"Reconciliation and Homer's Iliad" | CAS Inquire

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Anne Duncan of the Department of Classics and Religious Studies gave this talk for the "War, Peace, and Reconciliation" theme of CAS Inquire on Oct. 8, 2024

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[00:00:00.000]Good evening, and thank you so much for joining us, whether you're in person or online.
[00:00:07.920]I'm June Griffin. I'm the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences.
[00:00:14.280]And it's my great pleasure to welcome you to the fifth year of the CAS Inquire Lecture Series.
[00:00:19.580]The organizing theme this year is War, Peace, and Reconciliation.
[00:00:24.320]This theme is very well chosen given the persistent and devastating ravages of war
[00:00:28.840]across the world today, and the no less persistent, urgent, and humane calls for
[00:00:33.960]peace and reconciliation. All of these matters raise fundamental questions about the very nature
[00:00:40.020]of humanity. Even with the culture and identity of the College of Arts and Sciences, this series
[00:00:45.560]embodies the commitment of our faculty, students, and staff to opening important questions and
[00:00:51.600]critical examinations.
[00:00:52.800]As is the tradition of the CAS Inquire program, this year's theme will be explored through
[00:01:04.800]a diverse range of intellectual orientations and disciplinary perspectives, including political
[00:01:10.040]science, classics and religious studies, evolutionary biology, and history.
[00:01:15.640]This evening, our speaker is Dr. Anne Duncan, Chair of the Department of Classics and Religious
[00:01:21.760]Studies.
[00:01:22.760]Dr. Duncan earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and has been a member of the
[00:01:27.620]CAS faculty since 2007.
[00:01:29.540]She's author of Performance and Identity in the Classical World and numerous articles
[00:01:35.460]on Greek and Roman drama and performance issues.
[00:01:39.340]Her talk tonight, Reconciliation and Homer's Iliad, demonstrates the timelessness of this
[00:01:44.600]ancient text by describing the reactions of several readers to the poem and to his profound
[00:01:49.440]ability to articulate both the horrors of war and the possibilities of the future.
[00:01:52.720]Please join me in welcoming Dr. Duncan.
[00:01:57.320]Dr. Duncan Duncan: I'm going to put this in my pocket.
[00:02:10.220]Okay, so I'd like to begin by thanking the organizers of CAS Inquire for the opportunity
[00:02:18.180]to be here.
[00:02:19.180]And I'd also like to thank my colleagues and my students in the Department of Classics
[00:02:22.680]and religious studies for their support, and other friends who are here.
[00:02:26.080]And I'd like to thank all of you for coming this afternoon.
[00:02:29.060]I hope that you'll feel free to ask questions after the talk.
[00:02:34.180]So one of the greatest pleasures of my job as a professor of classics is getting to witness
[00:02:38.900]the reactions of people having their first serious encounter with ancient Greek literature,
[00:02:44.080]and in particular with Homer's epic poem The Iliad.
[00:02:46.920]And by serious encounter, I mean, you know, engaged reading or watching, I mean really
[00:02:52.640]reading the stuff and paying attention to it, rather than treating it as a boring homework
[00:02:56.700]assignment to get out of the way as quickly as possible.
[00:03:00.100]For many people, their first encounter with ancient Greek literature is in school, and
[00:03:03.760]unfortunately for many people, that is also where it ends.
[00:03:07.680]But for some people, that school encounter is a serious one.
[00:03:11.320]Many of the classics majors in my department can tell you exactly what sparked their passion
[00:03:16.300]for ancient religion.
[00:03:18.300]And for other people, their first serious encounter with Greek literature comes later
[00:03:22.600]than traditional college age.
[00:03:24.000]It comes in full adulthood, like a bolt out of the blue.
[00:03:28.000]Whenever it happens, I find, people are struck by a sudden, amazed recognition: "Oh my goodness,
[00:03:34.900]they're just like us!"
[00:03:37.440]It can be hard to reach this moment, because you have to get past the unfamiliar names
[00:03:41.620]that are difficult to spell and pronounce, the tangled mythology lurking behind every
[00:03:47.020]story, and the 25 or 100 years or so of history between the ancient Greeks and us.
[00:03:52.560]But if you can leap past all that, even for a moment, you can have this amazing, sort
[00:03:58.640]of time-traveling moment of kinship, like just like us.
[00:04:03.660]They loved and hated, fought and worked and played, fostered their children, and fretted
[00:04:09.260]about their deaths.
[00:04:10.260]And most importantly for our purposes today, they went to war, and those that came home,
[00:04:15.680]came home forever marked by the experience.
[00:04:19.440]I want to begin today by talking about the reactions of two different men and women who
[00:04:22.520]came to the home of the Iliad, two different men who, in full adulthood, came to this 2800-year-old
[00:04:28.880]home and found in it something astonishing, human, and relatable, and moving.
[00:04:34.020]They each had their "just like us" moment, each from the perspective of his own job.
[00:04:40.000]The first man is the film critic David Demby.
[00:04:43.160]The second man is the psychiatrist Jonathan Shea.
[00:04:46.620]After I talk about these two men's reactions to the Iliad, I'll talk about a third man's
[00:04:51.480]engagement with the Iliad.
[00:04:52.480]I'll finish with some thoughts about what we as modern readers can take away from the
[00:04:57.400]Iliad about war, trauma, and the possibility of healing reconciliation.
[00:05:02.240]David Demby wrote movie reviews for the New Yorker magazine from 1998 to 2014.
[00:05:11.040]In the mid-90s, when he was just about 50 years old, pushing 50, he decided to go back
[00:05:16.800]to college and reread the so-called great books.
[00:05:22.440]He had a mission from his alma mater, Columbia University in New York City, to enroll in
[00:05:33.200]two of the required core freshman courses that present first-year students with a survey
[00:05:37.500]of the greatest hits of the traditional Western literary canon.
[00:05:41.760]The very first thing he read was "Homotilia," which he had already read once as an 18-year-old
[00:05:46.880]freshman 30 years earlier and had frankly forgotten all about.
[00:05:52.400]What David Dennehy says about the Iliad after coming back to it as a middle-aged man and
[00:05:57.220]film critic, and this is sort of a long quote, he says, "I have forgotten.
[00:06:02.920]I have forgotten the extremity of its cruelty and tenderness, and reading it now, turning
[00:06:09.100]the Iliad open anywhere in its 15,693 lines, I was shocked."
[00:06:14.440]A dying word, shocked.
[00:06:16.980]Few people have been able to use it well since Claude Rains so famously said, "I'm shocked,
[00:06:22.360]I'm shocked."
[00:06:23.360]I'm not sure what kind of gabbering is going on here, as he pocketed his metal teeth as
[00:06:26.320]well.
[00:06:27.320]But it's the only word for excitement and alarm of this intensity.
