The Determination of Character and the Freedom to Decide

Against the nuance between self-determination and foreign agency at-tempted here, one could object that although Pandarus is only moved by Athena according to his character, he does not, for that reason, have freedom of choice. As Heubeck formulates it, “character and des-tiny [stand] in a deep interior and secret communication” in Homer, so that neither of these two phenomena “inner desire and capacity and di-vine control and guidance… can be thought independently for itself,”⁵¹ since the individual in Homer simply has that character which predis-poses him to a specific form of influence through the gods. To demon-strate that we are justified in differentiating between the inner capacity and the external influence and that the individual is not simply deter-mined through his characteristic disposition, I would like to analyze an-other example more closely in which, as in Pandarus’ case, the gods tar-get an individual precisely because of his characteristic attitude and where it is nonetheless clear that the freedom of choice is not taken from him: the Ate of Agamemnon.⁵²

At the beginning of the events of the Iliad in the battle with Achilles, Agamemnon had boasted that he did not need Achilles’ help, as he was especially honored by Zeus.⁵³Contrary to law and custom, he had Bri-seis, who had been awarded to Achilles as a prize, taken away from him.⁵⁴Achilles had therefore ensured through his mother Thetis’ medi-ation with Zeus that Agamemnon would pay for this insult through losses in battle against the Trojans.⁵⁵ In order to carry out this plan, Zeus decides to send Agamemnon a dream that should blind him and delude him with visions of a quick victory.⁵⁶ From this perspective, one can say that Agamemnon, who indeed lets himself be deceived by the dream, in essence only carries out Zeus’ will. However, here too, there are enough signs in the text that Agamemnon is not simply robbed of his responsibility for his initiative to act.

51 See Heubeck 1954, op. cit., 74.

52 On this, see above all the careful analysis in Kullmann 1956, op. cit., 100 ff.

53 Iliad 1.175.

54 Iliad 1.322 ff.

55 Iliad 2.1 ff.

56 Iliad 2.1 ff.

For one thing, the dream Zeus sends works upon Agamemnon just as Athena worked upon Telemachus, Penelope, etc. in the examples dis-cussed above: in influencing him, it orients itself to Agamemnon’s in-dividual character—indeed, to his momentary psychic condition: “I am here as messenger from Zeus, who is greatly worried about you from afar and sympathizes with you…” so begins the dream speech.⁵⁷ Thus, the dream blinds Agamemnon in a psychologically refined way by lulling him into a seductive sense of security through the hubristic conceit he had manifested in the previous fight with Achilles. Thus, as with Pandarus, one can say of Agamemnon that he fell victim not to Zeus but to his own conceit. Furthermore, this is not the only inci-dence of Agamemnon’s hubristic confiinci-dence in the power granted him by Zeus; rather, as Gundert has convincingly shown, it constitutes a basic tendency of his nature such that one could well say that the dream from Zeus targeted a highly personal and unique internal flaw in his nature. However, that it was not necessary for Agamemnon to heed the dream in spite of his predisposition to seduction by Zeus, as Gundert thinks, is shown by Nestor’s reaction to Agamemnon’s report of his dream. Nestor says namely: if another of us had reported such a dream, we would have called it lies and betrayal and contemptuously turned away from him.⁵⁸In other words, Nestor knows that one cannot blindly heed a dream even when it comes from the gods.

Moreover, Nestor not only expresses a typical caution, but rather, adopts an attitude with his reservation that is also otherwise possible in Homer. Penelope, too, calls dreams !jqit|luhoi, speeches in which one cannot distinguish between true and false, and therefore does not trust the dream that suggested to her that Odysseus had re-turned.⁵⁹No less important than Nestor’s reaction is Homer’s narrative commentary, for he calls Agamemnon—like Pandarus in a similar situa-tion—m^pior, stupid.⁶⁰He, too, shares Nestor’s evaluation of Agamem-non’s behavior and, like him, considers it to be at the very least intellec-tually imprudent.

Agamemnon, however, (and this is especially informative) makes clear, through his own behavior and through the words with which he judges his behavior, how he evaluates his personal role in becoming 57 Iliad 2.23 ff.

58 Iliad 2.79 – 81.

59 Odyssey 19.560 f.

60 Iliad 2.38.

blind. To be sure, Agamemnon thereby expresses himself—at first glance—in a very contradictory manner, which is why his case has re-peatedly been taken as an example of the fact that divine and human motivations for action are not clearly distinguished in Homer. Howev-er, a closer interpretation shows, as I believe, that Agamemnon knows exactly how to separate his own share and the gods’ share in his failure.

