December 24, 2002
The latest from Carthage
by Jack Foran
Thanks to Bruce Jackson for the timely remembrance of the Third Punic War (“Saddam delendus est!” Buffalo Report, 12/18).
The main point of comparison with the prospective war on Iraq seemed to have to do with the excessively obsessional character of the motive for the war. But I also appreciated the classical historical perspective in general—of the piece itself and of the quote from Polybius providing the thoughts of Cornelius Scipio as he watched the burning of the city he had just conquered. Historical perspective is what the proponents of the imminent war seem to wish to avoid at all costs.
I loved how, for Scipio, the vision of Carthage in flames immediately recalls Troy. And then the recollection of Troy, the mutability of all human affairs. And mutability, humility. For what happened to them could happen to us. And at the same time, I think, compassion for the vanquished. Implicitly, at least, based on the tradition of Greek literature about Troy. For the writers who wrote about Troy—Homer and the tragedians, especially—wrote about the suffering of the vanquished, rather than transient political realignments. And most prominent among the vanquished (because the vanquished warriors were all dead), the innocent bystanders, the women and children. Focusing on individuals: Hecuba, Andromache, even elen.
All things the proponents of the imminent war don’t want to think about. There’s no humility about them. Not only is this one of the most obsessional wars ever, it’s one of the most hubristic. We’re going into this war on the premise that we’re the one global superpower, and that gives us the right to realign the world in our image, to our liking. And we have such massive technological systems and firepower superiority that we can do this without even taking casualties, or minuscule ones in comparison with the enemy, who will suffer and die in enormous numbers. (We take comfort in this. And if it was not so, if we thought this war would involve any serious sacrifice on our part, we wouldn’t attempt it.) Many who will suffer and die will be women and children. But we can’t think of these as individuals. Just numbers. Collateral damage. And we don’t even want to know the numbers. As we don’t know the numbers of women and children who perished in the previous Gulf War and aftermath.
When we learned in school about the reasons for the Trojan War, there were three basic stories. First, the Paris-Helen story. Paris visits Menelaus, the king of Sparta, and steals his wife and takes her back to Troy. Then, an older story about Paris having to choose who is greatest among the goddesses: Athene, goddess of wisdom, Hera, goddess of power, and Aphrodite, goddess of beauty. And of course he picks Aphrodite, angering the other two, resulting in the war, and explaining the basic partisan alignment of deities in the war. These myth stories were satisfying on a purely literary level. But then there was another story, more of a real world story, about commercial interests, about Troy as a rival or somehow stumbling block to Greek commercial ambitions. This was a much more difficult story to grasp. Partly because so nebulous—who knew anything about economic and commercial realities in that practically prehistoric situation, anyway? Partly because to us high school students, commerce and economics, in general, were such foreign territory. On the other hand, the city of Troy, in Asia Minor, near the Hellespont, did conceivably control the Greek commercial routes to the east. But, of course, years later, thinking about it, the stories about Paris and Helen and Paris and the goddesses are obviously just myth. Not credible causes of a war involving a veritable united nations of Greek states. Only the third story, about commercial and economic rivalry, difficult as it is to know much about the particulars, makes sense as the cause of such an enormous war.
This is another Trojan War we’re contemplating. Not in a literary sense. Not in the sense of an event subsequently recollected and rendered and interpreted and mined for significance as to the nature and meaning of human conflict. Though that’s possible. But in the sense of a push-comes-to-shove act of aggression to determine and distribute once and for all—or as if once and for all—some large-scale commercial and economic realities (read oil, but lots of other things, too) in the long struggle West versus East.
copyright 2002 by Buffalo Report, Inc.