A philosophical essay

Conundrums are questions which cannot be answered (or so says a philosopher). (Karl Popper, I believe). Such questions are the true concern of philosophy, all else being science adds another (Berlin).

Well then, here’s a bit of philosophy.

Krawczuk’s Seven Against Thebes proposes two sets of conundrums.

The first arises out of the easy fragility of literary monuments. And so, the anonymous heroic epic Thebaid, first cousin and contemporary of the Iliad and the Odyssey, in antiquity often regarded their equal, widely read and admired for nine hundred years, was lost. So was Antimmarchos of Kolophon’s Thebaid, the controversially groundbreaking remake of the Homeric epic, the first example of the new genre of erudite epic, loved, hated and argued over for seven hundred years. So were most of the works of Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles; numerous others of whom we only know by name (the Sykion cycle of dramas in praise of Adrastos, a hero of the Thebaid); and uncounted thousands – tens of thousands? – whose existence we can only guess.

Now, recall the literary treasures of the Niniveh library, both those which had been lost for sixteen hundred years and recovered and those, much more numerous, perhaps 80% of the library’s content, which had been lost for good: the astounding proof of the existence of a thousand years of literature of Babylonia. Yet, until 1920’s we had had no inkling that such a thing had even existed.

Or think of the lost middle age of India. It was as vast and populous as Europe, as ancient and as cultured. Between her ancient classics – The Vedas, the Upanishads, The Mahabharatas, The Tripitaka on the one hand; and her middle age literary flowering of Ujjain on the other; there stretch a thousand years of deafening literary silence. From it only here and there fabulous ruins of abandoned stone temples jut out. Their walls are covered with incomprehensible carvings illustrating their now lost literature, today incomprehensible. That literature was written on palm leaf. Palm leaf has to be recopied every generation or else it is devoured by rot. If a war or an epidemic interrupts the copying, all is lost. And was. Forever.

But is it really lost? Did we – or anyone – really have it? And whose loss is it? Theirs or ours? And that one thousand million letters of medieval Indians are lost, what loss is it exactly? As it is, we have more literature than anyone can ever read; we are not at risk of running out of something to read; what loss then is it if part of the production in which we are drowning up to our ears is mercifully lifted from us? If, by a miracle, ten thousand Indian classics from the lost middle age were to be recovered, who on earth would have the time to read them?

And there are other ways of losing: take Statius’ Thebaid, from the second century A.D., one more retelling of the same Theban story, this time in Latin. For over a thousand years it was read and admired as one the best works of Latin letters, a paragon of style, a textbook of locution. Today it isn’t lost but – forgotten: no one ever reads it. Younger works have upstaged it – Dante, Milton – for reasons that are not really apparent, except that moderns prefer, god only knows why, works written in their own language (or about their own gods?). What difference does it make that the Statius’ Thebaid has not really been lost, when it is not read? One might as well put it to the torch: it would not be more lost that way and perhaps – more regretted.

And there is the other set of cultural conundrums jumping at me as I read the book: the conundrums of repetition. Over the span of eight hundred years the expedition of seven against Thebes was set in epic form no less than three times (once in Homeric times, once by Antimmachos, and once by Statius); and the various dramatic settings of the epic are without number (Krawczuk discusses at least ten). What made the ancients go back to the same story over and over again? What makes us go back to the Trojan War?

Perhaps the reason is precisely our awareness of our memory’s frailty.

Whenever we choose to repeat one old story, we steal resources (time, manpower, memory) from another. (Each time we reread Milton we fail to read Statius and each time we retell Troy we fail to retell Thebes). So perhaps we repeat old stories on purpose? Anyone after two decades rereading a book which he once read and put aside will be struck by how little he has remembered of it; and how poorly he had remembered what he did. And it gets worse: sometimes we get to the end of a book only to realize that we had once read it.

Burdened with so much to remember, we forget. So perhaps we repeat old stories constantly so that we may manage to remember something?

It is not a great discovery that without remembering, and repetition, there would be no culture; and countless class B movies about amnesia have taught us that without remembering (and repetition) we would not be ourselves. It follows that we must try to remember and thus are doomed to repetition. As long as one remembers (repeats?) – the horse at least (the horse, the wooden horse!) the past is not entirely lost; and one isn’t entirely uncultured.

Which leaves me with the final conundrum: why the horse? If what defines a culture are the stories it chooses to repeat – its canon – then, out of all the stories of ancient literature, why the horse?