An End to All Things...

We lost a giant today.

There's no other way to describe the death of Arthur C. Clarke. It wasn't unexpected, I suppose, but that didn't make getting the news any easier. It didn't make the denial any easier.

I actually got the news in two installments. The first time was at the tail end of a news broadcast in which I didn't hear the name, but knew what it was about. The second time was on the radio. The main Zarathustra theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey started up and my first thought was, "Maybe it was actually Stanley Kubrick who died." It wasn't. Come to think of it, Kubrick might have beat Clarke to the hereafter.

The denial didn't last much longer than the thought itself. But even though I realized it made sense for a ninety year old man's body to finally fail, I still took the news poorly.

I don't actually read all that much fiction. In general, I believe that the real stories about things that have happened or are happening are far more interesting. It's an ironic attitude, I guess, since I've wanted to write fiction for a long time. There are, however, few fiction writers I genuinely appreciate. Arthur C. Clarke's name is at the very top of that list.

Arthur C. Clarke had a larger footprint on the development of the human race than almost any other writer, especially the writers of fiction. I firmly believe that in a hundred years he will be mentioned in the same breath as Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, and Dante simply because he had the foresight to look beyond the mundane to the possible and the willingness to put what he saw to paper. In some ways, I believe his foresight will eventually define the 21st Century as historians look back on it from the 22nd Century and beyond.

We already know that Clarke envisioned satellites before Sputnik. We also know that he foresaw the Y2K problem in the book Rendezvous with Rama. Over the next few decades I believe we will realize he envisioned a lot of other things that we are only now beginning to think about. For one thing, he believed that the internet would create something of a hive mind for the interconnected generation. I think that we saw the first dose of that at the beginning of this year with the Anonymous v. Scientology War on the Internets or whatever they called it. It probably won't last long enough to accomplish much, but the collective organization and sheer global scope of a protest planned by people who were best known for propagating lolcat macros, goatse, and that hilariously overblown news report that equated taking down a MySpace page with global terrorism and that iconic yellow van exploding every five seconds was downright impressive. I tracked down whatever news I could of the protests the day after the Lisa McPherson anniversary ones in February. As I read, I contemplated tracking down Arthur C. Clarke's contact information just so I could send him an email I assumed he would never read that said, "Hey, you called this one."

I kind of wish I had. It would have been cool to say I'd done it and now I won't get that chance again. It's sad, too, since I'm guessing there will be many times in my life I'll see something and think, "Hey, Arthur C. Clarke called this one."

I always used to think of Clarke as being sort of naively utopian. His books tended to end well and involved little or no warfare. It was only recently that I realized he wasn't really a utopian, but an optimist and a progressive in the most basic sense of the word.

Arthur C. Clarke lived in the future. He saw the possibilities of tomorrow more clearly than a lot of us see today and better than some people see yesterday. In tomorrow he saw a never ending string of puzzles and challenges, each on capable of destroying the human race. He believed, in the end, that humanity would rise to each of the challenges and figure out how to survive and even thrive.

In this he presented one of the clearest possible cases for continuing human evolution, not just biologically but sociologically. I don't think he ever believed we would overcome the petty jealousies and discriminations to which we are prone, but I think he believed that we as a race will constantly try to grow out of our superstitions and fears. Yes, there will be new ones around the corner, but we can't deal with them until we deal with the ones we have here and now.

I think Arthur C. Clarke was constantly amazed by the potential of the human race. I believe he saw us as awkward adolescents groping blindly towards adulthood. I think that's exactly where we are and, quite possibly, the most optimistic way of looking at us, the most hopeful.

On some level, though, the news of Clarke's death is a low note on what is an otherwise amazing day. I haven't been able to tear myself away from news about Barack Obama's speech on race. I am shocked, amazed, and heartened by what he said today. I keep seeing some sort of reprint of an internet idiot who called it a bunch of "gobbledygook" and I can't help but wonder if that guy actually understands the English language or he's just been brainwashed to believe that eloquently spoken ideals are useless somehow.

Honesty isn't "gobbledygook." Ideals are not somehow useless. We haven't seen a political candidate like Barack Obama since at least Bobby Kennedy and maybe Abraham Lincoln. We've certainly not seen anything like it in the seven years of George W. Bush.

