This old man and "la gente folle"

We've been asking for a while why it is that at the midpoint of the Paradiso, when we ought to be ascending to the Empyrean, Dante brings us down to earth to listen to an old man who spends three cantos evoking the good (and not so good) old days. 

Of course, it's not any old man.

Paradiso 17 is both the center of the highest canticle and the climax of the pilgrim's encounter with Cacciaguida. Whatever else we might say interpretively, it's clear than Dante has presented us with a vivid, lively character, a fully rendered human being. He is, of course, a man of many parts -- polutropos, as Homer might have said.

Cacciaguida beams with love and joy at meeting his great-great grandson. He has the suppleness of many languages at his disposal, retains a strong memory of his life in Florence, and expresses his love for that earlier moment in its history. He possesses providential vision (as do all whose gaze reaches the cospetto eterno), and, with chivalric precision, seizes the culminating moment of their encounter to en-coeur-age his "leaf." 

The text in which Cacciaguida appears does more than offer a memorable human portrait. Canto 17 opens with the scene of Phaeton seeking to know his old man. One can be told the Sun is one's father, but one wants proof. Seeking to control the horses of the Sun, however, proves to be an apocalyptically bad idea. To the ancient world, nothing was more difficult to know in clear, uncertain terms than one's origin. 

Similarly the tale of Hippolytus and Theseus brings to the fore how difficult it is for a father to know his horseman son* -- even a father who could thread the Minoan labyrinth. Genetic relations are dangerous, treacherous, and difficult to read. Visit the Sun, you're still in the dark -- the ways of the world are ambiguous, indirect -- ambage, as the poet will say.** Natura oscura.

The encounter with Cacciaguida, though, marks a rupture that seems to lead out of this predicament. The full impact of this meeting's place in the heavens becomes clear when we gather that here, on Mars, among the warriors, Dante as pilgrim and poet is reoriented to a point outside the natural order:

                                     il punto  

a cui tutti li tempi son presenti; (17:17-18)

This point, beyond the natural world, sees all contingency before it can occur, and is in fact a reliable source of intelligence about all origination. In learning of his family, his home, and his life through the triangulated gaze of Cacciaguida, Dante is acceding to a source beyond the Sun.

Né per ambage, in che la gente folle
già s'inviscava pria che fosse anciso
l'Agnel di Dio che le peccata tolle,

ma per chiare parole e con preciso
latin rispuose quello amor paterno,
chiuso e parvente del suo proprio riso:

Not in vague phrase, in which the foolish folk 
Ensnared themselves of old, ere yet was slain 
The Lamb of God who taketh sins away, 

But with clear words and unambiguous 
Language responded that paternal love, 
Hid and revealed by its own proper smile: (17:31-36)

La gente folle -- that is, all who lived before the slaughter of the Agnel -- is a potent critique of the world of Virgil and David, Plato and Moses. And it's spoken here not by Cacciaguida or Beatrice, but by Dante. The pathos of the ancients in the first circle of hell, living eternally in desire without hope, is recalibrated here in this new light. The poem is moving yet again into a new phase.

In the next post, we'll see a little of what that new phase entails. One thing is for sure: Dante, as a poet whose poem does what it says, will not leave Cacciaguida until he comes to grips with himself as pilgrim and his mission as poet. The union - or fusion - of pilgrim and poet can be realized, but only in mutual sacrifice. 

What is remarkable here is how Dante grounds even this moment of moving beyond Nature firmly in the world of men. Cacciaguida is no demi-god. No supernatural figures or forces are acting here. There is the word of a sacrificial lamb that broke the ancient model of the gente folle, and a plain-talking old man who guides Dante on his hunt.


*Hippolytus and Phaeton can be seen as classical prefigurations, or analogues, of Corso and Buondelmonte.

**The word ambage appears only here in the Commedia. Hollander's note on the word (l. 31) is helpful - this is the first half of it.

The word ambage has an interesting history. Dante probably found its most troubling presence in Aeneid VI.99, where ambages was used to typify the animal-like sounds of the cave-dwelling Sibyl's prognostications. On the other hand, and as Pio Rajna (“Arturi regis ambages pulcerrimae,” Studi Danteschi 1 [1902]: 91-99) has pointed out, in Virgil, Ovid, and Statius it is also used to describe the twisting path found in the Cretan labyrinth; it also in Virgil indicates an enigmatic way of speaking. 