[00:06:30.320]The brute vitality of the air, the magnificence of ships, wind, and fires, the raging battles,
[00:06:36.520]the planes charged with terrified horses, the beasts unstrung and falling, the warriors
[00:06:41.320]flung face down in the dust, the ravaged longing for home and family and meadows and the rituals
[00:06:46.880]of peace, leading at last to an instant of reconciliation, where even two men who are
[00:06:52.320]bitter enemies fall into rapt admiration of each other's nobility and beauty. It is a
[00:06:58.140]war poem, and in the Richmond Lattimore translation, it has an excruciating vividness, an incessant
[00:07:05.140]observation of horror that causes almost disbelief. And now Denby quotes from Lattimore's translation
[00:07:11.020]of the Ode. "Ido Meneas stabbed in the middle of his chest with a spear, and broke the bronze
[00:07:16.800]armor about him, which in time before him guarded his body from destruction. He cried
[00:07:22.280]a great cry, broken, the spear in him, and fell thunderously, and the spear in his heart
[00:07:29.180]was stuck fast, but the heart was panting still and beating to shake the butt end of
[00:07:34.140]the spear." Look at that, Denby. He says, "If I had seen that quaking spear in a shopping
[00:07:41.420]mall scare movie, I would have abandoned the sticky floors and headed toward the door."
[00:07:46.800]Exploitation! Dehumanization! Teenagers never read anything! That's why they love this grisly
[00:07:52.240]movie trash. Yet here is the image at the beginning of Western literature and in its
[00:07:57.280]most famous book. That's the end of this quote. Denby is shocked by the gore and violence
[00:08:04.760]and sheer cinematic vividness of the battle scenes in the ending. Somehow his 18-year-old
[00:08:10.260]self had passed a rhythm unremarkable. But he's also struck by the tenderness in the
[00:08:15.280]ending, by the way that all the good things in life—home, family, health, peace, stability,
[00:08:22.200]and stability—are marked by their absence in the sport poem, present only in quick flashbacks
[00:08:27.960]to normal case time. And that, I think, is the perspective of a middle-aged man, husband
[00:08:33.720]and father, someone who's staring at mortality in the mirror at the moment.
[00:08:38.560]There'd be comments on something that most attentive readers of Homer are also struck
[00:08:42.680]by, and that is that virtually all of the combat scenes in the poem—and there are
[00:08:47.380]dozens of them—are between named individuals, individuals who have hallmarked their role
[00:08:52.160]as homelands, families, and lineages that they, or Homer, falls about before they triumph
[00:08:58.080]or die.
[00:08:59.080]Death is rarely anonymous in the end.
[00:09:03.240]For all his reveling in bone-crunching, blood-spurting, severed-head-rolling action scenes, Homer also
[00:09:09.820]gives virtually everyone in the poem a moment of human dignity before they die.
[00:09:15.160]Here's an example of three battle deaths in quick succession, from a translation by
[00:09:19.620]Stanley McFarland.
[00:09:20.620]This is one connected passage.
[00:09:22.120]Menelaus killed Scamemius.
[00:09:23.120]This man had been taught to hunt by Artemis herself, and could shoot any animal the mountain
[00:09:30.860]forest nourished.
[00:09:31.860]But neither the goddess nor all his old skill in archery could help him down.
[00:09:36.360]Menelaus planted a spear between his shoulder blades and drove it out through his chest.
[00:09:40.320]He fell with a thud, and his armor clanged on his body.
[00:09:44.680]Meriones killed Perikles, whose father was Pecton and grandfather Harmon, and who himself
[00:09:50.080]was a skilled craftsman.
[00:09:52.080]Athena loved him prettily.
[00:09:54.080]He could build all sorts of intricate things, and had built for Perikles the doomed holes
[00:09:58.260]that first spelled even for Troy and for himself, since he had no inkling of the gods' oracles.
[00:10:05.160]Meriones ran him down from behind and hit him in the right buttock.
[00:10:08.620]The spear points slid beneath the bone and cleared through to the body.
[00:10:12.540]He fell to his knees and groaned as death took him.
[00:10:16.840]Neges took out Pidaeus, Antinor's son, though he was a bastard.
[00:10:22.040]Pidaeus embraced him as one of her own to please her husband.
[00:10:24.580]Now Neges got close enough to him to send his spear through the tendon at the back of
[00:10:28.280]his neck and on into his mouth, cutting away the tongue at the root.
[00:10:33.380]He fell into the dust, his teeth clenched on cold bones.
[00:10:40.500]Homer has the same precision of language whether he's talking about a man who was born a master
[00:10:45.160]but was raised by his father's legitimate wife, or about where exactly its ear point
[00:10:50.160]passes through the body.
[00:10:52.000]Both kinds of information are worthy of careful, focused attention.
[00:10:57.880]That's remarkable enough, but what is even more remarkable is that this granting of
[00:11:02.880]a moment's spot, a moment's quiet dignity, is true for both sides of the conflict.
[00:11:09.920]It happens for the Greeks and for the Trojans.
[00:11:12.920]When you consider that the Iliad is about some events that take place in the tenth and
[00:11:16.920]final year of the Trojan War, a ten-year war between an alliance of Greek kings and the
[00:11:21.960]Greeks on one hand and the Asian city of Troy on the other, when you consider that the Iliad
[00:11:26.960]was essentially the national poem of Greece before Greece was even a nation, and that
[00:11:31.960]it's the first war poem in the Western literary canon, it is simply staggering that the Trojans
[00:11:37.960]are depicted in this poem as fully sympathetic people, no better and no worse than the Greeks.
[00:11:44.960]The Greeks are not the good guys in the national epic of Greece.
[00:11:48.960]They, and the Trojans with them, are trapped in this poem.
[00:11:51.920]They are in this conflict, sickly and unsure of whether there will be any end to it.
[00:11:57.880]Some Greeks behave admirably, some behave abominably.
[00:12:02.880]It is another aspect of poem's realism.
[00:12:06.880]The Greek who behaves the most admirably and most abominably is the star of the story, great warrior Achilles.
[00:12:14.880]The Iliad is about an incident in which Achilles and the commander of the Greek alliance, Agamemnon,
[00:12:21.880]take the prize of honor, a woman, as it happens. Agamemnon takes Achilles' prize away from him at an assembly of the troops.
[00:12:29.840]Achilles comes away from this encounter with his commander feeling dishonored, disrespected, and shamed in front of the entire army,
[00:12:37.840]and in retaliation, he decides to stop fighting and sit up the war in his tent.
[00:12:43.840]Without his impressive fighting skills, the Greeks are handicapped, and they are even more handicapped when Achilles' mother, who just happens to be on her own,
[00:12:51.840]the goddess, persuades the king of the gods, Teux, to temporarily give the Trojans the upper hand in battle, so as to further punish the Greeks with disrespecting Achilles.
[00:13:02.800]During the large middle portion of the epic, when Achilles is not fighting, the Trojans bring the battle all the way down to the seashore where the Greek ships are reached.
[00:13:11.800]The Greeks are trapped and desperate, with their backs to the sea and the Trojans trying to set fire to the Greek ships.
