Pietas Essay for Karate Class

[ginlindzey]

 Every now and then we have "homework" in karate (tae kwon do) class.  Most people in the class are in the intermediate level, and that's when we begin working on character.  So we had this homework assignment a couple of weeks back about "loyalty and being a follower."   This was the same week that my former principal showed up in class (for those of you who have been reading this blog for a while, you will understand what an emotional shock this was to me) and that I found out that I had a worrisome lump in my breast.

As mentioned elsewhere, the lump was benign and I had the lumpectomy today.  Under the haze of painkillers I have decided to post the essay here, if for no other reason than it demonstrates how one can learn and grow from what one is reading, and in this case, from the Aeneid.


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Loyalty, Being a Follower, and Pietas in Vergil’s Aeneid

In Vergil’s Aeneid, the hero of the epic is a young man named Aeneas. He is often described as pius Aeneas, that is, “pious,” “devoted,” or “loyal.” He is a man marked by his being pius or by his pietas, that quality of loyalty, responsibility, and sense of duty. In fact, it is our trying to understand exactly what the author Vergil meant when he repeatedly used the word pietas that is at the heart of understanding this epic poem—a poem that was clearly about more than the adventures and battles of one man. It embodied the philosophy of a new type of hero, one that wasn’t just marked out by his virtue in arms but also in his duty to his father, the gods, his future city (Rome), and his people accompanying him on this adventure. So when we talk about what loyalty means and what it means to be a follower, I think not only about what it means to me personally with what I have learned in life, but also what it meant in this deeply moving epic that I will be teaching for the first time this coming year.

To understand what it means to be a follower is also to understand how to recognize a leader. The world is made up of more followers than leaders, because it is easier to be in a pack and go with the flow. The pack can often lead you in unhealthy directions, whether it be physically, emotionally, spiritually, or all three. Leaders of such packs control through fear, peer pressure, manipulation, and our longing to simply belong. Such leaders demand respect and exact control by any means available to them because their own insecurities as well as their own inability to follow, when needed, dominate their bad decisions, whether intentional or unintentional.

True leaders do not demand that you recognize that they are leaders or that you follow them. You follow them because you are truly attracted to their strengths and their goodness. And perhaps that word, goodness, sounds too simplistic, but so is defining pius as simply “pious.” Aeneas was a true leader—a leader in fighting both in Troy and later in Italy—a strength to his friends and family when in his heart he suffered deep loss and profound grief, and a willing follower of the gods when he was told to leave burning Troy and set off to found a new nation. It would have been easy for him to build a new city the first time that the wandering Trojans touched ground, but he was “driven by fate” and the gods to sail to Italy. He put aside his own desires, following what he knew to be right. He demonstrated loyalty to his people by taking care of them on their travels, allowing those who were too weak or too old to stay in cities they visited, cheering them on in their struggles, rewarding them when appropriate, and at all times being a father to them while at the same time looking up to his own father for guidance and leadership.

In my life, I would not say I knowingly followed a leader, but there were definitely people in whose footsteps I followed. They were all teachers whose devotion to students and to excellence drove me to strive for greatness when I felt I would never be great. I knew I was a good student, but I had done nothing extraordinary. I became a high school Latin teacher, which was nothing more than following in their footsteps. I didn’t enter the workforce with a high salary. I didn’t have a profession that people really respected. Too often teachers are unappreciated and are considered less than peers in other fields because success is judged by salary. Then, for a number of reasons, I left teaching after one year. For years after I floundered, looking for a place to be, perhaps for someone to follow. I had no sense of direction and loyalties to none.

I finally did return to Latin and eventually to teaching. The journey back began with an article I read about how to truly read Latin fluently by a man named Dexter Hoyos. The strength of Dexter’s argument in the article and his fresh view on this pedagogical aspect attracted my attention. I pursued a correspondence with him, which eventually led to his publishing a book on the topic. As I became involved in editing a journal for classics here in Texas, I came to know many well-known leaders in the world of Latin pedagogy and classics in general. I became friends with Rick LaFleur, revisions editor for the best-selling Wheelock’s Latin, the leading college entry level Latin text and editor of Classical Outlook, the leading journal for classics in this country. As I became friends with people like Dexter and Rick and others who are the greats in classics, I became not just a follower, but also a leader in turn. I discovered that I had unique talents that I could use to serve the classics community in this country. What I had learned from following, I used in leading. This was not a conscious effort; I didn’t know I was becoming a leader. I was simply following my heart and my passion for teaching Latin well and discovering and creating techniques that would make my Latin students superior to what I was like as a Latin student.