The etymology reflects this:

The fall of chivalry: Paradiso 17

This will just be a brief suggestion, rather than a reading. The Paradiso, the city of God, spends more than three cantos at its dead center on the city of man. 

That city is riven by two kinds of love:

Benigna volontade in che si liqua
sempre l'amor che drittamente spira,
come cupidità fa ne la iniqua,

A will benign, in which reveals itself
Ever the love that righteously inspires,
As in the iniquitous, cupidity, (Par.15. 1-3)

The good love does something noble right at the start -- it falls silent:

silenzio puose a quella dolce lira,

The knights and armies moving along the four equal arms of the cross extinguish their songs in order to listen to this one soul who's arrived, a bit dazzled by the vast red sphere, the gleaming galaxy of the huge cross, the power of music he is moved by without understanding. 

This giving of attention is a constitutive chivalric act. It is the turn from the needs of the self (cupidità) to the other. That tens of thousands of knights and soldiers fall silent at once is  a signal gesture of the knight's honor, service, and love to one in need. It puts the entire Cacciaguida section under the sign of knightly courtesy, which carries a rich and highly sophisticated ethical discipline. (For a sampling of the range and depth of the chivalric paideia, see Aldo Scaglione's Knights at Court, especially chapter 2.)

If we read Paradiso 16 in this light, it might provide an incisive moral perspective. For what we see is a city that is divided -- Cacciaguida gives us the simple honest families of a modest town; the town grows, rich families from outside move in, bringing with them their aristocratic presumptions even as other families are developing mediated systems of lending that will bring untold wealth to their children.

It's a city marred by a failure of Church and State to work in harmony -- perhaps that ideal was only reached in the Knight, he who placed his mastery of power and skill into the service of his lord, and of his lord's Lord.

Perhaps this is why, when Dante first speaks to his great-great grandfather, Beatrice's smile brings an allusion to the story of Lancelot. Unlike Francesca, who met a literary knight in a Romance, the poet meets one who, though found only here in his poem, is presented as not a literary figure, but as an actual knight who served his Emperor and his God. 

And perhaps this is why the central antagonism of Cacciaguida's survey of Florentine development is the suicidal conflict between families of honor and good will on one hand, and on the other, those whose specialization lay in mooching off the church, or, "the insolent breed that plays the dragon behind him that flees and is mild as a lamb to him that shows his teeth," (Par.16.115-117).

At the heart of this civic ruin is the ruined virtue of the heart -- the honorable city of benign will is succumbing to those whose strength lies in clever merchandising and wealth built by greed. 

In this light, the unhorsings of Buondelmonte and of Corso are not two disparate events in a random development. Rather, the ends of these well-heeled deserters of their ladies are two manifestations of the same event: the fall of Florentine cavalleria.

Cacciaguida's portrait of contingent, mortal Florence is both loving and scathing; Dante's "root" speaks openly and clearly of his past and future, and the outcome is literally en-coeuraging -- he steels the poet with what it takes to complete his poem, whatever the risks.

                    . . . all falsehood laid aside,
Make manifest thy vision utterly,
And let them scratch wherever is the itch;

                   . . . rimossa ogne menzogna,
tutta tua visïon fa manifesta;
e lascia pur grattar dov' è la rogna.  (17.127-29)

When we reach this moment near the end of the central canto of the Paradiso, the necessity of this "detour" begins to become clear. The poem could not come to be without this radical injection of boldness and heart. The courage to speak the truth is the only medicine to cure a sick city:

Ché se la voce tua sarà molesta
nel primo gusto, vital nodrimento
lascerà poi, quando sarà digesta.

For if thine utterance shall offensive be
At the first taste, a vital nutriment
'Twill leave thereafter, when it is digested. (17.130-132)

Cacciaguida compared Dante with Hippolytus, who is Ovid's key transitional figure between Pythagoras and Aesculapius. The tale of the journey of the serpent-god from Greece to Rome is the last journey, and the last good story, of the Metamorphoses. It's all told in disguise; Hippolytus himself is disguised, he's now known as "Virbius."

If Ovid wrote of the metamorphosis of Greece into Rome (it might be his central theme), Dante here, inspired by Cacciaguida, dispenses with oracles and the promises of hidden gods. The root is the truth of his life -- to be voiced with chivalric mastery -- openly, freely, boldly,

"Because the spirit of the hearer rests not,

Nor doth confirm its faith by an example

Which has the root of it unknown and hidden

Or other reason that does not appear."

"che l'animo di quel ch'ode, non posa

né ferma fede per essempro ch'aia

la sua radice incognita e ascosa,

né per altro argomento che non paia.”

