The
glorification of generations past is no foreign concept. I am sure that each one
of us have encountered at least one relative or close family friend that laments
the “good all days.” Homer’s Iliad is
no different. The following line struck me as oddly familiar when I first read
it, “Aeneas recovered quickly and picked up at a stone that two men – as men go
now – couldn’t lift, but which he handled easily” (20.289-91). Surely, I had
recently heard someone, somewhere, claim a similar heroic feat that our ancestors
were capable of but that our generation is clearly lacking.
As I
was so curious as to where I had heard such similar language, I started to research.
Where did such notions come from? And why? Interestingly, I came upon an
article titled “No guts, no glory: How framing the collective past paves the
way for anti-immigrant sentiments.” This article, written by Dr. Frank Mols, a
professor of Political Science at the University of Queensland, and Professor
Jolanda Jetten a professor of Psychology also at the University of Queensland,
describes their recent research and findings,
“We examined the PRWP (Populist
Right-Wing Parties) leaders in France, The Netherlands, and Belgium and [determined]
in each unique contexts how these leaders instilled collective nostalgia and
perceptions of discontinuity between past and present to justify a tougher
stance on immigration, asylum-seeking and multiculturalism.” (Abstract).
The fact that modern day politicians are using such
lamentations of the past “to persuade their audience that our past is glorious
[and] our future is bleak” (abstract) seems strangely similar to the theme
which Homer invokes in the quote above. Moreover, it is quite possible that it
is indeed from a politician’s lips that I recently heard such a lamentation.
Hence, did the ancient Greeks
use such glorifications of the past for the same reasons that the Populist
Right-Wing Parties do today? Was this a form of cultivating anti-immigration sentiments
in ancient Greece? If so, it would explain why the ancient Greeks tried so
strongly to distinguish themselves from the “barbarians.” The only problem with
fully accepting this conclusion, with respects to the above quote, is that
Aeneas is a Trojan and hence not a Greek. However, the Iliad does not strongly distinguish the Trojans from the Greeks.
Both the Greeks and Trojans worship the same gods and these gods even fathered
or mothered heroes on both sides. With this fact in mind, the glorification of
days gone by and the lamentation of the “weakness” of the men of today, could
have very well served the same purpose in ancient Greece that it serves today
for PRWP leaders – “it justifies a tougher stance on immigration asylum-seeking
and multiculturalism.”
Works
Cited
Mols, Frank. “No guts, no glory: How framing the
collective past paves the way for anti-immigrant sentiments.” ResearchGate. 2014. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
*Please note I could not get ahold of the entire
paper, I could only find the abstract, hence I cited straight from the
abstract.
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