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The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer, by Jonathan Gottschall
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Homer's epics reflect an eighth-century BCE world of warrior tribes that were fractured by constant strife; aside from its fantastic scale, nothing is exceptional about Troy's conquest by the Greeks. Using a fascinating and innovative approach, Professor Gottschall analyses Homeric conflict from the perspective of modern evolutionary biology, attributing its intensity to a shortage of available young women. The warrior practice of taking enemy women as slaves and concubines meant that women were concentrated in the households of powerful men. In turn, this shortage drove men to compete fiercely over women: almost all the main conflicts of the Iliad and Odyssey can be traced back to disputes over women. The Rape of Troy integrates biological and humanistic understanding - biological theory is used to explore the ultimate sources of pitched Homeric conflict, and Homeric society is the subject of a bio-anthropological case study of why men fight.
- Sales Rank: #2120419 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Cambridge University Press
- Published on: 2008-04-21
- Released on: 2008-03-20
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .51" w x 5.43" l, .74 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 236 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"Gottschall escorts us to the rich but sparsely inhabited borderland between anthropology, biology, and literary analysis, where he has found gold. The Rape of Troy is an original and important contribution to all three of these fields, and a very good read in addition." --Edward O. Wilson, University Research Professor Emeritus and Honorary Curator in Entomology at Harvard University
"The Rape of Troy is, above all, a brilliant little book - so brilliant that I wish it were less little. It crackles with intellectual vigor, academic rigor, and the prospect of triggering a revolution in research at the intersection of anthropology, biology, and literature.....[Gottschall's] account of "Homeric tragedy" rises to a level of sanguinary poetry that might make Cormac McCarthy envious." --David Barash, University of Washington, Journal of Human Biology
"There is no way to get bored with Gottschall. He has written a small masterpiece of evolutionary-literary analysis. Only someone with such a thorough knowledge of Homer and Homeric scholarship as he has could do this. This ability to marry disciplines with confidence and authority is rare and should be cherished....For a Homeric moment let us be free to wonder and applaud." --Robin Fox, Rutgers University, Evolutionary Psychology
"This is a fine book in a vigorous style with a delightfully fresh take on an old story. The best book on Homer I've read in years." --Barry Powell, Department of Classics, University of Wisconsin
"A rare combination of literature and science, The Rape of Troy presents an innovative study of the world of Homer from the perspective of evolutionary theory. The results are striking, highly readable and guaranteed to provoke much thought on an always topical and urgent question: what are the causes of violence?" Hans van Wees, University College London, Author of Status Warriors and Greek Warfare: myths and realities.
"Though serious in its purpose of advancing knowledge, The Rape of Troy is also powerfully literary. Gottschall became imaginatively absorbed in the Homeric poems, and through the often virtuoso quality of his interpretive rhetoric, he enables the reader to share in his responsiveness to Homer's poetry. When we speak of criticism that "impresses us with the power, richness, and responsiveness of the critic's mind," it is to criticism of this quality that we refer." Joseph Carroll, University of Missouri, Style, forthcoming
About the Author
Jonathan Gottschall is Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Washington and Jefferson College. He co-edited (with David Sloan Wilson) The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (2005) and has published numerous articles seeking to bridge the humanities-sciences divide.
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22 of 30 people found the following review helpful.
Jonathan Gottschall. The Rape of Troy: Emotion, Violence, and the World of Homer. Cambridge University Press.
By hreeves@ricochet.net
The rigid division between the humanities and the sciences has been lamented now for the better part of the last hundred years. With The Rape of Troy, Jonathan Gottschall aims to build a bridge over a small section of this divide. Armed with a theoretical apparatus that is drawn from both Anthropology and evolutionary sociobiology, Mr. Gottschall sets out to explain the pattern of violent behavior that is depicted in the Iliad and Odyssey. The project is a bold undertaking, and Mr. Gottschall may well have pointed the way forward toward a fruitful approach to explaining certain elements of Homeric society. The Rape of Troy nevertheless falls short of being a work of serious scholarship. Although Mr. Gottschall, an adjunct assistant professor of English, seems relatively at ease with the evolutionary theories he is applying, he appears to possess only a basic familiarity with the text of Homer, a rudimentary and ad hoc understanding of the Greek world, and a limited knowledge of the language. As a result, his conclusions seem to be driven more by his theoretical preconceptions than by a balanced and thorough weighing of the evidence. The book therefore ultimately points the reader down a path that its author lacked the capacity to illuminate, much less follow himself.
