The truckers and Hector: the gods are angry with those who drag a noble “enemy” through the mud.
Will the dream of a Canada as a place where we all belong survive the winter?
(Franz Matsch’s Triumph of Achilles; Achilles drags the body of Hector though the mud)
As the tragic events of recent days in Ottawa have unfolded, many residents have expressed not only disagreement with the truckers but also thinly or barely masked disdain for them as inferior beings and as a metaphoric source of infection against which the city must guard itself and be sanitized.
These sentiments are being implicitly encouraged by official messaging, especially from our Prime Minister who has decided to implicitly label bodily autonomy an unacceptable idea and has successfully mobilized the hostility of many Ottawa residents toward the truckers to seize emergency powers. Trudeau knows his base and understands who he can count on to believe that their own convenience and sense of superiority should determine political and legal outcomes.
The following appeared in my Twitter on Feb. 20 under Ottawa Police: “If you are involved in this protest, we will actively look to identify you and follow up with financial sanctions and criminal charges.” Assuming that this is an authentic message, what does the vague “involved” mean? I am a law-abiding and fearful person, so I always do as told by the police and the law, but will we at some point in the future have to fear speaking out, which currently is still a constitutional right? While I will always follow the law, I hope that the legality of this tragedy will be closely scrutinized and that the truckers and protesters will benefit from fine and vigorous legal defence and from the fairness of judges who will uphold the idea that the law should be an instrument of justice, not of politics or power.
People in Ottawa who participate in the smear campaign against the truckers and who seem to be encouraging harsh interpretations of the law would benefit from re-reading The Iliad, the epic story of the Greek siege on Troy, especially starting in Book 22 and until the end of the epic.
(Giovanni Maria Benzoni’s Hector and Andromache)
One of the features that makes the Iliad more than just militaristic Greek propaganda is that the enemy is profoundly humanized—so much so that it is hard to tell who the most revered and dignified hero of the Iliad is: Achilles the Greek or Hector the Trojan prince. Even though Hector is the enemy, he is deeply respected for his courage and integrity, as well as his love of his city and family and willingness to fight for what he believes in.
When Hector kills Achilles’s friend Patroclus (mistakenly believing him to be Achilles because Patroclus was wearing Achilles’s armor), Achilles, mad with grief, not only kills Hector at the point of his sword; he also ties Hector to his chariot and drags him through the mud, defiling his corpse to the great distress of his grieving family who are standing at the walls of Troy, watching the horror unfold.
The tragic demise of noble Hector begins when he finds himself standing outside the walls of Troy, the only Trojan who has refused to retreat from the Greek assault:
(Sergey Postnikov’s Farewell of Hector and Andromache)
So all through Troy the men who had fled like panicked fawns
were wiping off their sweat, drinking away their thirst,
leaning along the city’s massive ramparts now
while Achaean troops, sloping shields to shoulders,
closed against the walls. But there stood Hector,
shackled fast by his deadly fate, holding his ground
Priam, the king of Troy, begs his son to retreat into the safety of the walls:
and the old man moaned, flinging both hands high,
beating his head and groaning deep he called,
begging his dear son who stood before the gates,
unshakable, furious to fight Achilles to the death.
The old man cried, pitifully, hands reaching out to him,
“Oh Hector! Don’t just stand there, don’t, dear child,
waiting that man’s attack—alone, cut off from friends!
You’ll meet your doom at once, beaten down by Achilles,
so much stronger than you—that hard, headlong man. . . .
Back, come back! Inside the walls, my boy!. . . .
So the old man groaned
and seizing his gray hair tore it out by the roots
but he could not shake the fixed resolve of Hector.
Hecuba, Hector’s mother, joins her husband Priam in pleading with Hector to retreat into safety:
So they wept, the two of them crying out
to their dear son, both pleading time and again
but they could not shake the fixed resolve of Hector.
No, he waited Achilles, coming on, gigantic in power.
(Rafael Tejeo’s Achilles Defeating Hector)
Hector does feel fear and tries to flee by the time Achilles arrives, but it is too late, and Achilles slays Hector:
With that he wrenched his bronze spear from the corpse,
laid it aside and ripped the bloody armor off the back.
And the other sons of Achaea, running up around him,
crowded closer, all of them gazing wonder-struck
at the build and marvelous, lithe beauty of Hector.
Achilles and the other Greeks feel deep respect for their dead enemy Hector, but then Achilles, grieving for Patroclus and traumatized by war, makes a critical mistake:
and now he was bent on outrage, on shaming noble Hector.
