All 50 Uses of
The Iliad
in
The Iliad
- The Iliad and the Anger of Achilles The Iliad is both a landmark in the history of literature and a relic of its prehistory, so that to read it today is to encounter two masterpieces of ancient narrative at once.†
Book Intr.
- The Iliad and the Anger of Achilles The Iliad is both a landmark in the history of literature and a relic of its prehistory, so that to read it today is to encounter two masterpieces of ancient narrative at once.†
Book Intr.
- The first and more familiar is The Iliad as the "Song of Troy" (the meaning of "Iliad"), a classic, text that stands at the beginning of a Western epic tradition more than twenty-five centuries old.†
Book Intr.
- The "Anger of Achilles" became The Iliad because it suggests, despite its focus on a single episode in Akhilleus' meteoric life, the utter devastation of the Trojan War and gives it meaning through the eyes of its hero.†
Book Intr.
- The Greeks themselves had already canonized The Iliad by the fifth century B.C. (when the title "Iliad" is first attested).†
Book Intr. *
- In the high-classical culture of Athens, The Iliad, along with its sequel, The Odyssey, was memorized by schoolboys, performed to vast audiences in public arenas, and studied closely by scholars in lectures and monographs.†
Book Intr.
- When Greece fell under the sway of Rome in the third and second centuries, The Iliad began its metamorphosis from great national epic into the first poem of Europe.†
Book Intr.
- Such was his prestige that when Virgil aspired to compose the national Roman poem, he built his Aeneid squarely upon Homer: its first six books followed The Odyssey to tell how Aineias survived the fall of Troy and made his way to Italy, and the last six books closely refashioned The Iliad to recount the tragic war he fought there to found a new civilization.†
Book Intr.
- Tracing literary traditions to individual inventors not only oversimplifies—The Iliad is far from being the oldest epic in the world—but obscures the amazingly rich and complex traditions that lie behind the work.†
Book Intr.
- To put The Iliad in its historical contexts also makes it at least as fascinating as when it is seen as the product of a single artistic genius.†
Book Intr.
- In fact, the two perspectives are finally inseparable: serving as a repository of the past in an unlettered culture, the singer of epic aspired to be traditional, to retell the oldest stories without obvious novelty or idiosyncrasy; yet these same traditions were so profuse and so many-sided in their meanings that only the strongest poetic vision could have wrought from them the definitive shaping that is The Iliad.†
Book Intr.
- The immense story of Homer's reception is very well told in Howard Clark, Homer's Readers: A Historical Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey (Newark, 1981).†
Book Intr.
- Epics Before Homer On most estimates, The Iliad as we know it first came into shape sometime between 750 and 650 B.C. The traditional nature of the epic language makes it hard to date precisely, and some scholars are pushing it toward the sixth century.2 Because of its undeniable overall design, it is convenient to follow Greek tradition and call the person who gave it final form Homer, with the qualification that this name only crops up about a century later than the poem and is enshrouded from the first in folktale and fancy.†
Book Intr.
- 3 Whether the same poet composed both The Iliad and The Odyssey has been debated since antiquity, but need not concern us here.†
Book Intr.
- What is very clear is that The Iliad, even if it was as early as 750 B.C., came out of a very old tradition of heroic song.†
Book Intr.
- Alongside these ancestral inheritances, The Iliad also clearly reflects the influence of Near Eastern civilizations, for the time in which the poem came into shape was also one of strong Eastern influence on Greek culture.4 The very fact that we have a text of The Iliad documents this influence, for the song could not have been written down without the alphabet that the Greeks adapted from a Western Semitic script sometime in the eighth century.†
Book Intr.
- Alongside these ancestral inheritances, The Iliad also clearly reflects the influence of Near Eastern civilizations, for the time in which the poem came into shape was also one of strong Eastern influence on Greek culture.4 The very fact that we have a text of The Iliad documents this influence, for the song could not have been written down without the alphabet that the Greeks adapted from a Western Semitic script sometime in the eighth century.†
Book Intr.
- Perhaps the most striking Eastern literary antecedent to The Iliad is the story of Gilgamesh, which derives from Sumerian legends that reach back to the third millennium.†
Book Intr.
- By the time The Iliad was written down, Gilgamesh had been the most popular heroic saga throughout the Near East for a thousand years, being translated and transmitted on baked clay tablets through the lands of Asia Minor and all the way to the Mediterranean.†
Book Intr.
- As daughters of Mnemosyne, "memory," the Muses personify oral tradition, and Greek song traditions about Troy constitute the third and most immediate context in which to locate The Iliad.†
Book Intr.
- An obvious starting point for these traditions is the fall of Troy itself, for there was indeed a city of Troy, and it does seem to have suffered a series of disasters around the time that later Greek scholars set for the Trojan War, 1184 B.C. We know this because of the pioneering archaeological labors of Heinrich Schliemann, who, in a time when Homer was regarded as pure fantasy, followed up clues in The Iliad to the northwest coast of Turkey a mile or two from the entrance to the Dardanelles.†
Book Intr.
- Signs of renewed collective enterprise and an increased sense of national identity are the Olympic games, founded in 766 B.C., the establishment of an oracular center for all Greeks at Delphi, and a new wave of colonization and exploration that expanded the Greek horizons from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Black Sea beyond the Troad.7 It has been noted that a main concern of The Iliad is the difficulties of keeping together a massive but tenuously united coalition.†
Book Intr.
