In neither the one case nor the other would it be true to say that the gods make human beings into puppets and destroy their freedom. The proper analogy is not a puppeteer and his puppets but a grand master playing chess with a novice. The novice's freedom is complete: he may make any moves he likes. But the grand master defeats defeats him easily because he is a better chess player and can see farther ahead. Just so are the gods more powerful than mortals, and when a god wishes to destroy a man, his actions may be free but they will not achieve their intended goal. And just as a grand master might add insult to injury by announcing in advance the exact piece with which he will produce check-mate, so the gods often mock their victims by giving them accurate prophecies of future destruction, prophecies which they nevertheless cannot avoid and which may even be instrumental in their downfall.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Sunday, May 26, 2024
They Kill Us for Their Sport
David Kovacs, The Heroic Muse: Studies in the Hippolytus and Hecuba of Euripides (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 74: