Reading Assignment 1
Iliad, Books 1, 2, 6, 9, 18, 24. As you read these selections, pay close attention to how the characters interact with each other.
There are at least four excellent, widely available modern English translations of both epics, by (in chronological order) Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Fagles, and Stanley Lombardo.
Available online is a fine contemporary translation by Ian Johnston –
https://www.coursera.org/learn/ancient-greeks/lecture/GUkPt/homer-1-iliad
Homer, The Iliad
/lecture/GUkPt/homer-1-
Interactive Transcript
You know, we've gone through several hundred years of history already, and that's fine. But it's somehow more daunting than anything to try to talk about a work as complex as the Iliad or the Odyssey in the relatively short time that we have available to us in these lectures. I'm not going to try to sum up the story. It's far to complicated for that. Instead, what I would like to do is to talk with you about how we've come to understand Homer in terms of the way he conveys a vision of a society and its values. The back story may be familiar to you. Here depicted on a vase painting where the Trojan prince Paris is asked by three goddesses to judge essentially a beauty contest, which of them is the most attractive, Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. Each of them tries to bribe him. And Aphrodite offered him the most beautiful woman in the world and so he chooses her to be the most beautiful of the goddesses. Unfortunately, the most beautiful woman in the world is Helen, who is married to Menelaus, who is king of Sparta. When Paris goes to visit the royal couple, Helen takes off with him. They go to Troy and the Greeks mount a war of revenge to get her back. So, the setting for this great poem is war and all of its horror, its nobility, its baseness, and its glory.
Before we start talking about that, we can go back to yet another one of the figures that we've already met, and that's Heinrich Schliemann. Remember, he was the German archaeologist, business man archaeologist, who excavated at Mycenae. Four years before going to Mycenae, he excavated at a site that he was sure was Troy. Modern day Hissarlik in the northwest corner of Turkey, right near the Dardanelles. Schliemann dug down into a great mound there, and just at about the place that he thought he would, he ran across a stratum burned, destroyed buildings, also a tremendous amount of jewelry. And he was convinced that he had found Troy. There's a lot of debate about whether there was actually a Trojan war and I'm not going to get into that now. But, there may have been, preserved by Homer, some remnant of a genuine historical event. Certainly, all of the heroes whom we'll be talking about, Achilles and Agamemnon and Hector, those are depictions. That doesn't mean that they're not important, of course. We'll come back to all of this as we go through. I want to give you a little sense of what this poem might have sounded like. These are the first five lines of The Iliad. I'm going to exaggerate the beat a little bit, just so you get some sense of the rhythm of what's called dactylic hexameter, which is the meter that these poems were composed in and it goes,[FOREIGN]. And the translation a little bit lumpy which I've put up here. Although literal, is, the wrath, sing, o goddess, of Peleus's son Achilles, carrying doom, which brought countless sorrows to the Achaians, and sent many brave souls of heroes to Hades, and left the rest as spoils for all dogs and birds, and the will of Zeus was fulfilled. These lines have come down to us over the millenia.
It seems that Homer, whoever he was or whoever they were, I'll come back to that in a moment, likeliest composed first in the eighth century BCE, that is the 700s. Homer is identified in the Romantic imagination as a blind bard from the island of Chios, just off the coast of Asia minor. This was partly because there is a blind bard in the Odyssey when Demodocus, and partly because an early poem, one of the so called Homeric hymns, talks about a blind bard of Chios. And for the longest period in the history of these poems, it was thought that there was a single great poet named Homer. I want to emphasize now, at the very beginning, the cultural importance of Homer. There is, I think very little, by way of a similarly dominant figure in other world literatures. For the Greeks Homer was the poet. Whenever subsequent authors talk about the poet, there's only one the poet that they're talking about. If you look for Homer in subsequent works of history, philosophy, tragedy, even comedy, you'll find him. Memorizing Homer was part of the education of any reasonably well brought up young Greek man. And this will also be very important for us because, knowing Homer was one of the most important ways that Greek society started to define itself at the end of the Dark Ages, the beginning of what's called the Archaic Age. We'll spend more time there later on, when Greeks separated themselves culturally from the rest of the eastern Mediterranean societies. So, what do we know about Homer? Not much. The great, great breakthrough in Homeric studies was made in the 1930's by a young American scholar named Milman Parry, then an assistant professor at Harvard. He had a theory that brought him to central Europe where he recorded Yugoslav bards singing great long poems. And what he found there, was that the bards didn't make these up as they went along. You can't do that. The Iliad is some 16,000 lines of verse. The Odyssey, some 12,000. You can't make this up as you go along. What the bards had, as they did what's called oral composition, was a set, a huge set to be sure, of one might call a database of pre-made phrases. Some of them are just two words. You saw one, although you didn't recognize it, in the first line of the Illiad. That two-word phrase, Peleus's son Achilles, [foreign] fits into this rhythm. This is what's called an epithet. That is an adjective attached to a name. And as you're reading Homer, you're probably struck by the enormous amount of repetition. So, that you have swift foot Achilles, or Achilles, son of Peleus, or grey-eyed Athena, or Zeus of the thunderbolt, et cetera. So, these are, these combinations of formulas in terms of epithets. But the formulas can be much more extensive as well. Sometimes a few words, he spoke answering him. Sometimes much more extensive even than that. So, a description of a sacrifice, is repeated again and again. This is the way these bards composed. And again, I just want to emphasize the importance of this kind of poetry, as a conveyor of cultural values, of cultural memory. Bards are heroes. But it's not just the bards that are heroes because in those very first few lines of the Iliad we hear that the wrath of Peleus's son sent many brave souls of heroes to Hades. Who were the heroes?
