Thematic Worldview Essay 2 (Unit 5 – 175 points)

Overview

Write an academic essay illustrating how the literary texts for Units 3-5 represent the influence of worldviews on specific themes.

Structure

This should be an academic essay with an introduction, body, and conclusion. The essay should be approximately 1,000 words, with 8 paragraphs of approximately 125 words each. The paragraphs should adhere to the following structure.

Introduction: The introduction should include a thesis statement that enumerates three themes that explore in the essay: 1) romantic love, 2) punishment for sin, and 3) internal conflict.

Body: The body of the essay should reflect the structure outlined in the thesis, with two paragraphs devoted to each theme.

Body paragraphs 1 and 2: Illustrate how the literary texts these units conceive of romantic love, focusing especially on the sonnets by Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Donne. Using examples from Petrarch’s poems, explain the Petrarchan view of love. Make sure not only to provide quotations from the poems, but also to comment on these passages and explain their significance for the reader. Address how Shakespeare challenges the Petrarchan worldview in his sonnets, and explain how his conception of love differs from Petrarch’s. Finally, examine Donne’s transposition of the love sonnet form into a religious context. Explain how Donne transforms the sonnet through his applying the Christian worldview to this form.

Body paragraphs 3 and 4: Examine the theme of punishment for sin in the literary texts from Units 3, 4, and 5, paying special attention to Dante’s Inferno, Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s Tale,” Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Examine the theme of sin and punishment in these texts, and explain how each author represents the theme of punishment for sin. Examine how the texts with a more overt Christian worldview (The Inferno and Paradise Lost) differ in their representation of this theme in contrast with those with a more secular setting (“The Pardoner’s Tale” and Hamlet).

Body paragraphs 5 and 6: Finally, examine the theme of internal conflict in the texts for these units. Explain how the texts from the Middle Ages and before offered less insight into the thoughts and motivations of characters. Contrast these more simplistic characters with the dramatic scenes of internal conflict we see in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Milton’s Satan. Explain to the reader what these two characters struggle with, and use passages from the texts to illustrate why these conflicts makes the characters compelling. Conclusion: The conclusion should summarize and restate the central claims of the paper.

Requirements

The essay should be a minimum of 1,000 words, be APA-compliant, and include a title page, appropriate citations, and references. Please include at least five direct quotations from the texts we have read.

Sources

Cite any of the course texts and any academic article(s) from the Library databases in the essay. All references must by cited correctly in the text and be included in the references page. Do not use online or printed sources beyond the parameters outlined above.

McAllister, E. J. World literature from a Christian perspective: Volume I. UnpublishedManuscript. *PDF is attached.

Puchner, M., Akbari, S. C., Denecke, W., Fuchs, B., Levine, C., Lewis, P., & Wilson, E. (2014).The Norton anthology of western literature: Volume I (9th ed.). New York, NY: W. W.Norton.ISBN: 978-0-393-93364-2

The Holy Bible

Also attached is our schools APA QUICK FORMATTING GUIDE

BU

APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE

1

Updated 9/10/2018

APA QUICK REFERENCE STYLE AND FORMATTING GUIDE

2 0 1 8

BELHAVEN UNIVERSITY
1500 Peachtree Street

Jackson, Mississippi 39202

 

BU APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE 2

Updated 9/10/2018

APA Quick Reference Style and Formatting Guide – 2018

Adult Studies Editors: Dr. Paul Criss and Dr. Everett Wade.

Adult Studies Reviewers: Dr. Kotina Hall, Ron Pirtle, Dr. Kim Priesmeyer, and Paige Walters.

Adapted from Belhaven Graduate School of Education Quick Guide, editors Dr. David Hand, Dr. Cynthia
Wilkins, Dr. Catherine Wasson, and Dr. Rebekah Chiasson.

Belhaven University – Jackson, Mississippi

Developed and adapted from the (2009) Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association
(6th ed.). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.

BU APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE 3

Updated 9/10/2018

TABLE OF CONTENTS

General Guidelines
4

Underlining vs. Italics 4

Page Numbers 4

Page Headers 4

Section Headings 5

Paragraph Indentation 5

Title Page 5

Spelling Bible and Biblical 5

Spelling Christian worldview 5

Citations

6

In-Text Citations: The Basics 6

Direct Quotations 6

Paraphrasing and Summarizing 7

Citing Various Types of Authors 7

Citing Indirect Sources 8

Citing Electronic Sources 8

Citing the Bible 8

Citing Yourself 9

References

10

Using Online Database Citation Tools 10

Entries for Different Types of Authors 11

Articles in Periodicals 13

Books 14

Electronic Sources 14

Quoting and Paraphrasing

16

Quotations 16

Paraphrases 17

Examples 17

Example Materials

19

Sample APA Pages 19

Example APA References by Type 22

Preparing an Essay

24

Introduction 24

Body Paragraphs 24

Conclusion 25

BU APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE 4

Updated 9/10/2018

GENERAL GUIDELINES
Papers are to be typed, double-spaced on standard-sized paper (8.5″ x 11″) with 1″ margins on all sides.
APA recommends using 12 pt. Times New Roman font. Belhaven requires that candidates use 12pt
Times New Roman.

Underlining vs. Italics
Use italics rather than underlining. Do not use the functions of your word processor to create underlining,
or other special fonts or styles of type.

Page Numbers
Number all pages except those for artwork in the upper right-hand corner. Begin numbering pages with
the title page. The number should appear at least one inch from the right-hand edge of the page and on
the same line as the Header. See below for instructions on how to add page number and header properly in
Microsoft Word.

Page Headers
Pages occasionally are separated, so identify each page with the header flush left and page number flush
right. To add a header to your paper in Microsoft Word 2007, complete the following steps:

1. Open a new document in Word, and click the “Insert” tab.
2. In the Header and Footer section, click on “Header,” and choose the first option, “Blank.”
3. Within this Toolbar, go to the “Options” section, and check the box next to “Different First Page.”
4. Click inside of the brackets in the upper left-hand corner that read “[Type here]” and type the words

“Running head” (without quotations), followed by a colon and a shortened or full version of the title
of your paper in all caps (up to 50 characters in length).

5. Click the tab button on your keyboard twice, and the cursor should move to the far right corner.
6. At the far left of the “Header and Footer” toolbar, click on “Page Number,” and scroll to the fourth

option, “Current Position.” Choose the first option, “Plain Number,” and the number 1 will then
appear in the top left corner of your title page.

7. Then, proceed the second page of the paper.
8. Click on your title, and delete “Running head:” from the header. Page 2 and onward should now

just contain the abbreviated, all-caps title of your paper, while “Running head:” remains on the title
page.

If 12 pt. Times New Roman is not set as the default font in Microsoft Word, you will need to highlight the
header text and page number and change the font to this. The title page header must include the words
“Running head:” followed by the shortened paper title in all caps. The words “Running head:” do not
appear in the header anywhere else in the document.

BU APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE 5

Updated 9/10/2018

Section Headings
Title of paper: Center the title of the paper on the first full page of text right below the page header. Use
upper and lower case lettering. The title should not be boldface or underlined. If the title is longer than one
line, continue to next line and single space (do not double space the title). If there is a colon in the title,
divide the title at the colon and complete the title on the next line.

First-Level Headings: First level headings are centered and in boldface. The major headings should be
informative and concise, conveying the structure of the paper. For example:

First-Level Heading Centered and Boldface

Second-Level Headings: Second-level headings are flush left and boldface. For example:

Second-Level Heading Flush Left and Boldface

Undergraduate and master degree level programs only utilize two levels of headings: first-level and second-
level. Specialists and doctoral programs utilize all five levels of headings.

Paragraph Indentation
Indent the first line of every paragraph with a five-space indent. Use the tab function if you are using a word
processor or computer. Most word processors’ or computers’ default setting is acceptable.

Title Page
The title page should contain the title of the paper, the author’s name, and the institutional affiliation (in that
order). Include the page header (described above) flush left with the page number flush right at the top of
the page. Start the first line of the title by counting 17 single spaces down from the Page Header. Center
the title, the author’s name, and the institution’s name.

Double space between the title, author’s name, and the institution. If the title exceeds more than one line,
double space the title name. If the title has a colon in the name, this is the best place to break the title into
two lines, space down from the colon and then complete the title. Next double space down to add the
institution’s name. (See the sample Title page at the back of this Handbook.)

Spelling Bible and biblical
The word “Bible,” when it refers to the sacred book is a proper noun and is always capitalized. “Holy Bible”
and “Scripture” are also proper nouns and should always be capitalized. The word “biblical” is not a proper
noun and is not capitalized.

Spelling Christian worldview
Belhaven University renders the term as one word: Christian worldview, not Christian world view.

BU APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE 6

Updated 9/10/2018

CITATIONS
What follows are some general guidelines for referring to the works of others in your essay.
Note: APA style requires authors to use the past tense or present perfect tense when using signal phrases
to describe earlier research, for example, “Jones (1998) found” or “Jones (1998) has found.”

In-Text Citations: The Basics
When using APA format, follow the author-date method of in-text citation. This means that the author’s last
name and the year of publication for the source should appear in the text, for example, (Jones, 1998), and
a complete reference should appear in the reference list at the end of the paper. If you are referring to an
idea from another work but NOT directly quoting the material, or making reference to an entire book, article
or other work, you only have to make reference to the author and year of publication and not the page
number in your in-text reference. All sources that are cited in the text must appear in the reference list at
the end of the paper.

What follows are some rules for in-text citation capitalization, quotes, and italics:

• Always capitalize proper nouns, including author names and initials: D. Jones.
• If you refer to the title of a source within your paper, capitalize all words that are four letters long or

greater within the title of a source: Permanence and Change. Exceptions apply to short words that
are verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs: Writing New Media, There Is Nothing Left to
Lose. (Note: in your References list, only the first word of a title will be capitalized: Writing new
media.)

• When capitalizing titles, capitalize both words in a hyphenated compound word: Natural-Born
Cyborgs.

• Capitalize the first word after a dash or colon: “Defining Film Rhetoric: The Case of Hitchcock’s
Vertigo.”

• Italicize titles of longer works such as books, edited collections, movies, television series,
documentaries, or albums, e.g.: The Closing of the American Mind.

• Put quotation marks around the titles of shorter works such as journal articles, articles from edited
collections, television series episodes, and song titles, e.g., “Multimedia Narration: Constructing
Possible Worlds.”

Direct Quotations
When directly quoting from a work, you will need to include the author, year of publication, and the page
number for the reference (preceded by “p.”). Introduce the quotation with a signal phrase that includes the
author’s last name followed by the date of publication in parentheses.

According to Jones (1998), “Students often had difficulty using APA style, especially

when it was their first time” (p. 199).

If the author is not named in a signal phrase, place the author’s last name, the year of publication, and
the page number in parentheses after the quotation.

She stated, “Students often had difficulty using APA style” (Jones, 1998, p. 199), but she

did not offer an explanation as to why.

BU APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE 7

Updated 9/10/2018

Paraphrasing and Summarizing
If you are paraphrasing an idea from another work, you only have to make reference to the author and
year of publication in your in-text reference, but APA guidelines encourage you to also provide the page
number (although it is not required.)

According to Jones (1998), APA style is a difficult citation format for first-time learners.

APA style is difficult for first-time learners (p. 199).

Citing Various Types of Authors
A Work by Two Authors: Name both authors in the signal phrase or in the parentheses each time you cite

the work. Use the word “and” between the authors’ names within the text of a sentence:

Research by Wegener and Petty (1994) supports this claim.

Use the ampersand in the parentheses at the end of a sentence or paragraph:

These conclusions were supported by many other researchers (Wegener & Petty, 1994).

A Work by Three to Five Authors: List all the authors in the signal phrase or in parentheses the first time
you cite the source.

(Kernis, Cornell, Sun, Berry, & Harlow, 1993)

In subsequent citations, only use the first author’s last name followed by “et al.” in the signal phrase or in
parentheses. In et al., et should not be followed by a period.

(Kernis et al., 1993)

Six or More Authors: Use the first author’s name followed by et al. in the signal phrase or in parentheses.

Harris et al. (2001) argued…

(Harris et al., 2001)

Organization as an Author: If the author is an organization or a government agency, mention the
organization in the signal phrase or in the parenthetical citation the first time you cite the source.

According to the American Psychological Association (2000), …

If the organization has a well-known abbreviation, include the abbreviation in brackets the first time the
source is cited and then use only the abbreviation in later citations.

First citation: (Mothers Against Drunk Driving [MADD], 2000)

Second citation: (MADD, 2000)

BU APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE 8

Updated 9/10/2018

Two or More Works in the Same Parentheses: When your parenthetical citation includes two or more
works, order them the same way they appear in the reference list, separated by a semi-colon.

(Berndt, 2002; Harlow, 1983)

Authors with the Same Last Name: To prevent confusion, use first initials with the last names.

(E. Johnson, 2001; L. Johnson, 1998)

Citing Indirect Sources
If you use a source that was cited in another source, name the original source in your signal phrase.
List the secondary source in your reference list and include the secondary source in the parentheses.

Shelton argued that … (as cited in Hawkins, 2016, p. 112).

Citing Electronic Sources
Cite an electronic document, if possible, the same as any other document by using the author-date style.
Note: Never use the page numbers of Web pages you print out; different computers print Web pages with
different pagination.

Kenneth (2014) explained…

Citing the Bible
Identify the version of the Bible used in the first citation of the text when directly quoting from Scripture.

Example:

Paul writes, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13,

New King James Version).

Spell out the version – do not use acronyms for versions. Do not identify the version of the Bible unless
directly quoting from the Bible. If only summarizing, paraphrasing, or referencing, then only identify the
book, chapter, and verse.

Example:

James emphasizes that though we are saved through faith and not works, a living faith

should naturally produce good works (James 2:14-26).

Note: Do not identify the version of the Bible in subsequent references unless and when a different version
is cited or referenced in the text.

BU APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE 9

Updated 9/10/2018

Do Not Reference the Bible On the Reference Page. According to the Publication Manual of the
American Psychological Association, 6th ed., 2009, section 6.18, reference entries are not needed for the
Bible and other major classical works.

Citing Yourself
Students should not recycle assignments from previous courses. Furthermore, even if you would like to use
material from a previous paper, Belhaven recommends that you paraphrase instead of directly quoting from
a previous assignment.

Doe (2016) explained that “the previous literature on the virtues of solar energy has

largely ignored the problem of toxic metals” (p. 3).

The reference entry would follow the APA style for unpublished manuscripts.

Doe, J. R. (2016). Problems with Solar Energy. Unpublished manuscript, Belhaven

University.

BU APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE 10

Updated 9/10/2018

REFERENCES
Your reference list should appear at the end of your paper. It provides the information necessary for a
reader to locate and retrieve any source you cite in the body of the paper. Each source you cite in the
paper must appear in your reference list; likewise, each entry in the reference list must be cited in your text.

Your references should begin on a new page separate from the text of the essay; label this page
“References” centered at the top of the page (do not bold, underline, or use quotation marks for the title).
All text should be double-spaced just like the rest of your essay.
• All lines after the first line of each entry in your reference list should be indented one-half inch from the

left margin. This is called hanging indentation.
• Authors’ names are inverted (last name first); give the last name and initials for all authors of a particular

work for up to and including seven authors. If the work has more than seven authors, list the first six
authors and then use ellipses after the sixth author’s name. After the ellipses, list the last author’s name
of the work.

• Reference list entries should be alphabetized by the last name of the first author of each work.
• For multiple articles by the same author, or authors listed in the same order, list the entries in

chronological order, from earliest to most recent.
• Present the journal title in full.
• Maintain the punctuation and capitalization that is used by the journal in its title.
• Capitalize all major words in journal titles.
• When referring to books, chapters, articles, or Web pages, capitalize only the first letter of the first word

of a title and subtitle, the first word after a colon or a dash in the title, and proper nouns. Do not capitalize
the first letter of the second word in a hyphenated compound word.

• Italicize titles of longer works such as books and journals.
• Do not italicize, underline, or put quotes around the titles of shorter works such as journal articles or

essays in edited collections.

Using Online Database Citation Tools
The online research databases available through the Belhaven Library page provide a tool to generate
reference page entries for sources automatically. For Gale databases, this tool can be found on the right-
hand side “Tools” menu under “Citation Tools.” For EBSCOhost databases, a similar tool is listed under the
“Cite” option on the right-hand side “Tools” menu. When using these tools, students should take several
precautions to ensure that the reference entries are indeed correct and reproduced properly on their
references page. Students should remember that the formatting of the reference page entry is ultimately
their responsibility and not that of the citation tool.

Follow these steps to ensure your generated citation is correct:
1. Check to make sure that APA formatting is selected for the reference page entry, since many

databases have other options such as Chicago Style or MLA.
2. Once you have copied the entry, be sure to merge the formatting with your document when pasting the

entry. To do this, right click on the space where you would like to paste the entry, navigate down to
“Paste Options,” and then choose “Merge Formatting.”

3. After doing this, the hanging indent of the entry may still be malformed. Check to make sure this is not
the case, and fix the indent if necessary.

BU APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE 11

Updated 9/10/2018

Entries for Different Types of Authors
The following rules for handling works by a single author or multiple authors apply to all APA-style
references in your reference list, regardless of the type of work (book, article, electronic resource,
etc.)

Single Author: Last name first, followed by author initials.

Berndt, T. J. (2002). Friendship quality and social development. Current Directions in

Psychological Science, 11, 7-10.

Two Authors: List by their last names and initials. Use the ampersand instead of “and.”

Wegener, D. T., & Petty, R. E. (1994). Mood management across affective states: The

hedonic contingency hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66,

1034-1048.

Three to Seven Authors: List by last names and initials; commas separate author names, while the last
author name is preceded again by ampersand.

Kernis, M. H., Cornell, D. P., Sun, C. R., Berry, A., Harlow, T., & Bach, J. S. (1993).

There’s more to self-esteem than whether it is high or low: The importance of stability

of self-esteem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 1190-1204.

More Than Seven Authors: List by last names and initials; commas separate author names. After the

sixth author’s name, use an ellipses in place of the author names. Then provide the final author name.

There should be no more than seven names.

Miller, F. H., Choi, M. J., Angeli, L. L., Harland, A. A., Stamos, J. A., Thomas, S. T., . . .

Rubin, L. H. (2009). Web site usability for the blind and low-vision user. Technical

Communication, 57, 323-335.

Organization as Author: Simply list the organization in place of an author’s name.

American Psychological Association. (2003).

BU APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE 12

Updated 9/10/2018

Unknown Author: begin with the title of the work.

Merriam-Webster’s collegiate dictionary (10th ed.).(1993). Springfield, MA: Merriam-

Webster.

NOTE: When your essay includes parenthetical citations of sources with no author named, use a shortened
version of the source’s title instead of an author’s name. Use quotation marks and italics as appropriate.
For example, parenthetical citations of the source above would appear as follows: (Merriam-Webster’s,
1993).

Two or More Works by the Same Author: Use the author’s name for all entries and list the entries by the
year. The earliest comes first.

Berndt, T. J. (1981).

Berndt, T . J. (1999).

When an author appears both as a sole author and, in another citation, as the first author of a group, list
the one-author entries first.

Berndt, T. J. (1999). Friends’ influence on students’ adjustment to school. Educational

Psychologist, 34, 15-28.

Berndt, T. J., & Keefe, K. (1995). Trends in adolescent education. Child Development,

66, 1312-1329.

References that have the same first author and different second and/or third authors are arranged
alphabetically by the last name of the second author, or the last name of the third if the first and second
authors are the same.

Wegener, D. T., Kerr, N. L., Fleming, M. A., & Petty, R. E. (2000). Flexible corrections

of juror judgments: Implications for jury instructions. Psychology, Public Policy, and

Law, 6, 629-654.

Wegener, D. T., Petty, R. E., & Klein, D. J. (1994). Effects of mood on high elaboration

attitude change: The mediating role of likelihood judgments. European Journal of

Social Psychology, 24, 25-43.

BU APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE 13

Updated 9/10/2018

Two or More Works by the Same Author in the Same Year: If you are using more than one reference by
the same author (or the same group of authors listed in the same order) published in the same year,
organize them in the reference list alphabetically by the title of the article or chapter. Then assign letter
suffixes to the year. Refer to these sources in your essay as they appear in your reference list, e.g.: “Berdnt
(1981a) makes similar claims…”

Berndt, T. J. (1981a). Age changes and changes over time in prosocial intentions and

behavior between friends. Developmental Psychology, 17, 408-416.

Berndt, T. J. (1981b). Effects of friendship on prosocial intentions and behavior. Child

Development, 52, 636-643.

Articles in Periodicals
Basic form: APA style dictates that authors are named last name followed by initials; publication year goes
between parentheses, followed by a period. The title of the article is in sentence-case, meaning only the
first word and proper nouns in the title are capitalized. The periodical title is run in title case, and is followed
by the volume number which, with the title, is also italicized. If a DOI has been assigned to the article that
you are using, you should include this after the page numbers for the article. If no DOI has been assigned
and you are accessing the periodical online, use the URL of the website from which you are retrieving the
periodical.

Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (Year). Title of article. Title of Periodical,

volume number(issue number), pages. doi:http://dx.doi.org/xx.xxx/yyyyy

Article in Journal Paginated by Volume: Journals that are paginated by volume begin with page one in
issue one, and continue numbering issue two where issue one ended, etc.

Harlow, H. F. (1983). Fundamentals for preparing psychology journal articles. Journal of

Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 55, 893-896.

Article in Journal Paginated by Issue: Journals paginated by issue begin with page one every issue;
therefore, the issue number should be indicated in parentheses after the volume. The parentheses and
issue number are not italicized or underlined.

Scruton, R. (1996). The eclipse of listening. The New Criterion, 15(3), 5-13.

BU APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE 14

Updated 9/10/2018

Books
Basic Format for Books

Author, A. A. (Year of publication). Title of work: Capital letter also for subtitle.

Location: Publisher.

Note: For “Location,” you should always list the city and the state using the two letter postal abbreviation
without periods (New York, NY).

Calfee, R. C., & Valencia, R. R. (1991). APA guide to preparing manuscripts for journal

publication. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Edition Other Than the First

Helfer, M. E., Kempe, R. S., & Krugman, R. D. (2007). The battered child (5th ed.).

Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Electronic Sources
Please note: There are no spaces used with brackets in APA. When possible, include the year, month, and
date in references. If the month and date are not available, use the year of publication.

Article from an Online Periodical: Online articles follow the same guidelines for printed articles. Include
all information the online host makes available, including an issue number in parentheses.

Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Date of publication). Title of article. Title of Online

Periodical, volume number(issue number if available). Retrieved from

http://www.someaddress.com/full/url/

Baker, M. J. (2012). Understanding the living Web. Website Journal, 149. Retrieved

from http://www.websitejournal.com/articles/understanding

http://www.someaddress.com/full/url/

http://www.someaddress.com/full/url/

BU APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE 15

Updated 9/10/2018

Online Scholarly Journal Articles: Referencing DOIs: Because online materials can potentially change
URLs, APA recommends providing a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), when it is available, as opposed to the
URL. DOIs are an attempt to provide stable, long-lasting links for online articles. They are unique to their
documents and consist of a long alphanumeric code. Many-but not all-publishers will provide an article’s
DOI on the first page of the document.

Please note: In March of 2017 the formatting recommendations for DOIs changed. DOIs are now rendered
as an alphanumeric string which acts as an active link. See the example below.

Article From an Online Periodical with DOI Assigned

Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Date of publication). Title of article. Title of Journal,

volume number, page range. https://doi.org/10.0000/arc0000000

Brownlie, D. (2007). Toward effective poster presentations: An annotated bibliography.

European Journal of Marketing, 41, 1245-1283. https://doi.org/10.1037/arc0000014

Article From an Online Periodical with no DOI Assigned: Online scholarly journal articles without a DOI
require the URL of the journal home page. Remember that one goal of citations is to provide your readers
with enough information to find the article; providing the journal home page aids readers in this process.

Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Date of publication). Title of article. Title of Journal,

volume number. Retrieved from http://www.journalhomepage.com/full/url/

Kenneth, I. A. (2000). A Buddhist response to the nature of human rights. Journal of

Buddhist Ethics, 8. Retrieved from http://www.cac.psu.edu/jbe/twocont.html

http://www.journalhomepage.com/full/url/

BU APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE 16

Updated 9/10/2018

QUOTING AND PARAPHRASING

The preparation of a formal paper places a great deal of responsibility on the individual student.
That responsibility is measured by the way the student utilizes ideas and written material prepared by
others, as well as the way such materials are represented by the student in the paper. Failure to
observe commonly accepted professional standards in the preparation of a paper most frequently is
labeled as plagiarism. Plagiarism may result in the student’s receiving an “F” for the course.

Quotations
Material that has been written and published by another author must be handled as a quotation when it
appears as a part of another person’s work. In this case, when you, as a student, are utilizing printed
material from another author, you must indicate that it is a direct quotation. This can be done in one of
two ways. If the quotation is less than forty words, put quotation marks around the material. If the
material is lengthier, it is appropriate to indent the material in a block quotation. Block quotations should
be indented one-half inch from the left margin, double-spaced, and not placed within quotation marks.
In both cases, it is necessary to give a proper citation including the name of the author, the year the
material was published, and the page or pages on which the material can be found.

Paraphrases

Paraphrasing is when you use the ideas of others, and it most often involves the rewording and
restructuring of written material to fit your own style of writing. The ideas contained therein, however,
are those that are usually already written and published. The reason for using paraphrasing is twofold:
(1) to put the idea into your own words and (2) to give credibility and authority to the idea. For
whatever reason material is paraphrased, a citation should be properly noted.

Paraphrasing is a valuable skill because:

• it is better than quoting information from an undistinguished passage.
• it helps you control the temptation to quote too much.
• the mental process required for successful paraphrasing helps you to grasp the full meaning of

the original.
6 Steps to Effective Paraphrasing

1. Reread the original passage until you understand its full meaning.
2. Set the original aside, and write your paraphrase on a note card.
3. Jot down a few words below your paraphrase to remind you later how you envision using this

material. At the top of the note card, write a key word or phrase to indicate the subject of your
paraphrase.

4. Check your rendition with the original to make sure that your version accurately expresses all
the essential information in a new form.

5. Use quotation marks to identify any unique term or phraseology you have borrowed exactly
from the source.

6. Record the source (including the page) on your note card so that you can credit it easily if you
decide to incorporate the material into your paper.

BU APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE 17

Updated 9/10/2018

Examples
The original passage:

Students frequently overuse direct quotation in taking notes, and as a result they overuse

quotations in the final [research] paper. Probably only about 10% of your final

manuscript should appear as directly quoted matter. Therefore, you should strive to limit

the amount of exact transcribing of source materials while taking notes.

Lester, J. D. (2012). Writing research papers. Berkeley: University of California Press.

A legitimate paraphrase:

In research papers students often quote excessively, failing to keep quoted material down

to a desirable level. Since the problem usually originates during note taking, it is essential

to minimize the material recorded verbatim (Lester, 2012, p. 46).

An acceptable summary:

Students should take just a few notes in direct quotation from sources to help minimize

the amount of quoted material in a research paper (Lester, 2012, p. 46).

A plagiarized version:

Students often use too many direct quotations when they take notes, resulting in too many

of them in the final research paper. In fact, probably only about 10% of the final copy

should consist of directly quoted material. So it is important to limit the amount of source

material copied while taking notes.

Note: Plagiarism is the act or instance of plagiarizing, to steal or pass off the ideas or words of another
as one’s own without crediting the source. Paraphrasing or quoting material without crediting the
source is plagiarism. As indicated above, plagiarism may result in the student’s receiving an “F” for
the course.

BU APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE 18

Updated 9/10/2018

Paragraph with Paraphrasing without direct quote

The author discusses the impact of boarding schools through what some

literature refers to as nine characteristics explaining the impact of such

institutions. Many of these refer to the social status of the pupils and social

standing of those who have been charged with their care. Two of the

characteristics—close student-staff relationship and dual curriculum—stand out

when accounting for what some would consider the long-term success of boarding

schools (Kahane,1988).

Paragraph with Paraphrasing with direct quotation

Kahane (1988) argues the impact of boarding schools through what some

literature refers to as nine characteristics explaining the impact of such
institutions. Many of these refer to the social status of the pupils and social
standing of those who have been charged with their care. Two of the
characteristics—close student-staff relationship and dual curriculum—stand out
when accounting for what some would consider the long-term success of boarding

schools (Kahane, 1988). Weinberg (1967) found, “Certain scholars have assumed

that boarding schools provide a consistent pedagogical environment that increases

their power to desocialize and resocialize pupils” (p. 64).

Running head: CAN MEDICATION CURE OBESITY? 1

Can Medication Cure Obesity in Children?

John Doe

Belhaven University

CAN MEDICATION CURE OBESITY? 2

Can Medication Cure Obesity in Children?

In March 2004, U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona called attention to a health

problem in the United States that, until recently, has been overlooked: childhood obesity.

Carmona said that the “astounding” 15% child obesity rate constitutes an “epidemic.” Since the

early 1980s, that rate has “doubled in children and tripled in adolescents.” Now more than 9

million children are classified as obese (Yanovski & Yanovski, 2002, p. 594). While the

traditional response to a medical epidemic is to hunt for a vaccine or a cure-all pill, childhood

obesity is more elusive. The lack of success of recent initiatives suggests that medication might

not be the answer for the escalating problem. Furthermore, a medicating approach fails to solve

other problems associated with obesity, such as poor cardiovascular health and unhealthy dietary

habits. In many cases, the side effects of weight loss drugs may even exacerbate preexisting

problems of high blood pressure and elevated heart rate. In light of the inherent problems of

fighting obesity through medication alone, medical professionals must advocate a more holistic

approach that includes diet and exercise in their strategies for reducing childhood obesity.

The widening scope of the obesity problem has prompted medical professionals to

rethink old conceptions of the disorder and its causes. As researchers Yanovski and Yanovski

(2002) have explained, obesity was once considered “either a moral failing or evidence of

underlying psychopathology” (p. 592). But this view has shifted: Many medical professionals

now consider obesity a biomedical rather than a moral condition, influenced by both genetic and

environmental factors. Yanovski and Yanovski have further noted that the development of

weight-loss medications in the early 1990s showed that “obesity should be treated in the same

manner as any other chronic disease . . . through the long-term use of medication” (p. 592). The

search for the right long-term medication has been complicated. Many of the drugs authorized by

CAN MEDICATION CURE OBESITY? 3

References

Bailey, D. R., & Kraft, J. (2015). Childhood obesity rates in secondary schools. Child

Development, 108, 162-179.

Banks, M. R. (2017). Understanding childhood obesity. Dietetics Journal, 149. Retrieved from

http://www.dietetics.com/articles/understandingobesity

Summers, D. M. (2016). An assessment of common factors in cases of childhood obesity.

Pediatric Psychology, 32, 411-436.

Yanovski, S. Z., & Yanovski, J. A. (2002). Drug therapy: Obesity. The New England Journal of

Medicine, 346, 591-602.

* Sample pages adapted from The Bedford Handbook, pp. 729-738.

BU APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE 22

EXAMPLE APA REFERENCES BY TYPE

Type of Source Sample Reference Entry (Actual references are double-spaced.)

Book, one author Warfield, C. (1998). High school teaching strategies. New Haven, CT:

Harper Collins.

Book, two authors Baxter, J. D., & Stein, G. M. (2014). Prevention and care. New York,

NY: McGraw Hill.

Book, editors in place of
authors

Kennedy, X. J., & Gioia, D. (Eds.). (2007). Literature: an introduction.

New York, NY: Longman.

Work in an Anthology Johnson, J. A. (1987). My bones are vexed. In J. Timmerman & D.

Hettinga (Eds.), In the world (pp. 232-237). Grand Rapids,

Michigan: Baker Academic.

Journal Article Drichel, S. (2008). Regarding the other: Postcolonial violations and

ethical resistance in Margaret Atwood’s work. Modern Fiction

Studies, 54, 26-49.

Journal article, read online,
without doi

Jacoby, W. G. (1994). Public attitudes toward government

spending. American Journal of Political Science, 38, 336-361.

Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.

Journal Article, read online,
with doi

Fearon, J. D., & Laitin, D. D. (2003). Ethnicity, insurgency, and civil

war. American Political Science Review, 97(1), 75-86. doi:

10.1017/S0003055403000534

BU APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE 23

Magazine Article, print

Henry, D. R., (1999, September 9). The question of gun control. Time,

178, 28-30.

Magazine Article, read
online

Henry, D. R., (1999, September 9). The question of gun control. Time,

178, 28-30. Retrieved from http://www.time.com

Newspaper Article, print

Beauchamp, D. M. (2010, November 15). Tennessee goes green. The

New York Times.

Newspaper Article, read
online

Beauchamp, D. M. (2010, November 15). Tennessee goes green. The

New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com

Web Site: no author, no
publication date.

Cystic fibrosis. (n.d.). Retrieved December 16, 2015, in Mayo Clinic

website. Retrieved from http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-

conditions/cystic-fibrosis/basics/definition/con-20013731

BU APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE 24

PREPARING A TRADITIONAL ACADEMIC ESSAY†

Part 1: The Introduction
An introduction is usually the first paragraph of your academic essay. A good introduction does two
things. For one, an effective introduction gets the reader’s attention. You can get a reader’s attention
by telling a story, providing a statistic, pointing out something strange or interesting, or providing and
discussing an interesting quote. Be interesting and find some original angle via which to engage others in
your topic. An effective introduction also provides a specific and debatable thesis statement. The
thesis statement is generally only one sentence long. A good thesis statement makes a debatable point
that someone might disagree with and argue against. It also serves as a roadmap for what you argue in
your paper. The following is an example of a first paragraph:

Preparing to be a teacher requires more than just knowing the material to be

taught. In addition to the knowledge needed to teach effectively, instructors also need a

variety of skills in order to interact successfully with students. To be an effective

teacher, one has to deal with students according to their individual needs, have

patience, and earn students’ respect rather than demanding it from them.

Note that the thesis statement (in boldface) addresses three points:

 Dealing with students according to their individual needs

 The need for patience

 Earning respect rather than demanding it
This thesis statement helps to structure the rest of the essay, as it clearly addresses three points that can
then be explained in the corresponding sections of the paper.

Part 2: The Body Paragraphs
Body paragraphs help you prove your thesis and move you along a compelling trajectory from
your introduction to your conclusion. If your thesis is a simple one, you might not need as many
body paragraphs to prove it. If it is more complicated, you will need more body paragraphs. The next
paragraphs (depending upon the number required—as in our example, three points) deal with each
individual point. You must use a different paragraph for each point. You should use transitional worlds
to introduce each paragraph.

† Adapted from handouts by Dr. Liliana Naydan, University of Michigan, Sweetland Center for

Writing and the Jacksonville Theological Seminary Student Catalog 2015.

BU APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE 25

Example of the second paragraph in our example essay:

To begin with, every student is different. If I am going to reach each and every

student in my class, I need to find out all I can about that student. Knowing his or her

background will help me to understand why he or she reacts the way that he or she

does. Some students need visual instruction while others need hands-on participation.

Just knowing the material that I am teaching is not sufficient.

Example of the third paragraph:

In addition to knowing all that I can about each student, I learned that patience

is a vital necessity for a teacher to possess. Sometimes it is necessary to repeat

instructions several times before all of the students understand the material.

Sometimes I may have to alter my progress of teaching in order to make sure that

every student knows the material that I am presenting.

The words bolded at the beginning of the two example paragraphs indicate transitional words. You are
not to underline these words in your essay. You should continue the rest of the paragraphs—except the
final one—using the points in your first paragraph. The last paragraph is a concluding paragraph and
should summarize what you state in the first paragraph. Once again, you should list all points that you
have discussed in your essay.

Part 3: The Conclusion
A conclusion is the last paragraph of your essay. If you are writing a particularly long essay, you might
need two or three paragraphs to conclude. A conclusion typically does one of two things—or, of course, it
can do both.

An effective conclusion summarizes the argument. Instructors will not expect you to write anything
new in your conclusion. They just want you to restate your main points. Especially if you have made a long
and complicated argument, it is useful to restate your main points for your reader by the time you have
gotten to your conclusion. If you do so, keep in mind that you should use different language than you used
in your introduction and your body paragraphs. The introduction and conclusion should not be exactly the
same.

BU APA QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE 26

An effective conclusion explains the significance of the argument. Some instructors may want you to
explain your argument’s significance. In other words, they want you to answer the “so what” question by
giving your reader a clearer sense of why your argument matters.

• For example, your argument might be significant to studies of a certain time period.
• Alternately, it might be significant to a certain geographical region.
• Alternately still, it might influence how your readers think about the future. You might even opt to

speculate about the future and/or call your readers to action in your conclusion.

World Literature from a
Christian Perspective
By Edwin McAllister

2

Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Introduction to the Old Testament 8
Introduction to The Iliad 17
Introduction to The Odyssey 29
Introduction to Agamemnon 39
Introduction to Oedipus 50
Introduction to The Aeneid 59
Introduction to the New Testament 73
Introduction to The Confessions 79
Introduction to Beowulf 84
Introduction to The Inferno 90
Introduction to The Canterbury Tales 96
Introduction to Luther’s Commentary on Galatians 104
Introduction to The Prince 110
Introduction to “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” 115
Introduction to Hamlet 121
Introduction to Paradise Lost 130

3

World Literature From A Christian Perspective Introduction

When I was in grade school, I had an argument with a friend over the
ethics of telling lies. We were having a schoolyard fight over a lie I’d been telling
recently. I claimed to have broken my leg in order to avoid playing tackle
football at recess, and my friend told me that I could not lie because “the Bible
says lying is wrong.” I challenged him to “find the place” where the Bible says
lying is wrong.
Finding “the place” turned out to be more difficult than my friend
thought it would be. It took us half an hour to find the Ten Commandments in
the dusty old King James we dug up, but when we did locate them, “Thou shalt
not tell lies” was not among them. Instead, what we found was “Thou shalt not
bear false witness against thy neighbor.” (Exodus 20:16). That didn’t help
much, since it didn’t really cover what I was doing. At worst, I was bearing
false witness against myself. In our further attempt to find “the rule,” what we
discovered was a lot of stories and poems and precious few straightforward
“thou shalt not kill”-type rules.
Although we didn’t realize it at the time, my friend and I were learning a
valuable lesson about the Bible: often, rather than directly stating truth or
ethical ideals, the Bible uses literary techniques to embody or incarnate ideas.
In other words, rather than saying “do not lie,” the Bible shows God’s hatred for
lying in stories like that of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 or in figurative
language like that Jesus uses in John 8 when he identifies Satan as “the father
of lies.” Acts 5 never literally says “Do not lie,” but when Ananias and Sapphira
are struck dead by God after lying to the Holy Spirit, the story shows that God
hates lying. When Jesus identifies Satan as the father of lies he does not
literally mean that Satan is a father who has lies as his children; instead, by
identifying Satan as “the father” of lies, he implies that Satan is the ultimate
source of all falsehood. Stories and figures like these embody God’s love of the
truth and his hatred for falsehood.
Literature not only embodies propositional truths like “God hates lies,” it
also conveys experiential truth, or what it feels like to live through a particular
experience. At times, such experiential truth can gratify our curiosity about
other lives, other cultures, and other times. None of us is likely to experience
the brutal hand-to-hand combat described so precisely in the Iliad, but reading
the Iliad can help us to understand something of the terror and exhilaration
these warriors felt.
But the experiential dimension of literature does more than simply
gratify our curiosity about the experiences of other people and places. The best
literature teaches us something about how it feels to be a limited human being
living in a fallen world. The Iliad not only asks us to experience combat, but to
experience the grief of losing someone close to us. Achilles’ grief for Patroclus
can help us to understand our own grief and how to avoid the worst excesses to
which grief can drive us. Achilles’ grief can cause us to reflect on our own
human limitations and the temptation to live as if those limitations did not
exist. When we respond to good works of literature by saying to ourselves: “Yes,
that is what life is like; that is how it feels to be human,” we are responding to
the experiential truth that literature conveys.

4

Finally, literature is frequently a better learning tool than propositional
language. Memorizing the ten commandments is a chore. Remembering the
basic outline of the story of Joseph is simple, yet that same story has as much
to teach us about the character of God as the Ten Commandments, and
perhaps more, as we shall see.
In addition to being pleasurable for its own sake (everyone loves stories),
literature can intensify the impact of what we read by speaking to our hearts
rather than to our heads only, implanting its lessons far more deeply than
“head knowledge.” Literature is also easier to remember, a way of saying a
great deal in a small space. When David writes “The Lord is my shepherd,” he’s
using a metaphor that contains volumes of information about God—information
that need not be memorized because it is packed into the metaphor itself.
Psalm 73, which we will explore at some length, is a great example of
how Biblical literature can embody both propositional and experiential truth.
Psalm 73
1 Truly God is good to the upright,
to those who are pure in heart.
2 But as for me, my feet had almost slipped;
I had nearly lost my foothold.
3 For I envied the arrogant
when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.

4 They have no struggles;
their bodies are healthy and strong.
5 They are free from the burdens common to man;
they are not plagued by human ills.
6 Therefore pride is their necklace;
they clothe themselves with violence.
7 Their eyes swell out with fatness;
their hearts overflow with follies.
8 They scoff, and speak with malice;
in their arrogance they threaten oppression.
9 They set their mouths against the heavens,
and their tongue struts through the earth.
10 Therefore their people turn to them and praise them; and find no fault in them.
11 They say, “How can God know?
Does the Most High have knowledge?”
12 This is what the wicked are like-
always carefree, they increase in wealth.

13 Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure;
in vain have I washed my hands in innocence.
14 All day long I have been plagued;
I have been punished every morning.

5

15 If I had said, “I will speak thus,”
I would have betrayed your children.
16 When I tried to understand all this,
it was oppressive to me
17 till I entered the sanctuary of God;
then I understood their final destiny.

