Unit 1

English 201:    Masterpieces of Western Literature

Introduction:

Reality:Our Western culture is comprised of two legacies that remain in tension with each other on nearly all fundamental questions.  We recognize this tension in answering such a basic question as: "what is reality?"  One person says, "reality is whatever God decided to make."  Their text is (in part) Genesis (W&H 70).  Another person says, "reality is a set of principles & operations best understood by science."  This answer derives from the legacy of ancient Greece.  You might want to look through these two webpages to better understand the opposition:

 

What is Reality?

Metaphysical Theories of the Presocratics

Theme:  Our text says that "heroism is the theme of both poems" (131).  The problem is that we then need to ask how one becomes a hero?  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,  Mahatma Gandhi & George Washington were all heroes, but of very different kinds.  The Iliad is all about Akhilleus.  The Odyssey is all about Odysseus.  They are both heroic, but they are also polar opposites.  It is more accurate to say that The Iliad is about power.

Archeologists believe that a war was fought at Troy in about 1,100 bce (before the common era).  Sometime in 700 bce Homer composed The Iliad to illustrate at least two things: that power is irresistibly attractive.  Every human encounter can be characterized as a contest for power.  Someone dominates & the other person submits.  Men use aggressive techniques; women use tactics like beauty, charm, & innocence to control men.  The inference in the archaic age was obvious: if victors write the history or decide how society operates, then we (the Greeks) should be unconditionally committed to power.  Akhilleus personifies this cultural commitment.  The Iliad, however, is tragic.  It ends in mourning & even Akhilleus is left in tears.  Homer's second point is that power is dangerous.  A life unconditionally dedicated to power (Akhilleus) is ultimately self-destructive.  It is also malevolent.  Akhilleus causes grief for everyone, including his mother (Thetis), his surrogate son (Patroklos), & his comrades.

If unconditional power is so dangerous, perhaps we (Greeks) should renounce it.  The cultural values of India counsel exactly this.  Ahimsa (nonviolence) is the inviolable first moral principle of Hinduism, Jainism, & Buddhism.  Interestingly, the Aryan people migrated into both Greece & India.  The Vedic pantheon roughly parallels the Olympian pantheon.  The Iliad  finds a rough parallel in The Ramayana, which is also about rescuing beauty (Helen, Sita).

Aristotelian morality recognized 3 possibilities in regard to any virtue.  Consider courage.  A deficiency of courage is called cowardice. Strangely, someone may have too much courage becoming foolhardy.  The heroic or accomplished person achieves the fulcrum point of balance midway between the two extremes.  Our text talks about "nothing too much" & moderation in all things (6).  Odysseus personifies this balance in regard to power.  So why not simply begin with Odysseus?

Look for Odysseus as you read The Iliad.  He is there & speaks lines, but he is obscured by Akhilleus, who is simply awesome -- the male counterpart to Helen's beauty.  Homer knows that he must first demonstrate how following the example of Akhilleus leads to disaster, before we are ready to consider the more sophisticated model of moderation & balance in the example of Odysseus.

Study Reading:

You must study-read the text, not just casually & passively read it to see what happens next in the plot.  Instead you must read the footnotes, mark the important passages with a hi-liter (in order to come back & study them again) & occasionally use a reference book, like the Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology to better understand background material.  Our text provides some background about Paris' choice of Aphrodite over Hera & Athena (p. 133).  This is only a first step.  Homer did not write history.  His characters personify values & their interaction always means something more than the literal level about what happens next.  For example, you should seek to better understand what each of these divinities (Hera, Athena, Aphrodite) personifies.

In association with Paris' choice, look up Helen & her marriage to Menalaos.

You should also look up the story of Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter Iphigeneia to Artemis (p. 610 is a minimal starting place).

Finally, don't be satisfied with n.32 on p. 142 about Thetis.  Or maybe you are satisfied at this point that you know enough about Thetis.  But you then find more allusions to Thetis (1.453-- ).  Footnote 38 p. 145 doesn't entirely clarify the reference & you should look up Thetis in your Dictionary.

I am sure you noticed the strange spelling of, e.g., Akhilleus by Fitzgerald in place of the usual Achilles.  Fitzgerald hopes to get us to pronounce the names a little more like they would have sounded in ancient Greek.  You will notice that there is no soft "c" sound in Greek.  It is always a hard "k" sound.  So Circe (the witch who changes men into pigs) becomes Kirke.  I will follow Fitzgerald's spelling.  When we get to Aeschylus you will find Kassandra changed into the more usual Cassandra; Aigisthos back into Aegisthus.

Before explicating lines from the epic poem, we need to know something more about the Greek outlook on life & about specific incidents that precede the opening of the work.  Click on the next section: Background above.