Mr. Hindsight

      The Trojan War: It’s the greatest epic of the ancient world. The most beautiful woman in the world is kidnapped from her husband’s palace in Sparta. The vengeful Greek states assemble an enormous combined army in attempt to recapture her, and, after an interminable siege, they finally breach the defenses with their infamous Horse and ransack the city. Any Trojans who resist are killed, and those who surrender are enslaved, but that’s not the sum of the Trojan population: some Trojans are able to surreptitiously escape the carnage. These few people assemble in a sanctuary some distance from the city, and organize themselves into a refugee coalition to seek a new home elsewhere, led by the venerable hero Anchises.

      Not Aeneas, of course, because when Troy fell and the refugees set out, Aeneas’ father was still alive, was still respected as an elder, and still had authority over his son. This is the backstory to the Aeneid, but even though Aeneas got to be the eponymous hero of the epic, he’s still second banana when the action opens, and he’s stuck in that position until his father dies some considerable time later. So who is this Anchises, this non-eponymous hero who will lead the refugees out of Troy?

      If you’ve read about Anchises in the Aeneid, you may know him as a mystic whose primary role is interpreting omens. When the Trojan refugees flee the smoking ruins of their city, Anchises is the wise old man; in the Trojans’ extensive journey to find a new home, Anchises looks for signs from the gods and oversees the journey with a managerial eye. He leaves most of the work that is strenuous or otherwise difficult to Aeneas, his robust son in the prime of his life. After Anchises dies, Aeneas takes over this leadership role with very little success--Aeneas is not so talented at interpreting omens, and he often misinterprets messages from the gods. He has some degree of notoriety (at least in Latin 4 classes) as a whiny and defeatist hero, who takes the most optimistic interpretation possible from omens and wishes for his own death when those interpretations don’t pan out. After much difficulty and several false starts, Aeneas finally manages to lead the refugees to Italy and found a new society.

      Even though Aeneas is the one who sets the new society down in Italy, Anchises is more iconic in the escape from Troy. You can always recognize him on a vase or sculpture because he’s being carried by someone else: Anchises was crippled and was unable to flee Troy under his own power. One point that is never mentioned in the Aeneid is how exactly Anchises came to be crippled, although there is an established explanation for it, and it reveals a very different side of Anchises’ personality. Apparently Anchises took his sweet time becoming the elderly sage of the Aeneid, and had some youthful indiscretions buried in his past, hidden from the respectable portrait of him presented by Vergil.

      In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, for example, Anchises is a young hero in the prime of his life. His primary attribute is his physical beauty. Aphrodite is the heroine of this episode, for certain definitions of “heroine” (the real purpose of the story is to humiliate her). The other gods have gotten fed up with the goddess of love embarrassing them by making them fall in love with degenerate mortals, so Zeus causes Aphrodite herself to fall in love with a mortal, hoping that she’ll be too ashamed of her entanglement to keep humiliating the other gods. For the target of her infatuation, Zeus chooses Anchises, who is remarkably handsome for a lowly mortal. Aphrodite, falling in love as directed, disguises herself as a virgin princess and immediately goes to Anchises’ place to seduce him.

      There are some clues here in the Hymn that Anchises isn’t the most diligent youth in Phrygia. First of all, when Aphrodite goes down to seduce him, she’s able to catch him alone because he’s lounging around his home while everyone else in his community is off working. Second of all, Aphrodite introduces herself with the most tortured set of excuses possible, and Anchises doesn’t bother to question them. ‘I’m a princess, from, uh…Crete! And I was performing a dance when Hermes kidnapped me and brought me here because…the gods decreed that I was supposed to be your wife! And I speak your language perfectly because…I had a nurse from your homeland!’ It’s a pretty flimsy story (try it out the next time you want to seduce someone, I dare you), but all Anchises cares about is that there’s a super-sexy virgin on his doorstep who is apparently eager to marry him--marriage, of course, being code for sex. He stops asking questions and they go straight to bed.

      Once they’ve sated themselves sexually, Anchises’ hindsight kicks in--not because he reconsiders Aphrodite’s weak cover story, but because she reveals herself as a goddess. This idea apparently terrifies Anchises, who thought that he was taking advantage of an isolated, unprotected girl--he had no idea he was contending with a powerful woman who had the power to defend herself! Greek men, at least in mythology, are generally wary of falling under the influence of more powerful women (Eos, the dawn goddess, is something of a bogey for attractive young men, and there were so many stories of her abducting and sexually exploiting them), and Aphrodite panics Anchises by the mere fact of being a goddess. He expresses his terror of being “unmanned” by his encounter with Aphrodite, but she warns him that he won’t be harmed unless he goes around bragging that he slept with a goddess. After that the Hymn comes to an end and the biography of Anchises is pretty sparse until you come to the Aeneid, in which Anchises is old, with a grown-up son, and, crucially, withered legs, which implies that Anchises let his ego get the better of him, that he bragged about his adventures after all with no thought for the consequences. That foresight that he’s famous for in the Aeneid, it took him quite a while to develop it. It is fitting that, when Aeneas is hauling Anchises out of Troy (you can see this illustrated on plenty of Greek vases, and you can also read about it in the Aeneid itself), Anchises is recognizable not only because he’s being carried, but because he’s always looking backwards. Hindsight is his forte.

      Fortunately for Aeneas, Anchises drops dead before the Aeneid opens, and he only appears in flashbacks narrated second-hand. Aeneas is able to seize the reins as the primary hero, which is good for his future as a recipient of hero cult, but possibly not so good for his followers, who have to accept his whiny defeatism in place of leadership. Anchises did eventually develop enough foresight to interpret omens and chart the course of the refugees, but only after he had made enough mistakes to build up a store of hindsight for reference.