18 Surely you place them on slippery ground;
you make them fall down to ruin.
19 How suddenly are they destroyed,
completely swept away by terrors!
20 As a dream when one awakes,
so when you arise, O Lord,
you will despise them as fantasies.
21 When my heart was grieved
and my spirit embittered,
22 I was senseless and ignorant;
I was a brute beast before you.

23 Yet I am always with you;
you hold me by my right hand.
24 You guide me with your counsel,
and afterward you will take me into glory.
25 Whom have I in heaven but you?
And earth has nothing I desire besides you.
26 My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart
and my portion forever.

27 Those who are far from you will perish;
you destroy all who are unfaithful to you.
28 But as for me, it is good to be near God.
I have made the Sovereign Lord my refuge;
I will tell of all your deeds.
*This is the “New Revised Standard McAllister Version” (NRSMV) of this
Psalm, cobbled together from several other translations.
The psalm begins with a statement of propositional truth: “Truly God is
good to the upright.” We might notice, though, that the speaker begins this
statement with the word “Truly,” as though the statement needed some
intensification, indicating the speaker’s recognition that the propositional
statement of the first verse (“God is good to the upright”) is not self-evident.
From its beginning line, then, the poem embodies the truths of human
experience, where short-term observations do not always support the abstract
claims made elsewhere in the Bible. Is God really “good to the upright”? A
cursory glance at the world would certainly suggest otherwise, for it is

6

frequently the case that those who despise God and trample his truth seem to
be the most “blessed.”
The dissonance between the Biblical truth that “God is good to the
upright” and the experiential evidence of human observation is the puzzle that
the speaker mulls over in this poem. The psalm itself embodies this dissonance
because the claim that is ultimately upheld in the psalm (God IS good to the
upright) is at first stated only as an abstract proposition, whereas the evidence
against the claim (the wicked are prospering) is presented in a series of concrete
images, which we will explore in some detail below.
The speaker begins with a series of relatively straightforward
observations about the prosperity of the wicked: “they have no struggles” and
“their bodies are healthy and strong.” The language becomes more recognizably
literary when the speaker claims that “pride is their necklace.” “Pride” cannot
literally be worn around the neck; this is figurative language. In this case, the
figure is called a metaphor, a comparison that does not use the words “like” or
“as.” Instead of saying “A is like B” (a figure called a simile), metaphor instead
makes the much stronger and more striking claim that “A is B.” Metaphor
helps us to grasp something abstract or unfamiliar (the pride of the wicked) by
comparing it with something concrete and familiar (a person wearing a
necklace). A necklace is something worn openly, often as a way of displaying
prosperity (especially thick gold chains or jewels). So the suggestion here is
that the wicked are not even ashamed of their pride, but rather display it
openly.
The speaker goes on to tell us that the eyes of the wicked “swell out with
fatness.” Again, the speaker simply presents us with a word-picture, but the
picture speaks clearly enough that no further explanation is necessary. In this
culture, fatness is not shameful, but is instead a sign of prosperity, indicating
that one does not have to do manual labor and can afford to eat a great deal of
rich food. So the image of the eyes of the wicked swelling out with fatness
embodies or incarnates the abstract idea that the wicked are prospering.
An even more interesting figure appears in verse 9, where we are told
that the tongue of the wicked “struts through the earth.” (NASB translates
“struts” here as “parades.”) The figure here is called personification, which
happens when a writer invests an object with human properties. In this case, a
tongue is made to walk grandly around the earth as if it had legs and a brain to
guide it. The psalmist asks us to see the picture as a way of understanding the
real object he is describing: the words of the wicked, which are obviously as full
of false pride as a lone man strutting through the earth laying claim to all that
he sees.
Verses 10 and 11 show us the effect of the apparent prosperity of the
wicked: other people admire the wicked and turn away from God. Seeing the
wicked go unpunished, they are encouraged to engage in wicked behavior
themselves. After all, if God does not punish the wicked but gives them
prosperity, maybe he does not watch over human behavior at all. Of course,
the psalm doesn’t literally say any of this. Instead, it simply reports the actions
and speech of “the people” and leaves us to infer what these speeches and
actions mean. The speaker even begins to report his own frustration with God’s

7

lack of oversight in allowing the wicked to prosper by directly reporting his own
thoughts: “Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure.” In other words, “What a
waste of time to be obedient to God if wicked people have all the wealth, health,
and happiness.”
But the psalm does not leave us to sort unaided through the implications
of the disheartening experience of seeing the wicked prosper. Instead, just after
verse 14, at the exact midpoint of the psalm, the tone changes based on the
speaker’s having “entered the sanctuary of God.” This last phrase is more
figurative language serving to indicate not necessarily a change in physical
location, but a figurative change in thinking, since “entering” this sanctuary
involves an entire change of heart on the part of the thinker, a change that will
be embodied in the rest of the psalm.
This change of heart might be described as a shift from short-term to
long-term thinking; the shift is incarnated for us in figurative language. The
speaker remembers here that God places the wicked “on slippery ground.” Of
course, the speaker does not literally mean that God puts down wicked people
in the mud, but that figuratively speaking, the wicked are in “slippery places,”
places where one cannot stand long before falling. “Slippery place” is a physical
metaphor describing the spiritual position of the wicked before God. The
implication, here and elsewhere, is that destruction is coming on the wicked
eventually. The ultimate destruction of the wicked is one of the most
fundamental of all Biblical themes, embodied in stories all over the Bible.
When we begin to allow ourselves to think in Biblical terms, when our
hearts are soaked in the truth of the Bible, we understand that the prosperity of
the wicked is only temporary. God has never allowed the wicked to prosper
unpunished, though retribution comes on God’s timetable and not on man’s.
God’s character as the punisher of evil deeds has not changed. The history of
God’s interaction with humans is full of stories of the temporary prosperity of
the wicked being ultimately placed under God’s judgment.
In Psalm 73, the speaker’s ultimate embrace of God’s way of thinking,
comes through, rather than apart from, a wrestling with the fallen world and its
apparent contradiction of Biblical truth. The speaker in the psalm reaches
solid ground theologically only after looking carefully and actively at his world,
even in those places where the facts seem to contradict scripture, even at those
actions and behaviors that are displeasing to God, not hiding from them, but
encountering them and thinking about what they mean. To extend the
psalmist’s metaphor, we enter the sanctuary of God by passing through the
courtyard of critical thinking.
My prayer is that, even as the psalmist’s view of the world is deepened by
approaching the evidence of experience from a Biblical perspective, your
encounter with literature will help you undergo the same process of
transformation this psalm embodies. This process is described by Paul in
Romans 12:2, when he warns against being “conformed to this world,” as the
speaker of the psalm appears to be in the first fourteen verses, relying solely on
his short-term observations of the prosperity of the wicked. Paul commands
instead that we allow ourselves to be “transformed by the renewing of [our]
mind[s], that [we] may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will

8

of God.” Knowing the will, and thus the character, of God, is the end or
purpose of all human knowledge. The study of the best literature can be an
invaluable aid in that process.
Worldview
The Bible teaches us that humans are limited beings who exist in a fallen
world, a world that is very different from the world that God originally created
for us to occupy. God created us with a consciousness that was designed for a
perfect world, but, like fish out of water, we no longer occupy that world. As a
result, our minds constantly scream that something is wrong. The hard facts of
existence—death, disease, aging, human evil, our own loneliness and sense of
isolation—strike us as desperately wrong, so we naturally search for answers.
This search is as human and normal as breathing.
The mere fact of human consciousness, of existing in a fallen world,
forces on each of us certain questions. Who am I? Why am I here? What
should I be doing? What went wrong? Where am I? Who (or what) is in control
of events? No culture has ever existed that did not feel the need to answer
these questions, for they are built into the very nature of man.
Your answers to these questions define your worldview, your way of
thinking about yourself and your relationship to the world and to God. Every
human being has a worldview; some are more explicit and carefully constructed
than others, but we all have one. One of the goals of this anthology is to
encourage you to think more carefully about your own worldview and to begin
“taking every thought captive” so that your thinking will become more clearly in
line with a Biblical worldview. For organizational purposes, I am dividing these
worldview questions up into three areas: view of man (who am I?), view of the
world (where am I?), and view of the divine (what, or who, is in charge?). In
practice, we’ll see that all of these questions are inter-related, that answering
any of these questions in a particular way affects the way we answer the others.
View of Man
Who am I? Every worldview attempts to provide a meaningful answer to
this question, an answer that helps an individual to understand his
relationship with the world and with the divine. Am I created or did I “just
happen”? Do I have free will, or are my actions predetermined by some external
force? Can I take significant action? How can I live a meaningful life? How
useful is my reason? How do I balance my responsibilities to the community
with my own desires? Are my abilities and gifts in life the result of who my
parents are? How important are “every day” events like cooking, eating, and
caring for children? Are they less important than extraordinary events like
wars, counsels, and business meetings? How important is romantic love? Is
love merely a distraction from more important matters?
View of World
Where am I? The nature of the world we inhabit has been a subject of
reflection for philosophers and scientists since the beginnings of recorded
history. The primary questions that humans have asked about the world
involve orderliness. Does the world display an order, a predictable pattern of
behavior, or is the world simply random? Psalm 73 seems to be asking

9

precisely this question; after all, if evildoers flourish, there must be no order.
Answers to this question are generally based on how one answers other related
questions: was the world created, or did it just happen? Is the physical world
all that exists, or is there a spiritual world as well? Does the physical world
really exist? Some non-Christian worldviews like Hinduism and Christian
Science hold that the material world is merely an illusion and that the only
“real” world is the spiritual. Other worldviews like Platonism hold that the
material world exists but is only a shabby and imperfect reflection of the truly
significant spiritual world. Finally, some worldviews like scientific determinism
insist that the spiritual world does not exist at all, or if it does it is unnecessary
for explaining the physical world. View of the world also includes views about
man’s ultimate destination: where (if anywhere) do we go after death?
View of the Divine
What (or who) is in control? The Bible tells us that God created humans
to be in a close and loving relationship with Him; when man sinned, he cut
himself off from his relationship with God. Ever since, man apart from God has
felt deeply that something or someone must be in control of the observable
world, working behind the scenes. But different cultures and groups without
the Biblical revelation of God have disagreed about the nature of that divine
someone or something. Is there a force that transcends the physical world that
controls it? Does that force have personal features like emotions, memory, or
planning? If the force is personal, is there one God, as the Hebrew tradition
insists, or are there many, as the Greeks, Hindus, and Mormons claim? How
complete is the control of the divine over physical affairs? Did the force that
controls the universe actually create the universe?
Organization of Chapters
Each chapter of the textbook consists of an introduction to a single piece
of literature or selections from a single work or author. Each chapter will be
divided into five, and sometimes six, sections. The first section of each chapter
will be entitled “Introduction” and will include general notes about the author,
the immediate historical context for the work, changes in critical opinions or
receptions of the work, and other matters not directly related to worldview
issues. The next three sections of each chapter (“View of Man,” “View of the
Divine,” “View of the World”) will discuss how the work or group of works
reflects a particular worldview. Where necessary, chapters will also include
“Individual Analysis of Major Characters.” Finally, each chapter will include
a section on the “Artistic / Aesthetic” qualities of each of the works. Here,
we’ll explore the specifically literary qualities of each work: design and
patterning, relationship to art of the past, how form reflects meaning, and
finally how the work treats the importance of art itself to human existence.

10

Introduction to the Old Testament

2 Chronicles 18-20 Introduction
General
Even students who know the Bible well may not recognize this
obscure narrative from the Old Testament, but this brief passage can
teach us a great deal about the Hebrew worldview, particularly when we
compare some of the features of this passage with similar features we
will encounter later in our study of classical literature. The narrative is
drawn from the “divided kingdom” period, when the Israelites split into
two political entities: Israel, which generally had apostate kings, and
Judah, which generally remained faithful to God.

View of Man
2 Chronicles 18-20 provides us with a great example of a literary
feature that sets the Bible apart from literature being produced out of the
classical tradition at the same time: the Bible’s focus on the moral
development of individuals. Jehoshaphat grows and changes over time
and is a dynamic, multifaceted individual. Nevertheless, he retains
certain features of his personality over time. Consider Jehoshaphat’s
early experience with Ahab; his alliance with this wicked King of Israel
brings disaster, particularly because of ignoring the words of the prophet
Micaiah. Jehoshaphat does not make the same mistake in his second
great crisis. He learns and grows so that his behavior in the second
crisis is in part determined by what he learned in the first crisis.
Classical heroes, on the other hand, do not develop but remain static.
Unfortunately, Jehoshaphat’s transformation is not complete; some of
his weakness of character evidently remains with him throughout life.
Just as he was willing at the beginning of his reign to keep company with
King Ahab, so at the end of his reign does he make a deal with Ahaziah,
another wicked king of Israel.
In addition to his dynamic personality, Jehoshaphat’s ability to feel
and to express fear also sets him apart from most classical heroes.
Unlike Achilles, the hero of the Iliad, who is so mighty in battle that he
fears no man on earth and even takes on a god, Jehoshaphat is
admirable precisely because he is aware of his own limitations. He
cannot defeat the army that is approaching Judah through his own
strength. This awareness motivates him to take his most significant
action: calling directly on God in prayer.
The prayer itself makes an interesting contrast with prayers that
we will find later in classical literature. For the Greeks, prayer is often a
form of “deal-making” with the gods that places man in the position of a
spiritual trading partner, offering to perform sacrifices, build temples,
and carry out other “god-honoring” acts in return for favors from the

11

gods. In the Iliad, a priest of Apollo begins his prayer to his god by
reminding the god of all the good things the priest has done for him:
Hear me, Apollo! God of the silver bow . . .
If ever I roofed a shrine to please your heart,
Ever burned the long rich thigh bones of bulls and goats
On your holy altar, now, now bring my prayers to pass!
Jehoshaphat’s prayer, on the other hand, shows that the God of the
Bible cannot be manipulated, because he cannot be motivated by greed
or vanity. Man, as understood from a Biblical perspective, has nothing
to offer an entirely self-sufficient God as part of a deal-making process.
If the cattle on a thousand hills belong to our God (Psalm 50:10b), He
will not be impressed with our small sacrifices. More importantly, the
gospel of grace tells us that God’s favor cannot be won through works of
goodness; our works cannot make him love us more, nor can our neglect
of works make Him love us less, since His character is unchanging and
eternal. Thus, Jehoshaphat’s prayer to this self-sufficient God simply
reminds God of His character in the past and asks Him to act in a way
that is consistent with His protection and provision of past times.
Most importantly, the prayer ends with a statement of utter
dependence: “…we have no power to face this vast army that is attacking
us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are upon you.” If
Jehoshaphat is the hero of this story, he is a very different kind of hero
from those we will encounter in classical literature. We admire Achilles
and Odysseus for their courage, their resourcefulness, and above all
their splendid independence. But Jehoshaphat admits his own inability
to help himself, declaring himself entirely dependent on God. God’s
answer to Jehoshaphat’s prayer reveals a great deal about the nature of
Biblical heroism and the ancient Hebrew worldview: “Do not be afraid.
For the battle is not yours, but God’s.” In the context of the Hebrew’s
belief in a God controlling all human affairs, traditional classical heroism
is impossible. Man cannot win any genuine glory for himself, for all of
his accomplishments are only expressions of the glory of God.
Thus, Biblical heroism differs from classical heroism mainly in its
dependence and passivity. Biblical heroes are utterly dependent on God
for their strength, for their skill, and for the favor that they find from
others. Biblical heroes often express their heroism simply by believing
God and waiting for him to work. Consider Daniel, a giant of faith; his
greatest act of heroism was not being eaten by lions. Daniel doesn’t tear
the lions to pieces as Achilles would, or trick them into destroying
themselves as the wily Odysseus would have. He simply stands and
waits for God to take care of the situation. Joseph’s heroism consists of
waiting patiently in jail— or worse still, running away from a woman
(Potiphar’s wife). Try to imagine Achilles running from a woman! Homer
does not ask us to admire his characters based on their moral behavior.

View of World

12

All the events that occur in this story are under the control of an
omnipotent God. But this God is invisible, separate from the creation
that he watches over. How God manages to make the Ammonites,
Moabites, and Meunites destroy one another—what ruses or disguises he
uses, how he manipulates their thinking—is of no interest to the narrator
or, presumably, the audience. God’s presumed omnipotence makes
defeating such an army so laughably simple that it seems to be not worth
narrating at all. Compare this with Homer’s careful description of the
intervention of the gods in the fighting before Troy.

View of the Divine
The prayer of Jehoshaphat also points to a critical distinction
between Greek and Hebrew ideas of God: where the Greeks gods are
capricious, changing their minds, shifting alliances, and abandoning
their favorites without warning, for the Hebrews, God is unchanging, the
same yesterday, today, and forever. Thus, remembering God’s behavior
in the past becomes a critical part of understanding how He will behave
in the present and future. God asks us to be familiar with His Word
because it reveals His character to us, a character that remains the same
throughout history.
The Greeks, as we will see, had no such assurance. Aside from
their powers and their immortality, the Greek gods are ultimately no
different morally from any human being; and their actions show it. Out
of gratitude toward a particularly pious individual like Hector, they may
act for a time to protect his interests. But when their own interests
conflict with his, they withdraw their favor and allow him to die.

Artistic/Aesthetic
A second great difference between classical and biblical narrative
styles emerges early in Chapter 20, where we are told that “some men”
came to warn Jehoshaphat about the approach of the armies out of
Aram. Who are these “men”? How did they learn this news? What was
their relationship with Jehoshaphat? The Bible never tells us. Compare
this with Homer’s treatment of the embassy to Achillles in Book IX of the
Iliad. There, we learn the identities of all of the messengers, we learn the
relationship of each of these men to Achilles, and we are treated to a long
speech from each man that expresses his unique personality and
relationship to Achilles.
The narrative also points to another difference between classical
and Biblical narrative style: the comparative reticence of the Bible with
regard to specific detail. Biblical narrative uses much greater economy of
detail than Homeric narrative. Homer will often stop and lovingly
describe objects – Achilles’ armor and shield, for example – that have
nothing to do with the plot of the story. In classical narrative, details
are often included for their aesthetic value. The greater economy of

13

Biblical narrative underlines the fact that the Bible was written and read
according to a very different set of assumptions than those that animated
the production and consumption of classical works of literature. As
grand as Homer’s works are, and as fully as they express the ideals of
classical civilization, they were ultimately created as entertainment, a
way to kill time around the campfire. Thus, details are often included for
their own sake. The Bible was produced as a didactic religious text,
designed to teach us something about God, the world, man, and man’s
relationship with God. Details not relevant to the didactic point of the
story are relentlessly stripped away, and we are left with only what is
most important. It follows that ALL details in Biblical narrative are
included for a reason.
We might also note that the Biblical narrative includes no details
about the armies beyond their size and their points of origin. Unlike
Homer, who skips effortlessly back and forth from the Greek to the
Trojan army and introduces characters from both sides, the Biblical
narrator is not interested in the makeup or character of the Moabite,
Ammonite, and Meunite fighting forces. All we need to know is that they
have opposed themselves to the people of God and that God will take
care of them. Are there great heroes accompanying this army? Will
there be a clash of mighty men like the struggle between Achilles and
Hector that is the climax of the Iliad? Such issues are of very little
interest or significance to Hebrew writers or readers. There are no such
“clashes of the Titans” in the Bible; the only significant head-to-head
physical combat in the Bible involves an insignificant shepherd boy
fighting against the giant Goliath, and here the whole point of the story is
the didactic lesson that God can empower even the lowliest and weakest
to do battle with the mightiest hero on earth. Unlike the Greek gods, the
God of the Bible is not impressed with physical prowess.
This particular battle becomes a powerful expression of that truth.
This army does not have to strike a single blow; they simply believe God
and act on his commands. God does the work. When Jehoshaphat’s
army arrives on the battlefield, the enemy is already conquered. They
have nothing to do except pick up the pieces and go home rejoicing.

Story of Joseph (Genesis 37, 39-46) Introduction
General
I suggested in the introduction to 2 Chronicles 18-20 that the Bible
follows a principle of “narrative economy” so that every specific detail
will have some relevance for the story. If that principle holds true in
relation to the story of Joseph, the mention of Joseph’s exact age,
seventeen, (in Gen 37:2) must be significant. Joseph’s age at the
beginning of the story puts him on the cusp between childhood and
adulthood. The second mention of Joseph’s age comes after he has

14

taken the reins of power in Egypt, when we learn that he is thirty, and
has thus come to full adulthood. The events in between represent a
kind of “coming-of-age” story that allows us to see Joseph’s early
immaturity and to compare his earlier behavior with his later more
mature behavior. Thus, the story reflects the Bible’s characteristic
focus on individual moral development. We must understand
Joseph’s past in order to understand his behavior in the present, for
like other Biblical characters, his personality is the sum total of his
experiences.
Joseph’s character at the beginning of the story is clearly that of a
spoiled youngest child. He is not only sheltered from doing the kind of
work his brothers must do, but he is given what must be for the brothers
an incredibly annoying symbol of his status as his father’s favorite: a
many-colored coat entirely inappropriate for a man of his age and birth
order. Such a mark of favor should by rights be given to Reuben, the
oldest brother. Jacob’s decision to “play favorites” sets the sons of
Zilpah, Bilhah, and Leah against Joseph, the son of Jacob’s love-match
with Rachel.
The first indication of Joseph’s immaturity is his acting as “tattle
tale” against these brothers, bringing home “their evil report” to Jacob.
This does not endear Joseph to his brothers, but he makes matters
considerably worse when he decides to tell his brothers about the dream
he has had. Joseph’s brothers immediately understand the meaning of
the dream: at some point in the future Joseph will have power over them.
The brothers assume, probably correctly, that Joseph too understands
the meaning: “Shalt thou indeed reign over us?” In the Hebrew culture of
Joseph’s day, age and birth order were critically important for
establishing a hierarchy of authority within the family; for Joseph, a
youngest brother, to wear clothes that symbolize his favored status and
to report to his brothers and parents a dream suggesting that he would
rule over them would have been extremely offensive. Their resentment
over this episode plays a large part in the brothers’ dislike of Joseph.
Remember their remark as they see Joseph coming from afar, just before
they sell him into slavery: “Behold this dreamer cometh.” Joseph’s
behavior at the beginning of the story shows us an immature young man,
displaying his desire for personal glory by lording his favored status and
prophetic dreams over his older brothers and parents.
Jacob’s behavior, like Joseph’s, is more intelligible if we know his
past. In particular, his choice of Joseph as his favored son is
understandable when we remember that Joseph is the product of Jacob’s
love for Rachel, the woman he loved so dearly that he was willing to work
14 years for her father in order to win her hand in marriage. Because at
this point Joseph is the only son Rachel has produced, Jacob is probably
more inclined to favor him because of the love he bears his mother. But
if Jacob’s behavior is in part the product of his experiences and his

15

environment, it is also consistently and unmistakably his own: his
tendency to play favorites (which he undoubtedly inherited from his own
parents, Isaac and Rebecca, who each had a favorite among their twin
sons Jacob and Esau) is a constant feature of his personality from the
beginning of this section of his history until the end: the favoritism he
shows Joseph will be transferred to Benjamin (also a son of Rachel) by
the story’s end. Jacob’s actions and speech are also marked by
consistent melodrama and self-pity, as he repeatedly “refuse[s] to be
comforted” and threatens his children with mourning himself to death:
“in mourning will I go down to the the grave to my son” (37: 35). Later,
he repeats the threat when Reuben proposes taking Benjamin to Egypt:
“[Y]ou will bring my gray head down to the grave in sorrow” (42:38b).

View of the Divine
Though God is very rarely mentioned in this narrative, His
presence is nevertheless significant at every point. In fact, the entire
narrative embodies the claim of Psalm 73, which is that although short-
term observation may suggest the contrary: ultimately, God’s
righteousness is knowable through the outward appearances of the
observable world—in this case, the details of Joseph’s experience. As in
2 Chronicles 20, the narrator does not feel obliged to explain how God
manipulates events or works behind the scenes to preserve and bless his
people. God’s transcendent power is so great that such explanations
would either be incomprehensible to limited human beings, or, if
accommodated to our understanding through symbol and metaphor,
would serve to lessen our sense of the power and majesty of our God.
Like the speaker of Psalm 73, Joseph comes to understand God’s
purpose fully only after passing through difficult experiences.

View of Man
Joseph’s heroic qualities are uniquely Biblical and contrast
powerfully with those character qualities we will see held up as heroic in
classical literature. The chosen vessel of an omnipotent and omniscient
God, Joseph is “heroic” primarily in his passivity, in his willingness to
wait and see what his God will do. He is the helpless victim of his
brothers. He has to wait patiently in prison, unable to free himself by his
own exertions. He is principally distinguished from other characters in
the tale not by his superior courage or strength, but by his quiet hope
and trust in God and his constant willingness to deflect glory away from
himself and toward God. When Joseph is praised for his ability to
interpret dreams, he turns aside the praise: “Do not interpretations
belong to God?” (40:8) or, “I cannot do it, but God will give Pharaoh the
answer he desires” (41:16).

16

Joseph is not a warrior, not a king, but merely the spoiled
youngest son (in a culture with very little value for youngest sons) of a
sheep-herder. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that Joseph is the
last person in the world anyone would expect to have heroic qualities.
And yet his obscurity and lack of early promise set Joseph firmly in the
line of Biblical heroes, who often seem chosen by God precisely for their
obscurity and lack of promise. Consider David, another youngest son
whose primary responsibilities in his youth are sheep-herding and
cheese-carrying. Yet David is chosen by God to defeat the mightiest
warrior in the Philistine army at an age when the armor and weapons of
an adult warrior are far too large for him. Or consider Gideon, the great
military leader who begins his career cowering in a hole in the ground.
Christ himself is perhaps the greatest example of this Biblical theme: an
obscure son of an obscure carpenter living in an obscure corner of the
earth. God chooses losers, underdogs, cowards, youngest sons, the
obscure and unpromising, and makes them heroes.
The defining character quality for Biblical heroes is a trust in and a
dependence on God. The Biblical hero is always dependent on God.
Traditional heroism, particularly in its proud independence—the
strength and courage of Achilles, the wily resourcefulness of
Odysseus—
is not even a possibility for Biblical heroes. Joseph’s lack of
responsibility for his own personal success is underlined so often that
it approaches the comic; he arrives somewhere—Potiphar’s house, jail,
the palace of the Pharaoh—and immediately “finds favor” and is put in
charge. By the last repetition of this pattern, hardly ten minutes can
have passed between the time Joseph is brought up from Pharaoh’s
dungeon and the moment he becomes the second most powerful man
on Earth. The speed with which this happens, and the obvious
disproportion between the duties Joseph performs and the Pharaoh’s
generous response (consider that at this point Pharaoh does not even
know if Joseph’s prediction is going to come to pass), all point very
strongly to the fact that Joseph is still by and large a passive
participant in his own meteoric rise to the top, utterly dependent on
God for all he has.
The story also embodies another important Christian theme: the
value of suffering. Joseph suffers horribly, yet in the end sees that God
is in control of all the events of his life. This new awareness of the value
of suffering brings about not only greater emotional maturity for Joseph,
but also a better life for his entire family.

View of the World
Is Joseph’s world orderly? Not at first glance; it cannot have seemed
like an orderly world to Joseph when his brothers tossed him into a

17

pit and sold him into slavery. Yet by the end of his life, Joseph is able
to forgive his brothers precisely because he understands their
behavior as part of a larger order imposed by God: “I am your brother
Joseph and the one you sold into Egypt! And now, do not be
distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here,
because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you” (45:4-5).
As Joseph comes to recognize the hand of God behind his sale into
slavery, so too does he see God’s hand in all of the events that have
brought him to this place: “So then it was not you who sent me here,
but God. He made me father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household,
and ruler of all Egypt” (45:8). For Christians, God’s pattern of
provision, though hidden from man in the short term, reveals itself in
larger patterns. Perhaps the largest pattern, one unavailable even to
Joseph, is God’s preservation not of Joseph, but of Judah, for it is
through Judah’s line that Christ will come (Matthew 1:3); so God here
is not merely preserving Joseph and his brothers, but exercising his
plan of salvation for all humanity.
Dreams play a key role in revealing the orderliness of the world in the
story of Joseph. Though they often seem random, the dreams
ultimately come to pass. That God can impart dreams that give a
clear vision of the future means God knows what is going to happen.
At the very least, this means that the created world operates
according to a pattern that is visible to God. But as the story of
Joseph makes clear, the dreams of Joseph not only reveal a God who
knows what will happen, but a God who wills those things to happen,
a God who sees into a future in which His will for His people unfolds.
The movement of this future from vision to reality, confirming the
orderliness of creation and the sovereignty of God over that creation,
is embodied in the story of Joseph.

Aesthetic/ Artistic
This section of Genesis sets up a leitmotif, or a series of repeated
parallel scenes, that is based on Jacob’s earlier deceptions and trickery.
Jacob deceived Isaac through the use of clothing, taking some sheep’s
skin and laying it across his arms and breast to convince his dying father
that he was Esau. In chapter 37, Genesis takes up the theme of poetic
justice, “the kidder kidded,” and repeats it four times before the story of
Joseph ends. In the first instance, Joseph’s brothers return from the
fields with a torn piece of Joseph’s coat dipped in blood. They use this
item of clothing to convince Jacob that Joseph has been killed by a wild
animal. The parallels with Jacob’s deception of his own father should be
obvious, particularly in the use of an item of clothing as the major prop
for the deception. The theme appears a second time in the 38th chapter
of Genesis (not included in our selection) in which Judah, a grown man

18

now with children of his own, is in turn deceived by his daughter-in-law,
Tamar, again through the use of clothing. Joseph himself falls victim to
this form of deception at the hands of Potiphar’s wife, who uses a bit of
Joseph’s clothing to convince her husband that Joseph has attempted to
rape her. Finally, Joseph himself uses his robes and jewelry to deceive
his brothers at the end of the story.
Biblical narrative makes significant demands on the reader. This
pattern of deception is never explicitly mentioned by the narrator or by
any of the characters, though it very easily could have been. For
example, at the moment Jacob realizes that Joseph is not dead, he might
cry out: “God has revenged himself on me for deceiving my own father!”
or words to that effect. But neither he nor any of the other characters
notice the justice of what has happened. Nor does the narrator go to any
great length to point this out. The work of discovery is left to the reader.
In like manner, God’s shaping hand in the events of Joseph’s life is never
specifically mentioned until the very end. Biblical writers expect us to do
the work. The Bible demands a far more active engagement on the part
of the reader and may be far more subtle than classical literature.

19

Homer’s Iliad Introduction

General Notes
The Iliad begins in the middle of a complicated situation. We find
ourselves with an army encamped on a beach before a city. The leaders
of this army are bickering among themselves over women and other war-
prizes. Beginning readers are often confused by the opening of the poem
that assumes our familiarity with a wide array of strange characters and
events—kings, heroes, gods, goddesses, wars and scandals long past.
Who are these people? Why are they fighting the Trojans? Why are they
fighting with each other? What are their relations with one another?
How many “kings” are on this beach? Who’s the boss?
However, our confusion over these matters can actually be
instructive, since it leads us to a critical conclusion about Homer’s
audience: they were bound together by a common knowledge of a
tremendous body of myths and legends that most contemporary readers
have never learned. Homer’s readers did not need the author to fill in
the background of the events he describes because Homer could assume
his readers already knew why the Greeks were fighting the Trojans, why
an argument over a woman was important enough to overturn the war
aims of the entire Greek army, how the chain of command in the army
was supposed to work, and so on.
In fact, not only did Homer’s readers know the background, they
knew the story itself; it will remain true of classical literature before
Virgil that audiences were already familiar with the plots of the stories
they heard or watched. Greek audiences already knew the outcome of
Agamemnon’s dispute with Achilles. They already knew that Achilles
would kill Hector, and that Troy would fall. The pleasure that they
received in hearing these stories had very little to do with the kind of
tension regarding outcome that contemporary adult audiences value so
highly. Instead, Greek audiences took pleasure in the tale itself—hearing
Achilles or Agamemnon speak in their characteristic fashion, watching
the wiliness of Odysseus, hearing the long-windedness of old men like
Nestor and Phoinix, waiting to see how this storyteller would handle the
battle between Achilles and Hector—since the outcome of the battle was
never in doubt.
The lack of what we call “plot tension” will remain a constant in the
classical literature that we will read. Even in the Athenian tragedies,
writers are simply reworking mythological materials that are already
familiar to their audiences. Everyone already knows that Clytemnestra
will murder Agamemnon, that Jason will desert Medea, and that Oedipus
is guilty of unwittingly killing his father.
The “deep background” for the war in Troy involves a wedding in
heaven. All the gods and goddesses were invited to the wedding except,
logically enough, the goddess Discord, whose name means “trouble.”
Discord, angry at her exclusion from the festivities, disrupts them by

20

rolling a golden apple into the wedding hall; on the apple are written the
words “for the fairest.” Three of the goddesses, vain creatures that they
are, step forward to claim the apple: Hera, wife of Zeus and goddess of
political power; Athena, daughter of Zeus and goddess of wisdom and
battle; and Aphrodite, goddess of passionate physical love between men
and women.
None of the gods are stupid enough to involve themselves in this
dispute, so the goddesses decide to find a human to judge between them.
Their choice ultimately lights on Paris (also called Alexandros), one of
many sons of Priam, King of Troy, and a man considered to be the most
handsome among mortal men. Given a choice between political power,
martial prowess, and sexual attraction, Paris not surprisingly chooses
Aphrodite. It will be a fatal choice for him and for many others.
As his reward for choosing her, Aphrodite gives Paris his request:
the love of the most beautiful woman in the world—Helen, “the face that
launched a thousand ships.” Unfortunately, Helen is already married to
Menelaos, a Greek king, son of Atreus and brother to Agamemnon.
Paris, accepted as a guest into the home of Menelaos, “kidnaps” his
willing wife (she’s been charmed by Aphrodite) and takes her back with
him to Troy. Menelaos and his brother Agamemnon gather together the
other kings of Greece to help them to avenge their insulted honor, and
set off for Troy. (The poem takes its name from the Greek name for Troy:
Ilium or Ilias.)
This tale, not included in the Iliad, gives us a great deal of critical
information for understanding the behavior of the gods, especially the
hatred of Hera and Athena for Troy and the love of Aphrodite for the city
and its inhabitants. It will also explain why Aphrodite, in the Aeneid, will
become the protector of Aeneas, a Trojan warrior who escapes the ruin of
his city to found Rome.

View of Man
The Iliad is not “didactic.” That is, it does not explicitly set out to
teach any particular lesson. Nevertheless, the story of Achilles and
his withdrawal and its disastrous consequences embodies or
incarnates a very specific lesson about the value of the human
community and the dangers and consequences of leaving it. Achilles’
decision to withdraw from the Greek army not only affects him, but
causes suffering to all of those around him. So does Agamemnon’s
decision to ignore the plea of Chryses to return his daughter, which
causes the terrible plague in Book One. Indeed, we are told that the
entire community supports the return of Chryses’ daughter to him,
and that only Agamemnon is not pleased with his offer. By pointing
out this contrast, Homer clearly underlines here that Agamemnon is
setting himself against the will of the entire community; Agamemnon
ultimately learns his lesson and admits that this refusal was a
mistake. By the opening of Book Nine, he is ready to admit his error

21

(though he blames it on the gods). Achilles never admits that
deserting the community was a dangerous and irresponsible thing to
do, but the loss of Patroclus causes Achilles deep regret.
Hector and Achilles, the tragic heroes of the Iliad, are torn between
their public responsibilities and their private desires. Generally
speaking, responsibility and desire are in harmony for the Greek warrior.
The warrior has the public responsibility to face danger and death in
defense of his comrades, family, and city; he is prompted to do so not
only by public duty, but by his private desire for personal “glory,” which
consists in outward shows of his worth given to him by the community
he protects. These “shows” can take the form of precedence in speaking
in the assembly or the bestowal of gifts such as horses, women, gold
bars, armor, or even whole cities. Generally, these public duties and
private desires work in harmony.
When Agamemnon takes Briseus away from Achilles, he brings
these goals into conflict. Achilles has been publicly insulted by
Agamemnon and his honor has been lessened by having his “war prize”
taken from him. As a result, Achilles loses his motivation to fight. When
his three friends approach him in Book IX and urge him to return to the
battle because his friends need protection, Achilles turns a deaf ear to
their pleas. He is not moved by his responsibility to the community.
In Homer’s worldview, two factors limit human freedom. The first of
these is the constant interference of the gods in human affairs. Gods
instill desires in humans to do things they might not have done
otherwise, although often the interference of the gods simply causes
people to act in accordance with their own personalities. Aphrodite
inflames Paris and Helen with uncontrollable desire for one another,
so that they seem not to be in control of their own actions, but neither
of them seems to possess much self-control at any point in the tale.
Agamemnon blames the gods for his disastrous decision to take
Briseus away from Achilles, but Agamemnon has never been a very
good leader and is accused by Achilles of constantly taking the best
prizes for himself even before Agamemnon takes Briseus.
The gods’ interference with human behavior does not mean that
human life is completely under the control of the gods; only when the
gods choose to interfere is human freedom limited. Otherwise,
characters in Homer are “free” to behave in any way they choose,
though almost all of them tend to behave in ways that are consistent
with their predispositions: Nestor is long-winded, Agamemnon is
selfish and self-aggrandizing, Ajax is laconic, Paris is shameless, and
so on.
A more troubling limitation on human freedom in Homer is “fate”
or “destiny.” Achilles knows more about his own destiny than any other

22

human character. He knows that he will die in battle before Troy falls
and that he will never see his home again. He knows that he is “fated” to
die shortly after Hector. But even the fate that governs the lives of these
heroes does not completely restrict human freedom. The Greeks
understood “fate” as a destination or goal, a pre-determined endpoint.
Thus, Hector may be fated to die at the hands of Achilles. But what
happens before that time, and even the manner of that death, may not be
determined at all. No human chooses his own fate, but he does have a
choice about how he conducts himself on the way to that final
destination. He may behave heroically and win glory, or he may behave
shamefully.
The central facts of human existence as it is portrayed in the Iliad
are its brevity and its ultimate end in death. The Iliad can properly be
described as a poem of death, since the poem itself is primarily
concerned with fighting and dying. Having no real belief in the afterlife,
impending death is the central concern of all the heroes; their courage in
battle and desire to win glory for themselves is one way of cheating death
of its sting. Being remembered in songs and stories is the surest path to
the only form of immortality the Greeks accepted. Achilles’ experiences
here are meant in some ways to be representative of all humanity;
despite his “godlike” excellence, Achilles knows that he is going to die
young in Troy and that he will never return home. The death of
Patroclus is so upsetting to Achilles that he loses his mental balance,
becoming a terrifying monster of slaughter and desecration in his
fruitless attempts to satisfy himself through revenge.

View of World
As the Iliad begins, a plague is destroying the Greek army. Its
origins are unknown to the Greeks, but are assumed to involve the anger
of Apollo, the god of plague. Taking the initiative because of his concern
for his fellow soldiers, Achilles calls an assembly of the leaders to discuss
the problem. Unfortunately, by doing so Achilles is making himself a
stench in the nostrils of Agamemnon, who as leader of the army should
have called this meeting himself. Achilles makes things worse when, in
urging the seer Calchas to speak his mind, he promises to protect him
from the anger of anyone, including Agamemnon; this is of course before
anyone knows that the plague really is Agamemnon’s fault. It is not
surprising then that shortly afterwards, Agamemnon lashes out against
Achilles, promising to take away Briseus.
The political world of the Iliad is purely aristocratic. The great
heroes on the beach before Troy are all kings in their own homelands.
The only way of determining precedence is “greatness,” a quality that
includes, but is by no means limited by, physical courage and strength.
Agamemnon is the “greatest” of the kings on the beach, but is no match
for the killing power of Achilles, the strength of Ajax, or the wisdom of

23

Odysseus. He is, however, clearly blessed by the gods above all the other
heroes by virtue of his superior wealth; because he possesses more men,
more ships, more cities, more slaves, and more gold than any of the
other kings, Agamemnon can claim to be the greatest of the Greeks, even
though others may excel him in particular strengths. This reveals an
assumption implicit in the Greek worldview: great wealth is the
equivalent of great favor from the gods. There is assumed to be a direct
relationship between material prosperity and the love of the gods.
Agamemnon is “the best” because the gods are assumed to love him the
most. This, of course, is in direct contradiction to the worldview
expressed in Psalm 73, which tells us that material prosperity is not a
measure of how greatly we are loved by god.
Though the gods themselves do not seem to be particularly moral,
engaged as they are in all kinds of petty bickering and jealousies, they do
take some interest in the careful observation and preservation of
particular kinds of human relationships, particularly the relationship of
guest to host, the suppliant relationship, and family relationships. These
relationships must be observed and respected, or swift punishment will
result. Consider, for example, the place of the suppliant relationship in
the Iliad. For the Greeks, to supplicate someone meant going and asking
someone of higher rank for a favor. The suppliant kneeled before his
patron, taking his knee in one hand and his chin in the other, and
followed a highly ritualized pattern of requesting his favor. Greeks who
were the recipients of supplications were expected to respond in some
way that would address the needs of the suppliant. The Iliad begins with
a supplication refused; Chryseis, the priest of Apollo, supplicates
Agamemnon for the return of his daughter. Agamemnon refuses and
chaos results. The Iliad ends with a supplication accepted; Priam comes
to Achilles and begs for the return of the body of Hector. Achilles accepts
and order is restored. The Trojan war begins because Paris violates the
guest-host relationship. Oedipus Rex and the plays of the Oresteia
explore the consequences of violating family relationships.
Perhaps the most graphic illustration of the Homeric worldview is
the shield of Achilles. Forged by Hephaestus, the god of the forge, as a
favor for Thetis, Achilles’ mother, the shield is a microcosm, or, literally, a
“little world” that contains within itself the entirety of the Homeric
universe: earth, sky, sea, sun, moon, and stars. The human world as it
is pictured on the shield is as static and unchanging as the physical
universe. There is one city at peace, where civility and order are
expressed in weddings and feasts, and in particular with the public court
deciding a blood feud that otherwise might lead to clan warfare. There is
another city at war, in a state very much like Troy’s. The point of
showing both cities is that both of these states are, in the Homeric
worldview, normal and inescapable. Times of peace are followed by times
of war. The rest of the shield contains other scenes of cyclical human
activity: plowing, planting, harvesting, cattle-herding, sheep-grazing,

24

dancing after the harvest is gathered. The shield expresses the Homeric
view of history as cyclical; there is no progress. Man is static, as is the
world that he lives in. Neither has any ultimate purpose, but exists for
its own sake, going nowhere in particular. Virgil, in the Aeneid, will
“adapt” Achilles’ shield for his hero, Aeneas, but will express on it a very
different view of history.