In a situation of terrible distress, in which the Greeks risk losing to the Trojans and in which Agamemnon is despondent and desparate,⁶¹he admits freely and openly to Nestor that his unjust conduct against Achilles was his blindness and, as he straightaway adds, that it was his own fault (and he once again emphasizes his awareness of his personal guilt) which he committed against Achilles in following his harmful mind. In contrast, in the great public reconciliation scene,⁶² he casts all blame upon Zeus, the Erinyes, and Moira: they deceived his mind at that time in the assembly. Indeed, Agamemnon calls upon no less a person than Zeus himself as evidence that he was powerless against Ate. Zeus, too, the first among gods and men, once let himself in his boastful pride at his regal power be deceived and blinded by Hera. I be-lieve one should not draw the conclusion from this rhetorically talented defense of Agamemnon’s that he no longer wants to acknowledge sub-jective responsibility for his wrongdoing, for which he is at any rate pre-pared to answer fully and to pay recompense in this moment. Agamem-non, so it seems to me, does not seek an acquittal from all guilt from his audience but understanding for his situation.

The parallels between his behavior and Zeus’ case which Agamem-non invokes alone prove this. The suggestion that Zeus, too, once suc-cumbed to Ate should not and indeed cannot establish that Zeus’ free autonomy in acting, too, is overturned through Ate’s agency, but only that it is difficult to guard oneself against Ate—so difficult, that once even Zeus’ great Nous was not capable of realizing the consequen-ces of his actions. The similarity between the mistake and the cause of the mistake that Agamemnon sees in his and Zeus’ case refutes yet an-other common explanation of his plea. Adkins, for example, in general agreement with the interpretation of this scene that has become stan-dard, says: “Agamemnon cannot understand how he came to do some-thing like this, and he feels that there must have been some element there in the situation that was not under his control. Since his society 61 Iliad 9.115 – 120.

62 Iliad 19.86 – 138.

ascribes an extensive domain of unexpected psychological phenomena to divine influence, Agamemnon naturally speaks in these terms.”⁶³ In contrast to this interpretation, Agamemnon does not appear to consider what occurred to him at the time in the assembly a completely unex-pected and inexplicable psychological phenomenon, but rather, mani-fests a remarkable degree of insight into the sort of danger he succumbed to at the time. He can not only identify the god to whose power he suc-cumbed and describe his mode of operation, but also in a detailed nar-ration of the history of Zeus’ Ate (which I unfortunately cannot inter-pret in detail here) says unmistakably albeit indirectly that he could not tolerate Achilles belittling his honor and, irritated by this, in his pride placed more faith in the invulnerability of his power than was prudent.

This was precisely the mistake that Zeus, according to Agamemnon’s speech, was supposed to have made: irritated by Hera’s public doubts at his ability to realize his plans, he, the first among the gods and men (eqn|lemor), let himself in his boastful pride be blinded and misled to im-prudence. Thus, one may not attribute the fact that Agamemnon seeks to excuse his behavior by referring to the temptation of a divine agency to which he succumbed to his ignorance of the irrational forces that erupted within him. On the contrary, its reasons and justification lie therein that Agamemnon knows the opposition to which he succumbed and can describe it: it is blindness through the possession of power, a blindness to which he was not equal. Agamemnon does not attribute this power of blindness to himself, but feels a power of seduction at work in it that proceeds from Zeus himself. Further, he knows that as king and commander-in-chief, he is especially vulnerable to this power. His apology lies therein. But he also knows, as becomes clear through his reference to Zeus’ identical mistake, that he has only himself to blame for not having been careful enough and for having given in to temptation.

The manner in which Agamemnon imputes blame to Zeus thus makes evident that it is not the same thing for him whether he imputes blame to the gods or to himself; indeed, it shows that he can distinguish precisely between his guilt and that which absolves him of this guilt.

Agamemnon’s behavior teaches us that the Homeric characters also have and are aware of a degree of free choice where a divine power works upon the weakenesses or strengths inherent to their nature. I do not believe that Homer thinks humans gain their specific character-63 See A. W. H. Adkins, From the Many to the One (London: Constable, 1970), 27.

istic traits, their character, without their own doing. But even if one were to assume this, they are nonetheless responsible for the behavior that corresponds to their specific characteristics. Agamemnon does not consider his nature with its tendency to overestimation of his power an adequate excuse for his mistake, but merely a factor that made it dif-ficult for him to behave correctly. He says: “I have let myself be mis-led,” and that, as we know, means: “I have done something wrong that I could have done right.” The fact that Zeus, too, once committed this mistake only means that it can be difficult to avoid this mistake, and not that it is not a mistake.

