In our earlier lecture, lectures we took a look at ideas about myth.
We traced back from antiquity all the way up to the present time, as in terms of
what people thought about myth or vast stretches of time.
In, in this lecture, we're going to turn the clock backwards and move from our
present day period into this, the times that are going to represented in the
mythic stories that we're going to be turning to next.
Few time periods are important for us to keep in mind.
Now, obviously, is an important one. What's happening in the world today is
going to color and influence the way that we appropriate and read these myths and we
want to pay some attention to that. Roman times here I picked out the first
century BCE as classical Rome, so if you hear me referring to classical Rome, I
mean, during that period. Rome obviously had a lot of years before
and after during which they were top dog in the Mediterranean, but when I talk
about classical Rome, I'm going to be referring roughly to first century BCE,
first century CE, roughly in that time period.
Another important moment for us is going to be classical Athens, fifth century BCE.
So when I say classical Athens, that's what I mean.
And there were say Homeric times I'm referring to the eighth century BCE.
Homer wrote around 750 as best we can tell, so say eighth century is a general
target for what the dates all about. And Homer himself was writing many years
after the fact, as you can see from the graph here, he's actually writing nearly
500 years after the topic he is covering the Trojan War, which according to the
legendary materials, took place right around in the fifteenth century BCE.
Tracing back over these periods, we're going to be looking at Homer in the first
big chunk of this course focusing on the Odyssey.
When we get past that, we'll move into some other epic poets from early time
periods including Hesiod. We'll look at some Homeric hymns that
emerge during this Homeric period. Moving on to classical Athens, we're going
to look especially at the Greek tragedies the tragedians remake, stories that they
knew from Homer and earlier poets in, in ways that are definitive for later time
periods. And then we, when we move into the Romans,
we're going to be looking at Virgil and Ovid.
The stories that were going to see populating this long arc of time have many
similarities but also many differences. Classical Athens is not the same as
Homeric Greece and Homeric Greece is surely not the same as classical Rome so
we'll keep an eye on all of these particulars as, as, as needed.
The Trojan War, we go ahead and say, took place in the thirteenth century BCE.
And the reason we go ahead and say that has to do very much with this man.
Before, if this course were being taught 150 years ago, assuming there was, was an
internet, the professor at that time would say, well, the Trojan War is a legend.
We really don't have any evidence that it actually took place.
Heinrich Schliemann was curious about this, his dates are 1822 to 1890.
He took a team over to the North coast of Turkey Asia Minor and found that in the
sites where there supposed to be the great Citadel of Troy, he actually found that
yes, indeed, there where the ruins of a, a marvelous, very wealthy city and it looked
like that city had been conquered over many times over the course of history and
there was a kind of great cataclysmic conquest of this Citadel that took place
right around roughly corresponding to the time that Greek legend said the Trojan War
took place. So, after Schliemann, we now say that, you
know, there likely was a Trojan War about which Homer and his legends are being
told. Well, Schliemann never found anything that
said you know, this shield belong to Agamemnon or, here lieth thee sword of
Achilles. We don't have anything that got recovered
in the archaeological evidence that verifies any of the details including
characters, personages, events any of the details that are recorded in Homeric
legends and in later materials. But, we can go ahead and say that there
was a Trojan war and Homer's version of it may or may not correlate to any historical
event that actually took place. Now, diving into Homer's world, is
something that we need to do with perhaps warning it's a, it's a dark world and a
world built on the coursing energy of war. Coursing and negative energy of war.
It's a very stark place, where things that need to be dealt with get dealt with,
sometimes very abruptly and summarily, and often times with violent and quick kinds
of, of endings, we're talking about a place that's going to be where human the
exhibition of human talents are typically taking place in the field of one dimension
of human experience, that's the field of conflict.
Now, all of us are going to think about the, the, the, whether was Homer's epic,
anti-war epic or, or a pro-war epic actually doesn't answer to any of those
kind of categories Homer's epic, I think floats above all of them.
Instead, what he looks at as a real human experience, that is the experience of
honor and conflict between groups of our species that decide to launch that kind of
thing against each other, and then tries to figure out what is the human experience
of this, what does it mean for us in our humanity.
Looking at the Trojan War, we're going to meet lots of people who are coursing
around in the background of it, especially in our engagement with the Odyssey and
it's important for us to know some of these characters that emerge in Homer's
Iliad. This is his account of the Trojan War.
The Iliad is a poem about rage and thinking about rage, it's, it's obviously
fronted in this epic that is about the war.
But what's interesting is that Homer talks about rage of a specific kind, It is the
rage of Achilles that he is most interested in.
Achilles, yes, is having war, as a Greek, is having war rage against his Trojan foes
but the rage that really drives the epic is actually an inter-Greek one, It's
Achilles versus Agamemnon. Achilles and Agamemnon have an argument
that starts off the Iliad. And these two great Greek warriors,
Agamemnon the older general, and Achilles the younger, extremely talented warrior
have words they can't quite settle them in the, in the appropriate way.
Agamemnon's leadership is not up to snuff to handle this situation.
And so, he loses, Agamemnon loses his greatest warrior because he decides to go
out and insult Achilles in front of all of his peers.
And when that happens, Achilles decides to withdraw.
