Page 103 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol III

922 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

modern Turkey, the Iliad and Odyssey deal with distinct a centuries-long dark age, not that of the more prosper-
themes. The Iliad relates the rage of the hero Achilles ous Mycenaean age.
who, insulted by the Greek leader Agamemnon, refuses The Homeric poems are also among the oldest—if not
to fight and urges his mother, Thetis, to have the gods the oldest—works of written Greek and their transcrip-
turn the tide of battle against his comrades. His anger tion marks a crucial transition in the development of writ-
turns to grief when his friend Patroclus is killed by Hec- ing. The West Semitic alphabet upon which Greek is
tor while wearing Achilles’ armor.Achilles returns to bat- basedhasonlyconsonants.Greek,ontheotherhand,con-
tle and kills Hector, threatening to defile his corpse until tains both consonants and vowels,which are essential for
Hector’s father, Priam, asks him to surrender the body rendering the metrical rhythm of Greek poetry, and one
for a proper funeral, which he does. The action of the theory holds that the scribe who first set down the Home-
book takes place over a few days in the last year of the ric epics was bilingual and forced to introduce vowels to
war, but Homer also recounts the origins of the conflict accommodate the Greek. Homer’s use of dactylic hexa-
and much of the story of the previous nine years. meter was widely imitated in antiquity, most notably in
The Odyssey relates the return home of the Greek Virgil’s epic of the founding of Rome by theTrojan refugee
hero Odysseus after the war. Although it is regarded as Aeneas.The first half of the Aeneid recountsAeneas’s voy-
more of a folktale in which the hero makes excursions to age to Italy,on the model of the Odyssey, while the second
fantastic lands and the underworld, the geography of the half has the more martial spirit of the Iliad.
Odyssey is clearly modeled on the experience of eighth- As important as the epics are as a foundation of the
century Greece, which was then beginning its westward “Western” literary tradition, many of the plots and
expansion. His homecoming takes ten years because of themes derive from older Near Eastern antecedents, the
the obstacles put in his way by Poseidon, god of the sea. best known of which is the Epic of Gilgamesh. As well
In addition to telling of Odysseus’s wanderings and as being a standard reading in survey courses of West-
tribulations, the Odyssey also tells of the efforts of his ern literature, Homer’s legacy is seen in the design of
son, Telemachus, to rid his house of the many suitors James Joyce’s mock-heroic epic novel Ulysses (the Latin
who have descended in hopes of marrying his mother, name for Odysseus), which Joyce divided into the
Penelope. In the end, father and son are reunited, they Telemachiad, the Wanderings of Ulysses, and the Nos-
kill the suitors, and Odysseus resumes his place as lord tos (homecoming).
of Ithaca.
Lincoln P. Paine
Thanks to their exploration of human (and divine)
motive, their narrative force, and the sheer beauty of the See also Greece, Ancient
language, the Iliad and Odyssey have been regarded as
cornerstones of the Western literary tradition since antiq-
Further Reading
uity. More recent evaluations of Homer have established
Clarke, H. W. (1981). Homer’s readers: A historical introduction to the
an important historical place for him. At the end of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Newark: University of Delaware Press.
nineteenth century, the German archaeologist Heinrich Homer. (1990). The Iliad. (R. Fagles,Trans.). New York: Penguin.
Homer. (1996). The Odyssey. (R. Fagles,Trans.). New York: Penguin.
Schliemann discovered the site of ancient Troy, which is Parry, M. (1980). The making of Homeric verse. (A. Parry, Ed.). New York:
believed to have burned in about 1250 BCE.This discov- Arno.
Powell, B. B. (2004). Homer. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
ery suggested that the story of the Iliad had a factual
basis. If the stories originated in the thirteenth century
BCE, they underwent a contextual metamorphosis so that
by the time they were written down, apart from a few in- Homosexuality
tentional archaisms, many of the poem’s details reflect
the reality of eighth-century Greece, then emerging from See Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement; Sex and Sexuality