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                   Imprimis, On Line  -- March, 1993
        
        Imprimis, meaning "in the first place," is a free
        monthly publication of Hillsdale College (circulation
        435,000 worldwide). Hillsdale College is a liberal arts
        institution known for its defense of free market
        principles and Western culture and its nearly 150-year
        refusal to accept federal funds. Imprimis publishes
        lectures by such well-known figures as Ronald Reagan,
        Jeane Kirkpatrick, Tom Wolfe, Charlton Heston, and many
        more. Permission to reprint is hereby granted, provided
        credit is given to Hillsdale College. Copyright 1992.
        For more information on free print subscriptions or
        back issues, call 1-800-437-2268, or 1-517-439-1524,
        ext. 2319.
        
             ---------------------------------------------
        
               "Modern Values and the  Challenge of Myth"
                     by Stephen Bertman Classicist,
                         University of Windsor
        
             ---------------------------------------------
        
                          Volume 22, Number 3
                     Hillsdale College, Hillsdale,
                             Michigan 49242
                               March 1993
        
             ---------------------------------------------
        
        Preview: Myth, whether it is the myth of the ancient
        Greeks and Romans or the myth of the Jews and
        Christians, is about truth and universals. It is about
        good and evil, virtue and vice. It is about the shared
        experiences of the human condition -- from pain, fear,
        cruelty, and defeat to joy, heroism, love, and triumph.
        
             As Stephen Bertman argues, many of the myths we
        have inherited from the past still have the power to
        profoundly affect our ideals and shape our lives. His
        remarks were delivered during Hillsdale College's
        Center for Constructive Alternatives September 1992
        seminar on ancient myth.
        
             ---------------------------------------------
        
                          Aeneas and Ulysses:
                   Ancient Heroes for a Modern World
        
        Eastward across the sea from Greece lay the ancient
        citadel of Troy. Legend tells how a thousand ships once
        sailed there carrying an invading army. Besieged by
        Greek warriors, the fortified city finally fell after a
        decade of war.
        
             The last battle took place inside the city walls.
        Having penetrated its defenses by guile, Greek
        commandos put the city to the torch. In the final
        struggle many Trojans heroically laid down their lives.
        The casualties would surely have included a Trojan
        prince named Aeneas. But the gods, we are told, kept
        him from throwing his life away in a cause they knew
        was lost. Instead, they urged him to flee, gathering up
        as many of his fellow citizens as he could find and
        commandeering ships for their escape. The city in
        flames, its sanctuaries violated, Aeneas moved through
        the ruins, leading the survivors to the shore.
        
             The gods promised Aeneas that they would lead him
        to a new homeland, but ten years of searching,
        struggle, and sacrifice lay ahead until it was found.
        Surviving many perils and temptations, Aeneas at last
        led his people to Italy, where they were destined to
        found the nation of Rome.
        
             At the very time that Aeneas was searching for a
        homeland, another veteran of the Trojan War was also
        sailing the seas. Ulysses, an enemy of Aeneas, was
        trying to get back home to Greece with the Greek
        soldiers he had commanded at Troy. Like the Trojans,
        Ulysses and his men would face countless trials and
        tragedies on their homeward way.
        
             The goddess Calypso offered to make Ulysses divine
        if only he would stay with her. Likewise, Aeneas was
        tempted to remain forever with Dido, the sensuous queen
        of Carthage. But both heroes felt compelled to continue
        their journeys. Aeneas was fulfilling a vow to found a
        new nation, and Ulysses was returning home to help the
        wife and son he had left behind 20 years ago before,
        loved ones who now desperately needed him. Both heroes
        chose hardship over ease, danger over security and, in
        Ulysses' case, death over immortality.
        
                       From Legend to Literature
        
        Today we know the ancient stories of Aeneas and Ulysses
        from Vergil's Aeneid. and Homer's Odyssey. Along with
        the Iliad, Homer's epic poem came to serve as the bible
        of classical Greece, and similarly, Vergil's became the
        national epic of Rome. But literary classics are like
        mountains. Because their venerable outlines are so
        familiar, we look upon their presence as benign,
        ignoring the immense seismic pressures primordially
        responsible for their form.
        
