When I think about olden Greek legends, sometimes I am reminded of the Story of Agamemnon and how he lead Sparta and all the nations of Greece against Troy.
When Menelaus heard that Helen had eloped with her lover Paris (who was supposed to be a guest in Sparta), his heart was acrimoniously torn apart and so sought after the assistance of his older brother Agamemnon. Agamemnon was a war-mongering man who loved power and control. In fact he had been hoping to gain control of Troy but was unable to lobby support from his allies. Troy was one of the most wealthy nations around because it had access to important sea routes. When Agamemnon heard of Menelaus’s plight, he made a deal with his brother and said he would help Menelaus get Helen back and offer him Paris’s life but in promise for the riches of Troy.
Menelaus gathered all the great Kings around him and mustered an army of 10000 fleets of warships to sail to Troy. The most important characters in this story were of course Achilles and Odysseus. Achilles was the son of Peleus (a mortal), the king of Myrmidons in Troy. His mother, Thetis, was a Goddess and tried to make Achilles immortal by dipping him in the river Styx. However she forgot to wet the heel she held him by and that left him vulnerable at that spot.
Odysseus was a man of great intelligence and had a great mind of strategies of war. He was one of the supposed suitors for the hand of Helen. Because Tyndareus (Helen’s father) feared that whomever he did not choose as Helen's husband would become jealous and rage war against Sparta, Odysseus came up with a solution and convinced Tyndareus to make it mandatory that all the suitors of Helen to swear an oath to defend whomever Helen chose as husband from among the oath-takers. The suitors, including Odysseus, swore, and Helen finally chose Menelaus as her husband.
Agamemnon, however was not able to gain support from Poseidon, the God of the Sea. The winds blew in the opposite direction of Troy, which made it impossible for them to sail toward their destination. A prophet came to Agamemnon and informed Agamemnon that Poseidon would only grant him access to good winds only if Agamemnon would sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia. Agamemnon thus tricked Iphigeneia by convincing her that she would be wedding Achilles. When Iphigeneia was dressed in her wedding gown, Agamemnon murdered her upon the altar to satisfy Poseidon. They were thus granted favorable winds to Troy.
This whole part of the story disgusts me entirely since Agamemnon in the legend loved his daughter Iphigeneia a lot. When it came to the cross road between wealth and power and family, he chose the former. What was left of his decision was a wake of destruction and tragedy. It is true that Odysseus eventually was the protagonist in the fall of Troy. He was the one who knew that there was no way to destroy the walls of Troy and leveraged on Troy’s weakness (their pride) to cause their downfall. The idea of the Trojon horse was his and he challenged to Trojans to take the Horse into their city. But what was left of the tale was the burning of the City of Troy, of death of tens of thousands of soldiers, disease and 15 years of absence from the home country. When Agamemnon finally returned to Mycenae, his home country, his wife had taken a lover and eventually murdered him for revenge of killing their beloved daughter.
I love and enjoy hearing or watching epic tales of war. One of the situations that really touches (and can make me tear) is when I see the remnants and witness the destruction caused by war. I find that a side of me that’s a little queer since I am not affected by those lovey-dovey stories where a lover dies and his counterpart mourns (That bores me a little as a matter of fact). Some examples can be seen from the shows, “The Curse of the Golden Flower”, when Jay Chou (the prince) led his soldiers into a war they couldn’t win and charged against the shield barricade of the enemy and in another show, “The Kingdom of Heaven” the scene when the Arabs tried to retake the city of Jerusalem, and suffered great casualties. (Gosh I love that show, I want that DVD!)
The most recent show was from the anime Kishin Taisen Gigantic Formula, and during a post-war scene of great battle between two machinas, when the pilot of one of the automatons came out of her cockpit and witnessed her city in ruins, she started weeping for the plight of her city. I have posted some screen shots below. That particular scene really, really touched me.
What makes these parts of the show so sad to me is when I think to myself, all this pain and suffering, for what cause? For what purpose? They say that the study of history is so that we can learn from our past mistakes. I think that even with all the academic sources and historical evidence readily available, men are unable to learn at all from the past, or rather we choose not to. As a matter of fact, men are attracted to the idea of war and the abandonment of what I call idyll. This can be seen from how we enjoy watching war firms, and engage in games like Metal Gear Solid, Call to Duty and all other games that involve the spill in massive amounts of blood. If we truly, abhor the idea of war, it would be rationale to avoid entertainment such as these. I think of SAF and how all men in our country have to enlist to serve our country. They tell us that we have a role to play in defending our country. To me, I think this is all a façade. When I was training in Tekong and doing our Basic Military Combat training, our instructors would instruct us to shout “Kill! Kill! Kill!” with every movement we made. This does not make sense to me. How does the idea of “Killing” go hand in hand with protecting our loved ones? I think this is where we lose our sense of purpose here.