Piercing the tendons, ankle to heel behind both feet,
he knotted straps of rawhide through them both,
lashed them to his chariot, left the head to drag
and mounting the car, hoisting the famous arms aboard,
he whipped his team to a run and breakneck on they flew,
holding nothing back. And a thick cloud of dust rose up
from the man they dragged, his dark hair swirling round
that head so handsome once, all tumbled low in the dust— . . . .
And so he kept on raging, shaming noble Hector,
but the gods in bliss looked down and pitied Priam’s son.
The god Apollo characterizes Achilles as
That man without a shred of decency in his heart . . .
his temper can never bend and change—like some lion
going his own barbaric way, giving in to his power,
his brute force and wild pride, as down he swoops
on the flocks of men to seize his savage feast.
Achilles has lost all pity! No shame in the man,
shame that does great harm or drives men on to good . . . .
. . . this Achilles—first he slaughters Hector,
he rips away the noble prince’s life
then lashes him to his chariot, drags him round
his beloved comrade’s tomb. But why, I ask you?
What good will it do him? What honor will he gain?
Let that man beware, or great and glorious as he is,
we mighty gods will wheel on him in anger—look,
he outrages the senseless clay in all his fury!
The goddess Hera tries to defend Achilles’s literal smear campaign on the grounds that Achilles is a superior being, the son of the immortal Thetis, while Hector is a member of an “inferior class. She mocks the gods for “keeping company” with the “truckers:”
. . . Hector is mortal. He sucked a woman’s breast.
Achilles sprang from a goddess—one I reared myself:
I brought her up and gave her in marriage to a man,
to Peleus, dearest to all your hearts, you gods.
All you gods, you shared in the wedding rites,
and so did you, Apollo—there you sat at the feast
and struck your lyre. What company you keep now,
these wretched Trojans.
But Zeus, the head God, would have none of this snobbism. He reminds Hera that Hector was a loyal “taxpayer” who sacrificed regularly to the gods:
But Zeus who marshals the storm clouds warned his queen,
“Now, Hera, don’t fly into such a rage at fellow gods.
These two can never attain the same degree of honor.
Still, the immortals loved Prince Hector dearly,
best of all the mortals born in Troy ...
so I loved him, at least:
he never stinted with gifts to please my heart.
Never once did my altar lack its share of victims,
winecups tipped and the deep smoky savor. These,
these are the gifts we claim—they are our rights.
Zeus then summons Thetis, Achilles’s mother, to Olympus and gives Thetis an order to convey a message from the Gods to her son:
Go at once to the camp, give your son this order:
tell him the gods are angry with him now
and I am rising over them all in deathless wrath
that he in heartsick fury still holds Hector’s body,
there by his beaked ships, and will not give him back—
perhaps in fear of me he’ll give him back at once.
(Joseph Wencker’s Priam at the Feet of Achilles)
When Priam, the King of Troy, goes to Achilles to beg to redeem Hector’s body, Achilles finds himself overwhelmed with empathy for the father of his dead “enemy:”
Priam wept freely
for man-killing Hector, throbbing, crouching
before Achilles’ feet as Achilles wept himself,
now for his father, now for Patroclus once again,
and their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house.
Then, when brilliant Achilles had had his fill of tears
and the longing for it had left his mind and body,
he rose from his seat, raised the old man by the hand
and filled with pity now for his gray head and gray beard,
he spoke out winging words, flying straight to the heart:
“Poor man, how much you’ve borne—pain to break the spirit!
What daring brought you down to the ships, all alone,
to face the glance of the man who killed your sons,
so many fine brave boys? You have a heart of iron.
Come, please, sit down on this chair here...
Let us put our griefs to rest in our own hearts,
rake them up no more, raw as we are with mourning.
What good’s to be won from tears that chill the spirit?
Priam and Achille’s mutual respect shines through in their eyes and makes them listen to each other with respect:
Priam the son of Dardanus gazed at Achilles, marveling
now at the man’s beauty, his magnificent build—
face-to-face he seemed a deathless god ...
and Achilles gazed and marveled at Dardan Priam,
beholding his noble looks, listening to his words.
But once they’d had their fill of gazing at each other,
the old majestic Priam broke the silence first:
“Put me to bed quickly, Achilles, Prince.
Time to rest, to enjoy the sweet relief of sleep.
Not once have my eyes closed shut beneath my lids
from the day my son went down beneath your hands ...
(Hector's Corpse Brought Back to Troy; detail from Roman artwork)
Achilles’s final gesture of good will is a promise to suspend the fighting until the Trojans have had time to mourn Hector with the full dignity that the noble man deserves deserves:
“Tell me, be precise about it—
how many days do you need to bury Prince Hector?