The essence of Mr. Gottschall's argument is that the excessive violence of the Homeric world can be explained using the principles of evolutionary sociobiology. The basic insight that he brings to bear in his analysis is that men fight with other men in order to gain sexual access to women. Marshaling anthropological studies of primitive cultures, the author further argues that these fights become ever more violent as the supply of women of childbearing years declines. He then conjectures -- the evidence, he grants, is inconclusive -- that there was likely a shortage of women in the time of Homer. This shortage may have resulted from polygyny, in which the powerful local chiefs monopolized the supply of women, and/or from excess female mortality, brought on both by exposure of infant girls and a variety of other childrearing strategies designed to favor the survival of male offspring. In sum, his argument is that "the patterns of violence in Homeric society are tantalizingly consistent with the hypothesis that Homeric society suffered from acute shortages of available young women relative to young men." (4)
The book is in eighth chapters. The first rehearses the arguments regarding the possibility of reconstructing archaic Greek society from the Homeric poems and the archeological evidence. Gottschall here provides the reader with a basic summary of the controversy between analysts and unitarians, a review of the oral theory of M. Parry, and a survey of the archeological work of H. Schliemann. The second chapter provides a brief ethnography of the Homeric world. This chapter's aim is to dispel the sort of misconceptions -- for example, that Homer's world was "a wealthy world of stable monarchies rules by powerful kings" (29) -- that undergraduate Greek History surveys ordinarily address. Although useful for the non-classicist, therefore, these chapters may be passed over by the specialist.
Chapter 3 reviews the ethnographic, anthropological, and socio-biological evidence for the proposition that young men tend to grow more violent as they have greater difficulty obtaining sexual access to young women. Much of this material may be unfamiliar to the classicist. Essentially, the argument is that males, who invest relatively little time and biological energy in the production of offspring, have a strong incentive to compete for females, who must invest considerable time, energy, and opportunity costs in the production of offspring. Because sex is "cheap" for males, in other words, they will attempt to mate more promiscuously than females, who must shepherd their resources more carefully. It is out of this disparity in the incentives operating for each sex that competition among males for access to females arises.
Chapter 4 is perhaps the most interesting in the book. The author here argues against the contention that the dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon was not about women but about honor, by observing that honor -- and, indeed, all competition between men -- is ultimately a proxy for competition over women. While Gottschall's argument is not persuasive on several counts, his use of the text of Homer and of anthropological evidence is here at its best. If nothing else, his contention that the dispute in the Iliad would never have arisen had Agamemnon merely repossessed a tripod warrants a response.
Chapter 5 assesses how the oftentimes fatal -- indeed suicidal -- competition between Homeric warriors can be explained by sociobiology. Gottschall concludes that even a male who is killed in battle before he can produce offspring may nonetheless be pursuing a successful strategy for passing on his genes, provided that his death creates sufficient kleos to benefit the other male members of this family. The lament of Odysseus that he would have preferred to die gloriously at Troy rather than die unknown at sea is offered as support for this theory. This argument possesses not only the explanatory power that makes evolutionary arguments viscerally appealing, but also that touch of madness which accompanies every attempt to explain all things by reference to one thing, and ultimately renders such attempts incredible.
Chapter 6 considers the Homeric woman and explains how she contributed to the vicious cycle of escalating male violence. Confronted by a violent society in which men would compete to kill their husbands, slaughter their children, and carry them off as plunder, Homeric women naturally sought out the strongest and most violent males as mates in order to maximize their chance of being successfully defended and protected. This led, by principles of natural selection, to the breeding of ever more violent, aggressive, and powerful males, thus perpetuating the cycle.
Chapter 7, "Homer's Missing Daughters," puts forward Gottschall's case for an endemic shortage of women in archaic Greece. As Gottschall admits, the textual and archeological evidence does not suffice to establish the existence of such a shortage. The argument, therefore, reduces to the conjecture that because the Iliad and the Odyssey exhibit the level and type of violence that one would expect to find in a society where women are in short supply, women were therefore likely in short supply in archaic Greece. This is the weakest of Mr. Gottschall's arguments, primarily because he fails to take adequate account of the fact that the Iliad and the Odyssey are works of literature, almost certainly geared toward a male audience. One might just as plausibly conclude, by way of counterexample, based upon the high levels of violence among young males and the relative absence of women that one finds in the Godfather movies, that the United States experienced a pronounced shortage of marriageable women in the early 1970s. The conclusions that should be drawn from Arnold Schwarzenegger I leave to the experts.