Death in Florence - Paradiso 16

The history of Florence before and after Dante is so rich and fraught with conflicts, treacheries and a wide cast of players as to make it hard to keep even the general outlines clear. 

A helpful (and well written) summary can be found in the first chapter of R.W.B. Lewis's Dante: A Life, published years ago in the New York Times (the text might be marred by some coding, but it's worth it). 

Lewis's chapter is here, and begins with Cacciaguida:

As you walk across the Ponte Vecchio in Florence today, you come upon a plaque bearing a passage from Dante's Divine Comedy. The lines are spoken by Dante's ancestor Cacciaguida, whom the poet encounters in one of the higher spheres of heaven, among the warrior saints. They reflect grimly on an event that took place on that very spot in 1216, almost fifty years before Dante's birth, and plunged the city into decades of turmoil. The event was the murder of Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti . . . more . . ..

We last encountered Buondelmonte lying dead at the feet of "the mutilated stone that guards the bridge" - the ancient statue of Mars. Cacciaguida's depiction of early Florence climaxes in the tale of the failed attempt to unite two feuding families, the Amidei and the Donati, through marriage. An alliance with the daughter of the Amidei would have forged a bond of common interest between them. All Buondelmonte had to do was to accept the daughter and dowry offered. Instead he chose another bride from the wealthier Donati. 

Remembering an earlier time, Cacciaguida spoke of dowries before they had transformed brides into commodities:

Non faceva, nascendo, ancor paura
la figlia al padre, ché 'l tempo e la dote
non fuggien quinci e quindi la misura.

Not yet the daughter at her birth struck fear
Into the father, for the time and dower
Did not o'errun this side or that the measure. 

(Par. 15.103-05)

As a direct result of his open betrayal of his troth, Buondelmonte was struck as he came from his wedding. He was knocked from his horse, then stabbed to death in front of his new bride. 

Some nine decades later, the city is ruled and roiled by the irrepressible Corso Donati, fomenting faction at every turn.

In Paradiso 17, Dante will learn of his own exile, of "how hard is the way going down and up another man's stairs." The key figure behind his exile and expropriation was Corso, a relation through Dante's marriage to Gemma Donati, and the swashbuckling head of the black Guelfs, who opposed the Whites, headed by the Cerchi.

Corso married the daughter of a wealthy Ghibelline, which enraged many who had supported him. Eventually the citizens forced Corso to flee the city; he was soon captured nearby. While being led back to Florence, Corso fell or threw himself from his horse, whereupon a captor lanced him to death.

Death of Corso Donati

Dante must have pondered the striking resemblances between the fates of these two men. Both Buondelmonte and Corso chose wealthy brides, not modest maids. Their choices unhorsed them. In Cacciaguida's story, Florence itself had once been a modest maid, but now is festooned with jewelry, make-up, and dress. And the old man compares Dante to Hippolytus, exiled from his native city by a lie, dragged to his death by frightened horses.  (Dante turns out to be less Euripides' tragic Hippolytus than Ovid's, who returns from Hades to live a new life in Italy.)

Buondelmonte's death at the bridge divided the city into the factions which then first were called Guelfs and Ghibellines. Corso's death ended the contention between the city's Whites and Blacks. In both cases, Florentine blood was spilled by Florentines. 

The fates of these two men, almost a century apart, are uncannily alike -- almost as if one fate. They are root and branch of the same "seed plot." It's like an opera or Greek myth, not devised by literary artifice, but given by the history of Florence. From the same plot, but a different seed, Dante will be cut off from his city, but not from his "root." He'll complete his solar journey thanks to the clear oracles of Cacciaguida. 

Witness to a pure act: The end of the Hippolytus

εἴθε φθέγμα γηρύσαισθέ μοι

1075

καὶ μαρτυρήσαιτ᾽

. . . would that you could utter speech on my behalf 

and bear me witness!

This is the second of two afterthoughts on the last portion of the Hippolytus (the first is here). Given that the reading of a work of this richness is never really at an end, more may occur.

We have noted some of the many symmetries of the play -- mirrorings, both verbal and structural, between opening and end; the "bookended" goddesses, and more. The structural circularity gives the audience the formal equivalent of a closed system that is destined to ever repeat the antagonism between Aphrodite and Artemis, which can be translated into any number of conceptual formulae. E.g., the erotic desire to possess and be possessed vs. the aversive assertion of the independence of the integral self.

