An Undemocratic Turn?

Ever since, in the first flush of the world's dawn, Kronos ate his own children and had his testicles cut off for it, myth and violence have been inseparable. Explanations for this are manifold, and none of them makes us look good. Otto Rank suggested that myths of the birth of heroes, like those of Oedipus, Hercules, or Paris, are themselves born of our deepest childhood desire to destroy our father.¹ For René Girard, myths like that of the Theban king are based, not on our subconscious wishes, but on real, historical acts of collective violence. Girard's Le Bouc émissaire proposes a pattern of persecution in human societies, by which communities at the verge of breakdown purge their need for violence by killing or banishing an innocent they believe to be the root of all evil. In the imagination of the persecutors, whose distorted accounts of the crisis are the stuff of mythology, the scapegoat is so extraordinarily powerful that it can endanger all of society– and save it, too. Hence the throng of monstrous divinities in world mythology.² Walter Burkert thought that the preponderance of bloody rituals in myth–Thyestes' murder of Atreus' children in a sacred grove, the orgies of the Dionysian festivals, the virgin sacrifices of Iphigenia and Polyxena–is rooted in the 90,000 years mankind spent hunting, killing, and eating its victims. Accordingly, Burkert amended the name of our species from homo sapiens, the knowing man, to homo necans, the killing man, in the title of his study.³

Myths, it seems, tell suitable stories for the descendants of Cain. And because of that, myth is uniquely placed to serve as a looking glass for those who contemplate the shadows on the human face divine. The German philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, for example, turned to myth in the last years of the Second World War, when 'the fully enlightened earth radiate[d] under the banner of triumphant evil'.⁴ In their view, the Enlightenment had broken its promise to liberate the individual. Where the ancient heroes of mythos had been oppressed by the inescapable oracle's fatum or swept up in a cycle of death and retribution in a 'world without exit', the modern subjects of logos were just as blindly dominated by a system of technological mastery that methodically exploited both nature and mankind. 'Brutal facts' were the new fatal necessities–the laws of nature, the laws of the market place, the norms of society which determine all-important success. These forces deform individuals and shape society into a herd whose clearest expression for Horkheimer and Adorno was the Hitler Youth. Thus, in an effort to set it free, the Enlightenment had destroyed the individual, and mankind had exchanged the ancient fear of nature for the panicked expectation that the world would be 'set on fire by a totality which they themselves are, and over which they have no power'.⁵ Following its own dialectic movement, the Enlightenment had turned back into mythology.

Emily Katz Anhalt's second monograph also examines the relationship between myth, man, and violence in four chapters on the Iliad, and one each on Sophocles' Ajax and Euripides' Hecuba. But Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths does not comment on Girard, Adorno, or any other theorist of myth and violence. It bypasses the modern and postmodern history of myth theory and conceptually belongs to a much older, humanist tradition that casts the poets of ancient Greece as the nurses of an as yet uncivilised mankind. George Puttenham captured the spirit of this line of thought about myth when he wrote that the most ancient Greek poet

were aged and grave men, and of much wisdom and experience in the affairs of the world, they were the first lawmakers to the people and the first politicians, devising all expedient means for the establishment of commonwealth, to hold and contain the people in order and duty by force...