             The Odyssey and the Aeneid, which were legends
        long before they became literature, arose out of
        extended periods of social turmoil. The Odyssey was
        created between the 12th and 9th centuries B.C., during
        the Dark Ages of Greece when political and economic
        chaos followed the Heroic Age. Though this Greek epic
        portrays a world of palaces and feudal splendor, it
        actually depicts a culture that had ceased to exist. To
        a nostalgic audience that ached for order, the Odyssey
        held out the hope of a life restored. You can go home
        again, it argued, if -- like Ulysses -- you exert every
        fiber of muscle and every sinew of mind. Even those who
        know the poem well often fail to realize that more than
        half of the story deals not with maritime adventure but
        with the moral reconstruction of domestic society.
        
             In like fashion, in the first century B.C., the
        Roman poet Vergil took pre-existing tales and used them
        to compose a sermon to inspire his people. The Romans
        had endured a century of class struggle, revolution,
        and civil war, terminating in the fall of the Republic.
        Through Aeneas' example, Vergil showed his fellow
        citizens that they had a special destiny, one that they
        could fulfill by imitating their heroic ancestor's
        virtues of dedication and self-sacrifice.
        
                         The Power of the Past
        
        In sailing through the turbulent waters of their time,
        the ancient Greeks and Romans could draw strength not
        only from legend and literature, but from the temporal
        perspectives of their respective cultures. In facing
        the perils of an uncharted future, they were sustained
        by a firm hold on the past.
        
             The value the Greeks and Romans assigned to the
        past is symbolized by two figures from classical
        mythology. Achievements in the arts, the Greeks
        believed, were inspired by divine powers they called
        Muses (hence the word "music"). Mnemosyne, whose name
        means "memory," was the mother goddess of the Muses and
        the arts. Underlying this relation was the conviction
        that creativity in the arts requires an understanding
        of tradition. In a larger sense, the tree of
        civilization cannot flourish unless its roots draw
        nourishment from the past.
        
             To the Romans, Janus, for whom the month of
        January is named, was the god of beginnings. Janus was
        one of the most peculiar gods of mythology, for he had
        two faces, one which looked ahead and one which looked
        back, reminding that every new undertaking depends for
        its success on the guidance people can borrow from
        experience.
        
             To speak of something as a "myth" today implies
        that it never really happened. Yet what we disparage as
        mythology the Greeks and Romans would have called their
        most ancient history, no less valid for the distance
        that separated them from the events their stories
        described. Myths embodied truths that transcended time.
        As such, they deserved special reverence.
        
                          The Burden of Memory
        
        The practice of referring to the past was easier for
        the ancients than it is for us. First of all, there was
        less past to remember. Events were more comprehensible
        because their numbers had been winnowed by tradition,
        the precious residue preserved in memory and passed on
        orally from generation to generation. The old and the
        wise and the storytellers were the keepers of the
        legacy, and the telling and retelling of treasured
        stories ingrained them in the hearts of the listeners.
        
             As time has gone on, however, more and more
        factual information has accumulated in the storehouse
        of history. Its sheer bulk makes it difficult to
        distinguish what is worth knowing. The printed page,
        the flypaper of human thought, attracts and adheres to
        itself all the buzzing and expiring minutiae of
        experience. The mass production and collection of books
        after the invention of the printing press radically
        expanded the burden of what can be learned and has made
        the task of learning intimidating. Like the player in a
        perverse version of the child's game, "I Pack My
        Trunk," he whose turn is historically last must
        memorize the most.
        
