Dante, Sophocles, Gilgamesh REVISED
The Epic of Gilgamesh, Dante's Inferno and Sophocles Oedipus the King are all classic and foundational Western texts which depict, en passant, the importance of humankind's demand to know, to explore and penetrate the unknown, to arrive at ultimate truths about existence and its mysteries, and to find meaning or value therein. I hope to demonstrate with reference to specific episodes -- that of Utnapishtim in Gilgamesh, of the episode of Ulysses in Dante's Inferno, and in the great address to the protagonist hymned by the chorus of Sophocles' tragedy of Oedipus -- this complicated depiction of human intellectual overreach.
Dante provides us with the basic topos of this kind of overreach as a sort of failed heroism, or heroism that breaks forth the bounds of Aristotelian temperance (or sophrosyne) and becomes, paradoxically, a vice. (The Aristotelian definition of sin is central to Dante, since his theology is derived from the Roman Catholic Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas.) Dante uses the earlier epic hero of Homer's Odyssey, given his Latinized name of Ulysses here, to depict a post-Homeric account of Ulysses' demise during one final voyage westward through the "pillars of Hercules" (or present-day strait of Gibraltar, separating the Mediterranean sea from the Atlantic Ocean proper). Ulysses musters a crew by appealing
"Shipmates," I said, "who through a hundred thousand perils have reached the West, do not deny to the brief remaining watch our senses stand experience of the world beyond the sun.
Greeks! You were not born to live like brutes
But to press on toward manhood and recognition!" (Ciardi 222)
This otherwise admirable quest for "experience" seems allegorically like a metaphor for the never-ending intellectual inquiry which can -- in the context of a religion with an established dogma, such that Dante illustrates with his allegory, actually come to seem no heroic virtue at all, but a form of hubris. Yet if the struggle is against death itself -- as Dante seems to imply -- why should it not be troped as heroic? If we turn back from Dante's epic Commedia all the way to the Epic of Gilgamesh, we can find a similar linkage of death with intellectual quest for understanding. In his famous lament of Tablet IX, Gilgamesh laments not the death of heroism, like Dante's Ulysses, but actual death: after Enkidu's death, Gilgamesh seemingly becomes aware of his own mortality, lamenting:
I am going to die! -- am I not like Enkidu?!
Deep sadness penetrates my core,
I fear death, and now roam the wilderness
I will set out to the region of Utnapishtim, son of Ubartutu, and will go with utmost dispatch! (Kovacs, Tablet IX)
In a subsequent tablet which Kovacs omits as being from a later textual tradition, Gilgamesh will indeed seek out the legendary Utnapishtim, a sort of analogue to the Biblical Noah with the added magical element that Utnapishtim has learned how to cheat death entirely, and has become immortal. Yet he offers no satisfactions to the hero, who will travel onward from this encounter, with differing explanations as to why he had not obtained immortality. But the passion of the lament for Enkidu in Tablet IX perhaps makes it clear that Gilgamesh would sooner be reunited by death with his beloved friend than spend a life living in the strange eternity of Utnapishtim.
Gilgamesh represents an archetypal human plight to this degree: he is unable to avoid death. But the heroic march of generations is hymned by the chorus in Sophocles' Oedipus the King, in the direct address of the Chorus to the protagonist, which Robert Fagles translates thus:
Chorus:
…is there a man more agonized?
More wed to pain and frenzy? Not a man on earth,
The joy of your life ground down to nothing
O Oedipus, name for the ages
One and the same wide harbor served you
Son and father both
Son and father come to rest in the same bridal chamber.
How, how could the furrows your father plowed
Bear you, your agony, harrowing on In silence O. so long?
But now...
Ishtar is enraged and the gods then send the Bull of Heaven as a punishment. Together, Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the bull. The gods view this as an insult and decide to punish the two men. They make Enkidu ill and he soon dies. The death of Enkidu has an enormous impact on Gilgamesh. He suffers endless sadness. He mourns and grows afraid of dying himself. A man who was
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Epic of Gilgamesh: A Timeless Tale "The Epic of Gilgamesh" is fascinating and worthwhile because it allows us to see how ancient civilizations lived. We often think of the earliest societies in a detached way, never stopping to think of how they thought about certain things or why they did what they did. Gilgamesh's story revolves around gods, goddesses, and worldly leaders but it also shares with humanity the notion of
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