Something similar holds, to take one more example, for Helen as well. Helen is predestined by nature to be both Aphrodite’s protégé and victim. It was thus especially difficult or perhaps even impossible for her to resist Aphrodite. Even Priam, who is not insensitive to the charm she radiates, recognizes this when he says to her: for me, it is not you who are responsible for this misery of war, but the gods in my eyes are the guilty ones.⁶⁴Priam’s apology, however, is no different than Agamemnon’s apology for his behavior. Helen herself does not ac-cept this apology, but says, she should have chosen death rather than given in to temptation through Aphrodite and left home and husband.⁶⁵ Indeed, she repeatedly calls herself a brazen bitch for that reason.⁶⁶ Helen thus knows that she is partly responsible for her decision to follow Paris, for she did not have to follow Aphrodite in her actions, even if it was impossible for her to resist Aphrodite’s charm: she could have chos-en death, as she says, and as Euripides’ Phaedra actually does in a similar situation.

VII. Conclusion

Although the problem raised could not be made visible in its complete extent, I must end here and draw at least those general conclusions which can be legitimately drawn from what has been said. Our start-ing-point was the question of whether Homeric man’s (by our stand-ards) remarkable dependence in domains where we see the individual as autonomous (e. g., when an idea occurs to someone, when someone 64 Iliad 3.164.

65 Iliad 3.172 – 75.

66 Iliad 3.180; 6.344.

is filled with the spirit of battle or is swept away by passion), whether this strong external appearance in fact points to Homeric man’s igno-rance of the spontaneity of his own inner existence or, at the very least, to an as yet unclear understanding of the distinction between self-determination and foreign agency. I believe that the few examples analyzed here suffice to make clear that in this appearance the conspic-uously other thrusts itself too far into the foreground. The difference between the modern and Homeric view of man’s free autonomy is not that we possess something that either did not exist or merely existed in incipient form in Homer, but that the domain of man’s autonomy is differently demarcated in Homer than the way we are used to thinking it.

The gods’ adaption of themselves to humans in exercising influence that is observable in Homer and the humans’ complementary responsi-bility for the type of divine influence upon them (through which re-sponsibility they themselves, through their own natures, through their liking or antipathy, are the cause of the divine gifts they merit) results in a view of human autonomy in Homer that is guided implicitly but consistently by a basic idea that was probably explicitly expressed for the first time in Heraclitus’ statement, Ghor !mhq~p\ da_lym.⁶⁷ The same thought can be found in many forms in Plato⁶⁸ and in all of later Platonism,⁶⁹but also in Aristotle⁷⁰(e. g., at the end of the Nicoma-chean Ethics). It is the thought that it is the individual himself who dis-closes to himself the divinity in the world that is offered equally to ev-eryone and who, through his own thoughts and deeds, determines in what form divinity shows itself to him—or withdraws as well.

To be sure, much that we would call the product of one’s own inner life is, in this view, in fact something distinct from this inner life, some-thing external. The illuminating power an idea may exercise upon one’s thinking, the temptation that the representation of money and fame ex-ercises upon thinking, the persuasive, tempting or even logically con-vincing power a thought has in itself, but also beauty’s power to charm, the blindness that proceeds from power, the battle-lust or the battle-frenzy that are capable of gripping a man and many more things 67 Heraclitus, Fragment B 119 (Diels-Kranz).

68 See, above all, Timaeus 86 ff.

69 See, for example, Proclus 1899, vol. 1, op. cit., 105 l. 9 ff; see also Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, pars 1, q. 83 ad 1,3 and resp. ad 3.

70 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1179a20 ff.

that we more or less consistently ascribe completely to man’s inner life work upon a man from the outside in Homer’s portrayal. However, this does not mean that Homeric characters had no knowledge of the ca-pacity in them through which they themselves determined what they decided or planned to do. This capacity is merely not restricted to the individual’s inner processes as a whole, as though the love that I feel is simply my feeling and as though the thought I think is completely my thought. Rather, this capacity is restricted to what really lies in the individual’s subjective power, i. e., to the manner in which someone takes up an idea, the way in which he discloses or represents this idea to himself, what sort of idea is capable of convincing him, the extent to which he is receptive to eroticism, power, danger, etc. and how he re-sists or surrenders to what he has so received. That means that a knowl-edge of the limitations of the finite possibilities of man is constitutive for Homeric man’s understanding of himself. In recognizing his depend-ence upon powers that are not at his disposal, Homeric man also gains an understanding of the domains in which he is truly free and au-tonomous.⁷¹ It is this autonomy which is aware of its own limits that makes the human open and ready for a knowledge of the divine and thus simultaneously brings him into a “soteriological” relationship with God. For knowledge of the divine is now no longer merely a ra-tional activity, but a “becoming-like” to God that is carried out by the individual as a whole.

71 For a deeper treatment, see the author’s Selbst ndigkeit und Abh ngigkeit menschli-chen Handelns bei Homer. Hermeneutische Untersuchungen zur Psychologie Homers (Stuttgart : Steiner, 1990).