[00:13:18.800]Achilles' best friend and foster brother, Patroclus,
[00:13:21.800]says that he can borrow his armor and go out into battle dressed as Achilles to scare the Trojans off and give the Greeks a little bit of relief.
[00:13:29.760]Achilles reluctantly agrees, and Patroclus is killed in battle when he passes his advantage too far.
[00:13:36.760]The star trojan warrior Hector, the prince of Troy, cuts him down and takes Achilles' armor as a trophy.
[00:13:45.760]When another Greek warrior returns from the battle to give Achilles the news that his best friend has been killed,
[00:13:51.760]Homer tells us that this man has to hold Achilles' hands to keep him from cutting his own throat and feet.
[00:13:59.720]This is a Roman sarcophagus depicting Achilles mourning for the dead Patroclus who is lying in the field.
[00:14:08.720]At this moment, everything changes for Achilles.
[00:14:12.720]The war stops being about honor and glory and counting trophies and looking like a big shot in front of the troops,
[00:14:19.720]and it becomes simply about personal revenge.
[00:14:21.720]He wants to kill Hector.
[00:14:24.680]He wants to kill Hector so badly that he doesn't eat or sleep until he goes back into battle with new armor that his mother has the gods make for him.
[00:14:33.680]And then he goes into a berserker's age.
[00:14:36.680]This is where we get body counts rather than named individuals dying.
[00:14:40.680]Achilles slaughters Trojans in indiscriminate heaps.
[00:14:44.680]He makes a river literally run red with Trojan blood.
[00:14:48.680]He finally gets his chance to confront Hector.
[00:14:51.680]He spears him in front of his parents who are watching the battle from the walls of Troy.
[00:14:56.640]After Hector dies, Achilles mutilates his corpse and has his men do it to him.
[00:15:02.640]Then he drags Hector's body behind his chariot three times around the walls of Troy
[00:15:07.640]and all the way back to his tent where he spends days torturing a Ferdinand.
[00:15:12.640]He is completely stuck in his grief and anguish.
[00:15:16.640]It is the story arc about Achilles from a warrior who is keenly sensitive
[00:15:21.640]to the rules of his culture's honor code to an animalistic killing machine
[00:15:25.640]that intrigues our other reader of the Iliad, Dr. Jonathan Shea.
[00:15:29.640]Dr. Shea, now retired, was a psychiatrist at the VA Center in Boston.
[00:15:34.640]He specialized in treating severe post-traumatic stress disorder
[00:15:38.640]and he ran a support group for Vietnam veterans with severe PTSD.
[00:15:42.640]Dr. Shea came to the Iliad as an adult and as a psychiatrist
[00:15:47.640]and had that same shock of recognition that I talked about earlier.
[00:15:51.600]Achilles, he realized, has PTSD.
[00:15:55.560]He can even pinpoint the twin causes of Achilles' breakdown:
[00:15:59.560]the darkness of death and Agamemnon's dishonoring of Achilles in front of the army.
[00:16:04.560]Dr. Shea says that severe PTSD is usually caused by the combination of the greatest loss,
[00:16:10.560]such as the death of a close comrade at arms,
[00:16:13.560]and crucially, the betrayal of what's right by those in authority.
[00:16:18.560]Achilles experiences both of these things in the Iliad
[00:16:21.560]as he steps.
[00:16:22.560]He conducts a human sacrifice of Trojan boots on Patrakos' grave.
[00:16:27.560]He mutilates the detective's corpse over and over,
[00:16:30.560]clearly wishing he could kill him over and over again.
[00:16:34.560]He cares nothing for the community of other good warriors,
[00:16:37.560]nothing for the goals of winning the war and going home.
[00:16:40.560]He neither eats nor sleeps.
[00:16:43.560]He is like a walking dead man, and he is terribly, terribly dangerous.
[00:16:49.560]The brilliance of Dr. Shea's book,
[00:16:51.520]"Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character,"
[00:16:55.520]is that it juxtaposes a discussion of Achilles' story in Ilium
[00:16:59.520]with a discussion of the experiences of the Vietnam veterans
[00:17:03.520]in Dr. Shea's support group.
[00:17:05.520]We hear there of the deaths of comrades-in-arms
[00:17:08.520]and of the trails by authority figures,
[00:17:11.520]of going berserk in battle after life loses all meaning.
[00:17:14.520]To give you an example of berserking,
[00:17:16.520]Dr. Shea quotes one of the Vietnam veterans in his support group.
[00:17:20.520]I was a fucking animal.
[00:17:23.520]When I look back at that stuff, I say,
[00:17:25.520]"That was somebody else who did that. That wasn't me. That wasn't me."
[00:17:28.520]You know, who the fuck was that?
[00:17:30.520]You know, at the time, it didn't mean nothing. It didn't mean nothing.
[00:17:33.520]War changes you. Changes you. Strips you.
[00:17:37.520]Strips you of all your beliefs, your religion,
[00:17:40.520]takes your dignity away, and you become an animal.
[00:17:43.520]I know the animals don't.
[00:17:45.520]The animal insensitivity of people.
[00:17:47.520]You know, it's unbelievable what humans can do to each other.
[00:17:50.520]Then Dr. Shade puts that soldier's words
[00:17:54.520]next to the words of Achilles when he's finally confronting Hector,
[00:17:57.520]ready to kill him a thousand times over in revenge for killing the conquerors.
[00:18:01.520]Hector tries to strike a deal with Achilles,
[00:18:04.520]but the winner of their duel should return the loser's body to his people for proper burial.
[00:18:09.520]Achilles says, "Don't try to come to deals with me, Hector.
[00:18:13.520]Do lions make peace treaties with men? Do wolves and lambs agree to get along?
[00:18:18.520]No.
[00:18:19.520]They hate each other to the core, and that's always between you and me.
[00:18:22.520]No talk of agreements until one of us falls and blots Ares with his blood."
[00:18:28.520]Both of these soldiers referred to themselves as animals, or as worse than animals, animals filled with human rage, human evil.
[00:18:37.520]I want to be clear that it's Dr. Hsieh who is drawing the connections between the Iliad and the war in Vietnam, not the mental support group.
[00:18:43.520]It's not like we're taking a period of the Iliad.
[00:18:46.520]Dr. Hsieh is the one putting Achilles' statements
[00:18:48.520]next to the statements of men who fought in Vietnam saying,
[00:18:51.520]"Look, it's just a house."
[00:18:54.520]And his book is incredibly moving, wise, and wonderful.
[00:18:57.520]I recommend it to all of you.
[00:18:59.520]You know, you want to look hard for a genius craft poem.
[00:19:02.520]Dr. Hsieh reads the Iliad as the story of the destruction of Achilles' moral character
[00:19:07.520]and the beginnings of the two buildings.
[00:19:09.520]At the beginning of the poem we see Achilles honoring the rules of society's warrior code,
[00:19:14.520]the scarce soldiers who beg for their lives,
[00:19:17.520]and then sends them back to their families.
[00:19:19.520]He saves time for the battlefield.
[00:19:21.520]He respects the dead.
