[Milton-L] RE: Dennis Danielson's quiet voice

[Carrol Cox]

jfleming at sfu.ca wrote:
> 
> But in Greek religion -- as Nietzsche points outs somewhere -- is it not
> precisely the case that the gods made you do it (whatever it was)? "He must
> have been deceived by a god," say the Greeks, at the downfall of a great
> man.

Helenn claims, and I think we are supposed to believe her, tht Aphrodite
"made her" run off with Paris, and whenn he apologizes to Achilles
Agamemnon similarly blames a god. Some critic (Lattimore? Knox?) points
out that only human action  in the Iliad is signficant because humans
die; the gods' immortality trivializes their actions.

Achilles commits no Aristotelian error; he does NOT bring on his own
tragedy; the tragic actionn is his bearing of the tragedy imposed on him
by forces beyond his control. Most wonderfully in his recognition of the
shared fates of Priam and his own father, but also in his magnificence
in the conduct of the funeral games, at a point when he is still
dominated by the rage and grief at the death of Patroclus.

And the ending is beautiful beyond words:
			And once they'd heaped the mound
They turned back home to Troy, and gathering once again
they shared a splendid funeral feast in Hector's honor,
Held in the house of Priam, king by the will of Zeus.

And so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses.

One could almost use as a commentary on this, KM's:

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they
please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves,
but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from
the past."

Carrol