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 My
topic this week is strength. The word ‘strong’ is used generally
as an adjective; but it can also be used as a noun; the form ‘strength’
is a noun, and generally in this article I intend to talk about
this aspect.
Curiously,
the idea of the strong man appears generally to be an early concept:
the majority of quotations relating to the strong are early. The
heroes known for their strength were characters such as Hercules
(Herakles in the original Greek) and Samson; and there were other
spectacularly strong characters in other cultures. I suppose nowadays
one might think of Superman; but in fact the Hulk might be a better
example, in that the classic strong men tended to be flawed to
a greater or lesser extent.
There was
an animated TV series called The Mighty Hercules, based
loosely (very loosely!) on the classical character that ran from
1963 to 1966. The theme song was sung by Johnny Nash, and here
it is:
Hercules,
hero of song and story!
Hercules, winner of ancient glory!
Fighting for the right,
fighting with his might;
With the strength of ten
Ordinary men!
Hercules,
people are safe when near him!
Hercules, only the evil fear him!
Softness in his eyes,
Iron in his thighs;
Virtue in his heart,
Fire in every part of
The Mighty Hercules!
Later, there
was a series with live actors called The Adventures of Hercules,
but I know of no poetic aspects!
Both the
earlier Egyptian and Assyrian-Babylonian mythologies had entities
who were identified later as Hercules, but the first Grecian mention
of him is in connection with the war between Zeus and the Olympians
against the Giants, who had sprung from the blood of the mutilated
Uranus (see the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology for
more details: the following is a brief summary from this source).
It turned out that the Giants (the sons of Gaea) would only succumb
to the blows of a mortal, and Hercules was assigned that task.
He had problems with Alcyoneus, who resisted his attack, until
Athene revealed to Hercules that Alcyoneus was invulnerable so
long as he stood on the soil, which had given him birth. The hero
seized the giant in his arms and lifted him off the ground, and
was then able to kill him. Hercules also rescued the bound Prometheus,
breaking the chains with which he had been bound to the crest
of Mount Caucasus, and killing the eagle that had been eating
his immortal liver.
Hercules
was apparently the son of Alcmene, the wife of a Theban chief,
Amphitryon, who was seduced by Zeus who took on the appearance
of Amphitryon during his absence. Amphitryon himself returned
immediately after, and as a result twins were born: Iphicles was
the son of Amphitryon and Hercules was the son of Zeus. For this
reason, Hercules was persecuted by Hera, the wife of Zeus. However,
he was protected by the warrior goddess Athene, who, on his death,
welcomed him in the threshold of Olympus. The foundation of the
Olympic Games has been attributed to him.
Amphitryon
was the grandson of Perseus, and on the day that Hercules was
supposed to have been born Zeus swore a solemn and irrevocable
oath before the Olympians that the descendant of Perseus who was
about to be born should one day rule Greece. Hera promptly set
off and delayed the delivery of Hercules, and also went to Argos
where she accelerated the delivery of Eurystheus, who was fathered
by Sthelenus, also a son of Perseus. Since Zeus could not go back
on his oath, Eurystheus eventually became ruler of Greece. Later,
for reasons we will not discuss here, Hercules spent twelve years
under the orders of Eurystheus, who imposed on him the most arduous
labors: the “Twelve Labors of Hercules”.
 The
order and list of the twelve may have been recorded earlier, in
an epic poem on Hercules (Heracleia) by Peisandros of Rhodes (c.
600 BCE). However, since this epic is lost (except for a few fragments
mentioning the Cerynitian Hind and the Stymphalian Birds) and
the remaining poems from the Archaic period only itemize six labors,
we rely on later sources for the complete list.
During the
Classical period, the labors were known, but each of the available
literary sources lists less than twelve. On the Hephaisteion Temple
in Athens (built 450-444 BCE), only nine labors were carved, even
though there were spots available for ten. It wasn't until the
Roman-era library writers Diodorus Siculus and Apollodorus that
we find a complete written list of the twelve.
By comparison
with Hercules, the other strong men of legend seem rather second-rate
at best. However, he was not simply a hero, in the modern sense.
In detail, he was frequently a cruel man, with a foul temper;
and this general view of the conflict between the gift of great
strength and the curse of the inability to control it is echoed
in other figures of legend. This comes out most clearly in the
case of Samson. His story is told in the Book of Judges
in the Bible. Samson was a Nazarite, a Jew bound by a vow to leave
the hair uncut, to abstain from wine and strong drink, and to
practice extraordinary purity of life and devotion, the obligation
being for life, or for a certain time.
Internal
evidence suggests a date of around 1000 BCE for the writing of
the Book of Judges, and the book covers about 200 years
following the entry of Israel into Canaan. Iron had just been
discovered, and this revolutionized both agriculture and warfare.
The Hittites first employed iron weapons about 1400 BCE. The Book
of Judges describes a time when the various tribes where scattered
and divided, and lacked a leader to unite them. During this time,
when things were at their worst, God always raised up a “man of
the hour”, and this is the theme of the Book. Sometimes these
were good and noble men like Gideon, or Samuel; but sometimes
they were erratic and unstable men, like Samson.
 Samson
performed many feats of strength as a young man, including killing
a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, and carrying
the doors of the city of Gaza and the two posts, bar and all,
and carried them to the top of a nearby hill. However, he eventually
revealed to the woman Delilah that his strength was related to
his vows as a Nazarite, and particularly to his hair and beard,
which had not been cut in his life. While he slept, she had a
man shave off the seven locks of his head, and his strength left
him. The Philistines captured him, and put out his eyes; and carried
him down to Gaza. His hair began to grow again, and eventually
the Philistines brought him out of the prison house to entertain
them at a big gathering. Samson, after entertaining them, rested
between the pillars on which the house stood. He pulled the pillars
from under the house, and three thousand people perished, together
with Samson himself.
