Iliad
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I'm writing a paper for the Iliad and the topic is about the justification and glorification of war portrayed in the book. Could anyone here give me some good talking points or where I might find some in the Iliad?
Topics I have so far
>The idea of Kleos justifying the act of war for Achiles
>How the spoils of war and greed can cause internal justification of war
>The acts/will of the gods seen as justification for the actions of the Greeks/Trojans in the war
I'm not asking for anyone to write this paper for me I just want some guidance on themes I should explore more
Bump?
>>7816764
"Talk Shit Get Hit" - A Greek Tragedy
"The Gang Steals Someones Wife"
>>7816764
How's that class civ A level treating you?
You should probably include stuff about the hector and andromache (and terrifying his son) episode.
I would also make reference to one of the most explicit anti-war parts which is Priam and his wife crying down from the battlements for Hector to come back.
If you fix yourself firmly in the text without getting too obsessed with the presumed worldview (i.e. that of the warriors, which is not nececelery that of the narrator) you will do well.
Remember the fickleness and non-omnipotence (think Zeus getting shagged into forgetting to watch the war) of the gods.
And here is something i've just totally made up now: the episode of Odysseus and Ajax wrestling but unable to beat each other as a metaphor for the entire contest of the war or something.
>>7816764
>needing justification for the most virtuous of all masculine activities
Even your prompt sounds like some modern leftist bullshit remaining blithely ignorant of the completely different social and moral standards of the era in question.
>>7816831
yeah i totally agree with thisits a pretty shitty prompt but i'm just trying to write a paper, even though there are many differences and views about war from that era than there is today, it's still worth noting that many of these people were not good people and used/justified warfare to achieve selfish desires (just like this day and age)
>>7816826
fucking kek
>>7816827
Thanks a bunch, i'm shit at writing this helps a lot
>>7816848
Oh yeah and how EVERYONE HATES ARES.
Considering he's the god of war, and despite the fact that the gods are playing around keeping the war going they still loathe him, I'm sure you can make something of that.
You can make a quick reference to Hesiod's story of the gold through iron ages of man, and how he also hates war (this may make your teach moist).
>>7816831
Too bad the Greeks were European so professors can only talk about how shitty they were.
>>7816764
Why did all of Greece under Agamemnon invade Troy for one girl? Why did the families of these men support them in doing so, even the women? Was this woman that beautiful? Yes, it is that in part. There is the saying of the woman who launched a thousand ships. But in going after this woman and the cowardly Paris who stole her, the men were going to reclaim society. It was not that the men were horny and all marveled the beauty of this woman. It was that these men upheld their values so much, that they wouldn’t even let this woman, who had beauty blessed by a “goddess” get away with doing something so heinous as breaking a wedding vow and running away with another man to another country.
And we see this again when Achilles refuses to fight. The Achaens had vows that a certain maiden, as a spoil of war would go to Achilles. But King Agamemnon broke this, and thus Achilles refused to bend to his will and retreated to his own tent. This is showing a people who held on to honor, respect, justice, even at the cost of defying the most beautiful woman in the world (and the mischievous deities that supported her) as well as kings. In both cases what was theirs was reclaimed.
>>7816764
I always found it anti-war.
The greatest heroes are torn to pieces regardless of hubris or honor, and only the sneaky fuck wins in the end.
Hector especially does everything right and nothing wrong, and in the end his kid and wife get it.
>>7816764
Understand both justification and glorification are modern concepts, not particularly applicable to classical antiquity or even the myths of the Ancient civilizations (which is what the Iliad falls under, it is after all set in Mycenaean Greece before the Dark Ages and fall ~3600 years ago). Under our modern lens justification is the apologist explanation of war, and glorification is the bravery of our nation's defenders.
>The justification for war throughout history has always been self-interest and the profit of the aggressor.
>The glorification has always been of the individual soldier, in particular the Greek tradition of the heroic warrior who kills effortlessly and shows no mercy to his enemy.
Well you can't write 2 sentences because your teacher will fail you, so you need to reinterpret the text through a modern lens and try to somehow tie that in together.
>the justification
Read about and mention American and Soviet Foreign Policy post WW2. America had expansion under direct military intervention, democratic coups, assassinations and invasions. USSR had expansion under staged revolutions, supporting dictators economically, creating a system of satellite states which were reliant on the Kremlin to stay in power.