View of the Divine
The ancient Greeks were polytheists, worshipping a large group of
anthropomorphic gods, the most powerful of which was Zeus. These
gods possess only limited control over the physical world. For example,
though they can fly and move about with blinding speed, they are
restricted in space and cannot be in more than one place at one time.
Compare the accounts of Iris and Hermes, the female and male
messenger gods, moving between heaven and earth with the Biblical
accounts of God’s interaction with men. The Bible never tells us about
God having to move from one place to another to speak with Abraham, or
suggests that, like Zeus, God’s attention can be distracted from events in
one place on earth by a visit to another place on earth.
Greeks gods are subject to creation because they are a part of it.
According to Greek mythology, the current group of Olympian gods took
their power by force from Rhea and Cronos, their parents. They did not
create the world in which they live, and thus cannot transcend certain
aspects of it, such as space and time. They also cannot transcend the
workings of the force called Fate or Destiny. Though Homeric works
occasionally suggest that Zeus could overturn a hero’s Fate if he wanted
to, he never does. Instead, Homer treats Fate as a force operating
outside the will of Zeus and over which he has no control (although being
immortal he is not “Fated” himself). For example, as Achilles chases
Hector around the walls of Troy, Zeus takes up a set of golden scales and
weighs the “portion” of Achilles against the “portion” of Hector, and
Hector’s sinks. Zeus makes no decision in this case. He simply consults
“Fate” and ultimately abides by its dictates.
Though the members of the Greek “pantheon” (the term means “all
the gods”) differ from human beings in their immortality (they cannot be
killed) and in their tremendous powers, their morality is not superior to
the morality of normal humans. In some cases, it is worse. Their
motivations are basically the same as those moving the humans in the
Iliad to act: vanity, vengeance, lust, wounded pride, and greed. They are
capable of love, but they are equally capable of implacable and irrational
hatred and are willing to destroy innocent humans to get their way. To a
certain extent, everyone in Troy is a victim to the wounded vanity of Hera
and Athena.
Homer constantly encourages us to compare the life of the gods with
the life of mortals; the gods’ problems are always temporary and always

25

trivial. For humans, the same difficulties are matters of ultimate
importance. For example, when Homer shifts from the human world to
the world of the divine in Book 1, we find many similarities between the
situation there and the situation but on earth, but where things go
disastrously on earth, they go very smoothly in Heaven. Where Chryseis’
supplication to Agamemnon in the first half of Book 1 is refused, in
Heaven Thetis’ supplication to Zeus in the second half of Book 1 is
accepted. Where the first half of Book 1 recounts the beginnings of a
disastrous human power struggle between Achilles and Agamemnon, the
power struggle between Zeus and Hera in the second half of Book 1 is
brief, its outcome never in doubt, and ends happily. When Hera
criticizes Zeus about his plans to favor the Trojans temporarily, he
responds:
Ah but tell me, Hera,
Just what you can do about all this? Nothing.
Only estrange yourself from me a little more—
And all the worse for you . . .
Now go sit down. Be quiet now. Obey my orders,
For fear the gods, however many Olympus holds,
Are powerless to protect you when I come
To throttle you with my irresistible hands. (1.675-683)
Zeus speaks and the gods quake with fear. Hephaestus tells the story of
his disastrous attempt to oppose the will of Zeus, provoking healing
laughter. On Mount Olympus, there is no struggle for supremacy. Zeus
is firmly in control, which ultimately turns out to be a good thing in
Homer’s view, for the gods quickly end their feud and return to feasting,
laughing, and lovemaking. Contrast this with the power struggle
between Agamemnon and Achilles, which takes 24 books and countless
deaths to patch up.

Artistic/Aesthetic
Despite the fact that it embodies the values of classical culture and
has a great deal to teach us, the Iliad, and classical literature in general
(with the exception of the Aeneid), was generally not didactic—that is,
was not written in order to teach a lesson. The primary purpose behind
recitations of the material (probably done by a professional reciter of
poetry called a “bard” for audiences gathered in a public place — perhaps
around a campfire) was entertainment. Thus, unlike the Bible, where
material not explicitly related to the unfolding drama is generally
excluded, in Homer such “extra” material is often the whole point; extra
stories are included for an audience that loves extra stories. The story of

26

Meleager included by Phoinix in his long-winded speech to Achilles in
Book IX is a great example; such an interpolated narrative would never
appear in the Bible–imagine the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac
interrupted for a three chapter explanation of the birth of his mule and
you get some idea of how alien this narrative technique would be to
Hebrew readers.
It is also the case that the Iliad makes far fewer demands on its
readers than the Bible. For example, Homeric characters remain almost
entirely static. Even Achilles does not really change; rather, when his
rage passes, he returns to being the man he was before he was insulted
by Agamemnon. Homer’s heroes wake up each morning as if it were the
first day of their lives; Odysseus is always wily, Ajax taciturn,
Agamemnon self-glorifying, and so on. Biblical heroes, on the other
hand, carry their pasts along with them, so that the behavior of Jacob
late in life makes no sense unless one knows all of Jacob’s history. Yet
the Bible never tells us “Jacob loved Joseph the most because Joseph
was the son of Rachel, the wife he loved the most.” We are expected to
understand issues like this in light of what we know about the past of
these characters. Homer never makes this kind of demand.
One of the most characteristic literary techniques employed by
Homer is the “epic” simile. Such similes were designed to describe and
explain the mythic, heroic world of the epic for common farmers and
herdsmen who had no experience with sieges, walled cities, and heroic
combat. Homer draws his points of comparison in these similes from the
world familiar to his listeners, from farming, herding, and the behavior of
animals in the natural world. Thus, in Book VI, Homer compares Paris,
running out to battle in his gleaming armor, to a “stallion full-fed at the
manger” breaking free of his tethers and running out across the plain to
a river. Or, in Book VIII, Homer compares the campfires of the Trojans
surrounding the Greek ships to the stars in the night sky. Homer’s epic
similes have the effect of familiarizing the unfamiliar. For Homer’s
audience in the 8th century, the Trojan war was part of a very distant,
heroic past, no longer part of history, but of myth.
Homer in his invocation announces his subject as the rage of
Achilles and it will be this rage that gives the poem its unity. Some
readers are surprised to find that the poem does not follow the Trojan
war through to its conclusion, but the war is for Homer and his audience
only the (very familiar) backdrop against which the human drama
unfolds. Homer no more needs to “finish” the story than a contemporary
American writer using the American Civil War as a background needs to
inform a Southern audience about how things turned out. The great
unifying subject here is anger: the poem begins with the beginning of
Achilles’ anger—originally directed at Agamemnon—but the poem does
not end when Achilles and Agamemnon are reconciled to one another.

27

Nor does the poem end when Achilles defeats Hector in revenge for the
death of Patroklos, for afterwards his rage is redirected not only toward
himself because of his part in the death of his friend, but toward the very
order of existence and the human imperative to cope with death and loss.
It is not too much to say that this is true of Achilles’ anger all along: his
rage is the anger of the adolescent who discovers that the world is unfair.
When Achilles puts aside his “godlike” rage, when he “grows up” and
returns to the human family — accepting supplications, eating and
drinking, weeping, mourning for his own father, sympathizing with the
father of his enemy, accepting the inevitability of his own impending
death, then (and only then) is the poem really over.

Individual Analysis of Major Characters
Achilles
When, in the first few lines of the Iliad, Homer announces as his
topic the “anger” of Achilles, he uses the Greek word mênis. Menis is
probably better translated as “wrath,” since it is a word that is used
elsewhere exclusively for the anger of gods. The word points to Achilles’
“godlikeness,” a point to which the poet constantly draws our attention
by labeling him over and over as “godlike” Achilles. Not only the greatest
warrior of his age, Achilles is also the child of a union between a goddess,
Thetis, and a human, Peleus. He will constantly be torn between his
humanity and his divinity, his “godlikeness.” Remember, though, that in
Homer’s view of the divine, calling a character “godlike” is not necessarily
a compliment.
The temptation Achilles constantly faces is to withdraw himself
from human concerns and affairs and to deny his human connections.
He is, in a sense, godlike in his refusal to battle together with the other
Greeks, godlike in his decision to ignore Agamemnon’s apologies and
pleas that he return to battle, godlike in his ultimate return to battle
(twelve Trojan warriors die of fright before he ever picks up a spear), and
finally in his grief for Patroclos, which expresses itself in his refusal to
join the other Greeks in eating and drinking. No human being can deny
his own humanity for long without suffering the consequences, and to a
certain extent the entire Iliad traces the trajectory of Achilles’ “godlike”
decision to put himself outside the concerns of mere mortals, and the
slow and painful process of his realization that he is mortal after all and
must ultimately return to the human family.
It is worth noting that Achilles is very young and has spent almost
his entire adult life on the beach before Troy. His behavior in some ways
is similar to the behavior of many adolescents in his refusal to face his
own limitations. He provokes authority figures from Agamemnon to
Apollo, he refuses in his fury to accept a supplication from Hector – as
other men do, refuses to relent in his fury toward Agamemnon – as other
men do, refuses to accept inadequate compensation for the damage to

28

his honor – as other men do, refuses to accept the death of a friend and
move on – as other men do. Even after he returns to the army to fight, he
refuses in his fury and grief to eat, drink, or engage in sexual relations
with the women he has won. All of these refusals are characteristic of
Achilles’ adolescent fury at discovering that the world is unfair and
resistant to his desires. Achilles’ confrontation with his own limitations
becomes all the more poignant because Achilles is “godlike” in so many
other ways.

Hector
Homer sets up a stark contrast between Hector, the greatest of the
Trojan heroes, and Achilles, preparing us for their final showdown in
Book 22. By introducing us to Hector’s family in Book 6 (Andromache,
his wife, Astyanax, his son, Queen Hekabe and King Priam, his mother
and father, Paris, his brother, and Helen, the woman Paris stole away
from Menelaos), Homer places Hector in the kind of domestic context
that we never see for any of the Greek heroes—certainly not Achilles, who
has deserted his lonely old father to go to war, nor Agamemnon, who will
return to Greece with a concubine only to be murdered by his wife, nor
even Odysseus, who takes up with a series of women before returning
(temporarily) to his wife. Hector, Homer makes plain, has a great deal
more to lose than his honor and glory.
In our selection, we first see Hector returning into the walls of
Troy, where he is surrounded by Trojan women asking about sons,
brothers, husbands, and neighbors. The scene establishes Hector as a
man solidly rooted in a particular place and community, in stark
contrast to Achilles in particular, who has left home and family long ago
and knows he can never return, and to all the Greeks in general, who
have by choice or force remained absent from their own homes for ten
years.
But it is in his charming reunion with Andromache (historically
perhaps the most popular episode in the Iliad) that Hector’s character is
best established. Hector’s gentle and considerate treatment of
Andromache, herself an early victim of kidnap and ransom, contrasts
starkly with the Greek camp, where women are simply property to be
traded between heroes. Hector finds Andromache on the city walls,
where she has gone to watch the fighting out of her concern for his
safety. She runs to meet her husband and brings with her Astyanax,
their child. Thus, we see Hector with father and mother, wife and child,
showing him as a far more complete human being than Achilles.
The conflict between his public responsibility to protect Troy and
his family, and his private, individual pursuit of personal glory creates
problems for Hector. Andromache, recognizing that Hector’s pursuit of
personal glory may bring ruin on her and the city, warns her husband

29

against fighting too aggressively, begging him to come back into the city
and fight from atop its walls:
“Reckless one,
my Hector—your own fiery courage will destroy you!
Have you no pity for him, our helpless son? Or me,
And the destiny that weighs me down, your widow,
Now so soon. Yes, soon they will kill you off,
All the Achaean forces massed for assault . . .
Pity me, please! Take your stand on the rampart here,
Before you orphan your son and make your wife a widow!”
Hector’s response makes plain that, for all his domestic concerns, his
motivation is still, ultimately, the same as Achilles’: to gain personal
glory and honor. Hector’s personal commitment to winning glory for
himself will come at a heavy cost, as he well understands, as he goes on
predict the fate of Andromache after the destruction of Troy. She will, he
knows, be taken into slavery and forced to live as the concubine of a
Greek warrior, and it may be that things will be worse for his wife and
child because of his own fame.
Hector’s thoughts before his final, tragic death at the hands of
Achilles clarify that his personal priorities as a warrior-hero outweigh his
communal responsibilities. Having advised the Trojan army to remain in
the field despite the return of Achilles to battle, Hector refuses to retreat
with the rest of the army into Troy when the tide of battle turns.
Ignoring the pleas of his mother and father, Hector remains on the field
to face Achilles. His reasoning shows how important winning glory and
avoiding shame are to him, even if doing so comes at the cost not only of
his own life, but ultimately of the family and city he is protecting:
No way out. If I slip inside the gates and walls,
Polydamas will be first to heap disgrace on me—
He was the one who urged me to lead our Trojans
Back to Ilium just last night, the disastrous night
Achilles rose in arms like a god. But did I give way?
Not at all. And how much better it would have been!
Now my army’s ruined, thanks to my own reckless pride,
I would die of shame to face the men of Troy
And the Trojan women trailing their long robes . . .
Someone less of a man than I will say, “Our Hector—
Staking all on his own strength, he destroyed his army!”
So they will mutter. So better by far for me
To stand up to Achilles, kill him, come home alive
Or die at his hands in glory out before our walls.
The key words in the speech are “better by far for me,” because clearly
Hector’s decision to stand and face Achilles is motivated by his personal
desire to win glory and avoid shame. By putting Priam and Hecuba on
the walls at this moment, by having Andromache earlier beg Hector to
remain inside the walls, Homer makes clear that Hector understands the

30

consequences of his decision. His family and community will ultimately
pay the price for Hector’s glorious last moments. Without Hector to
protect them, Troy and all its people are doomed.

31

Homer’s Odyssey Introduction

General
Samuel Butler was only half-joking when he called the Odyssey
“the Iliad’s wife.” The Odyssey, far more than the Iliad, concerns itself
with issues traditionally associated with women. In large measure, this
is because, unlike the Iliad, the Odyssey focuses on the private realm of
domestic life, a realm associated in the Greek mind with the women who
occupied it and who were, in large measure, in control of it. The shaping
principle of the Odyssey is Odysseus’ return home. Compare this with
the Iliad, which, even in the rare moments when it deals with the
domestic (Hector’s meeting with Andromache in Book 6, for example),
does so only to contrast it with the more central business of warfare.
The Odyssey, on the other hand, focuses on Odysseus’ attempts to
return home to his family. Warfare is not the be-all and end-all of this
hero’s life, but rather a means to a larger end: going home.
As a result of this changed focus, the tone of the two epics could
hardly differ more. Where the Iliad is a tragic exploration of death and
human limitations in a time of war, the Odyssey explores not glorious
death but painful and costly survival after the war is over. It is a comic,
future-oriented look at life and possibility in a time of peace, a fast-
moving tale of a difficult journey undertaken by a man uniquely prepared
for it. This has led many scholars to conclude that Homer (if he existed)
probably wrote the Odyssey much later in life than the Iliad; its vision is
fuller and more humane, its hero admirable both for his physical
prowess and his cleverness.
The Odyssey displays a self-consciousness about the importance of
art to the good life that is nearly absent from the Iliad, particularly in the
way Homer uses Demodokos, the Phaiakian poet/bard, to represent the
bardic tradition that probably produced Homer. Though there is no
reliable historic evidence, tradition has it that Homer, like Demodokos,
was blind; yet despite his blindness, the poet possesses the artistic
capacity to move people very deeply with his art. Both Odysseus and his
son Telemachus are moved to tears at different points in the Odyssey by
the song of a bard; this is an especially painful and beautiful experience
for Odysseus as he hears his own experience transmuted into art:
There is no boon in life more sweet, I say,
than when a summer joy holds all the realm,
and banqueters sit listening to a harper
in a great hall, by rows of tables heaped
with bread and roast meat . . .
Here is the flower of life, it seems to me! (9:5-15)
The songs of Demodokos comment in interesting ways on Odysseus’
experiences in the past and those yet to come. In his first song, he tells
of Odysseus’ conflict with Achilles. In Demodokos’ second performance,
he sings of Hephaistos, the god of the forge, who comes home to find that

32

his wife has been unfaithful, a future prospect that Odysseus himself
perhaps is facing. Agamemnon, killed by his unfaithful wife
Clytemnestra at his homecoming, warns Odysseus from the underworld
that he may face the same fate at the hands of Penelope. The songs of
Demodokos help Odysseus make sense of his past and prepare for his
future—the job of all good art!

33

Thematic Comparison of Homer’s Epics
Odyssey Iliad
Peace War
Domesticity/Civilizations
eating
sleeping
washing clothes
dancing
singing
telling stories
poetry
athletic contests
families
marriage
funerals
good manners
social rituals
Combat/Savagery
dressing for battle
counsels between men
wounding
killing
boasts and taunting
disorderliness/chaos
desecration of corpses
men behaving like animals
winning glory
sacrificing domestic for
martial
destruction of families
Returning home Leaving home/Destruction of the
domestic
Folk tale
monsters
witches
magic
Myth
heroes
gods
Continuing life/Survival Death
Guile/Cleverness Martial skill
Women play significant role Women play no significant role

View of Man
While the Iliad focuses on the tragedy of being human in its
constant reiteration of the themes of death’s inevitability, human
limitations, and the shortcomings of “this world” versus the perfect world
of the gods, the Odyssey pays far more attention to the things that make
life bearable for human beings: eating, drinking, dancing, storytelling,
lovemaking, and sleeping. It is to this “bearable” domestic world that
Odysseus and his men long to return; they fight monsters, the weather,
and the malice of the gods in order to do so. Odysseus even surrenders
the possibility of immortality offered to him by Calypso in order to return
to Penelope. He tells her:
I long for home, long for the sight of home.
If any god has marked me out again
For shipwreck, my tough heart can undergo it.

34

What hardship have I not long since endured
At sea, in battle! Let the trial come!
Nowhere is this focus on the mundane more evident than in the
Odyssey’s repeated treatment of the theme of eating. It is no
exaggeration to say that in the world of the Odyssey, the rule of life is eat
or be eaten. And if one does eat, one had best be careful about when
and where. The savage, uncivilized Kyklops Polyphemos, eats several of
Odysseus’ men; the Laistrygonians are gigantic cannibal vampires, the
monsters Scylla and Charybdis both threaten to eat Odysseus and all of
his men. There are also perils related to what one eats. Those who eat
the lotus root are trapped in a fantasy world and never want to leave it.
Any man foolish enough to eat or drink in Kirke’s house finds himself
transformed into a swine; the most shocking part of that transformation
is that the men, after their transformation, are immediately fed pig food:
Scarce had they drunk when she flew after them
With her long stick and shut them in a pigsty—
Bodies, voices, heads, and bristles, all
Swinish now, though minds were still unchanged.
So, squealing, in they went. And Kirke tossed them
Acorns, mast, and cornel berries—fodder
For hogs who rut and slumber in the earth. (322)
The companions of Odysseus are finally lost to their own appetites when
they are unable to stop themselves from eating the cattle of the Kikones
and of Helios. The greatest crime of the suitors of Penelope, who are all
killed by Odysseus at the end of the Odyssey, is consuming another
man’s wine and food. How one eats seems to distinguish casualties from
survivors, the innocent from the guilty, the civilized from the uncivilized,
even the living from the dead (who crave blood).
As David Denby points out in Great Books, the Odyssey is built
around a paradox. On the one hand, the body constantly craves rest and
food. As Odysseus tells Alkinoos, when he washes up on Phaiakia naked
and starving:
There is nothing more shameless
Than this belly of ours, which forces a man
To pay attention to it, no matter how many
Troubles he has, how much pain in his heart. (Lombardo 7:229-
32)
On the other hand, as soon as one does begin paying attention to the
shameless belly, one is in danger of losing one’s full humanity, of ending
up drugged, sleepy, and half-alive like the Lotus-Eaters, bestial like the
transformed men on the island of Kirke, guilty and doomed like the
suitors who endlessly consume Telemachus’ inheritance, or nearly
comatose like Odysseus himself and his men after a year on the island of
Calypso. In the Odyssey, humans live in constant tension between self-
indulgence and self-denial; they are the Scylla and the Charybdis of

35

every man’s life, and all of us must learn to sail between them without
being consumed by either one.
Odysseus’ “heroism” is in some measure defined by his ability to
practice the kind of self-denial that other heroes lack. Odysseus
possesses the adult’s capacity to defer desire, particularly in the matter
of personal glory. Odysseus constantly shows an ability to set aside his
prerogatives as famous hero, for example disguising himself as a poor
beggar on Phaiakia (or even, in the encounter with Polyphemos, as
“Nobody”), something Achilles was notoriously incapable of doing.
However, it’s always a deferral of glory—postponing glory now to achieve
it more fully later– and it’s never indefinite–as Odysseus proves when he
feels compelled to reveal his identity to the furious Polyphemos, despite
his own men begging him to keep his mouth shut. Odysseus is willing
to be “Nobody” for a time, but ultimately he’s motivated by the same
desire to be remembered and admired that drives Achilles and Hector.
It is their inability to practice the same self-denial that gets many
of Odysseus’ men killed. Their first mistake is insisting on eating the
cattle of the Kikones right now, refusing to wait until they have safely
withdrawn from the scene of their recent victory. The scene repeats itself
again and again as Odysseus’ men surrender to temptation, eating
Kirke’s food, opening the bag of wind Aiolos gives to Odysseus, or eating
the cattle of Helios.
Paradoxically, though, it is Odysseus’ ability to deny himself that
ultimately leads to his fulfillment. For what Odysseus wants, above all
things, is to live, to survive, even if it means hunkering down with an
empty stomach, covering himself in a pile of leaves, and sleeping until
tomorrow, trusting that something better will come along. During his
journey he is constantly confronted with the temptation to dwell in
“unlifelike” places – the island of the Lotos Eaters or the Island of
Calypso, or even Skheria, the island of the Phaiakians. Ultimately, he
rejects the forgetfulness, slothfulness, life-denying nostalgia, even
immortality, those places represent and instead chooses life, with all its
pain and change, an unending struggle that makes him “a man of
constant sorrow.”
Continually, Odysseus chooses life, which sets him in stark
contrast to Achilles, who kills Hector with the full knowledge that in
doing so he brings his own death closer, and who constantly behaves as
though he were not a mortal at all. Odysseus, in his behavior, recognizes
his human limitations in a way that Achilles never does. The Odyssey
affirms Odysseus’ choice as the correct one when, during his journey to
the Land of the Dead, Odysseus attempts to comfort the ghost of
Achilles. “[Y]ou need not be so pained by death,” he tells Achilles, for
there was never a man “more blessed by fortune than you” (XI.541, 536-

36

7). Achilles’ chilling reply speaks volumes about how important the
ancient Greeks’ view of the afterlife was to their values:
Let me hear no smooth talk
Of death from you, Odysseus, light of councils.
Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
For some poor country man, on iron rations,
Than lord it over all the exhausted dead.
Put simply, Achilles would rather be a live dog than a dead lion.
Odysseus, in his capacity to survive, is, in the world of the Odyssey, a far
better model for human behavior than the eternally dissatisfied Achilles.
Odysseus is set apart from Achilles and Hector not only in his
capacity for self-denial. A more obvious difference is Odysseus’ keen
intelligence. Throughout the Iliad and the Odyssey, Odysseus’ defining
quality is his capacity to think his way out of problems; watch how
Odysseus himself draws attention to this ability as he tells his stories to
the Phaiakians. We’ll explore this cunning in more depth as we look
more deeply at the character of Odysseus below.
View of the Divine
The gods of the Odyssey are the same as the gods of the Iliad—
limited, capricious, and immoral. However, perhaps because of the
Odyssey’s more narrow focus on Odysseus and his son, and because
both heroes are materially assisted by Athena, the overall impression of
the gods in the Odyssey is that they are more benevolent and kindly
disposed toward humans. Poseidon, Odysseus’ principal enemy among
the gods, is mostly absent from the narrative, and seems more like an
impersonal force whipping up monsters and storms than a personal god.
Athena and Odysseus share a love for disguises; both of them use
disguises to put others at a disadvantage. When Odysseus finally
returns home to Ithaca, he disguises himself in order to investigate
what’s happening at his house. Encountering the disguised Athena but
failing to recognize her, Odysseus contrives one of his many masterful
lies. Athena listens, enjoying the performance, then interrupts him,
obviously amused:
Only a master thief, a real con artist,
Could match your tricks—even a god
Might come up short. You wily bastard,
You cunning, elusive, habitual liar! (13:299-302 in Lombardo)
As Sheila Murnahan points out in her introduction to Stanley
Lombardo’s translation of the Odyssey, Athena is Odysseus’ divine
double, a warrior-goddess noted both for her mastery of warfare and her
cunning intellect. Given the obvious affection and admiration that
Athena feels for Odysseus, their relationship seems more like a
partnership of equals than one of goddess and worshipper.

37

Artistic/Aesthetic
Beyond the change in tone, the Odyssey shares a great deal in
common with the Iliad. We see again the use of the extended “Homeric”
simile, which uses the natural world to describe the heroic world, again
the rapid-fire narrative shifts between Homer’s descriptions of the gods’
interactions and those of men. Both share the same meter in Greek
(dactylic hexameter). The ancient Greeks thought of them as a pair and
assumed both were by the same author.
As we have noted, the Odyssey pays far more attention to the
domestic and places a higher value on civilization and survival than on
warfare and destruction. Consider the scene of Nausikaa asking her
father for permission to take her chariot and wash clothes. His loving
indulgence of her scolding and his awareness that her real desire is not
to clothe him or her brothers, but to get a husband, are delicately,
comically handled. This kind of tender domestic scene, and the gentle
humor that suffuses it, are almost entirely absent from the Iliad.
Of course, not all of the humor of the Odyssey is as delicate. The
Iliad contains nothing quite so corny and juvenile as Odysseus’ practical
joke on Polyphemos (“Who has hurt you?” “Nobody! Nobody has hurt
me!” “Oh well, quit complaining then.”) Perhaps this sort of humor
knocked them dead back in the Bronze Age, but one suspects that jokes
of this nature were tired even in Homer’s day. That the Odyssey makes
use of them anyway is part of its comic charm. Like the later comedies of
Shakespeare, the Odyssey is filled with treatments of love, of disguise, of
mistaken identity, and concludes with a happy ending. One senses an
older Homer at work, the youthful thunder and lightning of the Iliad out
of his system, more amused than disgusted, laughing and enjoying the
spectacle of life more than he did when he was younger.

View of the World
The long wanderings of Odysseus show how the world was, for the
Greeks, a larger and more wondrous place than it has become for us.
Uncertain that there were any limitations or end to the world, the
possibility of novelty and discovery were high. Who knew, after all, but
that there might not actually be some place where the inhabitants were
one-eyed giants? Not that the Greeks were entirely innocent to the
possibility that travelers might return with tall tales. The gentle humor
of Alkinoos’ reply to Odysseus’ wild stories certainly suggests the
Phaiakians had heard a few whoppers before:
From all we see, we take you for no swindler—
Though the dark earth be patient of so many,
Scattered everywhere, baiting their traps with lies
Of old times and places no one knows. (11:399-406)
We believe you, Odysseus. Honest. Whether this speech is in earnest or
another example of the civility and politeness of the Phaiakians I will
leave to the reader’s judgment. But it does show that the Homeric

38

Greeks, however little they might have known about the larger world they
inhabited, were not entirely credulous simpletons when it came to the
tall tales of travelers.
They were aware, however, that the world outside their small
communities was an extremely dangerous place, one in which the
traveler has no help from police, banks, public transportation or even
accommodation. Travel was dangerous, slow, unpredictable, and
dependent on the whims of nature. That the Greeks would eventually
embody these dangers of the larger world in the form of monsters—the
vampires, witches, giants, and angry sea monsters who populate the
lands where Odysseus wanders—is hardly surprising. One must
struggle to survive in this world and constantly be on guard, for a
moment’s forgetfulness can be fatal. The narrow escapes of Odysseus
from the Kyklops, the Laistrygonians, the Skylla and Charybdis, come
always at a terrible cost, generally in the lives of his men, all of whom are
dead by the time Odysseus washes ashore at the beginning of Book 4
(though they are temporarily “revived” as Odysseus tells his stories).
If the world was full of more obvious physical dangers like giant
blood-sucking cannibals, Odysseus’ stories also suggest that it is full of
more subtle dangers as well. Especially dangerous are the various
temptations embodied in Odysseus’ encounters with powerful women;
the temptations of “sloth,” that deadly sin which transforms men into
animals, seem powerfully incarnated in the episode of Kirke. At the
moment of their transformation back into human beings, Odysseus’ men
are filled with unbearable sorrow, since they must now face the pain and
trials of being fully human again:
Their bristles fell away,
The coarse pelt grown upon them by her drug
Melted away, and they were men again,
Younger, more handsome, taller than before.
Their eyes upon me, each one took my hands,
And wild regret and longing pierced them through,
So the room rang with sobs, and even Kirke
Pitied that transformation.
It is one of the strangest and most beautiful moments in classical
literature, suggesting that most people are content to be animals, feeding
and sleeping, “hogs who rut and slumber in the earth,” rather than face
the pain of being fully human. A hero like Odysseus, on the other hand,
when offered the possibility of surrendering his humanity, repeatedly
refuses. Kirke and Calypso offer immortality, a life utterly free from
hunger, cold, and want; Nausikaa offers youth, beauty, and wealth.
Somehow, Odysseus prefers his aging wife, the rocky soil of Ithaka, the
uncertainties of returning home after twenty years to a house full of
dangerous strangers, to any of these temptations. The Odyssey, like The
Wizard of Oz, confirms a very old truth: there’s no place like home.

39

Particularly distant from the charms of home is the Land of the
Dead, here represented not as an “underworld” (although the ancient
Greeks generally understood it as such), but as a physical “on-the-map”
location. Homer’s dark and terrifying picture of the afterlife is
unmatched even in Dante. The “ghosts” of the dead are spiritless,
miserable shadows longing for nothing so much as to return to the land
of the living again. Odysseus’ trip becomes all the more terrifying
because he knows that his choice to leave Calypso means that he will
have to join these spirits himself eventually.
Character of Odysseus
Like Achilles or Hector, Odysseus is essentially static or
unchanging. He is the same clever, self-possessed, courageous,
resourceful, determined man in the last book of the Odyssey that he is in
the first. For example, Odysseus shows the same wiliness that helped
him survive Troy at his first appearance in the Odyssey in Book 6. He
quickly takes the measure of Nausikaa, decides how to approach her,
what to ask for, and flatters her with a pickup line that was probably
tired even in the Bronze Age: “Mistress, please, are you divine, or
mortal?” Shortly afterwards, Nausikaa says to her maids:
I wish my husband could be as fine as he
And glad to stay forever on Skheria.
Odysseus reads her age and station in life perfectly, and then addresses
her accordingly, knowing that as beautiful as she is she must be slightly
vain and must be thinking about marriage, which of course the reader
already knows is the case.
Still, it is also true that over the course of his final adventures,
Odysseus is changing somewhat as well. By moving Odysseus through a
series of transitional spaces ruled over by women (Arete, Kirke, Calypso),
Homer shows how Odysseus moves toward a more domestic and peaceful
frame of mind, preparing him to make the transition from the bloody
“death world” of the Trojan War to the domestic world of Ithaka. The
land of the Phaiakians in particular seems a perfect preparation for his
return home; his emergence, naked, bruised, and covered in brine into
the midst of a party of terrified young girls suggests at the beginning of
this episode how poorly prepared Odysseus is for this world. Odysseus,
the hero of Troy, legend all over the world, emerges from the woods with
a branch over his privates to cast himself at the feet of a teenage girl. As
the episode unfolds, Odysseus is slowly restored to his rightful
appearance and place as he washes, dresses, competes successfully in
athletic contests, and tells the stories that establish his identity as the
famous man he finally reveals himself to be.
The transition is a slow one. The refusal of Odysseus to accept
Prince Laodamas’ invitation to join in the athletic games suggests
Odysseus is still not ready to rejoin the domestic, orderly, peaceful post-
Troy world. Instead, like a warrior, he awaits a challenge and an insult,

40

and then responds with a vehemence that seems to embarrass the
Phaiakians. Alkinoös smoothes over the tension with a gracious and
self-effacing speech (unlike anything in the Iliad) that identifies the
characteristics of the Phaiakians as the domestic arts of peace: singing,
dancing, warm baths and changes of clothes. Odysseus’ tearful
response to the songs of Demodokos, which sets him apart from everyone
around him, suggests that he is not yet far away enough from the
traumatic events of the Trojan war to be able to respond with pleasure
and joy to its transmutation into art.

41

Aeschylus’ Agamemnon Introduction

General
Aeschylus is the first known practitioner of the drama and the
earliest of the great Greek tragedians, producing his work around 500
B.C, the high water mark of Athenian artistic and cultural development.
Most of Aeschylus’ plays were written and performed in the years before
the establishment of an Athenian empire. Greek drama (according to
Aristotle) has its origins in religious rituals performed in honor of
Dionysus, god of wine, intoxication, madness, and release from
consciousness. Early choral performances in honor of Dionysus later
developed into artistic contests with prizes. At first, the cast of Greek
drama consisted only of a chorus and one “actor.” The chorus and actor
engaged in some kind of spoken or musical dialogue with one another.
When a second actor was added, the art form we call the drama was
born. Aeschylus added a third actor, but seldom exploits the dramatic
possibilities a third actor offers. For example, in Agamemnon,
Cassandra is on stage while Agamemnon and Clytemnestra talk, but
never interrupts.
Three playwrights were chosen for each three-day competition.
Each day, one playwright staged three tragedies and then a comic satyr-
play. In the first half of the fifth century, each day’s three plays were
generally part of a single narrative unit. This is the case with
Agamemnon, which is the first play of a trilogy often referred to as the
Oresteia, since it mainly concerns Orestes, the son of Clytemnestra and
Agamemnon. The Oresteia is the only complete surviving trilogy,
although many of the other surviving Greek tragedies were probably
originally performed as part of larger narrative units. The vast bulk of
Greek tragedies have been lost.
Aeschylus was a highly public figure. He fought in Athens’ most
significant battles against the Persians and was a well-known and highly
respected participant in the public life of the city-state. Just as
Aeschylus was a highly public figure, so was Greek tragedy a highly
public genre, far more public and culturally central than the drama of
our own day. Tragedies were not performed in private theaters, but in
large public outdoor amphitheaters that held thousands. The tragedies
were performed as part of a dramatic contest, which took place during
Athens’ annual festival honoring the god Dionysus. All public business
stopped so that citizens could attend. (No one knows if women or non-
citizens attended.) Wealthy benefactors chosen by lot financed the
productions. The state subsidized attendance for poor citizens. In short,
everyone of political importance in Athens would have attended these
performances, and they were considered a critical forum for addressing
issues of public interest.

42

The staging in Greek drama underlines the public nature of the
genre. There are almost no indoor scenes in any Greek drama, the
action generally taking place in front of a “skene,” a false background
that could serve dramatically as the front of a temple or palace, or,
occasionally, the mouth of a cave. Such conventions were forced by the
fact that no indoor theater of the necessary size could have possibly had
adequate lighting. It is also true that in the balmy Mediterranean
climate, a great deal of public business was conducted outdoors. Still,
the convention stresses that the actions on the stage are taking place
against a public backdrop, by public figures, with a public audience.
The chorus, which sang and danced its part throughout the play,
serves as a surrogate audience for the actors. Played by young men,
who, like the actors, wore masks throughout the play, the Chorus might
in any given play be asked to represent a group of “old men of Argos,”
“Theban priests of Apollo,” or even “Corinthian women.” But in each
case, the chorus is dramatically understood as a kind of voice of the
people, or voice of common sense, balanced against the often-extreme
claims and actions of the actors.
View of the World
Taken by itself, outside of the context of the other two plays in the
Oresteia trilogy, Agamemnon might seem to suggest a chaotic world
without clear boundaries for human behavior. Clytemnestra murders
her husband and announces it publicly immediately afterward, and the
Chorus cries out that the gods will have vengeance on her for this
terrible act. But as the play ends, justice is incomplete: Agamemnon has
been punished for his misdeeds, but his murderer still walks free.
Clytemnestra seems to have gone unpunished.
Yet the establishment of justice is a primary theme in the play.
The Athenians were proud of the fact that they had, as a city-state,
established institutions to dispense justice as an alternative to tribal or
personal vengeance. Prior to the establishment of courts and policing
bodies, if one person was wronged or murdered by another, the only
mechanism of justice was personal or tribal revenge. If a person from
family A murders someone from family B, someone from family B will
have to take revenge on someone else from family A. Unfortunately, now
family A has to revenge that murder, and the cycle goes on endlessly.
This is the problem that faces Clytemnestra as the play begins.
Agamemnon, her husband, is responsible for the death of her daughter
Iphigenia, who was sacrificed to the gods during the Trojan War.
Clytemnestra is, not surprisingly, furious, and plots revenge during
Agamemnon’s absence. Unfortunately, her desire to kill her husband is
also motivated by her having taken a lover during his absence. The
lover, Aigisthus, has his own complex reasons for desiring revenge on
Agamemnon. Even without the soap opera complications,

43

Clytemnestra’s situation is precarious for the simple reason that in order
to avenge a family murder, she has to commit a family murder. So
Clytemnestra faces two limitations on her vengeance: One, she cannot
cleanse Agamemnon’s pollution from Argos without becoming polluted
herself by murdering her own husband. Two, she is not personally fit to
be an objective instrument of justice because she has a personal, selfish
interest in the death of Agamemnon, which will free her to carry on her
affair with Aigisthus.
The play embodies a critical problem of the old system of justice.
Under the old system, the avenger must be the closest blood kin to the
victim. Clytemnestra is the closest blood kin of Iphigenia, her murdered
daughter. Aigisthus is the closest kin of his murdered brothers, and
Agamemnon is the closest kin of their murderer (Agamemnon’s father
Atreus). Thus both are under some obligation to take revenge on him.
Unfortunately, neither is taking revenge out of pure motives, and even if
they were, both must violate serious taboos in order to take revenge:
Clytemnestra by murdering her own husband, Aigisthus by murdering
his “host,” Agamemnon. Both, in other words, must become the subject
of someone else’s blood revenge. That “someone else” is, in this case,
Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Although Orestes never
appears on stage during this play, his presence hangs over it, since the
audience knows that eventually, Clytemnestra will herself be murdered
by him. Needless to say, this murder won’t be the end of the problem,
because this blood avenger, although acting with purer motives than
Clytemnestra or Aigisthus, is still staining himself with the blood of his
mother, and must thus be the target of someone else’s vengeance. When
no one steps forward to avenge Clytemnestra, a group of goddesses called
the Furies takes over. They are ancient tribal deities, here embodying a
kind of impersonal cosmic justice. By the end of the trilogy, Athena
turns aside their wrath at Orestes by making them the guardians of a
court established in Athens; thus, a new communal justice is established
capable of putting an end to the cycle of vengeance by putting the
punishment of crime in the hands of the state rather than in the hands
of individuals.
Interestingly, then, at the end of the Oresteia, justice is taken out
of the hands of the divine actors, the Furies, and placed into the hands
of a human institution: the Athenian court. We have noted that the
Greek gods are not creators and that they are subject to the order of the
world rather than existing outside that order. If “sin” for the Greeks is
acting “unnaturally,” that is, in a way that somehow violates the
orderliness of the world, then “sin” is not an offense against a personal
God, as it is in the Christian worldview, but is rather a violation of the
world’s structuring principles: sons don’t murder fathers, wives don’t
murder husbands, guests don’t murder hosts, and so on. Presumably
punishment follows from such behavior without regard to motivation,

44

since violating the laws by which the world operates is like jumping off a
20-storey building. One might have the best motives in the world, but
one still falls and dies. Orestes has the finest possible motives for
murdering his mother, but the Greek concept of cosmic justice,
embodied in the Furies, means that he must be punished. Under this
scheme, then, the human justice of the Athenian court seems a good
deal more just than divine justice, which is incapable of taking
motivation or circumstance into consideration.
Artistic/Aesthetic Notes
Unlike the epic, tragedy is focused primarily on the human world.
Where Homer moves back and forth between the world of humans and of
gods, in tragedy we are fully fixed on the human world with the divine
world only rarely making an appearance. The form itself here makes our
understanding more limited and more focused on the human. In
tragedy, we generally see man’s problems from man’s more limited
perspective. Aeschylus underlines this by having all of his major
characters claim to act in the name of justice: Agamemnon,
Clytemnestra, and Aigisthus all claim to have deeper insight into the
workings of justice than the people around them. Yet the play finally
affirms that none sees more than a small part of the pattern. Only
Cassandra sees clearly, but because of the curse of the gods, she is not
believed. Her prophecies again underline the limitedness of all the
characters.
The poetic language of Greek tragedy is rich and strange, nowhere
more so than in the long choral odes between “scenes.” These odes,
which often range free from the immediate concerns of the characters on
stage, place the action of the play into a much larger philosophical
framework. The language and imagery are sometimes so dense and
suggestive that translation becomes simply an educated guess; scholars
are still puzzled by many lines in choral odes. Other images and
metaphors, when rightly understood, suggest far greater range and
significance to the actions of the play. Consider, for example, the
Chorus’ description of the Greek armies marching to war:
Ten years gone by, ten to the day
our great avenger went for Priam . . .
Atreus’ sturdy yoke of sons
launched Greece in a thousand ships,
armadas cutting loose from the land,
armies massed for the cause, the rescue—
[From within the palace Clytemnestra raises a cry of triumph]
the heart within them screamed for all-out war!
Like vultures robbed of their young,
the agony sends them frenzied,
soaring high from the nest, round and
round they wheel, they row their wings,

45

stroke upon churning thrashing stroke,
but all the labor, the bed of pain,
the young are lost forever.
The chorus begins with a more or less straightforward description of the
Greek army setting out from Troy to avenge the kidnapping of Helen.
Suddenly, they are interrupted by a scream of triumph from
Clytemnestra, still offstage. (The stage directions, here and throughout
the play, are imaginative reconstructions of the action on stage. We
really have no very clear idea of how the plays were acted.)
Clytemnestra’s “cry of triumph” marks the moment at which the
chorus’ imagery becomes far more dense and suggestive, perhaps
because her scream reminds them of some of the more disturbing
implications of what they are saying. The simile (“Like vultures robbed of
their young . . . “) describes not only the mindset of the Greek army as it
set out for war bent on revenge because of the robbery of Helen, but also
the mindset of Clytemnestra as she waits for Agamemnon to return, bent
on revenge because of the “robbery” of her daughter Iphigenia. The
comparison to vultures, eaters of the dead, is hardly flattering to the
Greek army or to Clytemnestra; the simile, particularly toward its end as
it stresses the ultimate failure of the vultures to regain their stolen
young, captures the sense of retributive justice as an inescapable trap
which is the theme of the play. In setting out to Troy to revenge one sin,
the Greeks commit many more that will require revenge in their own
turn, just as Clytemnestra will lay a trap for herself when she murders
her husband. Escape seems impossible.
Note that in all Greek tragedy, violence occurs offstage. However,
we usually get a description of the events there (Greek dramas are full of
generic “messengers” who show up to describe what has happened
offstage), then the bodies are usually displayed onstage. Our English
word “obscene” comes from the Greek term “ob-skene,” meaning,
literally, “offstage.” The reticence of the Greeks to show violence on stage
is in interesting contrast to their obvious fascination with violence and
willingness to hear about it in all its gory details. Remember Odysseus’
description of the blinding of Polyphemos (which will pale next to the
messenger-borne descriptions of Oedipus putting his own eyes out or the
princess and Kreon melting together after being poisoned by Medea.)
Still, the ancient Greeks seem to have believed that some things should
not be seen, in sharp contrast to our own culture where rape, torture,
self-mutilation, and serial murder are nightly offered up as
“entertainment” on our televisions. The Greek restraint in this matter
may seem jarring.

