The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [22]
The rarest kind of reversal—that of a ruler recognizing that a policy was not serving self-interest and daring the dangers of reversing it by 180 degrees—occurred only yesterday, historically speaking. It was President Sadat’s abandonment of a sterile enmity with Israel and his search, in defiance of outrage and threats by his neighbors, for a more useful relationship. Both in risk and potential gain, it was a major act, and in substituting common sense and courage for mindless continuance in negation, it ranks high and lonely in history, undiminished by the subsequent tragedy of assassination.
The pages that follow will tell a more familiar and—unhappily for mankind—a more persistent story. The ultimate outcome of a policy is not what determines its qualification as folly. All misgovernment is contrary to self-interest in the long run, but may actually strengthen a regime temporarily. It qualifies as folly when it is a perverse persistence in a policy demonstrably unworkable or counter-productive. It seems almost superfluous to say that the present study stems from the ubiquity of this problem in our time.
Chapter Two
PROTOTYPE: THE TROJANS TAKE THE WOODEN HORSE WITHIN THEIR WALLS
The most famous story of the Western world, the prototype of all tales of human conflict, the epic that belongs to all people and all times since—and even before—literacy began, contains the legend, with or without some vestige of historical foundation, of the Wooden Horse.
The Trojan War has supplied themes to all subsequent literature and art from Euripides’ heart-rending tragedy of The Trojan Women to Eugene O’Neill, Jean Giraudoux and the still enthralled writers of our time. Through Aeneas in Virgil’s sequel, it provided the legendary founder and national epic of Rome. A favorite of medieval romancers, it supplied William Caxton with the subject of the first book printed in English, and Chaucer (and later Shakespeare) with the setting, if not the story, of Troilus and Cressida. Racine and Goethe tried to fathom the miserable sacrifice of Iphigenia. Wandering Ulysses inspired writers as far apart as Tennyson and James Joyce. Cassandra and avenging Electra have been made the protagonists of German drama and opera. Some thirty-five poets and scholars have offered English translations since George Chapman in Elizabethan times first opened the realms of gold. Countless painters have found the Judgment of Paris an irresistible scene, and as many poets fallen under the spell of the beauty of Helen.
All of human experience is in the tale of Troy, or Ilium, first put into epic form by Homer around 850–800 B.C.* Although the gods are its motivators, what it tells us about humanity is basic, even though—or perhaps because—the circumstances are ancient and primitive. It has endured deep in our minds and memories for twenty-eight centuries because it speaks to us of ourselves, not least when least rational. It mirrors, in the judgment of another storyteller, John Cowper Powys, “what happened, is happening and will happen to us all, from the very beginning until the end of human life upon this earth.”
Troy falls at last after ten years of futile, indecisive, noble, mean, tricky, bitter, jealous and only occasionally heroic battle. As the culminating instrumentality for the fall, the story brings in the Wooden Horse. The episode of the Horse exemplifies policy pursued contrary to self-interest—in the face of urgent warning and a feasible alternative. Occurring in this earliest chronicle of Western man, it suggests that such pursuit is an old and inherent human habit. The story first appears, not in the Iliad, which ends before the climax of the war, but in the Odyssey through the mouth of the blind bard Demodocus, who, at Odysseus’ bidding, recounts the exploit to the group gathered in the palace of Alcinous. Despite Odysseus’ high praise of the bard’s narrative talents, the story is told rather baldly, as if the main facts were already familiar.