The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [30]
Delusion, the elder daughter of Zeus; the accursed
Who deludes all and leads them astray.’…
… took my wife away from me.
She has entangled others before me—
and, we might add, many since, the Litai notwithstanding. She appears once again in Mark Antony’s fearful vision when, gazing on the murdered corpse at his feet, he foresees how “Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge with Atē by his side, shall cry ‘Havoc’ and let slip the dogs of war.”
Anthropologists have subjected myth to infinite classification and some wilder theorizing. As the product of the psyche, it is said to be the means of bringing hidden fears and wish fulfillments into the open or of reconciling us to the human condition or of revealing the contradictions and problems, social and personal, that people face in life. Myths are seen as “charters” or “rituals,” or serving any number of other funetions. All or some of this may or may not be valid; what we can be sure of is that myths are prototypes of human behavior and that one ritual they serve is that of the goat tied with a scarlet thread and sent off into the wilderness to carry away the mistakes and the sins of mankind.
Legend partakes of myth and of something else, a historical connection, however faint and far away and all but forgotten. The Wooden Horse is not myth in the sense of Cronus swallowing his children or Zeus transforming himself into a swan or a shower of gold for purposes of adultery. It is legend with no supernatural elements except for Athena’s aid and the intrusion of the serpents, who were added, no doubt, to give the Trojans a reason for rejecting Laocoon’s advice (and who are almost too compelling, for they seem to leave the Trojans with little option but to choose the course that contains their doom).
Yet the feasible alternative—that of destroying the Horse—is always open. Capys the Elder advised it before Laocoon’s warning, and Cassandra afterward. Notwithstanding the frequent references in the epic to the fall of Troy being ordained, it was not fate but free choice that took the Horse within the walls. “Fate” as a character in legend represents the fulfillment of man’s expectations of himself.
* Previously widely disputed, this is the span of time more or less agreed upon by scholars since the decipherment of Linear B in 1952.
* In other versions, the origins of the war are associated with the Flood legend that circulated throughout Asia Minor, probably emanating from the region of the Euphrates, which frequently overflowed. Determined to eliminate the unsatisfactory human species, or alternatively, according to the Cypria, to “thin out” the population, which was overburdening the all-nurturing earth, Zeus decided upon “the great struggle of the Ilian war, that its load of death might empty the world.” He therefore contrived or took advantage of the goddesses’ quarrel over the Apple to bring the war about. Euripides adopts this version when he makes Helen say in the play named for her that Zeus arranged the war that “he might lighten mother earth of her myriad hosts of men.” Evidently, very early, there must have been a deep sense of human unworthiness to produce these legends.
Chapter Three
THE RENAISSANCE POPES PROVOKE THE PROTESTANT SECESSION: 1470–1530
At about the time Columbus discovered America, the Renaissance—which is to say the period when the values of this world replaced those of the hereafter—was in full flower in Italy. Under its impulse the individual found in himself, rather than in God, the designer and captain of his fate. His needs, his ambitions and desires, his pleasures and possessions, his mind, his art, his power, his glory, were the house of life. His earthly passage was no longer, as in the medieval concept, a weary exile on the way to the spiritual destiny of his soul.
Over a period of sixty