The play examines certain inherent dangers posed when either of these divine powers moves toward absolute plenitude. Examples include the speech of Hippolytus that rabidly wishes to silence and isolate all women, reaching a vision of wild beasts patrolling cities to ensure the end of the communal bonds and procreative sexuality of the human race. Likewise eros bends Phaedra to a desire that would mean the end of marriage, children, and social position; her solution is suicide and murder.

Given that each goddess's power in its pure form leads to absurdity and death, the play is driven of necessity to explore the virtue of sophrosyne as a means of mediating, reconciling the goddesses through the achievement of a complex balance allowing for love yet also for a freedom from it -- an oxymoronic sweet servitude, chosen subordination, independent agreement to bonds of love and obligation, etc.

In a sense the play then seeks to work out the probability of some viable synthesis or exchange of the properties of love and freedom, after demonstrating some quite extreme versions entailed by the divine fullness of each. Instead of witnessing some realized fusion of the goddesses, the audience gets a vivid rendering of a hanging, a chariot crash and a vow by Artemis that she will destroy Aphrodite's next human lover in an endlessly reversible contention of symmetrically opposed gods.

It would be understandable if the audience were to file out of the theater at this point persuaded that there's no way out of this cycle of creation and destruction. No synthesis can thrive, nothing can combine to progress, allowing for hope for change in the future. As circles tend to demonstrate, there really is nothing new, just the eternal recurrence of a pattern that can be called tragic fate. Even without violence, the correct model of a contented life is to have an end that matches the beginning. As Hippolytus says on the happy morning of his last day, using a buried metaphor of the rounded race course:

τέλος δὲ κάμψαιμ᾽ ὥσπερ ἠρξάμην βίου. 

May I end my life just as I have begun it!

To see whether this iron circle of human life is the only plausible view a reader of the Hippolytus can take away, let's briefly look at a few elements of the final scene. As noted above, the epilogue balances the prologue, but there are some interesting inflections. For example, while Aphrodite appears as herself and then as an immobile statue, Artemis appears, if at all, first as herself, and then to Hippolytus as voice and fragrance. The goddess of love, desire, sexual longing and friendship is associated with the eye while the goddess of independent selfhood is linked to hearing, to music and to smell.

In the final scene, Hippolytus is near death. Artemis explains that she is forbidden to shed tears. and is unable to help Hippolytus avoid the anger of Aphrodite:

πληροῦσα θυμόν. θεοῖσι δ᾽ ὧδ᾽ ἔχει νόμος:
οὐδεὶς ἀπαντᾶν βούλεται προθυμίᾳ1330τῇ τοῦ θέλοντος, 
ἀλλ᾽ ἀφιστάμεσθ᾽ ἀεί.

Among the gods the custom is this: no god contrives to cross the will of another,but we all stand aside [ἀφεστήξω]

Nor can she stay with her devoted follower to the end. Gods can't abide the dying breath of mortals, she explains.

καὶ χαῖρ᾽: ἐμοὶ γὰρ οὐ θέμις φθιτοὺς ὁρᾶν
οὐδ᾽ ὄμμα χραίνειν θανασίμοισιν ἐκπνοαῖς:
ὁρῶ δέ σ᾽ ἤδη τοῦδε πλησίον κακοῦ.

Farewell: it is not lawful for me to look upon the dead or to defile (χραίνειν - touch lightly, taint) my sight with the last breath of the dying. And I see that you are already near that misfortune.

That is the goddess's last word. Her farewell mirrors Hippolytus's distancing himself from the statue of the goddess Aphrodite:

πρόσωθεν αὐτὴν ἁγνὸς ὢν ἀσπάζομαι. 

I greet her from afar, for I am pure. (102)

Artemis leaves as Hippolytus becomes immobile, a statue. We might reflect on the relation of gods to mortals and mortals to statues.

So far, this remains within the echoic symmetry of the play's beginning and ending. But it also sets up the final act of the play, in which Hippolytus frees his father from the blood taint of murder.

Would it not have been more in keeping with a world made of equal and opposite forces for Hippolytus to curse his father with his last breath? While he knows that holding back from vengeance will accord with Artemis's wish, there is nothing he, dying, stands to gain. Immortalizing his name in the pre-nuptial ceremonies of Athenian maidens has already been unconditionally granted by his divine companion.

As Hippolytus turns to his father and releases him from blood curse, he's using a power that could have punished Theseus with exile. Instead, he sustains and extends his life, in full knowledge of what his father has cost him.

