Literature Humanities 07-08

Reflecting on the Iliad

One text down,.....uh a whole bunch to go....
Anyway, this is an open thread to give you a chance to give your own reaction to this strange, incomparable work. What surprised you? What disappointed you? What do you find yourself thinking about still? Favorite part? Most troubling element?

Whatever you have to say, please do refer to some text, either directly or by citation, to let us know what you are basing your analysis on.

As for me, the passage the Sierra mentioned in class on Monday when Achilles offers Phoinix to "be king equally with me" still blows me away. There's no precedent for it in the work and gives a glimpse of generosity that Achilles seems to be lacking elsewhere.

One other detail that I like is in Book VI, when Hektor is making his good-byes to Andromache. I'll quote at length:
        So speaking glorious Hektor held out his arms to his baby,
who shrank back to his fair-girdled nurse's bosom
screaming, and frightened at the aspect of his own father,
terrified as he saw the bronze and the crest with it's horse-hair,
nodding dreadfully, as he thought, from the peak of the helmet.
Then his beloved father laughed out, and his honoured mother,
and at once glorious Hektor lifted from his head the helmet
and laid it shining upon the ground. (VI. 466-473)

This seems to be a reference to the unnatural quality of war-making, especially when  Homer emphasizes the "bronze" and "horse-hair," which suggest a kind of inhumanity. And that Hektor will take off the helmet to soothe his son gives a sense, perhaps, of the proper hierarchy of glory, honor, and family. 

Glaukos v. Diomedes

In Book VI, Glaukos rises to face the rampaging Diomedes. To this point, Glaukos is unknown to the Greeks, and so Diomedes ask him to give some account of himself. Glaukos's answer seems unusual in The Illiad:

          High-hearted son of Tydeus, why ask of my generation?
           As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity.
           The wind scatters leaves on the ground, but the live timber
          burgeons with the leaves again in the season of spring returning.
           So one generation of men will grow while another
           dies.

Ironically, his geneaology turns out to be crucially important, since they agree to a truce after discovering an ancestral bond.

Some questions to consider:
Does his logic oppose the prevailing honor/shame/glory ethos of poem?
If so, why does it appear here? And what does their encounter contribute?
Are there other moments like this?
What do you think of the truce? I find it surprising, bit I cannot quite pinpoint why it seems so out of place.

What the Helen?

In re-reading The Iliad, I found Helen's character surprising. In fact, beyond being the putative "cause" of the war, I don't remember her at all. So her confession to Hektor that she wished she was with a better man came as a bit of a shock--though she doesn't excuse her own involvement:

           Brother by marriage to me, who am a nasty bitch evil-intriguing,
              how I wish that on that day when my mother first bore me
              the foul whirlwind of the storm had caught me away and swept me
              to the mountain, or into the wash of the sea deep-thundering
              where the waves would have swept me away before all these things happened.

What do we make of this Helen?
What else does she say, and how does it relate to this self-ridicule?
How does this admission shape your overall impression of the war?
Why might Homer give her this particular melancholy and near tragic self-awareness?