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Ate

Ate

Ἄτη — Zeus’s eldest daughter; a daimon of disastrous state of mind: inner confusion, delusion, ruinous recklessness, shading into the disaster that recklessness causes. Dodds is precise on the Homeric usage: in the iliad, ate “never means objective disaster” as it commonly does in later tragedy; it names the inner condition of the agent at the moment of ruinous action (Dodds 1951, p. 6). The two passages that speak of ate in personal terms — Il. 9.505 ff. and 19.91 ff. — are, in Dodds’s reading, “transparent pieces of allegory,” not the rule. Homer’s figure is vivid:

She does not tread the ground but walks on men’s heads, harming them. This one or that one she binds. (Iliad 19, via Padel 1992)

Ate once blinded Zeus himself; he seized her by her shining locks and cast her out of Olympus, whereupon “she soon reached the works of men.” Agamemnon invokes her to explain his error in offending Achilles: “savage ate, damaging his phrenes, made him misjudge things.” The protection of a divine precedent is that if Zeus was damaged by Ate, a mortal’s lapse has some cover. The confession is neither evasion nor full guilt; it is the Homeric recognition that a god can blind a hero without thereby releasing the hero from the consequences of what he did while blinded. Ate belongs to the complex Dodds reconstructs — moira–Erinys–ate — that “has deep roots, and might well be older than the ascription of ate to the agency of Zeus” (Dodds 1951).

Tragedy, Padel observes, does not bring Ate onstage personified. Aeschylus gives her one houndlike sketch; after that the word ate tends to mean “disaster” rather than the blinding that causes it. Tragedy replaces personified Ate with lyssa, madness proper. But Ate remains the paradigm instance of the porous-self: a daimon that enters the phrenes from outside and ruins them. What Jung will call an autonomous complex, what Hillman will call a pathologizing of soul — Homer already calls Ate.

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