Why do we read the iliad today

Unfortunately, one of them usually the one who's not the main character dies during the course of the story. The death has a profound effect on the remaining hero, and changes them forever.

It's important to note that 1. The two cannot just be friends or acquaintances. The character's death needs to be a huge turning death point in the story. They are also the basis of literature, teaching us about the natural man man at his best and worst, but natural man.

They don't give us the answers that we find in revelation, but they do give us the questions. Eris, goddess of discord Sent gold apple for the fairest All of the goddesses wanted it Hera, Athena, Aphrodite.

Greek Life and Culture Survey English 9. The Iliad. He was not the first author because in his day stories were. Odyssey Power Point Notes.

First told orally or sang Put into writing generations. Ancient Greek Literature. Because the Greeks loved myths and stories, it is no surprise that they created great works of literature. Early Greek writers. Greek Epics 6. Guiding Question: Why were epics and fables important to the ancient Greeks?

By: Ivy Phillips. Helen was the most beautiful woman in the world, and she was married. I Need a Hero! We will be reading one of the greatest masterpieces of epic poetry…. The Odyssey. People who have been told to expect the ultimate poetic experience — and discover instead a world of hurt.

The most obviously painful experience is the infamous catalogue of the ships in Book Two : three hundred brutal lines naming plus Greek captains and hundreds of related cities and islands — this quickly followed by a similarly challenging line catalogue of Trojans.

These passages can be a grind — but at least they have the virtue of eminent skipability. Other issues are not so easily avoided. We are given a back story about the parentage and homeland of just about every character we meet, and they themselves love to expound on their parentage and hearth and sheep and other such tiresome details in their speeches.

But the duel is inconclusive because Aphrodite conceals Paris in mist, grabs him and puts him back in his bedroom. Likewise, Athena grabs Achilles by the hair at a crucial moment, and Zeus is forever tipping his scales this way and that to decide the outcome of battles. Small wonder that Achilles gives it all up to have a sulk by the ships.

On top of all these challenges is the fact that this is an ancient Greek poem. There will always be a suspicion that translations may not do it justice. The short answer to that question is: yes.

But the longer one is complicated and gets to the heart of what we may be losing in translation. Otherwise, it feels very alien.

Not to mention a meaty word in and of itself. There are further tricks here that are hard to translate. Add to that the lovely assonance in all those vowels, and the difficulty of recreating the feel of a syllabic hexameter, and you can understand why translators have such a struggle. There are, however, some names that you must remember. I will list them here as Achaian or Trojan, but as you read the poem, you will find yourself automatically remembering who these people are.

The names below are taken from the Lattimore translation. More commonly Achilleus is known as Achilles and Aias as Ajax. Achilleus is the son of Peleus, Diomedes is the son of Tydeus. If all of this sounds confusing, I promise that the confusion will disappear as you get involved in the story. Another hint concerns the second half of Book II.

Just as you begin to get involved with the story, everything stops halfway through Book II so that Homer can present what is called the Catalogue of the Ships, a long list of all the warriors who came to Troy and where they came from. This list serves at least two functions. One is that it allows Homer to show off his skill at fitting all of these names into the strict metrical requirements of the verses. A more significant function is that it served as an historical record for the ancient Greeks while at the same time illustrating how important this war had been for their ancestors.

A friend of mine once met a gentleman from Greece at a party. When the Greek gentleman mentioned his birthplace, my friend said he had never heard of it. Archaeologists have also made use of the Catalogue to identify some of the ancient cities that are mentioned.

Despite the historical importance of that catalogue, however, my recommendation is that when you get to it, you should skip directly to Book III so that you can maintain the continuity of the story. My last hint concerns the many battle scenes in the poem. We in twenty-first-century America have certainly become accustomed to violence in literature and film, not to mention everyday life, but of course we did not invent violence.

The Iliad is full of violence. In its many pages of battle scenes, we read of hundreds of deaths, often described in graphic detail. These descriptions are hardly pleasant, and they get worse as the poem continues, but they are a very important part of the poem.

You may tire of the battles and you may want to skip over them and over some of the gorier details. Do not give in to that impulse. If those scenes disgust you, the poem is working. Let me begin discussing The Iliad by elaborating on that point. The Iliad is an epic poem more about that later and epic poems are so often full of fighting and other kinds of mayhem that many readers, relying on superficial readings, on their own prejudices, or on the traditions that exist about such things, assume that such works glorify fighting and mayhem.

Of course, I am exaggerating, but not too much. Sophisticated readers tend to make these points in more, well, sophisticated ways, but the result is much the same: The Iliad is about the heroic code, they say, and Hektor, for example, is a hero because of his adherence to that code despite the odds against him.

