February 21, 2019

"Have you read Sophocles’s 'Ajax' ever?... You have a neurotic hero who cannot get over the fact that he was by all standards the successor to Achilles and deserves Achilles’s armor..."

"... and yet he was outsmarted by this wily, lesser Odysseus, who rigged the contest and got the armor. All he does is say, 'This wasn’t fair. I’m better. Doesn’t anybody know this?' It’s true, but you want to say to Ajax, 'Shut up and just take it.' Achilles has elements of a tragic hero. He says, at the beginning of the Iliad, 'I do all the work. I kill all the Trojans. But when it comes to assigning booty, you always give it to mediocrities—deep-state, administrative nothings.' So he stalks off. And the gods tell him, 'If you come back in, you will win fame, but you are going to end up dead.' So he makes a tragic, heroic decision that he is going to do that. I think Trump really did think that there were certain problems and he had particular skills that he could solve. Maybe in a naïve fashion. But I think he understood, for all the emoluments-clause hysteria, that he wasn’t going to make a lot of money from it or be liked for it."

Said Victor Davis Hanson, quoted in "The Classicist Who Sees Donald Trump as a Tragic Hero" (an interview in The New Yorker). Hanson is promoting his book, "The Case for Trump."

85 comments:

Seeing Red said...

But I think he understood, for all the emoluments-clause hysteria, that he wasn’t going to make a lot of money from it or be liked for it."

Sometimes you do things for the right reasons. Does Trump need more money? That part rubs me raw.

tim in vermont said...

Trump is more like Beowulf, he killed Grendel, is having a bit more trouble with her mother and the nest of trolls though. Still he wields the terrible swift sword that is Twitter, so you can’t count him out.

Achilles said...

The leftists refuse to allow their opponents to have good motivations.

n.n said...

He stands to lose more than he could ever gain from public service. Perhaps he has an honest motivation to make American great again, at home, abroad, and for our Posterity.

Lucid-Ideas said...

What Trump is and what he represents - as something VDH could appreciate - is the fundamental ability of Western Societies to invent and use the systems they invent for - metaphorically speaking - steering ships clear of icebergs and disaster.

Xenophon's Anabasis stands out for all time in providing this lesson.

Trump was the outsider among the '10,000' who the majority believed could right the ship and be the guide in the wild for half that population that realized Hillary would've been an utter disaster. She represented a fork in the road from which going back wasn't possible and indeed would've embarked the nation on an irreversible course to an uncertain and terrifying future. Trump's election is amazing and reassuring even if its only amazing characteristic is that it could happen at all...almost every single entity with power to influence if not all were dead-set against him.

My greatest fear is that the forces seeking to return us to what the world was like pre-16' will not only never stop but have now been put on notice to quadruple their efforts...as we are seeing now in all its abject ugliness.

If it's war they want it's war they'll get. As in Anabasis we intend 'to return home'.

Yancey Ward said...

ARRGGH! Tim in Vermont! You beat me to it!

Christy said...

Hanson's book is $18 hardback and $18.99 kindle! What's up with that?

Yancey Ward said...

Amazon had to recoup the lost money from NYC.

Carol said...

That interviewer sounds a bit...patronizing. Like VDH is a real freak show.

Lewis Wetzel said...

Too much of a stretch to compare trump with Achilles w/o a lot of qualifications. Maybe the New Yorker edited the context of Hanson's remarks?
Hanson always draws comparisons between current events and events in the classical period.
But what do I know? I think that Iliad works best as a tale of the supernatural. There is something eerie about the way Greek mythology just stops after the Trojan War. Nothing new happens in Greek mythology after the remaining Greeks go home. And the Trojan War took place at the end of the bronze age, just before the Greeks became literate. It is as though the written words acted as a barrier to keep the gods from interfering with human history.

Carol said...

Anyway, I'm grateful for the education in Greek tragedy I got in freshman Drama class. I totally agree Trump will be a tragic figure, and perhaps in a hundred years, if we have any decent tragedians, we will get an honest rendering of him.

Yancey Ward said...

I am not going to listen to the entire interview, but what struck me in that one quoted bit was that Hanson was comparing Ajax to Hillary Clinton. Was I wrong?

mccullough said...

MAGA meets the classics. Would sell more if he compared Trump to the Marvel Universe characters.

Fen said...

"I totally agree Trump will be a tragic figure"

The Left is going to assasinate him. "Will anyone coughLoneWolfcough rid me of this meddlesome priest?"