             This explains a fundamental truth that few who
        enter the multicultural debate acknowledge: as
        creatures of time, we are all multicultural. And like
        the DNA that is encoded with our biological past, our
        cultural matrix is inscribed with the preferences and
        prejudices of earlier times. We may ignore our ancestry
        if we wish and elect to be ideological orphans, or we
        may search out our parentage. But the latter course is
        not easy. Pushing through the crowded terminal of
        civilization, we will have to hang on not only to our
        own luggage, but to the bulging, clumsy trunks of
        previous ages. No wonder so many students, faced with
        such a daunting task, resort to hiring Cliff, the
        friendly porter, to help carry their load.
        
             But while Cliff's Notes may help a student pass an
        exam, they can't help a whole civilization pass the
        more challenging test of time. To do that, a people
        must have a deeper, historical insight into their own
        condition.
        
                            Cultural Amnesia
        
        The 18th century historian Gibbon, the author of The
        Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, lived 13
        centuries after Aeneas' heirs had been vanquished. We
        are only two centuries removed from Gibbon's time, yet
        we have forgotten most of what Gibbon knew. Eight
        centuries separated the classical Greeks from the
        Trojan War, yet they remembered it in profound detail,
        just as the Romans remembered it centuries after.
        
             Americans, by contrast, know little of what
        happened in their own country only decades ago.
        According to a Gallup Poll of college seniors sponsored
        by the National Endowment for the Humanities in the
        late 1980s, 58 percent didn't know who was president
        when the Korean War began, 42 percent couldn't place
        the Civil War in the right half century, and 24 percent
        thought Columbus landed in America in the 1500s. If
        even recent history blurs in the memory, there must be
        other factors apart from the passage of time that
        explain our gross and progressive cultural amnesia.
        
             One such factor was the industrial revolution,
        which, by rapidly gratifying material desires, led to
        an increasing preoccupation with the present. A second
        factor has been the electronic revolution, which has
        placed an even greater emphasis upon immediacy.
        Television is the best example of this phenomenon. It
        exists from moment to moment. Its instant images appear
        and disappear with the speed of light, melting the
        distinction between appearance and reality, and
        creating the illusion that all things are sensually
        accessible.
        
             By contracting time itself until everything seems
        short-term, television desensitizes the mind to the
        notion of long-term consequences. What was past is no
        longer prologue. It is curbside trash.
        
             Almost 50 years ago, Sir Winston Churchill warned
        that an "iron curtain" had descended across the
        continent of Europe. Today, across America and across
        the world, another iron curtain is descending -- an
        electronic curtain -- less apparent and more pervasive
        than the curtain of Churchill's day. It is a curtain
        not geographical but temporal, one that isolates us
        from all other times but now.
        
                         The Challenge of Myth
        
        As an embodiment of ancient truth, myth challenges this
        kind of worship at the altar of the present. And
        because myth is enduring, it blatantly defies the law
        of disposability that often dictates human
        relationships and modern values. Myth proclaims the
        continuity of existence and declares that a life lived
        only in the present is a life betrayed. It also offers
        a definition of what it means to be human -- a
        definition that still has the power to move men, even
        after thousands of years.
        
             Myth is also, finally, about understanding the
        nature of time itself. Through ancient myth, each of us
        is a time traveler, journeying from past to future,
        oblivious as one melts into the other -- like reveling
        passengers on a cruise ship, unconscious in the moonlit
        night of the speed at which we cross the ocean swell.
        We surrender to time, yielding fluidly to its flow like
        marine creatures carried on by an underwater current.
        For time is our sea.
        
             ---------------------------------------------
        
        Stephen Bertman is a professor of classical and modern
        languages, literatures, and civilizations at the
        University of Windsor in Ontario. He is the author of
        Doorways Through Time: The Romance of Archaeology
        (Tarcher/Putnam, 1987, 1991), Art and the Romans
        (Coronado Press, 1975), and editor of The Conflict of
        Generations in Ancient Greece and Rome (B.R. Grner:
        Amsterdam, 1976). His September 1988 Imprimis essay,
        "Classical Perspectives on the 21st Century," was
        reprinted in Vital Speeches.
                                  ###
        
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