When we use the word hero today, we generally think of somebody who demonstrates extraordinary virtue or courage under extraordinary circumstances. For the ancient Greeks heroism was not a kind of moral accomplishment, but was a status. What made you a hero? You were the son of a hero. Genealogy is the first, first criteria. In addition to that, you tended to be tall, and good looking. You had military courage. You had a group of retainers who would follow you with sort of unquestionable loyalty. And, you, like Achilles here depicted in his departure from his homeland, had constantly to prove yourself because this is a world of contest and competition. Heroism is in some ways a remarkably fragile status. It is constantly being tested. It's sort of a zero, a zero-sum game, as it's called, because anything that I win, you pretty much lose. We have constantly, all of us, to display arete, which can be translated as virtue or excellence. When we're really at our height, we're in a condition called aristeia, which means being at one's best. In combat, this means, as I sometimes joke, that you grow and glow. You take on a kind of superhuman power. You're compared to fire.
Achilles has an aristeia in the Iliad that sort of involves the natural world. He starts fighting the river's commander because he is so far beyond himself. And what you hope to gain from all of this is kleos. Which is the word that means glory or renown. This is what heroes long for, yearn for, fight for, and strive for. So what happens? Well, sometimes the competition can take the form a friendly competition. One of the most common motifs, a very popular motif in vase painting, believe it or not, shows the two great Greek heroes Achilles and Ajax, having set their armor aside but holding onto their spears. And they're playing a kind of board game like chess or checkers. Nobody's quite sure what it was. But of course, it's really combat where heroes prove themselves. This is a representation of a scene which doesn't occur in the Illiad. It took place in another epic which has perished from the Itheos, and it shows Achilles fighting an Ethiopian warrior named Memnon. And if you look very closely, you can see on either side, their mothers are watching. The Iliad is a dominantly male poem. Women do appear, but they tend to be tokens that are exchanged. There's Helen of course, who had taken off with Paris, prince of Troy. There is also, at the beginning of the poem, Chryseis, the daughter of the priest of Apollo whom Agamemnon has taken. When he has to give her back, in a supreme display of ill temper, he takes Achilles' prize. This is what sets Achilles rage going. For a hero to be insulted like this, in public, is probably the worst thing that can happen. It is literally a fate worse than death. What happens is that Achilles withdraws from battle. Here, he is shown in a beautiful red figure vase tending the wound of his beloved companion, Patroclus. And when Achilles withdraws, the whole world is upset, the world of the Achaean warriors. And one of the ways that we can see how bad things have gotten, and I hope you all had a chance to read this in book two, there's a chaotic assembly. And who speaks up? The one named member of the mass, otherwise anonymous of regular warriors, one Thersites. He's not a hero. He is, if anything, an anti-hero. He's described as the ugliest man ever to appear under the walls of Troy. What he says is what Achilles has been saying, that Agamemnon is greedy, a bully, shouldn't behave the way he does. But Thersites doesn't have the right to say it and he is clubbed back into silence by Odysseus. Before we get too sentimental about this incidentally, the reaction of the other Greek soldiers should in form, ours. Instead of expressing sympathy for their fellow soldier, what they say is, this is an excellent thing Odysseus has done. Because when somebody like Thersites can speak up, it means that the world is sort of spinning out of control. As Achilles maintains his isolation, Agamemnon finally realizes that he has to get him back. And they send an embassy to try to get Achilles back. It doesn't work. But, what it does demonstrate is yet another one of these Homeric values, or, I should say attention in Homeric society. Who are you loyal to? Are you loyal to your family, to your community to your army? Here, Achilles, muffled, is maintaining his rage and his isolation. And in book nine of the Iliad, he makes a typically Achillean statement. He says, why should I fight? We all wind up dead anyhow. The heroic code to gain glory or to be more blunt, to help one's friends and to hurt one's enemies, is here undercut by the simple remark about mortality. Eventually though, Achilles has to come back into battle. And he does. And he faces off against the Trojans' great champion, Hector, whom we have seen on the battlefield. He is the son of Priam. He is the greatest of the Trojan warriors. And Achilles has been told that when he kills Hector, his own death will follow soon. He's willing to take that on because Hector has killed Patroclus. In the excess of rage and grief, Achilles tries to mutilate Hector's body, by dragging him around the walls of Troy, latched onto his chariot. The gods preserved the corpse from exfoliation. And then, at the very end, there's an extraordinary scene here represented in a fragment of a vase, when the old king of Troy, Priam, who has lost so much, comes to Achilles to beg for the return of the corpse of his son. The Iliad is a poem about the glory and the sorrow of war. Achilles and Priam share a moment of common grieving for all they have lost. Achilles does return the corpse to the king. And the poem that had begun with, sing, muse, the wrath of Achilles, ends with, that was the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses. The poet has taken a set of stories that he has inherited, that have been told and retold. We talked about how literacy died out, disappeared during the dark ages, and has given us one of the first, really the first and still one of the greatest monuments in the literature of the West.