Brad Pitt as Achilles in Troy	Detail of "The School of Athens" by Raphael         Plato and Aristotle

Overview: As human beings mature into greater awareness, a question arises that is the central inquiry of philosophy:  How shall I live?  This has been translated and elaborated in numerous directions, through many disciplines, so that it is often restated as:  What is the meaning of life?  Who am I?  What is truth?  With a thousand worlds for the asking, how best to spend the time given to me? If early wisdom is any guide, we might lend an ear to Aristotle, who simply says, the person who knows most is likely to live best.  For Aristotle, the highest state of human perfection is in the contemplation of truth.  Whether a truth can be determined through sustained analytical thinking, or, if it must be held up against the authentic, spontaneous response of deeply felt emotions, this is the point of much friction between philosophy and the arts.  The source of this disagreement may be traced to the ancient debate between Plato and Aristotle.  That Plato felt hostile towards the emotions aroused by literature and the arts, and denounced them as a means of learning, has been the cause of much distress for its practitioners, supporters and teachers.  I would like to take the time here to examine how this disagreement came about, especially how it has played a role in promoting a negative attitude towards the arts that has persisted up to today.  Nussbaum (14) tells us that before Plato, Greek tragedians recognized the ethical significance of learning through emotional experience.  In other words, the ancient Greeks did not divide the poetic from the philosophical.  What brought about such a change?  In the next section I will attempt to clarify the issues surrounding this argument in order to set forth certain concepts that I will revisit in later sections. The Paradox of Plato Both Plato (428-347 B.C.) and the poets agreed their aim was to investigate human life and how to live it, but where they and later Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) parted company was over the nature of understanding and ethical truth.   For modern readers to comprehend Plato’s stance, we must slant our thinking towards the culture in Greece at that time.   The pre-Socratics were basically oral thinkers, strongly rooted in the traditions of the past.  Of  Xenophanes, Heraclitus and Parmenides, the three whose work has survived, what we notice first is a strange way of speaking, not merely due to certain verbal and metrical habits but in their expression or mental attitude. (Havelock x).  This is because they were embedded in myth, these thinker-poets, and their means of expression was through recitation.  By this period various tribes of people had invented their own religions and mythologies that were related to the Greeks but with slight differences.  Further abroad, there were even more different systems of explaining the world in terms of spiritual values and dogma.  In the first millennium B.C. these systems began to converge on Greece, situated as it was at the crossroads of Africa, Persia, the Middle East, Europe and the surrounding city-states of the Mediterranean.   Wherever cultures with strong ideas rub up against each other, there follows a competition for the hearts and minds of the people.   Because the nature of religion and deity-based mythologies is such that no one group could accept another’s beliefs, Helladic Greece became a crucible for religious and mythological strife. (Hughes/Abbs 162). The struggle to find a peaceful equilibrium was equally strong and the early philosophers became the heroes of the conflict.   It created them, opened up depths of spiritual imagination as they attempted to impose order and make sense of it all.  Religious passion was transformed in the philosopher to an awareness of the sacredness and seriousness of life.  Obscure symbolic mysteries in the mythologies became for the philosophers a perception of universal, human truths.  A tectonic shift was underway.  What followed was the apogee of ancient Greece, the great fifth century B.C., which saw the waning of the religious era and the waxing of the philosophical. (163). Yet during Plato’s lifetime, in the early days of Greek rationalism, religious symbolism and ritual still exerted great influence. (Havelock ix).   Perhaps more importantly, Plato viewed this era in Greek civilization as one of quasi-morality.  As part of their training, the young were taught that although virtue was important, it was often difficult and unrewarding.  In the Republic, Plato has written a guide book where he attempts to isolate the principle of morality in the abstract, to be defined and defended for its own sake, and to set forth what he believed would be the happiest human condition.  Never before had pure morality been envisioned as a goal for society and its individuals.   The Republic, ultimately then, came to be written as an indictment of Greek tradition and its educational system, as well as an attempt to create order from the cultural chaos of the time. (12).

