The newest issue of Vanity Fair contains what most people would consider to be a monumentally unflattering portrait of John McCain. For example:

It’s quite possible that nothing at all has changed about John McCain, a ruthless and self-centered survivor who endured five and a half years in captivity in North Vietnam, and who once told Torie Clarke that his favorite animal was the rat, because it is cunning and eats well. It’s possible to see McCain’s entire career as the story of a man who has lived in the moment, who has never stood for any overriding philosophy in any consistent way, and who has been willing to do all that it takes to get whatever it is he wants.

But I want to challenge, at least in one sense, the notion that any of these characteristics should necessarily be considered negative.

Why is it, for example, problematic that someone should be “willing to do all that it takes to get whatever it is he wants”? What’s the problem with being “ruthless” or even “self-centered”? And why not choose the rat as one’s favorite animal — what’s wrong with being cunning and eating well?

In reading this portrait of John McCain I am reminded of Homer’s portrayal of the great hero, Odysseus. From the beginning of the chapter I’m writing on Odysseus as a classical heroic archetype, here’s how I explain the distinct heroism of Odysseus:

There are very few similarities between Achilles and Odysseus, the two great Homeric heroes. The former is unmatched in strength and speed, speaks his mind and does what he says, and even challenges gods in battle; his martial skill sets the stage for an Achaean victory at Troy and his reward is kléos [κλέος; everlasting glory] despite an untimely death. The latter proceeds along a different path, in large measure because his primary concern is nostos [νόστος; homecoming]. While the Iliad is clear about the fighting skill of Odysseus, his preference is always for strategy and subtlety over straightforwardness. His artifice of the wooden horse ultimately ends the war at Troy, but the story that Homer devotes to him instead concerns the ten years spent in his attempted return to his home on the island of Ithaca. Odysseus is undoubtedly a hero, but he is made of very different stuff from Achilles; one is sharp while the other is blunt and, perhaps consequently, one survives while the other perishes. As Margalit Finkleberg (1995: 2) claims, “there is no way in which Odysseus’ behaviour throughout the Odyssey can be accounted for as heroic on terms of the Iliad.” Given the choice, then, most wouldn’t choose Odysseus’ life – due to the terrible suffering he must endure and the reputational costs associated with his choices – even though he achieves nostos in the end. Indeed, Odysseus is singled out for his decidedly unheroic behavior: he makes use of unseemly disguises, employs trickery rather than fighting straightforwardly, and is well-known as someone who is willing to lie to achieve his objectives.[1]

Certainly, then, the heroism of Odysseus is unusual, and not simply because it is so distinct from the more classically heroic behavior of Achilles. The very first reference to Odysseus in the Odyssey highlights how unusual he is, as Homer refers to him with the epithet polytropos [πολύτροπος; of many ways].[2] The word itself is clearly intended to convey two things: first, the many twists and turns that Odysseus must take before returning home to Ithaca and second, his personality trait of being strategic or wily.[3] While there is general agreement about these two meanings for the epithet, I want to argue that it also provides insight into the distinct type of heroism that Odysseus embodies. By introducing Odysseus as a “man of many ways,” Homer (1999: 27) identifies him as one who is well-known and lauded for possessing some classically heroic trait even though it is never clear that he embodies that trait. Thus, Odysseus is often referred to as a “master mariner” and a “great tactician,” but nothing that he does in the Odyssey suggests that he is particularly deserving of these epithets. Indeed, the Odyssey is a story about his inability to sail home and, during the course of his difficult journey, every single member of his crew dies a distinctly unpleasant death: either eaten by monsters, crushed by giants, or drowned by the gods. Further, the best examples of his tactical brilliance – his blinding of Polyphemos and his elaborate vengeance against Penelope’s suitors – allow him to succeed against his enemies when they are largely defenseless. While Odysseus might very well be both a master mariner and a great tactician, the Odyssey is not about celebrating those particular attributes; they are not the reason that he is a Homeric hero. In this way, he is lauded for his many classically heroic ways even though his heroism actually centers around his ability to endure a great deal more suffering than others in order to accomplish his nostos.