Loyalty and the ability to follow is crucial in the job market. Businesses need employees they can trust; employees need leaders they can follow. This is crucial in an educational environment, where the chain of command must be followed. The leader or principal should supply a vision that all can and will support. Aeneas provided that vision to his men—a vision of a new Troy, a new nation to found, one that promised to be the ruler of the world one day. Aeneas also protected and supported his men. A principal’s responsibilities are to do the same. When a leader is strong, when a leader is good, when a leader has those qualities of pietas that Aeneas had, there is no question but that people will follow and follow willingly and with great loyalty. Aeneas was often referred to as Father Aeneas because he was like a father to his people—guiding them, protecting them, urging them on to great things. My first principal I thought of as a grandmother—my own grandmother being the matriarch of the family and one that we would all follow to the ends of the earth. We would do anything for her; we loved her dearly. Likewise this same principal gave us the vision for making the journey through each school year and the support to teach our students in the best way we knew how. 

The principal that followed her wanted desperately to be the kind of leader that inspired loyalty and followers. And we, as teachers, wanted to give her our loyalty, and we did at first. She led us in new directions, directions that perhaps seemed cloudy, but we followed. We followed because it was in our nature to be loyal to our leader. Before too long, though, some of the decisions of this principal led us into deep water and hurricane force winds. She would stand in the winds and declare that she felt nothing more than a comforting, cool breeze, that we were imagining the blows we were being buffeted by. And so we would return to our work, puzzled and confused…and eventually afraid.

The difficulty in being a teacher is that while you are a follower, you are also a leader. If you are a good teacher, students become your followers, they offer you loyalty, they trust you for protection and guidance and loyalty in return. As a teacher you can also end up becoming a leader among your peers who are afraid to stand up for themselves, who just want to follow, who just want to be protected, and who don’t know what to do when a leader fails them.

The most precarious situation for  teachers to be in is one of feeling like their loyalty to their leader, their principal, has been betrayed. Being without leadership—what should one do? In most cases, you leave and look for new leadership, someone you can follow and bravely serve. But when you yourself are a leader in turn, must you stay? When students and parents and fellow faculty members look to you for strength and support and protection, can you possibly leave?

There is no simplicity to concepts of loyalty and being a follower, or in being a leader. Betrayals occur and are felt when loyalty is dissolved. When the actions of that principal led to my safety and the safety of others being in serious jeopardy, my loyalty dissolved. She had not provided the protection that a leader needs to provide. Followers were abandoning her at every turn. We felt deeply betrayed and caught in our roles of leaders and followers. Likewise, I am sure she felt deeply betrayed by our lack of loyalty and our—admittedly, my—desperate and perhaps foolish attempts to find someone in leadership above her to save us and protect us. I am aware of that; and I suffered for that as well. I suffered for what was seen as a horrendous betrayal.

In reading the Aeneid and studying the battle scenes one comes to understand the power and raging strength of the furor or fury of battle. Pallas, a young but brave soldier who did embody pietas and who did appeal to the gods faithfully for help, went up against Turnus, the leader/general of the enemy and was easily slain. Turnus did not appeal to the gods but knowing his strength was superior simply gloated that he wished Pallas’s father could see him die, then stripped him of his belt to wear as spoils of war. It was his arrogance that his strength and superiority would see him through that led to his downfall at Aeneas’ hand when Aeneas saw the belt of the young man who had been entrusted to his care. 

I was foolish and perhaps emotionally young as a teacher during that turbulent year.   My actions may have been for right, and I did appeal to the equivalent of the gods—those people in central office who could have stepped in—but like the gods in the story, they did not step in. They could not, would not. In fact, they turned a blind eye to the situation, believing only what they wanted to.   I was beaten by lies and manipulation, by all those ugly things that are “fair in love and war,” and was emotionally and mentally stripped bare. 

When I joined our tae kwon do school, I knew—explicitly knew—that one thing I was here to learn was respect for authoritiy. I had lost it. I had begun to rebuild it at my new school, but I knew that in my heart I had become a maverick.  Merriam-Webster’s dictionary has these definitions for a maverick: 1. an unbranded range animal; especially : a motherless calf; 2. an independent individual who does not go along with a group or party. Both of these definitions are apt; we were, seemingly, motherless without a leader we could follow and I became sure that I could trust no one in a leadership role with my welfare. The only one with my welfare at heart was me. So when I first joined tae kwon do, bowing and lining up were all part of the theatrics to me. They were part of the role I needed to play in order to participate in the game but I hardly felt that I was really showing respect to leadership. That respect came later, over time.