Back to the story of Troy- The soldiers of Agamemnon were told that they had an obligation to defend the pride of their country and their King. They must not condone their country being made a cuckold by allowing Helen to be stolen by Troy! So this is where it all boiled down to- Thousands of soldiers fighting for one man’s honor (Menelaus) and one man’s greed (Agamemnon). This is what I mean by façade. This is what I mean having no sense of purpose. This is why scenes like those I mentioned make me sad.
Why did Helen leave her husband and 6 year old daughter behind and elope with Paris? She chose with her own free will to marry Menelaus. Was she wrong to elope with her lover? Even if she did not love Menelaus, was she wrong to abandon her daughter? These questions have been debated on since time immemorial and an answer to this have not been decided upon.
In the myth from Plato’s Symposium (an extract from The Unbearable Lightness of Being):
“People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Let us suppose that such is the case, that somewhere in our world each of us has a partner who once formed part of our body. Toma’s other part is the young woman he dreamed about. The trouble is, man does not find the other part of himself. Instead he is sent a Tereza in a bulrush basket. But what happens if he nevertheless later meets the one who was meant for him, the other part of himself? Whom is he to prefer? The woman from the bulrush basket or the woman from Plato’s myth?”
Likewise, Menelaus was from the bulrush basket which was sent to Helen and Paris was the other half of Helen from Plato’s myth, which was meant for her. She chose Paris and in so doing, acted in accordance with Aphrodite’s insuperable desire, the longing for the half of herself that was lost. Even if Helen’s decision brought about a great loss and death, to me, she had a purpose that was greater than all the men who went to war for her, and that purpose was for love. Even the King of Troy, Priam concurred: “I have fought many wars in my time, some were fought for land, some for power some for glory. I suppose fighting for love makes more sense than all the rest…”
And this to me makes all the difference because the purpose makes the outcome, no matter what it's grief, it's weight, it's tragedy, bearable for the people who lived in the past and for the future generations who have lived after them. We shoulder it when we are obliged to study the history of previous World Wars in our school curriculum. We shoulder it when we cry together watching historic firms in masterpieces created like "the Pianist". This is what it all boils down to which Milan Kundera very aptly describes regarding men's fundamental debacle:
The struggle of man against power, is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
When Menelaus heard that Helen had eloped with her lover Paris (who was supposed to be a guest in Sparta), his heart was acrimoniously torn apart and so sought after the assistance of his older brother Agamemnon. Agamemnon was a war-mongering man who loved power and control. In fact he had been hoping to gain control of Troy but was unable to lobby support from his allies. Troy was one of the most wealthy nations around because it had access to important sea routes. When Agamemnon heard of Menelaus’s plight, he made a deal with his brother and said he would help Menelaus get Helen back and offer him Paris’s life but in promise for the riches of Troy.
Menelaus gathered all the great Kings around him and mustered an army of 10000 fleets of warships to sail to Troy. The most important characters in this story were of course Achilles and Odysseus. Achilles was the son of Peleus (a mortal), the king of Myrmidons in Troy. His mother, Thetis, was a Goddess and tried to make Achilles immortal by dipping him in the river Styx. However she forgot to wet the heel she held him by and that left him vulnerable at that spot.
Odysseus was a man of great intelligence and had a great mind of strategies of war. He was one of the supposed suitors for the hand of Helen. Because Tyndareus (Helen’s father) feared that whomever he did not choose as Helen's husband would become jealous and rage war against Sparta, Odysseus came up with a solution and convinced Tyndareus to make it mandatory that all the suitors of Helen to swear an oath to defend whomever Helen chose as husband from among the oath-takers. The suitors, including Odysseus, swore, and Helen finally chose Menelaus as her husband.
Agamemnon, however was not able to gain support from Poseidon, the God of the Sea. The winds blew in the opposite direction of Troy, which made it impossible for them to sail toward their destination. A prophet came to Agamemnon and informed Agamemnon that Poseidon would only grant him access to good winds only if Agamemnon would sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia. Agamemnon thus tricked Iphigeneia by convincing her that she would be wedding Achilles. When Iphigeneia was dressed in her wedding gown, Agamemnon murdered her upon the altar to satisfy Poseidon. They were thus granted favorable winds to Troy.
