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Euboulia in the Iliad

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Malcolm Schofield
Malcolm Schofield
Affiliation:
St John's College, Cambridge
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Extract

The word euboulia, which means excellence in counsel or sound judgement, occurs in only three places in the authentic writings of Plato. The sophist Protagoras makes euboulia the focus of his whole enterprise (Prot. 318e–319a):

What I teach a person is good judgement about his own affairs — how best he may manage his own household; and about the affairs of the city — how he may be most able to handle the business of the city both in action and in speech.

Thrasymachus, too, thinks well of euboulia. Invited by Socrates to call injustice kakoetheia (vicious disposition — he has just identified justice as ‘an altogether noble good nature (euetheia)’, i.e. as simple-mindedness), he declines the sophistry and says (Rep. 348d): ‘No, I call it good judgement’. But Plato finds little occasion to introduce the concept in developing his own ethical and political philosophy. The one place where he mentions euboulia is in his defence of the thesis that his ideal city possesses the four cardinal virtues. He begins with wisdom, and justifies the ascription of wisdom to the city on the ground that it has euboulia (Rep. 428b) — which he goes on to identify with the knowledge required by the guardians: ‘with this a person does not deliberate on behalf of any of the elements in the city, but for the whole city itself — how it may best have dealings with itself and with the other cities’ (428c–d). It is normally rather dangerous to draw an inference from the absence or rarity of a word to the absence or rarity of the idea expressed by the word.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , May 1986 , pp. 6 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1986

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References

1 Snell, B., The Discovery of the Mind, English translation by Rosenmeyer, T. (Oxford, 1953)Google Scholar; Dodds, E. R., The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, 1951)Google Scholar; Adkins, A. W. H., Merit and Responsibility (Oxford, 1960)Google Scholar.

2 See Murray, O., ‘Philodemus on the good king according to Homer’, JRS 55 (1965), 161–82Google Scholar.

3 References are to the second revised edition published by Penguin Books (London, 1979).

4 World, pp. 80–2.

5 World, pp. 114–15.

6 Redfield, J. M., Nature and Culture in the Iliad: the Tragedy of Hector (Chicago, 1975)Google Scholar, so described by Finley in the bibliographical essay in World, p. 184.

7 Lloyd, G. E. R., Magic, Reason and Experience (Cambridge, 1979)Google Scholar; Kirk, G. S., The Nature of Greek Myths (London, 1974), ch. 12Google Scholar; Détienne, M. and Vernant, J. -P., Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (Hassocks, 1978)Google Scholar.

8 So Détienne, and Vernant, , Cunning Intelligence, pp. 316–17Google Scholar.

9 I have restricted my attention to the Iliad, principally because the Iliad is much richer in councils and assemblies than the Odyssey, but also because I want to avoid the complications raised by the problem of whether the poet of the Odyssey is different from the poet of the Iliad — for if they are different (as the arguments of Kirk, G. S., The Songs of Homer (Cambridge, 1962)Google Scholar and more recently Griffin, J., Homer (Oxford, 1980)Google Scholar persuade me), then it may be prudent method not to assume that the social and intellectual worlds of the two poems are the same. I have also tried to avoid begging questions about the poetics and compositional techniques of Homer, and about the extent to which we are justified in seeing the Iliad as a monument of tragic architecture, every detail controlled by a conception of the whole.

10 The assembly or council theme in Yugoslav oral epic is studied by Lord, A. B. in The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 68–81Google Scholar.

11 As Lloyd says, ‘There can be few societies that do not, in some degree, prize skill in speaking, and the variety of contexts in which it may be displayed is very great. Apart from in the arts of the poet or story-teller and of the seer or prophet, eloquence may be exhibited in a number of other more or less formalised situations, including eulogies of the powerful and contests of abuse such as the song duels reported from the Eskimos.’ And he continues: ‘Good speaking and good judgement — and the two are often not sharply distinguished — need to be shown wherever groups of individuals meet to discuss matters of consequence concerning the running of the society, its day-to-day life and internal affairs and its relations with its neighbours’ (Magic, Reason and Experience, p. 59).