Major conflicts are Vietnam War and Soviets in Afghanistan. Specifically read about the justifications for these wars given by each Imperial power at the time and how newspapers reported on them.
>and glorification of war
You need to write about WW1 and how the French officers rode into battle wearing breastplates and got completely mowed down by German artillery and machine guns.
Ever since the brutal loss of life an attrition of the trenches in WW1 war itself has not really been glorified. The romantic notion of a soldier dying in battle is now more of a harsh reality of politicians manoeuvring pawns for power plays. Once the American public got it's first in colour taste of embedded reporting from Vietnam, the war became a PR nightmare and protests engulfed many major college campuses and cities around the country. War is not glorious, it is often mean, unfair and boring. A lot of anti-war movies were made around the 70s and 80s. Today War is an ugly word, instead Veterans and Troops gets used, and they are glorified words representing defenders of freedom and this type of Orwellian rhetorical nonsense.
So, what relevance to Homer?
Well it seems after 3000 years both the REAL justifications and glorifications of war have not changed. It is about profit and honouring the effective warrior.
////
Nb. The Iliad is actually about brotherhood and the love of men, war is just a framing device to get a lot of different types of men together and have them contrast against each other. The ultimate love expressed between actual brothers (Paris Hector) and lovers (Patroclus Achilles), both heroes weakened by the love for their lesser, but also in a way strengthened by it.
>>7816764
i'm doing classics at oxford and i have an old essay i've written on the heroic code in the iliad. it contains bits on how a homeric hero could justify going to war. can email it to you if you want me to send it?
>>7816764
I don't think the illiad necessarily glorifies war. It just truthfully tells how brutal it really is. So many instances are present where a character is introduced on the battlefield. His family, history, and profession, etc. Sometimes a whole page for one random character only to be brutally cut down in huge next couple lines. It's terrible, and you begin to realize the true cost of war.
>>7816764
The political problem of who should rule might be interesting. You have the issue of who Achilles and Agamemnon both are, and who should be leading the Greeks. Achilles is the greatest warrior, but Agamemnon is the king of kings. Who, of the two, should rule? And does Homer indicate a possible stance to take on the subject? Are we to understand these two figures as opposed, or is there a way to moderate their harsher features in order to acquire them both for political stability?
>>7818428
The Greeks didn't necessarily see death and misfortune as punishments. They could be, but tragedy was also the more or less inevitable fate of a great hero. Sophocles says it plainly through the chorus in Antigone:
"Near time, far future, and the past,
one law controls them all:
any greatness in human life brings doom."
>>7820370
(cont.) The Iliad (and Greek fiction in general) isn't anti-war because war is both the stage on which men become heroes and ALSO where they meet their tragic deaths -- which are glorious in their very tragedy. War is neither good nor evil, it's simply the sphere in which life (both its positive and negative aspects) reaches its maximum intensity.
Homer took something terrible and made it beautiful. It's poetry not the Pentagon Papers.
>>7820370
>death not misfortune or punishment
Bro, if you can read German read this:
https://archive.org/stream/archivfrreligi20reliuoft#page/254/mode/2up/search/schuld
The noun Κήρ means "doom" and it's used throughout the Iliad before heroes battle. It's the fate that's death - which is fate par excellence since everyone has to meet it sometime. But usually it's Zeus who distributes the "dooms" that eats at ones soul and holds up ones movements in battle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keres_(mythology)
https://books.google.com/books?id=PdE7AAAAIAAJ&dq=tacitus+en+varus+eodemque+iterum+fato&q=khp#v=snippet&q=khp&f=false
>>7818428
>Hector especially does everything right and nothing wrong,
I wish this meme would end.
Letting Apollo trip Patroclous, cheaply killing him then gloating is as bad as Achilles slaughtering all the young guys as they beg.
Not your army.
>>7816764
There's something interesting in that Achilles first demands a wife from his superior, but then decides that avenging Patroclus would be the highest honour for him.
Of course, if you're Paris and you seduce the President's wife, then you're going to be targeted by the whole population. If you just seduce a foreign citizen's wife, then you can be punished as an individual, but the representative guards the honour of the state, generally. If all honour has been removed, then the citizens are quite often willing to die en masse. That is really foremost.