Still, Obama's speech today was something I think Clarke would have appreciated. It was honest, acknowledged that prejudices exist and called everyone who heard to understand that we don't have to be defined by those things any more.

We don't have to be defined by the things we once were. That might not change today or tomorrow, but if we work at it, it will change.

In Arthur C. Clarke's world change is an inevitability. The only sensible response to changes is to rise to the occasion. In doing so, we all grow up just a little bit. I don't think anyone believed this more than Clarke.

So long, Arthur C. Clarke. You will be missed, but never forgotten.

Marching Up Country

I finally got my own copy of Xenophon's Anabasis a couple weeks ago. It's not one of the better known historical documents of the world. Still, it's one of the greatest military sagas and adventure stories ever written. The story itself is fairly simple. Some time around 401 BCE, Cyrus, the brother of the Persian king Artaxerxes, decided that he should be the king. So he assembled an army, including a large cohort of Greek mercenaries. Cyrus pressed through Turkey and in to modern-day Iraq. Somewhere near Babylon, the Great King finally brought the usurper to battle. The Greek hoplites beat all comers, but Cyrus died and his allies abandoned the Greeks in the middle of hostile territory with no way home and no friends. After Persian duplicity resulted in the murders of the five Greek generals, Xenophon was elevated to fill one of the vacancies and was instrumental in leading the Greeks out of enemy territory. At one point they resolved to head in to a mountainous territory to the north of Babylon held by a people called the Karduchians (The Dakyns translation I'm using spells it Carduchians, but its now generally more accepted that the Greek and Roman letters we translate to "C" is a soft sound, analogous to the "S." The Karduchians should have the "K" sound, for reasons which will be presently made clear. Either way, it's not an entirely clear-cut issue, as some words with the "K" sound have switched, but others, like Corinth, retain their older spelling. I generally use K in these situations, but if I quote Dakyns I'll use C). Xenophon describes the Karduchians thusly: "They were a people, so said the prisoners, dwelling up in the hills, addicted to war, not subject to the king; so much so that once, when a royal army one hundred and twenty thousand strong had invaded them, not a man came back, owing to the intricacies of the country."¹ The Greeks though that the Karduchians would be friendly to them, owing to their mutually negative relationship to the Great King. It was not to be. After a grueling week in that unfriendly land, Xenophon records, "seeing that the last seven days spent in traversing the country of the Carduchians had been one continuous battle, which had cost them more suffering than the whole of their troubles at the hands of the king and Tissaphernes put together."² (Tissaphernes, for the record, was one of Artaxerxes' most capable generals. He was the one who originally tricked the Greeks and would dog them throughout the journey.) The Karduchians still exist today and live in almost the same exact place where Xenophon and the Greek mercenaries fought them more than two millennia ago. We no longer call them Karduchians, however. We call them Kurds. Empires have come and gone in the land of the Kurds since Xenophon met them There were, of course, the Persians, but from there the short list includes the Greeks, Seleucids, Romans, Sassanids, Ottomans, and, of course, Saddam Hussein's regime. That section got me thinking of something one of my profs used to bring up on a fairly regular basis. There's a concept out there known as "American Exceptionalism." It, in and of itself, is not a philosophy but instead attempts to describe a philosophy. It's a two pronged concept, first that America does everything according to the highest possible levels of virtue and second that America is more capable than any other people in the history of the human race to achieve any given task. The Vietnam War is the perfect example of American Exceptionalism. We engaged in war with the Vietnamese people in spite of the fact that we had just spent a decade supporting a failed French attempt to hold on to its old colony. The US military made an assumption of victory based on tactical decision making, yet did not think for a moment about the strategic considerations of the situation. One of the known facts about the Vietnam War is this: the United States won every battle it fought. Yet it lost the war. It even set up a situation exactly like Dien Bien Phu, the battle that