46

View of the Divine
Agamemnon’s gods, especially Zeus, seem more distant from the
world of men and more mysterious than Homer’s. (No divine characters
appear in this play, though they will later in the trilogy.) Also, as we
have noticed, though most of the characters in the play speak as if they
were certain of the will of Zeus, and even claim to have acted in his
service, the play itself never affirms these claims. In fact, Agamemnon
(especially when it is viewed together with the other plays of the trilogy)
strongly suggests that all of these characters have an extremely limited
(and often self-serving) view of what the gods are doing in their lives.
On the other hand, the gods in Agamemnon may ultimately be
more benevolent than those of Homer. In Book 24 of the Iliad, Achilles
comforts the grieving Priam with an allegory involving Zeus. Zeus, says
Achilles, has two “great jars” that stand by his door—one full of miseries
and the other full of blessings. No one, says Achilles, gets anything from
the good jar without also having some bad things mixed in, and uses his
own father as an example. He suggests then that Zeus is more or less
neutral toward humans, mixing good and bad fortune together.
Suffering happens when an indifferent Zeus decides to bring it on.
Though both Homer and Aeschylus make the inevitability of
suffering a principal theme, Aeschylus goes on to claim that that
suffering produces some kind of positive result. The chorus, which
generally places events in a larger perspective, claims that there is a
bigger picture behind the seeming randomness of events, that the
suffering these characters experience actually has been contributing to
something larger than any of them in particular.
[Zeus] has led us on to know,
that Helmsman lays it down as law
that we must suffer, suffer into truth.
This “proto-providential” view of the gods will emerge more strongly in
Virgil. In the case of these plays, the “larger cause” moving behind
seemingly random events is “the will of Zeus” that Athens establish a
court that will resolve the human suffering caused by tribal justice.
The view of God’s total control is probably closely related here to
the rise of Athenian political power. Is Athenian supremacy merely a
product of random events? Or does it express some deeper purpose of
the gods to bless mankind via the rule of Athens? The second,
“providential” belief will come full flower under Roman rule in the Aeneid,
where all of history is visualized as a kind of prelude to the
establishment of the Roman Empire.

View of Man
To the extent that Clytemnestra and Agamemnon are meant to be
representative types in this play, it would be safe to say that Aeschylus
saw humans as shortsighted and frequently inclined to assume a

47

knowledge of the will of the gods that they do not actually have. The
danger of this, as Aeschylus saw, is that those claiming such knowledge
tend to use the claim in self-serving ways. Agamemnon, “hoisting the
pickaxe of Zeus,” brings ruin on the Trojans as an expression of divine
justice—which just happened to make him very rich. Clytemnestra,
certain that divine justice demands the death of Agamemnon, murders
him—which just happens to set her free to pursue her affair with
Aigisthus.
Of course, from another point of view, Clytemnestra and
Agamemnon are anything but representative types. They are fabulously
wealthy and powerful, born into ancient noble families and accustomed
to rule. Classical literature will concern itself almost exclusively with
such characters, showing very little interest in the speech, actions, or
character of common people. “Average” characters, like the Watchman,
where they do appear, are generic and insignificant to the action of the
play. The members of the chorus are a bit less anonymous; they are
equipped with a good moral compass and worthy of some attention, if not
individually then collectively. This is not surprising given that Athens is
the birthplace of democracy, founded on the principle that the average
guy has some concept of what’s best for society.

Character of Clytemnestra
From the very beginning of the play, there is much to suggest that
Aeschylus and his audience found Clytemnestra a disturbing and
unnatural figure. Agamemnon begins, like Hamlet, in darkness, with the
revelation that something is rotten in the city-state of Argos. The land
over which Clytemnestra rules is a place of darkness, nightmares, and
terror. The watchman calls Clytemnestra “that woman” who, he says,
“maneuvers like a man.” After Clytemnestra’s speech of triumph
regarding the sacking of Troy, the chorus pays another backhanded
compliment to her by telling her it was “spoken like a man.”
Clytemnestra throughout the play demonstrates a ferocious,
almost infernal energy, striding out and taking charge of events,
sacrificing animals, preparing, manipulating, and speechifying. She is
an overwhelming presence, devious, cunning, and a master of
doublespeak. For example, as she tells Agamemnon of the terrible time
she spent waiting for him to return, Clytemnestra laments that their
child is not with them to see the happy day.
And so
our child is gone, not standing by our side,
the bond of our dearest pledges, mine and yours;
by all rights our child should be here . . .
Orestes. You seem startled.

48

Agamemnon is startled, since he obviously thought the “child” she was
talking about, the “bond of our dearest pledges,” was Iphigenia. The
exchange is chilling; Clytemnestra is not only planning a murder, she’s
playing with her intended victim like a cat with a mouse. She indulges in
the same kind of sadistic doublespeak when she insists Cassandra come
inside the palace:
Do it now!—
I have no time to spend outside. Already
the victims crowd the hearth, the Navelstone,
to bless this day of joy I never hoped to see!!—
our victims waiting for the fire and the knife … (1053-1057)
Clytemnestra speaks as though the “victims” she speaks of were animals,
but the audience (and Cassandra) know that Clytemnestra’s victims will
be human.
Despite her love of such sadistic play, Clytemnestra still somehow
manages to put the rather thickheaded Agamemnon off his guard. She
accomplishes this in part by heaping flattery on him, then convincing
him to commit an act of overwhelming pride by walking on dyed
tapestries. The Greeks called this kind of act “hubris” and Greek
mythology is full of tales of people committing prideful acts—Arachne
comparing her weaving to Athena’s, for example—and then being
punished for it. Clytemnestra wants to be sure the gods are on her side
by having Agamemnon commit some terrible misdeed and then killing
him shortly afterward.
As Agamemnon treads down the priceless red tapestries,
Clytemnestra engages in a particularly revealing bit of her characteristic
doublespeak:
Quickly – let the red stream flow and bear him home
To the home he never hoped to see – Justice
lead him in!
Leave all the rest to me
The spirit within me never yields to sleep.
We will set things right the with gods’ help.
We will do whatever Fate requires. (902-907)
Again, this master manipulator of people and language shows her skills,
particularly in her promise to “set things rights” and “do whatever Fate
requires.” The audience, of course, knows what she means, though
neither the chorus nor Agamemnon do. The speech also reveals a key
aspect of Clytemnestra’s personality: her insistence that she is acting in
the defense of impersonal justice.

49

Clytemnestra’s claim to be an impersonal minister of justice is, of
course, at odds with the obvious relish she shows for the murders she is
about to commit, or to her chilling exaltation once the murders have
been performed:
Words, endless words I’ve said to serve the moment—
Now it makes me proud to tell the truth.
How else to prepare a death for deadly men
who seem to love you? How to rig the nets
of pain so high no man can overleap them?
I brooded on this trial, this ancient blood feud
year by year. At last my hour came.
Here I stand and here I struck
and here my work is done.
I did it all. I don’t deny it, no. . .
It is right and more than right . . .
Here is Agamemnon, my husband made a corpse
by this right hand—a masterpiece of Justice. (1390-1400, 1420,
1429-1430)
As she speaks, the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra are brought on
stage, perhaps on a wheeled platform, and displayed to the audience.
Her sense of triumphant relief is palpable and she seems genuinely taken
aback that the Chorus would question her behavior, accusing them (with
some justice) of using a double standard, since none of them condemned
Agamemnon for the sacrifice of his own daughter.
Most importantly, in her dialogue with the chorus, Clytemnestra
disavows personal responsibility for the murder of her husband, claiming
to be a kind of disembodied spirit of vengeance:
You claim the work is mine, call me
Agamemnon’s wife—you are so wrong.
Fleshed in the wife of this dead man,
the spirit lives within me,
our savage ancient spirit of revenge. (1527-1530)
Note, too, that Clytemnestra identifies this spirit of vengeance with the
deep past, referring to it as “savage” and “ancient.” The next two parts of
the play will deal with the establishment of a new form of civic justice,
administered by the state rather than by family or tribe.
The Chorus responds to Clytemnestra’s claim by pointing out that
if Agamemnon’s behavior was worthy of revenge, then so is
Clytemnestra’s:
And you, innocent of this murder?
And who could swear to that? and how . . .
and still an avenger could arise,

50

bred by the father’s crimes, and lend a hand. (1534-1537)
In other words, it is entirely possible that someone will come and take
vengeance on Clytemnestra. As the play ends, she and Aigisthus are
threatening the old men of the chorus, behavior that does not bode well
for the future of the community they hope to lead.
Character of the Chorus
As the play begins, the members of the chorus identify themselves
as the old men left behind by the war party that went to Troy.
We are the old, dishonored ones,
the broken husks of men.
Even then they cast us off,
the rescue mission left us here
to prop a child’s strength upon a stick. (79-83)
They present some of the strongest anti-war sentiments in all classical
literature, particularly in their clear-eyed identification of the cause of
the Trojan war: Helen, the “woman manned by many” for whom “the
generations wrestle, knees / grinding in the dust, the manhood drains, /
the spear snaps in the first blood rites” (68-72). Given that the members
of the Chorus were too old to go to war ten years ago, they must be
ancient now, but still seem to feel some sting at having been
“dishonored” by being left behind. With the costs of the war so clearly
before them, perhaps they are entitled to some cynicism.
The members of the chorus seem easily excited, but on deeper
thought often end choral odes doubting the claims they made at the
beginning. Like most choruses, they seem oddly ineffectual to
contemporary audiences, seeing terrible events taking place but never
interfering to stop them. Fear makes them reluctant to speak out. They
clearly attempt to nerve themselves up to warn Agamemnon’s herald of
the danger they suspect awaits him (Clytemnestra’s affair with Aigisthus
is an open secret), but cannot seem to work up the nerve to do so. So
too do they fail to warn Agamemnon himself of the danger he faces. They
manage only to bid him to “Search, my king and learn at last/who stayed
home and kept their faith/ and who betrayed the city” (791-793).
Though they are deeply suspicious of Clytemnestra and filled with
foreboding when she and Agamemnon enter the palace after his walk
across the tapestries, they still do nothing.
They are sympathetic to Cassandra, a slave and stranger, but their
dimwitted inability to understand her prophecies infuriates us, even
when we know that Apollo has decreed that no one will ever believe
Cassandra’s prophecies.

51

Character of Agamemnon
Like his wife, Agamemnon views himself as the instrument of
impersonal revenge, acting only as the agent of Zeus’ revenge on Troy, a
view evidently shared by some others—for example, the Herald, who
claims that Agamemnon “hoisted the pickaxe of Zeus, who brings
revenge” (515-522). Like a Bronze Age Hell’s Angel, Agamemnon arrives
in his chariot, his plunder carried before him, Cassandra riding in the
back. He has clearly benefited richly from the sack of Troy: “The storms
of ruin live!/ [Troy’s] last dying breath, rising up from the ashes/ sends
us gales of incense rich in gold” (804-6), then immediately claims his
success is the working out of justice, that he was not seeking his own
ends.
Agamemnon is smart enough to know that walking on the
tapestries is an act of hubris (913-925), but stupid enough to allow
himself to be convinced to do so, even though he fears being struck
down. His success has clearly gone to his head and robbed him of his
native wit, or he would never do such a thing.
In presenting Agamemnon as a self-righteous nitwit, Aeschylus
actually helps the audience to keep its focus on the larger thematic
issues of the play. We never sympathize very deeply with Agamemnon,
and we are expected to recognize that there is some justice behind
Clytemnestra’s murder. By keeping us from focusing too much on the
individuals involved in this murder, Aeschylus gives us enough critical
distance to consider the murder as a complex, flawed act of vengeance
that will ultimately create great chaos because there is no institution for
resolving the endless cycle of revenge.

52

Sophocles’ Oedipus Introduction

General
Like Aeschylus, his fellow playwright, Sophocles was a prominent
man deeply involved in the public affairs of Athens. In addition to being
a successful and prolific playwright, Sophocles was a military leader and
elected official. Sophocles’ life thus exemplifies the Greek ideal for artists
as full participants in public life. The ancient Greeks did not consider
artists to be “set apart” or different from others. This integration of art
and artists into the public life of the state was also reflected in the status
of the Athenian theatre, which was not a marginalized activity patronized
by a tiny intellectual elite (as it is in twenty-first century America), but a
public genre. It was supported by public funds and attended by nearly
everyone in the city-state. It thus became a forum for exploring issues of
importance to the community.
Oedipus Rex was produced during the final years of Athens’ war
with Sparta; the war had been a terrible mistake for the Athenians, who
were by this time trapped inside their own city walls by marauding
Spartan armies. A plague swept through the city, killing thousands. An
oracle from Apollo’s shrine at Delphi had predicted the ultimate defeat of
Athens, but many were inclined to disbelief, if only because the news was
so bad they did not want to believe. Sophocles’ work becomes an
exploration of the consequences of this attitude. Sophocles asks the
questions: Is prophecy real? Can anyone see into the future? What if
prophecy is impossible? What are the consequences for the culture if we
stop believing in prophecy?
In the way it answers these questions, Oedipus Rex represents the
extreme conservatism that is one way of responding to spiritual and
intellectual crisis. Sophocles’ play, while a stunning artistic
achievement, also expresses his conservative agenda for promoting the
gods’ moral integrity, that indeed they did punish evil and reward good.

View of the World
Oedipus Rex begins with a crisis that closely resembles the
beginning of the Iliad; a chorus of Athenian priests appears before King
Oedipus to ask for guidance in responding to a plague raging through
Athens. The play thus begins with the assumption by the chorus that if
there is a plague, there must be a cause for it. Sophocles here promotes
the idea that a definite, though sometimes mysterious and hard-to-
fathom, relationship of cause to effect exists. Detective work, it is
assumed, will uncover the truth. The plague is assumed to have a
cause; this is why the chorus of priests asks Oedipus to send to the
oracle at Delphi for an explanation of the source of the plague.
Even though the play affirms an orderly world, it is an orderliness
that is very difficult to uncover; man is generally blind to it, a point

53

Sophocles makes through his repeated use of the imagery of blindness in
the play. Ironically, the one character who is literally blind at the
beginning of the play, Tiresias, is most capable of figuratively “seeing” the
source of the plague, whereas Oedipus, who can literally see, is
figuratively blind— not only to his own responsibility for the sickness,
but also to his tangled relationships with his wife and children. Like
Hector, he does not “see” his own place in the world until too late. Here,
Tiresias, the blind “seer,” or prophet, identifies the killer:
Blind who now has eyes, beggar who now is rich,
He will grope his way toward a foreign soil,
A stick tapping before him step by step.
The speech is a kind of riddle, the significance of which is understood by
the audience but not by anyone else on stage except Tiresias. Oedipus
himself obviously does not even understand the riddle at this point. The
chorus too is reluctant to believe Tiresias’ claims about Oedipus.
Sophocles here uses the literary device called dramatic irony, where the
audience knows more than the characters on stage.
One of the most difficult issues for many students of the play is
Oedipus’ “punishment.” Why must Oedipus be punished, even when
he was not aware that he was committing such great crimes? After
all, he did not know he was killing a king, did not know he was killing
his father, and did not know that he was marrying his mother. So
why must he suffer if his crimes were unwitting? To understand why
Oedipus suffers, it is important to understand that for the Greeks,
moral law (the rule that people who do bad things suffer as a result)
was a natural function of the world (like gravity) that took no account
of motivation or circumstance and was administered in an impersonal
way. For the ancient Greeks, to “sin” was to violate the natural order
of the world. For the Hebrews, on the other hand, to “sin” was to
commit an act in violation of the character of a God with personal
qualities—one who felt anger, pity, and love. For the Greeks, to “sin”
was to break a natural law like the law of gravity.
Punishment for killing a king, marrying your mother, and so on, came
impersonally from the fabric of the universe and was “administered”
as impersonally and surely as a person falls who jumps off a nine-
story building. Because the Greek gods did not create the universe,
they did not “build” its moral fabric; to a certain extent, the gods
themselves are subject to the laws of the universe, which they are
inside (for example, they cannot be in more than one place or time at
once). Thus, one does not sin against a personal god (as the Hebrews
do) who might have the power to judge motivation and circumstance.
Instead, one sins against an impersonal universe, which has no more
interest in motivation or circumstance than the law of gravity does.
The fact that Oedipus does not mean to violate the two most sacred
relationships is irrelevant. He must be punished because he did a bad

54

thing. The certainty of this punishment becomes, for the Greek
audience, the guarantee that the universe is an orderly place. The
chorus longs for the punishment of Laius’ murder as an affirmation that
the world makes sense; after expressing their belief in “great laws” that
“tower above us, reared on high,” the Chorus explains that these great
laws require the punishment of evil:
But if any man comes striding, high and mighty
in all he says and does,
no fear of justice, no reverence
for the temples of the gods—
let a rough doom tear him down,
repay his pride, breakneck, ruinous pride! (972-980)
But the Chorus also expresses a sense of outrage, because if the oracle of
Apollo is correct, someone murdered their king and got away with it,
escaping punishment. The dissonance between what they believe—
sinners are punished—and what they see happening—sinners going
unpunished—causes a crisis of belief:
Can such a man, so desperate, still boast
he can save his life from the flashing bolts of god?
If all such violence goes with honor now
why join the sacred dance? (981-984)
These rhetorical questions imply what the rest of the ode makes perfectly
clear: if evil goes unpunished, there’s no point in engaging in religious
activities. The world is random. The gods do not exist.

View of Man
Like Homer, Sophocles emphasizes the limitedness of man. The
play suggests that man’s perspective is so small that, like a flea crawling
through an oriental carpet, he is incapable of seeing the larger pattern
around him. Oedipus is certainly heroic in his determined quest to find
this larger pattern and understand his own place in it, but for all his
heroism he is also representative; his quest for order is every man’s
quest. Oedipus’ desire to understand the pattern of the world and his
own part in the pattern is universal, because God built man to live in an
unfallen world. As God’s creatures, we immediately recognize in disease,
death, and oppression that something is wrong, even if we do not always
understand what that something is.
It is worth remembering that, for the ancient Greeks, the most
powerful of the gods, Zeus, was not the creator of men. According to
Greek myth, Zeus did not create the world and so does not govern its
most basic “built-in” laws. Because Zeus did not create men either, he is
neither expected to know very much about humans nor to care very
deeply for them. The Bible insists, on the other hand, that man is
“fearfully and wonderfully made” by his creator, and that God knows

55

“our inmost hearts” (Psalm 119) from the moment he created us.
Christianity makes much bolder claims about the place of man in the
world—that we are created in the image of God and given stewardship
over creation, for example—than Greek myth.

View of the Gods
Unlike the epics, tragedies are told from a man’s-eye view of the
world. In Greek tragedy, there is no overarching narrator to explain what
the gods are doing or thinking. Tragedy is thus a much more human-
centered art form than the epic. Tragedy, much more than epic,
embodies man’s sense of bewilderment at the actions or inactions of the
divine powers. The workings of the gods are far more mysterious and
terrifying here than in Homer. The gods in Oedipus seem to be less the
personal deities that they are in Homer and are rather more abstract
enforcers of moral law. Apollo’s sudden and unexplained punishment of
Thebes is one good example of the inscrutable behavior of the gods. We
do not travel to Mount Olympus with the narrator, as Homer would have
us do, to hear Apollo explain to Athena why he is sending a plague on
the Thebans. Instead, Sophocles lets us puzzle out Apollo’s motivations
through prophecies delivered by fallible humans who, as Oedipus notes,
might be inclined to lie in order to advance their own interests.
In the life of Oedipus, the workings of the divine powers are even
more mysterious and inexplicable. Why is Oedipus fated to do such
terrible things? He suffers under no generational curse like Agamemnon,
nor, beyond his impious speech, does he seem to have committed any
particular act of outrage against the gods. His suffering more closely
resembles that of Job than that of Achilles or Agamemnon, whose
afflictions can be neatly traced back to single acts.

Literary Qualities
Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy, the most influential work of
literary criticism in the western tradition, uses Oedipus Rex as a
touchstone of literary excellence. From the beginning, Oedipus Rex has
been the tragedy against which all other tragedies must be judged. Later
critics, particularly during the Enlightenment, extrapolated a set of
classical “rules” from Oedipus that they called “the three unities,”
relating to time, place, and action. According to these rules, the play
must unfold in “real time.” Thus, in Greek tragedy characters never walk
on stage in the middle of the play announcing that three years have
passed since the last scene. In a sense, all of Oedipus Rex is one long
scene with no breaks. This compression into real time means certain
unlikely events and coincidences are necessary. When the chorus asks
Oedipus to send for an oracle from Apollo, he announces that he has
already done so, and Creon arrives almost immediately, back from his

56

long journey. Messengers arrive from Corinth with the news that
Oedipus’ father is dead at precisely the correct moment in the plot. The
messenger who comes happens also to be the only person in Corinth who
knows that Oedipus was not Polybus’ son. Such coincidences pile up,
but the plot moves so quickly that the audience hardly notices. In
addition to the “unity of time,” these “rules” dictate that the play must
also unfold in one place, never changing settings. Finally, the play must
follow one action from its beginning to its logical ending. Not all Greek
tragedies follow these rules as closely as Oedipus Rex does, but these
aesthetic features have exerted a powerful influence on later generations
of playwrights.
Aside from observing the three unities, the most outstanding
aesthetic feature of the play is its insistent, repeated use of dramatic
irony. Sophocles plays on the fact that the audience, already familiar
with the myth of Oedipus, knows much more about what is happening
and what will happen than the characters do, so that characters
frequently say things that are more meaningful to the audience than they
are to the speakers. For example, Oedipus’ ironic promises (I’ll do
everything God asks! I’ll punish the man who’s responsible! I’ll make him
pay! I’ll banish the murderer!) put the audience in the position of
knowing more than Oedipus does. All his statements are true, but they
are true in a way that Oedipus himself does not understand, and the
audience knows that all these statements will come back to haunt
Oedipus later. At one point, Oedipus (still unaware that Laius is his
father or that he is Laius’ murderer) imagines that his obligation to find
the murderer of Laius may be deeper than that of a king searching for
the cause of his people’s suffering; Laius might have been Oedipus’
kinsman:
Why, our seed
might be the same, children born of the same mother
might have created blood bonds between us
if his hope of offspring hadn’t met disaster—
but fate swooped at his head and cut him short.
I will fight for him as if he were my father
stop at nothing, search the world
to lay my hands on the man who shed his blood. (296-303)
The layers of irony in this speech are almost too thick to explain since
they involve the tangled, chaotic net of kinship relations Oedipus creates
when he fathers children by his own mother. “Children born of the same
mother” have created blood-bonds between Oedipus and Laius since
Oedipus’ children are also Laius’ grandchildren (by his own wife!). When
Oedipus says that Laius’ “hope of offspring . . . met disaster,” he means
that Laius had no children, but of course Laius had Oedipus, so the
speech is true in an ironic way, since Laius’ offspring Oedipus did bring
disaster on Laius (by “cut[ting] him short” and marrying his wife).
Oedipus’ promise to fight for Laius as if he were his own father is also

57

ironic, since Laius is Oedipus’ father. Finally, Oedipus’ promise to “lay
[his] hands on the man” who shed his father’s blood will also come to
pass in an unexpected way when Oedipus puts out his own eyes.
Given that the audience already knows the horrible truth about
Oedipus and what is going to happen to him, there is no plot tension.
Instead, Sophocles’ consummate skill as a dramatist is displayed
through his careful unfolding of events. We see Oedipus learning the
truth bit by bit, putting together the pieces. Oedipus’ role in the murder
of Laius comes clear first, but the true horror of Oedipus’ parentage is
revealed later in the play as it moves toward its truly horrific climax. The
persistent irony of the play is everywhere evident, not only in the
speeches of the characters but in the unfolding of events. For example,
as Jocasta tells a story that she thinks will convince Oedipus to ignore
prophecy (Laius was prophesied to die at the hands of his son, but died
instead at the hands of thieves), she unwittingly drops a critical piece of
information: Laius was killed at a place where three roads meet.
Suddenly, Oedipus remembers his own violent encounter with a stranger
at a place where three roads meet, an encounter that took place shortly
before his arrival in Thebes. In other words, Jocasta’s attempt to comfort
Oedipus ironically reveals that Oedipus’ deepest fears are true.

Oedipus’ Character
Oedipus is a hero to the Thebans, who proclaimed him king after
Laius, their former king, was found murdered. Oedipus is given the
office of king, despite being unknown in Thebes, because he destroys the
Sphinx, a monster that was terrorizing Thebes by blocking the roads
leading in and out of the city. The Sphinx accosted travelers, demanding
they answer a riddle. Those who could not were tossed off a cliff. The
riddle is this: “What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the
afternoon and three legs in the evening?” The answer is, of course, man,
who crawls at birth, walks in his prime, then hobbles along with a cane
in old age. When the quick-thinking Oedipus answered the riddle
correctly, the Sphinx, in a towering snit, threw herself off the cliff.
Oedipus’ actions early in the play show that he is a good king,
aware of his people’s crisis and eager to respond. His respect for the
elderly priests contrasts with Clytemnestra and Aigisthus’ treatment of
the old men of Argos in Agamemnon. He has deep love and pity for his
people:
My children,
I pity you. I see—how could I fail to see
what longing brings you here? Well I know
you are sick to death, all of you,
but sick as you are, you are not as sick as I. . . .

58

. . . my spirit
grieves for the city. (69—89)
Nor is all of this mere flapdoodle from a man who, admittedly, thinks a
great deal of himself. His actions show that he is intent on identifying
the pollution in Thebes and eliminating it, even if he is himself the
source of the corruption.
On the other hand, Oedipus’ punishment is not entirely
undeserved. He has certain qualities of character that in some ways
make him responsible for his own punishment. For example, Oedipus’
self-confidence borders on hubris. At one point, Oedipus interrupts the
chorus to ask why they are praying to the gods when they could just as
well be praying to him: “You pray to the gods? Let me grant your
prayers” (245-260). The speech displays an incredible degree of self-
confidence, though it may be justified given his past, especially his defeat
of the Sphinx. Oedipus prides himself on being a self-made man, and it
is no small part of his tragedy to discover that fate may have had a
significant role in making him who he is— a point that is intensified by
his discovery that he is not a rootless self-made man, but an old guy still
living at home! With his mom!
Oedipus is quick-tempered. When, rightly fearful, Tiresias refuses
to speak, Oedipus gets angry very quickly:
Nothing! You,
you scum of the earth, you’d enrage a heart of stone!
You won’t talk? Nothing moves you?
Out with it, once and for all! (380-383)
Shortly afterward, Oedipus accuses Tiresias of involvement in a plot to
kill Laius, then transfers his fury from Tiresias to Creon, accusing Creon
of attempting to take power from him. Such scenes can only be meant to
make us see Oedipus’ weakness, since we already know Tiresias and
Creon are both innocent of the charges that Oedipus makes against
them.
His short temper and paranoia are ultimately of less importance
than his impiety toward prophecy and the gods. It is this final straw that
seems to break the camel’s back. Oedipus’ full punishment follows very
soon after he joins Jocasta in mocking the very idea of prophecy. When
the messenger from Corinth brings news of the death of Polybus (the
man Oedipus thinks is his father), Oedipus exults, thinking that he has
escaped prophecy:
So!
Jocasta, why, why look to the Prophet’s hearth,
the fires of the future? Why scan the birds
that scream above our heads? They winged me on
to the murder of my father, did they? That was my doom?
Well look, he’s dead and buried, hidden under the earth,

59

and here I am in Thebes, I never put hand to sword . . .
But now, all those prophecies I feared—Polybus
packs them off to sleep with him in hell!
They’re nothing, worthless! (1054-1063)
In a sense, Oedipus has mocked prophecy his whole life. He ran away
from Corinth trying to escape a prophecy of Apollo. He mocks Tiresias,
who, according to Oedipus, could not defeat the Sphinx. But all these
actions simply tie him up more tightly into the net of his fate.

Character of Jocasta
Jocasta appears at first as an indulgent, good-tempered wife who
seems accustomed to dealing with her husband’s petulance and mood
swings. Her attempts to make peace between Creon and Oedipus, who
are fighting like schoolboys, is disturbingly similar to the behavior of a
mother with her misbehaving children.
More disturbingly, from the beginning Jocasta is openly skeptical
of prophecy. She has had experience with prophets before when she was
told that her son would murder his father. She believes she has escaped
this prophecy, and cites it proudly when Oedipus grows despondent over
Tiresias’ claim that Oedipus is himself the murderer of Laius. After word
comes that Polybus has died, Jocasta, in her exultation, makes even
more explicit her rejection of the whole concept of prophecy, and, by
extension, the very idea of the world’s orderliness that prophecy
underwrites: “You prophecies of the gods, where are you now?” (1036).
Jocasta also makes clear the shocking implications of her disbelief in
prophecy:
It’s all chance,
chance rules our lives. . . .
Better to live at random, best we can.
In other words, if there is nothing divine overseeing the course of human
events, no one who knows what will happen tomorrow, then there is
nothing to punish evil men—no good or evil at all, really. We can live in
any way we want, and do anything we want, and there will be no reward
or punishment from beyond.
Sophocles wrote Oedipus as an explicit rejection of this claim. The
play insists that we cannot “live as if there’s no tomorrow,” that the evil
that men do catches up with them. As his “test case,” Sophocles chooses
Oedipus, a man who, though unwittingly, has done the very worst things
a man could possibly do: kill his own father and marry his own mother.
Even the most sophisticated moral hair-splitter would have to be
shocked by these actions. If a man can do these things and get away
with them, then it seems like a reasonable inference that the gods do not
exist. Through Oedipus’ suffering, Sophocles suggests that he still
believed in moral equity and retribution for sins against the universal
moral order.

60

Character of the Chorus
The chorus in Oedipus is composed of Theban citizens. They make
quiet attempts to mediate between the angry Oedipus and the prophet
and are later reluctant to confirm to Creon that Oedipus has been
making charges against him. They seem meek and mostly want to stay
out of the way of the titanic characters, all of whom seem much larger
than life.
They are a pious lot, making frequent prayers and expressing
shock at the blasphemous speeches of Jocasta and of Oedipus as they
exult in the “failure” of prophecy. We have seen already that the chorus
affirms a “common sense” view of the orderliness of the world and the
existence of laws that go beyond any man. But for all their piety, the
chorus recognizes the consequence of unfulfilled prophecy; reverence for
the gods will disappear:
Never again will I go reverent to Delphi,
the inviolate heart of Earth
or Apollo’s ancient oracle at Abae
or Olympia of the fires—
unless these prophecies all come true
for all mankind to point toward in wonder.
King of kings, if you deserve your titles
Zeus, remember, never forget!
A great deal is at stake in the fate of Oedipus. As terrible as his
punishment is, the ending is ultimately happy in its affirmation of the
orderliness of the world.

61

Introduction to Virgil’s Aeneid

General
Virgil lived through Rome’s most tumultuous years to see the re-
establishment of an ordered community unified under the leadership of
Octavian (later called Caesar Augustus) after a bloody civil war and the
division of the empire. Virgil was a personal friend of Octavian and may
have been commissioned by him to write a patriotic epic celebrating the
history and character qualities of Rome, a work that became the Aeneid.
Virgil is constantly aware of the fact that he is writing in the shadow of
Homer and both imitates him and moves beyond Homer to write a Roman
epic, exemplifying and encouraging Roman views of nationhood, personal
heroism, and history all differing radically from those embodied in
Homer’s works.
The Aeneid can be viewed as a kind of Roman imperial
propaganda, an attempt to encourage the values necessary for the
creation and preservation of the Roman empire: self-sacrifice, devotion to
duty, a willingness to sacrifice present happiness for the sake of a
(sometimes very distant) brighter future, a willingness to sacrifice
individual happiness and self-development for the greater good of the
community. Community and future always trump individual and
present in the Aeneid; as such, the work obviously promotes a very
different set of personal priorities than those which characterize Greek
heroes like Achilles, Hector, or even Odysseus. The state has now
become more important than the individual. The truly heroic man is the
one willing to make sacrifices for the good of Rome.
Consider, for example, Virgil’s description of Aeneas’ refusal to
accept Dido’s supplication that he remain in Carthage for a few days
before leaving her:
[Dido] pleaded in such terms, and such, in tears . . .
[but] no tears moved him, no one’s voice would he
Attend to tractably. The fates opposed it;
God’s will blocked the man’s once kindly ears.
And just as when the north winds from the Alps
This way and that contend among themselves
To tear away an oak tree hale with age,
The wind and tree cry, and the buffeted trunk
Showers high foliage to earth, but holds
On bedrock . . . just so this captain,
Buffeted by a gale of pleas . . .
Felt their moving power in his great heart,
And yet his will stood fast; tears fell in vain. (IV 582-596)
Contemporary readers often condemn Aeneas for his hardheartedness in
these final exchanges with Dido. Yet as the simile makes clear, Virgil
intends for his readers to admire Aeneas’ manly firmness in refusing the
pleas of Dido, because he refuses her in the name of duty. Aeneas’ duty

62

is, of course, to the future and to the state: the founding of Rome that
the gods have revealed to him. This positive depiction of Aeneas’ refusal
of a lover’s pathetic supplication embodies a worldview that is quite
different from that of Homer or the Greek tragedies; for where the Greeks
highly value human relationships like the guest-host relationship, the
suppliant relationship, or even the relationship of husband and wife, in
the Aeneid all human relationships are subordinated to larger public
responsibilities. Think of the chaos and misery that result from
Agamemnon’s violation of the suppliant relationship or Paris’ violation of
the guest-host relationship or Oedipus’ unwitting violation of a whole
series of family and personal relationships. In the Aeneid, violations of
such relationships are not punished. In fact, human relationships are
represented here as a hindrance to the performance of the civic duties the
gods have in mind. Aeneas violates nearly all of these human
relationships, but Virgil holds him up as the paragon of duty.
At the time Virgil began the Aeneid (roughly 30 B.C.), the Romans
had effectively controlled Greece for over one hundred years. Despite the
Greeks’ status as a conquered people and the presence in Rome of
thousands of Greek slaves, the influence of Greek culture on Rome was
profound. Roman law, architecture, sculpture, and literature had all
been affected by Greek models; even more significantly, Greek religion
and mythology had been adopted, more or less wholesale. The Greek
pantheon or roster of gods was simply taken over and renamed, but
otherwise remained almost exactly the same:
Zeus becomes Jupiter
Hera becomes Juno
Aphrodite becomes Venus
Athena becomes Minerva
Hephaestus becomes Vulcan
Poseidon becomes Neptune
Hermes becomes Mercury
Virgil’s reworking of Greek mythological materials suggests that the
Romans felt some anxiety about this cultural debt; after all, the great
imperial Romans could hardly be indebted to a race of slaves. So Virgil
takes the Greek mythic past and writes Roman history into it, but does
so in order to suggest that the Romans are not descended from the
Greeks at all, but rather from their arch-enemies the Trojans. (The
English will, many centuries later, also claim Trojan ancestry, as we will
see in the Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.) The Aeneid lays out
the mythic origins of Rome and the Roman people in the heroic exodus of
the Trojan warrior Aeneas and his small band of followers, who travel
from Asia Minor to Italy and found Alba Longa, the city that will produce
Romulus and Remus, the eventual founders of Rome. Aeneas’ account
of the fall of Troy emphasizes the cunning, deceit and cruelty of the
Greeks as opposed to the nobility of the Trojans.

63

The Aeneid’s View of the World
Like Odysseus, Aeneas takes what becomes for the epic hero an
obligatory trip to the underworld. For purposes of comparison with other
treatments of this subject, note that Aeneas has a guide who takes him
down into a dark underworld guarded by allegorical figures of all the
things that cause death, a place full of demons and monsters. Aeneas,
like Odysseus before him and Dante after him, mistakes shadows for
substance, attempting to embrace the shades of people familiar to him.
He encounters a ferryman, Charon, and finds that the dead must cross
over a river to reach the underworld, and that the dead actually desire to
cross this river and reach their appointed place. This desire is thwarted
for those who are not buried. Their souls are banished from the world of
the dead for one hundred years and they wander on the wrong side fo the
river. Like Odysseus before and Dante after him, Aeneas spots a friend,
in this case Palinurus, who confirms a fulfilled, though very tricky,
prophecy that said Palinurus would come unharmed to Italy. Palinurus
reveals that he had made it to Italy after washing ashore, but was
immediately killed by the savages living there.
In the Aeneid, the dead are slightly more organized than they are
in the Odyssey. The most innocent among them, infants and the falsely
accused, seem to live the closest to the external world and are thus
encountered first by Aeneas as he travels into the underworld. The
travellers then encounter King Minos, the judge of the dead, then
suicides wishing to be alive again, then finally those who died for love.
Aeneas sees particular figures from myth in this group, then focuses on a
single one, a pattern Dante will reuse.
The long description of Aeneas’ armor is obviously modeled on
Homer’s treatment of the parallel episode in Book XVIII of the Iliad.
However, a careful reading of the shield of Aeneas reveals a Roman view
of history that contrasts sharply with the Greek view embodied by the
shield of Achilles. The repetition of events in a circular pattern on
Achilles’ shield suggests a circular view of history as an unchanging cycle
of peace and war, starvation and plenty, sowing and reaping, and so on.
Aeneas’ shield, on the other hand, suggests a linear history, depicting
not generic objects or events like a “city at war” or “wine-making,” but
easily recognizable specific historical events that lead toward the
foundation of the Roman Empire. The shield is especially detailed in its
depiction of the sea battle at Actium when Octavian defeated Marc
Antony and his ally Cleopatra of Egypt. For Aeneas, the events depict a
distant future that his present sufferings will make possible. For Virgil
and his readers, the events depicted on the shield had already taken
place, and they would have been generally recognized as the most
significant events in the development of the Roman Empire. The final
scene on the shield, which shows representatives of the entire world
passing before Augustus in triumphal procession, suggests that all of
human history has been a linear process pointing toward the

64

establishment of a single world government under the leadership of
Rome. The images viewed together imply that the destiny of the entire
world is to be united under Roman leadership.

