Author: Raymond

Montaigne set forth that nothing man-made can achieve the beauty and perfection of things created by nature. In the western man-made society, there were full of inequality, evil and greed. Comparing to Europeans, he thought barbarous Tupinamba were closer to nature. They had no words to describe the concepts of lying, treachery, envy or greed, and they would not steal resources from other tribes. They believed “valour towards their enemies and love towards their wives.” Under the naturalistic virtues, Tupinamba would kill and eat their prisoners as  a form of symbolic revenge. Unlike Europeans tortured their enemies into a state of cowardly submission, Tupinamba treated their prisoners well and the captives always faced death with bravery and scorn.

In my opinion, there are at least two reasons that Christine de Pizan choose to make the Amazons side with the Trojans rather than the Greeks.

On one hand, the Greece was more powerful than the Troy at that time. Arranging Amazons in the weaker side could highlight their bravery, belligerence and adventurous spirit. Instead of Troy, they tended to challenge the powerful Greece.

On the other hand, it showed the chastity of Amazon Warriors. Penthesilea kept virginity because she thought most of men couldn’t match her. But when Penthesilea heard that Prince Hector who had the same qualities as her, she began to love him. After Hector was killed by Achilles during the war, Penthesilea looked at Hector’s body in a temple and Swore to avenge him. And then she fought until dying. By depiction of this, Pizan displayed the precious virtue that women should be loyal and faithful to their lovers.

I think the discussion of the story of the invention of the arts in Egypt has these significant functions. First, it stated the fact that the invention of words helped people pass their knowledge and experience to future generations. Second, it critically presented that the words might be misunderstood by others and was the fake of wisdom. Being more dependent on words, people gradually became more forgetful.  This discussion dialectically revealed the right and wrong of the words. Last but not least, it was also the self-questioning of Plato that words were dead and something deeper should be engraved on the soul of people. The rhetoric is vivid and makes the dead words more closed to the soul.

 

In the original concept, revenge was justice. With the creation of the city-state, the tradition of revenge came to an end. With the court, the plaintiff and the defendant went to court, asserted their claims, presented evidence, refuted arguments, weighed right and wrong, and made a judgment. Thus the cycle of revenge was broken, and the chain of revenge was cut by a neutral third party (the court) with no interest, and no one would avenge Orestes. The revenge represented by the goddess of vengeance and the primitive justice from ancient times evolved into the realization of justice through judicature, and revenge eventually led to judicial justice. People began to establish a sense of personal responsibility, and the primitive system of revenge was disintegrated, and the earliest courts came into being. The court of the Orestes trial might be regarded as the first formal judicial institution in the classical world. This marked the beginning of an era of public relief.