Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

Well, the Odyssey revolves around a ticked-off Poseidon preventing Odysseus from returning home for a decade, killing Odysseus' entire crew in the process. So, a temporary victory for Odysseus results in a year of suffering and death for all of his comrades - not a great result if you happened to be under Odysseus' command.

The Greeks didn't "pretend to make peace with the Trojans". They just got in their ships and pretended to leave. There is nothing in Homer to indicate that he or his contemporaries thought the ruse was impious or dishonorable. Quite the contrary. As DeLong says, the whole thing was Athena's idea anyway. And besides what's dishonorable about tricking an enemy into letting you past the gate?

Poseidon indeed took exception to what Odysseus did, although there are worse penalties than being marooned on a small island with Calypso.

The most important point is that ours is Helleno- Romano- Judeo- Christian civilization, and polytheists did not have a notion of a single comprehensive morality.

The conquest of Canaan was roughly contemporary with Trojan war and Y... was as partial as Poseidon or Athena. The difference is that Greeks have seen piety, bravery, treachery and vainglory at both sides, and Jews did not.

The treatment of Odysseus in Greek tragedy, particularly Sophocles' Philoctetes, indicates that some Greeks thought Odysseus' tricky ways were pretty odious. I can't recall anybody objecting to the Trojan Horse specifically (well, except for Aeneas in book 2 of the Aeneid, but he's a Trojan), but other deceptions and deceits of Odysseus get heavy criticism. There's an ode of Pindar, for instance, which criticizes Homer for glorifying Odysseus, since he won the arms of Achilles through deceit. Sophocles and Pindar lived around 300-150 years after "Homer" (if there was such a guy), so there might just be a shift in attitudes over time. More likely, though, is that they differ from Homer because there was a wide range of opinion on the use of deception in warfare.

Also, it's true that Horse is Athena's idea, so its use can't really be said to be impious. On the other hand, plenty of impiety happened during the sack of Troy. One notable example is the rape of Cassandra, which occurred in a temple of Athena. After this Athena was pretty pissed off, and she ruined the homecoming of many Achaeans. Somehow I don't think it's coincidence that a victory won through a trick turned out to be so dishonorable.

Poseidon wasn't upset about the horse, he was upset about his son Polyphemus...

I thought but couldn't be bothered checking that Kleiman was wrong on this one. There was never a peace treaty with the Trojans or any implicit or explicit promise that the Greeks wanted peace. A feigned retreat is not at all the same thing as a broken peace treaty; I doubt that Odysseus would even have been considered to have committed perfidy under the relevant Geneva conventions.

Listen guys....a' la guerre comment a' la guerre!

Also, Lacoon himself was strangled by the sea-serpents sent by Athena (as shown in the beautiful Michelangelo statue, see link www.romaviva.com/Vaticano/galleria_fotografica.htm# ). The scene in which he throws a spear against the statues, creating an echoing noice that proves the horse to be empty inside, is shown in the Eneid which says that Athena made Lacoon's compatriots deaf to the sound to prevent them to heed Lacoon and Cassandra.
Let's remember that the story of Troy, in the Greek mind, was also the story of the inevitability of fate thus the gods and the human character are just puppets in the hand of fate and guided in their actions to the inevitable end decreed by destiny. Those who try to oppose destiny are always driven to despair or killed in the most inventive manners.

Tell me, is there a difference between dishonourable (atimia) and impious behaviour? It's my impression that showing impiety, or disrespect for the gods, was foolish but not dishonourable. If you said something rude about Athena or hit her over the head or something, she might eg turn you into an immortal turtle and power-staple you to a board with a dish of turtle food eternally out of reach, but your fellow Greeks probably wouldn't think you a wicked man - just a bit foolhardy.

Especially true in the Iliad, where the gods are on different sides, and the entire war is really a proxy war between different factions on Olympus.
Laocoon got in the way of Athena's boys and thus needed killing, but that doesn't make him a bad man - he was just on the wrong side. Odysseus did some things that were impious (killing Polyphemus, enabling the sack of Troy) but not dishonourable. Achilles did things that were dishonourable (mistreatment of Hector's body) but not impious. Killing your parents was both dishonourable (you would be condemned by other men) and impious (you would also be hounded by the Kindly Ones).

There are different branches to the story: in one, the Greeks simply built the horse and sailed out of sight. In another, the Greeks signed a peace treaty, built the horse, and sailed out of sight...

The only lesson relevant here to most people simply is: damned if you do and damned if you don't. When the powers that be fight, there is no side that is safe for the average guy. True in Homer's day and true now. Homer's epic poem is in part a paen hymn toward the plight of mankind throughout the ages, forced to battle between irrational yet powerful social forces where the concepts of virtue and pettiness are haphazardly arranged at the political level.

And most poignantly the plights of those like the priest, his sons, and Cassandra show it has always been those who have attempted to expose the futility and waste of such power struggles that have been singled out for extraordinarily sad fates.

I love these Homeric threads you have been serving up, Brad. "Odysseus" and "Impiety" sent me scurrying for my "Euthyphro". There, you will recall, Plato has Socrates reason-- on the very steps of the tribunal that will try and condemn him for impiety-- that a pious act, whatever it is, cannot please some of the gods but displease others. Likewise, I can't agree with you that Athena saw the Trojan Horse as a pious work. Every "Christian" nation goes to war claiming God is on its side, as does the conquering football hero. We, and ancient Greeks before us, take these assertions at face value only at our peril.

I think that the Greeks knew that without an authority able to enforce law over the whole Greek world, sometimes impious treachery would be triumphant, and sometimes (not always) pious virtue could be suicidal.

Their polytheistic system, with its confusion of erratic divine wills, modelled their political disunity. So decency was often unaffordable. Jacob Black-Michaud (Cohesive Force) has described this kind of system as "ethical scarcity", within which men who know what the virtuous act is, and would like to choose it, can't afford to.

What's your source for the "peace treaty" version?

Test.