This story
forms the basis of a fairly long poem my John Milton (1608 – 1674),
Samson Agonistes. This poem is 1,758 lines long, and
I do not intend to use it as my first poem of this week! I do
intend, however, to use a brief extract from early in the poem,
where Samson, before the prison gates in Gaza, mourns his fate,
and points out that great strength is worthless without great
wisdom.
Ogden Nash
(1902 – 1971) also wrote a poem called, for some reason not entirely
clear to me, Samson Agonistes. Here it is:
I test
my bath before I sit,
And I'm always moved to wonderment
That what chills the finger not a bit
Is so frigid upon the fundament.
My next strong
man is someone completely different: Goliath of Gath. He was a
giant from the city of Gath, a member of the Philistine army.
According to the King James Bible, he was 6 1/2 cubits
tall; this is about 9 1/2 ft. However, two manuscripts and a Dead
Sea scroll manuscript of Samuel read 4 cubits and a span. This
reading has been accepted by the translators of the New American
Bible, which reads "six and a half feet tall". As you
know, he challenged anyone from the Israeli army to come out and
fight him, man to man; and no one accepted the challenge until
David, who had come simply to deliver bread and parched corn to
his older brothers, persuaded Saul, the King of Israel, to let
him fight Goliath. David took five smooth stones from the brook,
and with his sling felled Goliath. He then used Goliath’s own
sword to kill him and cut off his head.
There have
been two or three poems about this story. The first is by Emily
Dickinson (1830 – 1886):
I took
my Power in my Hand --
And went against the World --
'Twas not so much as David -- had --
But I -- was twice as bold --
I aimed
by Pebble -- but Myself
Was all the one that fell --
Was it Goliath -- was too large --
Or was myself -- too small?
Another was
by Phillis Wheatley (1753 – 1784), whose work we have mentioned
several times in recent columns. These are some lines from her
poem Goliath of Gath:
Thus David
spoke; Goliath heard and came
To meet the hero in the field of fame.
Ah! fatal
meeting to thy troops and thee,
But thou wast deaf to the divine decree;
Young David meets thee, meets thee not in vain;
'Tis thine to perish on th' ensanguin'd plain.
And now
the youth the forceful pebble slung
Philistia trembled as it whizz'd along:
In his dread forehead, where the helmet ends,
Just o'er the brows the well-aim'd stone descends,
It pierc'd the skull, and shatter'd all the brain,
Prone on his face he tumbled to the plain:
Goliath's fall no smaller terror yields
Than riving thunders in aerial fields:
The soul still ling'red in its lov'd abode,
Till conq'ring David o'er the giant strode:
Goliath's sword then laid its master dead,
And from the body hew'd the ghastly head;
The blood in gushing torrents drench'd the plains,
The soul found passage through the spouting veins.
And now
aloud th' illustrious victor said,
"Where are your boastings now your champion's dead?"
However,
our second poem of this week is by Robert Graves (1895 – 1985),
entitled Goliath
and David
(For D.C.T., killed at Fricourt, March 1916), first published
in November 1917. This poem is quite different, in that it suggests
the received story is wrong, and that the courageous youngster
was in reality slain by the giant barbarian soldier. This is clearly
inspired by the death of a young friend in the hideous carnage
of World War One.
Now, so far
we have talked about the very strong limited by their lack of
what could be called virtue. There is a quite different view,
where in fact virtue confers strength. This is stated most clearly
in the poem Sir Galahad, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809
– 1892). As you will know, Tennyson became very interested in
the Arthurian legends, expressed for example in his Idylls of
the King, but this poem is somewhat different. Sir Galahad was
the virtuous knight committed to the search for the Holy Grail:
My good
blade carves the casques of men,
My tough lance thrusteth sure,
My strength is as the strength of ten,
Because my heart is pure.
The shattering trumpet shrilleth high,
The hard brands shiver on the steel,
The splinter'd spear-shafts crack and fly,
The horse and rider reel:
They reel, they roll in clanging lists,
And when the tide of combat stands,
Perfume and flowers fall in showers,
That lightly rain from ladies' hands.
Later, he
says:
I never
felt the kiss of love,
Nor maiden's hand in mine.
More bounteous aspects on me beam,
Me mightier transports move and thrill;
So keep I fair thro' faith and prayer
A virgin heart in work and will.
 The
more modern view of strength has tended to be that of professional
athletes, and also weightlifters and body builders. Arnold Schwarzenegger
described some interesting details of this in his early movie,
Pumping Iron, and in the Terminator movies one
can see some of the aspects of the gift of great strength and
the problems of wisdom and moral control I have described above.
While it is easy to dismiss this as a trivialization of the antique
heroes, it is worth thinking about the romanticization of the
Arthurian knights that has taken place: recent historical studies
suggest that if indeed they existed, Arthur himself was at best
a local warlord, and his warriors were a bunch of thugs.
My last poem
of this week, All
The Reason There Ever Is, is about weightlifting, because
for quite some time that’s what I did; and I was often asked why.
Here to conclude
is a poem of William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939), The Secrets
of the Old:
I have
old women's secrets now
That had those of the young;
Madge tells me what I dared not think
When my blood was strong,
And what had drowned a lover once
Sounds like an old song.
Though Margery is stricken dumb
If thrown in Madge's way,
We three make up a solitude;
For none alive to-day
Can know the stories that we know
Or say the things we say:
How such a man pleased women most
Of all that are gone,
How such a pair loved many years
And such a pair but one,
Stories of the bed of straw
Or the bed of down.
I hope your
blood is still strong!
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