 

How does this relate to art?  Plato describes the distance of art from the Forms through the example of a painting of a bed.  The Form of a bed is eternal; it is a pure essence, an ideal.  When a carpenter builds a bed, it is one step removed from the ideal Form.  But an artist who copies this bed from her point of view is therefore at a third remove from reality.  She doesn’t understand the Form of the bed, nor has she made a functioning physical piece of furniture.  And moreover, since she avoids confronting the disparity between the appearance of the bed and the Form, her art willfully accepts appearance without questioning it.  Thus Plato accuses the poets of being undignified or immoral. (390).  Their work is at best frivolous and at worst dangerous, to science and morality.  For this reason, Plato recommends the major Greek poets from Homer to Euripides be excluded from the Greek educational system. (Havelock 3-4). For modern thinkers there has been great reluctance to take what Plato says at face value.  One of the main arguments, Havelock (6) states, is that “the experience of poetry today has an aesthetic dimension that was lacking in Plato’s day”.  That is, we now accept that the experience of poetry can offer a particular kind of aesthetic understanding, one that appeals to us through the senses, feelings and intuition.  But Plato reacts to the elements of poetry as though they are a type of psychic poison.  He charges the poet with contriving to distort meaning through the use of language (Republic 601A) or embellishing meaning by exploiting the resources of meter, rhythm and harmony.   To us, this seems to be violating the heart of the poetic experience.  Plato goes on to say,      In the same way the poet can use words and phrases as a medium to paint a picture of any craftsman, though he knows nothing except how to represent him, and the meter and rhythm and music will persuade people who are as ignorant as he is, and who judge merely from his words, that he really has something to say about shoemaking or generalship or whatever it may be.  So great is the natural magic of poetry.  Strip it of its poetic coloring, reduce it to plain prose, and I think you know how little it amounts to.  (601A) All Plato’s efforts run contrary to our idea of “poetry for poetry’s sake”, especially as a means of communicating experience.  And it is important at this stage to recall that the Republic was partly written as a manual for educational reform.  His objections are in the context of the standards he was setting in terms of education.  For him then, poetry is a threat to education due to a moral danger as well as an intellectual one.  It clouds values, good character and prevents perception of the truth. (Havelock 6). Today in education we defend poetry as morally uplifting, inspiring us to higher levels of consciousness, deeper compassion and making us more aesthetically adept at reaching out to new and ineffable ways of describing those realities which escape prosaic articulation.  But this is a modern prejudice and many thinkers have attempted to rescue Plato in order to make him more palatable to modern tastes.  Havelock (7) counteracts  such attempts by saying if  “the programme of the Republic is utopian and that the exclusion of poetry applies only to an ideal condition not realizable in the recognisable future or in earthly societies…(then) why should the Muse of all people be selected for exclusion from Utopia?  …this depends … on the assumption that the Republic (so-called) is about politics.  Is that not the label on the bottle?  Yes, it is, but…in this instance (it) reports a strong flavour of educational but not of political theory.  The reforms which are proposed are considered to be urgent in the present and are not utopian.  Poetry is not charged with a political offense but an intellectual one and accordingly the constitution which has to be protected against her influence is twice defined as the polity within the soul.”  Another deflection of Plato’s assault is to refocus his target a little left of poetry on to that of drama.  In his desire for a life of virtuous moderation, we may say that Plato was a puritan, and like most puritans, Plato disliked theatre.  Public performance is at home with vulgarity, buffoonery, histrionic emotion and even scandal.  Aristocratic taste is sometimes offended by gaudy showmanship, rude sounds and behavior, displayed especially by the mob mentality of the crowd.  (Murdoch 397).  The fear that words might provoke deeds led Plato to urge his followers to be content with the more sedate writer who would reproduce the speech of the decent man. (Republic 398B).  Of course Plato has a point in some respects about the cheapening and cruel effects of an atmosphere where everything can be mocked and rendered ludicrous.  (Murdoch  398).

