Lucian after Hume: Love, war, and a dialogue of the dead
October 9, 2024
As death drew near, David Hume read Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, a strange text, full of pithy gems. Alcorn discusses one of the "finger pointer" dialogues and presents a fresh interpretation of Hume’s theories of necessity and morality.
As death drew near, David Hume read Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, a strange text, full of pithy gems. Alcorn discusses one of the "finger pointer" dialogues and presents a fresh interpretation of Hume’s theories of necessity and morality.
Adam Smith, in a letter to William Strahan (November 9, 1776), recounts David Hume’s reckoning with death. As death drew near, Hume read Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, a strange text, full of pithy gems.
One of Lucian’s Dialogues, 1 which I call the dialogue of finger pointers, invites fresh interpretation in light of Hume’s theories of necessity and morality. I will also discuss the dialogue’s distinctive narrative logic. The dialogue takes place among Aeacus, who is judge of the dead, and three protagonists of the Trojan War.
Backstory: Helen, casus belli
The backstory to this dialogue is the mythology of origins of the Trojan War. Helen, a magnetic beauty, is casus belli. Her many valorous suitors make a two-part pact, (a) to compete in prowess for her hand in marriage and (b) to take up arms to help the victor regain her, should an interloper abscond with her. Two key suitors are Menelaus and Protesilaus. Menelaus emerges victorious in competition. Protesilaus, on the rebound, marries Laodamia. Paris of Troy visits Menelaus and steals Helen—or steals her heart. The narrative tradition is ambiguous: Does Paris abduct Helen? Or elope with her? Or seduce her (abduction into love)?
Menelaus duly enlists Helen’s former suitors to honor their pact. They sail to Troy to wage war to regain her. Protesilaus is the first warrior to leap ashore at Troy—and the first to die in battle.
Before we turn to analysis, let’s have the brief text of the dialogue fresh in mind.
Lucian’s text
Aeacus. Why do you dash at Helen, and choke her, Protesilaus?
Protesilaus. It was because of her that I was killed, Aeacus, and left my house half-built, and my newlywed wife a widow.
Aeacus. Then blame Menelaus, for taking you to Troy to fight for a woman like that.
Protesilaus. Quite right. I should blame him.
Menelaus. Don’t blame me, my good man. It would be fairer to blame Paris. Though I was his host, he carried off my wife with him, contrary to all justice. Paris ought to be strangled, and not by you only, but by all the soldiers on both sides, for bringing death to so many.
Protesilaus. A better idea. Then you, accursed Paris, are the one I’ll keep forever in my grip.
Paris. That would be unjust, too, Protesilaus, for I practice the same craft as you. I’m a lover too, and subject to the same god. You know how it’s none of our wishing, but some divine power leads us wherever it chooses, and it’s impossible to resist him.
Protesilaus. True enough. Well, I wish I could catch Eros here.
Aeacus. I will answer you in defense of Eros. He will say that he may have been the cause of the love of Paris, but that you, Protesilaus, were the sole cause of your own death; for, when your fleet was approaching the land of Troy, you forgot your new-wed wife, and made that mad adventurous leap ashore before any of the others; you were in love with glory, and because of her were the first to die at the landing of the army.
Protesilaus. Then, Aeacus, I shall retort with an even stronger argument in my defense. The responsibility lies not with me, but with Fate and the way the thread was spun from the start.
Aeacus. Quite right. Why, then, blame the present company?
Protesilaus. It was because of her that I was killed, Aeacus, and left my house half-built, and my newlywed wife a widow.
Aeacus. Then blame Menelaus, for taking you to Troy to fight for a woman like that.
Protesilaus. Quite right. I should blame him.
Menelaus. Don’t blame me, my good man. It would be fairer to blame Paris. Though I was his host, he carried off my wife with him, contrary to all justice. Paris ought to be strangled, and not by you only, but by all the soldiers on both sides, for bringing death to so many.