12 The scholia almost invariably comment on the two virtues of thought and action or soul and body they take Homer to be commending in these passages. In the present case an especially interesting inference from 9.442–3 is drawn by Σb: κα⋯ ὅτι δ⋯ π⋯ντων [sc. μύθων τε κα⋯ ἔργων] κρείττων ή εὺβουλία δηλοῖ δι⋯ τούτου.

13 For some passages in the Odyssey, Hesiod and Pindar similar to those collected above in the Iliad see e.g. Thalmann, W. G., Conventions of Form and Thought in Early Greek Epic Poetry (Baltimore, 1984), 182Google Scholar and n. 46. Cf. Solmsen, F., ‘The “gift” of speech in Homer and Hesiod’, TAPA 85 (1954), 1–15Google Scholar.

14 But this phrase already carries a hint of euboulia, for, of course, the verb μέδω seems to imply: ‘organise in a thinking way’. Cf. e.g. Chantraine, P., Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque (Paris, 1968)Google Scholar s.v.

15 Themistes needs explanation rather than translation. Lloyd-Jones, Hugh thinks the best definition of themis is ‘declaration of a divine command or of a command advised by a god’ (The Justice of Zeus (Berkeley, 1971), 116 n. 23)Google Scholar. ‘Themistes are thought by the Greeks to come from god, but to the armchair anthropological observer they appear as ‘customs, usages, principles of justice’ (ibid. p. 6). As Finley puts it well (World, p. 78 n.): ‘Themis is untranslatable. A gift of the gods and a mark of civilized existence, sometimes it means right custom, proper procedure, social order, and sometimes merely the will of the gods (as revealed by an omen, fot example) with little of the idea of right’.

16 For an interesting comment on the hymnic character of v. 97 and its significance see Thalmann, , Conventions of Form and Thought, pp. 140–2Google Scholar.

17 The Justice of Zeus, pp. 6–7.

18 So e.g. Kirk, G. S., Homer and the Oral Tradition (Cambridge, 1976), 11–12Google Scholar; contra Taplin, O., ‘The Shield of Achilles within the Iliad’, Greece and Rome 27 (1980), 1–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Finley concedes that ‘there are lengthy arguments, as between Achilles and Agamemnon, or between Telemachus and the suitors’. But these, he claims, ‘are quarrels, not discussions, in which each side seeks to overpower the other by threats, and to win over the assembled multitude by emotional appeal, by harangue, and by warning’ (World, p. 114). The implication, I take it, is that the quarrel of Iliad 1 does not involve the conflict of different principles, but only a collision between Achilles' and Agamemnon's quests for one and the same goal: honour. This account has some attractions. But it runs into difficulty as soon as one inquires: what are we to say about the critic who asks himself ‘Is Achilles or Agamemnon right?’? The critic could not avoid describing and assessing the quarrel in terms of conflicting reasons — reasons actually offered or capable of being offered in justification or censure of the protagonists’ behaviour. How else could he be a critic? It cannot be denied that the critic appears often enough in the Iliad: Nestor in 1.254–84 and 9.103–13 is only the earliest of his incarnations. The main thesis I am going to argue in this section of the paper could be put as a point about the protagonist and the critic: Finley's conception of the heroic code is informed exclusively by the protagonist's viewpoint; a more adequate account will need to accommodate the critic's viewpoint too, not least because the protagonist is expected to exercise the euboulia of the critic.

20 The Iliad's imaginative sympathies, like The Song of Roland's, are with the rash young men who are the focus of the narrative and whose rashness indeed sustains it. But the heroic ethic is not entirely geared to their point of view: it demands an old head on young shoulders. Probably it would only occur to someone middle-aged to write a paper on a poem about youth pointing this out.