But I would reiterate here that Plato is hugely concerned with the emotional impact on the audience.  In particular, he points a finger at the poet’s use of mimesis, or imitation, which caused the audience, as well as the actors and the poet himself, to identify emotionally with the characters in the play.  It is this pathology of fluctuating emotions, he says, with which we feel but never think and the submission to the hypnotic effect of the poet’s skills that is the root of the problem.  The damage is caused by being under the spell of an artist’s imperfect view of things and the audience’s identification with that view. (Havelock 26).  Now we begin to see that Plato’s argument is concerned with people identifying with flawed role models, not just the noble heroes.  In so being affected, people might be encouraged to adopt lower behavior, much like our modern worries about viewers mimicking TV, film or video game violence.  It is the irrational emotional power of art, along with its power to tell lies or subversive truths, that puts us significantly at risk, according to Plato. (Murdoch 13).   There is nothing left for it but censorship. If we take the stories of gods, heroes and human beings seriously, full as they are of murder, incest, treachery, uncontrolled passions, weakness and cowardice, I feel we could agree with Plato that after a time the repetition of this hazardous material may lead to copycat behavior by those with undeveloped minds.

Heraklion, Theatre at Gortyn

If it were only this, we might be able to understand Plato’s objection.  But he leaves off criticizing the content of the stories to examine the manner in which they are told.  He begins to reveal a fundamental hostility to the poetic experience per se, and especially to the imaginative act which makes up such a large portion of that experience. (Havelock 10-11). Why does Plato view poetry as such a menace to the moral fabric of his society?  We must recall that up to this time, the poets were the only means of transmitting knowledge in a pre-literate society.  Poetry circulated a massive repository of useful information, in effect a veritable encyclopedia of ethics, politics, history, culture and even skills, such as the proper way to load and unload ships.  An indoctrination rather than an entertainment, poetry was the core of the able citizen’s educational equipment.  Once this is grasped, we can begin to understand that the Republic is an attack on the existing, traditional system.  In the tenth book of the Republic Plato takes issue with the idea that the poets ought to know about the techniques and subjects of which they speak.  Homer, Plato contends, attempts to discuss warfare, military leadership, politics and education, when in fact, Homer had very little practical experience in most of these areas.  Yet Homer is so convincing in relating these subjects that he is admired for his expert knowledge.    Plato goes to great lengths here to illustrate the enormous gulf between the truth as understood by reason and the illusions produced by poetry. (28). All of this strikes us as foreign to our modern way of thinking.  We assume the poet is an artist who creates works of art.  But for Plato the concept of aesthetics never enters the discussion.  He persists in criticizing the poets for not teaching well.   (29). I tend to agree with the literary critic, Harold Bloom (6), who sees this as Plato’s deep and personal resentment towards the poets.  Bloom claims that as Plato became more aware of the hold poetry had over society’s imagination, he began to recognize the “agon”, or competition with philosophy.  It matters little if it is geographical, religious, or philosophical; the struggle for ideological dominance is inevitable as education systems are put into place.  (Eisenberg 36).   The lesson in Homer is the glory of battle, the strengths and weaknesses in each of us, and so Homer teaches the poetics of conflict.   And all of Plato is an incessant conflict with Homer.  Worse, all of Plato’s efforts were in vain, Bloom (6) says, because it was the voice of Homer, not Plato, that was the continued schoolbook of the ancient Greeks.  We might concede that this kind of attack is fair if Homer is actually intending to provide a manual on the manufacture of beds, etc.  If that is so, it is a poor manual.  It is indeed not based on practical experience or understanding.  In contrast to art, Plato’s Theory of Forms is epistemological and wishes to define the kinds of knowledge that would be described as universal, precise and final. (Havelock 30). Perhaps the most surprising revelation is that if poetry’s primary purpose was to provide a social encyclopedia, one that Plato defined through the standards of his Academy as functioning badly, it was because the goal of his curriculum was expressed by the word episteme, which is often translated into English as “science”.  A graduate of the Academy possessed rigorous training in mathematics and logic, which Plato deemed most necessary to a society he believed ought to be organized along scientific lines. (31).

