A good reason not to be an ancient Greek

I'm still working my way through that translation of the Iliad. Today I got to the funeral for Patroclus. Pretty much it struck me as a nasty tradition, and one just as well not adhered to these days.

Achilles, Patroclus' best friend, sponsored the funeral. There were sacrifices: sacrifices of a dozen noble Trojan youths, in retribution for Patroclus' death, and then there were sacrifices of bulls and pigs for the giant feast. There were games, with prizes. First prize was--I don't know, a bowl or something valued at twelve oxen, and second prize was a woman skilled at women's work, valued at four oxen. Then there was the chariot race itself. Apollo cheated and helped one contestant, but Athena saw and tripped him up and helped someone else win. The decision at the end of the race didn't so much take into account who won as a number of other factors, like the contestants' rank, how good their horses and usual driving were, and the interference of the gods.

The number of problems with this whole scenario almost boggles the mind.

Also today I was reading The Daring Book for Girls, which is a sister book to The Dangerous Book for Boys. The girls' edition was rather a disappointment, in a way. Dangerous really reached an essential part of boy-ness, with its delightful mix of adventure and knowledge. One feels that if a boy really absorbed everything in that, he'd be well on his way to being a good, dangerous man. Daring, while it had a fair amount of interesting content (including the letters of Abigail Adams!), overall wasn't very feminine. The entire premise appeared to be a feminist "anything boys can do, girls can do better and should be allowed to," which is rather different. If a girl absorbed everything in that, she'd be...a wannabe boy. They left so much girl-ness out.

Don't get me wrong. I have no objections to canoes, or tying knots, or the daring exploits of ancient queens and modern female scientists and Olympic champions. I adore world travel and really great espionage. When they pointed out that in ancient times, the prizes for the men's Olympic games were, in fact, women, I acknowledged the justice of the charge. (Homer, I trust you now know that was a problem.) It's just, ironically, in their zeal to prevent girls from being "only" a girl, the authors almost prevent them from being girls at all, in the sense of being different from boys.

Girls need to become more themselves, to do activities more pleasing and suitable to who they are, and not just take chapters out of the boys' book. It reminded me of Enchanted, where the daddy kept buying his little girl books about strong women, but she just wanted to read about princesses. It would never do for the daddy to be a sweet princess, but it was excellent for the princess to be one. It also wouldn't do for her to turn into a hard lawyer, but it made him awesome. And in the happy ending, they married, remained their delightful selves, and she ran a very successful business--sewing princess-style party dresses. And the New York lady went to the kingdom and probably did a splendid job helping her prince run his kingdom, because he didn't have a lick of common sense and she did. That's the kind of thing I'm thinking about. I want a broader vision for femininity than Daring had.

I can't think of any philosophy that leaves room for boys to be boys and for girls to be girls besides Christianity. (Fairy tales demand a Christian worldview and asphyxiate in any other: but that's a blog post for another day.) God considers every human precious, for we are made in His image and for His glory, and He loves us, and we ought to consider one another precious. It's not a power struggle any more. We don't have to be perennially terrified that someone might take advantage of us, and even authority of one person over another turns out to be okay, under God. The genuine gender differences become good things, and in another sense irrelevant, given our equal status as members of the Body of Christ. Should the ear get jealous of the eye, or say it's not needed because it's not an eye? Of course not. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? But we are all members of Christ, who is all, and in all.

None of the ancient religions can say this. If there's no god, your importance is what you make it. If there are many gods, your importance depends on how much you can make the gods like you, and by all accounts they're not very reliable. They bicker like four-year-olds.

So I was vaguely disturbed to see paganism alive and well at the museum gift shop this afternoon. They were selling little silver acorns, in remembrance of the Norse oak tree symbolizing life. Why would people want to bring back the gods? They weren't nice to people. They were into terror, and human sacrifice, and using women, and foulness of all kinds.

All this today--the ancient poet and the modern feminists and the revamped pagans--made me appreciate again my religion. :-) Christianity is so much better than any alternative. I'm so glad it's Christmas and that Jesus came to earth, and became a human, and our high priest and our entirely-good-enough sacrifice and our lawyer before God. That's something to be merry about.