For Next Week: Books 22, 23 & 24 of The Iliad & Tuesday's Class Recap

Try to finish The Iliad for next week's class, but don't worry if you don't quite make it there. You'll have time to catch up soon. Also, after the questions below, there's a brief recap of our class today. 

Answer TWO of the following as usual: 

Q1: In a passage omitted from our version of Book 24, the gods debate about whether Achilles should give up Hector’s body.  Apollo, who thinks he should, speaks:

How callous can you get?  Has Hector

Never burned for you thighs of bulls and goats?

…but now you cannot

Bring yourselves to save even his bare corpse

For his wife to look upon, and his mother,

And child, and Priam, and his people…

No, it’s the dread Achilles that you prefer,

His twisted mind is set on what he wants,

As savage as a lion bristling with pride,

Attacking men’s flocks to make himself a feast.

Achilles has lost all pity and has no shame left.

Shame sometimes hurts men, but it helps them too.

A man may lose someone dearer than Achilles has,

A brother from the same womb, or a son,

But when he has wept and mourned, he lets go.

The Fates have given men an enduring heart.

But this man?  After he kills Hector,

He ties him behind his charior

And drags him around his dear friend’s tomb.

Does this make him a better or nobler man? (lines 37-57)

What do you think Apollo means by an “enduring heart,” and why might this speech suggest that hubris is a quality of gods—not men? 

Q2: How does Book 24 present Achilles’ decision to give Hector’s body back to Priam?  Is it still an act of compassion and mercy?  Does this book redeem Achilles in our eyes, or is he merely a pawn of the gods, forced to do Zeus’ bidding? 

Q3: How do the various women respond to Hector’s body—Andromache, Hecuba, and Helen?  How does this give us different perspectives on who Hector was, and whether or not he died honorably—or for the right reason? 

Q4: Why do you think the book ends with the funeral of Hector, rather than with the fall of Troy, or even the death of Achilles?  If the story is about Achilles’ rage, then why not end with the natural outcome of his rage—his death?  Why is ending the book here, rather than later on in the actual story of Troy, somehow satisfying?

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TUESDAY'S CLASS RECAP: 

AESTHETICS AND AUTHORSHIP (pages from Graziosi's book):

* Page 9: "Homer" is an aesthetic judgment--the idea of a single author is more aesthetically pleasing to us. It fits in with our "myth of genius," and a great work being the product of a single great mind, even though this may be erroneous. 

* Page 7: In the  17th century, the poems were thought "too vile, rude, cruel, proud" to be the work of a single person. Are there too many inconsistencies and discrepancies? Could one mind produce all of this--the glories and the difficulties? 

* Page 14: Was the poem, perhaps, an oral poem dictated to a scribe, so that there is "one author," either the poet-reciter or the poet-transcriber? This is possible, but also unlikely: there are still too many voices for one person to be the sole originator of the work. 

CLUES IN THE EPIC?

* Page 13: The formulas the epic follows—oral tricks to help a poet flesh out the story and fill the verse. However, neither poem is a slave to them; it goes beyond mere formulas and cliches. 

* Page 16: The difference between how Achilles is described and how he actually is—“swift footed,” but never moves, etc. The poem often evokes the cliched language of a hero or a god, and then shows us the opposite, as if to make fun of them, or to simply be ironic. That does suggest that the narrator is pushing against the fabric of the narrative. 

* THE SIMILES, as discussed in the last blog--be sure to watch and comment! 

* page 18: ALSO—the literary language of the poem is not a spoken language, but an invented, ornate language. For example, we never say "thus," or "heretofore" in normal speech, but we could use it in academic writing. It's used to create a more formal, more analytical style of writing. So, too, with Homer's verse, which doesn't reflect how the Greeks spoke, but how they told history/mythology. It had to sound different. 

THE AUDIENCE AND THE NARRATOR

* Page 24-25: Graziosi demonstrates how the poem offers asides and metaphors to suggest that the audience is not the same as the characters in the poem. This may have been added later to make the myth more relevant and relatable to the audience. almost like a translation. 

* Page 26: Was the poem a way to understand the lost, ancient world? The Greeks grew up around ruined fortresses, ancient statues, and other landmarks whose meaning was probably lost in time even in antiquity. So the poem itself could be a 'myth,' or translation of these objects through the language and events of the poem. 

* Page 34: Where do we hear the "author's" voice in the narrative? How do we know that they are distinct from the story they tell? Where do we 'hear' them?

* page 37: seeing from the Greek side—the Iliad is more ‘cinematic,’ it moves like a movie would today (even though such technology wouldn't be invented for thousands of years!) 

* page 41: The Odyssey is more from Odysseus’ side—more at ‘eye level.' We seem from a more intimate point of view.