I now feel I could trust any blackbelt in the school with my life if I needed to. Abel is no longer my colleague and friend—though, of course he is—but is my grand master. I cannot help but think to call him “sir” now or by his title (which I will not even attempt to spell!), while his name slips to the back of my mind. I am in awe of his knowledge and am deeply loyal to the leadership which he provides. I feel safe, I feel protected, I feel he has my best interest at heart—as do all of the blackbelts I have studied under—and I believe I could follow him to the ends of the earth. He has that quality of pietas that Aeneas had, and he will in his own realm always be held with awe and always command the most loyal of followers. And we are, together, a team. There can be no teamwork, no cohesion without loyalty, and that loyalty must go both ways to be strong. Without it we are merely individuals gathered together for class.

At my new school, the end of this last year sealed my new-found respect and loyalty for my principal, but he has advanced up the ladder to central office.   I am now a follower again, blindly hoping that this new leader will have these characteristics of pietas. And so I will play my part, and offer my loyalty to the team, and hope that the new principal also is able to earn my loyalty so that I can follow her not because I have to, but because I want to.

There is one last quality of pietas that I haven’t discussed: that it includes sacrificing “self” for the bigger picture. Aeneas had to abandon a love affair with the Carthaginian queen, Dido, because it was necessary for him to move on and continue his quest to found a new nation. Before that he had wanted to die in battle at Troy. But he was driven by his responsibilities to others. How often are we driven to such ends, and when in this modern world is that too far? I have, for years now, questioned my decision to see the year out when all went to hell at my former school. Should I have left after I broke up the gang fight? I didn’t; I couldn’t even consider it at the time because I felt I had an almost sacred responsibility to my students and their parents. But today… today I think my mistake was not walking away then, in February, right after that fight. I didn’t walk away and I am now sure that I should have. How much of the mental anguish that I still go through would have been spared? But I was a leader…or, perhaps, I was arrogant enough to think myself too important to those students and their families to leave, and to my colleagues and friends as well, although we had already lost several during the year who could not stomach what was happening.

Even now, I face a new challenge in my life. I have just this week—a week frought with the challenges of reliving many of the things mentioned in this paper and facing them again for serious review and reflection—found out that I have a lump in my breast which needs to be biopsied. As my mind travels down the road of worst possibilities, I am already thinking, “What about my students and my program? What about my children? My husband?” Not about myself… but ultimately, of course, I will have to think about myself or I will not be able to be there for my students and children and husband in the long run. And perhaps I am thinking negatively. Perhaps the lump is benign. And I digress….

The ultimate truth is that true leaders and devoted followers are tightly bound by the bands of loyalty. There is no easy separation, no easy decisions of “self.” You become a team. I have often wondered if people like the problematic principal suffer insecurities because they never understood the importance and strength in teamwork, true teamwork, where even the captain plays as hard as the rest of the team, suffers with them, triumphs with them, and the celebration at the end of the day is not saying “we won!” but instead celebrating the good fight, win or lose. With my first principal we always celebrated fighting the good fight together. That never happened with the second principal because she was never in it with us and was leading by yelling back at us to follow. There was easy separation, and clear definitions of self. We were all thrown into survival mode, which is hardly a true way to survive. Survival mode is this feeling, this atmosphere of “look out for number one.” We were rats jumping from a sinking ship, and you could no longer count on anyone getting your back. You were on your own. No following, no leading—just leaping. The team was long gone.

And finally, what does this truly mean to me for my future and my goals? As always, to keep my eyes open for those true leaders who demonstrate pietas and to follow them, but to also strive to attain that pietas myself in all aspects of my public and private life so that I can truly deserve those who follow me.  I have followers, I know that, and I take the responsibility of being considered a leader very seriously. I know there are times I must step up and lend my voice to a subject, whether I’d find it more comfortable to sit in the stands and watch or not.   Most recently, there has been a bit of a crisis in the Latin community concerning College Board’s decision to cancel one of our two AP exams. I didn’t join in the voices whining about change, but examined carefully the AP Annual Report and tried to understand why this organizational body which controls and directs our Latin programs in great measure wanted to make this change.   And now I want to be involved in the changes that are to come with our current AP test over the next few years.  I am keenly aware that I have an ability to think outside the box and to find solutions to problems in the teaching of or sustaining of the classics. I must step up because others can’t or won’t or lack vision. And at the same time as I do this, I must teach my classes, mindful at all times to teach to all students, not just the best and brightest. And ultimately, to simply help my fellow man, adding a verse to the song of life any way I can, whether it be by following or leading, but always by extending loyalty to those who have earned it. Pietas.

 

– July 27, 2008