Chapter 8 musters everything from the Prisoner's Dilemma to Nash Equilibrium to Aristotle's Poetics in order to explain why the Greeks in Homer's time were unable to break out of this vicious cycle of violence. Reduced to its essence, the argument is that they could not, because whichever group first sought to breed more women in order to reduce the gender imbalance and, thereby, curtail violent male behavior, would quickly be conquered by whichever group chose to continue breeding an excess number of violent males.
The book suffers from the author's lack of intimate familiarity not only with the classical world and its languages and cultures, but also with modern classical scholarship. Indeed, the discussion of the Homeric Question (12-19), as well as the application of Aristotle's analysis of tragedy to the Homeric epics (140-50), have about them something of the feel of an undergraduate paper. Sentences such as "Alogon is a difficult word to translate, but it conveys a sense of negation (a-logon, without logos)" (141), while charming in their way, are unlikely to render many philologists sympathetic to Mr. Gottschall's cause. It is particularly unsettling, however, that several howlers -- for example, that Ajax delivered the first speech in the embassy to Achilles (63); that the funeral games took place in book 19 of the Iliad (81); and that a speech occurring "early in the Odyssey" is cited to book 24 (97) -- escaped the notice of the editors at Cambridge University Press. And while one now expects "formulas" in place of "formulae," the use of "formula" as a plural (143) left the reviewer sulking in his tent. The writing style ranges from the excessively florid to the downright silly. For a truly remarkable piece of purple prose, I refer the reader to page 143. In sum, Mr. Gottschall has made a valiant effort to bring the insights of anthropology, sociobiology, economic analysis, game theory, and Aristotle to bear on the world of Homer. He seems, however, to have undertaken a task ultimately beyond his competence.
The principal problem with Mr. Gottschall's argument, however, is not so much that it is poorly made, but that it impoverishes our understanding of human behavior, psychology, and culture. Provided that he is willing to proceed with a sufficiently monomaniacal zeal, any theorist -- be he a Marxist hoping to explain all things in terms of class, a feminist seeking to explain all things in terms of gender, a Foucauldian seeking to explain all things in terms of power, or a socio-biologist seeking to explain all things in terms of reproductive strategies -- will ultimately be able to rationally explain all things by reference to this one thing. As G.K. Chesterton once quipped, however, "[t]he madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything except his reason." It is precisely this sort of reason, reasoning divorced from judgment, from prudence, and from experience, that has run wild in Mr. Gottschall's work. It is precisely this sort of reason untethered from common sense, moreover, that the division of the humanities and the sciences has lamentably created in the modern academy.
15 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
Great title, Great book
By Michael Damian Gehlhausen
People have been writing about Homer for 2500 years. So, as the author says at the outset of the Rape of Troy, "it is not easy to say anything new about Homer," and it is even harder to say things that are both new AND true. But by bringing together information from biology, anthropology, and history, The Rape of Troy may well have pulled it off. The book presents a whole new theory of the driving reasons for intense violence and conflict in the real historical world that produced the Homeric Epics.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
The Ape in Achilles
By Amazon Customer
Turf-defending classicists may dismiss this work, but it's more interesting than any of the several books I've read by specialists on Homer. And it's far more compelling than such novelistic readings as those of Bernard Knox appended to the Fagles versions.It places Homer in the context of recent studies of prestate warfare; after all, Homer's is the fullest testimony we have on the subject. And it uses the latest paradigms of theories of male violence, which are evolutionary. Now that Marx and Freud have shown their feet of clay, their names are mud, and Darwin is enjoying a resurgence even while no Republican presidential candidates will admit they believe in evolution.
The book argues that male violence has its roots in sperm-competition, genetic programming for reproduction, and thus reads Homeric warfare as essentially rapist, with the note that the touchy tempers of the warriors and their thirst for status, booty, and revenge can all be subsumed within this quest to capture women. The author might have used the word "fetishization" to more advantage on this topic, and I would also encourage him to borrow my definition of humans as "featherless bipeds with a propensity for confusing means with ends." I would also have liked more attention to berserker battle-frenzy, the sheer mad joy of slaughter. so well exemplified by Achilles, and to insane competitiveness among Greek males, where he could have that impudent and unprofessional but suggestive work by Philip Slater, "The Glory of Hera."
The book. and the whole evolutionary approach, will offend feminists and Boas-tradition anthropologists, which is regrettable, for they have been powerful forces for good. But paradigms change. You may object that Gottschall's thesis is speculative, since we cannot prove that Homer's is an accurate picture of Achaean society, but so what? Stephen Greenblatt's widely-praised recent book on Shakespeare is shot through with speculation. That's another paradigm change
Read this book if you love Homer, and also read "Demonic Males" and "The Literary Animal."
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