On Monday, I mentioned a passage that intrigued me in Plutarch’s life of Coriolanus. I find the Lives in general pretty entertaining (which is why I’m still reading them: duh) and informative (because I know almost zero about Roman history, while my knowledge of Greek history is awfully spotty). In addition the “historical facts†of his biographies (depending on what you think of his accuracy), Plutarch also has some awesome digressions about history, character, and, in this case, the role of the gods and free will in Homer’s poetry.
Discussing how Coriolanus’ mom and wife got it into their heads to gather the women of Rome and implore the general directly to spare the city that ostracized him, Plutarch ascribes a sort of divine inspiration, which leads to the passage that I mentioned:
[A]t last a thing happened not unlike what we so often find represented — without, however, being accepted as true by people in general — in Homer. On some great and unusual occasion we find him say, “But him the blue-eyed goddess did inspire;†and elsewhere, “But some immortal turned my mind away, / To think what others of the deed would say;†and again, “Were’t his own thought or were’t a god’s command?”People are apt, in such passages, to censure and disregard the poet, as if, by the introduction of mere impossibilities and idle fictions, he were denying the action of a man’s own deliberate though and free choice; which is not, in the least, the case in Homer’s representation, where the ordinary, probably, and habitual conclusions that common reason leads to are continually ascribed to our own direct agency. He certainly says frequently enough, “But I consulted with my own great soul;†or, as in another passage, “He spoke. Achilles, with quick pain possessed, / Resolved two purposes in his strong breast;†and in a third, “—Yet never to her wishes won / The just mind of the brave Bellerophon.â€
But where the act is something out of the way and extraordinary, and seems in a manner to demand some impulse of divine possession and sudden inspiration to account for it, here he does introduce divine agency, not to destroy, but to prompt the human will; not to create in us another agency, but offering images to stimulate our own; images that in no sort or kind make our action involuntary, but give occasion rather to spontaneous action, aided and sustained by feelings of confidence and hope. For either we must totally dismiss and exclude divine influences from every kind of causality and origination in what we do, or else what other way can we conceive in which divine aid and cooperation can act? Certainly we cannot suppose that the divine beings actually and literally turn our bodies and direct our hands and our feet this way and that, to do what is right: it is obvious that they must actuate the practical and elective element of our nature, by certain initial occasions, by images presented to the imagination, and thoughts suggested to the mind, such either as to excite it to, or avert and withhold it from, any particular course.
I still have problems with understanding the instances in Homer where the gods take physical roles in the action (especially in the Iliad), but I thought this was a pretty graceful effort at reconciling the role of gods in free will.
As a bonus, it ties back to the previous post I wrote about Plutarch’s life of Pericles. Here, he explains that the role of his Lives is to inspire virtue by recounting the virtues:
[V]irtue, by the bare statement of its actions, can so affect men’s minds as to create at once both admiration of the things done and desire to imitate the doers of them. The goods of fortune we would possess and would enjoy; those of virtue we long to practice and exercise; we are content to receive the former from others, the latter we wish others to experience from us.
It sounds to me like he’s saying that the gods are responsible for inspiring our extraordinary actions through their images, but also that the Lives can help inspire the mundane (earthly) virtues. Let me know if it sounds like that to you, esp. if you’ve read more of the Lives and can clue me in on some of the meta of what Plutarch’s doing.
is. There’s a neat passage in this bio that I’ll transcribe and post a little later, about the role of the gods in human action.
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