The June 2017 attempted mass assassination of Republicans is like the appearance of Patient Zero in an Ebola outbreak. The Democrats have released the contagion into the air, they just had trouble controling who was infected next.

traditionalguy said...

The Best "hero like Trump" would be George Patton. They both studied their subject intently be it war, or politics in Manhattan Real Estate, for over 30 years before being placed by God into the middle of the key spot at a key time to win a great and glorious victory over evil forces. They both believed God would fight for them and prayed daily.

Both men amazingly have the instinct to see the future of a battle from the study of history ( which is why VDH loves Trump) and from a lifetime of interaction with opponents from all over the world. And they both understand attacking momentum that keeps the skeer going is what wins.

Patton would say a great warrior should be killed by the last bullett of the winning campaign. Trump knows his fate.

Michael K said...

The interview began with a slam at VDH as anti-Mexican, no doubt a reaction to his earlier book, "Mexifornia."

I think of Trump as PInochet. He left Chile the richest country in South America and is hated by leftists everywhere,

They also, in denigrating every Trump biography, ignored Black's book which is excellent.

Michael K said...

Patton also had a titanic ego and VDH has written a couple of books about him.

YoungHegelian said...

deep-state, administrative nothings.

I'd love to see the Homeric Greek for that phrase.

The wording does have the air of an Homeric epithet about it.

Molly said...

(eaglebeak)

It is obvious that Trump knew that when he became President, everything else he had worked for all his life would be under attack, devalued, boycotted, lose money, be irreparably wounded.

But he said (paraphrase, but he said something very close): I don't care about that any more. This (the Presidency, the country) is what matters now.

So I think Hanson is making a serious comparison, not just to Ajax, but to other gods and heroes. What he doesn't say in the interview is that in Sophocles' play, and in Greek myth overall, Ajax falls on his sword when Achilles' armor is awarded to the wily Odysseus.

In the play, as he does so, he cries down revenge on the House of Atreus (the brothers Agamemnon and Menelaus, who led the Greeks against Troy). And the revenge comes in terrible fashion (see Aeschylus' Oresteia).

Let's hope, pray, and vote so that the Democratic Socialists, and establishment Republicans don't achieve their desire of imposing such a tragic ending on our country and its President.

readering said...

"I think Trump really did think that there were certain problems and he had particular skills that he could solve."

If so, boy was he deluded. Look at the trail of business failures he left behind, saved by a rising NYC real estate market.

Molly said...

(eaglebeak)

P.S. Isaac Chotiner didn't even have the wit to read the damned Ajax play before interviewing Hanson. But The New Yorker prides itself on its intellectuality.

What a joke.

readering said...

Talk about elitists!

Menahem Globus said...

I usually avoid the New Yorker because the articles say very little of consequence and go on forever. Finally they publish something deserving of a longer format and they cut it off early.

Ficta said...

"Hanson's book is $18 hardback and $18.99 kindle! What's up with that?"

Amazon is allowed to discount the physical product as they see fit. The idiot publisher gets to set the price of the ebook. There was a big court case about this and the good guys (Amazon) lost.

nob490 said...

My personal thought is that VDH is generally the smartest guy in any room. And I think what he gets most right is that sometimes you get what you need, but not necessarily in the way you would have chosen.

Trump (certainly as opposed to Hillary) is much preferred. But his style is clumsy, he doesn't have a nice crease in his pants, isn't tall and slim, or play basketball. What he does do is call out the people and systems that need to be called out, at least in the opinion of about half the country. He's a bit of a slob, and offends certain folks as uncouth. So what?

Whoever said that our president had to look and talk a certain way to be "acceptable?"

narayanan said...

Why so tragic already? - undue pessimism and throwing up hands.

6 more years to go to turn things around

William said...

I'm a product of STEM so, sadly, I know nothing about "the classics."

What I do know, however, is that VDH is one smart dude.

Now class, here is your homework assignment: compare and contrast VDH and AOC. Heh!

Robert Cook said...

Tragic hero? Hardly. I still don't think Trump really wanted or expected to become president. I think he ran as a matter of ego, and to enhance his brand. My guess is Trump took the news of his victory with thoughts of "What the fuck...do I do now?"

Tank said...

I think Trump ran because he loves this country and thought he could do a better job than the other candidates. He was right.

People living in the NY area, if they were interested, could have heard Trump talking about many of the things he’s still talking about, and ran on, for many years before he ran; he used to fairly frequently appear on radio shows or even call in himself to discuss issues. He had exactly the same America first outlook then.