A Roman mosaic showing Plato's Academy

However, I would still like to question why Plato chose such an easy scapegoat for all of society’s woes.  What role exactly did Plato see poetry as playing?  The answer to this last part of the puzzle may lie in Plato’s difficulty in discussing poetry as separate from the conditions under which it is performed.  This leads us to believe the actual performance of poetry was much more crucial to Greek culture than we might realize.  These were not selected readings held in public or private venues nor kept to festival days in the theatre.   These performances were in fact a fundamental part of adult recreation.  People did not go to the bookshop or library to pick up a copy of The Iliad and read it at home.   The relationship between the audience and the poet was always that of listeners at an oral performance. (Havelock 37-38). The Greeks had been using the alphabet since the 8th century B.C. but as with any new technology it was slow to spread.  Its appearance did not necessarily imply full literacy.  Reading must be introduced at the primary level, not the secondary, and records show that as late as the 5th century B.C., Athenians were taught to read as adolescents.  The skill was therefore overlaid upon previous oral learning.  We can assume then that along with a dominant oral learning style, there also persisted an oral state of mind, and for Plato, this was the main enemy, for the manner of thinking determines the connection of the group. (40-41).  The terms of thinking become standardized so that the group recognizes a clear identity and shares a singular consciousness with a similar set of values.  And to maintain a standardized identity a group must take action to preserve a certain body of knowledge.  In the form of language, for example, information will be passed on to others about methods of building a house or cooking food.  Paradigms will be drilled into successive generations. (42). In a pre-literate society, this living knowledge is retained through storytelling.  But how can such detailed instruction be transmitted from person to person over multiple generations without losing its precision?  The answer was, as Havelock (42) puts it, to use a particular “verbal technology” based on rhythmic wording that was constructed cleverly enough in metrical patterns so as to imprint sound, shape and meaning on the listener’s psyche. All memorization in this tradition required continual repetitive recitation.  The body of knowledge was repeated at the banquet, family rituals, and in the public theatre and marketplace.  Parents, elders, students and professionals participated in a community conspiracy to keep its precious knowledge alive. (43-44). How is such a body of memory to be acquired, not just by the professionals but by the average members of the group?  We have alluded to it earlier as an appeal to psychic resources, sometimes latent but available in the consciousness of each person.  It is actually accomplished by a collusion between poet and listener.  The Homeric poet knew he controlled the culture in which he lived and this was a fact accepted by the community and himself without reflection or analysis.  He was highly aware of the skills he used to imprint ideas on memory but the actual methods he employed were personal unto himself.  It is this personal power that alarms Plato.  Both what the poet was saying and how it was being said was being accepted without question because the Homeric audience submitted gratefully to the pleasurable, hypnotic effect of the poet’s art.  Let us spend a moment showing how this was done, in particular by Homer, and by literature in general.  Partly it is accomplished by the marriage of words to dance rhythms. (145-146).  If we look closely at this technique, we compare the easiest way to memorize, and that is through sheer repetition, Hector is dead; Hector is dead. This, however, has little force.  But compare it to the increased energy of the following, Hector is dead; dead indeed is Hector. where the words and meaning are the same but now we have a more unusual word order. If the mind chooses to take a further creative step, keeping the same essential image but taking a different angle on it or utilizing unexpected words or syntax, it can be restated in a more appealing way, Hector is dead; fallen is Hector                         Yea Achilles slew him Hector is defeated, Hector is dead.  Such is the virtuosity found in The Iliad.  The mind’s eye is bifocal; it sees meaning but it makes room for differences within the meaning.   In addition to this is the parallel system of repetition that concentrates on sound alone, outside of meaning.  In the example of, Hector is dead; Hector is dead.  the units of repetition are two-fold, the dactylic hexameter in the Greek is proportioned between lines of constant time length.  The result feels like slow regular undulations, which in turn are composed of an internal pattern of ripples of wavelengths.  In other words, the rhythmic memory constantly repeats itself.  (Havelock 147-148). The voice falls naturally into these rhythms, and as if that were not enough, other parallel rhythms reinforce it.  A reciter uses a lyre and his strumming sets up an acoustic rhythm in addition to the vocal cords, which add to the pattern of bodily reflexes.  Thus the listeners’ ears are doubly affected by two sets of sounds in concordant rhythm, voice and instrument.  The latter, however, is merely repetitive, otherwise it would detract from the main attention.  Lastly, there is the body itself.  The fingers, legs and feet are controlled in a pattern of actions akin to dancing, which aid in “acting out” the recital.  And this lulling, throbbing motion invites the audience to enter the poet’s trance and shadow the motions of the reciter, perhaps only half known to the listener herself, and soon the listener is accompanying the beat with a rocking motion or a foot tap of her own that keeps with the body’s overall rhythm. (148-150).