forced the French out of Indochina. At Khe Sanh, the U.S. won. Fairly convincingly. In the end, though, it didn't matter. The United States ignored recent history. The French hadn't been able to hold Vietnam and it hadn't exactly been a picnic for the Japanese during WWII, either. Furthermore, the U.S. ignored ancient history. The Chinese had attempted to take Vietnam on and off again for a thousand years or so and never managed to succeed in holding the territory, mostly because the Vietnamese fought guerrilla wars from caves and tunnels. By the time the Japanese, French, and Americans showed up, the Vietnamese had at least a millennia worth of experience fighting against an overwhelmingly large foreign power. Afghanistan is shaping up to be a similar story. Thirty years ago Afghanistan was the "Russian Vietnam." The second most powerful war machine in the world went in and found it couldn't overpower a significantly weaker nation. A hundred years before the British Empire was unable to subdue the area, either. After 9/11 the U.S. went in with overwhelming force and it looked like we managed to accomplish something that the Russians, British, and, for that matter, Alexander the Great, had found rather difficult. Six years on the country has been handed over to NATO control and the countryside is far from pacified. Which brings us back to Xenophon and those intrepid Greek mercenaries. After Cyrus died in battle they didn't have a friend within a thousand miles. The entirety of the Persian Empire turned against them. They didn't even want to conquer, they just wanted to go home. Yet they were faced with an almost impossible task. A little bit of history is in order here (redundant much?). The Greek hoplite was the best heavy infantryman in the world at the time. Nothing would change that until the appearance of the Roman legions and any change in infantry structure up until that point was little more than a modification of the standard hoplite. (The Macedonians under Philip and Alexander the Great moved from an eight foot to a fourteen foot spear and incorporated heavy cavalry as a standard shock troop, but the hoplite was still fundamentally the same. Pyrrhus, using a similarly equipped hoplite army nearly brought Rome to its knees during the days of the Republic. Still, over the course of several months the Romans bled him white and even though he won the Battle of Asculum, he could not afford to maintain his campaign, famously saying, "Another such victory and I am undone," before returning to Greece. The concept of the Pyrrhic Victory remains with us to this day.) The Greek phalanx, meanwhile, was a nearly unstoppable formation. It had already won the day against the Great King's disorganized rabble at Marathon and Platea and proved unstoppable in the very battle where Cyrus died. Still, every tactical advantage the Greeks could bring to bear did not matter. They were in hostile country. Although they eventually got home (otherwise there would have been no Xenophon to write the Anabasis), it was no sure thing. Alexander the Great would later conquer the Persian Empire. It was only temporary, however, and Alexander and the successory Seleucid Empire took on far more of a Persian affectation than it took of a Greek culture. There's a lesson to be learned here (and, oddly enough, a roundabout application for the Mythology Project, but that's a story for another day). The United States went in to Iraq in 2003 with assurances from its leadership that all of the important lessons of Vietnam had been learned. Seeing as how the U.S. Army is fighting in Iraq from isolated firebases and having a hard time figuring out what the difference is between a normal Iraqi and an insurgent, something tells me that even that assurance was a lie. But there's a larger historical lesson that was never learned, possibly even never recognized. Most of the cultures on this planet are significantly older than the United States. Some of those cultures have been fighting tooth and nail for their own independence against outsiders for a thousand or more years. The modern-day Kurds descend from a line of people that were throwing rocks and firing arrows at Greeks twenty-four hundred years ago. That's a time period ten times longer than the history of the United States as a stand-alone political entity. We thought that we were better and smarter than history in Vietnam, then again in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet what we've actually learned is that American Exceptionalism is a lie. This is something to consider as the saber-rattling over Iran continues. ¹Xenophon, Anabasis, trans. H.G. Dakyns (Charleston, SC: BibiloBazaar, 2007), 113. ²Ibid., 125.