These products of wrath and battle are not being glorified in the poem. Certainly there was some kind of heroic code when the poem was composed, just as, for many people, there is now.

In fact, that code has not changed much over the past three thousand years, though Achilles weeps more than a modern American hero would. But one of the functions of literature is to challenge the accepted values of a society, and The Iliad challenges the values of its society at almost every point.

Consider just one of the many deaths that Homer describes. He was striving in all his fury To strike Idomeneus, but he, too quick with a spearcast struck him in the gorge underneath the chin, and drove the bronze clean through. He fell, as when an oak goes down or a white poplar or like a towering pine tree which in the mountains the carpenters have hewn down with their whetted axes to make a ship timber.

So he lay there felled in front of his horses and chariot, roaring, and clawed with his hands at the bloody dust. This passage surely describes the reality of war: it is cruel, it is painful, it transforms human beings into objects. Asios, as he dies, has less value even than a tree, which at least can be made into a ship timber.

All that Asios can do is scream and claw at the dust onto which his blood is spilling. There is not much glory in this picture. There is only horror. And later on, when Homer describes how. Before Aineias and Hektor the young Achaian warriors went, screaming terror, all delight of battle forgotten. Surely he is commenting sadly on our image of war.

This passage always makes me think of the enthusiasm that people manage to work up for wars. I think of the old newsreels of columns of young men marching off to World War I, smiling and confident that after a brief period of glorious fighting they will return healthy and triumphant to their families. It never happens that way, of course, and we never learn. Tolstoy, incidentally, makes this point brilliantly in War and Peace. But The Iliad is more than simply a poem that describes the horrors of war.

It explores the behavior of extraordinary human beings, male and female, in a world that is characterized by this war. The poem explores what it means to be a human being in a world where such wars, such shame, such mortality exist. Given the fact of human mortality—and the fact that we are so often in such haste to hurry it along—how do we, and how should we, continue to live in this world?

Perhaps the best way to begin looking at these points is by considering two scenes from Book VI. The first of these scenes actually illustrates at least two important points.

The first has to do with the question of realism. But The Iliad is not a work of representational realism. It does not pretend to portray everyday actualities. Later in the poem there will be a scene when Achilleus appears to be covered by a divine fire and sends the Trojan army running just by shouting. Or earlier in the poem, Helen appears on the ramparts and Priam, the Trojan king, asks her to identify all of the Achaian heroes who are arrayed against the Trojans.

That scene might indeed seem realistic, except that the war is in its tenth year and it hardly seems likely that Priam has just gotten around to asking who his enemies are. There are, of course, explanations for each of these scenes, but the main point here is that we must not expect Homer to be realistic in the most common sense of the term. What the poem tells us about human existence is real, but the events of the poem are not necessarily realistic.

Such is the case in Book VI. When the book opens, the Achaians and the Trojans are engaged in a major battle. It is difficult for anyone who has never been in a battle to imagine what it is like, but we must try to picture the tumult of hand-to-hand combat, with spears and arrows flying through the air, armor plates banging against each other, men shouting battle cries and other men, like Asios, screaming in pain.

The picture has to be one of nearly total chaos. In the midst of this chaos, two soldiers—Diomedes, from the Achaian side, and Glaukos, from the Trojan side—encounter each other. It is customary in Homeric battles—and it was probably the case in real battles—that when two warriors meet, they speak to each other, perhaps to issue a challenge or to offer insults or to boast about their prowess.

We can see this custom today in sporting events, where it is known as talking trash. Many things do not change. Diomedes assures Glaukos that if the latter is one of the gods, he will not fight with him, and he explains why in a story that takes up sixteen lines. Glaukos responds by giving his own family background and, in over sixty lines, tells stories about his ancestors.

We must recognize that such pedigrees were very important to these people. A warrior had to establish his nobility, and family background was one of the criteria; but we must also remember that this lengthy exchange takes place against the noise and chaos of the fighting.

Both warriors jump from their horses, shake hands, and, as a sign of their agreement, exchange armor, which means, obviously, that right there on the battlefield, with spears and arrows flying everywhere, they each remove their armor. What is going on in this strange episode?

Of course not. Homer has a point to make here that transcends representational realism. In the midst of battle, surrounded by the dead and dying, two great warriors meet, intending to kill each other, and yet in a brief instant, they discover their human connections. No longer are they faceless enemies bent on mutual destruction.

They are human beings, each with an identity, united by events in the distant past and by their common struggle against human mortality. We can see this point when Glaukos first responds to Diomedes:. As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity. The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber Burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning. So one generation of men will grow while another dies.