This is how the poet moves the audience and now we will go inside the listener herself to learn how a person is affected.  The recital of the social and cultural encyclopedia was an adult recreation but it could also be said that it was a great pleasure.  The audience was quite willing to spend time under the poet’s spell so as to let go of their cares and relax.  Poets were often praised for releasing their listeners from anxiety and grief. (152-153).  The pleasure of letting go while at the same time coding the information into the memory awakened another psychic phenomenon, that of fully identifying with the actor or character in the performance.  A listener as well as a reciter had to access her own previously experienced grief or anger in order to connect to that of Achilles’s.  In effect, the actor or listener became Achilles.   If this was achieved, a person could recall the story of Achilles for the rest of her life, quoting the story, line for line.  The cost of this mental effort, of course, was a complete loss of objectivity.  And here we are again at Plato’s complaint about the arts.  I would emphasize the importance of his choice of the word mimesis to describe the poetic experience which becomes more significant when we understand that it does not only apply to the poet representing Forms at a third remove.  The actor upon the stage is imitating a character who represents a hero or god, and the members of the audience themselves are following the words, sounds and body rhythms so closely that they are possibly mimicking the movements of the reciter which in turn helps them enter the trance more fully.  The vivid experience of the work enables them to remember the story they are hearing.  For Plato, this kind of learning, this emotional reliving of experience through the memory over and over again instead of learning through rational analysis, is for him the worst aspect of it.  For in the oral tradition, there is such an immediate impact upon the listener that the emotions rush forth and there can be no clear-headed understanding of the information that is being delivered, no critical distance nor objectivity that would allow for determination of the truth.  (Bailin, in conversation.).  And again, for Plato, this is the chief obstacle to the ideal method of learning as deemed by the Academy, that of scientific rationalism.  (Havelock 45, 47). In the end, Plato was to have his way.   As literacy spread in Europe, the oral tradition is all but lost to us.  From classical Greece on to our day, rational thinking and science appear to be winning over more and more hearts and minds.  In our modern society, the arts continue to suffer from Plato’s decree that they cannot be a form of knowledge.  The great paradox of Plato is that his masterpiece of thought is great art, yet it is something he never theoretically realized.  (Murdoch 13).   I will continue to bring up Plato in later sections when his ideas relate to issues I will discuss.  Ancient Greece did produce a great defender of literature, someone for whom emotion played a large role in discovering truth.  As we shall see in Week 3, one of Plato’s students took up art’s cause and argued in favor of its ability to provide a way of learning.  (excerpted from: Barber, Susan. The Immediacy of Writing:  Why Literature Matters More to Students Who Are Creative Writers.  SFU MA thesis. 2004)

 

Philosophy

Background:  Why do human beings behave justly? Is it because they fear societal punishment? Are they trembling before notions of divine retribution? Do the stronger elements of society scare the weak into submission in the name of law? Or do humans behave justly because it is good for them to do so? Is justice, regardless of its rewards and punishments, a good thing in and of itself? How do we define justice? Plato sets out to answer these questions in the Republic. He wants to define justice, and to define it in such a way as to show that justice is worthwhile in and of itself. He meets these two challenges with a single solution: a definition of justice that appeals to human psychology, rather than to perceived behavior.

 

Plato’s strategy in the Republic is to first explicate the primary notion of societal, or political, justice, and then to derive an analogous concept of individual justice. In Books II, III, and IV, Plato identifies political justice as harmony in a structured political body. An ideal society consists of three main classes of people—producers (craftsmen, farmers, artisans, etc.), auxiliaries (warriors), and guardians (rulers); a society is just when relations between these three classes are right. Each group must perform its appropriate function, and only that function, and each must be in the right position of power in relation to the others. Rulers must rule, auxiliaries must uphold rulers’ convictions, and producers must limit themselves to exercising whatever skills nature granted them (farming, blacksmithing, painting, etc.) Justice is a principle of specialization: a principle that requires that each person fulfill the societal role to which nature fitted him and not interfere in any other business.

