Thursday, February 21, 2019

Victor Davis Hanson
on Ajax, Achilles, and Trump

The New Yorker has an interview with Victor Davis Hanson, classicist, military historian, and Donald Trump supporter. The interview covers touches on many subjects in a short space: “anchor babies,” the travel ban, the statue-loving demonstrators in Charlottesville, Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and when it’s appropriate to mock a woman as unattractive: “There are certain women that may be homely,” Hanson declares. It’s like watching an interview from The Colbert Report.

And of course, Hanson talks about his forthcoming book, The Case for Trump, in which he likens Donald Trump, in passing, to the Greek heroes Achilles and Ajax. As he does in the interview:

“You have a neurotic hero [Ajax] who cannot get over the fact that he was by all standards the successor to Achilles and deserves Achilles’s armor, and yet he was outsmarted by this wily, lesser Odysseus, who rigged the contest and got the armor. All he does is say, ‘This wasn’t fair. I’m better. Doesn’t anybody know this?’ It’s true, but you want to say to Ajax, ‘Shut up and just take it.’ Achilles has elements of a tragic hero. He says, at the beginning of the Iliad, ‘I do all the work. I kill all the Trojans. But when it comes to assigning booty, you always give it to mediocrities — deep-state, administrative nothings.’ So he stalks off. And the gods tell him, ‘If you come back in, you will win fame, but you are going to end up dead.’ So he makes a tragic, heroic decision that he is going to do that.

“I think Trump really did think that there were certain problems and he had particular skills that he could solve. Maybe in a naïve fashion. But I think he understood, for all the emoluments-clause hysteria, that he wasn’t going to make a lot of money from it or be liked for it.”
These comparisons are bonkers. Let’s not forget: Trump, unlike Ajax, won the big prize, with, it seems, considerable help from outside actors who worked to rig the outcome — Russians, not Greeks. The Ajax of Sophocles’s tragedy Ajax (the work Hanson is referencing) does more than say “This wasn’t fair”: having planned to kill Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Odysseus, he is deluded by Athena into slaughtering cattle instead. And he then realizes what he has done: “Now I stand here / Disgraced.” What distinguishes Sophocles’s Ajax is his profound shame, an emotion Donald Trump seems incapable of feeling.

As for Achilles: he returns to battle out of a deep sense of loyalty to his beloved Patroclus, willing to sacrifice himself to avenge his comrade. Loyalty, self-sacrifice: further elements of human experience that seem foreign to Trump, except insofar as he demands them of others.

If Trump resembles anyone in the Iliad, it’s Agamemnon, the leader who is at a loss in a true crisis and claims Achilles’s prize of war (the enslaved Briseis) to assert his own greater authority. It’s the preening, self-aggrandizing Agamemnon who complains of fake news, dismissing the prophet Calchas’s explanation of a plague: “Not a single favorable omen ever!”

And it must be said: Ajax, Achilles, and even Agamemnon fight valiantly. None of them claimed to have bone spurs. The best comparison there would be to Odysseus, who feigned madness to avoid conscription. But once at Troy, he too fought valiantly.

In 2017 I wrote a post about Trump, Agamemnon, Oedipus, and Creon: We three kings. Or, really, one king and two tyrants.

Other related reading
All OCA Homer posts (Pinboard)

[Amazon’s Look Inside feature lets me see that the references to Ajax and Achilles are as cursory in Hanson’s book as they are in this interview. I’ve quoted from Peter Meineck’s translation of Ajax, in Four Tragedies (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), and Stanley Lombardo’s translation of the Iliad (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997).]

comments: 8

Fresca said...

I think, too, of how Agamemnon sacrifices his own child to raise the winds of war.

And nobody wins in that story.

Michael Leddy said...

I suspect Trump would be willing to sacrifice almost anyone to save his own neck. But not Ivanka!

Frex said...

No, not Ivanka, surely. Though didn't Agamemnon love Iphegenia dearly?
Hm... or maybe that's not specified---just my imagination?

Michael Leddy said...

The account in Aeschylus is pretty chilling.

Frex said...

Oh, yeah--I just looked it up.
Chilling, indeed.

He totally DOES NOT want to:

"Dire doom! to disobey the gods' commands!
More dire, my child, mine house's pride, to slay,
Dabbling in virgin blood a father's hands.
Alas! alas! which way to fly? "

And wow, how they tie her up and everything, "like some soft kid"...

Michael Leddy said...

And the Chorus says that after Agamemnon consents to the sacrifice, he changes: “At that very moment he changed / and his altered mind would do anything."

The real outrage in the Oresteia is that Iphigenia’s death counts for nothing. Orestes is not guilty of killing kin, because, as Apollo explains, mothers and their children and not truly kin, the mother being merely a vessel. But then what about Agamemnon and Iphigenia? That’s where the patriarchy really kicks in — Iphigenia’s death is just forgotten by the end of the trilogy.

Sean Crawford said...

Someone who follows me also follows you, which is how I found your blog.

How exciting to read of a fellow fan (who knows way more than I) of Ancient Greece. I have just this month bought a folio of two volumes by Robert Graves of Greek myths, from the bookstore guy who told me to get the Fagles translation for Homer.

Anyhow, I wanted to say that I blogged back in 2014 about thinking of Troy, and Vietnam, and reservists, at a lakeside cafe. Here is the link https://essaysbysean.blogspot.com/2014/01/troy-iliad-and-music.html

Michael Leddy said...

Thanks, Sean. I won’t have time to read your post tonight, but I will tomorrow.

Do you know Jonathan Shay’s book Achilles in Vietnam? It’s a remarkable book by a doctor and psychiatrist who found in working with Vietnam veterans with PTSD that their experiences again and again made him think of Achilles.