His Dark Magoguery

I’m still in touch enough with Christian Fundamentalism that I knew about the uproar over The Golden Compass long before it became a news story. I had only heard of Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy a little while before news of the movie came out. True, the first book came out a dozen years ago and I was somewhere in the neighborhood of the key demo, seeing as how I was 14 and an avid reader at the time. But I started reading Tom Clancy in the fourth grade and by the time I hit junior high I was firmly ensconced in a combination of techno-thriller and sci-fi and never really read or cared much about the fantasy genre. Either way, I learned of His Dark Materials at some point in the last year. Specifically, I learned that it was good storytelling and that the author made a big deal of his atheism. Then I learned about the movie, the great lengths the movie was supposedly going to in order to avoid controversy, and, eventually, the Christian backlash. Christian backlash tends to amuse me. It carries with it a panicked note that would seem to indicate that this one book, movie, or song will be able to, in and of itself, destroy a two thousand-year-old faith. It ultimately boils down to the deep, understandable dread of the fundamentalist, namely that fundamentalism of any stripe is a brittle “faith” built on an insubstantial foundation. Back in the early days of public atheism, the best friend to the atheist was, oddly enough, the Christian theologian. There was a time when a theologian in search of a way of handling apologetics would come up with the best possible argument against the existence of god or Jesus or for the a-historicity of Biblical claims, then refute them. It wasn’t the watered-down “apologetics” we find now with the utterly absurd notions of the Chick Tract or the hard-hitting “investigative journalism” of the 43,000 books in the Case for Christ series (nothing against Lee Strobel himself, but I was never overly impressed with The Case For Christ and I’ve been less impressed with each subsequent book in the theme. The “journalism” owes more to Buck Williams than Walter Winchell. Oh, and I have many, many things against Jack Chick). Point is, there was once a time when Christian theology wasn’t actually afraid of divergent viewpoints. In fact, it actively sought out diverging points. Yes, it was for the purpose of shooting them down with hard core theologizing, but I’m not complaining. It was, at least, interesting. Modern Fundamentalist Christianity is a belief system based on fear of anything that could possibly rock its “faith.” It spits on the traditions laid down by Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, and Paley. The uproar over The Golden Compass is a near-perfect illustration of just how anemic Christian theology and, therefore, the Christian faith has become. See, if I were, for some utterly bizarre reason, involved on the Christian side of a Christian/atheist debate wherein everyone pulled their opponents out of a hat, I would be hoping to pull Philip Pullman’s name. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, and Stephen Jay Gould (who might be fairly easy to beat now, what with the being dead thing) would have the advantage of rigorous scientific backgrounds. Arthur Miller and Jonathan Miller (no relation) have the advantage of being quite eloquent. Philip Pullman is just, well, shrill. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that I know he’s real and probably does believe the things he says he does, I’d say he’s a fantastic representation of a straw atheist. I’d also say he’s the atheist version of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, but Pullman actually knows how to write, create sympathetic characters, and his over-the-top exposition at least includes thoughts and ideas that are compelling enough to make it somewhat forgivable. Yes. I’ve read His Dark Materials. Every single one of the thousand-ish pages it contains. I enjoyed the books and actually stopped to think about a couple of the points Pullman made (even though they were in the exposition part of the book. But, hey, ham-handed delivery of a good/interesting thought doesn’t actually cover up a good/interesting thought all the time). Still, there was nothing in them that swayed my thinking on any religious topic. The closest it came was when he managed to state a couple of thoughts I have had or have heard in clearer and more succinct ways than I’d previously experienced. But that’s hardly something that can be described as compelling evidence for indoctrination. Thing is, there’s nothing in His Dark Materials that’s really compelling beyond the general fact that it's a fun story. I had to constantly remind myself that the world Pullman was building and the story he was telling from it were specifically designed for the destruction of the idea of the Christian god. If I hadn’t known that from the beginning I probably wouldn’t have really picked up on it. I’ve heard of a lot of people who were not exactly Christians to begin with who found his message annoying or didn’t even notice it was there in the first place. And until the movie was about to come out I have never once heard of the books from a Christian context. It’s weird, because I’ve either heard of them described as wonderful fantasy tales or decried in the same way I dislike C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy (I was rather interested by the first, ground my teeth to nubs trying to wade through the second, said, “Are you kidding?” and quit shortly in to the third. I think I handled Narnia in much the same way). Either way, Fundamentalist Christians all over the US got whipped up in to a frothy lather over The Golden Compass. They took all kinds of issue with the fact that (gasp!) the writer is an atheist, got all crazy with a couple of random quotes, then used the fact that any and all mention of god or church or religion was basically excised from the movie as proof of some sort of vast atheist conspiracy to indoctrinate poor, vulnerable Christian children and freaked out. Over nothing. Really. There is nothing for a person with a robust faith and a little bit of logical acumen to fear from Philip Pullman’s trilogy. The “Authority” of His Dark Materials is so very alien from any representation of god I’ve ever seen that there’s no real point of connect (and this is coming from a guy who refers to the god theory behind most Fundamentalist Christian thought as “The Cosmic Jackass God,” so that’s a fairly strong statement there). The universes are populated by beings that share names with beings that occupy popular mythological and religious writings but that aren’t really the same thing. Oh, and as for the big uproar about every person in Lyra’s universe having “daemons” as a symbol of the evil of Pullman’s world: I have little doubt that there was some intended mischief there, but a “daemon” and a “demon” are two very different concepts. The former is a class of mythological beings that are neither god nor human but that are there in the interface of people with the divine. The latter, is, of course, an agent of Satan. I’m pretty sure, in fact, that there’s at least one place in the trilogy where Pullman makes it a point to lay out the fact that he’s aware of the difference. The concept of the daemon, in fact, precedes the Christian demon due to the fact that Christianity appropriated and misapplied the word. Pullman’s daemon is a Greek classical construct and, as far as I can tell, is appropriately applied to the concept in which he uses it. But, see, knowing those things would require some modicum of research on the part of the hyperventilating Christian right. It’s much easier to pull down random quotes and start a hubbub than it is to read a book and look to see if there’s any particular reason why the author used a word that you think is the same as this other word but spelled it differently. I’m afraid there’s a reason for that. I’ve already said that there’s no reason for a person of robust faith and a tiny bit of logical acumen to fear His Dark Materials. The fact of the matter is, though, that Fundamentalism is the exact opposite of a “robust faith.” It is so brittle, so unsteady on its foundations, that it can’t bear to take that hit from an outsider with a really cool fantasy story built in to a poorly conceived conception of a god. Far from boycotting his works, Christians should be joining Philip Pullman in trying to kill The Authority of His Dark Materials. Or, at least, they should be figuring out how to explain that The Authority is nothing like the god found in the Bible. Perhaps, though, it’s taken as a given that it’s easier to attack a message than to read and contemplate it. And, maybe, the god most fundamentalists worship is too uncomfortably close to Pullman’s Authority and they’re afraid to admit it. I really couldn’t tell you which one it is, though. I should just get back to that whole Mythology Project thing. Just as soon as I figure out how to actually write Part 2 of Mythology in the Third Age without hating it. It's kind of important...

