Before Reading: Questions
for reflection
 What factors contribute to the victory of a
war?
 Why do people love to watch or learn martial
art?
 Why do people love action or even horror
movie?
Homer
 Time: 8 century BCE
 Birth place: Ionia; the western coast of Asia
Minor
 Blind
 The two master pieces attributed to him: the
Iliad & the Odyssey
The Iliad & The Odyssey
 Originally for oral recitation
 Their composition dated from the beginning
of Greek literacy
The features of Greek oral
poetry
 place: Ionian coast (modern Turkey)
 Performer: travelling bards
 Subject matter: tales of lost age of heroes
who fought with bronze, and of the great
cities besieged and destroyed by war
The features of Greek oral
poetry
 Form: Hexameter (six-part line)
 With musical accompaniment
 Poets fitting their own riffs (repeated short
notes) into the rhyme
 Common themes, traditional stories,
traditional characters, traditional
adjectives (“swift Achilles”), stock phrases,
even a set pattern of a whole scene
The features of epic in its
oral form
 A vast & intricate system of metrical formulas
 A repertoire of standard scenes (ex. The
arming of the warrior, the battle of two
champions)
 The known outline of the story
 No trace of individual identity in the poet; it’s
not the poet’s creation
Homer’s
unique contribution
 To make them into the written form
 The sophisticate organization
The Homeric poems
 origins: folk memories of a real conflict or
conflicts between Mycenean Greeks and
inhabitants of one or more cities in Asia Minor
 Plausibility: neither historical nor purely
fictional
The Iliad
 Subject: war
 Characters: men in battle & women whose
fate depends on the outcome
 Mood: cruelty, violence of war
 Theme: a. ambiguity (ambivalence) of the
meaning of war and (glory vs.
ignominy)
b. violence: man’s fear and desire
The Iliad: A work about
Trojan war
 Ilias: another name for Troy
After Reading
The Iliad: Its particular
structure
 Time setting: the tenth year of the war
 Central focus: conflict among the Greek
commanders (not between Greeks and
Trojans)
 Central subject: rage (of Achilles)
Achilles’ rage: its
influence
 1. making him alienated from his society
 2. (after Patroclus died) shifted into an
inhuman aggression against the Trojans
 3. willing to return to the human world (his
sympathy for Priam)
Graphic violence:
vulnerability of humans’
mortal bodies
 How Patroclus throws his spear at Sarpedon:
“just below the rib cage/ where it protects the
beating heart”
 When Hector rams his spear into Patroclus:
“into the pit of his belly and all the way
through”
 When Achilles’ spear “pierced the soft neck
but did not slit the windpipe”
War economy: a system of
exchange
 Ransoming of human bodies:
----Cryseis & Briseis
 The ownership of dead male bodies
-----the corpse s of Sarpedon, Patroclus, &
Hector
War: humans’ desire and fear
of violence
 Entertainment: it is exciting to hear or read
about slaughter (cf. action movie)
 At times, the poems brings out the terrible
pity of war (Troy will be ruined, the people
killed or enslaved).
 The poet looks back with regret to “the days
of peace, before the Greeks came.”
A bitter understanding of
Life:
 Violence and the threat of pain and death
are facts of life. Even when people are at
peace, there is murder, and lion or wolves
leap into the fold to kill the sheep.
The Greeks’ positive
attitude toward the facts of
life
 Mortals can’t choose, like gods, to avoid
death, but they can choose how they will die.
How/What, then, to choose
(in a war)?
 the exchange of honor for death?
---the choice Achilles and all the Greek
warriors faced
 Fighting for vengeance?
---What Achilles did after Patroclus died
 Fighting for protecting one’s family
---What Hector faced despite all his
unwillingness to engage in a war
War & Peace: Desire and Fear
 What meaning does war stand for Achilles?
 What meaning does war stand for Hector?
 What meaning does war stand for
Agamemnon?
 Which one do you sympathize?
The contrast between gods
and men
 On Olympus, all quarrels end in laughter and
drinking, not death.
 Before death, humans have to face grief,
dishonor, loss and pain—things that play little
or no part in any god’s life.
The valor of human beings as
mortals
 At the end, Achilles realized that all humans,
have to have “hearts of iron,” the ability to
endure unendurable loss and keep on living.
 The Iliad provides a bleak but inspiring
account of human suffering as a kind of
power, which the gods themselves cannot
achieve. (cf. the meaning of human suffering
in The Hebrew Bible).
The profundity of Homer
 Now we see why Homer chose to present the
story in a particular way.
 The Iliad in Homer’s presentation is no longer
an entertainment on feast.
 It’s a profound reflection on the meaning of
life and humanity.