The Aeneid’s View of Man
The Greek heroes’ blind pursuit of personal glory is never deeply
criticized by Homer, though the later Athenians, who are perhaps more
civic-minded and less individualistic than Homer and his audiences,
certainly suggest some criticisms of the heroic ideal in works like
Agamemnon, Oedipus Rex, and Medea. These moderate criticisms aside,
the Roman model of personal heroism is far more self-sacrificing and
future-oriented than the Homeric model. Aeneas is called on to be a
very different kind of man than Achilles or Hector. In the Aeneid,
Aeneas’ personal glory must always be secondary to the establishment of
the Roman empire and the pleasure of the present must be sacrificed to
preserve the best features of the past and to secure the future of Rome.
Consider Aeneas’ tale of the destruction of Troy. Over and over
again, the gods warn him to leave Troy because Troy is finished; but
Aeneas finds himself unable to obey the gods, so firmly set is he on
revenge against the Greeks and on the personal glory to be won in battle.
Like Hector, whose decision to die in battle with Achilles rather than flee
inside the walls of Troy dooms his family and city, Aeneas would rather
win personal glory for himself in the present than sacrifice it for the
future good of the community. Obviously, this kind of attitude is not the
ideal for the soldier of empire, who might spend half a lifetime guarding
some lonely outpost in Gaul or North Africa rather than enjoying the
benefits of Roman citizenship. The ideal Roman citizen needed to be
committed to preserving the Roman heritage embodied in its past and to
securing Roman prosperity for the future.
Virgil provides us with a visual symbol for this orientation away
from the present and toward both the glorious past and promising future
when Aeneas flees from Troy with his family. He is carrying his father
Anchises on his back, a symbol of the weight of the past and tradition,
and holding the hand of his son Iulus, symbolizing his commitment to
the future; his wife Creusa, symbolizing present pleasure, follows behind
and is ultimately lost in the burning city. Aeneas’ return into the
burning city to look for Creusa is the first of many indications in the first
half of the Aeneid that Aeneas is not yet fully emotionally committed to
the future laid out for him by the gods. His love affair with Dido and his
desire to remain in Carthage are also indications that Aeneas desires
some other future for himself than the one the gods have laid out for
him.
Given this necessity for sacrificing the present, it is no surprise
that Virgil takes a very dim view of romantic love; of course, the Greeks
were not especially enamored of romantic love either – (see the choruses’
prayers to Aphrodite in Agamemnon and Medea for moderate love or no

65

love at all). Here, romantic love is an insanity and a curse. Dido
becomes a model for what Aeneas might become if he surrenders his
devotion to duty. Virgil repeatedly depicts the immoderate love of Dido
as a wound or a destructive inward fire that causes her to break a public
oath never to remarry after the death of Sychaeus, her first husband.
The consequences for Dido are obviously grave, since her immoderate
love leads directly to her death. But they are no less grave for the
citizens of Carthage, whose heroic efforts at city-building win such
admiration from Aeneas when he arrives in Carthage. After Dido’s love
for Aeneas begins to distract her attention away from her responsibilities
to the community, the city-building taking place under her direction
stops:
Towers, half-built, rose
No farther; men no longer trained in arms
Or toiled to make harbors and battlements
Impregnable. Projects were broken off,
Laid over, and the menacing huge walls
With cranes unmoving stood against the sky. (IV: 114-120)
If devotion to the state and its projects is the highest good in the Aeneid,
then the interruption of the state’s construction and expansion is a
terrible consequence of the private pursuit of romantic or passionate
love.
Aeneas, during his visit to the underworld, is shown a pageant of
great men of the future, the men who will be most instrumental in the
success of Rome and its eventual bid at world empire. Romans, far more
than the Greeks, were willing to hold up individual “great men” as
models of civic behavior for emulation. Works like Plutarch’s Lives were
written for a younger generation who would imitate the virtues and avoid
the vices of great figures of the past. Unfortunately, this admirable
practice of remembering past heroes ultimately shaded into idolatry and
finally into ancestor and emperor worship.
View of the Gods
The gods as they are represented in Virgil are nearly identical with the
gods in Homer or Greek tragedy. They have the same kind of
presence and power, the same limitations. They still play favorites.
Hera/Juno is especially likely to try to thwart the will of fate.
Zeus/Jupiter never does so, but sometimes allows others to
temporarily “put off” some fated event. Juno loves Carthage and
wants it to be the ruling city of the world (her devotees are often
granted political power) but knows the prophecy that Troy’s ancestors
(the Romans) are fated to destroy Carthage. Knowing this, but still
angry at the Trojans for losing the beauty contest, Hera seeks for as
long as possible to prevent the founding of Rome. It is partly through
her intervention that Dido and Aeneas have the affair that slows

66

Aeneas’ journey to Italy. If Hera seeks to thwart fate, Jupiter
ultimately intervenes in Book IV to ensure that fated events do
happen, sending Mercury to Aeneas with the message that he must
leave Carthage at once and get on with his duty to go to Italy and
found Rome.
The gods certainly do not occupy any higher ground morally in
Virgil than they do in Homer. They directly participate in the deceit used
by the Greeks to overthrow Troy, particularly in the false omen they give
after Laocoon casts a spear at the side of the “sacred” wooden horse.
Two snakes appear, swimming from Tenedos (the island where the Greek
fleet is hidden) and kill Laocoon and his two sons. Everyone who sees
this horrible event assumes Laocoon deserved it for desecrating the
horse, a conviction that only grows stronger after they see the snakes
curling at the feet of the statue of Minerva. As in Homer, the gods work
at cross purposes, deceive one another, and use humans for their own
ends. The conspiracy of Venus and Juno in encouraging the love affair
between Dido and Aeneas is a particularly shameful example of this kind
of malicious behavior on the part of the gods. Juno thinks a marriage
between Dido and Aeneas will guarantee peace between Troy and
Carthage. Venus, who has had the future more clearly explained to her,
allows the marriage to go on as a way of purchasing safe harbor for
Aeneas. Both are participants in the destruction of Dido.
Artistic/Aesthetic Qualities
The Aeneid is a self-conscious attempt to write in Homer’s epic
tradition. Consider this very brief and incomplete list of similarities
between Virgil’s epic and Homer’s epics:
• As the anger of Poseidon keeps Odysseus and his men
wandering, so does the anger of Juno keep Aeneas and the
remnants of Troy wandering.
• As Odysseus is shipwrecked on Phaiakia, a highly civilized
place where he is taken in and treated royally, so Aeneas is
shipwrecked near Carthage, arriving completely unknown,
and yet is taken in and treated like a king
• As Odysseus’ past adventures are primarily related through
his own storytelling, so Aeneas’ experiences in Troy are
related through the stories he tells during a banquet in
Carthage
• As Achilles has the goddess Thetis for his mother and
protector, so does Aeneas have Venus
• As Phaiakia becomes an attractive, highly civilized
alternative to wandering, with sexual overtones (Odysseus is
clearly offered the princess Nausikaa), so Carthage is an
attractive, civilized alternative to establishing a city in the
wilderness, and Dido’s sexual attractions are such that

67

Aeneas can only with the greatest difficulty pull himself away
from Carthage to continue his voyage
• Virgil makes frequent use of “Homeric similes”
• As Achilles is armed by a goddess mother (Thetis) who goes
into Heaven to ask for a set of armor from the god of the
forge (Hephaestos), so is Aeneas armed by a goddess mother
(Venus) who goes into Heaven to ask for a set of armor from
the god of the forge (Vulcan)
• Both Homer and Virgil include long and detailed descriptions
of the shield forged for their respective heroes.
• The rivalry and struggle of Aeneas and Turnus is very similar
to the struggle between Achilles and Hector. Turnus kills
Pallas, a youth entrusted to Aeneas by his father; Turnus
takes and wears Pallas’ belt as a token of victory, just as
Hector takes Achilles’ armor from Patroclus.
• As Hector is deserted by his “brother” during his final battle
with Achilles, so is Turnus deserted by his sister Juturna
during his final battle with Aeneas

Like Homer, Virgil begins with an announcement of his subject, but
Virgil has two subjects rather than one: warfare and wandering.
These are the two great Homeric subjects, with warfare as the central
subject matter of the Iliad and wandering as the central subject
matter of the Odyssey. Virgil’s first lines indicate that the two great
Homeric subjects will be united in the Aeneid, and indeed the
structure of the epic seems to bear this out; roughly the first six
books of the Aeneid are concerned with the wanderings of Aeneas and
the Trojans and the second six are concerned with the wars the
Trojans fight to establish themselves in Italy among hostile tribes.
Unlike Homer, whose narration moves back and forth between the
Greeks and the Trojans and who never really takes sides in the dispute
between them, Virgil has an axe to grind against the Greeks; as a
consequence, Virgil puts his literary skills to work in order to manage
our emotional response to the fall of Troy in such a way that we end up
admiring the Trojans and despising the Greeks. Virgil allows us to
experience the disastrous fall of Troy through Trojan eyes, with an
emphasis on Greek dishonesty and duplicity. Unable to defeat the
Trojans in open battle, they fall back on deceit as a means of taking the
city. Sinon’s deception of the Trojans is particularly disturbing, since it
works only because he knows the Trojans to be fair-minded, softhearted
and hospitable. Knowing the upright Trojans will take pity on an
outcast, he takes advantage of those good qualities to trick them into
believing his story. As Aeneas tells the story to the Carthaginians, he is
careful to emphasize the naïve innocence of his fellow Trojans:
Burning with curiosity

68

We questioned him [Sinon], called on him to explain—
Unable to conceive such a performance,
The art of the Pelasgian.
As the tale goes on, Virgil makes it plain that deception is not a quality of
some Greeks, but of all; they are all deceptive by nature.
On a more subtle level, it is worth remembering the irony of
Aeneas’ position as he recounts this story. Like Sinon, he has just
wound up friendless and unknown among a foreign people, yet through
his stories and laments, he has won their pity and friendship. The tale
he tells of Sinon’s deception of the Trojans should warn the
Carthaginians about the dangers of being overly hospitable or overly
credulous. It was precisely these two qualities that led the Trojans to
believe the story of Sinon; this belief resulted in their destruction. And,
as Virgil makes clear, the overly trusting Carthaginians will themselves
be destroyed, though not for many generations, because of taking in the
stranger Aeneas. This generous act of hospitality ultimately results in
the dying curse of Dido, who prays to the gods for unceasing warfare
between Aeneas’ people (the Romans) and the Carthaginians.

Aeneas’ Character
Like Odysseus, Aeneas is established from the first lines as a man
of suffering and a victim of cosmic rage. But unlike Odysseus, who is
heading for home, Aeneas is leaving home and has only pain and
suffering ahead of him. Nevertheless, Aeneas has a glorious future, since
he will found Rome and be worshipped as a god.
Still, Aeneas’ character will have to develop and change over time. He
is not committed at first to the task that the gods have laid out for
him. His first response to the loss of his old life during the
destruction of Troy is suicidal despair. Because his fate is to found
Rome, the city that will carry on the noble heritage of Troy, the ghost
of Hector appears to Aeneas in a dream, warning him to leave Troy:
Ai! Give up and go, child of the goddess,
Save yourself, out of these flames. The enemy
Holds the city walls and from her height
Troy falls in ruin. Fatherland and Priam
Have their due; if by one hand our towers
Could be defended, by this hand, my own,
They would have been. Her holy things, her gods
Of hearth and household, Troy commends to you.
Accept them as companions of your days;
Go find for them the great walls that one day
You’ll dedicate, when you have roamed the sea. (II:378-388)
Aeneas wakes to find the city in flames; his first response, despite the
warning from Hector’s ghost, is to go into the flames and find a glorious

69

death: “…it came to me,” he tells his Carthaginian audience, “That
meeting death was beautiful in arms” (II:415-6). Later, when he
encounters other Trojans still fighting in the burning city, Aeneas tells
them, “You defend / A city lost in flames. Come let us die” (II:458-9).
Aeneas’ decision to pursue death rather than undertake the task
assigned to him suggests that Aeneas’ heroism is still very similar to that
displayed by the Homeric heroes; like Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, and
Medea, when the chips are down, the early Aeneas chooses personal
glory even when it means the destruction of the family and the death of
the future. The city itself is in absolute chaos; there is nothing left to
defend. The soldiers fight only for personal glory and revenge.
The graphic picture Virgil creates of the rape of Troy is
unforgettable. The towers of the city, wrapped in smoke and flame,
crash down into the blood-soaked streets. The screams of dying men
and women fill the night air. Groups of warriors appear and disappear in
the smoke-filled streets. Chaos reigns; Trojans dress as Greeks and are
killed by their own colleagues. The Trojans themselves participate in the
destruction of their city, tearing stones and timbers out of buildings to
throw down on the Greeks below them. Particularly tragic and gruesome
is the death of old Priam, his trembling hands barely able to lift the
sword he attempts to wield against Achilles’ son, the degenerate Pyrrhus.
The sight of old Priam’s death reminds Aeneas of Anchises, his own
father. Recognizing that to die in Priam’s palace would be selfish when
his father, wife, and son are in danger, Aeneas leaves and heads toward
home.
Before he can escape Priam’s palace, Aeneas spots Helen, the
woman he holds responsible for the war and its destruction. Just as he
is about to kill her, he is stopped by his mother, Venus, who scolds him
for neglecting his own family, then grants Aeneas a vision. This vision
reveals that the gods themselves are participating in the destruction of
Troy:
Look over there; I’ll tear away the cloud
That curtains you, and films your mortal sight . . .
Neptune is shaking from their beds the walls . . .
Juno in all her savagery holds
The Scaean Gates . . .
The Father himself empowers the Danaans,
Urges assaulting gods on the defenders. (II:767-781)
The theophany serves two purposes in the narrative. The first is to
convince Aeneas of the futility of continuing to fight for the city. The
second is to establish that Troy was not actually destroyed by the
Greeks, but by the gods and (as we have seen) the Trojans themselves.
The Greeks can thus take very little credit for sacking Troy.
Even after this vision, Aeneas is still not fully committed to obeying
the gods’ command that he leave Troy. After meeting with some
resistance from his father, who wants to die in Troy, Aeneas determines

70

to go back out and fight again. At this point, the gods send yet another
portent: a fire appears burning over Ascanius’ head. Still unconvinced,
Anchises asks the gods for another sign that they desire him to leave. A
comet suddenly appears out of the night sky, crashing down into the
city. This convinces both Anchises and Aeneas, and he takes up his
father on his shoulders and takes his son by the hand. With Creusa
following behind, they leave Troy but lose Creusa in their flight. Aeneas,
still not reconciled to the sacrifice of present joy the gods have decreed
for him, rushes back into the city to look for his wife; despite all the
visions, messages, and portents, Aeneas is still not fully committed to the
future. Finally, Creusa’s ghost appears to him, revealing to him yet
again his destiny:
For you
Long exile waits, and long sea miles to plough.
You shall make landfall on Hesperia
Where Lydian Tiber flows, with gentle pace,
Between rich farmlands, and the years will bear
Glad peace, a kingdom, and a queen for you. (II.974-979)
In a heartbreaking scene, Aeneas makes three attempts to embrace her,
but his hands pass through her ghost.
Nor does this mark the end of Aeneas’ struggle against the future
chosen for him by the gods. The city of Carthage is a powerful attraction
to the weary traveler, especially after Dido falls in love with him. For a
season, Aeneas seems to forget all about his destiny and settle into the
life of Carthage, acting as Dido’s common-law husband until the gods
send him a very forceful and direct reminder in the person of Mercury.
Mercury finds Aeneas overseeing construction in Carthage, basically
doing there what he is supposed to be doing in Rome. To make matters
worse, he is dressed in clothes that Dido has given him. Mercury scolds
him for forgetting his own destiny:
Is it for you
To lay the stones for Carthage’s high walls,
Tame husband that you are, and build their city?
Oblivious of your own world, you own kingdom!
. . . If future history’s glories
Do not affect you, if you will not strive
For your own honor, think of Ascanius,
Think of the expectations of your heir,
Iulus, to whom the Italian realm, the lands
Of Rome, are due. (IV.344-358)
It will be long after he leaves Carthage before Aeneas finally commits
fully to the destiny set before him by the gods. His struggle to submit
himself to this destiny (clearly not what he would have chosen for
himself, as he reminds Dido in their last meeting) is one of the most
interesting artistic features of the Aeneid.

71

The reward Aeneas receives for his piety is the vision of Rome’s
future granted to him during his trip into the underworld. Here he sees
what he’s sacrificing himself for: the creation of a world empire, one
made up of all tribes and languages and people from every nation on
earth. But the vision is for the future. Aeneas, without fully
understanding, sees and marvels, knowing that his sacrifices in the
present will make this glorious future possible.
Aeneas is often accused of coldness because of his abandonment of
Dido. In Virgil’s ethical cosmos, Aeneas’ “mistake” is having submitted to
the advances of Dido in the first place. Leaving her, though painful, is
meant to be seen as one of the most heroic acts that Aeneas commits.
As Maynard Mack suggests, what saves the Aeneid from being “mere
propaganda” for the inculcation of Roman virtues is Virgil’s clear-eyed
recognition that the foundation of empire comes at a tremendous
personal and emotional cost.

Dido’s Character
When the shipwrecked Aeneas observes the scenes of the Trojan
War carved on the side of a temple, he sees there Penthesilea, the Queen
of the Amazons, a group of women warriors allied with the Trojans.
Immediately afterward, Dido appears. Virgil draws our attention to the
similarities between these women. Like Penthesilea, Dido is a tall,
powerful, beautiful woman doing a man’s work. Virgil compares Dido to
another powerful woman, the goddess Artemis:
As on Eurotas bank or Cynthus ridge
Diana trains her dancers, and behind her
On every hand the mountain nymphs appear,
A myriad converging; with her quiver
Slung on her shoulders, in her stride she seems
The tallest, taller by a head than any,
And joy pervades Latona’s quiet heart:
So Dido seemed, in such delight she moved
Amid her people, cheering on the toil
Of a kingdom in the making. (II:107-117)
The comparisons here are meant to make a simple point: when Aeneas
arrives in Carthage, Dido is entirely in her element—confident, in charge,
respected, beautiful, and in the prime of life. We see her judging her
people, organizing them, making orders and assigning work. In addition
to all her other qualities, Queen Dido is a gracious host. When Ilioneus
makes a supplication to the Dido that he and the other Trojans be
allowed to stay in her kingdom while they repair their ships, she accepts.
We learn shortly after her first meeting with Aeneas that she has
made a public vow never to remarry after death of Sychaeus, her first
husband. Dido knows at this point that an affair with Aeneas would be

72

an affront to the laws of heaven and earth, but makes the mistake of
conferring with a bad counselor, her sister Anna, whose advice is closely
akin to Jocasta’s: forget the vow! “Do you believe this matters to the
dust, to ghosts in tombs?” she asks Dido. Anna ultimately convinces
Dido to surrender to her love for Aeneas by appealing to her sense of
public duty. She reminds her sister that the mighty Aeneas can protect
her from the savages surrounding Carthage. Dido and Aeneas, with a bit
of conniving from the gods, find themselves alone together in a cave
during a rainstorm. There they consummate their relationship and begin
living together as husband and wife, though there has been no formal
marriage ceremony. As soon as Dido begins living openly with Aeneas,
she loses the respect of her people, who remember the vow she made.
Rightly assuming that their Queen has lost control over herself and her
own sense of dignity, the people lose respect for her and the construction
of the city stops.
Dido’s shameful end clarifies the danger posed by the individual’s
pursuit of romantic love, particularly when that love is allowed to
interfere with duty to the state. Dido’s discovery that Aeneas is planning
to leave her precipitates a crisis that causes Dido to bring even greater
public shame on herself: “Furious, at her wits’ end, / She traversed the
whole city, all aflame / With rage, like a Bacchante drive wild” (IX 226-
228). Reduced to begging Aeneas to stay, Dido is tormented by the
recognition that her passion for Aeneas has cost her more than her own
self-respect:
Because of you, Libyans and nomad kings
Detest me, my own Tyrians are hostile;
Because of you, I lost my integrity
And that admired name by which alone
I made my way once toward the stars. (IV: 254-258)
Having seen Dido at her best, it becomes all the more painful to watch
her descent into suicidal madness. Love turns to bitter hatred as Dido
curses Aeneas, promising to haunt him after death.
Dido, like Medea, is a scorned woman who turns to witchcraft and black
magic, bringing in a witch-priestess to preside over her death ritual.
Dido builds a funeral pyre, climbs atop, lights it, and then stabs herself
with Aeneas’ sword.
Her final prayer embodies a truth about the classical
understanding of Fate that is worth some attention. For the Greeks and
Romans, Fate is an end-point at which one must eventually arrive. The
existence of this fate does not mean that man’s life is utterly determined
ahead of time. Instead, one mostly controls how one gets from Point A to
Point B. One can do it gloriously or shamefully, willingly or kicking and
screaming. One will eventually arrive at Point B if Point B is one’s
destiny, but one can reach that point via a variety of pathways. Notice
the wording of Dido’s curse on Aeneas, where she makes clear that she is

73

not praying that the gods alter Aeneas’ destiny, but she is praying that
they curse the “non-destined” parts of his life:
If by necessity that impious wretch
Must find his haven and come safe to land,
If so Jove’s destinies require, and this,
His end in view, must stand, yet all the same
When hard beset in war by a brave people,
Forced to go outside his boundaries
And torn from Iulus, let him beg assistance,
Let him see the unmerited deaths of those
Around and with him, and accepting peace
On unjust terms, let him not, even so,
Enjoy his kingdom or the life he longs for,
But fall in battle before his time and lie
Unburied on the sand! (IV.820-832)
Just as the Cyclops Polyphemus in his prayer to his father Poseidon
recognizes that Fate might require that Odysseus eventually make it
home, so Dido recognize that Aeneas’ success in founding Rome might be
inevitable. But there is still plenty left to curse and ruin. Dido
recognizes that certain issues (i.e. what is fated) are not open to change
and thus are not suitable for prayer. As we have seen in the death of
Hector, the gods have no real control over fate.
Dido’s final prayer also explains for Virgil’s readers the source of the
ultimate rivalry between Carthage and Rome that will result in the
Punic Wars and in Rome’s final complete destruction of Carthage:
Then, O my Tyrians, besiege with hate
His progeny and all his race to come:
make this your offering to my dust. No love,
No pact must be between our peoples; No,
But rise up from my bones, avenging spirit!
Harry with fire the Dardan countrymen
Now, or hereafter, at whatever time
The strength will be afforded. Coast with coast
In conflict, I implore, and sea with sea,
And arms with arms: may they contend in war,
Themselves and all the children of their children!
Dido, in her life and especially in her final prayer, becomes a kind of
negative alternative for Aeneas. If he chooses to pursue present pleasure
rather than the preservation of the community and the future, he may
not only lose his honor and self-respect as Dido does; he may ultimately
curse the future, consigning his own heirs to destruction as Dido does in
her last prayer. Thus, Dido in her life embodies the flip side of the self-
control, future-orientation, and community concern that are required for
the foundation and preservation of empire. Her death is a warning to all
who stray away from these virtues.

74

Works Cited
Mack, Maynard. Introduction. Aeneid. Norton Anthology of World
Masterpices, Volume 1, Fifth Edition.

75

The New Testament Introduction

The New Testament is made up of four gospels, one book of
history, twenty-one letters, and one book of prophecy. Most of these
writings seem to have been regarded by Christians as sacred from a very
early date. For example, 2 Peter 3:16 laments that some are distorting
Paul’s writing “as they do the other scriptures,” implying that Paul’s
epistles had for the early church the same authority as other scriptures.
Many early churches developed lists of sacred books approved for use in
worship. These lists are by and large identical, particularly with regard
to the four gospels and Paul’s letters. There was some early controversy
regarding James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Revelation, and Hebrews,
but these books were gradually accepted as sacred. All the books that
currently make up the New Testament were officially “canonized” by the
Council of Carthage in 397.
Christ and his disciples probably spoke Aramaic among
themselves, Aramaic having replaced Hebrew after the Babylonian
captivity as the common language of Israel. However, all of the books of
the New Testament are written in Greek. The expansion of the
Macedonian Empire under Alexander the Great three centuries before
Christ meant that Greek was recognized widely throughout Palestine,
Asia Minor, North Africa, and Italy. The apostles’ use of this lingua
franca, recognized across most of the known world, signals to us the
evangelical ambitions of these authors. The Greek scriptures could
travel easily from province to province and into the heart of Rome itself.
And travel they did, aided not only by the apostles’ use of Greek,
but also by the good system of Roman roads, the relative safety of travel
under Roman rule, a common currency, and Roman-established trade
routes crisscrossing the empire. Though the inhabitants of Israel in
Christ’s day deeply resented the Roman presence in their ancestral
home, the Romans provided the infrastructure that made the spread of
Christianity possible.

View of God
Like the Old Testament, the New Testament teaches that God is
the “most real” thing. However, this most real thing is now knowable
and approachable through His embodiment or incarnation in Christ
Jesus. As the “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), the Jesus
Christ of the New Testament is far more than a “wise teacher” or “great
philosopher,” as he has been called by some. He is God embodied, a God
who knows our pains, fears, and temptations, having experienced all of
them firsthand.
In our readings from the Sermon on the Mount in the book of
Matthew, Christ clearly identifies himself as God by his willingness to

76

teach “as one with authority” (Matt. 7:29), not as an interpreter of the
law, but as creator or maker of the law. Consider Christ’s teaching on
adultery in Matt. 5:27: “You have heard it said ‘You shall not commit
adultery.’ But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully
has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Christ begins by
stating the seventh commandment, then, rather than contradicting it or
canceling it, adds to it. So Christ’s words here embody his claim to an
authority to append to the Law—the Law which came directly from God.

View of Man
But note too how Christ appends to the law: by making its
observation even more difficult. Now man not only has to avoid the act of
adultery, but cannot even think about adultery without sinning. In light
of the impossibility of meeting this standard, calling Christ a great
ethical teacher seems misguided. After all, Christ sets an impossible
standard and then tells his audience they cannot be saved without
surpassing that standard: “For I tell you,” Christ warns his listeners,
“unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees,
you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 5:20). Even the
most apparently righteous, he says, are not righteous enough to stand
before God.
The impossibility of meeting this standard means that man’s moral
efforts on his own behalf will never be sufficient to win him the kind of
righteousness that will allow him to “enter the kingdom of Heaven.”
There is no hope for man to achieve saving moral righteousness on his
own. But if man will accept Christ’s sacrifice on his behalf, the
righteousness of Christ will be “imputed” to him. Man’s motivation for
moral behavior is thus transformed. Christian man does not behave
morally in order to win God’s love or approval, for he has this approval
already through Christ’s imputed righteousness. Instead, man acts
righteously out of gratitude toward the God who freely offers salvation
from sin and death.
The New Testament holds up Christ as a new model of Christian
heroism for our imitation. Christ tells his disciples “If anyone would
come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and
follow me” (Luke 9:23). Likewise, Paul exhorts the Ephesians to be
imitators of Christ, living “a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave
himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Ephesians
5:2). Man’s model for imitation is no longer the independent warrior, but
the Lamb of God, whose love for the world and willing obedience to the
Father cost him a painful death on the cross.
This Christ is very different from the other models of heroism we
have seen thus far. He is not visibly a warrior, though many hoped that
he would be. He engages in a struggle that is primarily spiritual rather

77

than physical, winning man’s salvation through his acceptance of
suffering, torture, and death rather than through physically overcoming
a monster or a powerful enemy. His followers are likewise exhorted to
meekness, humility, and forgiveness. Unlike the heroes of classical
mythology, Christ is deeply concerned with ordinary men: the poor, the
weak, and the sinful. His story is not a tale of triumph over human
enemies or monsters, but over death and the grave.
The picture of man that emerges from the New Testament is very
different from the picture of man in classical literature. Man is no longer
potentially a source of wonder to the gods, who watch the battle for Troy
with amazement and express dismay at Achilles’ brutal treatment of
Hector’s body. However, this does not mean that God ignores man.
Rather, God mercifully attends to man, who is dependent on Him for
everything. It is this quality of mercy in God that makes man’s
dependence a source of comfort rather than of fear: “Therefore I tell
you,” Christ preaches, “do not be anxious about your life, what you shall
eat or what you shall drink . . . But seek first his kingdom and his
righteousness, and these things shall be yours as well” (Matt 6:25ff ).
Christ comforts his followers with the assurance that because they are
entirely dependent on the goodness of God, they need not worry about
the pursuit of earthly wealth or glory.
Not only is New Testament man utterly dependent on God, but he
is also morally inferior to Him. Where in classical literature men and
gods are motivated by the essentially the same human drives (love,
compassion, vanity, greed, thirst for revenge, and so on), the New
Testament makes plain that man is morally inferior to God. In fact,
“inferior” is not the correct term, since it implies a continuity of moral
righteousness stretching from man up to God. The New Testament
insists that man’s moral nature is qualitatively different from God’s moral
nature; man is completely fallen by nature from birth, needing to bring
his own physical, mental, and spiritual being into harmony with God.
Paul writes that men are, “by nature, enemies of God” (Romans 5:10),
subject to death of body and soul (Romans 5:12-14), and slaves to the
cravings of our spiritual nature and thus subject to eternal punishment
(Eph 2:3).
In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ opposes worldly wisdom to
what might be called “kingdom wisdom:” “Blessed are those who mourn,
/ For they will be comforted./ Blessed are the meek, / for they will
inherit the earth.” From a worldly or temporal perspective, mourning
and meekness are not qualities likely to make a person “blessed” in any
normal sense of the word. Christ’s claims only make sense against the
backdrop of the coming kingdom of God and of the eternal life promised
to believers in scripture. Against this backdrop of a coming kingdom of
reward for the righteous, Christ can teach an unprecedented set of

78

ethical principles: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do
good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use
you, and persecute you.” Christ never promises that enmity and
persecution will stop if his disciples return love for hate; instead, he
promises an eternal reward. “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you,
and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely,
for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in
heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.”
Christ’s teachings likewise embody the principle that those who
are not found righteous will be punished in the afterlife. Christ warns
that not only will cursing one’s fellow man put one in danger of the civil
authorities, but of eternal punishment from God: “whosoever shall say,
Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.” Christ’s teachings on the
avoidance of sin likewise embody an insistence on an afterlife in which
punishment is as real an alternative as reward: “And if thy right hand
offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: it is profitable for thee that
one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should
be cast into hell.”

View of the World
The Biblical view of history, like the Roman view, is linear or
teleological, that is, moving toward a particular pre-determined end
point. In Christian writers, the passage of time is assumed to be taking
us toward the outworking of God’s plan for the world and ultimately
toward the end of history in God’s judgment and renewal of the creation.
The New Testament authors register their awareness that they are
writing against the backdrop of the imperial Roman view of history
embodied on Aeneas’ shield. At the beginning of Luke 2, for example,
Luke sets the nativity story into a Roman historical context: “In those
days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of
the entire Roman world. This was the first census that took place while
Quirinius was governor of Syria.” Luke establishes his historical
framework by referencing events related to Rome and its administration
of Palestine. But rather than placing Caesar Augustus and the Roman
Empire at the center of the events it narrates, the New Testament moves
Rome and its emperor to the periphery of the real main event: Christ’s
entry into the world. Caesar Augustus is just one more ruler in a long
string of rulers, Rome just one more empire in a long string of empires
that have briefly governed Israel. Neither is of sufficient importance to
detain the narrator for any length of time.

Artistic / Aesthetic
The New Testament is made up of four genres: gospel, history,
epistle, and prophecy. Embedded in each of these “genres,” or “types,”
there are other “types” or “modes” of writing as well: parables, orations,
proverbs, hymns, lyric poetry, and others. Given this wide variety of

79

literary types, each operating according to different rules, it is difficult to
specify a single set of qualities possessed by all the writings in the New
Testament.
Nevertheless, if we restrict ourselves to broad observations, such a
list is possible. Leland Ryken, in Words of Life: A Literary Introduction to
the New Testament, suggests a number of features that characterize New
Testament writing. The first is “experiential concreteness.” Rather than
stating abstract ideas in propositional language, the New Testament
writers generally embody, or incarnate their meanings in concrete images
and stories drawn from everyday life. Ryken points out that this impulse
to “image the truth” is found not only in New Testament stories but in
Christ’s preaching as well, which is heavily anecdotal and makes liberal
use of concrete images (17).
He gives as an example this exhortation from Christ’s Sermon on
the Mount in Matthew: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on
earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and
steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and
rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal”
(Matthew 6:19-20). Notice the abundance of specific detail and Christ’s
use of the image of “storing treasure” both literally in reference to this
world and metaphorically in relation to eternity. (We cannot, of course,
literally use heaven as a storage place for earthly wealth.) Christ’s point
here can perhaps be stated in abstract, propositional language; one
meaning might be that “man should be concerned with the eternal things
of God rather than with the ephemeral things of this world.” But
reducing the exhortation to propositional language robs Christ’s words of
the emotional and imaginary impact Christ achieves by appealing to the
imagination, creating “word pictures” in our minds to make his point
more memorable. This principle is at work in almost all Christ’s
teachings, but especially in the parables, one of his favorite forms.
The New Testament writings are also characterized by the use of
artistry and technique. Artistic patterning exists at every level, from
parallelistic single lines all the way to patterns at work in entire books.
Matthew, for example, when read as a whole, regularly alternates blocks
of narrative with blocks of teaching. The Sermon on the Mount contains
smaller sections of highly patterned language.
Consider, for example, the section of the Sermon that runs from
Matthew 5:17 through 5:48. Christ begins by announcing that He has
not come to abolish the Law and that the Law is still in force. He then
begins a series of six illustrations of his point: 5:21-26, where Jesus
teaches about the dangers of anger and lawsuits; 5:27-30, where Jesus
teaches about lust; 5:31-32, where Jesus teaches about divorce; 5:33-37,
where Jesus teaches about vows; 5:38-42 where Jesus teaches about
revenge; and 5:43-48, where Jesus teaches about loving our enemies.
Christ begins each of these sections with the words “you have
heard that it was said” (or something very similar), followed by a direct

80

quotation of some item of the Law from the first five books of the Old
Testament (verses 21, 27, 31, 33, 38, and 43). Then Jesus goes on to
contrast his own teaching with those the people heard from the Old
Testament: “But I tell you” (verses 22, 28, 32, 34, 39, 44). But generally
the contrast is not in quality but degree. Christ’s refinement of the Law
does not overturn the old Law; rather, Christ’s “refinement” makes the
Law even more difficult to uphold. If, for example, the old Law forbids
adultery, Christ forbids even thinking adulterous thoughts. If the old
Law says “don’t murder,” Christ forbids even speaking angry words. The
pattern repeats itself six times.
The passage, in addition to its formal patterning, embodies several
critical abstract points. Christ’s appending to the Law is part of how He
announces himself as God rather than as a mere teacher or rabbi.
Where a rabbi might interpret the Law, only God has the power to alter
the Law. The passage also clarifies that Christ’s mission is far more than
ethical teaching; though Christ seems to be “raising the bar” ethically
speaking in these passages, in fact He is setting a standard that is
plainly impossible for sinful man to reach. What person ever lived who
never thought an adulterous thought or was never angry? If Christ sets
impossible ethical standards, then his teaching must be either insane or
have a deeper meaning. Though Christ is an ethical teacher, he does not
make us righteous through his ethical teachings. Christ sets an
impossible standard because Christ’s ultimate mission is to call men to
an awareness of their own inability to live up to God’s standards, to the
repentance that follows from that awareness, and to the forgiveness and
reconciliation with the Father that His death on the cross makes
possible. He is himself the fulfillment of the Law, setting free from the
Law those who believe in Him.

Works Cited:

Ryken, Leland. Words of Life: A Literary Introduction to the New
Testament. Grand Rapids, MI. Baker Book House, 1987.

81

Augustine’s Confessions Introduction

General Intro
Augustine was born in Tagaste, a city in northern Africa during the
late years of the Roman Empire. By 354 A.D., the year of Augustine’s
birth, the Roman Empire (to which Tagaste along with most of the rest of
Northern Africa belonged) had become at least nominally Christian after
the conversion of Constantine. At the time of Augustine’s birth, the
entire empire was under terrible pressure from invading Germanic tribes
and was near political and economic collapse. Augustine was born into
an upper-middle-class family. He had a pagan father and Christian
mother. Augustine’s parents had ambitious plans for their son, who was
sent to school in Carthage to train as a rhetorician. During these years
(and with the approval of his parents) Augustine took a common-law wife
with whom he had a son. He later “dismissed” her at the prospect of an
economically and politically advantageous marriage. In the end, the
marriage never took place, but Augustine’s account of his own suffering
in leaving this first love is heartrending.
Augustine performed very well in his studies and became a teacher
of rhetoric in Milan, a wealthy city in Italy. However, despite his worldly
success, he found himself dissatisfied with the fashionable Manicheism
he had embraced as a scholar. His interactions with Bishop Ambrose of
Milan and with his Christian mother, together with his readings in
Scripture were affected him deeply. After some years of struggle,
Augustine finally decided to be baptized and become a Christian. This
was not an easy decision for Augustine. His understanding of the faith
led him to sell all of his possessions and give the money to the poor,
dedicating himself to a life of poverty, prayer, and study. He could give
up all hope of advancement as a scholar or as a government functionary.
Augustine never sought ordination to the ministry, but was obliged
to accept ordination in the city of Hippo in 391. He was eventually made
Bishop of that city, a demanding position he held for 34 years until his
death in 430. Augustine was deeply involved in the establishment of
church doctrine. His later years were consumed with combating various
heresies arising in the church. At his death, the Roman Empire was in
ruins, and his own city was under siege by the Vandals and Goths, who
had already sacked Rome. Augustine never lost his faith, working to
establish an orthodox Biblical understanding of basic doctrinal matters
until his last hours.

View of Man
Augustine’s Confessions embodies a shift in the concept of heroism
away from the pagan values animating classical heroes to the Judaeo-
Christian values characteristic of Old Testament heroes like Joseph or

82

Jacob. Augustine’s primary struggle is not external, but internal and
spiritual. The primary motivation of the hero shifts here away from a
pursuit of outward glory toward an inward examination of the soul. Nor
is the “hero” of the Confessions outstanding in any way. He is not, like
Achilles or Aeneas, a child of the gods or a prince or even a mighty
warrior. He is an ordinary man. In fact, his ordinariness is critical to
the message of the Confessions, since Augustine means for his own
experience to be exemplary of all human experience. To the extent that
Augustine has critical “heroic” action to take, he does so by putting
complete trust in God rather than in himself. Ultimately, the
Confessions does not embody Augustine’s overcoming external obstacles
in the manner of the classical hero, but rather his surrendering
internally to the overwhelming love of God.
This surrender, and the related idea that man is absolutely
dependent on God, is one of the primary themes of the Confessions.
Contemporary readers might expect the autobiography of a great man to
detail how the writer achieved greatness through his own efforts.
Instead, Augustine speaks from the beginning of his dependence on God:
“the gifts your mercy had provided sustained me from the first moment.”
He speaks of the mother’s milk he received as an infant as having come
not from the women who nursed him, but instead from God, who both
gave them the milk and the will to nurse the infant. When Augustine
speaks of his parents, it is generally to criticize their folly and sinfulness
and to express wonder and gratitude toward the God who used that folly
and sin to bless him.
In much of his work, Augustine helped to clarify the basic
Christian doctrine of original sin. This doctrine says that man is born
with a depraved will and is thus incapable of doing any good on his own.
God can certainly work out His good will through man’s evil, but man
cannot take any credit for having done good. Augustine was faced
during his lifetime with the spread of a heresy called Pelagianism.
Pelagius taught that man was capable of working for salvation and
earning merit. Augustine’s Confessions must be understood as, in part,
a response to the teachings of Pelagius.
Augustine taught that those who wish to see God must face the
weight of evil within themselves. Confession of sin, a sacrament in
Augustine’s church, exists to remind the Christian of how far short of the
standard of God’s holiness he has fallen. Only by facing his own
sinfulness through confessing it can the Christian truly recognize his
need for Christ and his dependence on God for righteousness.
Augustine’s confessions are a model to us, then, not only of how a life is
to be lived, but also how it is to be examined—carefully, painstakingly,
with much prayer and careful contemplation, with the Christian ever
ready to find and confess his own evil and shortsightedness.

83

View of God
Augustine’s view of God is consistent with other writers in the
orthodox biblical tradition. He is a single God, assumed to have absolute
power over all events, and to behave in consistent and loving ways. He is
revealed through the Bible; quotations from Scripture permeate the
Confessions. Because He is entirely pure, and thus morally superior to
man, He is approachable only through man’s humble confession of sin
and the forgiveness made possible through Christ’s atoning sacrifice.
The book itself embodies this principle. Augustine writes as a spiritual
exercise that draws him closer to God. As readers, we overhear a
conversation between a devout man and his God.
View of World
Augustine’s most influential work with regarding the nature of the
material world is the massive City of God. In this work, Augustine
defends Christians against the charge that the downfall of Rome was a
result of the anger of the pagan gods at Rome’s apostasy. Remember,
Rome had become officially Christian after Constantine’s conversion
around 340. In 410, eleven years after Augustine’s ordination as Bishop
of Hippo, Rome was besieged and then sacked by the Visigoths. The
entire Roman world was deeply shocked at this event. Rome was, after
all, understood as the “eternal city,” so how could it now be at the mercy
of the barbarian hordes? The most obvious answer seemed to be that
the pagan gods were angry because of the establishment of Christianity
as the religion of the empire.
Romans for centuries had interpreted the successes of their city as
a reflection of the favor of the gods; in the Aeneid, Virgil argues that the
successes of the Roman empire were evidence of the providential intent
of the gods to establishing Rome as the central power of the world.
Virgil’s understanding of Rome as the end of history was profoundly
influential on later generations; after all, for many centuries the Aeneid
was treated as a kind of Roman Bible. It was used as a key literary work
in the education of the empire’s elite; Augustine’s account of his own
education stresses the important role played by the Aeneid in shaping
the outlook and opinions of educated Romans. The Aeneid encouraged
Romans to think of their empire as the culmination of a providential
world history, the ideal end point toward which the whole pageant of
human history was directed. The gods, according to this interpretation
of history, had manipulated and controlled events so that Rome would
unite the world under one civilized central political unit.
However, the falling fortunes of Rome in general and the sack
Rome in 410 in particular led many to assume that Rome no longer
enjoyed the special favor of the gods.
Friends complaints to Augustine that the sack of Rome was evidence of
the anger of the pagan gods. Augustine’s response in the City of God
was to reassert one of the most basic biblical truths: worldly success

84

does not necessarily imply the favor of God. This is the very point of
Psalm 73, where we began our study of a Christian view of literature.
The psalmist begins by complaining of the success of the wicked and the
apparent failure of the godly, but is assured that this state of affairs does
not reflect God’s ultimate intentions. Thus, we cannot assume that
worldly prosperity reflects the approval or favor of God toward the
prosperous.
Augustine proposed that while Rome was establishing itself as the
political center of the world, a parallel but far less visible development:
the establishment of a spiritual city, the collective expression of the love
of God’s people for their creator. History is linear, but it points not
toward the establishment of an earthly empire, but rather toward the
establishment of God’s kingdom, the heavenly city: “ Two loves had built
two cities—love of self to the despising of God had built the earthly city;
love of God to the despising of self the heavenly city. (qtd. in Brown xxviii)

Artistic / Aesthetic

Augustine writes his Confessions as a kind of a love letter to God
or an extended prayer modeled on the Psalms. Confessions is great
literature rather than mere polemic because, rather than simply stating
his theological ideas as propositions, Augustine embodies these truths in
solid, concrete stories and images. The abstract theological principle of
total human depravity has seldom had a more effective literary
embodiment than the Pear Tree episode Augustine relates from his own
childhood. Throughout the Confessions, Augustine gives us examples
from his own experience that confirm the more abstract theological
claims of the work.
However, despite the literary qualities of Augustine’s Confessions,
Augustine’s attitude toward literature in general is often unfriendly.
Recounting his early education, he reflects with displeasure on how
reading the Aeneid and other works in Latin led him to pity fictional
characters but to neglect his own pitiable state, separated as he was
from the love of God. It was only the study of reading and writing that
was useful, says Augustine; the stories themselves were empty vanities.
Augustine also expresses a deep suspicion of drama. Where Aristotle
had argued that the sight of tragic actions on stage has a salutary effect
on man’s emotional life, purging him of unpleasant emotions like pity
and fear, Augustine’s theory of the love of tragedy is very different; he
labels it “wretched lunacy” to desire to feel the sorrow of others.
However, Augustine is also ready to admit that the best classical
literature can have a salutary effect. Augustine credits Cicero with
beginning him on “that journey upward by which I was to return to
[God].”