The spoils of war are supplementary. I mean that because Achilles had to send his wife back, he sulked and confessed that he no longer held any loyalty to his superior, because his superior did not represent him well enough.
So instead of choosing to die for a superior, or for a woman (and thus the spoil system), Achilles chose to die for an equal; a peer. There is an early element of democracy in this, but it's more formal than our own.
It leads into the Rape of the Sabines, around 750 B.C. (The lifetime of Isaiah and Elijah?), Daniel's exposure of the Canaanite Elders and their rape of Susanna, Judith, and on into Boudicca's revolt against the Romans upon those same principles.
It's important to keep in mind that even though Achilles is just one man circa 1185 B.C., he essentially changes all of Greek history by himself ... Simply in choosing when to remain out of battle, and choosing when to invest himself in battle...
If Homer had sung of Achilles's unceasing loyalty to his superior, there would never have been an aristocratic democracy in Greece. Achilles is the ultimate warrior, the ultimate individual, and the ultimate peon in some respects, but also the man who first granted real democratic power to individual Greeks, by selecting whom he would die for, when, and why.
>>7816764
>Cover shows the episode of the Trojan Horse, which occurs long after the events of the book are over
What the actual fuck.
>>7816764
The real nourishment of the story for the average Greek wasn't the materialistic angle of the spoils and the loot, but rather the awesome consideration that even if a man is passed over in society, or in conversation, or in treasure upon the earth... what he thinks, what he chooses, what he feels, what he esteems, how he acts and when... all happen to matter very greatly.
Achilles is remembered as a greater figure than Agamemnon, not for his material wealth, but for his unique and meditative gift of discernment.
By the end of the war, Agamemnon will eventually redeem his brother. What you should be left with at the end of The Iliad however, is this: Achilles has already ridden the descendants of Agamemnon and Menelaus of a sure inheritance, as a result of their unwillingness to pay tribute to his spiritual discernment (not his physical strength). So the Monarchs have already lost a major battle before they go on to win the Trojan War.
The moral here is that a man's life, cultural mold and outlook matter more than the immediate treasures of the civilisation he resides in. A man's life matters and he grants meaning to it in the larger scope of life and Classical History.
>>7822786
They always do this. It's strange, I've heard many people who are ostensibly in positions of learned authority set to teach students the meaning of the Iliad that lack basic understanding of it's structure
Try reading the book Just and Unjust Wars by Walzer for starters.
>>7816764
I hate this cover. Did the maker just watch Troy and not even open the book?
Google "Yale OCW Kagan Greece"
Kagan's introductory lectures are on Homer
Pilfer him and the secondary reading (Pomeroy) for orthodox-sounding talking points
If it's a real Greek/Ancient history course with an ancient historian, and not some polsci 101 shit-ass course called "War Through The Ages" with a fat brown lady who has never read anything and thinks penises are hegemonic mind-control devices, do not do something waffly like
>How the spoils of war and greed can cause internal justification of war
If you're going to do
>The acts/will of the gods seen as justification for the actions of the Greeks/Trojans in the war
be aware that questions like these have inordinately long pedigrees in the scholarship, so large that your professor needn't even have read them in full, because he's already familiar with their basic outlines just by osmosis
If you want an easy essay, pick something like kleos or time in the Greek consciousness, something that is easy to plumb the secondary literature on (and easy to get an idea of that literature's pedigree and progress), and write on that. An A+ essay is going to be one where you show familiarity with the basic, foundational, dominant, major (etc.) arguments on your topic (say, the nature and function of kleos in the Homeric & Ancient Greek mindset), and especially if you can show familiarity with the specific scholars and ideas about those concepts. Bonus points if you tie them together well for a nice conclusion or stance of your own, but showing that you did the work is what will make the fucking bored retard TA grading your paper throw you into the A-pile instead of the B-pile.
Remember that the TA or even the professor grading your paper is combing through seven billion papers of varying levels of mediocre eloquence, all trying to sound puffed up and important about their dumb, too-personal take on
>How the spoils of war and greed can cause internal justification of war
Remember that that person, professor or TA, is not a political scientist interested in your ethical argument about war, but a dude who memorises what previous scholars have said about Homer's depiction of war for a living.
Unless you're in the polsci course in which case something something postcolonialism brown people whatever
