Cedric H Whitman Quotes

To reveal death all at once would be to see it absolute, and not as the veiled end of the temporal process; yet such is Achilles' deathly earnest, so absolute is his fire that this is precisely what he threatens to do. - Cedric H Whitman

The Wrath of Achilles had probably been an epic subject for generations when Homer found it, and the germ of its meaning, the conflict between personal integrity and social obligation, must always have been inherant. - Cedric H Whitman

The fact that Achilles is the one to take the initiative (in the Chryse affair) is in itself significant: he feels responsiblity and concern for the cause, and is more quick and zealous than the king himself. - Cedric H Whitman

The basic story of "The Iliad" seems not even very servicable, for it has few parallels anywhere. - Cedric H Whitman

Personal integrity in Achilles achieves the form and authority of immanent divinity, with its inviolable, lonely singleness, half repellent because of its almost inhuman austeriy, but irresistible in its passion and perfected selfhood. - Cedric H Whitman

Odysseus sees reality as the situation or problem before him; Achilles sees it as something in himself, and the problem is to identify himself with it completely, through action. - Cedric H Whitman

It is perhaps not surprising, amid the general leveling of individual aspirations in the growing megalopolis that it was the "Odyssey", not the "Iliad" which Livius Andronicus introduced to Rome as its first "cultural" school book. - Cedric H Whitman

Achilles' absolute, like every heroic absolute, finds its telos or fulfillment, not in dislocating the world as it is, but in self-destruction. - Cedric H Whitman

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