This whole part of the story disgusts me entirely since Agamemnon in the legend loved his daughter Iphigeneia a lot. When it came to the cross road between wealth and power and family, he chose the former. What was left of his decision was a wake of destruction and tragedy. It is true that Odysseus eventually was the protagonist in the fall of Troy. He was the one who knew that there was no way to destroy the walls of Troy and leveraged on Troy’s weakness (their pride) to cause their downfall. The idea of the Trojon horse was his and he challenged to Trojans to take the Horse into their city. But what was left of the tale was the burning of the City of Troy, of death of tens of thousands of soldiers, disease and 15 years of absence from the home country. When Agamemnon finally returned to Mycenae, his home country, his wife had taken a lover and eventually murdered him for revenge of killing their beloved daughter.
I love and enjoy hearing or watching epic tales of war. One of the situations that really touches (and can make me tear) is when I see the remnants and witness the destruction caused by war. I find that a side of me that’s a little queer since I am not affected by those lovey-dovey stories where a lover dies and his counterpart mourns (That bores me a little as a matter of fact). Some examples can be seen from the shows, “The Curse of the Golden Flower”, when Jay Chou (the prince) led his soldiers into a war they couldn’t win and charged against the shield barricade of the enemy and in another show, “The Kingdom of Heaven” the scene when the Arabs tried to retake the city of Jerusalem, and suffered great casualties. (Gosh I love that show, I want that DVD!)
The most recent show was from the anime Kishin Taisen Gigantic Formula, and during a post-war scene of great battle between two machinas, when the pilot of one of the automatons came out of her cockpit and witnessed her city in ruins, she started weeping for the plight of her city. I have posted some screen shots below. That particular scene really, really touched me.
What makes these parts of the show so sad to me is when I think to myself, all this pain and suffering, for what cause? For what purpose? They say that the study of history is so that we can learn from our past mistakes. I think that even with all the academic sources and historical evidence readily available, men are unable to learn at all from the past, or rather we choose not to. As a matter of fact, men are attracted to the idea of war and the abandonment of what I call idyll. This can be seen from how we enjoy watching war firms, and engage in games like Metal Gear Solid, Call to Duty and all other games that involve the spill in massive amounts of blood. If we truly, abhor the idea of war, it would be rationale to avoid entertainment such as these. I think of SAF and how all men in our country have to enlist to serve our country. They tell us that we have a role to play in defending our country. To me, I think this is all a façade. When I was training in Tekong and doing our Basic Military Combat training, our instructors would instruct us to shout “Kill! Kill! Kill!” with every movement we made. This does not make sense to me. How does the idea of “Killing” go hand in hand with protecting our loved ones? I think this is where we lose our sense of purpose here.
Back to the story of Troy- The soldiers of Agamemnon were told that they had an obligation to defend the pride of their country and their King. They must not condone their country being made a cuckold by allowing Helen to be stolen by Troy! So this is where it all boiled down to- Thousands of soldiers fighting for one man’s honor (Menelaus) and one man’s greed (Agamemnon). This is what I mean by façade. This is what I mean having no sense of purpose. This is why scenes like those I mentioned make me sad.
Why did Helen leave her husband and 6 year old daughter behind and elope with Paris? She chose with her own free will to marry Menelaus. Was she wrong to elope with her lover? Even if she did not love Menelaus, was she wrong to abandon her daughter? These questions have been debated on since time immemorial and an answer to this have not been decided upon.
In the myth from Plato’s Symposium (an extract from The Unbearable Lightness of Being):
“People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Let us suppose that such is the case, that somewhere in our world each of us has a partner who once formed part of our body. Toma’s other part is the young woman he dreamed about. The trouble is, man does not find the other part of himself. Instead he is sent a Tereza in a bulrush basket. But what happens if he nevertheless later meets the one who was meant for him, the other part of himself? Whom is he to prefer? The woman from the bulrush basket or the woman from Plato’s myth?”
Likewise, Menelaus was from the bulrush basket which was sent to Helen and Paris was the other half of Helen from Plato’s myth, which was meant for her. She chose Paris and in so doing, acted in accordance with Aphrodite’s insuperable desire, the longing for the half of herself that was lost. Even if Helen’s decision brought about a great loss and death, to me, she had a purpose that was greater than all the men who went to war for her, and that purpose was for love. Even the King of Troy, Priam concurred: “I have fought many wars in my time, some were fought for land, some for power some for glory. I suppose fighting for love makes more sense than all the rest…”
And this to me makes all the difference because the purpose makes the outcome, no matter what it's grief, it's weight, it's tragedy, bearable for the people who lived in the past and for the future generations who have lived after them. We shoulder it when we are obliged to study the history of previous World Wars in our school curriculum. We shoulder it when we cry together watching historic firms in masterpieces created like "the Pianist". This is what it all boils down to which Milan Kundera very aptly describes regarding men's fundamental debacle:
The struggle of man against power, is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
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