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Becoming Achilles
Child-sacrifice, War, and Misrule in the lliad and Beyond
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2011
Summary
Viewing the Iliad and myth through the lens of modern psychology, in Becoming Achilles: Child-Sacrifice, War, and Misrule in the Iliad and Beyond,Richard Holway shows how the epic underwrites individual and communal catharsis and denial. Sacrificial childrearing generates but also threatens agonistic, glory-seeking ancient Greek cultures. Not only aggression but knowledge of sacrificial parenting must be purged.
Just as Zeus contrives to have threats to his regime play out harmlessly (to him) in the mortal realm, so the Iliad dramatizes threats to Archaic and later Greek cultures in the safe arena of poetic performance. The epic represents in displaced form destructive mother-son and father-daughter liaisons and resulting strife within and between generations.
Holway calls into question the Iliad’s (and many scholars’) presentation of Achilles as a hero who speaks truth to power, learns through suffering, and exemplifies kingly virtues that Agamemnon lacks. So too the Iliad’s cathartic process, whether conceived as purging innate aggression or arriving at moral clarity. Instead, Holway argues, Achilles (and Socrates) try to prove they are not what at bottom they experience themselves to be—needy, defenseless children, who fear to acknowledge, much less speak out against, parents' use of them to meet parents' needs.
What emerges from Holway’s analysis is not only a new reading of the Iliad, from its first word to its last, but a revised account of the family dynamics underlying ancient Greek cultures.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2011
ISBN-Print
978-0-7391-4690-3
ISBN-Online
978-0-7391-4692-7
Publisher
Lexington, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
256
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
Foreword by Gregory Nagy, General Editor No access
Preface and Acknowledgments No access
Introduction No access Pages 1 - 6
Chapter One. The Quarrel No access Pages 7 - 26
Chapter Two. Heroic Psychology No access Pages 27 - 48
Chapter Three. Mythobiographies No access Pages 49 - 60
Chapter Four. Catharsis and Denial No access Pages 61 - 78
Chapter Five. Fathers and Sons No access Pages 79 - 104
Chapter Six. Mothers and Sons No access Pages 105 - 130
Chapter Seven. Departures from Maternal Agendas No access Pages 131 - 152
Chapter Eight. Self in Crisis No access Pages 153 - 176
Epilogue: Achilles and Socrates No access Pages 177 - 198