Robert Cook said...

"The Best 'hero like Trump' would be George Patton. They both studied their subject intently be it war, or politics in Manhattan Real Estate, for over 30 years before being placed by God into the middle of the key spot at a key time to win a great and glorious victory over evil forces. They both believed God would fight for them and prayed daily."

Do you really think Trump believes in god, or prays, or that he thinks about good and evil? Boy, are you confused.

tcrosse said...

Do you really think Trump believes in god, or prays, or that he thinks about good and evil? Boy, are you confused.

Do you really think you can look deeply into his heart? Boy, are you confused.

Tank said...

I’m amazed at people who presume to know what other people’s relationship is with God.

Molly said...

(eaglebeak)

I don't know if he thinks about God or good and evil, but he sure as hell talks about them--

So that's a clue.

Robert Cook said...

"I don't know if he thinks about God or good and evil, but he sure as hell talks about them--

"So that's a clue."


Yup! A clue he's bullshitting the rubes.

tcrosse said...

"I don't know if he thinks about God or good and evil, but he sure as hell talks about them--

"So that's a clue."


So does the Pope.

Gahrie said...

I think Trump ran because he loves this country and thought he could do a better job than the other candidates. He was right.

Look I'm a big fan of how Trump has governed since he was elected, but I think it's pretty clear that he ran for president because he got savaged by Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner. He registered the trademark "Make America Great Again" in 2012 the month Obama was re-elected.

Charlie Currie said...

Blogger Christy said...
"Hanson's book is $18 hardback and $18.99 kindle! What's up with that?"

One of Mr Amazon's adopted children broke Mrs Covington's dining room window, and he has a $250M bill that needs covering.

mockturtle said...

Haven't read Sophocles but have read Ilead. It is a wealth of observations on human nature, regardless of the era. As Solomon wisely said, "There is nothing new under the sun."

mockturtle said...

He stands to lose more than he could ever gain from public service. Perhaps he has an honest motivation to make American great again, at home, abroad, and for our Posterity.

Exactly so, n.n. Nothing tragic about him, at least to this point. But a hero to many of us.

chuck said...

"What the fuck...do I do now?"

I think he was sincere about MAGA, he wanted to be a cheer up the limp and depressed America Obama left behind. That he was running against a cheerless nag helped his cause.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Trump claims belief in God and that’s good enough for me. I believed Obama too. No one gets to be president lacking His blessing if you believe the Bible.

Inga...Allie Oop said...

Blogger Achilles said...
“The leftists refuse to allow their opponents to have good motivations.”

Says the extremist that says all liberals are evil and have no soul.

Inga...Allie Oop said...

“My greatest fear is that the forces seeking to return us to what the world was like pre-16' will not only never stop but have now been put on notice to quadruple their efforts...as we are seeing now in all its abject ugliness.

If it's war they want it's war they'll get. As in Anabasis we intend 'to return home'.”

You people are getting nuttier and more extreme by the day, sounds like Achilles. Do you really want to sound like Achilles?

Inga...Allie Oop said...

“...he wanted to be a cheer up the limp and depressed America Obama left behind.”

Yeah, “American Carnage”! So cheerful! And you dupes lapped it up.

Bilwick said...

Inga comments on Achilles' statement that "leftists refuse to allow their opponents to have good motivations.” The State's Handmaiden counters this with: "Says the extremist that says all liberals are evil and have no soul."

See, I would never say that "liberals" (by which Inga and I both of course "tax-happy, coercion-addicted, power-tripping government humpers and State fellators") have no soul. They do have souls, but corrupted by their sado-masochism and desire to force other people to do stuff.

YoungHegelian said...

@Molly @1:28

Nice analysis, especially the part about the defeated Ajax calling down a curse on the House of Atreus which the gods hear & make come to pass.

Your freshman year tutors would be proud of you!

Robert Cook said...

"Trump claims belief in God and that’s good enough for me. I believed Obama too. No one gets to be president lacking His blessing if you believe the Bible."

You're too trusting. I knew Obama was a con before he was even elected. As Senator, he had promised he would oppose the revised FISA law if it contained promises of immunity to telecoms who have broken the law by helping President Bush illegally spy on Americans' telephone communications. He even said he would support a filibuster on such a bill. When the bill came up for vote, it contained the immunity for the criminal telecoms, and Obama voted for it. He late excused with some bullshit and promised that, as president, he would revisit it and "fix it." (He never did, of course).