I will hold back myself
and keep the Argive armies back that long.
And the old and noble Priam answered slowly,
If you truly want me to give Prince Hector burial,
full, royal honors, you’d show me a great kindness,
Achilles, if you would do exactly as I say.
You know how crammed we are inside our city,
how far it is to the hills to haul in timber,
and our Trojans are afraid to make the journey.
Well, nine days we should mourn him in our halls,
on the tenth we’d bury Hector, hold the public feast,
on the eleventh build the barrow high above his body—
on the twelfth we’d fight again ... if fight we must.”
The swift runner Achilles reassured him quickly:
“All will be done, old Priam, as you command.
I will hold our attack as long as you require.”
Respect for the enemy is a part of the heroic code. Dehumanizing and degrading the enemy, on the other hand, is a part of the totalitarian code.
If the gods of Mount Olympus were watching Ottawa, they might have had a few things to say about our hubris, which in Greek means excessive pride and defiance of the gods, leading to a fall. They would perhaps remind us of the human sacrifice made by the truckers, as well as their steadfast courage and determination—not to mention their long track record as taxpayers and loyal workers (the twenty-first century equivalent of offering sacrifices to the gods?). The gods would also remind us that it is one thing to believe that someone is your enemy; it is another thing altogether to drag a noble enemy through the mud of distorted narratives instead of allowing those who want to do so to mourn with dignity. And to Trudeau, from their immortal vantage point, the gods might prophesize that he is now creating the raw material over which future prime ministers will be apologizing—or perhaps the gods will prophesize even deeper tyranny in Canada. In the epic heroic code, you do not have to agree with the truckers to respect their determination to protect basic civil liberties—not to mention to respect for their humanity. Priam and Achilles gazed at each other in admiration and mutual respect. They listened to each other. Why do we look away in smug disgust and cover our ears?
And why do we charge people with “mischief” when the reason for charging them is a declaration of an emergency threat to Canada? There is a name in literature to calling mischief war—it is called the mock-epic genre (see, for instance, Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock”). But our own currently unfolding mock-epic feel more like a tragedy because there is nothing legally funny about it.
In Greek tragedy, the actors wore masks that portrayed fixed expressions. The chorus sang with one voice to express the collective point of view of the community. For example, in Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, the chorus sing, “Our sorrows defy number” to describe the devastation that the plague has been causing their city Thebes. During the protest, Ottawa appeared sometimes to consist of a chorus wearing tragic frowning masks—lamenting the inconvenience caused by the truckers and expressing anxiety about the truckers’ moral character. But what is behind the masks? What do we risk losing when we focus much attention on the fact that the truckers have to leave “our city” but little attention on the legal mechanism which was used to chase them away—the first-ever invocation of the Emergencies Act designed for situations that threaten not only a particular politician or lifestyle but the basic security of Canada? Does the end justify the means? And will what happened ever be seriously challenged by the courts?
In the movie Gladiator, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius is approaching death as the Roman army is fighting Germanic tribes on the snowy battlefield. Aurelius knows that his son Commodus is not a moral man. Instead, he decides to adopt Maximus, his loyal general, as his successor (too bad that our own leaders do not try to prevent their own immoral children from rising to power). Marcus wants Maximus to restore corrupt Rome to its true self. He broaches the subject by telling Maximus that Rome, far from a stable empire, is in fact “only” an idea, a fragile dream that needs to be defended. The bolding in the following excerpt from the screenplay of the Gladiator is mine:
[SCENE CHANGES to Marcus's tent where Marcus sits hunched over his desk, writing on a tablet. Maximus enters and Marcus does not look up.]
MAXIMUS: You sent for me Caesar? [No response. Maximus turns to look at the weak and old Marcus.] Caesar?
MARCUS: Tell me again Maximus, why are we here?
MAXIMUS: For the glory of the empire, Sire.
MARCUS: Ah yes, ah yes. I remember. You see that map, Maximus? That is the world which I created. For 25 years, I have conquered, spilt blood, expanded the empire. Since I became Caesar I have known four years without war - four years of peace in 20. And for what? I brought the sword, nothing more.
MAXIMUS: Caesar, your life...
MARCUS: Please, please don't call me that. Come here and sit. Let us talk now, together now. Very simply, as men. Well, Maximus, talk.
MAXIMUS: 5,000 of my men are out there in the freezing mud. 3,000 are cleaved and bloodied. 2,000 will never leave this place. I will not believe they fought and died for nothing.
MARCUS: And what would you believe?
