Classical Mythology in Context
by Lisa Maurizio
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Ancient Greek Heroes and Heroines – 5 Traits
• 1. A hero or heroine was understood to be a human being who
had died.
• 2. Heroes and heroines perform extraordinary deeds that may
or may not be moral.
• 3. Heroes and heroines die prematurely and violently.
• 4. Heroes and heroines were worshipped at their gravesites or
shrines.
• 5. Heroes and heroines obtain a form of immortality through
cult and song.
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Chapter 10: Heroes at Troy
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HISTORY Heroes in Homer’s Iliad
THEORY Heroes and Violence
COMPARISON Rome: Aeneas
RECEPTION Achilles in Contemporary Fiction
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HISTORY Heroes in Homer’s Iliad
• Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as Greek cultural touchstones
• The Trojan War
– For Greeks, occupied a place between fact and fiction
– Origins: Judgment of Paris
– Helen departs with Paris for Troy
– Agamemnon and Menelaus marshal allies to punish Troy
• The historical Troy and oral tradition
– “Homeric society”
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Figure 10.1 Paris sits between Hera and Athena
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Heroes in Homeric Society
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Heroes as aristoi, “excellent ones”
A hero’s aristeia on the battlefield
Kleos (reputation, fame)
Timé (honor, status)
Geras (prize)
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Agamemnon and Menelaus (1 of 2)
• Kings
• Ancestry
– Tantalus and Pelops
– Atreus and Thyestes
• Cannibalism and vengeance
• Paris diminishes Menelaus’s timé and kleos
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Agamemnon and Menelaus (2 of 2)
• Agamemnon and the beginning of the Iliad
– Chryseis, Briseis, and Achilles
• Agamemnon’s false dream
• Agamemnon’s aristeia in Book 11 of the Iliad
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Figure 10.2 Chryses kneels before Agamemnon
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Diomedes
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A manual on “how to become a hero”
Agamemnon challenges Diomedes
Diomedes wounds Aphrodite and Ares in his aristeia
Learns about Homeric values and heroism in Book 10
– Night raid with Odysseus
– Dolon
– Slaughter of Thracian king Rhesus
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Figure 10.3 Diomedes kills Rhesus
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Figure 10.4 Thracians
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Achilles
• Thetis, his mother, is a goddess
– Death and birth not in the Iliad
• Two immortal traits: his knowledge and anger
– His two fates
– “Anger”: first word of the Iliad
• Achilles’s withdrawal and the death of Patroclus
• Achilles’s aristeia
• Achilles and Priam
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Figure 10.5 Achilles mourns Patroclus
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Figure 10.6 Achilles and his mother Thetis
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Figure 10.7 Priam supplicates Achilles
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Hector and Priam
• Two most prominent Trojan princes in the Iliad
– More than honor at stake
– Destruction of Troy not in the Iliad
• Paris’s thwarted aristeia in Book 3
– Paris’s beauty, free-spirited nature, and interest in women
• Hector as heroic ideal
• Hector’s death and the death of Troy
• Hector’s funeral concludes the epic
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Figure 10.8 Neoptolemos kills Priam
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Figure 10.9 Funeral scene
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COMPARISON Rome: Aeneas
• Vergil’s Aeneid (first century BCE)
• Aeneas’s escape from Troy
• Achilles, Aeneas, and epic conventions
– Long poems
– Grand setting
– Centers on war or quest
– Serious tone
– Superior male hero with divine parent
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Figure 10.11 Aeneas escapes from Troy with his father on his shoulders
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Anger and Revenge in Vergil’s Aeneid
• Anger concentrated in Juno
• The Fury Allecto
– War between the Trojans and Rutulians, led by Turnus
• The Aeneid’s Odyssean and Iliadic halves
• The final scene: Aeneas kills Turnus
• The moral imperatives of empire and violence
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RECEPTION Achilles in Contemporary Fiction
• The Dying Achilles and Achilles Triumphant on Corfu
• David Malouf’s Ransom (2009)
– Priam’s ransom of Hector’s body in Book 24 of the Iliad
– Priam’s memories and sense of living two lives
– The role of Somax
• Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2019)
– Focus on Briseis
– The grim world of enslaved women in the Iliad
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Figure 10.12 Ernst Gustav Herter’s Dying Achilles
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Figure 10.13 Johannes G. Götz’s Achilles Triumphant
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