I knew then he was a con man. I knew if he was so willing to break his promise on a bill just months before the election he was hoping to win, how could we assume he would keep his promises as president? After all, before the vote, he had something to lose--the presidency. That didn't deter him from breaking his promise. Once in the White House, what incentive (or disincentive) could be so great that he would keep his promises? (The answer, of course, is none.)

I had thought I might vote for him, my first vote for a major party candidate in years. But, that scotched it. I made the decision I would not vote for him. And you know what? He turned out to be worse as President than I had expected!

(And, remember, of course, how he threw his Reverend aside when it was expedient for him to do so, a Reverend whose church he had attended for years.)

Trump has been an epic liar throughout his career. This doesn't mean he always lies, but he means he doesn't always tell the truth. There is nothing about him that indicates he has any belief any god, or in anything other than his own self-aggrandizement. I say this not just to insult him; this is the person I see, and he has been this person for years. He is basically a glorified used car salesman.

Quaestor said...

Until the last few sentences, I was thinking of Hillary as Ajax.

Ajax, btw, was a hulking dufus, the prototype of the large-bodied small-brained football player with a Polish surname immortalized not by the Olympian gods but Hollywood and humorists like James Thurber. Hillary was never hulking, nor Polish, nor small-brained — just plain small where it counts.

Quaestor said...

Ajax was such a moose he would have had difficulty wearing Achilles armor. And why get so worked up about something he couldn't use which had not done Patroclus any good? He wanted it because he wanted it.

Ajax, an idiot with a fixation on something that would do him no good... sounds more and more like Hillary if you ask me

Illuninati said...

Inga...Allie Oop said...
Blogger Achilles said...
"“The leftists refuse to allow their opponents to have good motivations.”

Says the extremist that says all liberals are evil and have no soul."

The truth hurts doesn't it Inga.

tcrosse said...

Hillary would fit in a classical tragedy: the fallen queen with a faithless husband, the confidante with a doofus husband, the ambitious daughter. In true tragic fashion her downfall is brought about by her own personality. Verdi could make good use of the story, but we'd have to do something about the voice.

mockturtle said...

No one gets to be president lacking His blessing if you believe the Bible.

He doesn't necessarily give His blessing. He often gives people the leader they deserve.

Quaestor said...

Inga wrote: Says the extremist that says all liberals are evil and have no soul.

Who, dammit. Who. Being soulless and evil is bad enough. Being relentless ungrammatical is inhuman.

Quaestor said...

Verdi could make good use of the story, but we'd have to do something about the voice.

Mezzo-soprano con voce stridente?

buwaya said...

"I think that Iliad works best as a tale of the supernatural. "

(also re the Iliad)
" It is a wealth of observations on human nature"

I always thought of the Iliad as a war-novel. An actual war-novel, not a war-themed novel or a war-set novel. Something like Goshawk Squadron, or the work of Patrick O'Brien or C.S.Forester (and not just Hornblower).

The Gods in the Iliad are not quite supernatural, in a more modern sense. They are like the weather, or shifts in support from high command, air raids and artillery or an enemy corps appearing suddenly on a flank.

buwaya said...

Trump could be a character out of Shakespeare.
Comedy, and drama, and maybe, eventually, tragedy.
Some cross between Falstaff and Prince Hal (or Henry V), and Richard III.
Or all three, in a way even Shakespeare could not have pulled off.

Written by a more original and inventive author than the Bard.

Quaestor said...

There were two Ajaxes, btw. Both were bested by Odysseus.

tcrosse said...

Trump could be a character out of Shakespeare.

He's Bart Simpson grown to adulthood.

buwaya said...

Bart Simpson - Prince Hal? And a lot more.
Even Groening read Shakespeare, and creativity is always at least 90% recycling.

wwww said...

So if Trump is Achilles, who is Odysseus?

This is fun, but Trump is a modern. I can't compare him to characters from the mythos of classical Athens.

Now, Shakespeare is a modern. Maybe there's someone in his world. But not in classic tragedy. Thinking of Miguel de Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life.

Roy Lofquist said...

Just because:

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

Theodore Roosevelt

Quaestor said...

So if Trump is Achilles, who is Odysseus?

Not Achilles, wwww. Ajax the Great. Achilles is a heap of ashes.

chuck said...

The interviewer tries, but he doesn't score. I would have liked a game that went more than one inning.

Big Mike said...

I think Trump really did think that there were certain problems and he had particular skills that he could solve.