 

At the end of Book IV, Plato tries to show that individual justice mirrors political justice. He claims that the soul of every individual has a three part structure analagous to the three classes of a society. There is a rational part of the soul, which seeks after truth and is responsible for our philosophical inclinations; a spirited part of the soul, which desires honor and is responsible for our feelings of anger and indignation; and an appetitive part of the soul, which lusts after all sorts of things, but money most of all (since money must be used to fulfill any other base desire). The just individual can be defined in analogy with the just society; the three parts of his soul achieve the requisite relationships of power and influence in regard to one another. In a just individual, the rational part of the soul rules, the spirited part of the soul supports this rule, and the appetitive part of the soul submits and follows wherever reason leads. Put more plainly: in a just individual, the entire soul aims at fulfilling the desires of the rational part, much as in the just society the entire community aims at fulfilling whatever the rulers will. The parallels between the just society and the just individual run deep. Each of the three classes of society, in fact, is dominated by one of the three parts of the soul. Producers are dominated by their appetites—their urges for money, luxury, and pleasure. Warriors are dominated by their spirits, which make them courageous. Rulers are dominated by their rational faculties and strive for wisdom. Books V through VII focus on the rulers as the philosopher kings. In a series of three analogies—the allegories of the sun, the line, and the cave—Plato explains who these individuals are while hammering out his theory of the Forms. Plato explains that the world is divided into two realms, the visible (which we grasp with our senses) and the intelligible (which we only grasp with our mind). The visible world is the universe we see around us. The intelligible world is comprised of the Forms—abstract, changeless absolutes such as Goodness, Beauty, Redness, and Sweetness that exist in permanent relation to the visible realm and make it possible. (An apple is red and sweet, the theory goes, because it participates in the Forms of Redness and Sweetness.) Only the Forms are objects of knowledge, because only they possess the eternal unchanging truth that the mind—not the senses—must apprehend. Only those whose minds are trained to grasp the Forms—the philosophers—can know anything at all. In particular, what the philosophers must know in order to become able rulers is the Form of the Good—the source of all other Forms, and of knowledge, truth, and beauty. Plato cannot describe this Form directly, but he claims that it is to the intelligible realm what the sun is to the visible realm. Using the allegory of the cave, Plato paints an evocative portrait of the philosopher’s soul moving through various stages of cognition (represented by the line) through the visible realm into the intelligible, and finally grasping the Form of the Good. The aim of education is not to put knowledge into the soul, but to put the right desires into the soul—to fill the soul with a lust for truth, so that it desires to move past the visible world, into the intelligible, ultimately to the Form of the Good.

 

Sphinx grave stela - Athens      535 B.C.	Lion - Corinth, Greece   550 B.C.

 

Philosophers form the only class of people to possess knowledge and are also the most just people. Their souls, more than others, aim to fulfil the desires of the rational part. After comparing the philosopher king to the most unjust type of person—represented by the tyrant, who is ruled entirely by his non-rational appetites—Plato claims that justice is worthwhile for its own sake. In Book IX he presents three arguments for the conclusion that it is desirable to be just. By sketching a psychological portrait of the tyrant, he attempts to prove that injustice tortures a person’s psyche, whereas a just soul is a healthy, happy one, untroubled and calm. Next he argues that, though each of the three main character types—money-loving, honor-loving, and truth-loving—have their own conceptions of pleasure and of the corresponding good life—each choosing his own life as the most pleasant—only the philosopher can judge because only he has experienced all three types of pleasure. The others should accept the philosopher’s judgement and conclude that the pleasures associated with the philosophical are most pleasant and thus that the just life is also most pleasant. He tries to demonstrate that only philosophical pleasure is really pleasure at all; all other pleasure is nothing more than cessation of pain. One might notice that none of these arguments actually prove that justice is desirable apart from its consequences—instead, they establish that justice is always accompanied by true pleasure. In all probability, none of these is actually supposed to serve as the main reason why justice is desirable. Instead, the desirability of justice is likely connected to the intimate relationship between the just life and the Forms. The just life is good in and of itself because it involves grasping these ultimate goods, and imitating their order and harmony, thus incorporating them into one’s own life. Justice is good, in other words, because it is connected to the greatest good, the Form of the Good. Plato ends the Republic on a surprising note. Having defined justice and established it as the greatest good, he banishes poets from his city. Poets, he claims, appeal to the basest part of the soul by imitating unjust inclinations. By encouraging us to indulge ignoble emotions in sympathy with the characters we hear about, poetry encourages us to indulge these emotions in life. Poetry, in sum, makes us unjust. In closing, Plato relates the myth of Er, which describes the trajectory of a soul after death. Just souls are rewarded for one thousand lifetimes, while unjust ones are punished for the same amount of time. Each soul then must choose its next life. (Adapted from Sparknotes.com)  Read:  Republic  Plato  Book X    <http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.11.x.html>