Protesilaus. A better idea. Then you, accursed Paris, are the one I’ll keep forever in my grip.
Paris. That would be unjust, too, Protesilaus, for I practice the same craft as you. I’m a lover too, and subject to the same god. You know how it’s none of our wishing, but some divine power leads us wherever it chooses, and it’s impossible to resist him.
Protesilaus. True enough. Well, I wish I could catch Eros here.
Aeacus. I will answer you in defense of Eros. He will say that he may have been the cause of the love of Paris, but that you, Protesilaus, were the sole cause of your own death; for, when your fleet was approaching the land of Troy, you forgot your new-wed wife, and made that mad adventurous leap ashore before any of the others; you were in love with glory, and because of her were the first to die at the landing of the army.
Protesilaus. Then, Aeacus, I shall retort with an even stronger argument in my defense. The responsibility lies not with me, but with Fate and the way the thread was spun from the start.
Aeacus. Quite right. Why, then, blame the present company?
Analysis: A dialogue of finger pointers
Quick to blame and eager for revenge, Protesilaus throttles Helen. Aeacus queries him and sets in motion a hub-and-spoke sequence of repartee. Protesilaus is the hub. We witness a chain of blame-shifting:
1) Protesilaus casts blame on Helen (casus belli).
2) Aeacus tells Protesilaus to blame Menelaus—because Menelaus enlisted him.
3) Menelaus tells Protesilaus to blame Paris—because Paris abducted Helen.
4) Paris tells Protesilaus to blame Eros—because Eros drove each of them alike. (Recall that Protesilaus was one of Helen’s suitors.)
5) Aeacus defends Eros and tells Protesilaus to blame himself—because Protesilaus, motivated by desire for glory, led the charge in battle and so placed himself in the way of death.
6) Protesilaus shifts blame from himself to “Fate and the way the thread was spun from the start.”
7) Aeacus accordingly (and conveniently?) exculpates all the interlocutors: “Quite right; why, then, blame the present company?”
The text artfully establishes a chain of necessity from rivalry of suitors for Helen to the death of Protesilaus as the first casualty of the Trojan War.
Hume’s psychological theory of necessity
Hume explains that necessity in human action consists in regular relations between (a) motivations and beliefs and (b) behaviors:
“We may imagine we feel a liberty within ourselves; but a spectator can commonly infer our actions from our motives and character; and even where he cannot, he concludes in general, that he might, were he perfectly acquainted with every circumstance of our situation and temper, and the most secret springs of our complexion and disposition. Now this is the very essence of necessity [… .]”— A Treatise of Human Nature (2.3.2.2)
Conversely, a spectator may infer motivations and beliefs from behaviors, thanks to the intuition of psychological necessity. Hume illustrates his psychological theory with a vivid example, a prisoner who interprets his situation and the behaviors of corrections officers accordingly:
“A prisoner […] when conducted to the scaffold, foresees his death as certainly from the constancy and fidelity of his guards as from the operation of the ax or wheel. His mind runs along a certain train of ideas: The refusal of the soldiers to consent to his escape, the action of the executioner; the separation of the head and body; bleeding, convulsive motions, and death. Here is a connected chain of natural causes and voluntary actions; but the mind feels no difference betwixt them in passing from one link to another [… .] […] liberty, by removing necessity, removes also causes, and is the very same thing with chance.”— A Treatise of Human Nature (2.3.1.17-18)
This is precisely how Protesilaus and his interlocutors explain one another’s behaviors. They indicate characteristic motivations and subjective beliefs about circumstances that jointly make the behaviors intelligible and, moreover, predictable, indeed inexorable, in a word, necessary, if only after the fact.
However, Lucian has Protesilaus and Aeacus not only explain, but also excuse—as enactments of Fate—all behaviors in the historical narrative. We may ask: Does necessity really imply excuse? My intuition is that Hume would demur at excuse.
