Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy: The Self in Dialogue (review)

Gill’s book is a wide-ranging attempt to improve our understanding of Greek poetic and philosophical thinking about the self and its role in ethics. His thesis is that the Greeks had an “objective-participant” model of personality which is different in important ways from the various “subjective” and/or “individualist” models which have often formed the basis of modern interpretations. While the subjective understanding of the person privileges a unitary first-person perspective in a Cartesian way, Gill argues that the Greeks—as do some modern thinkers—speak of an interplay between parts that is best studied from the outside. The individualist strand of thought makes individual autonomy a keystone of morality in a way indebted to Kant; Gill argues that the more communal mode of ethics advocated recently by Williams and MacIntyre is closer to the Greek ideal. Gill is surely right that Cartesian and Kantian assumptions have had a distorting effect on some readings of Greek texts, and he has made important progress by presenting a different framework based on modern work touching on Greek thought about ethics and the self.

After an introduction spelling out his objective-participant framework Gill devotes his first chapter to Homeric decision-making and a critique of the interpretations of Snell and Adkins. It is a mistake, he argues, to make self-consciousness the criterion for a full-blown concept of the self or for what counts as moral decision making. Homeric deliberations are closer in form to Aristotle’s thinking about decision making and the modern action theory which has reasons (whether conscious or not) replace the will as the basis for action. Nor are the Homeric heroes rightly criticized for allowing shame and their status to be considerations in their decision making; as Williams has argued, internalized shame can be a rather effective ethical motivator, and as both he and MacIntyre have argued, there is much to be said for allowing one’s place in society to inform one’s decision making. Gill’s argument here does not seem particularly novel, as his frequent citation of Williams and MacIntyre makes clear, but he does apply it thoroughly to four important Iliadic monologues in a way which clarifies these ideas and confirms their relevance for Homer.

The second chapter provides an analysis of why we feel sympathy for the problematic heroes of Greek epic and tragedy, particularly Achilles and Medea, despite their controversial deeds. Here Gill rejects the views of Bradley and Butcher, who argued that it was the power of the character’s self-conscious personality that won us over, and the structuralist view of Redfield, who made Achilles a mediator between the need to protect society and the desire for personal glory. Gill interestingly—and originally, as far as I know—argues that it is rather the hero’s acting out of an ethically exemplary gesture, based on implied or explicit second-order reasoning about the best sort of human life, that gains our interest and sympathy. For Gill it is important that the hero’s ethical position fall within the communal framework of his or her society: Achilles’ refusal to return to the fight is his way of showing how Agamemnon has undermined the code of heroic reciprocity; Medea’s murder of her children is, even more paradoxically, her means of showing Jason the importance of the bonds of philia.

Taking Achilles as our example, Gill rejects the view of Parry and Whitman that Achilles’ heroism is deeply subjective. Gill argues that Achilles, in his great speech of book 9, is not rejecting the heroic code itself but only Agamemnon’s perversion of it. While this reading makes good sense of much of Achilles’ speech in Iliad 9, it is difficult to square with the end of the speech, in which Agamemnon seems to have faded from view, leaving Achilles to question the heroic code itself. This is not to say that Achilles puts...