Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.44

M. But all things are full of errors. Achilles drags Hector, tied to his chariot; he thinks, I suppose, he tears his flesh, and that Hector feels the pain of it; therefore, he avenges himself on him, as he imagines. But Hecuba bewails this as a sore misfortune:

 

“I saw a dreadful sight, great Hector slain,

Dragg’d at Achilles’ car along the plain.” 

 

What Hector? or how long will he be Hector? 

 

Accius is better in this, and Achilles, too, is sometimes reasonable:

 

“I Hector’s body to his sire convey’d,

Hector I sent to the infernal shade.”

 

It was not Hector that you dragged along, but a body that had been Hector’s. 

 

Here another starts from underground, and will not suffer his mother to sleep:

 

“To thee I call, my once-loved parent, hear,

Nor longer with thy sleep relieve thy care;

Thine eye which pities not is closed—arise;

Ling’ring I wait the unpaid obsequies.” 

 

When these verses are sung with a slow and melancholy tune, so as to affect the whole theater with sadness, one can scarce help thinking those unhappy that are unburied:

 

“Ere the devouring dogs and hungry vultures . . .” 

 

He is afraid he shall not have the use of his limbs so well if they are torn to pieces, but is under no such apprehensions if they are burned:

 

“Nor leave my naked bones, my poor remains,

To shameful violence and bloody stains.” 

 

I do not understand what he could fear who could pour forth such excellent verses to the sound of the flute. 

 

We must, therefore, adhere to this, that nothing is to be regarded after we are dead, though many people revenge themselves on their dead enemies. Thyestes pours forth several curses in some good lines of Ennius, praying, first of all, that Atreus may perish by a shipwreck, which is certainly a very terrible thing, for such a death is not free from very grievous sensations. Then follow these unmeaning expressions: 

 

“May on the sharp rock his mangled carcass lie, 

His entrails torn, to hungry birds a prey! 

May he convulsive writhe his bleeding side, 

And with his clotted gore the stones be dyed!” 

 

The rocks themselves were not more destitute of feeling than he who was hanging to them by his side; though Thyestes imagines he is wishing him the greatest torture. It would be torture, indeed, if he were sensible; but as he is not, it can be none; then how very unmeaning is this: 

 

“Let him, still hovering o’er the Stygian wave,

Ne’er reach the body’s peaceful port, the grave!” 

 

You see under what mistaken notions all this is said. He imagines the body has its haven, and that the dead are at rest in their graves. Pelops was greatly to blame in not having informed and taught his son what regard was due to everything. 

—from Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.44

 

I originally did not take very well to being formally instructed in classical literature, and while my elders told me how exciting and enlightening it would be to read heroic poetry or tragic plays, I couldn’t grasp what all the fuss was about. 

 

I had the usual smug response of a flippant adolescent: these people talk funny, their primitive world is irrelevant to modern problems, and they have nothing to teach me. 

 

Then, at some point, it clicked with me. Despite the unfamiliar language, the peculiar circumstances, and the separation of time and place, these stories went straight to the core of the human condition. 

 

Behind the accidents, the beauty was in the subtle understanding about the essence. I haven’t been able to stay away from Homer, Sophocles, or Virgil ever since. A year or two later, I recognized it in Shakespeare as well, and in Dante, and in Milton, and so on . . . 

 

Achilles is such a wonderfully complex character, sometimes the villain, sometimes the hero, and always captivating. His rage is what ties so much of the Iliad together, first in stubbornly refusing to fight because of a disagreement with Agamemnon on the division of spoils, and then in savagely insisting on a fight to avenge the death of Patroclus. 

 

Achilles finally defeats Hector, and he denies the dying man’s last wish for an honorable burial. Instead, he drags the corpse behind his chariot, and proceeds to abuse the body for twelve days. 

 

Readers are sometimes aghast at the level of brutality, wondering how such extreme hatred could be possible, and yet I suspect that we have all stood right at the edge of being possessed by such anger, even if we have not followed through by stepping over the edge. The severity of the feelings is part of the very humanity of the tale. 

 

For the purposes of this chapter, however, Cicero focuses on how the intense aggression has made Achilles quite irrational. At some level, he is gratifying his passions, but does he really think that he is doing any further harm to Hector by mutilating the remaining flesh? 

 

Hector’s soul, after all, whatever that may be, is now departed, and that body suffers no more; whether his shade is in Hades, or his existence has been dispersed entirely, these tortures have no effect. Once his temper has diminished, and he shows a moment of poignant compassion for Priam, Achilles admits as much. 

 

Classical literature is packed with such instances of continuing to give some sort of significance to corpses, complete with the gruesome imagery of bones being picked by wild animals. Cicero is having a bit of fun here, by ridiculing the inconsistencies of such an attitude in the characters, however poetic it may sound. 

 

Will a man really continue to harass his surviving friends and family just because a specific ritual procedure hasn’t been followed? Is rotting in a field really any more destructive than being burned on a pyre? 

 

How, by Jove, does the tortured soul manage to sing out a song when his very throat is decaying miles away? Yes, there is a certain degree of literary license here, but let’s make sure it’s no more than that. 

 

Thyestes wants Atreus to be killed in a shipwreck, but then goes on to describe in vivid detail how much he further wishes the body to be twisted and mangled. Well, how could that make a difference? Wouldn’t the twisting and mangling be more appropriate before Atreus is deceased? 

 

I have an unpleasant acquaintance with a rather sick sense of humor, and he thinks up the most ridiculously shocking threats. Recently, he insisted I buy him a beer, or he would rip off my arm, beat me to death with it, and then make me eat my own fingers. I suggested he had already consumed more than enough beer, otherwise he would have proposed feeding me the fingers at the start of the whole process. I was relieved when the buffoon granted my point. 

 

On the other side of the spectrum, I know someone who refuses to be marked as an organ donor on his driver’s license, not on any ethical or religious grounds, but because he can’t bear the thought of his parts being cut out and placed inside someone else. I can’t seem to convince him that there can be no anxiety or jealousy where there is no perception. 

 

A contradiction involves two propositions that cannot both be true at the same time, or in the same sense. I should remember how just as dead men tell no tales, dead men are incapable of getting up to complain about their discomfort—you know, being dead and such. 

—Reflection written in 6/1996 

IMAGE: Gavin Hamilton, The Death of Hector (1766)