Hume’s social theory of blame
Hume reminds us that incentives matter. Rather than yield altogether to Fate, we endeavor to regulate behavior by means of law, religion, and ethics. He explains that praise (rewards) and blame (punishment) are crucial practices (incentives):
“Men have observ’d, that tho’ natural abilities and moral qualities be in the main on the same footing, there is, however, this difference betwixt them, that the former are almost invariable by any art or industry; while the latter, or at least, the actions, that proceed from them, may be chang’d by the motives of rewards and punishments, praise and blame. Hence legislators, and divines, and moralists, have principally applied themselves to the regulating these voluntary actions, and have endeavour’d to produce additional motives for being virtuous in that particular.”—A Treatise of Human Nature (3.3.4.4)
Hume notes that “legislators, and divines, and moralists” assign blame to regulate voluntary behaviors. What might these social actors say about responsibility for Protesilaus’ death?
Legislators focus narrowly on regulation of criminal behaviors.
A court of law might well convict Paris of forcible abduction (and perhaps rape) of Helen—but probably not of felony murder of Protesilaus. When Paris absconds with Helen, he neither intends nor foresees the chain of events that will eventuate in the death of Protesilaus. The path of necessity is too indirect for criminal responsibility.
Nonetheless the reader wonders: Does Aeacus, who is supposed to judge the dead, vacate his station and its duties when he exculpates “the present company”?
Divines (clerics) focus on regulation of the soul.
A sermon about the untimely death of Protesilaus would remind believers that the passions—for example, love and enthusiasm for glory—are prone to worldly misdirection and mismeasure. Disordered passions blind the soul.
A reader may wonder: What might clerics say about Protesilaus’ deflection of blame from himself to Fate (“the way the thread was spun from the start”)? Answers might vary a lot, according to differences in theology. For example, the Presbyterian Church (the established church in Hume’s Scotland) has a doctrine of predestination.
Moralists would focus on critical analysis of motivations and behaviors:
Protesilaus initially errs by blaming the victim (Helen), if we assume that Helen’s departure was an abduction, not an elopement.
Passions, such as love and glory, can short-circuit rationality and crowd out interest. They can even defeat themselves! Protesilaus’ urge for immediate glory squanders any chance of subsequent greater glory. Compare Odysseus, whose peculiar prowess was cunning (a kind of rationality). Odysseus would achieve vastly greater glory than Protesilaus in the Trojan War; and, after epic detours, would make it home alive, unlike Protesilaus.
Protesilaus evades responsibility by blaming Fate for his passions. A deep question arises: Is one responsible for one’s emotions? I hesitate to say.
Contrary to Hume’s social theory, protagonists of the Trojan War in Lucian’s Dialogue engage in all-too-human finger-pointing and blame-shifting, but ultimately escape and transcend blame because they inhabit mythology. They are larger than life—and therefore outside the law. In mythology, history is a clash of personalities—and personality is destiny. Thus, narrative disentangles a thread spun by Fate. Aeacus, the judge of the dead, seals a narrative that has Olympian overtones.
The logic of narrative explanation
Hume is also an historian in the tradition of methodological individualism. What might an analytical historian glean from Lucian’s Dialogue? Presumably, she would identify, categorize, and weigh the various causes that the interlocutors mention in their efforts to explain Protesilaus’ untimely death:
Helen is the intentional object (or rationale or ‘final cause’) of the war. Protesilaus then becomes a casualty of war.
Protesilaus’ headlong rush into battle is a proximate cause of his death because it is tantamount to a suicide leap.
The suitors’ pact with Menelaus and then Paris’ scandalous departure with Helen are necessary but not sufficient causes of Protesilaus’ death.
An analytical historian would note that narratives naturally tend to focus on salient causes. Salience is why Aeacus and Protesilaus first blame Helen, then Menelaus. Helen is obviously salient. Why also Menelaus? Because the pact makes Menelaus (a) a social creditor of Protesilaus and (b) commander of the expedition to Troy. Menelaus is the institutional authority in collective action towards war.
