Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn from Myths [Hardcover]

Over and over again Lefkowitz tells how in Classical Literature the manipulations of the Gods are the key to the events that happen. Lefkowitz asserts that when correctly viewed all the acts that happen show the seriousness of the Pantheon. It is just and proper that the Trojans are punished, their city destroyed, their population slaughtered and their women raped and sold into slavery because they are all collectively guilty of the abduction of Helen. But it is also just that the Gods extend the Trojan war and inevitably kill many of the Greeks attacking the city so that the Gods can fulfill a promise to Achilles' mother so that Achilles can Achilles can be covered in glory (before meeting his own inevitable death). And it is also just that the Greeks are punished for not rebuking one of their own for raping Cassandra in a temple dedicated to Athena. Such violations of ritual purity are more important than the offence done to Cassandra, who is later murdered without any of the Gods stepping in to intercede. It is proper that the seven sons and the seven daughters of Niobe are killed because Niobe insults the honor of the mother of Artemis and Apollo. It is likewise also proper that Aphrodite drives Phaedra mad with lust for her stepson because he insulted Aphrodite when swearing himself to eternal celibacy. It is proper that Oedipus and Antigone and Agamemnon meet the fates that they do because they have been cursed by the Gods.

What is wrong with this account? Part of the problem is that much of the book consists of summaries of Classical literature. Lefkowitz clearly belongs to the late Allan Bloom school of shallow, tendentious and interminable paraphrase as we read her accounts of Hesiod, the Illiad, The Odyssey, the Aenied, The Orestian Trilogy, the Oedipean trilogy, the story of Jason and the Argonausts and the Golden Ass. Oddly however, we do not examine Prometheus Bound, nor do we really get an idea of why writers changed myths until after the great age of Classical literature. This refusal to consider change makes Classical literature less ambiguous than it actually is. There is also a certain tendentiousness. Lefkowitz dismisses the God/Human matings as marginal and ultimately inconsequential to the divine life. But sex implies an equality between Gods and mortals; otherwise bestiality would be far more common than it is. And Lefkowitz does not really explain why Cupid asked for, and obtained, immortality for Psyche. But the larger problem is with Lefkowitz's concept of justice. By what criterion of justice can the population of Troy be punished while Aphrodite and Eris get off scot free? It was Eris who started the war by throwing the Apple of Discord and Aphrodite who promised Paris what was not hers to give. To argue that because Aphrodite is divine her actions are not frivolous does not convince. What Lefkowitz asserts is not a proper submission to reality, but an undignified abasement to arbitrary power. Far from being realistic it abjures reason and encourages contempt and callous indifference towards a humanity that is treated that way. It is not a coincidence that it was with the rise of Greek democracy that the dramatic view of divine power became more ambiguous, because it was in this period that the population outside a small elite was able to assert some form of dignity. In claiming otherwise, there is something disingenuous about Lefkowitz's comfortable pseudo-stoicism, and her view of tragedy which behind its veneer of toughness resembles academically sanctioned sadism. As Terry Eagleton has written: "By no means all Greek protagonists concede that their suffering is justified, accept their guilt or confess that the calamity follows from their own behaviour. And they are mostly quite right not to do so. It is the theorists of tragedy, not the victims of it, who imagine that they do, or at least that they should."