The Greek divinity Nemesis, hardly ever depicted in artwork, has no place within the Olympian pantheon of a dozen gods and goddesses. However she’s an omnipresent power of retribution, an implacable power of punishment that arrives, if not sooner, then later.
Nemesis can bide her time for generations, however there’s no escaping her.
So too, it appears, with President Donald Trump, who’s “clearly not a man who discards his grudges easily,” William Galston of the Brookings Establishment mentioned lately. This remark is an understatement.
Trump’s resentment has been steaming for the reason that 2020 presidential election. Now that he’s once more president, he’s removed from appeased; his ire is boiling over.
“Flooding the zone,” a time period borrowed from soccer, was former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s manner of describing the Trumpian tactic of issuing a barrage of statements whose sheer tempo and multiplicity, to not point out contents, are supposed to stymie any impulse at rational response.
As he has gained fame and energy, Trump’s contemptuous rage at his opponents and his urge for food for vengeance seem to have sharpened.
As a poet and pupil of the classics, my impulse is to seek out analogs for this conduct, this temperament – precedents which may assist present some perspective.
Trump shows his anger throughout a rally on Nov. 3, 2024, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
Tyrants, heroes and horses
Historians, I believed, would have the ability to provide you with analogs. For instance, Trump’s preliminary alternative of a political ally, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, as legal professional normal – extensively seen as unqualified for the put up and who later withdrew – was likened to the Roman emperor Caligula, who made his horse a senator. Figures from Greek historical past, from the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus to Alexander the Nice, might be famously power-hungry and vindictive.
Classical epic and drama furnish loads of rage, which is the primary phrase of the Homeric epic “The Iliad.”
Since epic and tragic heroes are in positions of energy, temperament and motion mesh. The Greek hero Achilles’ conflict with the Greek military’s commander Agamemnon on the outset of “The Iliad” is psychologically believable. Every man feels insulted and slighted by the opposite; each have trigger for resentment.
Achilles nurses his rage in any respect his fellow Greeks till, a lot later within the epic, his grief on the loss of life of his beloved Patroklos sends him again into battle. This larger-than-life hero is weak, changeable and human.
Maybe probably the most well-known instance of vengeance in Greek tragedy is Aeschylus’ trilogy, “The Oresteia.” When Clytemnestra murders her husband, Agamemnon, on his return from Troy, she has three understandable motives. Agamemnon has sacrificed their daughter; he has introduced house a mistress, Cassandra; and Clytemnestra feels loyalty, each private and political, to Aegisthus, her husband’s cousin, whom she has taken as a lover in her husband’s absence and who has his personal causes for hating Agamemnon.
So vindicated does Clytemnestra really feel in having murdered Agamemnon – and Cassandra as nicely – that she proudly compares her motion to rain that fertilizes the crops. As rain is a part of the cycle of the seasons, her act has righted the stability of justice.
Agamemnon was murdered in chilly blood by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, in vengeance for Iphigenia’s loss of life and all of the grief he’d given them each.
Flaxman, artist, from The Print Collector/Getty Photos
Crafty rage results in loss of life
Turning to some of Shakespeare’s extra vengeful characters, Iago in “Othello” is an embodiment of a crafty rage that leads him to systematically destroy the harmless Othello’s marriage. He does this by falsely hinting – after which planting a series of proof suggesting – that Othello’s bride, Desdemona, is untrue.
Othello ultimately kills each Desdemona and himself. However the Romantic critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously referred to Iago’s “motiveless malignancy,” because it’s onerous to make sure precisely why Iago is so set on destroying Othello.
Hamlet himself is a reluctant avenger who retains laying aside the act of revenging his father’s homicide. Within the historical past play named for him, Richard III’s resentment, going again to having been a deformed and unloved youngster, makes extra sense. Richard lusts after energy; he systematically and clandestinely murders his personal brother and nephews, who would stand between him and his elder brother Edward’s throne.
Whether or not motivated by political ambition, generalized rancor or an inherited task, none of those figures ends nicely. All of them have enemies, they usually all – besides Iago, who will probably be tortured and executed – die on stage. All have achieved loads of harm; none survives lengthy to really feel vindicated. Even Clytemnestra’s triumph is short-lived, since her personal son, Orestes, will quickly avenge his father’s loss of life by murdering his mom – Clytemnestra.
However all these figures appear to really feel private ardour. Even the opaque Iago has one chief goal: Othello. They don’t current compelling parallels to Trump, whose anger seems to be concurrently non-public and public.
Simply offended, Trump is fast to strike again with insults; however he additionally appears to have an insatiable urge for food for broader and deeper punishment, meted out to extra individuals and even after a lapse of time. Therefore literary parallels are lower than compelling.
Trump’s anger appears extra normal than private. His aggrieved sense of getting been wronged, victimized by his enemies, is a continuing in his profession. However his targets shift. In the future it’s judges; one other day it’s election officers. Yet one more day, it’s the “deep state.”
And Trump’s implacable resentment has struck a chord amongst many Individuals whose resentment has a extra rational foundation. Trump’s base might consider he’s talking for them – “I am your warrior. I am your justice,” he mentioned in a speech at a conservative discussion board, however his first precedence has at all times been himself.
A spirit, ranging for revenge
The harm achieved by Trump is usually inflicted by others. Their threats, harassment and even violence are achieved within the identify of Trump.
He has pardoned virtually all the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, a few of whom have now boasted they’ll purchase weapons.
Trump has eliminated authorities safety from figures who’ve dared to disagree with him and have acquired loss of life threats, together with Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Shakespeare, turning historical past into nice poetry, involves thoughts in any case. In “Julius Caesar,” figuring out that his funeral oration over the physique of the assassinated Caesar will fire up an indignant mob, Mark Antony muses:
“And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,With Ate by his side come hot from hell,Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voiceCry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war”
Antony imagines Caesar’s vengeful spirit rising from the underworld to incite additional violence. Not solely will Caesar’s assassins be punished, however the hell of civil struggle will probably be let free to trigger widespread struggling. Exactly who Trump desires to punish seems secondary to his enjoyment of releasing exactly these hellish canine. Everyone seems to be a possible enemy and a possible sufferer.
“I am your retribution,” Trump has mentioned. Nothing in Trump’s persevering with story extra clearly echoes the classics than this ominous melding of self with a superhuman precept of revenge.
Such a merging of a mortal particular person with a pitilessly summary energy like Nemesis is nearer to delusion than to historical past. Or so it could be comforting to imagine.