Reconstruction of Homer's view of the world

Although historical, archaeological, and linguistic evidence suggests that the epics were composed between 750 and 650 b.c. they are set in Mycenaean Greece in about the twelfth century b.c., during the Bronze Age. This earlier period, the Greeks believed, was a more glorious and sublime age, when gods still frequented the earth and heroic, godlike mortals with superhuman attributes populated Greece. Because the two epics strive to evoke this pristine age, they are written in a high style and generally depict life as it was believed to have been led in the great kingdoms of the Bronze Age. The Greeks are often referred to as “Achaeans,” the name of a large tribe occupying Greece during the Bronze Age.

But Homer’s reconstruction often yields to the realities of eighth- and seventh-century b.c. Greece. The feudal social structure apparent in the background of the Odyssey seems more akin to Homer’s Greece than to Odysseus’s, and Homer substitutes the pantheon of deities of his own day for the related but different gods whom Mycenaean Greeks worshipped. Many other minor but obvious anachronisms—such as references to iron tools and to tribes that had not yet migrated to Greece by the Bronze Age—betray the poem’s later, Iron Age origins.

For centuries, many scholars believed that the Trojan War and its participants were entirely the creation of the Greek imagination. But in the late nineteenth century, an archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann declared that he had discovered the remnants of Troy. The ruins that he uncovered sit a few dozen miles off of the Aegean coast in northwestern Turkey, a site that indeed fits the geographical descriptions of Homer’s Troy. One layer of the site, roughly corresponding to the point in history when the fall of Troy would have taken place, shows evidence of fire and destruction consistent with a sack. Although most scholars accept Schliemann’s discovered city as the site of the ancient city of Troy, many remain skeptical as to whether Homer’s Trojan War ever really took place. Evidence from Near Eastern literature suggests that episodes similar to those described in the Iliad may have circulated even before Schliemann’s Troy was destroyed. Nonetheless, many scholars now admit the possibility that some truth may lie at the center of the Iliad, hidden beneath many layers of poetic embellishment.

Troy -- east gate (Early Bronze Age)

Like the Odyssey, the Iliad was composed primarily in the Ionic dialect of Ancient Greek, which was spoken on the Aegean islands and in the coastal settlements of Asia Minor, now modern Turkey. Some scholars thus conclude that the poet hailed from somewhere in the eastern Greek world. More likely, however, the poet chose the Ionic dialect because he felt it to be more appropriate for the high style and grand scope of his work. Slightly later Greek literature suggests that poets varied the dialects of their poems according to the themes that they were treating and might write in dialects that they didn’t actually speak. Homer’s epics are Panhellenic (encompassing all of Greece) in spirit and use forms from several other dialects. This suggests that Homer suited his poems to the dialect that would best complement his ideas.

The Aftermath of the Iliad

The Trojan War has not yet ended at the close of the Iliad. Homer’s audience would have been familiar with the struggle’s conclusion, and the potency of much of Homer’s irony and foreboding depends on this familiarity. What follows is a synopsis of some of the most important events that happen after the Iliad ends.

Achilles receiving armor from Thetis

The Death of Achilles

In the final books of the Iliad, Achilles refers frequently to his imminent death, about which his mother, Thetis, has warned him. After the end of the poem, at Hector’s funeral feast, Achilles sights the beautiful Polyxena, the daughter of Priam and hence a princess of Troy. Taken with her beauty, Achilles falls in love with her. Hoping to marry her, he agrees to use his influence with the Achaean army to bring about an end to the war. But when he travels to the temple of Apollo to negotiate the peace, Paris shoots him in the heel—the only vulnerable part of his body—with a poisoned arrow. In other versions of the story, the wound occurs in the midst of battle.

