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The Iliad

This research provides a comparison and contrast of Homer's epic poem The Iliad and Simone Weil's essay "The Iliad, or a Poem of Might." The research will set forth the cultural context for the pattern of ideas in the work of origin and then discuss ways in which how Weil's 20th-century commentary on the epic demonstrates a way of validating the relevance of the ancient text to contemporary sensibility and experience.

It is impossible to discuss the structure and priorities of Western culture and civilization without reference to the Iliad as a foundational cultural document. The Iliad is considered a classic because, through the stories of the various characters it follows from Greece and Troy, it articulates how the West perceives what uniquely belongs to its view of human experience and human nature. It is in that sense that the Iliad functions as a document of myth and culture.

Also important is that from the ancient period onward Western culture appears to have understood the importance of the text. Aristotle, who knew the Iliad as an ancient text in the fifth century BC, is at pains in the Poetics to refer to Homer as "divinely inspired beyond all other poets" (66). Hamilton cites the view of "an ancient writer" that Homer "touched nothing without somehow honoring and glorifying it. He was not the Greek Bible; he was the representative and spokesman of the Greeks . . . quintessentially Greek" (177). Thus to take in the ideas, events, and people of the Iliad is to understand human nature very much as the ancient Greeks did. If the Iliad has power to affect modern sensibility, it therefore declares a continuity of the Western worldview and opinion of human nature from the ancient to the modern period.

Rieu (xv) cites the widespread but not unanimous consensus that Homer was working c. 750 BC. However, both he and Hamilton note that some scholars date the Iliad as early as 1000 BC. That would mean that each epic had a diffe...

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The Iliad. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 16:09, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1682467.html