 ἐπεί σε τοῦδ᾽ ἐλευθερῶ φόνου 

for of this murder I acquit you

There is no reward here, no reciprocity for Hippolytus. He acts in full knowledge of the seamless solitude that accompanies one who is about to enter Hades. His divine companion has already left:

μακρὰν δὲ λείπεις ῥᾳδίως ὁμιλίαν... 

Yet how easily you leave our long friendship!

The final act of Hippolytus -- a verbal act (ἀφίημι - send away, divorce, excuse, let loose, release) -- exiles taint from his father, who has tainted himself by believing in the taint that Phaedra had cast upon his son. The casting out of taint is a gratuitous gesture that is not eros, but rather a kind of freeing, liberating of the father, an act whose authority and power inheres in its being the last intention of the dying son.

In working toward this moment, the playwright has taken pains to remove every trace of interest, desire, vengeance and reward from Hippolytus's last word. He is staging an unforced act that is ἁγνός, that is, pure, autonomous, good-willed:

ὦ χαῖρε καὶ σύ, χαῖρε πολλά μοι, πάτερ. 

I wish you, father, plenteous joy as well!

We could call it a godlike act, but performed in the moment of imminent death, it is beyond the reach of any Greek god. Instead of gaining immortality for the soul of Hippolytus, it is recognizable as pure by the fact of his human mortality, which in its bare finality stands as guarantor of its authority. The fully self-possessed act arrives in the loss of self...

Such autonomy exists outside the order of necessity and fate. It is purely Greek in the clarity of its refusal to hold out any compensatory reward -- some afterlife*, or diminution of purgation, or prospective sainthood, or a better seat in the paradisal choir -- nothing of the sort is here. Nor is there anything supernatural in what Hippolytus does; no miracle overturns the laws of nature.

In the Greek sense, the audience here are martyrs, witnesses to a gratuitous act that is senseless within the existing moral framework of its occurrence. They witness an autonomy unimaginable in the world of necessity, fate, and divine hatred.