MAXIMUS: They fought for YOU and for Rome.
MARCUS: And what is Rome, Maximus?
MAXIMUS: I have seen much of the rest of the world. It is brutal and cruel and dark. Rome is the light.
MARCUS: Yet you have never been there. You have not seen what it has become. I am dying, Maximus. When a man sees his end he wants to know that there has been some purpose to his life. How will the world speak my name in years to come? Will I be known as the philosopher, the warrior, the tyrant. Or will I be remembered as the Emperor who gave Rome back her true self? There was once a dream that was Rome, you could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish. It was so fragile and I fear that it will not survive the winter.
<Script: https://sfy.ru/transcript/gladiator_ts>
Following the tragic events of the recent days in Ottawa, we are in mourning for the idea of Canada as a free country where everybody can feel a sense of belonging. We have to deal with the shock that this idea is much more fragile than we have imagined and that some people may never feel a true sense of acceptance from the community. As an immigrant who is perceived by many as “different” for a variety of reasons, I have always felt that I love Canada more than Canada loves me, but I do not recall seeing such a blatant, state-endorsed demonization of any group in Canada as we now see for the truckers, protesters and unvaccinated people. Why was it impossible to acknowledge the truckers’ message as a legitimate voice within a society that values diversity and inclusion? Why not negotiate with them the possibility of a smaller ongoing protest that would minimize disruption to traffic, etc.?
Is liberty in Canada strong enough to survive winter 2022? Will it be reborn in the spring?
(“Krembo,” a popular Israeli treat)
As a Jewish person, I know that some dreams are too fragile to survive except in fragments. I recently walked into a European delicatessen in Ottawa stocked with delightful treats from countries such as Poland, Germany, Austria, Hungary and the Ukraine. Staring at me were many of the favorite treats of my childhood in Israel—cheesecake and doughnuts like the ones sold in Israeli bakeries, the chocolates in the shape of banana filled with banana cream that I used to buy in the corner store after school, the marshmallow coated with chocolate extremely popular in Israel, the super-thin egg noodles that my grandmother used to put in her chicken soup. . . The surprise encounter with these comfort foods was nostalgic and heartwarming—but it was also a jarring experience because when I grew up in Israel, none of these beloved treats were marketed and sold as European imports. They were proudly manufactured in Israel in our own factories and assertively labelled with Hebrew names, so there would be no reason for the sugar-craving Israeli kid to suspect their candy of being foreign—let alone in any way tragic.
In reality, these attractively packaged confections of my childhood were the fragments of a dream that painfully exploded and shattered to pieces—the dream of European Jewish life that at least between the enlightenment and the rise of Nazism looked pretty promising to many people (minus the pogroms, the Dreyfus affair, etc.). I can imagine the bitter-sweet longing of the people who first manufactured those treats in Israel and renamed them in Hebrew—as if to preserve something sweet from the world that was lost and offer those fragments as a silent gift to us, the children, often called by our grandparents “my candles” (candle being a symbol of memory in the Jewish tradition).
In Canada today, we may adapt the words of the fictional Marcus Aurelius: “There was once a dream that was Canada as a place of liberty where everyone feels that they belong; you could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish. It was so fragile, and I fear that it will not survive the winter.” Perhaps we should have listened to Aurelius more attentively. We did not whisper about diversity and inclusion o intersectionality. We spoke about those ideas clearly and assertively—only to refrain from upholding the very same values when it comes to Freedom Convoy 2022. Would it have been more honest to whisper instead of shout, to admit that liberty and inclusion was always much more fragile in Canada than claimed and that we should always be cautious about those who seek power? Like God in the Old Testament, Aurelius wants to make Maximus the emperor of Rome precisely because Maximus does not long to be the emperor. Should we be looking for people with more modesty and integrity to lead us?
Can we give Canada back its true self, or will the idea of Canada as a free place where people can find a sense of belonging explode, leaving us with only fragments of memory? Did we throw out the achievements of the scientific revolution and the empirical method in favor of the word “science” spoken in the public sphere as a mask for control? Are we travelling toward a cult-like future in which asking questions will mean heresy and punishment? They say that those who cannot defend their liberty do not deserve their liberty. What does it mean to defend our freedom peacefully today? Perhaps the best that some of us can do is feel the grief and think and speak freely.
Right now, as we are in mourning, we have to keep the flame of liberty alive, if only as a memory—and perhaps take some comfort in the myth that out of the ashes of Troy, was born a new great idea: Rome.
Quotations are from The Iliad (Penguin Classics). Translated by Robert Fagles. Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.