[00:19:23.520]But after everyone knows the tale of what's right,
[00:19:26.520]and after the death of Patroclus,
[00:19:28.520]Achilles goes berserk.
[00:19:30.520]He doesn't care about anything except getting revenge.
[00:19:33.520]Don't mean nothing,
[00:19:34.520]as none of Dr. Shade's support groups have.
[00:19:37.520]A clear example of this altered state is when he re-enters battle
[00:19:41.520]and mows down heaps of Trojan warriors looking for Hector.
[00:19:45.520]One Trojan manages to slip under
[00:19:46.520]his guard and grab his knees in the traditional formal gesture
[00:19:51.520]of supplication, what we would call begging for your life.
[00:19:55.520]He begs Achilles to spare him and ransom him back to his parents.
[00:19:59.520]And he adds the heartbreaking detail that he's already been captured
[00:20:03.520]and ransomed by Achilles once before,
[00:20:05.520]and he just got back to the fighting a few days ago.
[00:20:09.520]But what a difference a few days makes.
[00:20:11.520]Here is Achilles' response.
[00:20:13.520]"Shut up fool.
[00:20:15.520]And stop talking ransom.
[00:20:17.520]Before Patroclus met his destiny,
[00:20:19.520]it was more to my taste to spare Trojan wives,
[00:20:21.520]capture them, and sell them overseas.
[00:20:23.520]But now they all die.
[00:20:25.520]Every last Trojan god puts in my hands before Charles walks.
[00:20:29.520]All of them, and especially Creon's children."
[00:20:32.520]"You died too young.
[00:20:34.520]Don't take it hard.
[00:20:36.520]Patroclus died when he was far above you."
[00:20:39.520]"Take a look at me.
[00:20:41.520]You see how huge I am, how beautiful.
[00:20:43.520]I have a noble father.
[00:20:44.520]My mother was a goddess, but I too am in death's shadow.
[00:20:49.520]There will come a time, some dawn or evening or noon in this war, when someone will take
[00:20:54.520]my life from me with a spear thrust or an arrow of misdemeanor."
[00:20:58.520]And then Homer tells us, "Achilles sinks his entire sword blade down into this kneeling,
[00:21:04.520]unarmed man's body through the collarbone.
[00:21:08.520]Achilles is utterly cold, without pity or mercy, even for himself.
[00:21:13.520]He accepts his impending death as fact.
[00:21:16.520]Even killing Hector does not heal the trauma he has suffered.
[00:21:19.520]He is so far gone that it takes an act of divine intervention to bring him back."
[00:21:25.520]I'll talk about that moment of divine intervention in a little bit.
[00:21:29.520]There's one more modern reader of the Iliad's perspective on it I'd like to share with you in a moment,
[00:21:33.520]and it involves a story about one of my former professors, Dr. Martin Osborne.
[00:21:38.520]He was a German Jew, born in 1922,
[00:21:42.520]and when he was 16 years old and studying in Classics in high school,
[00:21:46.520]Kristallnacht happened, the Night of Broken Glass.
[00:21:50.520]During the night of November 9th to 10th, 1938,
[00:21:54.520]there were dozens of coordinated attacks on synagogues, Jewish-owned businesses, Jewish schools,
[00:21:59.520]and Jewish homes throughout Germany, while German police did nothing.
[00:22:03.520]Dozens of Jews were killed, and thousands more were arrested and sent to camps.
[00:22:08.520]Martin, his father Max,
[00:22:11.520]and his younger brother Ernst were all arrested and sent to the internment camp at Sachsenhausen.
[00:22:17.520]Martin and Ernst eventually made their way via a kindertransport, a children's transport,
[00:22:22.520]to Holland, then to England, then to Canada, where Martin finished his schooling,
[00:22:28.520]and finally to the U.S., where Martin became a professor of ancient Greek literature and history,
[00:22:33.520]with a joint appointment at the University of Pennsylvania in Swarthmore College,
[00:22:37.520]and two alma maters, as it happens.
[00:22:40.520]Martin was encouraged in his classical studies by his father, Max,
[00:22:44.520]who was a lawyer with a deep classical education.
[00:22:47.520]Martin saw the Max dietitian stuff.
[00:22:51.520]The very last time that Martin and his brother Ernst saw their father was in the camp,
[00:22:56.520]and Max quoted two lines of Homer in Greek to them.
[00:23:00.520]But not just any two lines. He quoted Hector in Book 6 of the Iliad,
[00:23:04.520]when the Trojan warrior is talking to his wife Andromache for what turns out to be the last time.
[00:23:09.520]Hector is coming to the city walls to find his wife,
[00:23:12.520]and Andromache meets him with their baby boy, Styanax, in her arms.
[00:23:16.520]She begs him not to go back out to the fighting, because if he does, he may die,
[00:23:21.520]and that will spell certain doom for their city, enslavement for her, and mistreatment or death for their son.
[00:23:27.520]In his reply to his wife, Hector reveals that he too knows that the stakes are high and the odds are bad,
[00:23:34.520]but he has no choice but to fight. And he has a moment where he predicts the future.
[00:23:38.520]"Essetai iman van papalove ilios irene.
[00:23:44.520]Cae primos cae laos eumelio primonium."
[00:23:49.520]"There will come a day when sacred Troy will perish, and Freon, and the people of Freon with a strong industry."
[00:23:57.520]Hector is foretelling his own doom, and his wife's doom, and their infant son's doom,
[00:24:03.520]and their entire civilization's doom, all the while insisting to his wife
[00:24:07.520]that he must go back to the fighting, because to do otherwise,
[00:24:11.520]even when he knows it is a losing moment, is to be a coward.
[00:24:15.520]Max Ostwald quoted these lines to his sons in the end:
[00:24:19.520]"Hell on earth, not knowing if any of them would survive,
[00:24:23.520]not knowing if their entire people would perish."
[00:24:27.520]That he was able to draw a connection between their plight and the plight of the Trojans
[00:24:32.520]in the ancient Greek epic in that moment, in that place, is astonishing to me.
[00:24:36.520]I don't know whether Max Ostwald meant those words to be comforting to his sons in some way,
[00:24:43.520]or relieving, or to be a rallying call to fight in the face of hopeless odds,
[00:24:48.520]or somehow all of those things at once.
[00:24:51.520]I do know that when sixteen-year-old Martin reached England,
[00:24:55.520]he tried to join the British army to fight Hitler.
[00:24:58.520]The British did not allow Germans to serve in their army, however, and the Jewish Germans.
[00:25:03.520]And I do know that when Martin Ostwald told me,
[00:25:05.520]this story when I was a student,
[00:25:08.520]he was trying to explain to me something both about his own history
[00:25:12.520]and about the power of the Iliad or any truly great literature.
[00:25:16.520]I think, if it's not too presumptuous,
[00:25:19.520]that what he was trying to explain is that the Iliad and other great works of literature
[00:25:24.520]has something in it that speaks to people across cultural domains and across time.
[00:25:29.520]When you come to learn and love a book like the Iliad,
[00:25:32.520]it changes and enlarges the way you see the world.
