1. Homer Time: 8 century BCE
Birth place: Ionia; the western coast of Asia Minor
Blind
The two master pieces attributed to him: the Iliad & the Odyssey

2. The Iliad & The Odyssey Originally for oral recitation
Their composition dated from the beginning of Greek literacy

3. The features of Greek oral poetry
place: Ionian coast (modern Turkey)
Performer: travelling bards
Subject matter: tales of lost age of heroes who fought with bronze, and of the great cities besieged and destroyed by war

4. The features of Greek oral poetry
Form: Hexameter (six-part line)
With musical accompaniment
Poets fitting their own riffs (repeated short notes) into the rhyme
Common themes, traditional stories, traditional characters, traditional adjectives (“swift Achilles”), stock phrases, even a set pattern of a whole scene

5. The features of epic in its oral form
A vast & intricate system of metrical formulas
A repertoire of standard scenes (ex. The arming of the warrior, the battle of two champions)
The known outline of the story
No trace of individual identity in the poet; it’s not the poet’s creation

6. Homer’s unique contribution
To make them into the written form
The sophisticate organization

7. The Homeric poems
origins: folk memories of a real conflict or conflicts between Mycenean Greeks and inhabitants of one or more cities in Asia Minor
Plausibility: neither historical nor purely fictional

8. The Iliad
Subject: war
Characters: men in battle & women whose fate depends on the outcome
Mood: cruelty, violence of war
Theme: a. ambiguity (ambivalence) of the
meaning of war and (glory vs.
ignominy)
b. violence: man’s fear and desire

9. The Iliad: A work about Trojan war
Ilias: another name for Troy

10. The Iliad: Its particular structure
Time setting: the tenth year of the war
Central focus: conflict among the Greek commanders (not between Greeks and Trojans)
Central subject: rage (of Achilles)

11. Achilles’ rage: its influence
1. making him alienated from his society
2. (after Patroclus died) shifted into an inhuman aggression against the Trojans
3. willing to return to the human world (his sympathy for Priam)

12. Graphic violence: vulnerability of humans’ mortal bodies
How Patroclus throws his spear at Sarpedon: “just below the rib cage/ where it protects the beating heart”
When Hector rams his spear into Patrolus: “into the pit of his belly and all the way through”
When Achilles’ spear “pierced the soft neck but did not slit the windpipe”

13. War economy: a system of exchange
Ransoming of human bodies:
----Cryseis & Briseis
The ownership of dead male bodies
-----the corpse s of Sarpedon, Patroclus, &
Hector

14. War: humans’ desire and fear of violence
Entertainment: it is exciting to hear or read about slaughter (cf. action movie)
At times, the poems brings out the terrible pity of war (Troy will be ruined, the people killed or enslaved).
The poet looks back with regret to “the days of peace, before the Greeks came.”

15. A bitter understanding of Life:
Violence and the threat of pain and death are facts of life. Even when people are at peace, there is murder, and lion or wolves leap into the fold to kill the sheep.

16. The Greeks’ positive attitude toward the facts of life
Mortals can’t choose, like gods, to avoid death, but they can choose how they will die.

17. How/What, then, to choose (in a war)?
the exchange of honor for death?
---the choice Achilles and all the Greek
warriors faced
Fighting for vengeance?
---What Achilles did after Patroclus died
Fighting for protecting one’s family
---What Hector faced despite all his
unwillingness to engage in a war
Fighting

18. War & Peace: Desire and Fear
What meaning does war stand for Achilles?
What meaning does war stand for Hector?
What meaning does war stand for Agamemnon?
Which one do you sympathize?

19. The contrast between gods and men
On Olympus, all quarrels end in laughter and drinking, not death.
Before death, humans have to face grief, dishonor, loss and pain—things that play little or no part in any god’s life.

20. The valor of human beings as mortals
At the end, Achilles realized that all humans, have to have “hearts of iron,” the ability to endure unendurable loss and keep on living.
The Iliad provides a bleak but inspiring account of human suffering as a kind of power, which the gods themselves cannot achieve. (cf. the meaning of human suffering in The Hebrew Bible).

21. The profundity of Homer
Now we see why Homer chose to present the story in a particular way.
The Iliad in Homer’s presentation is no longer an entertainment on feast.
It’s a profound reflection on the meaning of life and humanity.

22. A Question Why do people love to watch or learn martial art?
Why do people love action or even horror movie?