After Achilles’ death, Ajax and Odysseus go and recover his body. Thetis instructs the Achaeans to bequeath Achilles’ magnificent armor, forged by the god Hephaestus, to the most worthy hero. Both Ajax and Odysseus covet the armor; when it is awarded to Odysseus, Ajax commits suicide out of humiliation.

The Palladium and the Arrows of Heracles

By the time of Achilles’ and Ajax’s deaths, Troy’s defenses have been bolstered by the arrival of a new coalition of allies, including the Ethiopians and the Amazons. Achilles killed Penthesilea, the queen of the Amazons, before his death, but the Trojans continue to repel the Achaean assault. The gods relay to the Achaeans that they must perform a number of tasks in order to win the war: they must recover the arrows of Heracles, steal a statue of Athena called the Palladium from the temple in Troy, and perform various other challenges. Largely owing to the skill and courage of Odysseus and Diomedes, the Achaeans accomplish the tasks, and the Achaean archer Philoctetes later uses the arrows of Heracles to kill Paris. Despite this setback, Troy continues to hold against the Achaeans.

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts

The Fall of Troy

The Achaean commanders are nearly ready to give up; nothing can penetrate the massive walls of Troy. But before they lose heart, Odysseus concocts a plan that will allow them to bypass the walls of the city completely. The Achaeans build a massive, hollow, wooden horse, large enough to hold a contingent of warriors inside. Odysseus and a group of soldiers hide in the horse, while the rest of the Achaeans burn their camps and sail away from Troy, waiting in their ships behind a nearby island.

The next morning, the Trojans peer down from the ramparts of their wall and discover the gigantic, mysterious horse. They also discover a lone Achaean soldier named Sinon, whom they take prisoner. As instructed by Odysseus, Sinon tells the Trojans that the Achaeans have incurred the wrath of Athena for the theft of the Palladium. They have left Sinon as a sacrifice to the goddess and constructed the horse as a gift to soothe her temper. Sinon explains that the Achaeans left the horse before the Trojan gates in the hopes that the Trojans would destroy it and thereby earn the wrath of Athena.

Believing Sinon’s story, the Trojans wheel the massive horse into the city as a tribute to Athena. That night, Odysseus and his men slip out of the horse, kill the Trojan guards, and fling open the gates of Troy to the Achaean army, which has meanwhile approached the city again. Having at last penetrated the wall, the Achaeans massacre the citizens of Troy, plunder the city’s riches, and burn the buildings to the ground. All of the Trojan men are killed except for a small group led by Aeneas, who escapes. Helen, whose loyalties have shifted back to the Achaeans since Paris’s death, returns to Menelaus, and the Achaeans at last set sail for home.

After the War

The fates of many of the Iliad’s heroes after the war occupy an important space in Greek mythology. Odysseus, as foretold, spends ten years trying to return to Ithaca, and his adventures form the subject of Homer’s other great epic, the Odyssey. Helen and Menelaus have a long and dangerous voyage back to their home in Sparta, with a long stay in Egypt. In the Odyssey, Telemachus travels to Sparta in search of his father, Odysseus, and finds Helen and Menelaus celebrating the marriage of their daughter, Hermione. Agamemnon, who has taken Priam’s daughter Cassandra as a slave, returns home to his wife, Clytemnestra, and his kingdom, Mycenae. Ever since Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigeneia at the altar of Athena, however, Clytemnestra has nurtured a vast resentment toward her husband. She has taken a man named Aegisthus as her lover, and upon Agamemnon’s return, the lovers murder Agamemnon in his bath and kill Cassandra as well. This story is the subject of Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon. Meanwhile, Aeneas, the only great Trojan warrior to survive the fall of Troy, wanders for many years, searching for a new home for his surviving fellow citizens. His adventures are recounted in Virgil’s epic Aeneid. (Adapted from Sparknotes.com) 

Geneology of the Greek gods:  http://ancientgreece.com/mythology/mythology.htm Glossary for The Iliad:  http://www.mala.bc.ca/                     ~johnstoi/homer/iliad_index.htm
Principal Gods  click for main characteristics Homer: The Iliad and Odyssey   Greek Mythology Links	Athena of Gortyn 660 BC