85

The church sacrament of the confession becomes the occasion for
Augustine to reflect on his spiritual life. Thus, the first autobiography in
the western tradition is born of the Christian worldview, which tells
believers that the individual soul is of value and important. Augustine
talks directly with God in a frank and friendly manner, as though
assured of God’s favor and goodness toward him. He doesn’t have to be
meticulous and careful, but can pour out his heart in absolute trust: this
was obviously unthinkable for the Greeks, for whom the gods were
capricious, jealous, and generally uncaring.

Works Cited.

Brown, Peter. Introduction. Augustine, Confessions. Trans. F. J.
Sheed. Indianapolis / Cambridge. Hackett, 1993.

86

Early Medieval Literature Chapter Draft: Beowulf

Introduction
The anonymous Anglo-Saxon author of Beowulf was born into a
culture that had only recently embraced Christianity. Although the tale
is set before the Anglo-Saxon conversion (which began around 600), it
was written afterward, perhaps about 850. As a result, the Christian
values of the narrator are in tension with the pagan behaviors of the
characters and he reflects on these behaviors with some disapproval.
When, for example, the Danes pray to the pagan gods for protection from
Grendel, the narrator writes:
At times they vowed sacrifices at heathen temples, with their words
prayed that the soul-slayer would give help for the distress of the
people. Such was their custom, the hope of heathens; in their
spirits they thought of Hell, they knew not the Ruler, the Judge of
Deeds, they recognized not the Lord God, nor indeed did they know
how to praise the Protector of Heaven, the glorious King. Woe is
him who in terrible trouble must thrust his soul into the fire’s
embrace, hope for no comfort, not expect change. Well is the man
who after his death-day may seek the Lord and find peace in the
embrace of the Father.
These expressions of disapproval are so rare, many critics have argued
that they are “interpolations,” material inserted into a pagan work by a
later Christian copyist, perhaps a zealous monk.
However, aside from these expressions of disapproval, there are
other textual features of Beowulf that suggest its original author was a
Christian. For example, the narrator condemns pagan polytheism, which
he identifies as worship of demons, and gives Beowulf and Hrothgar
some conventionally pious speeches about trusting a monotheistic God.
Several characters speak about man facing judgment after death, a
concept alien to paganism. There are a few direct Biblical allusions,
notably to the creation and to the story of Cain and Abel. Finally, the
narrator places Grendel within a Judeo-Christian context by identifying
him as one of the demonic offspring of Cain.
However, if the writer was a Christian, his views are not entirely
consistent with those held by other writers in the Christian tradition.
Beowulf the man embodies many of the pagan heroic qualities, such as
boasting, reliance on physical strength and courage, and pursuit of
individual glory, that are largely rejected by Christian authors.
Furthermore, the only biblical allusions used by the author come from
the Old Testament; there is no mention of Christ or his sacrifice, but only
assurances of the providential oversight of a monotheistic God. The
values and attitudes embodied in Beowulf are thus a strange mixture of
pagan and Christian influences, suggesting that the process of cultural
transformation following the pagan embrace of Christianity was gradual.

87

The hero, Beowulf, appears to be solely the creation of this author.
Nearly every other character in the story is mentioned elsewhere in
Anglo-Saxon chronicles or literature. Beowulf appears only in this
manuscript.

View of the World
There is no fondness for nature in Beowulf; one finds no green
pastures or still waters. The natural world is instead depicted as a
terrifying, hostile, implacable force against which man must struggle
constantly. Unlike the Greeks and Romans, who enjoyed a sunlit,
temperate climate in a land where nature had long been “tamed” by
civilized man, the Germanic tribes that settled the shores of England in
the 5th and 6th centuries lived in an unpopulated, cold, rainy, heavily-
forested world alive with bears, wolves, snakes, and other dangerous
animals. Settlements generally consisted of a cleared space in the forest
with the mead hall as its center and a few houses around it. All around
them in every direction was darkness, danger, and the unknown. No
wonder the natural world was terrifying to them!
Against this backdrop, heroism is largely a measure of how bravely
and successfully man pits himself against the natural world. When the
drunken Unferth doubts Beowulf’s capacity to defeat Grendel, Unferth
cites Beowulf’s loss of a swimming contest as evidence of Beowulf’s
weakness. Beowulf sets him straight; he won that contest, Beowulf
assures his audience, swimming on the ocean five days and nights and
killing a whole slew of sea-monsters besides. This tale of swimming and
thus figuratively conquering the ocean becomes an important item on
Beowulf’s resume, establishing his credibility as an opponent for the
undefeated Grendel. Later, when a group of warriors leaves Heorot to
travel to the lair of Grendel’s mother, out among “the wolf-slopes, the
windy headlands, [and] the dangerous fen-path where the mountain
stream goes under the flood of the earth,” they find a terrifying lake of
boiling blood covered with “sea-serpents,” “water-monsters,” and “wild
beasts.” There is no sentimentality about the natural world in Beowulf.
It is alien and threatening.
Grendel and his mother are the story’s chief embodiments of the
danger of the wilderness. Grendel, we are told, is a “rover of the borders,
one who held the moors, fen and fastness.” He is never very clearly
described, which perhaps adds to his fearsomeness. We do learn that he
has scales, claws, and big teeth. We are told a good deal more about his
habitat than his appearance; Grendel lives outside the charmed circle of
the mead-hall, in the dark and lonely wilderness beyond. Grendel’s
mother has to be sought in her lair under a boiling lake. In a sense,
Beowulf’s defeat of these monsters is admirable because it represents
man’s ability to overcome a threatening and dangerous natural world.
Though written in English for an audience in England, Beowulf
recounts the deeds of the Danish and Geatish ancestors of its audience.

88

The events in Beowulf are thus in the audience’s distant, pre-Christian
past, so the characters are also necessarily pagan. Not surprisingly,
there are two different views of history at work in the poem: one cyclical
and hopeless, fate-governed, belonging to the pagan characters, and
another linear and providential belonging to the narrator and his
audience. Beowulf seems to occupy a middle ground between these two,
sometimes advocating trust in a providential God, while at other times
simply saying “Fate always goes as it must.”

View of Man
Against the backdrop of their terrifying view of nature’s power and
hostility to man, the civilized world seemed delicate in comparison.
Heorot, the mead-hall, represents the height of civilization in Beowulf. It
is the center of the community’s civilized life: its story-telling, ring-giving,
feasting and mead-drinking. The Danes wrested it up out of the
wilderness, but as Beowulf begins it has been reclaimed by Grendel, the
representative of that wilderness. Grendel despises the expressions of
civility taking place in Heorot: “Then the fierce spirit painfully endured
hardship for a time, he who dwelt in the darkness, for every day he heard
the loud mirth in the hall; there was the sound of the harp, the clear
song of the scop.” Even Beowulf’s defeat of Grendel will only reclaim the
mead-hall for a short time. The poet makes clear that Heorot will
eventually be completely destroyed in an attack that happens after the
action of the poem.
Human relations are equally delicate among these touchy warriors.
In the celebration that follows Beowulf’s defeat of Grendel, the scop (a
bard or professional storyteller) tells the gloomy (and complicated) tale of
an uneasy truce between the Jutes and the Danes that ultimately ended
in bloodshed. This reminds readers of the fragility of political and family
relationships among these tribes. The code of loyalty and vengeance that
animates this warrior society makes lasting peace nearly impossible.
There is very little possibility for escape from the cycle of violence. The
narrator expresses a pessimistic outlook regarding human relationships
that is characteristic of Anglo-Saxon literature.
Despite this pessimistic outlook, it is also plain that, for all the
weaknesses of the community, man belongs within it and has no
meaning outside of it. A good king is one who is able to cement his
thanes together into a mutually loyal community. Much of this is
accomplished through the giving of treasure, which becomes a public
way of recognizing the warrior’s value to his tribe. The narrator of
Beowulf spends a good deal of time describing the swords, cups, rings,
and so on, that Hrothgar gives to Beowulf, insisting that a good king is
generous with such things. As a negative example, the scop tells the
story of Heremod, a bad king who ruined his people by his greediness
and isolation. Likewise Heorot, with its hearth-fires, flagons of ale and
mead-benches becomes the perishable symbol of the (short-lived)

89

success of the Geats in establishing civil relations and in overcoming the
threat of the natural world.
The monsters in the story are characterized by greediness,
isolation, and a hatred for community. Over and over the narrator
stresses the isolation of Grendel, who despises the communal
celebrations at Heorot, preferring instead to wander alone in the woods
and marshes, sneaking in at night to consume sleeping warriors. He is a
cosmic party-pooper, embodying all the destructiveness of the natural
world and its seeming opposition to the establishment of an orderly
community. His mother shares all of his bad qualities, as does the
dragon Beowulf fights in the last section of the poem.

View of God
The view of God embodied in the tale also seems to be in transition
from pagan to Christian. On the one hand, the god of the poet is plainly
the God of the Bible: a single creator-God, loving and just, protecting
those who love Him, governing events. The poet gives God many
traditional Christian epithets: “lord,” “father,” “almighty,” “ruler of men,”
“king of glory,” “shepherd of glory,” and so on. On the other hand, there
are no mentions of Christ, the cross, the church, or any epithets
denoting “savior.” There are also disturbing remnants of pagan
theological concepts, particularly the idea of “fate,” or wyrd. As Beowulf
explains his decision to face Grendel without weapons, he comforts his
audience with the observation that “fate always goes as it must.”
Therefore, there is little to be gained by acting in self-protective ways.
The concept of life after death in Beowulf also contains some pagan
elements. For example, the ship burials described at the beginning and
end of Beowulf suggests the pagan possibility of “taking it with you.” The
practice looks forward to a common afterlife for all men that follows the
same basic rules as this life, where the deceased will need treasure,
weapons, ships, and so on. Beowulf at his death receives the same kind
of grand send-off, buried with the treasure he rescued from the dragon
that gave him his death-wound.
On the other hand, the narrator also suggests a more
conventionally Christian understanding of judgment after death followed
by a division of good men from evil men for an afterlife of reward or
punishment. As he responds to Unferth’s challenge, Beowulf reminds
Unferth that not only has he not done anything to make his own name
famous, he has committed acts that have actually made him infamous by
killing his own kin: “I have not heard say of you any such hard matching
of might, such sword-terror. . . . [Y]ou became your brother’s slayer, your
close kin; for that you will suffer punishment in Hell, even though your
wit is keen.” Beowulf is Christian in his understanding of a coming
judgment and the afterlife as an eternal outcome of that judgment.
On the other hand, Beowulf’s response to Unferth also clarifies the
essentially pagan underpinnings of his grounds for moral behavior.

90

According to Beowulf’s understanding, one behaves morally or immorally
on the basis of fear of punishment in the afterlife or expectation of
reward there. Unferth is going to Hell because he slew his own kin. This
is certainly a step above the pagan understanding of moral behavior as a
potential way of winning this-worldly favor from the gods. But the
reformed tradition insists that true righteousness, the kind that makes
men acceptable to God, comes only through the imputed righteousness
of Christ, a concept which, as we have seen, is entirely absent from
Beowulf. In the reformed tradition, Unferth would go to Hell because of
his fallen nature and his inability to behave with perfect righteousness
on his own.

Artistic/Aesthetic
Beowulf is poetry, though in the original Old English it employs
neither rhyme nor meter. Instead, the poet uses lines of irregular length
(normally eight to twelve syllables), each with a pause somewhere in the
line. Each of the line-halves has two strong stresses. Sometimes the
sentence ends at the pause, sometimes at the end of the line, and
sometimes neither. Sentences do not end between pauses. The two line-
halves created by the pause are always linked together by alliteration,
the repetition of initial consonant or vowel sounds. The first stress of the
second line-half cannot alliterate with the second stress of that line-half,
but must alliterate with one or both stressed syllables of the first half-
line. The form is nearly impossible to use in modern English, so most
translators rely heavily on alliteration without using the more complex
features of Old English poetry.
Aside from its heavy reliance on alliteration, another feature of
Beowulf that may act as a barrier to understanding is the poet’s use of
“included narratives.” These stories often seem like digressions to
modern readers; the poet is describing the celebration of Beowulf’s
victory over Grendel, then suddenly he slows to tell a long and gloomy
story about Hnaff and Finn, characters who seem to have very little to do
with current events in the narrative. However, the author almost always
uses these included narratives to illuminate a central theme or character
trait. The story of Hnaff and Finn, for example, offers a marked contrast
to the peaceful nature of the Geats’ visit to the Danes. Another example
is Beowulf’s amazing tale of his swimming feat, which both refutes
Unferth’s disparaging remarks and reinforces Beowulf’s fitness to
undertake the battle with Grendel. The “included narrative” is, in other
words, an important item on Beowulf’s résumé.
The fear of the natural world in Beowulf and other early medieval
works from western Europe does not translate to disdain for the physical
world. There are careful descriptions in Beowulf of swords and jewelry
and other physical objects, an attention to specific detail for its own sake
that is not found in early Hebrew literature. Though they feared the
natural world more than we do, the Anglo-Saxons were not haters of the

91

material world. They were, instead, lovers of art, man’s manipulation of
physical material. Archaeological finds confirm the love of art and
artificial objects expressed in Beowulf. A series of burial mounds
uncovered at Sutton Hoo in England and dated at around 620 A.D.
yielded complex and sophisticated art objects, some of foreign origin,
many of which were at least 150 years old when they were buried. A
large silver dish, for example, bears the mark of the Byzantine Emperor
Anastasius, who ruled about 490-518 A.D.

92

Dante, The Inferno Intro

Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 in Florence, Italy. The Roman Empire was a
distant, glorious memory and Italy had split into dozens of principalities and city-states
and would not be reunited for centuries. However, unlike much of the rest of Europe,
Italy still had many large cities which were flourishing culturally and economically,
especially toward the end of the Middle Ages.
Although Dante’s Florence was one such thriving metropolis, it was torn by
sectarian strife, a dangerous place of shifting loyalties to clan and political faction. Dante
was heavily involved in partisan politics in Florence and achieved some genuine, though
short-lived, influence. During the summer of 1300, when Dante’s party was in power, he
was named as one of the seven priors of Florence. When his party fell out of power a few
months later, he lost his position. Dante traveled with a party delegation to Rome and
during his absence his political enemies moved against him, trying him on trumped-up
charges and sentencing him to death in absentia. The effective result of this sentence was
that Dante was exiled from Florence for the rest of his life, unable to return for fear that
the death sentence would be carried out.
Dante lived out the rest of his days in poverty and exile, moving frequently from
city to city. He took revenge on many of his political enemies by including them in his
descriptions of the damned in Hell. Dante died in Ravenna, Italy, in 1321.

View of Man
In his essay “What is Art?,” Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy outlines the profound reversal
in heroic ideals embodied in the teachings and life of Christ:
The Christian ideal changed and reversed everything so that, as the gospel puts it,
“that which was exalted among men has become an abomination in the sight of
God.” The ideal is no longer the greatness of Pharaoh or of a Roman emperor,
not the beauty of a Greek nor the wealth of Phoenicia, but humility, purity,
compassion, love. The hero is no longer Dives, but Lazarus the beggar; not Mary
Magdalene in the day of her beauty, but in the day of her repentance; not those
who acquire wealth, but those who have abandoned it; not those who dwell in
palaces, but those who dwell in catacombs and huts; not those who rule over
others, but those who acknowledge no authority but God’s.
The character qualities Tolstoy identifies as Christian ideals—humility, purity, poverty,
obscurity—are diametrically opposed to those qualities of character Homer asks us to
admire in his heroes: the strength and self-confidence of Achilles, the wily
resourcefulness of Odysseus, the wealth and majesty of Agamemnon. Of course, as we
have seen in our readings in the Old Testament, Dante doesn’t so much reverse the
classical view as restore the Biblical view; his view of heroism is closely consonant with
both Old and New Testament models for heroic behavior.
The Christian view of heroism differs from the classical view of heroism most
critically in that Christians believe that man is powerless to save himself. He is, in the
most significant battle of all, utterly dependent on the courage and strength of someone
else. So the initiative, courage, and activity that make Achilles or Odysseus heroes are
now replaced with passivity, dependence, and waiting.

93

This passivity can be shocking to those familiar with the classical model of
heroism. Consider the first scene of The Divine Comedy: lost in the Wood of Error,
Dante confronts three wild beasts. His response is not to attack and kill them as Achilles
would, nor to defeat them through Odyssean stratagems. Instead, overcome with fear,
Dante retreats from this danger and gives up his quest. This is certainly not the kind of
behavior we have come to expect from our epic heroes; without divine intervention,
Dante’s epic quest would end in the first canto.
The contrast between Christian and classical heroism is treated explicitly; Dante
openly encourages us to recognize the difference between the behavior of past epic
heroes (the creator of the Aeneid is, after all, his guide through the underworld) and the
character Dante. Dante is constantly helped along by Virgil. Dante hesitates and often
doubts his own worthiness, particularly in light of what he knows about heroes of the
past. After noting that Virgil is the poet of Aeneas, the Trojan hero credited with the
foundation of Rome, which, as Dante notes, was “founded and foreknown/ as the
established Seat of Holiness/ for the successors of Great Peter’s throne” (II: 22-24), and
that Paul is another in the line of heroic Christians, Dante protests his own unworthiness:
But I–how should I dare? By whose permission?
I am not Aeneas. I am not Paul.
Who could believe me worthy of the vision? (II: 31-33)
Virgil responds by telling Dante that he isn’t worthy of the vision, but that Beatrice’s pity
for him prompted her to send help so that Dante’s soul would not be lost. Dante’s point
here is that God’s saving grace is not based on man’s worthiness, but rather on the divine
love that God has for man despite his unworthiness.
Despite his awareness of the divine sanction for his journey, Dante the character
rarely displays anything like traditionally heroic behavior. As early as Canto III, Dante
swoons with terror at the first sight of Charon the boatman and has to be carried by Virgil
to the next destination. He faints again out of pity for Paolo and Francesca after they tell
their sad tale. At many later points, Dante simply gives up hope and has to be urged on
by Virgil, sometimes gently and sometimes with great ferocity. For Dante the character,
opportunities for virtuous behavior in Hell are limited either to refusing to feel pity for
the souls of the damned (doing so, Virgil explains, is equivalent to questioning God’s
judgment) or to adding to the torments of the damned. When Dante expresses a wish to
see his old enemy Fillipo Argenti punished more fully, Virgil smiles indulgently, telling
him, “This is a wish that should be satisfied” (VIII.54). Otherwise, Dante does very little
to advance the journey. He follows where Virgil leads and obeys Virgil’s orders.
Despite his repeated emphasis on man’s incapacity to save himself, Dante still has
profound respect for human reason and treats it as one of the most important channels of
God’s grace. Virgil, Dante’s guide through Hell, is a symbol of human reason, with all
its creative glory and courage, but also with all of its weakness; Virgil is capable of
helping Dante recognize sin and learn to hate it, but is not capable of helping him
overcome it. Consider Dante and Virgil’s crisis outside the gates of Dis in Cantos VIII
and IX. They are confronted there with a crew of Rebel Angels, the same group that
stood with Satan in his uprising against God; as such, they represent pure evil, which, as
Augustine so memorably pointed out in the “Pear Tree” episode of his Confessions, does
not operate according to rational principles. According to Augustine, man does evil
because by his nature he loves evil and only secondarily for any rational benefit he might

94

receive from the act. The Rebel Angels cannot be reasoned with because they are
creatures of pure evil; therefore, Virgil, the symbol of human reason, is powerless against
them. Virgil’s powerlessness becomes more poignant when we remember how easily he
defeats the other monsters in Hell: Cerberus, Plutus, Minos, Charon, Phlegyas, and others
who threaten Dante. Dante and Virgil are forced to wait at the gates of Dis for the arrival
of an angel who opens the gate without effort.
Dante’s point in using Virgil as a guide through Hell is simple: God gives reason
in order to help man to recognize sin. Romans 1 and Psalm 19 both make clear that using
reason to observe the created world will reveal enough about God’s character to allow us
to know right from wrong so that even the heathen “are without excuse.” By following
Virgil, Dante uses as his guide the one man he believed embodied the highest
achievement of unregenerated human reason. This reason is sufficient to help him learn
to recognize and hate sin, but it is also limited, as we have seen, in its effectiveness.
Dante’s view of reason owes a great deal to Aquinas: reason here is not opposed to faith,
but is rather a supplement to it, strengthening and guiding it.
Dante’s journey through the underworld is meant to symbolize a process of moral
development, with Dante’s behavior and attitudes changing over the course of the trip,
especially in his ever-hardening response to the sinners. Dante begins his journey in a
state of great sympathy for the sinners. Consider his response to Paolo and Francesca,
the lovers who stop to tell their story; Dante weeps and faints with pity for them. Over
time, as he sees more and more sin, Dante uses his reason to pass through the first stage
of salvation: recognition of sin. As he does so, he becomes less sympathetic toward those
suffering until he reaches the point in the last circle where he is willing to add to their
punishment.
Dante’s treatment of romantic love is ambiguous. In its purest Platonic form
(represented here by Dante’s love for Beatrice) it can, via the detached contemplation of
physical beauty, lead the mind upward toward the ultimate spiritual beauty: God.
According to his autobiographical work La Vita Nuova, Dante’s lifelong unconsummated
love for a woman named Beatrice supposedly led him to renounce the world; in his epic,
he credits the same love with leading him toward God. Yet romantic love can also be, in
its physical and sexual aspects, a mortal sin that can lead men away from God, and as
such it is punished in its own circle in Hell. Still, Dante, the brokenhearted lover, puts
the lovers very near the top of Hell, among those who are least subject to the wrath of
God. He weeps and faints with pity at the sad tale of Paolo and Francesca.

View of the World
One of the most central intellectual features of medieval European thought was
the integration of life around a Christian worldview. Medieval artists and philosophers
sought to synthesize Greek philosophy and mythology with Christian revelation, an
approach hammered out most clearly in the work of Thomas Aquinas. Dante’s work
embodies this synthesis in many ways. For example, Dante includes monsters and
human characters drawn from classical mythology into his very Christian underworld;
Dido, Achilles, and Cerberus rub shoulders with Caiaphas, Nimrod, and Judas. Dante
shows his deep respect for the accomplishments of the ancients by creating a “limbo” for
the virtuous pagans, where Homer, Ovid, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, and other master

95

souls of pagan antiquity spend eternity. Even Dante’s choice of genres is a bow toward
the most influential art of the classical past: the great epics of Homer and Virgil.
Yet Dante is also careful to subordinate this classical world to Christian
revelation. Many of the monsters of pagan antiquity serve as a kind of bureaucracy of
Hell, keeping Hell orderly by sorting and punishing the sinners according to the divine
plan. Dante also suggests that, to the reasonable man, these monsters have lost most of
their ability to terrify or intimidate. Most of them simply collapse into a heap when
Virgil rebukes them. The only monsters that genuinely frighten Virgil are the Rebel
Angels. Reason is powerless against the true evil they represent because pure evil is not
rational.
Medieval Christianity is often criticized as Platonist, viewing the physical world
as an irredeemably evil place, the only purpose of which is to provide man with a
backdrop against which to prepare himself for an eternity in the spiritual world. Dante’s
work embodies this Platonist strain of medieval Christianity very strongly. Only the first
two cantos take place in the external, physical world. The rest of the Divine Comedy, all
ninety-eight remaining cantos, takes place in the world of the afterlife—Hell, Purgatory,
and Paradise. The physical world of the here-and-now is characterized in the Divine
Comedy only as a dark, gloomy, pathless wood from which the weary pilgrim longs to
escape. In addition, the first two cantos place a greater weight on the spiritual world by
using the physical world mainly as a symbol of the spiritual. Every material object is
shot through with a significance that points beyond itself. In the opening scene, the dark
valley, the high mountains, the three beasts, Virgil as a guide through the underworld,
and even the journey itself, are all physical pieces in an allegorical puzzle designed to
reveal spiritual truth. To the extent that the physical world does exist in the Divine
Comedy, it is only a prelude and pointer toward the real world of eternity.
Contrast this with Homer and Virgil, both of whom take heroes to the land of the
dead. In both cases, the afterlife sections of the Odyssey and the Aeneid are brief
diversions, sideshows to the real action taking place in the physical world. Dante’s work
will reverse this pattern of emphasis completely, focusing only briefly on the physical
world and spending almost all of its time on the afterlife. Because the physical world
appears only very briefly, the tiny physical space it occupies in the poem is analogous to
the tiny temporal space it occupies when placed next to eternity. For the Greeks, the
physical world was the main event, followed by an empty, lifeless, colorless afterlife.
For Dante and most medieval Christians, the poles reversed themselves, so that his
picture of “this life” in the first two cantos is dreary, pleasureless, and confusing, where
his pictures of the afterlife are among the most vibrant and vital of any writer in history.

View of the Divine
Dante’s God is utterly transcendent. Unlike the gods of classical literature,
Dante’s God does not appear himself in the Inferno and only makes his presence known
via intermediaries like Virgil, Beatrice, or the Angel who opens the gates of Dis.
Dante’s God is utterly just. The justice of God is a repeated theme of the Inferno.
In Hell, the punishment always fits the crime. At each new circle, Dante sees the
symbolically just torments of those who have rejected God. The Lovers, who allowed
themselves to be blown about in life by every wind of passion, are now in death
continually blown about the second circle by howling winds. The Thieves, who stole

96

from others in life, in death can keep nothing of their own, not even their own bodies,
which they must continually steal from one another. The Sullen are buried in mud. The
Flatterers are immersed in excrement. The justice of this punishment could hardly be
more obvious: They slung it in life; in death, they are slung into it. Part of the fun of
reading the Inferno for the first time lies in watching the fertility of Dante’s imagination
as he dreams up fitting punishments.
Another principle of God’s justice in Hell is that those who are suffering there are
generally getting what they wanted. The Lovers are a good example. In life, they chose
to exercise no control over their bodies, instead giving themselves over to the control of
their passions; in death, they continue in that state of powerlessness, blown about by the
winds. When Dante asks to speak to some of them, Virgil instructs him to call out to
them not in the name of God, but in the name of Love, the only power to which they will
respond. Their natures, in other words, have not changed; they are still surrendered to
their romantic passions rather than by God’s will. It is so with all the damned in Hell.
Thieves continue to steal forever. Blasphemers go on blaspheming. These are all people
who have chosen to be in hell and most continue to choose to be in hell, remaining in
their sins, or a symbolic re-enactment of them, forever.
Dante’s God is utterly rational and orderly. God’s administration of justice is, in
the Inferno, the highest embodiment of his rationality; the damned are not thrown willy-
nilly into a lake of fire but are all in their appropriate places, not only according to the
specific sin for which they are damned, but also according to how that sin fits into several
larger categories of sin. As Virgil explains, God divides types of sin into three large
categories, each punished in its own subdivision of Hell. In the first of three
“subdivisions” of Hell (Circles 3-6), God punishes the Incontinent, those lacking in self-
control, such as the Lustful or the Gluttons. Farther down (Circle 7), and thus more
subject to divine wrath, are the Violent, who are further subdivided. Then, at the lowest
level of Hell (Circles 8 and 9) are the Fraudulent.
Divine orderliness is further underlined by the fact that all arrangements in Hell
are hierarchical. Punishments progress in harshness from better to worse until, at the
bottom of the pit of Hell are those who are most actively subject to the wrath of God:
those treacherous to their patrons or benefactors. Here we find Brutus and Cassius,
leaders of the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar, Judas Iscariot, betrayer of Christ,
and, of course, Satan himself, who rose against his creator and rightful sovereign.
Furthermore, the order Dante embodies in the Inferno is only a small piece of a universal
order, a perfect hierarchy of creation arranged in a great chain that culminates in God.
It is also worth noting that Dante’s God differs from the divinities of Greece and
Rome in that He is no longer interested only in a few important mortals while more or
less ignoring the rest. Here, God’s attention is focused on every man, including a nobody
like Dante, whose unworthiness by conventional standards of heroism (“I am not
Aeneas”) only serves to underline the universality of God’s love for human beings. In
Dante, God’s standards of ranking men are not based on the wealth, power, and kinship
ties used by Homer’s readers to judge men, but rather on obedience to His Word.

Artistic/Aesthetic
Despite the historical, artistic, and theological complexities of the Inferno, the
work has had a broad popular appeal from its very beginnings, mainly because Dante’s

97

style is highly visual—almost cinematic. Though Dante relies heavily on allegory and
symbol, his work is understandable and enjoyable even for average readers who know
nothing of Florentine politics or papal history. Dante embodies the history and
theological debates of his time in lively dialogue and specific, concrete images that
remain with most readers long after they have forgotten footnotes about Celestine V or
the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. Who can forget the Simonists’ burning feet poking up
out of the fiery baptismal fonts or the awful mutilations inflicted on the Sowers of
Discord?
In addition to his powerfully imagined vision of the physical space of Hell and the
torments of the sinners therein, Dante includes a great deal of other material that makes
his work both instructive and pleasing. Nearly every sinner has a story to tell; characters
gossip. Dante faces monsters and demons at almost every turn. Dante even uses a good
deal of low-brow humor in certain sections of the Inferno, including groups of demons
signaling back and forth to each other via thunderous flatulence. We pass each group of
tormented sinners with the same kind of fascinated attention that makes us slow down as
we pass a wreck on the highway.
One of Dante’s boldest aesthetic choices in the Divine Comedy is his use of
vernacular Italian rather than Latin or Greek. The choice reflects not only his willingness
to move beyond the classical tradition, but also points to the beginnings of a wider
attraction to national languages taking place among artists and politicians all over Europe
at the time. The use of the vernacular eventually served not only to undermine the
universality of the Catholic Church, which resisted this trend throughout the Renaissance
and Reformation, but also built up a sense of national identity as different European
countries began to create literatures in their own languages.
Dante includes the biggest plug yet for the power of poetry: God likes it! There is
a special and not at all unpleasant part of the underworld set aside for the pagan poets of
classical antiquity. Dante, who may be modest about his worthiness to undertake a
journey through Hell, is not a bit modest about his poetic skills. The great pagan poets
accept him as one of their number. In the Odyssey, Demodokos’ poetry may have
gladdened the heart of man, but in Dante poetry is pleasing even to God Himself.

98

Chaucer Canterbury Tales Introduction

General
Few men were better prepared than Chaucer to create the
comprehensive portrait of English life in the Middle Ages that is The
Canterbury Tales. Born about 1340 into a wealthy merchant family,
Chaucer would from very early in life have been in daily contact with
people from all professions and social classes. He evidently had a very
good education and was made a page in a noble household as a teenager.
From that point on, Chaucer spent the rest of his life attached to the
nobility in various capacities. He was captured in battle in France and
ransomed by the king. In adulthood, he was in charge of customs for
part of London, a justice of the peace, a member of Parliament, and
participated in various missions to France and Italy. It was during these
diplomatic missions, especially those to Italy, that Chaucer came into
contact with the works of some of the great masters of medieval
vernacular literature including Bocaccio and, of course, Dante.
A brief comparison of Chaucer with Dante can be instructive.
While both were public men and officeholders, Chaucer seems to have
had few enemies despite living in highly divisive times, where Dante
made powerful enemies who eventually exiled him from his native city.
The same self-effacing modesty that helped Chaucer thrive probably also
influenced his writing; where Dante makes himself the protagonist of his
own epic and includes himself in a circle of the six greatest poets of all
times, Chaucer, also writing in first person, barely mentions himself in
Canterbury Tales. We have no clear idea if Chaucer’s political patrons
were even aware that he was a writer; there is no evidence that his
writing contributed at all to his social and economic advancement. If
Chaucer had any particularly strong religious convictions, he makes no
mention of them in Canterbury Tales, though there is an implied
criticism of the church in his portraits of crooked clergy members.
Where Dante is a stern moralist, sitting in judgment on the sins of his
characters, Chaucer is a gentle satirist, a man who takes people as they
are and seems more amused than disgusted at their misbehaviors. Both
write works with a large cast of characters, but where Dante’s
characterization is simple, direct, and flat, Chaucer’s characters often
seem quite complex.
Despite being closely attached to the household of Richard II,
Chaucer weathered the deposition and later assassination of that king
very well. Attached by marriage to John of Gaunt, the father of the new
king Henry IV, Chaucer suffered no ill effects from the downfall of his
former patron. By the time of his death, Chaucer’s adroit service to the
members of the nobility seem to have assured his family’s eventual rise
into their ranks; his granddaughter died a duchess.

99

Artistic/Aesthetic
Chaucer, like Dante, chose to write in the vernacular language of
his country–this at a time in England when most members of the
nobility were still speaking and reading mainly in French. Within the
Church, Latin was the official language. English, for centuries after the
Norman invasion, was the language of the common people, but using it
did not guarantee Chaucer’s popularity. Not only were most of the
common people illiterate, but English was still fractured into many
mutually incomprehensible regional dialects; had Chaucer been aware of
the existence of the Gawain poet (there is no evidence he was), he
probably would have understood very little of what he said or wrote. Yet
a growing spirit of nationalism meant that the English language was
becoming more acceptable at court, in business, and in literature.
Identifying the genre of The Canterbury Tales is notoriously
difficult. Rather than embodying a single genre, The Canterbury Tales
seems more like a collection of practically every popular genre of the
Middle Ages: romances, dirty jokes, lives of saints, exemplary moral
tales, sermons, and satires. Collections of tales had appeared before.
Some of these collections employed framing devices like the storytelling
contest and pilgrimage that Chaucer uses to introduce his tales.
Bocaccio’s Decameron, for example, was a collection of tales supposedly
exchanged by a group of noble young men and women to pass the time
as they sought refuge in the Florentine countryside from an outbreak of
the plague. The tales in A Thousand and One Nights are unified by a
single storyteller, Scheherezade, who tells her stories to a single listener
to keep herself alive.
Chaucer, however, does new things with the form. In none of these
earlier collections had the tales come from such a wide cross-section of
humanity, from lowly Millers to lofty Knights, or from such a wide variety
of genres. Nor had any earlier authors so expertly tied the tale to the
teller, so that in almost every case the story reflects the personality of its
teller. Finally, the tales become part of the dialogue between these
characters and reflect the drama of the pilgrimage as narrators choose
stories to score points against one another or as examples to support a
point of view in an argument. For example, the Miller tells his tale to
“quit” the Knight’s tale, offering a bawdy and improper story that serves
as a kind of counterpoint or answer to the Knight’s genteel courtly
romance.
Studying The Canterbury Tales may act as a healthy warning
against oversimplifying “the medieval worldview.” These tales remind us
that in any age beliefs and opinions vary widely depending on gender,
social class, experience, age, and personality. Chaucer’s character
portraits are so adroit, and his use of these characters’ voices to tell their
own stories is so consistent, that each story seems to embody its own
peculiar and often highly individualistic worldview. What we can say is
that all of these characters display remarkable unanimity on a certain

100

number of points: all accept that there is a hierarchy of social stations
within the culture (no one, for example, disputes that the Knight is
“better” than the Miller, although the Miller in his drunken state clearly
does not feel obliged to be particularly polite to his “betters”); all accept
the existence of the Creator God of the Bible and at least verbally claim
allegiance to Him; all accept that one true Church represents the will of
this Creator God in the world (though none are blind to the faults of this
institution); all are nominally Christians.
We noted that in The Inferno, the physical, material world occupies a
relatively small portion of the work and suggested that this was a
reflection of medieval Platonism, a mode of thought that elevates the
spiritual at the expense of the physical. Chaucer’s work displays the
new Renaissance interest in the physical world by rendering it in a
closely detailed and accurate way. No longer do we find ourselves on
“a road” near “a mountain,” objects important only for their spiritual
equivalents in Dante’s allegory. Now we find ourselves at Southwark,
near the Tabard tavern on the road toward Canterbury—a real place.
And the pilgrims on that road are rendered in a wealth of detail that
makes them seem profoundly real, from the Nun’s broach that reads
“Omnia vincit amor” to the great hairy wart on the Miller’s nose.
Because each of the tales seems to display its own worldview, I’ll
depart slightly from my normal organization in this chapter and explore
each part on its own rather than as part of a larger pattern.

Prologue
The justly famous “Prologue” to the Canterbury Tales is an
example of a medieval genre known as estates satire, a descriptive poem
that includes representative examples of all the “estates,” or classes and
occupations, which together composed medieval society. These
collections of portraits were generally drawn with satiric emphasis on the
vices popularly ascribed to each “estate” in life: millers were thought to
be thieves, monks high-living bon vivantes, pardoners conniving thieves,
and so on. (Remember, in our own day, the kinds of preconceptions
people carry about certain occupations: used car salesmen, postal
employees, lawyers, politicians, and so on.) Chaucer uses this form for
his prologue, but makes his characters both representative of a type and
highly individualized. So, for example, the Miller is not only a typical
thieving Miller, (Chaucer notes that he steals corn and overcharges his
customers) but Robin the Miller, a huge man with a bristling hairy wart
on his nose who likes wrestling, breaking down doors with his head, and
cursing through his huge furnace-like mouth.
Chaucer’s pilgrims represent a wide range of social levels, ages,
and occupations, gathered together to participate in the only medieval
institution that would allow for such a diverse mix: the pilgrimage. As

101

Chaucer describes it in the first lines of the Canterbury Tales, the
pilgrimage was a kind of ritual of spring, like baseball or house-cleaning,
something that people naturally began to think of when the weather
turned:
As soon as April pierces to the root
The drought of March . . .
Life stirs and tingles in them so,
Then off as pilgrims people long to go.
Pilgrimages like this were a fact of medieval life and were for most
participants probably more of a holiday than a religious observance.
Certainly there is little to suggest that Chaucer’s pilgrims are motivated
primarily by religious piety. A holiday mood prevails. The pilgrims take
their time along the way, eating, drinking, joking, and story-telling. They
pass a number of miraculous shrines on their way to Canterbury
(including St. Thomas’ miraculous shoe) without stopping. Most of the
members of the company seem far more interested in enjoying
themselves than in engaging in the kind of soul-searching pilgrimages
were supposed to encourage. Instead, they squabble, get drunk, tell
tales that make even the broad-minded narrator uncomfortable, and
generally behave like a bunch of cretins.

Pardoner’s Tale:
A Pardoner made his living by raising money for religious
institutions through begging and through selling pardons. These
pardons, according to official church doctrine, could release one from
punishment for sin, though not from the guilt of the sin, which could only
be pardoned through Christ’s blood. This fine theological distinction was
evidently lost on most churchgoers and probably on most Pardoners as
well, who promised, as Chaucer’s Pardoner does, that their pardons
could absolve sin altogether, effectively offering the opportunity for
Christians to buy a place in Heaven.
The figure of the Pardoner becomes an indictment of a thoroughly
corrupt church structure that preyed on the ignorant and credulous.
This the Pardoner makes clear when he says that his own bad
motivations merely reflect the bad motivations of other church
representatives:
Truth is that evil purposes determine,
And many a time, the origin of a sermon:
Some to please people and by flattery
To gain advancement through hypocrisy,
Some for vainglory, some again for hate. (1575)
The Pardoner, like his fellow church representatives, relies on Latin to
keep his ignorant audience in awe: “I say in Latin some few words or so,”
he tells his fellow pilgrims, “[t]o spice my sermon; it flavors my appeal /
And stirs my listeners to greater zeal” (1573). Remember, the average

102

churchgoer did not understand a word of the Latin used in church
services and had no personal access to the Bible in Latin or English. In
fact, the Bible would not be openly and fully translated into English for
over 200 years after the Canterbury Tales were written.
In this state of near-total ignorance regarding the scripture,
churchgoers were forced to rely solely on the authority of the clergy, who
are represented in the Canterbury Tales as almost entirely corrupt. Of
the many “church professionals” described in the Prologue, only one, the
lowly Parson, is represented as a true and faithful servant of God. The
rest are materialistic social climbers and hypocrites. As the Pardoner
begins his own tale, he not only boasts about the power he exercises as a
churchman over his awestruck audience, he cites other church authority
figures to support his claims: “I display my papal bulls . . . I show my
license . . . Bulls in the name of cardinal and pope, / Of bishops and of
patriarchs I show” (1573). These “bulls” are, one and all, testaments to
the holiness of an absolute scoundrel. So much for the reliability of
church authority.
Still, Chaucer makes the Pardoner an interesting and even
sympathetic character by making him so candid about his own
corruption. If he is a scoundrel and a liar, at least he’s honest about it to
his fellow pilgrims. He admits that he is vicious, that he steals money
from the poor, that he sells false relics and pardons, and that he cares
nothing at all for the spiritual well being of the people to whom he
preaches. And yet, somehow, the sermon that he preaches is a
stunningly effective diatribe against greed. The Pardoner recognizes that
he probably does some good despite himself:
But though that sin [avarice] is lodged in my own heart,
I am able to make other people part
From avarice, and sorely to repent,
Though that is not my principal intent. (1575)
Some readers see the Pardoner as a tragic figure, fully aware of his own
limitations and yet incapable of rising above them. Others see him only
as a hypocritical villain. In either case, the Pardoner’s character and bad
intentions serve as an ironic frame of reference for the tale he tells.
The Pardoner begins his tale, a stern warning against the dangers
of gluttony, by popping into a tavern for some food and booze. Before he
begins his story (a sermon he has preached so many times that he has it
memorized), the Pardoner gives a number of other examples of people
undone by avarice. The examples are a strange (for us) mix of Biblical
characters and quotes from or allusions to classical literature. This first
section of the Pardoner’s tale is a good example of the mix of Hebrew and
Greek influences on medieval thought that culminated in Thomas
Aquinas’ attempts to integrate the two in a form of thought that would
eventually be called Christian Humanism. Other examples can be found
earlier in Dante and later in Milton.

