanni. In denying him/herself the pleasure, satisfaction and stimulation to be derived from Classical study, the only one who suffers is s/he; meanwhile, I’m laughing all the way to the library.

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