This philosophical and highly poetic response, based on an extended metaphor, hardly seems appropriate to a battlefield conversation; but if we forget about realism, it turns out to be amazingly appropriate. The comparison of human life to the short life of plants is hardly novel, but Homer goes further than that. Individual human beings are like the leaves, which after a short existence will fall and be scattered by the wind; but the tree itself will continue to create new leaves, just as human beings will continue to flourish, even though individual generations will die off.

The subsequent action, however, shows also the value of the individual. It is because of such values, as evidenced by their grandfathers, that these two warriors find and extend the link between them, and they, too, a s individuals are vitally important. Does the audience think that the value of the armor matters? That value had become irrelevant. What matters is that amidst the dead and dying, vivid reminders of human mortality, Glaukos and Diomedes have managed to come together and somehow affirm life rather than death.

This triumph, unfortunately, is a small one, since death and battle will continue, but even minor triumphs are triumphs. The other key episode of Book VI involves Hektor. It would be like asking Babe Ruth to leave a World Series game in order to get coffee for the team. It makes no logical sense and it would never happen. On the other hand, as the action of the book develops, it makes a great deal of sense, because what happens to Hektor in Troy is vitally important to the themes of the poem, so that the sacrifice of realism becomes a minor, and easily overlooked, inconsistency.

When Hektor arrives at Troy, he meets his mother Hekabe and asks her to offer the sacrifice to Athena, which she does and which Athena rejects. Then he meets Paris, whom he rebukes for staying in Troy with Helen while all the other men are out fighting his battle for him. And finally he goes to find his wife Andromache. Hektor first looks for Andromache at home, but he is told that she is on the ramparts with their baby son watching the battle.

This detail is important because later, when Hektor is fighting his final battle with Achilleus, Andromache is not on the ramparts watching. Instead, in a kind of pathetic reversal of this scene, she is at home preparing a bath for what she thinks is the imminent return of her husband. When Hektor finds Andromache on the ramparts, husband and wife have one of the most central and revealing conversations in the poem.

To get the full import of this conversation, we must remember that Hektor, hero though he may be, is a young man, the husband of a young, loving wife. He is widely respected, and even Helen says that he alone has been consistently kind to her. When Hektor approaches Andromache, she weeps and pleads with him to stop putting himself in so much danger. She suggests that he pull his troops inside the city walls and concentrate them at the weakest spot, where the greatest attacks might be expected.

Her plan would protect the city and the warriors, and it makes a lot of strategic sense. She strengthens her argument by telling him something that he already knows but that the audience does not know, that she has only Hektor and their son in the whole world, since her father, her mother, and her seven brothers have all perished at the hands of Achilleus. With some justice, she fears that Hektor will suffer the same fate, and she knows that her life as a widow in a conquered city will be hellish.

What she has done, then, because she loves him and needs him, because she is a woman in a society that did not greatly value women, is put Hektor in the position of having to make a clear choice, which he certainly does. He tells her that he knows that what she says is accurate: he knows that if he follows his present course, Troy will be conquered and he will die.

What upsets him most, however, is her fate, for she will be carried off into slavery by the conquerors, who will not only abuse her physically but who will also mock her as the widow of Hektor. So why does he not change his strategy and follow her advice? I would feel deep shame before the Trojans and the Trojan women with trailing garments, if like a coward I were to shrink aside from the fighting… VI.

His only hope is that he will be dead before Andromache is captured so that he may not hear her screaming and know that what he foresees has actually happened. Every time I read The Iliad , I find myself wishing that Hektor would change his answer and prevent the whole calamity from happening. He knows that if the Trojans continue to pursue the course they have been following, he will be killed and they will be conquered and destroyed. Furthermore, Hektor knows what will happen to his beloved Andromache when he is dead and the city is conquered.

Nevertheless, he sees no way to implement her plan, because he has to win glory for himself. He could, conceivably, prevent his own death, the enslavement of his wife and son, and the destruction of his city, but he will not do so simply on the basis of pride. This scene, however, offers a particularly tragic part of the pattern, for Hektor knows that what Andromache fears will come true, yet he feels constrained to abandon his beloved wife and infant son for the sake of a pride that has little value.

He knows from his meeting earlier with Paris and Helen that Paris is unworthy and that Helen despises her new partner. He knows that his city will be destroyed. None of those factors matter to him as much as his pride, as his need to lead the fighting in a cause that is both futile and wrong. What a tragedy. War is clearly the province of men, who recognize its dangers but who believe in its nobility.

They know the risks that they take. They know that they will either die gloriously in battle or live gloriously as victors since no one in the Homeric poems ever survives with a disabling injury. These men have choices to make about their own destinies, though death, of course, is ultimately inevitable. But what about the women?