103

The tale itself involves three young men earnestly engaged in what
medieval theologians referred to as “the tavern sins:” drinking, gambling,
and swearing. Hearing a passing funeral procession, they learn that the
dead man is an old friend killed by dangerous character named Death,
who has been up to no good in the area. They are warned by their
servant and by the innkeeper that Death is dangerous and that they
should always be prepared to meet him. The character of Death is
allegorical; he is meant to be understood by readers as both a human
character in the story (a guy named “Death”) and as symbolic
representation of human mortality. Anything the characters say about
“Death” will thus be true in a way that makes sense both in the world of
the story, where Death is a character, and also in a more abstract or
philosophical context. For example, when a servant tells one of the
young men how his friend died, he identifies the killer as Death:
A sly thief, Death men call him, who deprives
All the people in this country of their lives,
Came with his spear and smiting his heart in two
Went on his business with no more ado.
A thousand have been slaughtered by his hand
During this plague. And, sir, before you stand
Within his presence, it should be necessary,
It seems to me, to know your adversary.
Be evermore prepared to meet this foe.
My mother taught me thus; that’s all I know. (1580)
The claim makes sense both on a literal and a symbolic level.
The young men all make a vow to take revenge on death and to
remain true to one another until they accomplish their goal. The vow is
triply blasphemous, in that the young men are 1) using God’s name idly;
2) vowing to do that which only Christ can do (i.e. defeat Death) and 3)
making two promises that they will not keep—they neither defeat Death
nor remain true to one another. All the rest is merely detail. An old man
(perhaps Death himself?) they meet and mistreat along the way directs
them to a tree, where, he says, they will “find Death.” Expecting a
human enemy, they find instead a chest of gold and immediately begin
plotting how each may have more than his fair share. In the end, all of
them die. Thus, they do find Death under the tree—not the character,
but the abstraction.
By the end of his tale, the Pardoner has become so heated and
enthusiastic that he seems to forget that he’s already told the pilgrims
his relics are counterfeit. Or perhaps he is merely attempting to amuse
the company by showing them his usual finale. In any case, he invites
the pilgrims to step forward, kiss his relics, and leave a healthy offering.
The Host is not amused. He suggests castrating the Pardoner and
“enshrining” his testicles in a hog turd. The Knight, one of the few
genuinely noble souls on the pilgrimage, comes between the Pardoner

104

and Host and insists they kiss and make up. They agree and the
pilgrimage goes on its merry way.

Miller’s Tale
The Miller’s tale has been shocking and amusing readers for
centuries. It is, basically, a medieval dirty joke, part of a genre called the
fabliau (plural: fabliaux). The fabliau is defined in The Riverside Chaucer
as “a brief comic tale in verse, usually scurrilous and often scatological
or obscene. The style is simple, vigorous, and straightforward; the time
is the present, and the settings real, familiar places; the characters are
ordinary sorts — tradesmen, peasants, priests, students, restless wives;
the plots are realistically motivated tricks and ruses” (7). In many ways,
the fabliau presents a kind of mirror image to the courtly romance of Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight. In fact, the Miller tells his tale to “even
up the score” (1534) after the Knight tells his tale—a courtly romance in
the “Sir Gawain” tradition. Where the courtly romance concerns itself
with the long ago and far away, the fabliau focuses on the now and the
nearby. Where the courtly romance treats of the extraordinary doings of
knights, kings, queens, and fabulous monsters, the fabliau tells of the
“everyday dirt” of peasants, millers, carpenters, students, and bored
housewives.
If the subject matter differs, the worldview that the fabliaux
embody differs still more. The courtly romance almost unfailingly
underwrites a “providential” view of the world—good wins out over evil.
Characters ultimately get justice and God seems to be overseeing events.
In the fabliaux, on the other hand, the world seems to operate according
to very different rules. As The Riverside Chaucer explains:
The cuckoldings, beatings, and elaborate practical jokes that are the
main concern of the fabliaux are distributed in accord with a code of
“fabliau justice,” which does not always coincide with conventional
morality: greed, hypocrisy, and pride are invariably punished, but so
too are old age, mere slow-wittedness, and, most frequently, the
presumption of a husband, especially an old one, who attempts to
guard his wife’s chastity. The heroes and heroines, invariably witty
and usually young, are those whom society ordinarily scorns—
dispossessed intellectuals, lecherous priests, wayward monks,
penniless students, clever peasants, and enthusiastically unchaste
wives. Their victims are usually those whom society respects—
prosperous merchants, hard-working tradesmen, women foolish
enough to try to remain chaste. The fabliau, in short, is delightfully
subversive—a light-hearted thumbing of the nose at the dictates of
religion, the solid virtues of the citizenry, and the idealistic
pretensions of the aristocracy and its courtly literature, which the
fabliaux frequently parody, though just as frequently they parody
lower-class attempts to adopt courtly behavior. (8)

105

In the fabliaux, the world operates according to short-term “common
sense” values rather than eternal moral values. Fabliaux thus embody
the value system of the first half of Psalm 73, where the prosperous are
those who look out for themselves regardless of morality.
And yet for all its subversion of conventional moral values, the
Miller’s tale teaches a valuable lesson about the dangers of Biblical
illiteracy and complete reliance on church authority, characteristics
encouraged by the medieval church. John, the wealthy but aged
carpenter, shows his ignorance in marrying a wife much younger and
better looking than himself. He shows it again by leaving her alone with
his young, attractive lodger Nicholas. John actually seems a bit proud of
his ignorance; upon learning that Nicholas has fallen into a fit of
madness over his books, John exclaims
Aye, blessed is the ignorant man indeed,
Blessed is he that only knows his creed! (1541)
John’s assumption is that man is better off not looking into or knowing
the things of God, an attitude propagated by church workers like the
Pardoner who longed to keep laypersons like John in ignorance and awe.
The effectiveness of this procedure is amply demonstrated in Nicholas’
ability to hoodwink John. Remember, Nicholas, as a medieval student, is
on his way to becoming a clergyman, so John is already inclined to
believe whatever the learned Nicholas tells him. But Chaucer makes the
point far clearer here by having Nicholas tell a lie that almost anyone
with the sketchiest biblical literacy could spot: Noah’s flood is coming
again, a claim that is explicitly contradicted by God’s promise to Noah
that He will not destroy the earth by flood again (Genesis 9: 8-17). John,
knowing only his creed, is left at the mercy of this manipulative, all-too-
human clergyman-to-be. John has little choice but to believe Nicholas,
having no other source of authority to consult on the matter, and having
been told all his life to accept the authority of religious professionals. He
ends up not only cuckolded, but badly injured and accused of insanity
by his neighbors. So much for the reliability of church authority.
John is not the only fool in the story. In fact, nearly everyone but
Alison is punished in some way by the end. Absolom, whose foolishness
is manifested in his polite, mannered, and indirect wooing of Alison (he’s
apparently been reading too many courtly romances), ends up humiliated
and farted on. Remember, this is a man Chaucer identifies as “a little
squeamish toward a fart” (1539). Nicholas, for all his slyness, apparently
does not know when to let a joke die; his attempts to play Alison’s trick
again get him the “red hot poker” treatment. Alison, simple, ignorant,
and apparently powerless, is the only one who gets what she wants and
emerges unpunished. She possesses the kind of worldly wisdom that is
rewarded in the context of the fabliaux.

106

Luther’s “Commentary on Galatians” Introduction
General Introduction
Though Martin Luther is generally credited with beginning the
Reformation, European corporate Christianity was dissolving well before
Luther’s new understanding of scripture made a break with the medieval
church inevitable. In politics, a rise of nationalistic feeling had, as we
have seen, manifested itself in the appearance of vernacular literatures
in the national languages of Europe. Dante and Chaucer are some of the
earliest examples of writers choosing national languages rather than
Latin for literary expression. In society, the stability of the feudal system
was undercut by the growing middle class, by the rise of town trading
centers, and more directly by an increasing number of peasant revolts.
In technology, the printing press made it possible to publish and
distribute the works of reformers like Luther very easily, even if they were
under papal ban. In culture, early humanists valued classical learning
far more highly than the medieval scholastic theologians had. Clearly,
then, the ground was ripe for change.
Nowhere was the need for change more apparent than in the
institutional church, which had become so corrupted that writers like
Dante and Chaucer felt compelled to criticize its materialism and
entanglement with secular politics. Both writers clearly believed that the
church was out of touch with the common people, often holding them in
contempt and keeping them ignorant of theology and scripture. Luther’s
dispute with the institutional church arose over one egregious example of
church corruption: the sale of indulgences, a profitable sideline for the
church. Was the Pope empowered to sell “pardons” for sin? Luther
argued that the indulgences issued by the Pope could release people from
church discipline for misbehavior, but had no effect on the sinner’s
standing before God. Luther’s claim, founded on scripture, was that any
“pardon” the Pope offered could only be temporal, not eternal. This small
claim started the controversy that ended in Luther’s excommunication
and the birth of the Reformation.
Born in 1483, Luther was the son of a peasant who had become
wealthy in the copper-mining industry and married a woman of some
social standing. Luther spent his early years in Thuringia, a mining
district of Germany, but after 14, he was seldom at home. His father
desired for him to be a lawyer, so he got very good schooling, receiving a
B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Erfurt.
While traveling home from the university, Luther was caught in a
terrible thunderstorm. The storm frightened him so badly that he vowed
to St. Anne that if he survived, he would become a monk. Luther entered
a monastery two weeks later over the strenuous objections of his father.
His first two years in the monastery seem to have been quiet, at least

107

from an external point of view. Internally, though, Luther was not at
peace. He struggled to acquire holiness sufficient to allow him to stand
before God and receive grace. His zeal annoyed his fellow monks,
especially his frequent, detailed confessions.
Encouraged by his monastic supervisor to study the scriptures as
an antidote to his spiritual crisis, Luther was transferred from his
monastery to the University of Wittenberg in 1511, taking his doctorate
in 1512 and beginning to teach immediately. Sometime around 1513
and 1519, Luther came to a revolutionary new understanding of the
gospel, which he taught over several years in classes on Romans,
Galatians, and the Psalms (among others). The lectures on Galatians
were delivered in 1516 and 1517.
Despite their revolutionary character, Luther’s lectures and
writings did not attract much attention until 1517, when Luther
published his Ninety-Five Theses against the sale of indulgences, an
important source of income for the church. Apparently, church
authorities were more willing to countenance heresy when it did not
threaten their power or profits. Once Luther openly attacked church
authority and tradition, the battle was joined. The Pope demanded
Luther come to Rome to answer the charge of heresy. Luther’s cause
was taken up by the Elector Frederick, who, like many European rulers,
sought greater local freedom from Roman church authority. Frederick
demanded the issue be debated in Germany rather than Rome.
Luther appeared before the young Emperor Charles V in March of
1521. His refusal to recant his works, based on a ringing endorsement
of the authority of the individual conscience guided by Scripture, is the
appropriate beginning point not only for the Reformation, but perhaps for
modernity itself. In response to a spokesman for the emperor who
demanded to know if Luther intended to recant or not, Luther replied:
Unless I am convinced by the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do
not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well
known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I
am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is
captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything,
since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. (from
“Luther at the Diet of Worms,” LW (Luther’s Works, 55 vols. (St.
Louis: Concordia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1955-1976) 32:103-31;
qtd in Noll Turning Points 154)
The weight of individual conscience, guided by scripture, is placed here
against all other manner of earthly authority.
His Majesty was not amused, nor was the Pope. Put under papal
ban and threatened with imprisonment, Luther was taken into protective
custody by Frederick at Wartburg Castle. Luther, more and more
convinced of the need for limits on papal power, churned out books with
astonishing speed. (Luther’s collected works run to fifty-five volumes
and he published something—a sermon, a commentary, a tract—roughly

108

every three weeks for his entire adult life.) Much of Luther’s later career
was spent writing, preaching, and rearranging the life of the church,
which was dramatically altered in those locations where his teachings on
scripture were embraced. For example, when, based on scripture, Luther
denied that monasticism was a higher calling than any other, the
foundations for the monastic system collapsed. Thousands of monks
and nuns left the monastery. Luther married one of these, a woman
named Katherine von Bora.

View of Man
The young man Luther, who began his studies as a legal scholar,
was anxious to understand the legal relationship of man to God: how can
man become worthy of receiving the grace of an absolutely righteous
God? How could a mere human “measure up” to God’s perfect standard?
Failing to measure up, did man not deserve damnation? Luther’s first
impulse, when confronted with his own mortality during a thunderstorm,
was to pursue righteousness via the most acceptable path he knew—
entering a monastery. Being a monk was, in the eyes of the medieval
church, a special way of being pleasing to God, storing up righteousness
not only for one’s self but for others as well. (In Joyce’s short story “The
Dead,” which we’ll read later, an Anglican is baffled by a Catholic’s
explanation of this doctrine.) But as Luther studied the scriptures
carefully, he found that God never intended for man to “earn” his own
salvation (much less the salvation of others) through obedience to God’s
law.
Luther instead argues that the Law exists only as a way of
exposing man’s unrighteousness and pointing him toward his need for
salvation through Christ. The Law was never intended as a guide for
earning merit. Instead, it was intended to increase man’s sense of his
own sinfulness and worthlessness, thereby driving him toward the
“imputed” righteousness available through Christ’s atoning death on the
cross. Man’s proper motivation for obedience to God’s Law comes not
through a desire to increase our own righteousness or earn salvation,
but through gratitude. Luther writes:

There are two classes of doers of the Law, true doers and
hypocritical doers. The true doers of the Law are those who are
moved by faith in Christ to do the Law. The hypocritical doers of the
Law are those who seek to obtain righteousness by a mechanical
performance of good works while their hearts are far removed from
God. . . . Instead of doing the Law, these law-conscious hypocrites
break the Law. They break the very first commandment of God by
denying His promise in Christ. They do not worship God in faith.
They worship themselves.

109

No wonder Paul was able to foretell the abominations that
Antichrist would bring into the Church. That Antichrists would
come, Christ Himself prophesied, Matthew 24:5, “For many shall
come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.”
Whoever seeks righteousness by works denies God and makes
himself God. He is an Antichrist because he ascribes to his own
works the omnipotent capability of conquering sin, death, devil, hell,
and the wrath of God. An Antichrist lays claim to the honor of Christ.
He is an idolater of himself. The law- righteous person is the worst
kind of infidel.

Man’s fallen nature means fallen man is incapable of working for his
salvation, which is now available only through Christ’s righteousness.
The regenerated Christian man did not need to earn righteousness
because he was already invested with Christ’s complete righteousness.
This makes any attempt to earn righteousness via obedience to the Law
not only unnecessary, but, as Luther suggests, a grievous sin.

View of God
Luther’s central contributions to Christian theology can be
summed up in two Latin phrases: sola scriptura (scripture alone) and
sola fides (faith alone). These two principles unite all the varying forms
of Protestantism and set them apart from the Catholicism they rejected.
The first phrase, sola scriptura, is Luther’s identification of the
source of authority for matters of theology and church governance.
Luther rejected the Catholic argument that church tradition had any
authority for determining the correctness of church practices or
teachings. Instead, all authority in such matters rested in the scripture
itself. Although Luther does not make this argument openly in
“Commentary on Galatians,” the commentary does embody the principle.
When Luther has an argument to make, he references nothing but
scripture to prove his points, never church tradition or other ancient
sources.
The second phrase, sola fides, indicates Luther’s insistence that
man’s salvation came to him through faith alone rather than through
good works or through a combination of works and faith. The medieval
Catholic church taught that man could stand before the righteousness of
God by a combination of serious intentions, good works whose
imperfections are met by grace, and the sacraments. Man’s salvation
was achieved through a combination of God’s grace, the intervention of
the institutional church, and the best acts of men.
Luther rejected the last two of these as channels of salvation,
insisting instead that man was saved only through believing God’s
promise of salvation through Christ. Luther’s key passage, one to which
he returns frequently in his writings on the subject, is Genesis 15:6 “And

110

he [Abraham] believed in the Lord; and he [the Lord] counted it to him for
righteousness.” In Luther, the emphasis is no longer on God’s grace in
enabling man to be righteous in his behavior and attitudes. God’s grace,
which is his righteousness, is shown as treating man as righteous
whatever his state of life. God’s righteousness is not infused into man,
but imputed to him through faith in Christ. Acceptability is imputed to
man; righteousness is ascribed to him. Man now stands before God only
through grace. Grace is not gained from the sacraments or earned
through good behavior.

View of the World
Luther’s transformation of theology does not extend as forcefully
into the Christian approach to the material world. Protestants, like
Catholics, believe in a providential God ultimately in control of human
history, moving it toward a predetermined end-point.
However, by elevating scripture as the primary source of authority
for determining how the church should be governed, Luther did break
with Catholic tradition regarding the importance of history. Catholics
argued that church history and tradition should have equal authority
with scripture in determining the appropriacy of such extra-biblical
church practices as the office of the Pope or the veneration of Mary.
Luther insisted that where there was no biblical foundation for these
practices, church tradition was simply wrong. Luther thus reduces the
significance of church history in relation to scripture.
The Reformation also emphasized the physical world in a way that
pre-Reformation Catholics had not. Luther and Calvin both emphasized
the idea that any human vocation could be a “calling” established by
God, making the farmer no less exalted or holy than the preacher. This
breakdown of the pre-Reformation division between sacred and secular
also produced a new emphasis on the goodness of the created world.
Post-reformation artists would re-engage with the particularity of the
world in new ways. Renaissance artists like Shakespeare will no longer
be content to create character “types” or to use the physical world merely
as a symbol for the spiritual, but will instead explore human personality
and the material world as interesting for their own sakes. It is not an
exaggeration to say that Shakespeare’s work would not have been
possible without Luther.

Artistic / Aesthetic
Luther never shied away from strong, forceful language in order to
make his points. As his controversy with Catholic authorities heated up,
Luther became still more forceful. By the time he published his
“Commentary on Galatians” in 1539, Luther had long been
excommunicated and the Reformation was well under way. He was thus
free to give vent to his anger and contempt in ways not always evident in
his earliest writings. Luther, for example, writes, “The Pope is the

111

Antichrist, because he is against Christ, because he takes liberties with
the things of God, because he lords it over the temple of God.”
Luther’s gift for figurative language is on dazzling display in his
“Commentary on Galatians.” Consider this description of the “civil”
purpose of the Law: “As a wild beast is tied to keep it from running
amuck, so the Law bridles mad and furious man to keep him from
running wild.” A brief list of other similes or metaphors Luther employs
to describe the Law suggest some of the figurative power of his writing;
the Law is a hammer of death, the thunder of hell, the lightning of God’s
wrath, a sledgehammer, a prison, a hell, a mirror, an usher, and, finally,
a schoolmaster. In each of these cases, Luther takes some familiar
object—a hammer, a mirror, lightning, an usher—and uses it to “make
familiar” to his readers the aspect of the Law he wishes to describe. He
is generally careful to unfold the areas of comparison he wishes to
illuminate, doing most of the interpretive work for his readers. For
example, when Luther describes the Law as a schoolmaster, he explains
at some length:
This simile of the schoolmaster is striking. Schoolmasters are
indispensable. But show me a pupil who loves his schoolmaster.
How little love is lost upon them the Jews showed by their attitude
toward Moses. They would have been glad to stone Moses to death.
(Ex. 17:4.) You cannot expect anything else. How can a pupil love
a teacher who frustrates his desires? And if the pupil disobeys, the
schoolmaster whips him, and the pupil has to like it and even kiss
the rod with which he was beaten. Do you think the schoolboy
feels good about it? As soon as the teacher turns his back, the
pupil breaks the rod and throws it into the fire. And if he were
stronger than the teacher he would not take the beatings, but beat
up the teacher. All the same, teachers are indispensable, otherwise
the children would grow up without discipline, instruction, and
training.
Just as Christ explained his parables to his students, Luther is a patient
teacher, drawing out the terms of the simile.

112

Machiavelli’s The Prince Introduction

General
Machiavelli was born in 1469, two hundred years after Florence’s
most famous son, Dante. Like Dante, Machiavelli was a prominent
public figure, deeply involved in the complex and dangerous politics of
Renaissance Italy. Between 1498 and 1512 he served an official for the
republican government of Florence, traveling with diplomatic missions to
Cesare Borgia (son of Pope Alexander VI), to Pope Julius II, to the
Emperor Maximilian, and twice to Louis XII of France. He had first-hand
experience with warfare and knew most of the great men of his day.
Unlike Dante, however, Machiavelli did not escape punishment
when his own party fell from favor. After the fall of the republican
government which he supported, Machiavelli was, for a season,
imprisoned and tortured by the Medici when he was suspected of
involvement in a plot against them. Once released, Machiavelli spent the
better part of the rest of his life trying to win patronage and favor from
the same Medici family that had tortured him. The Prince, a book of
advice for young rulers, was dedicated originally to Giuliano de’ Medici,
and then, after his death, to Lorenzo de’ Medici. Machiavelli’s efforts to
curry favor with the Medici were unsuccessful. His hopes were raised
briefly by the re-establishment of republican government in Florence, but
were dashed again when he found himself labeled a Medici sympathizer.
Machiavelli was a victim of his own bad advice. He died shortly
thereafter in 1527.

View of the Divine
Machiavelli has almost nothing to say about God, particularly
when he deals with the ethics of rulership. His silence on this point
speaks loudly, for almost no European thinker before him would have
begun to consider man apart from his relationship to his creator. The
silence is less surprising when one remembers that the church and its
rulers had reached such a pitch of corruption in Machiavelli’s Italy that
Machiavelli could assume his ruling-class readers would share his
cynicism toward religion. When Machiavelli gives examples of how
treachery, lying, or belligerence can serve the needs of “princes,” or
earthly rulers, he includes popes and archbishops along with kings and
generals as though there were no distinction between them. Indeed, in
Machiavelli’s day, the line between ecclesiastical and political power had
disappeared; popes led armies and played politics like any other secular
rulers and were generally members of the same set of powerful families.
Although Machiavelli never says God does not exist, or that religion
is only a tool in the hands of the powerful to keep the weak in slavery, he
strongly suggests these things by treating “goodness” as valuable only for

113

how its appearance can serve the ends of the prince. The prince, says
Machiavelli, should be good when it serves his interests and helps to
keep him in power. But when it does not he must learn how to avoid
actions that otherwise seem virtuous: honesty, patience, or generosity.
There is no appeal in Machiavelli to any standard outside man for
measuring whether any action is good or evil; these categories in
Machiavelli exist only relative to whether the action serves the interests
of the prince or not, whose interests are presumed to coincide with those
of the people. If an action serves the prince’s interest, it is good; if not, it
is bad.
In our reading, one of Machiavelli’s only direct references to a
divine power happens as he claims that the time is right for a prince to
unite Italy:
…we have before our eyes extraordinary and unexampled means
prepared by God. The sea has been divided. A cloud has guided you
on your way. The rock has given forth water. Manna has fallen.
Everything has united to make you great. The rest is for you to do.
God does not intend to do everything, lest he deprive us of our free
will and the share of glory that belongs to us. (1721)
Machiavelli suggests here that God has arranged matters so that a
Medici prince could unite Italy, but has no particular interest in the
means the prince might use to accomplish that end, and, further, that
God intends to share His glory with the glory of this prince. The last
sentiment would have come as a great surprise to Jehoshaphat, or to
Joseph, or to any of those close to the heart of God, who have long
understood that any glory man wins for himself is merely a reflection of
the glory of God, not a quality man shares with God.
By insisting that the prince’s behavior must be based solely on
self-interest, Machiavelli begins a tradition of thought that will ultimately
undermine the medieval concept of monarchy and transform European
social relations. By assuming that the highest “good” toward which a
ruler can strive is the preservation of his own power, Machiavelli releases
the ruler from any responsibilities toward God. Furthermore, he implies
that rulership does not come from God, but rather from the prince’s
efforts on his own behalf. Ironically, by rejecting the Christian tradition
that rulership comes from God, Machiavelli will open the door to new
philosophies that will undermine the authority of all princes by arguing
that authority comes not from God but from the consent of the governed.
View of Man
At first glance, it might seem that Machiavelli belongs to the Augustinian
Christian tradition that insists on the absolute fallenness of man. He
certainly has nothing good to say of man in a collective sense:
one must say of men generally that they are ungrateful, mutable,
pretenders and dissemblers, prone to avoid danger, thirsty for gain.

114

So long as you benefit them they are all yours. . . . they offer you their
blood, their property, their lives, their children, when the need for
such things is remote. But when the need comes upon you, they turn
around. (1715)
This wickedness of other men is one of the principal reasons Machiavelli
offers for the necessity of the prince learning “how not to be good.” But
there is a key premise that distinguishes Machiavelli’s view of man from
Augustine’s. In Augustine’s view, man does evil for its own sake, a
principle embodied in the pear tree episode. In Augustine, the evil of
man is ultimately motivated only by man’s love of doing evil. In
Machiavelli, on the other hand, man’s behavior is ultimately motivated
by his own self-interests without regard to moral categories like good or
evil. Men might do “good,” or they might do “evil,” depending on what
will serve them best in any given set of circumstances. But regardless of
circumstance, the wicked deeds of man are always motivated by self-
interest.
Despite the dim view Machiavelli takes of the average man, he
expresses an admiration for the extraordinary man’s potential to re-make
himself through the exercise of his will. The Prince, is, after all, an early
form of the self-help book so popular in our own era. Many of the first
books designed to serve as models or guides for human behavior
appeared during the Renaissance, particularly works like Castiglione’s
The Courtier, Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly, and Spenser’s English epic The
Faerie Queene, which has as its announced purpose “to fashion a
gentleman or noble person.” The sudden appearance of these works
suggests the Renaissance’s high estimation of man’s potential.
Suddenly, rather than passively accepting the estate into which he was
born, man had some freedom to “make himself.”
This more exalted view of man’s potential is based largely on man’s
ability to use his own reason. In The Prince, reason is left to operate
freely without being restricted by religious considerations. Note that
when Machiavelli wants to prove a point, he appeals for evidence to the
authority of reason bolstered by observation and experience. To make
his case, Machiavelli draws on a wide range of examples from classical
and more recent history. He points to exemplary events from the lives of
Caesar, Alexander VI, Julius II, and Charles V, to name only a few. He
asks readers to recall how the French cavalry defeated the Spanish at a
recent battle.
But where Machiavelli will point to historical events to bolster his
case for how the prince should behave under particular circumstances,
he never appeals to scripture for authority. Machiavelli’s refusal to
recognize a scriptural foundation for human leadership not only reflects
the contempt for the church felt by Machiavelli and his audience, but a
high regard for human reason as a sufficient guide for conduct.
Remember, as much as Dante respects reason, he insists that it is only

115

sufficient for recognizing sin, not for overcoming it. Dante reflects the
medieval synthesis of reason and faith hammered out by Aquinas, which
held that where reason and faith seem to conflict, faith wins out.

View of the World
Prior to the Renaissance, most Europeans had a “regressive” rather
than a “progressive” view of history. This means that, rather than
imagining themselves traveling forward toward some later and greater
perfection (as we tend to do in the modern era), they instead imagined
themselves traveling backward away from an earlier perfection. Since
Eden, according to the “regressive” view of history, mankind has moved
farther and farther from God’s original plan, “regressing” away from his
original state toward greater and greater sinfulness.
Such a worldview, not surprisingly, is profoundly conservative and
tends to discourage innovation or novelty. Medieval artists tended to
look toward the great works of the past as models for their own work
(remember Dante’s profound respect for Virgil and the “pagan poets”) and
to see themselves as inferior to both the Biblical and classical writers.
Understanding this view of history may help us to understand why
medieval thinkers were so heavily dependent on tradition and authority,
often citing ancient authorities in the most uncritical ways. Aquinas, for
example, in his Summa Contra Gentiles, cites without question the
existence of an eighteen-inch fish capable of immobilizing the largest
ships(Roston 4), a patently ridiculous claim but sacred for Aquinas
because it came from an ancient authority. This view of history also
helps to account for the medieval church’s own insistence on apostolic
traditions regarding papal and clerical powers and the nature of the
sacraments, even where they were not explicitly supported by scripture.
The assumption was that thinkers in the past, being closer to the original
perfection of creation, were far more likely to be right about such matters
than contemporary thinkers like Luther or Calvin.
Understanding this view of history also helps to account for
Machiavelli’s defensive tone regarding his own break with tradition:
“People will call me presumptuous because I am breaking with tradition”
(1712), he fears, but defends himself on the grounds that he is more
interested in being useful than in being faithful to the traditions of the
past. The Reformation was only beginning to make its anti-authoritarian
claims heard across Europe, so Machiavelli’s open willingness to break
with the tradition of the past probably has its roots in the scandalous
corruption of the Italian church. At any rate, this willingness to think in
new ways and to reject the reverent acceptance of old sources demanded
of medieval scholars would eventually come to characterize much of the
new thought of the renaissance. Many scholars trace the birth of the
“modern” era to this new concept of the present as radically broken or
separate from the past, which brings with it its own demand for novelty
in philosophy.

116

Some of the consequences of this “modern” idea of the present as
radically separated from the past are unarguably positive. Freedom from
the weight of the past has encouraged western thinkers to embrace
innovation, technological development, and freedoms of speech and
thought, and to value individual initiative and human freedom. On the
other hand, the same ideas have led to the breakdown of traditional
communities and values. Discontinuity with the past makes old people
irrelevant and inspires in the young far less faith in the sustaining truths
of earlier generations. This will ultimately lead many western
intellectuals toward the rejection of Biblical truth altogether as part and
parcel of an irrelevant past.
Artistic/Aesthetic
Strictly speaking, there is very little “literary” value in Machiavelli’s work;
it is, in the main, an abstract political treatise using few narratives and
very little figurative language. But Machiavelli’s influence on western
literature and thought has been so profound that The Prince cannot be
ignored by the serious student.

Works Cited:

Roston, Murray. Sixteenth-Century English Literature. New York:
Schocken Books, 1982.

117

“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” Introduction

General
“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” belongs to a genre called the
“courtly romance” and takes as its subject the doings of long-ago far-
away knights, ladies, kings, queens, and wizards against a backdrop of
enchanted castles and forests filled with fantastic monsters. As such, it
is the antithesis of fabliau like Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale,” which happen in
the here and now and involve low, common characters doing low,
common things. The romance is not bound by the literary law of
probability; anything can happen: trees talk, knights fall under evil
enchantments, men are beheaded and live to tell about it, and so on. At
the beginning of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Arthur and his
knights sit at a Christmas banquet waiting to see a wonder, and in rides
the Jolly Green Giant on a big green horse. Such is the logic of the
romance.
The poem is “courtly” because it was produced for a court
audience—a group of highly educated, sophisticated people whose
advancement in life depended largely on their wit and charm. The ability
to write beautiful poetry was a skill (like dancing, fencing, or riding) that
marked its possessor as genteel and worthy of notice. Courtly poems
were generally circulated in manuscript among courtiers as a display of
the authors’ sophistication and skill. This was probably the case with
“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” which was “discovered” in only one
manuscript among a collection of three other poems generally believed to
have also been written by the same author; unlike the Canterbury Tales,
“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” was not widely known for many
centuries. Yet its beauty is such that, upon discovery, it was almost
immediately admitted into the canon of truly great English poetry.
The poem was probably written about 1380, almost exactly the
same time Chaucer was writing the Canterbury Tales. Yet these two
giants of medieval English literature were probably unknown to one
another. Chaucer lived close to the royal court in London; the
anonymous Gawain-Poet wrote in a provincial court in the northwest
Midlands, far from the centers of power and influence. Even if they had
known of one another, they might have found one another’s speech and
writing incomprehensible, for each wrote in a different dialect; Chaucer’s
dialect led directly to contemporary English. The Gawain-Poet’s did not.

View of the Divine
The Christianization of England had been more or less complete for
several hundred years by the time the Gawain poet set down his tale.
Neither God nor theology plays any explicit part in the tale. This is not

118

surprising, given that everyone in the story, including the Green Giant,
acknowledges the lordship of the same God, leaving little room for
theological controversy or exposition. This is not to say that theology is
not important in the story; indeed, the poem’s primary theme is
theological, for the narrative embodies a very important point regarding
man’s relationship to God, more fully described in the section “View of
Man” below.

View of the World
Obviously, the Gawain Poet was not attempting to produce what
we would call a “realistic” work of art. The world his characters occupy
is enchanted, full of wonders like giants, dragons, witches, and talking
heads. This world follows different rules from the real world. A knight
traveling in any random direction will certainly find adventure – ogres,
castles, damsels in distress, and the like. Yet there can be little doubt of
God’s providential presence in this world. Despite his own doubts and
those of his fellow courtiers, Sir Gawain is saved from what seems like
certain death at the hands of the Green Knight.
The Gawain-Poet uses the natural world of forest and mountain as
a contrast or counter-point to the artificially elaborate and perhaps
overly-sophisticated world of the court. In the midst of the highly-
civilized Christmas celebrations at Camelot, the disturbing intrusion of
the Green Knight with his sprig of holly, his green axe, his green horse,
his green clothes, and his brutal “beheading game” (along with the
unforgettable scene of his severed head rolling along under the table
across the feet of the banqueters) are reminders of the fact that however
civilized and sophisticated man may become, he is still a part of the
natural world, possessed of a body and natural urges to use it. The poet
uses the hunting scenes to similar effect in the third section of the poem.
As Gawain lies in bed virtuously resisting the advances of Sir Bercilak’s
wife, the poet cuts in graphic descriptions of the slaughter and
disembowelment of several animals at the hands of Bercilak and his
hunting men. The poet’s point seems to be that while Gawain’s knightly
code of behavior forces him to behave as though he were not disturbed
(or even tempted) by the improper advances of Bercilak’s wife, he is still
possessed of a body like any other body, still a part of the natural world
even if he wants to believe he has risen above it. Gawain may be the
embodiment of knightly aspirations toward angelic perfection, but he
hasn’t left the green earth and his body yet, as he learns to his great
dismay at the end of the tale.

View of Man
The message of the “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is,
ultimately, theological, pointing toward the universal sinfulness of man,
the same theme embodied in St. Augustine’s “Pear Tree” episode. The

119

Arthurian tradition, despite being adapted by Christian writers and
readers, rests on the idea of the perfectibility of man. The knights who
gather around Arthur to form his Round Table seek to perfect their own
behavior in every way. The five-pointed star on the shield of Sir Gawain,
which he takes up in Part II as he leaves Camelot to seek out the Green
Knight, is a powerful symbol of this aspiration toward perfection,
suggesting that its bearer possesses physical, spiritual, and moral
perfection. Arthurian knights, the poem suggests, would like to behave
as if they were no longer in the natural world at all. They are not only
careless of physical danger, but also adherents to a code of ethics that
demands from them superhuman perfection in morals and manners.
The problem with such a model for human behavior is that it leaves no
room for human weakness. Ultimately, even though Sir Gawain is the
best knight, he still fails in his test.
To underline this theme, the Gawain-Poet has the Green Knight
explicitly question the aspirations toward perfection of Arthur’s knights.
For example, on his arrival at the Christmas feast, the Green Knight
explains to Arthur that he has sought out the court at Camelot because
…the praise of you, prince, is puffed up so high,
And your court and company are counted the best,
Stoutest under steel-gear on steeds to ride,
Worthiest of their works the wide world over,
And peerless to prove in passages of arms,
And courtesy here is carried to its height. (258-264)
Clearly, the Green Knight’s game is meant to take them down a peg or
two. When no one immediately takes up his challenge to the beheading
game, he taunts Arthur and his knights by reminding them of their high
reputation.
“What, is this Arthur’s house,” said that horseman then,
“Whose fame is so fair in far realms and wide?
Where is now your arrogance and your awesome deeds,
Your valor and your victory and your vaunting words?
Now are the revel and renown of the Round Table
Overwhelmed with a word of one man’s speech,
For all cower and quake, and no cut felt!” (308-315)
The excitement among the occupants of Sir Bercilak’s castle on the
arrival of Gawain also suggests how “puffed up” the reputation of the
Arthur’s knights has become, not only in physical courage, but also in
“courtesy,” or courtliness, the code of behavior governing knights and
ladies:
“Now displays of deportment shall dazzle our eyes
And the polished pearls of impeccable speech;
The high art of eloquence is ours to pursue
Since the father of fine manners is found in our midst.” (916-
919)

120

Against the backdrop of such high expectations, Gawain’s failure
becomes all the more poignant. If this man, with such a high reputation
for physical courage and good manners, fails in his test, then so must we
all; “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” ends by universalizing the
weakness and failure of Gawain as all the other members of Arthur’s
court begin wearing the green belt themselves. Gawain, who set out with
a shield that symbolizes human perfectibility, returns wearing a green
belt that symbolizes human weakness and shame. Friends adapt the
belt as a gentle reminder to Gawain and to themselves of the universality
of human sin and weakness, and presumably, the need for humility in
the face of this knowledge.
We have noted in our discussion of the story of Joseph and of the
Inferno that the Christian model for heroism is in some ways
diametrically opposed to the model as it appears in classical literature.
The Gawain Poet seems to be aware of this Christian tradition, as he
focuses almost exclusively on the meekness and passivity of Sir Gawain
rather than on his conventional heroic attributes. Aside from his
chopping off the Green Knight’s head in the first section, Gawain’s
heroism mainly involves passivity and waiting. For example, at the end
of the first section, Gawain faces the daunting prospect of waiting an
entire year before he can face his (probably fatal) trial. The narrator
exhorts him not to lose his nerve:
Now take care, Sir Gawain,
That your courage wax not cold
When you must turn again
To your enterprise foretold. (486-490)
For a man of action, the poet suggests, waiting may be one of the hardest
trials he will have to face.
Gawain’s greatest apparent trial involves avoiding the advances of
a woman. The descriptions of Sir Gawain in his bedclothes peeking from
under the covers or feigning sleep at the entrances of Sir Gawain’s wife
are hilarious precisely because they are so far from what we expect of a
traditional knight, whose adventures should take place outside, in
public, in armor. His “battlefield” here is a bedroom and his deadly
opponent is a beautiful woman. His “victory” here would have been
simply the avoidance of sin. Instead he fails by accepting the green belt
and then not giving it to Sir Bercilak in accordance with their earlier
agreement.
Even his physical trial is passive – he has to stand still while the
Green Knight takes a swipe at him with a gigantic axe; he fails at this
trial as well. In both failures, Gawain’s motivation is perhaps the most
forgivable of all human weaknesses: the desire for self-preservation. Sir
Bercilak, now revealed as the Green Knight, is far less judgmental of
Gawain’s shortcoming than Gawain is of himself:
…you lacked, sir, a little in loyalty there,
But the cause was not cunning, nor courtship either,

121

But that you loved your own life; the less, then, to blame.
(2366-2368).
The narrator seems uninterested in reporting on Gawain’s traditionally
heroic behavior. He passes quickly over those parts of the story involving
physical courage as if they were utterly unimportant, warranting very
little space:
At each strand or stream where the stalwart passed
‘Twere a marvel if he met not some monstrous foe,
And that so fierce and forbidding that fight he must.
. . . Now with serpents he wars, now with savage wolves,
Now with wild men of the woods, that watched from the
rocks,
Both with bulls and bears, and with boars besides,
And giants that came gibbering from the jagged steeps.
(715-723)
Note that this is all the space that the poet devotes to Gawain’s acts of
physical courage. Compare this with the space devoted to any of the
three days Gawain spends attempting to avoid the insistent wife of Sir
Bercilak, and one gets some sense of where the Gawain-Poet’s priorities
lie in telling this tale.

Artistic/Aesthetic
The verse form used in “Sir Gawain” employs stanzas of various
lengths, composed of alliterative lines. These “alliterative” lines each
contain four stresses, at least three of which usually fall on words
beginning with the same sound: “The knight that had knotted the nets of
deceit,” for example. This repetition of initial consonant sounds within
the same line is called “alliteration.” This alliterative verse was probably
deliberately archaic even for its original fourteenth-century audience,
meant to invoke for them a sense of the distant Arthurian past by
reminding them of much older alliterative works like Beowulf. Each
stanza is capped off by an elegant five-line verse called a bob and wheel.
The fairy-tale quality created by the archaic verse form is
strengthened not only by the setting (long ago, far away) and subject
matter (knights, ladies, battles with monsters, etc.) but by formal
elements as well, especially the use of three-fold repetition with the
climax on the third repetition. Just as fairy tales like Goldilocks or Little
Red Riding Hood are dependent on repetitions of three (“this porridge is
too hot, this porridge is too cold, but this porridge is just right”), many
episodes of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” are structured according
to this rule. For example, Sir Bercilak goes hunting for three days while
Sir Gawain resists Bercilak’s wife, Bercilak’s wife offers Gawain three
gifts before he accepts one, the Green Knight takes three axe swings
before Gawain escapes him.
Finally, though the poem is in four parts, it displays a remarkable
thematic unity. The poem begins and ends at Christmas. This is

122

especially appropriate since Christmas celebrates the birth into the world
of the One who saved man from having to be perfect. By being a perfect
man, living the kind of life to which Gawain and the other Knights of the
Round Table unrealistically aspire, Christ became the sufficient sacrifice
for the sins of the whole world—yours, mine, and Gawain’s.

