Iliad - SCHOLARSHIP

Peter Jones - Fight Scenes

• “There is always a common pattern” - A throws at B, misses and kills C, A misses B and B kills A (B is Greek) , A misses B, B hits and not pierces armour (A is Greek), A kills B, and so on

Peter Jones - Speeches

• “There are 666 speeches in the Iliad, and seventy-seven characters speak” (including the horse)

Seth L. Schein - Heroism

• “Through parallels, contrasts and juxtapositions of characters and actions, a dramatic structure is crated that forces us to consider critically the traditional heroic world depicted in the poem and the contradictions inherent in this kind of heroism.”

Silk - Characterisation

• “Perhaps the most alien feature of Homer’s people is that, in general, they seem to show no capacity for development: character is conceived as static.”

• Disagree - development of Achilles

Barker and Christensen - Mortality

• “The most important theme of the Iliad is Achilles’ growing recognition of his mortality”

Silk - Achilles and the Heroic World

• “It is clear that Achilles is an uncomfortable and even destructive presence in the heroic world”

Peter Jones - Heroic Code

• “There is tension at the heart of the Iliad between the hero’s natural desire for honour and status to be gained by winning, and his obligations to others to co-operate with them and ensure that their honour is not compromised by his search for his own.”

Peter Jones - Heroic Behaviour

• “Heroic behaviour and its consequences in the person of Achilles are the central subject around which Homer builds the Iliad. Within it are contained issues of self-control, power, authority and compromise which resonate far beyond the military context in which they are set. Above it rises the magnificent figure of Achilles, obsessive, complex, extreme, austere, reaping the whirlwind of decisions he freely makes.”

• Achilles vs the Heroic Code

Leaf - Heroic Code

• “By the end of the Iliad, Achilles only cares for revenge and not for honour”

Weil - Heroism

• “Heroism is but a theatrical gesture and snitched with boastfulness”

Nagy - Heroic Code

• “kleos was the primary medium for communicating the concept of the hero”

Robin Sowrby - Achilles

• “The character of Achilles is not good in any other sense that he excels others in physical prowess and is the best fighter”

• Disagree - exhibits other qualities (though some are negative)

Peter Jones - Partroclus

• “It was not Patroclus’ fighting ability that will be his undoing… it will be his desire to go too far and refusal to rein himself in that will kill him.”

Schein - Achilles vs Hector

• “Perhaps true main difference between the two heroes is that Hector is represented as quintessentially social and human, while Achilles is inhumanly isolated and daemonic in his geratenes.”

Shakescraft - Achilles

• “he could destabilise the order of divine and human existence vouchsafed by fate”

Weil - Similes of the Hero

• “Warriors are likened to either fire, flood run or fierce beasts, and whatever blind cause of disaster, or to frightened animals, trees, water, and whatever is affected by the violence of outside forces”

• Destructive vs Natural forces

Allan - War

• “The Achaens’ martial pre-eminence reminds us that to fully understand the Iliad, we must balance the suffering caused by war against the glory that comes from success in it.”

• Agree - Homer is impartial, shows both sides, creates pathos for both - balance between suffering and victory

Weil - Inevitability of War

• “Perhaps, all men, by the very act of being born, are destined to suffer violence”

Weil - Progress of War

• “The progress of war in the Iliad is simply a continual game of seesaw… he [Homer] forgets to treat victory as a transitory thing”

Peter Jones - Divine Intervention

• “Men who needed the gods most of all were not weak or powerless, but strong and heroic”

Peter Jones - The Gods

• “To understand them, we must divorce ourselves from theology, which attempts to present a systematic, coherent and self-consistent exposition in the nature of god, together with creeds and dogmas… For the ancients the world was full of gods who are best thought of as blind forces, like gravity… all one has to do is acknowledge its power”

Silk - The Gods

• The gods are not affecting human actions, but merely reflecting them - “Homer is perfectly capable of showing people making up their own minds without divine intervention.”

Silk - The Gods

• “Though consistently and coherently represented as external beings, they constitute forces which… we may take as equally internal”

Silk - Parallels between Mortal and Divine

• Argument on both plains in Book 1 - “The heroes’ quarrel is set to bring death and destruction; the gods’, by comparison, is aimless and even frivolous”

Janko - The Gods

• “a theme central to the Iliad: the unbridgeable chasm between mortal and immortal”

Redfield - The Gods

• “the gods are as chief source of comedy”

Shakescraft - The Gods

• “It is Zeus’ point of view that Homer encourages us to see”

Shakescraft - Mortals v Gods

• “the closer heroes come to the gods, the clearer the disparity between them becomes”

• Works well with Janko’s quote (“unbridgeable chasm”)

Janko - Mortals and Gods/ Fate

• “man as a plaything at the mercy of mightier powers”

Haynes - Women

• “Women are a central theme in the Iliad”

Hauser - Inside Troy (Women)

• “We see the world of perspective, the world that could have been, as opposed to the world of men”

Hauser - Battlefield (Women)

• “The battlefield is very firmly a man’s world, and women don’t have much of a play in it”

Nicholson - Women as Objects

• “In the Greek camp, women are traded like commodities”

Weil - Fate

• “Victory is less a matter of valour than of blind destiny”

Janko - Fate

• “Both ineluctable fate and unpredictable divine intervention reinforces the sense of man as a plaything”

Shakescraft - Fate

• “The fraught relationship between fate and free will applies even to the strongest god”

Monscare - Grief

• “The masculine ideology of the Iliad anchors suffering at the very heart of human heroism”

Thorpe - Menis

• “Those tears and sympathy for the plight of Priam brings Achilles’ anger to its end”

Shakescraft - Menis

• “Achilles’ anger is thus the cause of Patroclus’ death”

Weil - Relief

• “brief celestial moments” (Hector and Andromache) - war is replaced by “Justice and love”

Thorpe

“The song of kleos is just as real as Achilles’ very own life is to him.”