A central idea in the Iliad is the inevitability of death as also with the earlier Epic of Gilgamesh. The poignancy of life and death is enhanced by the fact that the victims of war are usually young.
Achilles is youthful and headstrong, and has a goddess for a mother, but even he has to die. We learn that he had been given a choice — a long life without heroic glory, or a short and glorious life in war. His choice of the latter marks him out as heroic, and gives him a kind of immortality. But the other warriors too, including the Trojan hero Hector, are prepared to die young. But they can be affected by death. After his death, she will lead an existence of perpetual mourning for him.
Immortality in Greek mythology can be a mixed blessing. The Iliad also has much to say about war. The atrocities in the war at Troy are committed by Greeks on Trojans.
One is that there are large elements of the Homeric stories, particularly The Iliad , that are shared among the Indo-European world as a whole, all the way from north India through Greece to Germanic and Icelandic stories. There are deep elements in Homer that have nothing to do with Greece or the Aegean. The second thing is that the situation in The Iliad is very clearly not one in which two deeply civilized nations are opposed to each other.
The civilized nation in The Iliad is Troy. It's a well-set-up, organized city, where women lead very dignified lives.
Outside Troy is this camp of wild barbarians—the Greeks. The Greeks are Homer's barbarians. The atmosphere in the Greek camp is like gang life in the more difficult parts of modern industrialized cities.
All ideas of rule and law and love count for nothing. The only thing that makes sense is revenge and self-assertion. And that picture of the Greeks doesn't make sense any later than about to B. After that, the Greeks had arrived in the Mediterranean and started to create a civil society. Before that, they were essentially tribes from the steppes between the Black Sea and the Caspian—nomadic, male-dominated, violent. That's the essential drama of Homer: this beautiful city trying to defend itself against these increasingly lawless, violent warriors outside.
That's what The Iliad is about. Bernard Knox , the renowned Homer scholar, says that 3, years haven't changed the human condition. We're still lovers and victims of violence, and as long as we are, Homer will be read as the truest interpretation of humankind. Can we love Homer without loving violence? I think Homer does not love violence in the end.
Homer dramatizes violence as one of the aspects of the human condition, but he doesn't celebrate it. It's a grave misunderstanding to think that Homer is about how beautiful the violent warrior is.
The key to that comes at the end of The Iliad. You've had these terrible scenes where Achilles, the great Greek warrior, has killed Hector, the prince of Troy, and tied him to the back of his chariot and dragged him round the walls of Troy with his whole family looking down from the ramparts.
It's not some elegant funeral procession. It's a hectic, brutal moment, and we can only read that with horror in our minds. Michael Longley , the great Irish poet, calls The Iliad "an ocean of sadness. You say these are essentially authorless works. Are there any manuscripts? Tell us about Venetus A. Homer's works were orally transmitted and orally performed poems, ever changing in the mouths of the different people who learned them and told them again. The Iliad survived for hundreds, if not thousands, of years as a spoken poem and was eventually written down, around to B.
But no manuscripts survive from that time. The earliest that survive were found rolled up under the heads of mummified Greek Egyptians in the Egyptian deserts from about to B. But they're just fragments, not the whole Iliad. The oldest complete Iliad is a manuscript found in the doge's library in Venice.
A French scholar discovered it at the end of the 18th century, which is why it's called the Venetus A. It had come to Venice from Constantinople-Byzantium, where it had probably been made in about A.
More importantly, it contained all kinds of marginal notes, the so-called scholia, which had been made by the great editors of The Iliad in the Greek city of Alexandria sometime between the first century B. So what you have in Venetus A is not only the text of The Iliad but also what these ancient commentators thought about it.
They worked from the standard text of the epic poem. The date they came up with fits the time most scholars think the "Iliad" was compiled, so the paper, published in the journal Bioessays , won't have classicists in a snit. The study mostly affirms what they have been saying, that it was written around the eighth century B.
We tried to document the regularities in linguistic evolution and study Homer's vocabulary as a way of seeing if language evolves the way we think it does. If so, then we should be able to find a date for Homer. It is unlikely there ever was one individual man named Homer who wrote the "Iliad. The story of the "Iliad" is well known, full of characters like Helen of Troy, Achilles, Paris, Agamemnon and a slew of gods and goddesses behaving badly.
It recounts how a gigantic fleet of Greek ships sailed across the "wine dark sea" to besiege Troy and regain a stolen wife. Its sequel is the "Odyssey.
Classicists and archeologists are fairly certain Troy existed and generally know where it is. In the 19th century, the German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann and the Englishman Frank Calvert excavated what is known as the Citadel of Troy and found evidence of a military conflict in the 12th century B. The Achaeans build a massive, hollow, wooden horse, large enough to hold a contingent of warriors inside.
Odysseus and a group of soldiers hide in the horse, while the rest of the Achaeans burn their camps and sail away from Troy, waiting in their ships behind a nearby island. The next morning, the Trojans peer down from the ramparts of their wall and discover the gigantic, mysterious horse.
They also discover a lone Achaean soldier named Sinon, whom they take prisoner. As instructed by Odysseus, Sinon tells the Trojans that the Achaeans have incurred the wrath of Athena for the theft of the Palladium. They have left Sinon as a sacrifice to the goddess and constructed the horse as a gift to soothe her temper. Sinon explains that the Achaeans left the horse before the Trojan gates in the hopes that the Trojans would destroy it and thereby earn the wrath of Athena.
That night, Odysseus and his men slip out of the horse, kill the Trojan guards, and fling open the gates of Troy to the Achaean army, which has meanwhile approached the city again. All of the Trojan men are killed except for a small group led by Aeneas, who escapes. Helen and Menelaus have a long and dangerous voyage back to their home in Sparta, with a long stay in Egypt.
In The Odyssey, Telemachus travels to Sparta in search of his father, Odysseus, and finds Helen and Menelaus celebrating the marriage of their daughter, Hermione. Meanwhile, Aeneas, the only great Trojan warrior to survive the fall of Troy, wanders for many years, searching for a new home for his surviving fellow citizens. Ace your assignments with our guide to The Iliad! SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook.
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