123

Shakespeare’s Hamlet

General Introduction
William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in the English village of
Stratford-upon-Avon. His father was a prominent merchant, craftsman,
and moneylender. He was involved in local government and even elected
bailiff, the equivalent of mayor, though he evidently fell into debt a few
years later. Shakespeare was probably educated in Stratford’s excellent
grammar school, where he learned Latin, some Greek, and received a
solid grounding in classical literature which he put to good use in his
plays. Sometime during the 1580’s, Shakespeare went to London to
work as an actor and writer.
The ordinariness of Shakespeare’s birth and education, coupled
with his dazzling literary and dramatic talents, have stimulated some to
propose other persons as the secret author of Shakespeare’s plays:
Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, even Queen Elizabeth. Adherents to
these theories, sometimes referred to as “anti-Stratfordians,” argue, often
with great vehemence, for the existence of widespread conspiracies of
silence among Elizabethan authors and critics regarding the true author
of the plays. Most of these theories, however, have weaknesses at least
as difficult to accept as the fact that Shakespeare wrote his own plays.
For example, if it is hard to believe a grammar-school-educated
Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, it is harder still to believe the Earl of Oxford
referred in Macbeth to events which occurred after he died.
We know very few details about Shakespeare’s life, especially when
compared to other authors of his era. We have no letters, very few public
records, and only one signature. The lack of documentary evidence
about Shakespeare’s life suggests he must have been a quiet man, rarely
in the kind of scrapes with the law that characterized the lives of many of
his contemporaries—notably Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, and
Ben Jonson. The plays themselves, both in their complexity and
number, suggest a disciplined man with a good work ethic. By the end of
his life, Shakespeare was evidently making a great deal of money, enough
to buy a large new house for himself, another for his daughter, and to
buy a coat of arms for his father, effectively moving himself into the
nobility. He died without a male heir in 1616.
Like the medieval pilgrimage, the Elizabethan theater brought
together men and women from nearly every social level in what was
otherwise an extremely hierarchical culture. People of all classes
attended the Elizabethan theater, from the “groundlings” who paid a
penny to stand in the open space before the stage to members of the
nobility who sat in private boxes or even directly on the stage. The
English allowed women to attend the theater, though not to act on stage.
Women’s parts were played by boys until almost 50 years after
Shakespeare died.

124

None of this is to suggest that the political or religious authorities
smiled on the theater. Elizabethan political authorities temporarily shut
down the theaters whenever the number of plague deaths in London
reached a certain level, perhaps on the assumption that the sight of such
idleness infuriated God. Any play performed on the English stage had to
be approved by a government censor who was free to remove or rewrite
scenes or even to refuse the play altogether. The theater itself was
attacked by Puritan reformers as lewd, immoral, and a waste of valuable
time. At the outbreak of their hostilities with the Anglican royalists in
1640, the Puritans would close down the English theaters for twenty
years.
Given the suspicion with which those in authority held the theater,
writing plays was understandably not a prestigious occupation in
Elizabethan England. Shakespeare probably did not seek publication for
his plays (in part because the lack of copyright laws meant other acting
companies might steal them). The only works it seems likely
Shakespeare did print on his own were two lyric poems, Venus and
Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Popular by Elizabethan standards
(Venus and Adonis was reprinted nine times between 1593 and 1602),
these works no longer attract many readers. Though Shakespeare’s lyric
poems are far less accessible than his plays, lyric poetry was considered
a “higher” or more reputable form of writing than drama. Renaissance
readers (there were not many) favored allusive, complex, and witty verse
designed to display the education and sophistication of its author and its
small audience. Because of its small audience, renaissance poetry was
often circulated in manuscript rather than printed and was designed to
build the reputation of the poet and, in the case of less wealthy poets, to
attract the attention of a wealthy patron. Most renaissance lyric poets
therefore wrote with a small, highly-educated audience in mind. The
plays, on the other hand, were written to appeal to the broad spectrum of
Elizabethan playgoers, who, as we have noted, came from all levels of
society. The plays made money through performance rather than
publication.

View of Man
The renaissance brought a new interest in man as an object of
wonder and study. While many writers in the classical tradition had a
very high estimate of man and his possibilities, the literature of the
Middle Ages was characterized by a stress on man’s limitations. Works
like The Inferno or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight emphasize man’s
inability to achieve true goodness or perfection without divine
intervention. However, writers of the renaissance express a renewed
sense of wonder at man’s seemingly unlimited potential to learn and
create. “What a piece of work is a man!” exclaims Hamlet. “How noble in
reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god—

125

the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!” Yet Hamlet’s
admiration is also mixed with disgust: “And yet to me what is this
quintessence of dust?” he asks. His words are reminiscent of the sense
of wonder David expresses in Psalm 8 when he asks “what is man that
thou art mindful of him?”
In addition to their celebration of man’s potential, Shakespeare’s
plays also exhibit a very new interest in the complexity of man’s inner
world, a subject that attracted little attention from either medieval or
classical artists. Homer’s interest in psychology seems limited to
describing how characters choose between two alternative courses of
action. The author of Beowulf seems to have almost no interest in his
hero’s inner life; Beowulf never doubts or second-guesses himself and
exhibits no self-consciousness. Chaucer’s characters have unforgettable
exteriors, described for us in careful detail, but their inner conflicts and
complexity seem to have been of little interest to Chaucer or his readers.
Shakespeare, on the other hand, seems fascinated by the inner
world of man, perhaps a reflection of the growing humanism of the
renaissance. Not only does Shakespeare create over a thousand sharply-
drawn unique characters recognizable through their speech and
behavioral patterns, but he presents the interior world of his central
characters in unprecedented detail and complexity. This is no easy feat
in drama, where playwrights are dependent entirely on speech and action
to convey characters’ internal states. Shakespeare solves the problem
largely through his extensive use of the soliloquy, speeches delivered
when the character is alone designed to reveal his state of mind.
Hamlet’s soliloquies, particularly his “To be or not to be” speech, are
among Shakespeare’s best-known passages.
Shakespeare’s techniques of characterization are thus a quantum
leap beyond previous literary efforts at representing the complex inner
world of man. Hamlet is perhaps the best of all Shakespeare’s plays for
observing these new techniques of “internal” characterization, since the
central mystery of the play involves the complex inner world of Prince
Hamlet. Throughout the play, every major character (including Hamlet
himself) wants to understand the deeper motives behind Hamlet’s bizarre
speech and behavior. Is he mad? If so, what is the source of his
madness? If not, why is he pretending to be mad? Is he angry because
of thwarted ambition? How much does he know about how his father
died? Is he planning revenge? Viewers, privy to Hamlet’s intention to
“put on the antic disposition,” are encouraged to ask another set of
questions about Hamlet: Which of his actions are real and which are
“played”? Is his cruel treatment of Ophelia an act? Does Hamlet suspect
that Claudius and Polonius are watching as he speaks to her? Or is he
pretending to be mad so that she’ll go back and report his madness to
her father? Even Hamlet himself seems mystified by his own complexity,
at one point lamenting that he does not himself understand why he has
not acted to revenge his father’s murder: “I do not know / Why yet I live

126

to say ‘This thing’s to do,’ / [Since] I have cause, and will, and strength
to do’t.”
Searching for answers to questions about Hamlet’s inner state is
tantalizing because Shakespeare creates characters in such a way that
what we see on stage seems only the tip of the iceberg. It is almost
impossible to treat Shakespeare’s characters as literary constructs
because they seem so real, so like us, particularly in their depth and
mystery. “I have that within” says Hamlet to his mother, “which passes
show.” The various attempts within the play to understand Hamlet’s
behavior are doomed to failure because, the play suggests, humans are
so complicated they may not be understandable, even to themselves.
When Guildenstern attempts to “draw out” Hamlet to reveal the source of
his madness, Hamlet first asks Guildenstern to play a pipe. When
Guildenstern protests that he cannot, not knowing the instrument,
Hamlet responds:
Why look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You
would play upon me . . . you would pluck out the heart of my
mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my
compass. . . ‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than
a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you fret me, you
cannot play upon me!
The warning is as much for readers and audience members as it is for
Guildenstern. Generations of readers have been attempting to “pluck out
the heart” of Hamlet’s mystery, but no consensus has emerged. It is
perhaps this mystery that most attracts readers to this play.

View of the World
Hamlet’s world is as mysterious as his character. If the characters
around Hamlet are trying to understand him, Hamlet has his own set of
mysteries to solve: What, exactly, is rotten in Denmark? Why the
preparations for war? Why the ghosts walking around at night? Was his
father murdered? If so, by whom? After his encounter with the Ghost
answers some of these initial questions, Hamlet is faced with a whole
new crop of mysteries: Is the Ghost honest, or sent to lure him to his
damnation? Which of the people around him are true friends and which
are spies of Claudius? How and when can he best take revenge on
Claudius? Does his mother bear any responsibility for the death of his
father? And, over time, perhaps the deepest mystery of all: why does it
take Hamlet so long to get revenge?
Hamlet is certainly weary of the hypocrisy, lying, and gluttony
around him. In his first soliloquy, even before he has learned that his
father was murdered, he expresses a powerful hatred for the world he
inhabits. His hatred of the world is so strong Hamlet wishes for complete
physical annihilation and expresses some regret that God’s law forbids
suicide:
Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt,

127

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the everlasting had not fixed
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! Oh God, Oh God,
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world.
Hamlet’s suicidal funk, his inability to choose between being and not
being, is closely related to his view of the world as “an unweeded garden,”
possessed by things “rank and gross in nature,” “a foul and pestilent
congregation of vapors.”
But the play itself may not embody Hamlet’s claims that his world
is irredeemably ruined by hypocrisy, greed, and lies. Horatio remains a
true friend to Hamlet throughout the play, even when Hamlet is betrayed
by Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and, to a certain extent, Ophelia.
Gertrude and Claudius are both tormented by conscience over their
misdeeds. Most importantly, the world ultimately shows itself to be just
in Hamlet when, at the end, Hamlet revenges himself on Claudius,
cleansing Denmark of its pollution.

View of God
Though Shakespeare’s characters express all kinds of opinions
about religious, philosophic, or political matters, it is difficult to know
exactly what Shakespeare himself believed. Some of the difficulty is
inherent in drama, since it is often impossible to know which (if any)
characters speak for the author. This difficulty is exacerbated by our
lack of biographical information about Shakespeare.
Finally, the age itself militated against the expression of strong
religious opinions. Consider that in the fifty years before Shakespeare’s
writing career began, England had been Catholic, then “Anglican” with
strong Catholic tendencies under Henry VIII, then Anglican with far
stronger Protestant tendencies under Edward VI, then virulently Catholic
again under Mary, then Anglo-Protestant again under Elizabeth. Each of
these regime changes brought with it heresy trials, denunciations,
beheadings, and burnings at the stake. There was every danger that
Elizabeth would die with no male heir and great uncertainty as to what
would happen afterward. Through 1588, the danger of invasion by
Catholic Spain was very real. Under such circumstances, the careful
man kept his mouth firmly shut regarding religious issues.
Hamlet presents a plethora of religious puzzles but few real
answers. Examining the appearance of the Ghost in Act I shows how
such questions tend to multiply. In the first act, the ghost of Hamlet’s
father appears to many characters. After this point, the Ghost reappears
only once, as Hamlet is confronting his mother. In that scene, only
Hamlet can see the Ghost, not Gertrude. Has the nature of the Ghost
changed somehow? Why is it visible to Marcellus, Barnardo, and Horatio
at the beginning of the play, but invisible to Gertrude in the middle of the
play?

128

Alone with Hamlet, the Ghost calls for Hamlet to revenge his
father’s murder. Christians, however, are clearly enjoined by the Bible
not to seek revenge. Is the Ghost revealing himself as an agent of Satan?
Furthermore, the Ghost describes his condition in a way to make clear
that he is suffering in Purgatory. However, Shakespeare’s patriotically
Protestant audience presumably did not believe in Purgatory, not only
because the belief had no Biblical foundation, but because the
Reformation doctrine of justification by faith made Purgatory
unnecessary. Furthermore, the Geneva Bible, the one used by
Shakespeare, expressly forbids consultation with the dead in Deut.
18:10-12: “Let none be found among you that . . . asketh counsel of the
dead.” The story of Saul’s consultation with the Witch of Endor and the
raising of Samuel’s ghost would have been very familiar to Shakespeare,
as would the notes in the Geneva Bible arguing that the “ghost” Saul saw
was only a demon sent to deceive him. Hamlet seems to be aware of the
possibility that the Ghost is a demonic agent. “The spirit that I have
seen” he tells Horatio, “May be the devil, and the devil hath power /
T’assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps / . . . Abuses me to damn
me.” Hamlet’s doubts about the origin of the Ghost are apparently put to
rest by Claudius’ response to the play-within-the-play staged by Hamlet
in Act 3. But is Hamlet too quick to assume that the guilt of Claudius
implies the divine origin of the Ghost’s call for revenge? In other words,
does it follow from Claudius’ guilt that the Ghost’s call for revenge is
from God?

Artistic / Aesthetic
Hamlet, like all of Shakespeare’s plays, is written in a combination
of prose and “blank verse” or unrhymed iambic pentameter. Although
most readers today do not recognize “meter,” it was the defining
characteristic of almost all English poetry until the beginning of the
twentieth century. The term “meter” describes the number of syllables in
a single line of poetry and the pattern of stressed and unstressed
syllables in the line. “Iambic” means that the line is arranged into a
pattern of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable:
duhDA. This “unit” of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed
syllable is called a “foot.” Because the ten-syllable line of much English
poetry is made up of five of these two-syllable “feet,” it is called
“pentameter,” with penta- here meaning “five.” The iambic pentameter
line sounds like this: duhDA duhDA duhDA duhDA duhDA. Here, for
example, are two lines from Hamlet’s warning to Horatio and Marcellus
that he may in the near future pretend to be crazy. The “U” shape above
a syllable indicates that the syllable is unstressed, where the “\” shape
indicates a stress:

U \ U \ U \ U \ U \
. . . As I perchance hereafter shall think meet

129

U \ U \ U \ U \ U \
To put an antic disposition on . . .

Note that there are a total of ten syllables in both lines and that the
syllables are arranged in a pattern of five “iambic feet,” that is, five units
of one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Note also that
where the reader or actor have some choice about whether to read a
single-syllable word as stressed or unstressed, multi-syllable words like
“disposition” or “hereafter” can only be read according to standard
English pronunciation: “DISpoSItion” or “hereAFter.” Thus, multi-
syllable words often serve as a clue to meter.
There are other ways to arrange English verse. Aside from the
iambic foot, the next most common foot is the “trochaic” foot. The
trochaic foot simply reverses the pattern of the iambic foot and so is one
stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable: DAduh. Here is the
first line of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven:”

\ U \ U \ U \ U
Once upon a midnight dreary
\ U \ U \ U \ U
While I pondered weak and weary

This is trochaic “tetrameter” because there are four feet instead of five.
The lines should sound like this: DAduh DAduh DAduh DAduh:

ONCE upON a MIDnight DREAry
WHILE i PONdered WEAK and WEAry

Notice that the stress here comes on the first syllable of the two-syllable
“foot” rather than on the second as it does in an iambic line. Note again
that multi-syllable words can only be stressed according to standard
English pronunciation; “dreary” cannot be read as dreaRY or “pondered”
as ponDERED. Finally, note that the full trochaic tetrameter line is only
eight syllables long rather than the ten syllables of iambic pentameter.
There are other kinds of meter, including lines with more or fewer feet
and feet with three syllables rather than two. However, this brief
introduction to English meter should help with much of the poetry we
will read over the next two semesters.
Though Shakespeare did not invent blank verse, or unrhymed
iambic pentameter, he certainly raised the standard for its use over the
course of his career. As Shakespeare’s poetic skills developed, his use of
the blank verse line became far more natural and supple. In his early
plays, Shakespeare uses blank verse in the same way Marlowe and other
earlier playwrights had: most of his lines are “end-stopped,” meaning

130

phrases and sentences tend in these plays to be of the same length as
the lines themselves. Phrases and sentences end when the line ends.
Consider the following lines from the opening speech of Richard III, one
of Shakespeare’s earlier plays. Richard laments how England has passed
from an earlier time of heroic, manly warfare to a time of effeminate
peace and civility:
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths,
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments,
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front,
And now—instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries—
He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute. (I.i.3-13)
Notice that most of the lines end with a period or a comma. The absence
of internal punctuation indicates that none of the lines has any internal
pauses or breaks. The language is ornate, full of rhetorically-balanced
antitheses (stern alarums v. merry meetings, dreadful marches v.
delightful measures), and on the whole sounds stiff and artificial to the
modern ear.
Now consider Hamlet’s speech from Act V, scene ii, when he
explains to Horatio the origin of his suspicion that Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern were taking him to England to be executed:
Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly—
And prais’d be rashness for it—let us know
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well
When our deep plots do pall, and that should learn us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will— (V.ii.4-11)
Notice the frequency of punctuation within the lines. Five of the eight
lines have some form of internal punctuation including two periods, or
“full stops,” that come near the ends of the second and third lines. Only
two of the lines have any punctuation at the end of the line, making most
of the lines “enjambed,” or running over from one line to the next. The
language here is also simpler, less ornate or self-consciously poetic.
There are not balanced antitheses or other rhetorical fireworks. The
effect is far more realistic and natural.
Shakespeare, unlike his predecessors, creates plays that are a
mixture of prose and poetry. Shakespeare uses shifts between prose and
poetry to indicate shifts in subject matter and emotion. Lower-class
characters (like the gravedigging Clowns of V.i) or fools (like the foppish
courtier Osric in V.ii) generally speak in prose, as do the higher-class
characters when they are expressing “low” sentiments or speaking to low

131

characters. Characters shift into verse when they are expressing deep or
lofty ideas. All of the soliloquys, for example, are in verse. The use
Shakespeare makes of these shifts is a strong indication that
Shakespeare’s audience, unlike most modern audiences, could hear the
shift from iambic pentameter to prose, and thus the shift could be used
to underline a change in emotional tone.

Hamlet’s Character
Given Shakespeare’s fascination with character and his deep
awareness and use of the Bible (a 1993 catalogue of biblical quotations,
allusions, and echoes in Shakespeare’s plays runs to three volumes), it is
not surprising that Shakespeare takes a very biblical approach to
character development. His characters change and grow on stage.
Hamlet returns from his sea voyage transformed. The intense,
inward, skeptical, and ironic Hamlet of the first four acts, the Hamlet
who busies himself devising plots and stratagems to avenge his father’s
murder, is a different man when he returns to Denmark. (In Kenneth
Branagh’s 1996 film version of Hamlet, Branagh underlines the change
by having the “post-transformation” Hamlet appear dressed in dazzling
white, having worn black through the first four acts.) The speech quoted
above from V.ii marks the change. Hamlet suddenly becomes a man who
believes in the power of God’s providence to protect him and to avenge
his father’s murder. When Horatio warns Hamlet that Laertes’ challenge
may be a trap, Hamlet responds by assuring Horatio that he does not
fear death because God’s plans cannot be altered by evil plots: “There’s a
special providence,” Hamlet says, even “in the fall of a sparrow. If it be
now, ‘tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now,
yet it will come. The readiness is all” (V.ii.157-160). Hamlet, in other
words, no longer needs to work out any plan for revenge, but can simply
wait for God to provide the opportunity for open, public revenge. That
opportunity comes in the last scene of the play when Hamlet faces
Laertes, and, by proxy, Claudius himself.

Works Cited
Shaheen, Naseeb. Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Comedies.
Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1993.
—. Biblical References in Shakespeare’s History Plays. Newark, DE:
University of Delaware Press, 1989.
—. Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Tragedies. Newark, DE:
University of Delaware Press, 1987.
Recommended:
Bate, Jonathan. The Genius of Shakespeare. New York: Oxford UP,
1998.
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Honan, Park. Shakespeare: A Life. New York, Oxford UP, 1999.
Marx, Steven. Shakespeare and the Bible. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.

132

John Milton’s Paradise Lost Introduction

General Introduction
John Milton was born in London in 1608, a few years before
Shakespeare retired to Stratford. Milton’s father was a wealthy merchant
who spent generously to ensure that his sons John and Christopher had
the best possible education. Milton enrolled at Christ’s College,
Cambridge, intending (like most college students of his day) to become
an Anglican clergyman. Milton does not seem to have gotten along very
well with his fellow students, many of whom were younger sons of the
nobility entering a religious vocation for lack of any other means of self-
support. In Milton’s judgment, these were not pious men, but “lewd
hirelings” who entered the Anglican Church not out of love for God but
out of desire for money. Milton developed a strong dislike for the
Anglican Church, Anglican clergymen, and the nobility which would,
together with his prodigious reading in the Bible, turn him in a more
sharply reformed direction.
Milton was notorious for his study habits, which often kept him up
until the early hours of the morning. According to Milton’s brother
Christopher “When he [John] went to Schoole, when he was very young
he studied very hard and sate-up very late, commonly till 12 or one a
clock at night.” After the age of twelve, the young Milton “rarely retired to
bed from my studies until midnight.” Upon graduation, rather than
entering the Anglican Church with most of his classmates, Milton retired
to a country estate to study for five more years, then took a lengthy tour
of France and Italy. By the time his education was completed, Milton
knew the classical writers more completely than any other man of his
time. He spoke and wrote Latin, Greek, French, Italian, Hebrew, and
German. His intellect was stupendous.
When Milton returned to England, however, it was not to continue
his studies. Already the Puritan Revolution was underway and Milton
was caught up in the excitement. He began writing political pamphlets,
most of them vigorous intellectual defenses of Puritan theology and
politics. By 1649, Milton was appointed the “Secretary for Foreign
Tongues” for Oliver Cromwell, specializing in Latin correspondence with
other nations. Milton went blind in 1652, the same year his first wife
died. He dictated his writings (including Paradise Lost) to literary
secretaries for the rest of his life.
After the Restoration, Milton went into hiding. He was found,
arrested, imprisoned, and nearly executed. Even after his release, Milton
was in fear of assassination. His political writings had made him many
powerful enemies. Under these inauspicious circumstances—blind,
exiled, poor, and in danger of his life—that Milton wrote his masterpiece,
Paradise Lost.

133

Despite his political involvements, Milton had from a very early age
desired to become the great English poet and had trained himself well for
the task, reading nearly everything available in Greek, Hebrew, or Latin,
especially the Bible, Homer, and Virgil. Like many great poets before and
after him, Milton understood the crowning achievement of any poetic
career to be the creation of an epic, which was understood to be the
loftiest and most noble of all poetic forms. But despite borrowing a
traditionally classical form, Milton would reject classical subject matter.
Milton insists instead that his subject: “Man’s first disobedience,” was a
subject
Not less but more heroic than the wrath
Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued
Thrice fugitive about Troy wall; or rage
Of Turnus for Lavinia disespoused;
Or Neptune’s ire, or Juno’s that so long
Perplexed the Greek, and Cytherea’s son . . . (IX.12-19)
In this passage, Milton alludes to the three great classical epics: The
Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid, but insists that his Biblical subject
was far more elevated than those chosen by the great poets of the past.
Milton uses, but constantly undercuts, the classical tradition,
either denouncing it as lies or subordinating it to the Christian tradition.
In his invocation in Book I, Milton announces that his poem “with no
middle flight intends to soar / Above th’Aonian mount” (I. 14-16). This
“Aonian mount” is Helicon, the traditional home of the Muses, the
goddesses who supposedly inspired Homer and Virgil. When Milton does
include classical material, he compares it unfavorably with his own
material. For example, when Satan looks about him and sees the beauty
of Eden, Milton tells us with a series of “nots” and “nors” how Eden
surpasses all the gardens of classical literature: “Not that fair field / of
Enna . . . / … nor that sweet grove / of Daphne . . . / …Might with this
Paradise of Eden strive / nor that Nyseian isle . . . / … Nor where
Abbasin kings their issue guard, Mount Amara” (IV.267-281).

View of God
Though Milton’s representation of God is in most respects
orthodox, most readers come away from Paradise Lost unimpressed with
God as a character. In the books in which God the Father appears,
particularly Book III, He sounds petulant, long-winded, self-defensive,
and disturbingly passive in the face of events taking place on Earth. The
Father expends a great deal of rhetorical energy defending the laissez-
faire policy He takes with respect to the fall: God watches without
intervening as Satan convinces Eve to commit the first sin. In fact,
Milton insists at many points in the epic that Satan does nothing without
God’s leave. Still, given God’s refusal to intervene in man’s fall despite
foreseeing it and Milton’s stated purpose to “justify the ways of God to

134

men,” Milton needs to allow God to explain himself; in a long dialogue
between the Father and the Son, the Father defends himself at length.
The points God makes are of great theological importance to the full
argument of Paradise Lost, but they make for a dull interlude between
the dynamic excitement of Books II and IV. Even if one agrees with
Milton’s theology, God the Father comes off as colorless, long-winded,
and static, particularly when compared to the Satan who has absorbed
our interest for the first two books of Paradise Lost.
There is some scholarly debate over Milton’s religious views,
especially with regard to the trinity. The Christian Doctrine (not
published until 1825) is supposedly Milton’s most systematic statement
of his own theology, though his authorship of this work has not been
fully established. The Christian Doctrine makes the unorthodox claim
that the Son and the Spirit are subordinate to the Father, a position
some claim to have detected in Milton’s work. Others, among them C.S.
Lewis, argue for Milton’s orthodoxy on this question.

View of Man
Milton’s attempt to “justify the ways of God to men” makes much
of God’s having given Adam and Eve reason and free will. When, in
Books V through VIII Raphael explains God’s full plan to Adam and
warns him of Satan’s approach, he sets out Milton’s doctrine of the
necessity for Adam and Eve to choose obedience:
That thou art happy, owe to God;
That thou continu’st such, owe to thyself,
That is, to thy obedience; therein stand. . . .
God made thee perfect, not immutable;
And good he made thee, but to persevere
He left it in thy power, ordain’d thy will
By nature free . . . (V.520-529)
Milton’s God wants free worship and love from Adam and Eve, not
enforced or fated obedience. Otherwise, their love for God would simply
be an unalterable, robotic response to necessity, meaning nothing.
Given Milton’s stress on man’s freedom before the Fall to choose
good or evil, it would seem strange for him to adapt a Calvinist position
toward man after the Fall, denying him any freedom of will whatsoever.
Milton’s position on the absolute fallen-ness of postlapsarian man is a
subject of some scholarly debate, but it is clear that Milton intends for
Adam and Eve’s personal responsibility for their own damnation to be
representative of the position of every man before God.
The God who gives man freedom of choice invests him with reason
to make that choice possible. Milton shows that reason is a powerful
force in Eden by giving many examples of unfallen reason at work.
Consider, for example, Adam’s first speech to Eve, overheard by Satan in
Book IV. Adam looks around him at the bounty of Eden, then sets his
reason to work:

135

. . . needs must the power
That made us, and for us this ample world,
Be infinitely good, and of his good
As liberal and free as infinite,
That raised us from the dust and placed us here
In all this happiness, who at his hand
Have nothing merited, nor can perform
Aught of which he hath need . . . (IV. 412-419)
Adam is led by his observation of the natural world toward a deep and
accurate knowledge of the character of the creator. He thus embodies
unfallen reason, observing the natural world and inferring the character
of God from his observations. Armed with this reason, man is capable of
recognizing the traps of Satan, if only because they will be at odds with
God’s sole command, what Adam calls “this one, this easy charge:” do
not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Of course, as Raphael warns Adam, reason can fail, but it does so
only in the face of deceptive appearances, which do not exist in Eden
until Satan arrives. Eve’s reason is subverted by Satan’s disguise as a
serpent possessing human wisdom and speech. Of course, even if
reason fails, Adam and Eve can always fall back on obedience. Warning
that Satan will attempt to lead them into sin, Raphael in Book VIII leaves
Adam with this stern admonition: “God has done his part, you do yours.”
The marriage of Adam and Eve is a hierarchy with Adam
unequivocally in charge. Satan, viewing the pair for the first time, notes
that everything about Adam’s appearance declares “absolute rule,” and
everything about Eve’s appearance suggests “subjection.” Difference in
gender implies different levels of authority within the marriage
relationship based on different levels of intimacy with God:
Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed;
For contemplation he and valor formed,
For softness she and sweet attractive grace;
He for God only, she for God in him. (IV.296-299)
Milton’s insistence on a gender-based authority system in the unfallen
marriage relationship has attracted criticism from modern feminists, but
his views on marriage were considered quite radical in his own day,
particularly in his ideal of companionate marriage, a relationship based
not on economics, family politics, or sexual convenience, but on what
Shakespeare had, a generation earlier, called a “marriage of true minds.”
The conversations between Adam and Eve in Eden, especially at the
beginning of Book IX, suggest that their pairing is an “intellectual and
spiritual partnership” and that they genuinely enjoy one another’s
company. Milton’s views on sex were also controversial. His insistence
that sexual pleasure is at the center of the unfallen marriage contradicts
the teachings of some church fathers on sexuality even within marriage
as “a necessary evil.”

136

One of Milton’s most consistent themes in Paradise Lost is that the
mind makes its own place. Though Milton treats Heaven, Paradise, and
Hell, as very real geographic locations, they are also psychological states,
reflecting the Renaissance fascination with man’s imagination and
internal world. Satan repeatedly expresses this idea, discovering that his
“escape” from Hell has not freed him from his own hellish internal state.
For example, as Satan enters Paradise for the first time in Book IV, he is
momentarily enchanted by the beauty there, but is immediately returned
to his emotional misery:
…Horror and doubt distract
His troubled thoughts, and from the bottom stir
The Hell within him; for within him Hell
He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell
One step no more than from himself can fly
By change of place. (IV. 18-23)
Satan’s entry into Paradise brings him no joy because he carries Hell
within him. Satan will later lament: “Which way I fly am Hell; myself am
Hell . . . “(IV.75).
The disorderliness of Satan’s internal world becomes outwardly
visible when he thinks he is unobserved by others. His soliloquies, for
example, show his internal divisions as he argues with and contradicts
himself. During one of these soliloquies, he is discovered in Eden by the
guardian angel Uriel when Satan’s undisguised face shows the changing
passions within him: “Thus while he spake, each passion dimmed his
face,/ Thrice changed with pale—ire, envy, and despair;/ Which marred
his borrowed visage, and betrayed/ Him counterfeit if any eye beheld”
(IV.114-116). Such passions move neither the angels nor Adam and Eve,
who, while experiencing emotion, are under the control of reason while in
their unfallen state.
After their fall, Adam and Eve will experience this same disordered
internal state and Milton will make explicit the comparison between the
external and internal fall.
They sat them down to weep; nor only tears
Rained at their eyes, but high winds worse within
Began to rise, high passions, anger, hate,
Mistrust, suspicion, discord, and shook sore
Their inward state of mind, calm region once
And full of peace, now tossed and turbulent. . . (IX.1121-1126)
Thus, though they have not yet been cast out of Eden, they are
experiencing Hell internally. But if the fallen psyche becomes its own
Hell, so too can the redeemed psyche become its own Heaven. The
archangel Michael, sent by God to explain to Adam the consequences of
his sin in Books XI and XII, assures Adam that, through the presence of
the Spirit and the practice of Christian virtues, he and his progeny shall
“possess / a paradise within thee happier far” (XII.586-7).

137

It has been argued that Satan is the real hero of the epic because
of his heroic qualities. He is defiant, independent, and active, defying
impossible odds to take revenge on God. He thus embodies many of the
character qualities of heroes in the classical tradition, particularly in
seeking after his own glory. Just before he deceives Eve, Satan
congratulates himself and reveals his own primary motivation in
destroying Man:
To me shall be the sole glory among
The infernal Powers, in one day to have marred
What he, Almighty styled, six nights and days
Continued making . . . (IX.135-138).
When Satan returns to Hell, he boasts of having accomplished the
corruption of Man and Earth armed only with an apple. Such boasting
and self-seeking are characteristic of classical heroes like Achilles or
Odysseus. It is little wonder that many readers of Paradise Lost,
particularly those best-versed in the classical tradition, have found much
to admire in Satan.
However, such readers ignore Milton’s apparent rejection of Satan’s
heroism. Milton undercuts Satan’s independence by reminding readers
that Satan is always under God’s supervision. For example, just before
Satan pulls himself out of Hell’s lake of fire in Book I, Milton describes
his stupendous size, then immediately notes that Satan only rises from
the lake because God permits it.
So stretcht out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay
Chain’d on the burning Lake, nor ever thence
Had ris’n or heav’d his head, but that the will
And high permission of all-ruling Heaven
Left him at large to his own dark designs,
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought
Evil to others, and enrag’d might see
How all his malice serv’d but to bring forth
Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shown
On man by him seduc’t, but on himself
Treble confusion, wrath and vengeance pour’d. (I. 209-220)
The passage also shows a second Miltonic theme which undercuts
Satan’s heroism; Milton insists that Satan’s actions only make his own
state worse and advance God’s plan. Satan believes himself an
independent operator. Milton shows that Satan’s self-understanding is
mistaken. He works for God despite himself, unleashing a flood of love
and mercy shown toward man that thwarts all of his plans.
Finally, Milton insists, along with many other writers in the
Christian tradition, that Christianity changes the very nature of what
constitutes heroic action. In the invocation that begins Book IX, Milton
rejects the warlike heroism of the older epics, lamenting that the “better
fortitude / Of patience and heroic martyrdom” (IX.31-32) have been

138

ignored by earlier writers. The Archangel Michael, as he explains the
future to Adam in Book XI, likewise reflects with disapproval on the
values of the warlike ages to come:
For in those days Might only shall be admir’d,
And Valor and Heroic Virtue call’d;
To overcome in Battle, and subdue
Nations, and bring home spoils with infinite
Man-slaughter, shall be held the highest pitch
Of human Glory, and for Glory done
Of triumph, to be styl’d Great Conquerors,
Patrons of Mankind, Gods, Sons of Gods,
Destroyers rightlier call’d and Plagues of men.
Thus Fame shall be achieved, renown on Earth,
And what most merits fame in silence hid. (XI. 689-697)
The final line shows the Archangel’s true attitude toward such heroism,
which Milton rightly understands as unbiblical.

View of the World
Milton’s universe is a hierarchy, with Hell at the bottom, Chaos a
bit higher, then Earth still higher. The Earth is suspended by a golden
chain from Heaven, which sits at the top of creation. Satan traverses
much of this space during his “escape” from Hell in Book II. This cosmic
hierarchy is reflected at every level of the creation, from Man’s
relationship to the animals, to Adam’s relation to Eve, and finally to the
internal world of Adam and Eve, where, ideally, reason reigns supreme
over “fancy” or “imagination.” When this hierarchy is subverted or
overturned, trouble results.
Satan’s rebellion against God is an offense against this hierarchical
structure of the universe. Satan, unsatisfied with his place as the
brightest angel in Heaven, aspires to move still higher on the scale of
being and usurp the place of God. His disrespect for hierarchy is part of
Satan’s fallen nature, on display in his escape from Hell, his proper
place, and his entrance into Paradise, where he does not belong. Satan
is also willing to move down on the chain when it is necessary in order to
execute his revenge. He voluntarily takes the form of a serpent, though
he recognizes that he is demeaning himself:
O foul descent! That I, who erst contended
With Gods to sit the highest, am now constrained
Into a beast, and, mixed with bestial slime,
This essence to incarnate and imbrute,
That to the height of deity aspired. (IX.163-167)
Eve’s offense is essentially the same as Satan’s. He seduces her by
appealing to her desire to move out of her assigned place in the Great
Chain of Being. “Look at me,” Satan says. “I ate and gained the powers
of reason and speech, denied to all the other animals. Just imagine what
will happen to you.” Eve reasons that if the serpent ate and achieved

139

speech and reason, faculties hitherto reserved to man, then she will
likewise rise to possess faculties hitherto reserved to God. Adam’s fall
differs only slightly. He puts his desire to remain with Eve ahead of his
desire to be obedient to God.
A central theme of Paradise Lost involves the meaning of human
history and its relationship to God’s providential purposes. This issue
must have been much on Milton’s mind during his last years as he saw
all that he had worked for overturned and himself in poverty and
disgrace, blind, poor, and in constant danger of imprisonment,
execution, or assassination. In spite of all this, Milton, like all writers in
the biblical tradition, affirms that history has a purpose, though that
purpose is not always visible to men. Before Adam and Eve are cast out
of Paradise, God sends the Archangel Michael to show to them a pageant
of human history. Adam sees firsthand the terrible consequences of his
sin for his offspring, but after hearing about Christ’s atoning sacrifice for
the sins of all men, including his own, Adam exclaims:
O goodness infinite, goodness immense!
That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good; more wonderful
Than that which by creation first brought forth
Light out of darkness! Full of doubt I stand,
Whether I should repent me now of sin
By mee done and occasion’d, or rejoice
Much more, that much more good therof shall spring,
To God more glory, more good will to Men
From God, and over wrath grace shall abound. (XII.469-478)
Satan’s sin and man’s sin have thus only increased the outpouring of
God’s love on his people. Sin cannot ultimately subvert the purposes of
God, and all creatures, including Satan, ultimately serve his plans.
Michael goes on to explain that after the final judgment God will create
“New Heav’ns, [and a] new Earth, Ages of endless date / Founded in
righteousness and peace and love” (XII.549-550).

Artistic /Aesthetic
Paradise Lost is the most respected, admired, and hated poem in
the English language. It has evoked both admiration and denunciation,
occasionally both at once. Samuel Johnson, one of Milton’s first critics,
begins his essay on Paradise Lost by admitting that in regards to its
design, Paradise Lost is the finest production of the human mind. Later
in his essay, Johnson writes that “Paradise Lost is one of the books
which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again.
None ever wished it longer than it is. We read Milton for instruction,
retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we
desert our master, and seek for companions.” In Milton’s defense, much
the same is said of the Bible.

140

Most readers will agree with Johnson’s complaint about the
difficulty of Milton’s style; his biblical and classical allusions, his use of
neologisms (newly invented words), creative misspellings, and Latinate
syntax make demands on readers that require an abundance of
explanatory footnotes in most editions. Despite these difficulties, most
readers have been able to understand Paradise Lost sufficiently to have
made it one of the most popular inspirational Christian works in history.
Through the nineteenth century, almost any Christian home in England
would have possessed a copy of this marvelous work, and it still inspires
readers today.
Milton was not only aware of his singularity, he was proud of it. A
lifelong rebel against complacency and tradition, Milton considered his
departures from traditional poetic practice an example of poetic heroism.
For example, though Milton did not invent blank verse (unrhymed iambic
pentamenter) he uses (it was introduced into English in 1554 in a
translation of Virgil), he defends the relatively new form. In a letter
appended to the second edition of Paradise Lost, Milton identifies rhyme
as “the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame
meter.” The reader, says Milton, should therefore consider the blank
verse of Paradise Lost as “an example set, the first in English, of ancient
liberty recovered to heroic [poetry] from the troublesome and modern
bondage of rhyming.”
Paradise Lost can be usefully viewed as an example of the baroque
style in literature. It is the most dynamic poem in English, frequently
shifting its setting from Earth to Heaven to Hell and its narrative
perspective from God to Satan to Adam and Eve to the poet himself.
Hardly ten lines pass together in the entire epic that do not have some
movement up or down, literal or figurative. Paradise Lost also shares
baroque art’s love of elaboration, from its extended similes (some with
two tenors and two vehicles), its multiplication of classical allusions and
long periodic sentences with tangled diction.

World Literature from a Christian Perspective
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Introduction to the Old Testament 8
Introduction to The Iliad 17
Introduction to The Odyssey 29
Introduction to Agamemnon 39
Introduction to Oedipus 50
Introduction to The Aeneid 59
Introduction to the New Testament 73
Introduction to The Confessions 79
Introduction to Beowulf 84
Introduction to The Inferno 90
Introduction to The Canterbury Tales 96
Introduction to Luther’s Commentary on Galatians 104
Introduction to The Prince 110
Introduction to “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” 115
Introduction to Hamlet 121
Introduction to Paradise Lost 130 World Literature From A Christian Perspective Introduction
Worldview
View of Man
View of World
View of the Divine
Organization of Chapters
Artistic/Aesthetic
Story of Joseph (Genesis 37, 39-46) Introduction
General
View of the Divine
View of Man
View of the World
Aesthetic/ Artistic
Achilles
Hector
Thematic Comparison of Homer’s Epics
Iliad
Odyssey
View of Man
View of the Divine
The gods of the Odyssey are the same as the gods of the Iliad—limited, capricious, and immoral. However, perhaps because of the Odyssey’s more narrow focus on Odysseus and his son, and because both heroes are materially assisted by Athena, the overa…
Artistic/Aesthetic
Character of Odysseus
Artistic/Aesthetic Notes
View of the Divine
Character of Clytemnestra
Character of the Chorus
Character of Agamemnon
Sophocles’ Oedipus Introduction
View of Man
View of the Gods
Literary Qualities
Character of the Chorus
View of the Gods
Artistic/Aesthetic Qualities
Aeneas’ Character
Dido’s Character
The New Testament Introduction
View of God
General Intro
View of Man
View of God
View of World
Artistic / Aesthetic
Dante, The Inferno Intro
Artistic/Aesthetic
Prologue
Luther’s “Commentary on Galatians” Introduction
General Introduction
View of Man
View of God
Machiavelli’s The Prince Introduction
View of the Divine
View of Man
Artistic/Aesthetic
“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” Introduction
View of the World