I think that there were plenty of people who have the skills to address America's problems. But I saw none of them step up to the plate in 2016, except for, possibly, Carly Fiorina.

But I think he understood, for all the emoluments-clause hysteria, that he wasn’t going to make a lot of money from it or be liked for it.

True on both counts.

Molly said...

(eaglebeak)

YoungHegelian: I really like your comment about freshman tutors!

buwaya said...

"This is fun, but Trump is a modern. I can't compare him to characters from the mythos of classical Athens. "

Why not? People are people. Religion is religion, myth is myth, no matter what people misunderstand about the inside of their own heads.

wwww said...

Not Achilles, wwww. Ajax the Great.

oh Ajax! Of Sophocles, I'm more familiar with Antigone. I was lucky enough to see a production of Euripides in Greece, in a classical outdoor theatre. It was incredible.

Still, no. I don't see Trump as fitting into the Greek classic understanding of the world. Tragedy may be the antithesis of Trump's state of being & world. He's a modern. Perhaps he even typifies modern man, as opposed to the tragic sense of life.

However, I suppose we could take aspects of tragic plays, and play with that.

tcrosse said...

Bart Simpson - Prince Hal? And a lot more.

A lot of cultures have a character who is a trickster. That's Trump.

buwaya said...

Hanson used Sophocles Ajax as an example of a tragic hero. Achilles is another, also cited by Hanson.

Tragic heroes are somewhat far from the American world-view.
Its a depth that American culture has rarely entered.
So also with martyrs. Americans do badly with martyrs. Or at least East Coast American literati do poorly.

My example is the open incredulity of Stanley Karnow dealing with the medieval-feudal-mythological Catholic mind of the Philippines, in "In Our Image". He strains to understand the emotional context but fails, and repeatedly admits to this failure.

buwaya said...

"Tragedy may be the antithesis of Trump's state of being & world. "

The tragic hero does not need to perceive himself as a tragic hero.

It is we, the audience, who, if given the lenses to understand the situation so, can see it that way.

Americans don't do tragic heroes, much, if at all. Not because they haven't got them, but because they don't understand them that way.

mockturtle said...

Which of our modern leaders is Nestor?

mockturtle said...

Americans don't do tragic heroes, much, if at all. Not because they haven't got them, but because they don't understand them that way.

Well, there was Nixon...

narciso said...

Stephen Decatur, the great hero of the barbary and war of 1812?

Narayanan said...

Blogger Robert Cook said...
Tragic hero? Hardly. I still don't think Trump really wanted or expected to become president. I think he ran as a matter of ego, and to enhance his brand. My guess is Trump took the news of his victory with thoughts of "What the fuck...do I do now

He set up Donald Trump 2020 presidential campaign.

His brand would be his place in history.

David Begley said...

Just bought the book through the Althouse AMZN portal.

buwaya said...

"Well, there was Nixon..."

Some of us see him that way. Not many.
I have a little portrait of his in a black frame in my office.
I got it shortly after he died.
People still wonder about it.

Narayanan said...

When is it tragedy?

Goals being frustrated by other agents or
Ill consequences of action chosen?

Quaestor said...

Which of our modern leaders is Nestor?

Joe Biden would like to think it's himself. But then Joe Biden thinks Nestor is a candy bar.

buwaya said...

"When is it tragedy?

Goals being frustrated by other agents or
Ill consequences of action chosen?"

All of the above, and more. Including fatal flaws, and ill turns caused by honorable positions, or ...

The culmination is catharsis.

The US tale is turning tragic, and we can expect at some point a catharsis.

buwaya said...

There is no one Nestor, there may be many, - or there are none, if one takes Nestor to be one who is esteemed for his wisdom by the mighty. I don't think there are any in such circles who could be described as being esteemed for their wisdom.

tcrosse said...

Blogger buwaya said...
"When is it tragedy?


When Nemesis comes to punish Hubris.

YoungHegelian said...

@tcross,

When Nemesis comes to punish Hubris.

Sounds like a great Country song in the making! Let's get ourselves a ghee-tar, a fiddle, a string bass, & a steel guitar & go to work! Sing it, y'all!

When Nemesis comes to punish Hubris,
You don't wanna be aroun'!
When Nemesis comes to punish Hubris,
You won't find a cop in town!

wwww said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
mockturtle said...

Honestly, you commenters restore my faith in America. And humor. Thanks.

Kirk Parker said...

Fiorina?

Why, so she could do for America what she did for HP?