[00:25:34.520]And at the risk of being even more perceptuous,
[00:25:38.520]I would like to venture that I saw this kind of effect in my professor
[00:25:42.520]decades after the events of this story I just told you.
[00:25:45.520]When I knew him, Mark Hauswald was an elderly man
[00:25:49.520]who had a long and distinguished academic career.
[00:25:52.520]He had spent a number of years in the Department of Classical Studies
[00:25:55.520]at the University of Pennsylvania,
[00:25:57.520]alongside another German emigre classicist,
[00:26:00.520]someone who also knew the Iliad very well.
[00:26:03.520]His professor had also been a teenager from World War II, certainly.
[00:26:07.520]He was not Jewish, however.
[00:26:09.520]In fact, he had been a member of the Hitler Youth.
[00:26:12.520]For decades, the concentration camp survivor
[00:26:16.520]and the former Hitler Youth member, who had lost a leg in the war,
[00:26:19.520]had been colleagues in the same small department,
[00:26:22.520]while avoiding speaking to each other, if at all possible.
[00:26:25.520]And he wasn't.
[00:26:27.520]Surprising, no one expected them to be anything like friends, and yet these two men somehow
[00:26:33.520]reconciled. They had a conversation in which they acknowledged the terrible barrier between them
[00:26:39.840]and at the same time agreed that they would try to see each other as individuals,
[00:26:43.920]not as representatives of a side in a conflict. I know about this because a friend of mine
[00:26:48.800]witnessed the conversation completely by accident and it became a joke.
[00:26:54.880]I'm not claiming that the Iliad brought these two men together, but one of the things that's
[00:26:59.120]incredible about the Iliad is that the Iliad shows Achilles being brought back to his humanity by,
[00:27:04.720]of all people, his enemy. When Achilles is stuck in his rage and his grief at the end of the poem,
[00:27:11.200]mutilating Hector's corpse over and over, the gods finally decide that this has to end.
[00:27:15.600]This is the moment of divine intervention that I was referring to earlier.
[00:27:18.800]But it's not the gods who help Achilles do anything.
[00:27:22.720]The gods help Priam, the elderly king of Troy, Hector's father, sneak unyoghest into the Greek
[00:27:28.960]camp at night and to appear in Achilles' tent, miraculously, to beg for his son's body back
[00:27:35.680]so that he can get a proper burial. Achilles is astonished and thinks about killing Priam.
[00:27:41.760]But as Priam offers Achilles heaps of treasure in exchange for his son's corpse,
[00:27:46.560]he does the formal supplication. He sinks to his knees in front of Achilles' chair and kisses his
[00:27:52.320]hand.
[00:27:52.660]He then takes a deep breath and says these words:
[00:27:54.660]"Respect the gods, Achilles. Think of your own father and pity me. I am more pitiable.
[00:28:01.860]I have borne what no man who has walked this earth has ever yet borne.
[00:28:05.940]I have kissed the hand of the man who killed his son."
[00:28:08.180]Achilles looks at Priam's gray hair and thinks about his own father, whom he has not seen in
[00:28:18.020]ten years, whom he knows he will never see again, for Achilles knows he was fated to die a true
[00:28:22.260]man, and he thinks that his own father might have a greater man. And there in Achilles' tent,
[00:28:29.220]Achilles the Greek and Priam of Troy weep together, each thinking about their own losses,
[00:28:34.580]their own grief, but sharing the common humanity of grieving for the dead. And after that, Achilles
[00:28:40.820]grants Priam a 12-day armistice in which each side can bury their dead at rest. Achilles finally
[00:28:47.060]begins to return to human emotions and human society at the end of the Iliad, and it is thanks to the
[00:28:51.860]Iliad's amazing enough to his enemy. I'm not suggesting that the Iliad brought my professor
[00:28:56.740]and his one-time enemy together as old men, but I do believe that the values the Iliad holds up,
[00:29:02.580]dignity for all people, courage, honouring the dead and the living, informed this late
[00:29:09.060]reconciliation between two men on opposite sides of a terrible event. And I do believe that Max
[00:29:14.820]Ostwald's quotation of the Iliad stayed with Martin his entire life. They told me it did.
[00:29:21.460]They're just like us. The Greeks, and the Trojans too, for that matter, are just like us. They exult
[00:29:27.460]in victory, they grieve in defeat, they suffer when their loved ones suffer, they do terrible
[00:29:33.060]things of war, things they never would have believed they were capable of, and they do amazing
[00:29:38.340]things, generous, noble things they would never believe they're capable of. One footnote in history
[00:29:44.820]of the Iliad's place in Western civilization is a famous story from ancient Rome. During the period
[00:29:51.060]of Rome's expansion into a Mediterranean superpower in the second century BCE, about 600 years after
[00:29:58.020]the Iliad was written down, and close to the time the Romans would conquer the Greeks and turn
[00:30:03.060]Greece into just another Roman province, Rome went to war against another great civilization,
[00:30:08.900]the African empire of Carthage. Rome and Carthage fought a series of wars for supremacy in the
[00:30:14.740]Western Mediterranean region. At one point, the Carthaginians, under the leadership of their great general
[00:30:20.660]Hannibal, crossed the Alps with war elephants and brought the fight all the way to the gates
[00:30:25.860]from the south, but the Romans held fast. Later, the Romans, under the leadership of their great
[00:30:31.460]general Scipio, took the fight all the way to the gates of Carthage itself and sacked it. The story
[00:30:38.420]goes that Scipio watched the fall of Carthage from a vantage point high on the hill. He stood
[00:30:45.140]there with his lieutenants, watching the capital city of his nation's feared and hated enemy being
[00:30:50.260]burned to the ground, and he turned to one of his lieutenants with tears in his eyes and quoted the
[00:30:55.220]Iliad, the same lines from the Iliad that Martin Oswald's father quoted: "There will come a day when
[00:31:01.620]sacred Troy will perish, and Creon and the people of Creon will be stoned in their spirit." And his
[00:31:08.020]lieutenant replied, "I fear the same will happen to Rome." Rather than glorying in the destruction of their
[00:31:14.580]enemy, these two Roman commanders found in that destruction are a reminder of their own mortality
[00:31:19.860]and their own nation's vulnerability. They saw Carthage as another Troy, and they grieved for
[00:31:25.060]its destruction even as they were causing it. That reaction, that humane reaction to victory,
[00:31:31.460]is something that the Iliad encourages, even requires, because there are no winners and losers
[00:31:37.620]in the poem, no good guys and bad guys, because everyone in the poem is capable of great good
[00:31:43.460]and great evil. Because everyone gets a moment of focused attention before his death, at least
[00:31:49.460]ideally, and because the absence of that focused attention is so clearly wrong when Achilles
[00:31:56.020]slaughters piles of nameless Trojans. The Iliad teaches us that we are all Greeks, and we are all
[00:32:02.420]Trojans, and even when we do terrible things, it is possible to reclaim them all. Dr. Hsieh's book,
[00:32:10.580]"Achilles in Vietnam," argues that Homer shows us that trauma is healed by what Hsieh calls
[00:32:16.660]grief, by which he means "communalized war."