- The scholarly six-volume The Iliad: A Commentary, edited by G. S. Kirk et al. (Cambridge, 1985-1993), contains excellent, readable essays on major topics of Homeric research.†
Book Intr.
- 3 The standard book and line enumeration of the Greek texts may have been imposed by ancient scholars long after Homer; the implications of this question for reading The Iliad are richly discussed in Oliver Taplin, Homeric Soundings: The Shaping of the Iliad (Oxford, 1992).4 Major studies are: Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Cambridge, Mass.†
Book Intr.
- 3 The standard book and line enumeration of the Greek texts may have been imposed by ancient scholars long after Homer; the implications of this question for reading The Iliad are richly discussed in Oliver Taplin, Homeric Soundings: The Shaping of the Iliad (Oxford, 1992).4 Major studies are: Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Cambridge, Mass.†
Book Intr.
- For a subtle reading of The Iliad in these terms, see Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore and London, 1979).†
Book Intr.
- Greek Epic in the Eighth Century B.C. We can glimpse the traditions behind The Iliad only indirectly, for it is the oldest Greek poem we have; linguists place it earlier than The Odyssey by about a generation (though our tools are not sharp enough to exclude the possibility that both poems were composed by a single, long-lived singer).†
Book Intr.
- Like the Trojan expedition itself, The Iliad is a great marshaling of stories that Homer had to pick, combine, and shape.†
Book Intr.
- The tension is only implicit in The Iliad, but the question of who shall be "best of Akhaians" is always in the air.10 A candidate who emerges for this title is Diomedes, the son of Tydeus.†
Book Intr.
- But The Iliad traces the fall of the city rather to Paris.†
Book Intr.
- 8 The most recent editor of the Greek text of The Iliad, Martin L. West, has translated this material for The Loeb Classical Library: Homeric Hymns, Homeric Apocrypha, Lives of Homer (Cambridge, Mass.†
Book Intr.
- 9 A sensitive explication of the rhetoric of Homer's heroes is Richard P. Martin, The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad (Ithaca, 1989).†
Book Intr.
- We do not hear of this story in other accounts of the career of Zeus, and it seems likely that Homer has improvised it to give weight to a plea that will set the action of The Iliad in motion.†
Book Intr.
- but he will assuredly die, and not all his greatness and half-divine descent can fend off the destiny laid on him before his birth.13 A final tale, recounted in part by Hesiod but ignored by Homer, explains why the Greeks are at Troy, for no less a reader of The Iliad than Pope admitted that "the reader ...is apt to wonder at the Greeks for endeavouring to recover her at such an expense.†
Book Intr.
- 13 For this reading, see Laura M. Slatkin, The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991).†
Book Intr.
- 14 Cited on Book III by E. T. Owen, The Story of the Iliad, as Told in the Iliad (Toronto, 1946), an often-recommended basic guide to the poem.†
Book Intr.
- 14 Cited on Book III by E. T. Owen, The Story of the Iliad, as Told in the Iliad (Toronto, 1946), an often-recommended basic guide to the poem.†
Book Intr.
- The Opening of The Iliad: The Stakes The stories canvased above show that Homer had a choice of innumerable starting points for his song, but he decided to set off his story of immense suffering with a small, almost trivial incident.†
Book Intr.
- This makes him more conscious of the price of heroism, but the same choice faces any mortal hero.16 From this perspective, the opening quarrel of The Iliad has a larger resonance, for the dishonor of having lost a woman is what the Trojan War is about.†
Book Intr.
- From this incident the rationale of the war will be increasingly called into question by Akhilleus, most strikingly in the ninth book of The Iliad.†
Book Intr.
- 15 See further in James Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad (Chicago, 1978).†
Book Intr.
- But The Iliad is several times longer than these, and sheer scale and size are clearly part of its ambition.†
Book Intr.
- In this way, Homer magnifies the first all-out battle of The Iliad by echoing the original marshaling of the expedition.†
Book Intr.
- The Iliad is introduced as a very limited story from late in the war; but as it plays out it is as though everything were happening for the first time.†
Book Intr.
- 18 Ancient testimony claims that Book X was a later insertion into the poem, and even The Iliad's most fervent admirers will have trouble denying that removing it from the work would increase its dramatic tightness.†
Book Intr.
- The nineteenth-century "analytical" tradition of carving The Iliad into originally separate "lays" that were awkwardly combined by "Homer" is now generally regarded as fruitless, but Book X is a reminder that ancient and modern standards of coherence are not always identical.†
Book Intr.
- The Iliad does end early in the tale of Troy.†
Book Intr.
- The restrained pathos of the final book of The Iliad is characteristic of the poem as a whole.†
Book Intr.
- Epic song, the final and immortal form of glory, is a great thing; but at root its power comes from sheer naming, as Homer gives out again the name the warrior's mother once gave him.22 19 Extensive parallels in the structure of The Iliad are highlighted in Cedric Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.†
Book Intr.
- 20 See the excellent discussion in Redfxeld, Nature and Culture in the Iliad.†
Book Intr.
Definition:
Homer's epic poem of the Trojan War (circa 850 BC)
The Iliad tells a story from the Trojan War. In the story, the war starts because Paris (prince of Troy) abducts a willing Helen (wife of the Greek king, Menelaus). A 10-year siege entrails in which Achilles is the greatest warrior. His anger and pride are themes in the story.