21 World, p. 113.

22 I am following Gisela Striker's fascinating paper on Antipater's subtle defence of the coherence of Stoic ethics against Academic criticism: see ‘Antipater, or the Art of Living’, in The Norms of Nature, ed. Schofield, M. and Striker, G. (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar. There is, of course, a more general affinity between the views of life characteristic of Stoicism and the Iliad, noted e.g. by Griffin, , Homer, p. 40Google Scholar, despite the massive difference between the optimism of Cleanthes' Hymn to Zeus, vv. 1–6 (SVF i. 537), and the pessimism of the Homeric model of vv. 4–5, 17.446–7.

23 World, pp. 115–16.

24 On propriety see Long, A. A., ‘Morals and values in Homer’, JHS 90 (1970), 129–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Cf. Heraclitus fr. 18 [KRS 210]: ⋯⋯ν μ⋯ ἔλπηται ⋯νέλπιστον οὐκ ⋯ξενρήει, ⋯νεξερεύνητον ⋯⋯ν κα⋯ ἄπορον (‘If one does not expect the unexpected one will not find it out, since it is not to be searched out, and is difficult to compass’).

26 It will by now be apparent that on my account the Homeric ideal of the hero prefigures the Aristotelian phronimos. I have said and shall say nothing about Aristotle's conception of euboulia (for which see EN VI 9 (1142a 32–b 33); cf. (on deliberative oratory) Rhet. I 4–6). But in a sense the whole paper is an Aristotelian reading of the Iliad.

27 But the argument of this section does not depend on the truth of this claim.

28 Reinhardt, K., Die Ilias and ihr Diehter (Göttingen, 1961), 272–7Google Scholar; Redfield, , Nature and Culture, pp. 143–53Google Scholar. The quotations that follow are from p. 143 of Redfield's discussion.

29 This is the suggestion of Farron, S. in his interesting article on Hector's mediocrity as a warrior, ‘The character of Hector in the Iliad’, Acta Classica 21 (1978), 39–57, at p. 49 n. 35Google Scholar: ‘It is possible that the reason why Euphorbus…is killed soon after he performs his great deed [sc. of wounding Patroclus] is that originally he did not exist in the tradition but was introduced precisely in order to diminish Hector's accomplishments. Since there were no traditional stories about him, he was eliminated after he had served his purpose’.

30 At 12.211–15 Polydamas says (according to the textus receptus): ‘Hector, always you rebuke me in assemblies, although my counsel is good — since it is not in the least seemly for one of the people (δ⋯μον ⋯⋯ντα) to speak beside the mark, neither in council nor in war, but always to increase your power. But now once again I will speak out as seems to me to be best’. On the ground that Polydamas is a noble, not a commoner, Allen, T. W. (CR 20 (1906), 5)Google Scholar proposed to emend δ⋯μον to δήμον', from δήμων (otherwise not attested), and meaning ‘knowing’, ‘prudent’. This was a desperate remedy for the real problem that Polydamas seems to refer to himself as a commoner if δ⋯μον is read. I think the solution (which was suggested to me by James Diggle) is to take his words as bitterly sarcastic: ‘since…power’ represents the attitude to himself that Polydamas takes to underlie Hector's rebukes — Polydamas is as good as a commoner, whose job if he speaks at all is to support Hector's cause with appropriate deference, not to say anything ‘beside the mark’, i.e. anything independent which might not be in line with Hector's own view. Redfield, (Nature and Culture, p. 144)Google Scholar avoids the difficulty by translating the received text differently: ‘Since it suits you not at all that our speeches differ among the folk’. But I cannot see how to get that out of the Greek.