Under African Skies

This is the story of how we begin to remember This is the powerful pulsing of love in the vein After the dream of falling and calling your name out These are the roots of rhythm And the roots of rhythm remain --Paul Simon, "Under African Skies" I think I have a bit of a morbid streak. The other day I learned of the existence of a book named We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch. I knew I had to read it. It called to me, even though all I saw of the book was a paragraph-long blurb. The book fit in with Dave Eggers' What is the What, the novelized story of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, a survivor of a genocidal war that long predated the current conflict in Darfur. It also connects in with A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers by Lawrence Weschler, a book that covered the despotic regimes of the '70s and '80s in Brazil and Uruguay from the perspective of the survivors. These books all tell different stories, but the stories are one and the same. They are the stories of what happens when some people forget that we are all human, no matter what label this group or that receives. All three books remind me that when we lose track of the fact that our enemies are human, we tend to forget that we are human. Gourevitch's book seems, at first glance, to be something too big for a simple thesis statement. It seems like it will answer a few questions and ask more than it, or any book, can possibly answer. But in the first chapter there is a paragraph that dares to ask one of the most difficult questions I've ever seen: But at Nyarubuye, and at thousands of other sites in this tiny country, on the same days of a few months is 1994, hundreds of thousands of Hutus had worked as killers in regular shifts. There was always the next victim, and the next. What sustained them, beyond the frenzy of the first attack, through the plain physical exhaustion and the mess of it? This is the same question that should haunt us as we approach the Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia, Darfur. These questions should follow us as we look at Saddam Hussein, but also at Gitmo and Abu Gharib. What mechanism is it in the human mind that allows commanders to order such atrocities? What mechanism is it that allows people to follow those orders? How did a program of Hutu Power allow Rwandans to kill their neighbors simply because they were Tutsis? How did Hitler and the Nazis whip the German people in to a frenzy directed at the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and crippled? Why did people follow Stalin, Pol Pot, even Joseph McCarthy? I fear we will never answer these questions. I also fear that we will have to ask them many times over in the future. One of the most quoted and least understood phrases quoted in regard to the study of history is Santayana's famous maxim that, "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it." We live in a world that takes that concept very literally. There is a general idea that because we know that some things happened in the past, they won't happen again. That's not at all what Santayana's warning means. Rote memorization is the easiest path to forgetfulness. We must learn the lessons of the past, not just the facts. These lessons aren't simply static bits of information for the digestion of historians. They tell us something about where we're going. They tell us what to look for now in order to avoid disaster in the future. It is because of what I know of Rwanda and the Holocaust that I fear the consequences of Ron Luce's BattleCry movement. It is because of the history of torture in South America that I worry about what will come of Gitmo and Abu Gharib. We seem to think that America is isolated from the rest of the world and its history. "It can't happen here," is one of the phrases most uttered when someone raises the alarm. It can. It probably will. Americans are humans, too. We have the very same tendency to villify those with different viewpoints and dehumanize those with different backgrounds everyone else does. We live in a nation that will eventually decline and fall. History tells us it happens to everyone. We aren't invincible. In fact, we're probably more vulnerable than most simply because we believe we are invincible. It can happen here.

