Works of Homer

The stories were for the ancient Greeks themselves a venerable source of lessons about morality, about the nature of heroism and about the proper ways in which a society should be structured. Given the value that the Greeks placed on these stories as exemplars of the values of Hellenic society, we can do the same by looking to the texts to help us understand how the Greeks understood their world. This task is, however, a difficult one because our own worldview is so fundamentally different (because based on such different life experiences) that it is often hard to know if we are experiencing a story like the Iliad in anything resembling the ways in which the Greeks themselves understood it. However, we have a better chance of understanding, and appreciating, the Iliad if we take with us a guide like Simone Weil who provides an interpretation of Homer's work

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rage and honor: The qualities that Odysseus expects from other leaders are very much those that we still expect from our leaders. (In fact, it is arguable that we have these expectations of our leaders precisely because of the fact that Western society has been for centuries permeated by the ideals of Greek society that Homer was one of the first to summarize.) Rather, what it striking about a passage like the following is the fact that while the leaders of men are supposed to emulate Odysseus in being both wise and brave, the men themselves are assumed to have no such worthy characteristics. The common soldiers - i.e. those who will be asked to be wounded or to die for their leaders - seem to have no higher moral inclinations whatsoever. It is not that Homer and Odysseus see them as being immoral, but rather that they are portrayed as if they were amoral, akin to cattle or horses or some other useful but "lower" or "inferior" form of animal labor. Clearly, Odysseus does not consider them to be fully human agents: The common soldiers in the Iliad could never be "the heroes of their own lives" to borrow the phrase that Charles Dickens so eloquently uses in opening David Copperfield. Whenever he met a king or chieftain, he stood b
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Approximate Word count = 1506
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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