[00:32:19.060]Part of grieving is simply weeping, which, as Achilles and Freon weep together in contempt.
[00:32:26.500]Another part of grieving is telling one's story, and telling the stories of those who
[00:32:30.660]can no longer speak for themselves, to people who are listening with respect and attention.
[00:32:35.220]At one level, that's what the Iliad is.
[00:32:38.100]It's a war story that we are meant to listen to with respect and attention, because telling
[00:32:43.060]one's story is a way of grieving and a way of healing, and I think this is why the Iliad
[00:32:48.660]ends with the funeral of Hector.
[00:32:51.220]After Priam returns to Troy with his son's body, there's a royal funeral for Hector,
[00:32:56.340]and several people close to him give speeches about what he meant to them and how devastated
[00:33:01.460]they are that he's dead.
[00:33:03.300]The last line of the Iliad is, "Thus they buried Hector, tamer of horses."
[00:33:08.820]It always is a surprise to my students that the poem doesn't go on to describe the fall
[00:33:12.180]of Troy or anything that does Achilles, but the end of all is written in the end of one,
[00:33:17.540]and in the grieving people.
[00:33:18.260]After the fighting is over, all that's left to do, all that we can do is tell the story
[00:33:27.140]as clearly and honestly as we can to people who are truly listening.
[00:33:32.020]We are all Greeks, and we are all Trojans.
[00:33:35.460]They're just like us.
[00:33:37.060]We can come back to a dark place with the help of friends, or even with the help of
[00:33:41.300]people who are supposed to be enemies.
[00:33:43.860]This is what great literature does, it lifts us out of ourselves.
[00:33:47.860]It makes it possible to see the world through someone else's eyes.
[00:33:50.960]We tell our stories, and we listen to other people's stories, and we try to heal.
[00:33:57.460]Thanks.
[00:33:59.460]Thank you.
[00:34:01.460]Thank you so much for coming in.
[00:34:11.460]We are ready for questions.
[00:34:13.860].
[00:34:23.860]Thank you.
[00:34:25.860]Question about the ending of the Iliad, so the final line is...
[00:34:40.860]That's the very active chamber of horses.
[00:34:42.860]...is that...
[00:34:43.860]Is that epithet itself further kind of the humanization of characters, that Hector was
[00:34:50.860]this fantastic warrior, or is that just that was his epithet, so that was what they're
[00:34:55.860]going to call it?
[00:34:56.860]I mean, kind of both.
[00:34:57.860]That's a great question.
[00:34:58.860]So, if you've read the Iliad, or if you're going to read the Iliad, I hope you will do
[00:35:02.860]at some point, you'll notice right away that one of the many stylistic works, which is
[00:35:08.860]totally standard for ancient epic, is that most characters get some sort of epithetic
[00:35:13.860]effect, some sort of word or words that is often said before or after their name.
[00:35:19.860]So Hector tamers horses, Zeus who gathers the clouds, Achilles with the shining helmet,
[00:35:25.860]Swift-footed Achilles, and it's both very descriptive and personal, but it's also kind
[00:35:32.860]of generic in that Achilles is called Swift-footed Achilles even when he's sitting down.
[00:35:38.860]He's not Swift-footed at that moment, and partly that's about the constraints of the
[00:35:43.860]poetry form that Homer was writing in, Homer was composing in.
[00:35:48.860]So I think there's this tension between how personalized is this?
[00:35:55.860]How unique is this?
[00:35:56.860]So that's Hector's epithet, "Hector, take our horses," and it fills out the poetic line.
[00:36:02.860]It makes it work, but I think it's also evocative of he's a human who is still connected to
[00:36:11.860]animals, but spiritual.
[00:36:13.860]It's superior to them, and all the sort of things that that unlocks for imagination.
[00:36:18.860]So that's a lame answer, but I do think it is both.
[00:36:23.860]What are the main differences between the two translations, and is there any significance to why you use those?
[00:36:36.860]I love talking about translations. Thank you so much.
[00:36:39.860]I'm going to show you now.
[00:36:41.860]So when I quoted David Denby, great books, he's quoting the Richmond Latimer translation, which you see is from 1951.
[00:36:54.860]That's the translation I kind of grew up on.
[00:36:56.860]And as a person who reads ancient Greek, it's amazing because it is so close to the Greek.
[00:37:03.860]It even kind of gets the word wrong sometimes, and yet it is readable English and has a kind of elegance.
[00:37:09.860]That said, as someone who teaches the Iliad to students in translation,
[00:37:14.860]the Lattimore translation is a little bit clunky and dated and old-fashioned sounding to students these days.
[00:37:21.860]And I find that the Stanley Lombardo translation is really zippy and punchy and vivid without sacrificing clarity.
[00:37:31.860]Stanley Lombardo was a professor at the University of Kansas. He just retired a few years ago.
[00:37:36.860]He actually came here and did a reading of the Iliad.
[00:37:38.860]That's seven years ago.
[00:37:42.860]There are 1,000 other translations.
[00:37:45.860]Emily Wilson, famously also a professor, just published a translation of the Iliad a few years ago
[00:37:51.860]that got all this amazing press coverage because apparently she's the first woman to ever translate the Iliad into English.
[00:37:57.860]Which, if I realize that, like...
[00:38:01.860]She's a MacArthur, like it's not.
[00:38:07.860]But it's an amazing translation and it's in meter, so that's like extra hard.
[00:38:12.860]So, you know, I think different translations achieve different effects.
[00:38:17.860]And so one question is, do you want something that's a little more faithful or something that's a little more agreeable?
[00:38:23.860]Do you want something that feels a little more colloquial or more getting the kind of old fashionedness of the language?
[00:38:31.860]There are all these considerations, but just talk on your own.
[00:38:36.860]I will try to rein myself in.
[00:38:41.860]I encourage you all. Also, there's a New Yorker article about my professor and it's amazing.
[00:38:50.860]I have a question about moving forward, because when you were talking about the way that.
[00:38:57.860]And I think you're very right. You know, in the Iliad, there are no winners.
[00:38:59.860]There are no, you know, you can't. They're all losers.
[00:39:02.860]You know, they're all losers.
[00:39:05.860]And yet and then there's, you know, this reflection you're talking about with Scipio and his knowledge of that.
[00:39:11.860]And and but it made me think about then the way that other texts process these prior texts, you know.
[00:39:21.860]And so, you know, I'm thinking about Hamlet in my own mind.
[00:39:24.860]But that made me also think about the Aeneid and the complexity then of the way that Virgil repackages that.
[00:39:34.860]Yes.
[00:39:35.860]Or Rome.
[00:39:36.860]Yes.
[00:39:37.860]And I'm wondering how do you take your reading here of reconciliation and these problems and, you know, do you treat these texts together?
[00:39:46.860]Do you talk about, you know, the Aeneid and its reflection on the Aeneid on Troy and what this does for Rome?