My sense is that much of the same could be said of John McCain. While Odysseus’ is certainly a very different sort of heroism — especially in contrast to the (relatively) straightforward heroism of Achilles — it’s a serious mistake, on my reading, to dismiss the endurance of suffering as somehow unheroic.

What’s more, it’s also a mistake to assume that McCain’s endurance would somehow not be connected to the way he conducts himself even now. That’s not to say that we ought not to criticize John McCain, the politician, because he is related to John McCain, the suffering hero. It is, instead, to say that we ought to realize that those things that allowed for his heroism might not make him the most noble politician in all of our eyes. We ought not to be surprised — or to assume that it would somehow be an obvious critique — that McCain continues to privilege the experience of the rat, who endures whatever life throws at him and who attempts to take care of himself at any cost.

Odysseus would undoubtedly say the very same thing.

Full article here (HT: Michael Tofias).

[1] Indeed, Odysseus’ lies serve to bind him more directly to his maternal grandfather, Autolycus, who “surpassed all men in fraud and ambiguous oaths” (Callaway 1998: 167; cf. Cramer 1973: 2-29 and Callaway 1993: 19 for more on the lies of Odysseus). Of course, Odysseus’ willingness to employ lying and trickery also earn him the condemnation of both Pindar (1980: 262), who contends “that Odysseus’ fame was far greater than his worth,” and Euripides (1954: 99), who portrays him as a “monster of wickedness whose tongue twists straight to crooked, truth to lies, friendship to hate, mocks right and honours wrong!”

[2] The translation of this term – also applied to Hermes – has met with a great deal of debate. Robert Fagles (Homer 2006: 77) renders it “of twists and turns,” while Fitzgerald opts for the far less literal “skilled in all ways of contending” (Homer 1990: 1). I have chosen to use the Lattimore translation of polytropos, “of many ways” (Homer 1999: 27) which is both more literal than the Fitzgerald translation and captures the dual meaning of the word better than does the Fagles translation. Apart from this single (though important) departure, I use the Fitzgerald translation throughout for its generally easy-to-read rendering of the Greek.

[3] Laurence Lampert (2002: 232n2) points out that “It is the defining quality of Odysseus, used in the first line of the Odyssey and at 10.330. As used by Hippias with respect to Odysseus (365b) it includes being false or lying and carries the connotations of wily and shifty.” Quoting Charles H. Kahn (1996: 121-124), Lampert continues: “Antisthenes, a follower of Socrates who wrote Socratic dialogues, also argued against the claim that Homer meant to blame Odysseus by calling him polytropos; Antisthenes claims that it is praise for being ‘good at dealing with men…being wise, he knows how to associate with men in many ways.’”

Bibliography

Cathy Callaway. 1993. “Perjury and the Unsworn Oath,” 123 Transactions of the American Philological Association.

–––––. 1998. “Odysseus’ Three Unsworn Oaths,” 119 American Journal of Philology 2 (Summer).

O. C. Cramer. 1973. Odysseus in the Iliad (Dissertation, University of Texas).

Euripides. 1954. The Bacchae and Other Plays trans. Philip Vellacott (London: Penguin Classics).

Margalit Finkelberg. 1995. “Odysseus and the Genus ‘Hero,’” 42 Greece & Rome 1 (April).

–––––. 1990. The Odyssey trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage Books).

–––––. 1999. The Odyssey trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics).

–––––. 2006. The Odyssey ed. Bernard Knox and trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Classics).

Laurence Lampert. 2002. Socrates’ Defense of Polytropic Odysseus: Lying and Wrong- doing in Plato’s Lesser Hippias,” 64 Review of Politics 2.

Pindar. 1980. Victory Songs trans. Frank J. Nisetich (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).