Achilles, too, is a ‘speaker of great words’

09-26-2024

“[S]peech is what makes man a political being. […] Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves.”
(Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958), p. 3-4)

There is always more to say about this striking passage from the prologue of The Human Condition. I will restrict my comments here to teasing out its resonances with Arendt’s reading of the Greeks, especially Aristotle and Homer. First, it is worth acknowledging that Arendt’s claim that speech is the activity that makes human beings distinctly political beings is not entirely of her own making. In a widely cited passage from the Politics (which Arendt discusses explicitly in Chapter II) Aristotle asserts that it is logos—speech, or reason—that makes the uniquely human way of life possible. Of course, other creatures use their voices to express pains and pleasures. But, for Aristotle, human beings go beyond such rudimentary expression when they use speech to “mak[e] clear what is beneficial or harmful, and hence also what is just or unjust.” In fact, Aristotle tells us, this is what speech is for; being in community with others means giving voice to one’s “perception of what is good or bad, just or unjust,” and “[a]nyone who cannot form a community with others […] is no part of a city-state.”

In The Human Condition, Arendt inherits and upholds the Aristotelian valorization of speech. This is most forcefully put in Chapter V, in a section titled “The Disclosure of the Agent in Speech and Action”:

Through [speech and action], men distinguish themselves instead of being merely distinct; they are the modes in which human beings appear to each other, not indeed as physical objects, but qua men. […] A life without speech and without action […] is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men.

These provocative (and, as I argue in work under development, problematic) assertions have their foundations in Chapter II, where Arendt considers Aristotle’s “second famous definition of man as a zōon logon ekhon (‘a living being capable of speech’).” This definition is ‘second’ to Aristotle’s even more widely cited description of the human being as zōon politikon, a political animal, but the fact that humans ‘possess’ speech (from èkhein) is no less crucial, since Aristotle acknowledges other political animals (bees, for instance), and other vocal animals, but never other speaking animals.

As part of her engagement with Aristotle on the topic of speech, Arendt contextualizes Aristotle’s position against other Hellenistic thinkers—namely, Sophocles, who died approximately twenty years before Aristotle was born, and Homer, who died approximately four centuries earlier. In both pre-Socratic sources, Arendt finds indications that “only two [activities] were deemed to be political” in their very nature: “action (praxis) and speech (lexis).” This suggests to Arendt that we should not be too quick to attribute to Aristotle the “conviction that these two human capacities belonged together and are the highest of all.” Instead, such a view “seems to have preceded the polis and was already present in pre-Socratic thought.” Arendt gives two pieces of evidence to support this historical claim, one from Homer and one from Sophocles. Let us examine the former.

According to Arendt, “[t]he stature of the Homeric Achilles can be understood only if one sees him as ‘the doer of great deeds and the speaker of great words’.” In a footnote, she specifies that these words are taken from Phoinix’ speech in Book 9 of the Iliad. What is the occasion for Phoinix’s comments? They are immediately preceded by Achilles’ wrathful threat to “return home to the beloved land of my fathers [Phthia]… [where] there will be a long life left for me” (I.IX.440–3). Phoinix implores Achilles “in a stormburst of tears” to remain on the battlefield of Troy despite Agamemnon’s insults, and reminds Achilles of his childhood spent under Phoinix’s tutelage:

Peleus the aged horseman sent me forth with you /
on that day when he sent you from Phthia to Agamemnon /
a mere child, who knew nothing yet of the joining of battle /
nor of debate where men are made pre-eminent. Therefore /
he sent me along with you to teach you of all these matters,
to make you a speaker of words and one who accomplished in action.

Looking at Phoinix’s words ourselves, we might wonder what it is that struck Arendt about his emotional speech. The most obvious answer is that he treats “speaker of words” with the same respect as “one who accomplishe[s] in action”—as Arendt puts it, the two are “coeval and coequal.” By reminding Achilles of his upbringing, Phoinix illuminates for us some of the priorities that were imparted to children of his time, and Arendt reads his speech to “clearly refe[r] to education for war and agora, the public meeting, in which men can distinguish themselves.”

Beyond the fact that Phoinix appeals to action and speech in the same breath, note that his performance is, itself, a remarkable demonstration of the power of speech in Homer’s time. Recall that Achilles is famously a ‘doer.’ None can stand before his wrath on the battlefield, not even Hektor who will, thirteen books later, fall to Achilles’ “savage fury.” But here comes “the aged horseman” Phoinix, unleashing an impassioned, expertly crafted speech with which he hopes to dissuade Achilles from his chosen course of action. Phoinix reminds Achilles of the days when “I [Phoinix] had set you on my knees, and cut little pieces / from the meat, and given you all you wished, and held the wine for you. / And many times you soaked the shirt that was on my body / with wine you would spit up in the troublesomeness of your childhood.” (One might wonder why a child young enough to need his meat cut into small pieces is being fed wine, to which I have no answer.)

Though Achilles is not entirely mollified after Phoinix is done, his position has shifted noticeably. Before Phoinix spoke, Achilles had instructed him to sleep in his tent “so that tomorrow / he may come with us in our ships to the beloved land of our fathers.” Now, after Phoinix’s intervention, Achilles is noticeably less certain of his decision: “[W]e shall decide tomorrow, as dawn shows, / whether to go back home again or else to remain here.”

The point is that, as Arendt puts it, “not everything was decided… through force and violence” in Homer’s time, even if speech is more prominent in Aristotle’s Athens, that “most talkative of all bodies politic,” where speech superseded action as the political activity par excellence. Arendt reminds us that the power of speech concerning the good, bad, just, and unjust was anything but a 4th-century Athenian discovery, and was not restricted to the historical rise of the polis, but descends from an “older pre-polis experience and tradition.” Though Achilles was a great warrior, his battlefield exploits are only part of the explanation for his heroic stature. Achilles, too, is a ‘speaker of great words,’ and one who knew (thanks to Phoinix’s tutelage) that debate is ‘where men are made pre-eminent.’

Arendt’s historical analysis of speech before the polis prefigures her more focused and forceful treatment of speech and action in Chapter V. Connecting these two sections reveals something of Arendt’s unique sensibility for interpreting historical texts and figures, as well as her deft hand at weaving historical sources into her own positions. Even if we cannot know precisely what Arendt gleaned from Phoinix, I am grateful that her footnotes offer us a way to peer over her shoulder and share in her objects of wonder.

About the Author:
Magnus Ferguson is a Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago and a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston College in 2023.