Achilles sits out most of the action of the epic in his tent and when he does, he
wishes death upon his own Greek comrades. He has rage, as a rage that is so bitter
and so awful, he now hates Agamemnon, his own Greek leader and so wishes that all of
his compatriots should pay the price of Agamemnon's stupidity.
His rage that is directed against one of his own and the business end of that rage
gets worked out on all of the Greek warriors as they suffer under the
onslaught of the Trojans. We see great characters in this fighting.
Again, Achilles is in his tense, but in his place arrives other Greek warriors to
take the place of top dog among the, among the fighters.
We have people whose names are Ajax, Diomedes on the Greek side.
We're going to meet another of these figures called Odysseus pretty soon.
On the Trojan side, the princes and kings that marshaled the forces there are led by
King Priam with his sons Hector and Paris as the leaders of the other side.
The war is dark, it's nasty, death on every page and it's also an unbelievably
beautiful piece of epic poetry. When we close out the story, Achilles does
finally put away his rage. He can't quite bring himself to make up
with the old, old man in his life, the authoritative Greek figure.
He never does quite reconcile with Agamemnon and the awful things that
Agamemnon had done to him to publicly humiliate him.
But instead, there's a moment that Achilles gets at the end of the epic in
order to reconcile himself in a certain way and put away some of his rage.
And when he does, it is not with his superior Agamemnon instead, and strangely,
Achilles has a moment to express other dimensions of his humanity than his warp
spasm war rage with the greatest of the Trojans, Priam has a moment with Achilles
where he has a chance to ransom back the body of his beloved son, Hector, whom
Achilles has treated with all the vengance of his war rage.
And Priam comes over to Achilles's tent, kisses the hands that killed his own son,
and begs Achilles to show some mercy. Achilles decides that there's he, he, his,
his own Greeks, and particularly Agamemnon, are not worthy of it.
But Priam, the Trojan general, Trojan king, actually, happens to be worthy of
Achilles's mercy. So, he does relent with the kiss of the
hands gives back the body, and Priam can bury Hector, and so ends Trojan War
according to Homer's Iliad. Now, you'll see here that it seems like
I've glossed over some things, you might say to yourself, what happened to the
Trojan Horse. There's stories that we have about
Odysseus and his involvement in the war, there's other kinds of strategies, that
come in, it's a ten year war, we've only talked about one little part of it.
Well, it's true, Homer's Iliad focuses only on a very short period of time, most
of the epic has to do with just three days of action out on the battlefield.
And it does not talk about a synoptic overview of the whole Trojan War.
Instead, that filling in of the story, comes from other epic poets around Homer
who dig into this story and start to tell the further pieces of it.
And in fact, there's a back story, we're going to find in myth there's always a
back story. And, if you want to use the language of
contemporary cinema, we're talking about, you know, prequels that, that show up
after the, main one appears. And, may have all already been, there have
been versions of prequels that were floating around before Homer.
But much of the legend, that we know starts to fill in the blanks after a great
poet like Homer makes it, his or her statement then the others come in round
and fill in all the details that need to be filled in.
For example, how in the world did this whole Trojan War start?
Well, we wind up with a legend that actually predates Homer.
It gets encoded in his epic, but it's not one that he concentrates on.
There is this figure, Paris. You'll know him, from the previous slide
as a prince and son of Priam. He's also a little bit of an
embarrassment. He's not such a great warrior, he's more
of a master of the arts of love than he is of the arts of war.
And in fact, he goes over and decides that it would be the right thing for him to do
to steal the wife of Menelaus. The wife of Menelaus just happens to be
Helen, who is the most beautiful woman in the world.
And when he does that, he upsets the greatest of the Greek generals, Agamemnon,
who just so happens to be the brother of Menelaus.
When Paris kidnaps Helen and takes her back to Troy, well, that's the end of
things off we go into the Trojan War. The shame that is visited on Menelaus is
visited by proxy on his brother, Agamemnon, and Agamemnon at that time
calls in all of his chits. He's the most powerful of the Greek kings
of the day, pulls in all of his chits and says to all of his local fellow leaders
that it's time for us to go clutter those Trojans and off they go.
Helen in case you may well have heard this, is indeed the face that launched a
thousand ships, Medieval rendering of what one of these ships might have looked like.
Pretty good actually. We've got the archaeological evidence that
confirms what all Greek warship looks like and it's not so bad.
So, Helen is the face that launches a thousand ships.
In the legend, that's the number ships that are needed to contain the grandeur,
the hugeness of Agamemnon's army. Thanks to parts of the Iliad, the detail,
all of the people that are involved, the famous catalog of ships of the Iliad, we
can count up, roughly, the number of people involved and it's about 100,000.
Homer's claim is that an army of 100,000 leaves the shores of Greece and goes over
to Troy to do the dirty work over there. Now, some people then walk into the
picture, those interested in myth and say well, wait a minute, there must be a back
story to this one. How is it that Menelaus lost his bride
Helen to this guy Paris? Why did Paris think it was okay to go over
and steal the wife of the brother of the greatest of the Greeks?
Well, story starts to percolate in to fill a net kind of question and we have a story
about the apple of discords. Some of you have heard this, I can see
here in a lovely painting giving us the whole background.
Peleus and Thetis have a wedding. Peleus is a great mortal