31 See Reinhardt, , Die Ilias und ihr Dichter, pp. 273–5Google Scholar, followed by Erbse, H., ‘Ettore nell' Iliade’, Studi Classici e Orientali 27 (1978), 13–34, at pp. 19–20Google Scholar

32 Erbse (op. cit. pp. 20–2) ingeniously argues that Hector is not here criticised for misjudgement: he has well-founded tactical and strategic reasons, presented in his reply to Polydamas (18.285–309), for rejecting his advice; he merely labours under forgivable ignorance of the divine plan for Troy. Erbse then (p. 23) explains 22.104 away as a sort of representation of what Hector fears will be the Trojan view of his generalship. This interpretation perversely alters the natural meaning of both 18.310–13 and 22.104. Certainly Hector has a military rationale for the course he advocates at 18.285–309: it is just not a very sensible one in the immediate circumstances. Redfield, (Nature and Culture, pp. 152–3)Google Scholar has a much better balanced treatment of the issue.

33 World, pp. 116–17. For discussion of patriotism in Homer see e.g. Greenhalgh, P. A. L., ‘Patriotism in the Homeric world’, Historia 21 (1972), 528–37Google Scholar; Scully, S., ‘The polis in Homer: a definition and interpretation’, Ramus 10 (1981), 1–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Patriotism is possible without the state, which, as Finley rightly holds, is what the Homeric polis is not (for criteria of statehood see Runciman, W. G., ‘Origins of states: the case of archaic Greece’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 24 (1982), 351–77)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Erbse, op. cit. pp. 23–4,29–32.

35 as See e.g. Long, A. A., Hellenistic Philosophy (London, 1974), 189–99Google Scholar.

36 See especially ch. 3, ‘The hero’, of Nature and Culture.

37 Homer on Life and Death, p. 74 n. 46 and pp. 145–6 with n. 6.

38 Homer, p. 43.

39 For discussion of this speech see Fenik, B. C., ‘Stylization and variety: four monologues in the Iliad’, in Fenik, (ed.) Homer: Tradition and Invention (Leiden, 1978)Google Scholar; and Sharples, R. W., ‘“But why has my spirit spoken with me thus?” Homeric decision-making’, Greece and Rome 30 (1983), 1–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Nature and Culture, p. 85.

41 Adkins, A. W. H., ‘Values, goals, and emotions in the Iliad’, CP 77 (1982), 292–326, at p. 298Google Scholar.

42 Cf. in general Griffin, , Homer on Life and Death, ch. 1Google Scholar (‘Symbolic scenes and significant objects’).

43 World, p. 115.

44 The Nature of Greek Myths, p. 288.

45 Nature and Culture, pp. 110–11.

46 It is strange that, of all Nestor's exercises in counsel, his advice to build the wall should meet with Finley's special approval. As Kirk says (The Songs of Homer, p. 219), ‘Nestor's original suggestion of building the wall was cursory and odd, and was associated with the proposal that the burnt bones of the Achaean dead should be collected for carrying back to their children after the war’. Kirk's new commentary on Iliad 1–4 is particularly good value on Nestor, (The Iliad: a Commentary, Vol. I: books 1–4 (Cambridge, 1985))Google Scholar. See for example his notes on 1.247–91 (pp. 78–82), 2.20–1 (p. 116), 2.76–83 (p. 123), 2.336–68 (pp. 150–5), 4.291–309 (pp. 360–3).

47 Austin, N., ‘The function of digressions in the Iliad’, in Essays on the Iliad, ed. Wright, J. (Bloomington, 1978), 70–84, at p. 75Google Scholar [reprinted from GRBS 7 (1966), 295–312Google Scholar]. This essay has many helpful things to say about Nestor's digressions, especially the one at 11.656ff. Austin suggests (p. 79) that ‘where the drama is most intense the digressions are the longest and the details the fullest’, and that ‘the length of the anecdote is in direct proportion to the necessity for persuasion at the moment’ (he thinks particularly of the story of Meleager in Book 9 and Nestor's story in Book 11, and argues that they ‘mark the most desperate stages in the deteriorating [military] situation’). The first of these propositions seems to me simply false: the drama is much more intense in the quarrel in Book 1 than it is in Book 11 at least. Austin concedes (p. 83) that ‘the digressions do not create suspense in the modern sense’ although they occur at dramatic moments. He claims, however, that prolix as they are they do represent ‘a concentration of tension’ (my italics). I think this is a false trail. As Austin himself shows, the very long anecdotes of Books 9 and 11 are designed to stop Achilles and Patroclus from concentrating on themselves and the present to the exclusion of all else, by diverting their attention to remoter times and places. The point is to induce a sense of perspective on the present which may shift their attitudes. Austin's final sentence reads (p. 84): ‘It [the Iliadic digression] brings time to a complete standstill and locks our attention unremittingly on the celebration of the present moment’. For ‘present’ read ‘past’. Pat Easterling suggests to me that we should compare e.g. the account of how Odysseus got his scar (Od. 19.383–466): a very long digression ‘poised between the moments when Eurycleia recognises the scar (vv. 392–3) and when she reacts to the recognition (vv. 467–75)’. She would ‘emphasise the significance or weight given to any episode which is embellished, whether by elaborate descriptions or by speeches’ rather than notions like tension or suspense.

