Thomas Hobbes - Leviathan - 1651
Use Hobbes as a lens
Hobbes helps readers ask what happens when human beings lack a stable power strong enough to restrain rivalry, fear, revenge, and competition. Ancient epics often begin with force - warriors, kings, cities, walls, gods, monsters, raids, and revenge - but they also ask whether order is protection, domination, or both.
The lens is strongest when it remains a question: does the epic imagine authority as necessary because human life tends toward conflict, or does it expose political power as another form of violence?
Questions To Test
- Life without order: Where does the epic imagine the world outside law, walls, oaths, or kingship as dangerous?
- Authority as protection: When does a ruler, city, or divine command reduce violence and protect communal life?
- Authority as domination: When does the same political power become coercive, vain, imperial, or abusive?
- Fear as a political force: Which characters obey because they trust justice, and which obey because they fear punishment?
- The city wall: In Gilgamesh, the wall of Uruk can look Hobbesian: a sign that human life needs durable enclosure, memory, and political form.
Epic Dynamics
- The Epic of Gilgamesh: Gilgamesh begins as a dangerous king whose city both needs him and suffers under him; the poem tests whether kingship can become more than force.
- The Odyssey: Ithaca without Odysseus shows a household and kingdom losing order to appetite, intrusion, and competitive violence.
- The Aeneid: Virgil imagines empire as order after chaos, but the poem also makes readers feel the human cost of that order.
- The Iliad: Achilles' rage shows the terror of heroic power when personal honor breaks loose from shared order.