The Virtues of Loyalty in a Law-Based World
How we define justice has changed a lot since the days of classics...
One of the most challenging things about reading The Iliad and The Odyssey from a modern perspective is that the inciting incidents for The Trojan War and its aftermath do not make a lot of sense to our sensibilities.
Imagine these circumstances: the hand of the most beautiful mortal woman to every step foot on Earth (she was a daughter of Zeus) and upwards of 30 people showed up as suitors — each a ruler of distinct Greek city-state, filled with treasures and soldiers. When Menelaus of Sparta won the right to marry her, the rest of the local monarchs new they had a problem: they were all tempted to kidnap her, they all knew that one or many of them would try and they all knew that this could lead to endless war and hardship.
So, the kings took an oath and it was a clever one — they vowed to defend Menelaus if anybody should steal Helen from Sparta. This worked to bond the kings in friendship and would create a deterrent. Anyone who did take Helen would have to fight every other king and army in the Greek islands.
But, Paris of Troy did it anyway and seems to have had the backing of some powerful gods to get it done. As the story goes, Hera, Athena and Aphrodite were all competing for ownership of the Golden Apple of the Hesperides, and they chose Paris to adjudicate their dispute and then offered him bribes for his favor. Paris chose Aphrodite when she offered up the love of Earth’s most desirable mortal. So Paris’ claim to Helen’s love was granted by the Goddess of Love herself, which means it had to have been true love, which is why Homer implies, in The Odyssey, that Helen left for Troy quite willingly.
This would seem to undermine the validity of the oaths taken by the other Greek kings. They were meant to step in against an actual abduction, not Helen’s sudden change of heart. The involvement of the gods in the story also might have given them a loophole and a way out would seem like a very good thing in retrospect. The Greek Kings sent nearly 200,000 soldiers to lay siege to Troy. They sacked many smaller towns and villages along the way, destroying cultures and enslaving people. It took them more than a decade to breach Troy’s walls and many of their heroes were killed. City States like Ithaca and Mycenae were left without leaders, to often tragic results. Of the people who fought with Odysseus, the King of Ithaca, and survived the Trojan War, exactly none of them made it home as they were all killed in grisly ways on their journey back.
But the King stuck by their promise from the start and did not waver even as the war stretched on. Maybe greed kept them on the battlefield, as they saw the treasures of Troy as a reward for their hard work, but loyalty is a more likely answer. None of the kings could afford to back away from their promises. Because the entire political system was built on such oaths being rock solid and dependable. As soon as you get into, “Well, when I said I’d fight to get your wife back, I didn’t mean if she left willingly or had been snatched away by a god,” then all the promises become worthless and the kingdoms will fight each other over the narrowest self interests or perceived slights.
In her introduction to her recent translation of The Odyssey, professor Emily Wilson writes at length about how many of the features of classical Greek culture, like kings keeping oaths to each other and treating strangers and travelers with generosity and kindness were meant to ward off a state of constant warfare. This is a very different way of thinking about society and politics but is necessary for keeping peace (and commerce flowing) in the absence of international law and institutions. The Greeks had a largely honor based system.
We don’t have that anymore. Countries like the United States and throughout Europe tout “the rule of law,” not the “rule of honor.” But what this really means is that our duty to law is supposed to outweigh our personal connections and loyalties. This is part of what put family members on opposing sides during the U.S. Civil War.
Indeed, we are now in a period of deep skepticism about personal connections. Ask yourself — how bad a thing would a close friend have to do before you abandoned them or wrote them off completely? What crimes would be unforgivable, if committed by people who previously inspired your love, devotion or loyalty?
Recently, actors Milas Kunis and Ashton Kutcher attracted criticism for writing to a judge on behalf of their friend Danny Masterson, convicted of raping two women in 2003. Masterson received a 30 year prison sentence while Kunis and Kutcher advocated for much less time in prison. The idea of celebrities advocating for each other to receive shorter prison sentences for violent crimes shocks and offends a society that’s run under a rule of law and people are rightly skeptical that people who are well-funded and well-connected use the power of their exclusive social networks to get away with crimes or to advance their interests in other ways that aren’t strictly fair.
Now, Eric Levitz writing for New York (link above) makes some very poignant criticisms of how Kunis and Kutcher went about their advocacy. But even he concludes: “And if you are friends with a defendant, and believe that they are capable of rehabilitation within a short time frame, it is legitimate for you to share that view with a judge.”
That is very interesting to me, because their should be space for personal loyalty in the system, because advocating for friends and even fighting for them, can be a good thing and because sticking by people (not their crimes) is important and is a classical virtue.