The Iliad

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 unde

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than with his experience of Achilles' aura of power and Achilles' momentary consciousness of such power. On the other hand, Achilles himself is frozen by the mere entrance of Priam, who has come to mourn Hector and bear him away for burial. Priam's life force comes not from the strength of a warrior but from inner, personal strength that is akin to dignity: "The human beings around us exert just by their presence a power which belongs uniquely to themselves to stop, to diminish, or modify, each movement which our bodies design" (Weil 28). To be sure, Achilles is at a physical advantage in this penultimate episode because he has killed Hector and desecrated his body by dragging it behind his chariot. But this is the same Achilles who has spent most of the time of the narrative of the Iliad pouting because mean old comrade in arms Agamemnon had appropriated the war-prize woman that Achilles saw first. This is the same Achilles, indeed, who watched his not particularly gifted, though well-loved, comrade warrior Patroclus meet Hector on the field in his place. Thus whatever personal power Achilles does have comes from his status as a premier warrior. The power, or force or might, that Priam has comes from within himself. Even at the
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Approximate Word count = 3823
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)

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