The Iliad
This is an excerpt from the paper...
The action of Homer's epic The Iliad brings two huge armies together, one inside the walls of Troy and the other outside, as a massive act of revenge for the stealing of Helen. Helen is the figure who stands between the two opposing armies. She is Greek, but she has been taken by the Trojans, willingly or unwillingly, and is the immediate cause of the war. History shows that the war between Greece and Troy took place, probably several times over several centuries, but the story of Helen was likely created by tradition and taken over by the poet for this epic work. The nature of Helen is important in the way the epic develops, though, and she is also an important figure in the legend and in later depictions of the same story. Rachel Bespaloff notes that Helen is the severest and most austere of the characters in The Iliad as she walks around the walls like a penitent, projecting an image of misfortune and beauty. She is a royal figure, but she is not free. Her lack of freedom does not derive from either the Greeks or the Trojans, however: Nothing short of the death of the Immortals would restore her freedom, since it is the gods, not her fellow men, who have dared to put her in bondage. Her fate does not depend on the outcome of the war; Paris or Menelaus may get her, but for her nothing can really change. She is the prisoner of the passions her beauty excited, and her passivity is, so to speak, their underside. M.I. Finley points out that Helen is the one of
. . .
o Troy. Her fate, as noted, is not that of the usual adulteress:
But when all the other Trojan women were being led off into captivity Helen was miraculously reconciled with her husband and returned as Sparta's queen. Since then she has become the symbol of men's erotic fancy, the quintessence as it were of all the varied moods of womankind.
There are two ancient stories as to Helen's birth. Leda was the wife of King Tyndareus:
The queen was by no means the first mortal woman to have been loved by Zeus, for the father of gods was of a highly amorous disposition and took his pleasures where he found them. One of the strategems he adopted in order to deceive his lady victims was to visit them in the guise of a bird.
Zeus visited Leda in the form of a swan, and so she lays an egg which hatches to emit triplets--Castor and Pollux, and Helen. Another account has it that two eggs were laid, with one for Castor and Pollux and the second for Helen and Clytaemnestra. when Helen refers to her parents in Homer, she does not name them, though Zeus is said to be her father while Leda is mentioned only as the mother of Castor and Pollux. Helen does acknowledge the latter two as her brothers. Another story emerges from the
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Philoctetes Helen's, Helen Helen, Pollux Helen, Helen Iliad, King Tyndareus, Greeks Trojans, Paris Troy, Paris Menelaus, Zeus Helen, Aeneid Aeneas, pollux helen, castor pollux, paris menelaus, castor pollux helen, assumed role, helen helen, story helen, helen's role, beauty excited, fell love, greeks trojans,
Approximate Word count = 1809
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
More Essays on The Iliad
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