[00:39:55.860]You know, I'm speaking in somewhat naivete.
[00:39:57.860]I really don't know how you would think about that.
[00:40:00.860]Educated naivety.
[00:40:03.860]Yeah. So, you know, the Aeneid is a whole other can of worms, as they say.
[00:40:09.860]So the National Epic of Ancient Rome, the Aeneid, which is written by Virgil at the beginning of the Roman Empire,
[00:40:16.860]deliberately to give Rome a national epic and also written deliberately to be like, well,
[00:40:22.860]the Greeks have Homer's Iliad and Homer's Odysseus, a poem about war and a poem about the warrior's return home.
[00:40:29.860]How can I top that? I know. I'll do both.
[00:40:32.860]So the first half of the Iliad is about the warrior's return home and the second half is like the war.
[00:40:39.860]And so it sort of reconditulates the Iliad and Odysseus and tries to updo them and echoes them constantly.
[00:40:44.860]And it's very, very complicated. And it's also an amazing poem in some way, in a very different way.
[00:40:49.860]That was gory. You know, so for a long time, critical interpretation of the Iliad has basically been divided between what has become known as the optimist camp and the pessimist camp.
[00:41:01.860]This is like the kind of stuff that scholars get into. That's really fun for us and incredibly boring to everyone else.
[00:41:07.860]So basically, there's this kind of you can you can interpret the Iliad to be sort of a message ultimately about
[00:41:20.860]the project of empire that the Emperor Augustus is embarking on for which he commissioned this epic poem because Iliad is supposed to be his ancestor.
[00:41:30.860]It's kind of the foundation of Rome, the foundation of his authority and all of that.
[00:41:34.860]And it seems really optimistic. And sure, Aeneas does lots of great things.
[00:41:39.860]But, you know, on the whole, he's really a great guy. And so this is building towards a wonderful thing.
[00:41:44.860]And then other scholars, the pessimists, point to all of the kind of moments in the Aeneid where Aeneas does these lots of great things
[00:41:53.860]or bad things happen that don't seem to be resolved.
[00:41:55.860]And in fact, the ending of the Aeneid is a great example of that, because the ending of the Aeneid
[00:41:59.860]is the funeral of his enemy, Ternus.
[00:42:02.860]And the ending is something like, "Ternus's spirit groaned and dooted, and fled."
[00:42:06.860]It's like it's at his funeral. So it's a panicked funeral.
[00:42:09.860]Except it ends in this even gloomier note, because there's no resolution with Aeneas,
[00:42:14.860]and is he really a hero, or is he the villain of the story?
[00:42:18.860]So I think, frankly, they can stand to try to straddle that line a bit more
[00:42:25.860]than arguing for either a positive spin or a negative spin.
[00:42:28.860]I think Virgil's trying to balance them really really carefully.
[00:42:32.860]What this is about his own politics is like another whole can of worms,
[00:42:36.860]but we definitely don't have to get into that.
[00:42:39.860]I mean, that's a great question. Thank you.
[00:42:43.860]Yeah.
[00:42:44.860]Now that you've mentioned the Aeneas, I was thinking,
[00:42:48.860]although it is written in specific story of Aeneas,
[00:42:51.860]it kind of also teaches you some of the morality of the Romans had such as,
[00:42:57.860]you know, feel the pattings.
[00:42:58.860]Yes, yes.
[00:42:59.860]So I was wondering, outside of this kind of humanization really of war,
[00:43:04.860]what it's like from the forest side of things,
[00:43:08.860]how does the Aeneas kind of portray the Greek beliefs and morality?
[00:43:14.860]Oh, morality, right.
[00:43:16.860]So, you know, there's sort of a, this is an honor culture.
[00:43:24.860]This is a shame culture.
[00:43:26.860]The world that the Aeneas set in.
[00:43:29.860]This is all about kind of behaving honorably according to certain rules
[00:43:36.860]that maybe don't align with the Aeneas of morality exactly.
[00:43:39.860]You know, there's a kind of cliche, but it's true,
[00:43:41.860]that the Greeks' basic orientation in morality
[00:43:45.860]was that you want to help your friends and harm your enemies.
[00:43:49.860]Because obviously you have enemies.
[00:43:51.860]Like, you know, duh.
[00:43:53.860]So you want to help your friends and harm your enemies.
[00:43:55.860]And that does not, you know...
[00:43:57.860]And Theranos, for that matter, too.
[00:43:59.860]Yes, Aeneas is made out to be, I would say,
[00:44:02.860]more of a moral pillar than any of the Greeks,
[00:44:05.860]or, frankly, the Trojans in the Iliad.
[00:44:08.860]He's always described as pious Aeneas, or dutiful Aeneas.
[00:44:12.860]There's a lot of emphasis on his
[00:44:14.860]attempting to preserve and protect his father and his son.
[00:44:18.860]He's always remembering to carry the little statues of the gods with him
[00:44:21.860]whenever he goes to camps and when he leaves the house.
[00:44:24.860]You don't get that focus from the Iliad.
[00:44:29.860]The morality of the Iliad is that you're supposed to play by the rules
[00:44:37.860]and then you should be rewarded.
[00:44:39.860]The ultimate goal they're all seeking is
[00:44:42.860]this is a world that doesn't really exactly believe in immortality.
[00:44:48.860]There's an underworld that everyone's ghost goes to
[00:44:51.860]but it's not heaven and it's not hell.
[00:44:53.860]Your ghost just kind of hangs out there.
[00:44:56.860]It's not very nice. It's kind of boring.
[00:44:59.860]You wouldn't prefer that over being alive, obviously,
[00:45:02.860]because it's like nothing.
[00:45:05.860]So what is the point?
[00:45:08.860]If you're not going to get a nice afterlife,
[00:45:10.860]if you do things right, what is the point?
[00:45:12.860]And the point is you achieve glory.
[00:45:15.860]You achieve renown.
[00:45:17.860]A Greek word for it is kleos.
[00:45:19.860]And that's what all these warriors are trying to do.
[00:45:22.860]It's almost like points.
[00:45:24.860]If they get enough kleos points, then they will be remembered forever.
[00:45:27.860]And that's how you live on.
[00:45:29.860]That's your legacy.
[00:45:30.860]That's your immortality.
[00:45:31.860]And that means like your son and your son's son will be able to say,
[00:45:34.860]"I am so-and-so, son of so-and-so."
[00:45:37.860]And people will be like, "Oh, that guy is amazing."
[00:45:40.860]So that's what you're going for.
[00:45:43.860]And that's the sort of moral code that Achilles is living by first
[00:45:47.860]and then just decides it's not worth it because Agamemnon violated it.
[00:45:51.860]Because Agamemnon violated it first.
[00:45:53.860]And he feels like, "If you're not even going to play by the rules,
[00:45:57.860]why should I fight your stupid war?"
[00:46:00.860]Yeah, I hope that answers your question.