And what might an analytical historian say about the role of passions (love and enthusiasm for glory) in the narrative account? Emotional dispositions vary among individuals and depend on circumstances for their full arousal. The pool of competitors for Helen’s hand in marriage exhibits self-selection for three qualities: wealthy generosity, intense love (passion), and great valor (prowess). Protesilaus’ leap into battle, too, exhibits self-selection, this time for enthusiasm.
An analytical historian might find it hard to assign weights to the various causes. She would try and rank the causes by their explanatory power. How much does each cause increase the probability of the outcome? Let’s take a qualitative stab. If the narrator (Lucian or the analytical historian) wishes to explain why Protesilaus died in full bloom in battle, then a case can be made that the pact among suitors has the greatest explanatory power. Menelaus wins the competition but not Helen’s heart. Protesilaus soon finds another love in Laodemia. Absent the pact and the Trojan War, he would have sought glory by paths less likely to entail death in full bloom. Love and enthusiasm for glory have relatively little explanatory power because, as folk wisdom reminds us, love can change target (there are many fish in the sea) and ambition for glory can change strategy (there is more than one way to skin a cat). By contrast, the pact has great explanatory power because magnetic Helen, unhappy with Menelaus, is likely to forsake him for another, and thereby trigger enlistment and war. Therefore, the pact, a unique social fact, is the most important cause of Protesilaus’ untimely death.
If, instead, the narrator wishes to explain why Protesilaus is the first to die in the Trojan War, then his intense enthusiasm for glory would have the greatest explanatory power.
The logic of narrative art
Lucian adheres to a convention of narrative parsimony. He includes in the narrative only those protagonists and actions, which, taken together, necessitate the outcome—Protesilaus’ death in battle at Troy’s shore. Passions (love and enthusiasm for glory), the pact of suitors, and the abduction and consequent enlistment of former suitors suffice to set the stage, in retrospect, for Protesilaus’ fateful leap. The dialogue can be terse and pithy because interlocutors and audience, alike, can fill in the blanks, thanks to familiarity with mythology.
Narrative art involves creation and resolution of tension—a process tinged with aesthetic emotion. Lucian’s Dialogue has a peculiar, fascinating narrative structure. It begins with the casus belli, then unfolds in reverse chronological order: enlistment, abduction, innate emotional dispositions (love, enthusiasm for glory), Fate. The dialogical chain of blame-shifting swims upstream, creating narrative tension.
The dénouement of Lucian’s Dialogue resolves two kinds of tension at once:
(a) Narrative tension created by the emergent puzzle: Who is to blame for Protesilaus’ death?
(b) Real social tension (violence) created by Protesilaus’ urge for revenge. The dénouement achieves social peace in the afterlife by placing blame, for war and death, on necessity itself (Fate).
Let me conclude with a contrast between Lucian’s Dialogue and narrative art after Hume. Take the classic novel. Jane Austen, Stendhal, Alessandro Manzoni, George Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy construct their narratives—whether contemporary or ‘historical’—to integrate plot resolution and character completion. The dénouement consists in actions, choices, or reckonings by central characters. Before the fact, these moves seem open. In the moment, they resolve the plot and finally define the characters themselves. After the fact, they seem characteristic, a kind of emergent necessity. This modern approach to narrative art was inaccessible to Lucian for the Dialogues of the Dead because his raw material was an inheritance of distinctive characters and established plots.
Acknowledgement: I thank Daniel Kapust and Liberty Fund for organizing a stimulating Virtual Reading Group, “‘To Die Contented:’ Hume, Smith, and Lucian on the Final Journey” (October-November, 2023). Dario Del Puppo and Kenneth Alcorn kindly made helpful comments on a draft.
- Lucian (circa 120-190 CE), “Dialogues of the Dead” 27 (19), in Lucian, Volume VII (Harvard University Press: Loeb Classical Library, 431), Translation by M. D. Macleod, pp. 160-61.↩