3 - The Classical Pattern: From the Order of Orpheus to the Chaos of the Thucydidean Momen

Summary

“With mankind,” he would say, “forms, measured forms, are everything; and that is the import couched in the story of Orpheus with his lyre spellbinding the wild denizens of the wood.”

Herman Melville, Billy Budd

… read Thucydides without horror?

words lost their significance

Ezra Pound, Canto LXVII (citing John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions)

In “The House-top,” a haunting poem about the draft riots in New York City in the summer of 1863, Herman Melville gives form to a moment that is the antithesis of form: the dismemberment of law. “The Atheist roar of riot,” which resounds through New York in the dog days of July, murders sleep and stifles the sound of sense. During the riots, which culminated in the massacre of blacks, inhabitants of the city shed their humanity and return to a savage nature, a state of bellum omnium contra omnes.

The Town is taken by its rats – ship-rats

And rats of the wharves. All civil charms

And priestly spells which late held hearts in awe –

Fear-bound, subjected to a better sway

Than sway of self; these like a dream dissolve,

And man rebounds whole aeons back in nature.

(BP, 89)

The rats infesting the city bite through the cords – the political and religious bonds – that have subjected them to a better sway than sway of self. The scourge of Draconian law and Calvin's creed must be wielded again.