War Music

One of the most interesting books I’ve read in the last year was Christopher Logue’s War Music. It’s an “account” of 8 of the sections of Homer’s Illiad. The reason it’s called an account is simple: it’s a modern, poetic re-telling of the blind master’s work. I loved War Music. I spent the better part of a week trying to track down a copy, then I tore through it. Meanwhile, my copy of the Robert Fagles translation of The Illiad sat on my bookcase and gathered dust. Why is this? I blame a man named Heinrich Schliemann. Back about a hundred and fifty years ago, Schliemann set out on a fool’s errand. His goal was to find ancient Troy. Yes, that Troy. The Troy of the Trojan Horse and the “face that launched a thousand ships” and deceptive Paris, proud Hector, eventual legendary foundation of Rome (see Virgil’s Aeneid, also recently helpfully translated by Robert Fagles). Schliemann’s friends probably sat him down one night and had a few fine German beers. They probably explained to him in exhausting detail why he was an idiot. “It’s poetry,” his friends would have told him, “Nothing more. You can’t follow a poem and find a real city any more than you could listen to a song and track down that beautiful girl for whom the stars hide their faces.” “Shut up,” said Schliemann, “Troy’s out there. I know it.” “Sure,” his friends nodded knowingly, “And so’s the island where Circe imprisoned Odysseus. Plato’s cave, I’ll bet you could find that, too. Oh, and try to take some pictures of Bigfoot looting El Dorado while you’re out there.” Schliemann’s friends, it seems, had no real sense of geography. Fortunately for Schliemann, he did not share that problem. Our plucky protagonist ignored his friends and headed out to find Troy. He followed the map recorded in The Illiad. Sure enough, right where he expected to find Troy, he found an ancient city that matched Homer’s account. Ever since then, The Illiad has been more than a poem. It’s been an actual historical document. And as such it’s been treated to modern translations and lost most of the majesty and lyricism it was supposed to have. Okay, it’s more complicated than that. There are many different schools of thought in how linguistics works and the importance of literal translation v. paraphrasing to maintain the purpose. Track down my friend Amy if you care, she knows more about this stuff than I do. The point of all of this is, in my mind, a question of Truth. Nobody had ever bothered to mount a serious search for Troy before Heinrich Schliemann did so. Why? It’s probably because everyone looked at Homer’s masterwork and saw the devices and the mythology and assumed it was nothing more than an ancient Greek TV show. Searching for Troy would be the equivalent of trying to find Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital by following the scripts of episodes of House. The devices in The Illiad are fairly obvious. Paris is tempted by the Goddesses Hera, Aphrodite and Athena. Achilles, the brooding half-god sulks his way thought the story. Clever Odysseus teaches the all-important Greek lesson of hubris to the Trojans, who accept the Trojan Horse and thus bring about their own demise. It’s entertainment. It’s mythology. It’s true. At least on some level. So the question brought to us by Homer’s Illiad is this: what constitutes truth? Did the characters and motivations in Homer’s tale have to be real in order for Troy to exist? Did Achilles or Agamemnon have to actually exist in order for us to learn lessons from them? Did Helen actually have to “launch a thousand ships” for the lessons about lust and greed and betrayal to stand up? What if the supposed ten-year war with Troy was actually, as historians believe, a series of trade squabbles between the burgeoning Greek navy and a city situated in prime real-estate on the Hellespont on to which Homer tacked on a few lessons about unity and greed and betrayal? Does the existence of Troy make Homer’s story any less valid? Does a war that had nothing to do with Paris kidnapping Helen mean that The Illiad has to be thrown out the window? If the lessons are true, does it matter whether or not the facts hold up? Edit: The poet's name is Logue, not Pogue. Thanks, Amy.