48 This seems to be Adkins, ' view in CP 77 (1982), 292–326 at pp. 299 and 325Google Scholar.

49 Mackenzie, M. M., Plato on Punishment (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1981), 73–4Google Scholar.

50 The Justice of Zeus, p. 13.

51 Merit and Responsibility, p. 37.

52 JHS 90 (1970), 127Google Scholar.

53 ‘The portrayal of moral evaluation in Greek poetry’, JHS 103 (1983), 35–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 See Redfield, , Nature and Culture, pp. 94–8Google Scholar, on Agamemnon's behaviour in the quarrel.

55 Cf. Lloyd-Jones, , The Justice of Zeus, p. 14Google Scholar.

56 World, p. 115.

57 But Kirk (in the course of an interesting discussion of the Τειχοσκοπία, where Odysseus is treated as the great Greek hero) finds Odysseus, ' character ‘complex and contradictory’ (The Iliad: a Commentary, vol. I, p.287)Google Scholar. This assessment of the Iliadic Odysseus is amplified in Rutherford, R. B., ‘The philosophy of the Odyssey’, JHS 106 (1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: a rich article which explores euboulia in the Odyssey.

58 Homer on Life and Death, p. 74. The incident also recalls an earlier occasion (7.379–402) when of all the Greek leaders it is again only Diomedes who has the spirit to offer decisively defiant advice in a difficult situation. A passage which forms another interesting contrast with the behaviour of Achilles and Agamemnon in Book 1 is 8.130–71, where Diomedes, like Agamemnon, is inclined on grounds of honour to reject Nestor's advice despite acknowledging its soundness, but unlike Agamemnon is saved (from attempting single combat with Hector) by a sign from Zeus.

59 Querbach, C. A., ‘Conflicts between young and old in Homer's Iliad’, in The Conflict of Generations in Ancient Greece and Rome, ed. Bertman, S. (Amsterdam, 1976)Google Scholar.

60 But the scholiast thinks he can infer from 9.374 that Achilles was not merely practised in the martial arts but also βονλεύειν ἄριστος: so ΣbT ad loc.

61 I owe this point to Pat Easterling, who further observes that he is the first person to talk about themistes (1.237–9). The character of Achilles' entry into the action is balanced by the stress Homer lays on his withdrawal as being from ‘the assembly which brings men glory’ at 1.490. As the scholium (ΣbT) says of 1.490–1: ‘Homer knows two virtues of men, action and speech. But he gives preference to speech.’ (Here at least, we might add in qualification.)

62 Nature and Culture, p. 17.

63 I owe thanks to many friends and colleagues who have encouraged me to work out these ideas for publication. I am especially grateful to Cynthia Farrar and Robin Osborne, who gave me the opportunity to present a first version to their polis seminar in Cambridge, and to Fred Rosen, whose 1983 polis conference at the London School of Economics heard a later draft. For comments on the penultimate draft I am indebted to Pat Easterling, Geoffrey Kirk, Geoffrey Lloyd and Michael Reeve. I alone, of course, am responsible for the final outcome.