Theseus, the hero of that world of active strength and cleverness, could never dream of anything like this clear-eyed act of Hippolytus. Now, untainted, he witnesses a man -- ἀνδρός -- who fills him with wonder, not unlike the mutual gaze of Achilles and Priam in Iliad 24. Glimpsed in that astonishment is the pure potency of a human act elsewhere not encountered by the much-traveled hero of Athens.

~~~~

*Though outside this discussion, it's suggestive that Ovid (Meta. 15) tells a tale of Hippolytus gaining a curious second life in Italy under the name Virbius (but this release from Hades also, by some legends, causes the death of Aesclepius).

Virbius

Eros, sophrosyne, myth and the Hippolytus

This group has completed its collective reading of the Hippolytus, so I'll post a few afterthoughts rather than continue with close readings of specific passages. As we turn to the Antigone of Sophocles, it might be worth a moment to look at the "raw material" of myth seized on by the Greek playwrights for their works.

For one thing, the material is hardly raw. The figures of Oedipus, Antigone, Hippolytus, Orestes, Philoctetes, Heracles, Dionysus, the Olympians and so many more are the legacy of a tradition formed, refined and elaborated over hundreds of years. Their stories involve families, cities, fabulous creatures, gods and nature, and situate themselves within a larger tapestry that could exfoliate into variations and permutations upon the tales already woven. Unlike, say, Old Testament stories that provoked infinite layers of commentary and interpretive creativity, but usually not literary variants or emulations, the Greek myths fueled and informed fresh literary and artistic works by generations of men at diverse historical moments.

Each moment found its form: for Pindar and Bacchylides, it was primarily the ode; for Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, it was tragic drama; for Homer and Virgil, it was the epic; for Ovid, the old myths offered a shared language of figures, literary modes and structures -- a lens for thinking about culture, storytelling, history and literature with sophisticated panache.

Any particular myth came already bound within a much larger given body of tales -- elaborate genealogies of gods, cities, nature and men. Some were complex skeins tracing sacred blessings and curses down through generations of a family.

As we leave (close readers never say "finish") the Hippolytus and begin the Antigone it's noteworthy how the core myths are generative. They pose dense porcupine problems, labyrinthine knots. Unlike the detective tales of Law and Order or Sherlock Holmes, they resist resolving into neat sums through logical agility or dogged scientific lab work. The audience leaves with no sense of mastery, no comfort of closure; instead, if anything, it's experienced a kind of intimate acquaintance with intolerable tensions.

Aphrodite

The same antagonisms operative at the opening of Hippolytus are there at the close. Even as the characters turn in agonized perplexity asking why certain destinies have come to them, the audience is spared any such questioning. We get the god's eye view of the matter at the very beginning with Aphrodite's prologue. There's no suspense about what will happen, no mystery as to why it's happening. All the "hooks" and plot devices constitutive of much modern storytelling are tossed aside. What motivates us to stay with such a story? Why go to the theater?

Let's suggest that one way of looking at the Hippolytus is as a struggle between eros and sophrosyne -- an oversimplification for the sake of argument. We might at first think about this rather abstractly, and rather limitedly, as the eternal agon of passion and reason, the power of desire versus the ability of the self to know and govern its realm -- all of which it most certainly is. What the play does, in virtually every line, every turn of plot, every speech and response, is offer deeper, richer, more comprehensive and more granular perspectives upon that inherent conflict. Drawn along by the action, we gather the implications of the mythos, and grapple with its complications.

Perhaps we acquire a more complex sense of the nature of love and the astonishing range of its effects. The shaft that leaps from eros' bow to Phaedra's heart to Theseus's pain and rage to the entangled death of the future hero-king is intensified and enriched through the prism of each character's acts and interactions.

Artemis

Perhaps we gather a deeper sense of the strategies of self-possession available to us -- from the curious rapture of Hippolytus to the devious authority of Phaedra to the "laid back" approach of the Nurse.  Are these viable solutions or illusory accommodations? Nothing is quite what we would decree as the ideal for our prim and proper world. Turn to the virginal opponent of eros and you find an arrow coming the other way. No simple, clear, coherent solution to the war of eros and sophrosyne stands readily at hand.

The play doesn't ignore the realm of the polis. At the moment he covers his son's face, Theseus says:

ὦ κλείν᾽ Ἀθῆναι Παλλάδος θ᾽ ὁρίσματα,
1460οἵου στερήσεσθ᾽ ἀνδρός.

Glorious Athens, Pallas' realm,
what a man you have been bereft of!

The line grows in power if we remember that this was the father who had seen his son first as a bookish self-indulgent child, then as a fiendishly deceitful rapist, but never as a man -- a man worthy of the admiration of Theseus, the greatest Athenian hero. The scene gains more yet if we happen to catch, only here, the shadow of Athena in the bottomless awareness of the loss to Athens in the untimely, undeserved, incommensurable death of this man.

==========

Shortly before dying, Hippolytus calls on Zeus:

Ζεῦ Ζεῦ, τάδ᾽ ὁρᾷς;
ὅδ᾽ ὁ σεμνὸς ἐγὼ καὶ θεοσέπτωρ,
1365ὅδ᾽ ὁ σωφροσύνῃ πάντας ὑπερσχών,
προῦπτον ἐς Ἅιδην στείχω, κατ᾽ ἄκρας
ὀλέσας βίοτον, μόχθους δ᾽ ἄλλως
τῆς εὐσεβίας
εἰς ἀνθρώπους ἐπόνησα.

Zeus, Zeus, do you mark this? Here am I, the holy and god-revering one, the man who surpassed all men in σωφροσύνῃ [self-control, temperance], seeing plainly ahead my course to Hades. My life is utterly destroyed; useless have been my hard labors of piety towards men.

He calls upon Zeus, but he might as well address us, the audience, we are on the level of the gods even as we see ourselves in the dying hero. The death he now foresees is the death Aphrodite foretold to us at the beginning. Theater as theoria. The strangeness of a day in which the lives of three great ones (μεγάλων) are lost and a nascent civilization careens off course under the serene sky and eye of Zeus doesn't get less enigmatic, but rather more, on closer scrutiny. Deeper insight into the struggle of eros and sophrosyne provides no practical nostrum with which we could build an optimistic program (e.g., the "power of positive thinking") for a better tomorrow.

This mode of myth is unlike what's meant when we say "myth" today --  a story that we think some deluded folks believe, but which others, namely we sage ones, know to be untrue. We have the closure and managerial composure to rest assured we know better.

When a noted historian recently was asked what he thought was the "most damaging myth in America today," his response was, "the idea of American exceptionalism."

Unlike the tale of, say, Thebes, exceptionalism yields little upon reflection; it's an idle phantasm at the farthest remove from myth. Myths don't pretend to solve our problems -- they are our problems, knots torn from the world's heart, made incandescently palpable to a certain ungrasping contemplation.