[00:46:03.860]And with that as a context, I'm wondering if you can say more about
[00:46:07.860]where you started us, which is the observation that there are no
[00:46:11.860]good guys and bad guys, and isn't it strange that the ethic of Greece
[00:46:16.860]doesn't say, "Greeks are the good guys."
[00:46:20.860]That is so strange. I think there's almost no conflict,
[00:46:25.860]especially even in our contemporary politics, where we don't try to say
[00:46:30.860]the other guy is the bad guy. I'm just wondering, what do you think
[00:46:36.860]made that a possibility, even?
[00:46:40.860]I think that's the question. I think that's the question, because Homer
[00:46:49.860]could have, and okay, like so, in the interest of full disclosure,
[00:46:54.860]I'm not sure there ever was a Homer.
[00:46:58.860]Dr. Fratz is shaking his head no. Some people think, I mean,
[00:47:02.860]that's a long story. We'll get into it next week, but
[00:47:06.860]whoever put this poem together in the form that it's in,
[00:47:10.860]because this is all legendary, traditional material,
[00:47:14.860]and there were different ways to do it.
[00:47:18.860]And this particular poet made some choices.
[00:47:25.860]One choice is to have the Trojans be just like the Greeks.
[00:47:29.860]They speak the same language. There's no language barrier
[00:47:31.860]when they meet on the battlefield. They all seem to speak Greek.
[00:47:34.860]They work with the same gods. They seem to have all the same customs.
[00:47:37.860]But they're Trojans. That's a choice.
[00:47:41.860]We know from Greek art. In fact, I'm going to go back to one of my slides here.
[00:47:47.860]In other versions of the Trojan War story, there's a real emphasis on how the Trojans...
[00:47:56.860]It's a Greek coalition that sails off to the thousand ships that sail off to Troy to get Helen back.
[00:48:02.860]In a lot of versions of the Trojan saga, the Trojans assemble their own coalition.
[00:48:07.860]Only it's all the weirdos of the world.
[00:48:11.860]I cheated. This is not a soldier that I was describing in that account.
[00:48:16.860]This is an Amazon. It's a woman.
[00:48:20.860]If you look, she's got a woman's sort of longer, slightly longer tunic on.
[00:48:26.860]And this is a dead Amazon. I mean, it's a circular vessel.
[00:48:30.860]So we can't make a flat floor, a flat ground, but she's lying down on the ground.
[00:48:35.860]She's got these exotic leggings on that are supposed to indicate like, whoa, she's a weird Eastern warrior lady.
[00:48:42.860]So the Amazons bed in the Trojan side.
[00:48:45.860]The Ethiopians bed in the Trojan side.
[00:48:47.860]I mean, all the sort of, you know, and semi-legendary, legendary and real people, but they're all seeing this exotic other.
[00:48:54.860]So Homer could have gone that direction and been like, on one side, here's the all-stars of Greece.
[00:49:00.860]On the other side, like, look at the weirdos.
[00:49:03.860]But he doesn't. He does not do that.
[00:49:05.860]Another choice he makes is that in the tradition, I mean, you've probably all heard the term Achilles heel, right?
[00:49:12.860]Achilles doesn't have an Achilles heel in the Iliad.
[00:49:14.860]The tradition is that his mother, Thetis, the sea goddess, she doesn't want to let him die.
[00:49:20.860]So she dips him into the river Styx when he's a baby.
[00:49:22.860]She holds him by his heel, she dips him in, and that makes his skin invulnerable.
[00:49:26.860]Except for that one little bitty place where her finger's pinched.
[00:49:29.860]And that's supposedly where Peres, while people shoots him with an arrow, a poison arrow, and kills him.
[00:49:35.860]That is not in the Iliad. There's no invulnerable skin.
[00:49:39.860]He's an amazing warrior, but he is vulnerable.
[00:49:43.860]There's no magic. Well, that's not true. There's some talking horses and whatnot.
[00:49:46.860]But other than that, there's no magic. Seriously.
[00:49:48.860]He made it, right? It's great.
[00:49:51.860]So he downplays that, that's in the tradition.
[00:49:55.860]So it's this very... The gods are there, but it's a very...
[00:49:59.860]It seems to be a very deliberate choice to focus on the human, and they're more relatable.
[00:50:06.860]And why, I don't know, but it seems to be consistent in several different ways.
[00:50:12.860]Any questions?
[00:50:17.860]I was just thinking about this particular scene that you were talking about.
[00:50:23.860]Do you think that's a sign of Achilles still being a little bit good?
[00:50:28.860]Because I know a sword through the breastbone back then was considered a good death,
[00:50:33.860]because it almost killed you instantly, instead of torturing him or prolonging it.
[00:50:38.860]Like it does for Hector's father?
[00:50:41.860]Yeah.
[00:50:42.860]For sure, yes.
[00:50:43.860]But I do think, you know, she's unarmed and she's begging.
[00:50:47.860]She's begging for her life.
[00:50:48.860]You're supposed to spare people.
[00:50:50.860]It's a thing.
[00:50:51.860]It's a ritual.
[00:50:52.860]It's a formal, acknowledged ritual that you go through to beg to spare your life on the battlefield.
[00:50:58.860]You kneel and you grab someone's knees, which exposes you.
[00:51:02.860]You drop your weapons, you make yourself vulnerable, and you grab their knees and you beg for mercy.
[00:51:08.860]And you're supposed to say, "Okay, fine.
[00:51:11.860]I won't kill you.
[00:51:12.860]I'll ransom you or I'll sell you off in slavery or something, but I'm not going to kill you."
[00:51:16.860]So she's trying to do that, and he's killing her.
[00:51:19.860]So maybe, but I mean, it's a better death than it could be, but it's still like maybe not doing what he's supposed to do.
[00:51:26.860]I will point out also, and there's a far more famous face painting that I could show you, but I can't right now,
[00:51:33.860]that also shows this.
[00:51:35.860]They're looking into each other's eyes, right?
[00:51:37.860]And Achilles hands on them.
[00:51:39.860]There's one of the other parts of the trailer.
[00:51:41.860]Parts of the Trojan saga that doesn't make it into Iliad
[00:51:44.860]is that Achilles squares off a single battle with the queen of the Amazons one day,
[00:51:49.860]Penthesilea, and of course kills her.
[00:51:52.860]The Amazons exist to be defeated by Greeks, basically.
[00:51:57.860]But there is this amazing famous face painting of Achilles killing the Amazon queen,
[00:52:02.860]and their eyes are just locked on each other because the myth is that
[00:52:06.860]at the moment he kills her, he falls in love with her.
[00:52:10.860]So, if that's supposed to be her, I'm not positive about that, but maybe.
[00:52:18.860]It's pretty intense though, right? It's very personal.
[00:52:23.860]Thank you, I appreciate it.
[00:52:37.860]Yes, thank you.
[00:52:39.860]on November 12th
[00:52:45.780]next in our series
[00:52:47.660]of
[00:52:48.060]Thank you all.
[00:52:51.300]- Thank you.
[00:52:52.140]Thank you.

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"Reconciliation and Homer's Iliad" | CAS Inquire

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