I'm fascinated by old stories. Stories are the oldest medium, and they've proven to be surprisingly good stores of information. Erik the Red was real, and he navigated to lands across the ocean just like the old stories said he did.
I think the writer sells short the comparison of Homer to the bible. It goes a lot deeper than "the one book everyone knows."
Homer is often thought to be describing events during the bronze dark age, the period between the collapse of middle eastern bronze age empires and the rise of iron age empires (like the greek one).
This is what the bible is too, to a large extent. The exodus, judges, King David, prophets, heros... Stories about the legendary dark age written by decendants during the early iron age.
As civilization (and population) re-grew these stories formed a cultural core. Judeans got swept into the aramean, babylonian, persian and later hellenic empires. The library of knowledge grew enourmously. But, the old stories still remained at the heart of the cultural.
Something similar happenned in greece. Greeks civilisation grew. greek scholarship got advanced, and worldly. They later created a world empire, existed under the roman empire. Still the stories remained, a stable foundation for more culture to graft onto.
In both cases, we have stories from the bronze age, that somehow remained important enough for 100 generations to remain at the heart of cultures today. Stories of desert nomads and aegean pirates on the margins of civilisation.
perhaps because the messages they carry transcend time. Fundamentally many of the old stories we still value have moral or philosophical components that are foundational to our cultures.
I don't think moral and philosophical conclusions are universal in any way. In fact, there's a lot of mismatch between our everyday modern morals and the ancient (or even recent) moral and political religious texts.
I do think there's universality of moral and philosophical questions. King Cyrus and #metoo debated the same questions. Plato/Socrates, René Descartes & The Matrix constructed story worlds to highlight the same epistemological problem (what if the world isn't real).
Good stories give you a richness of scenarios and questions to discuss, whether you agree or dissent to the author's conclusions.
I totally agree. Hence why I didn't say they necessarily provided the answers. Though I think our cultures are often deeply intertwined with their religions, which do provide a framework of answers to many of the questions (whether you actually practice said religion or not).
What does that mean, practically? For Odysseus for example, what foundational message does it have? I read it and it was interesting and even fun, I don't know what philosophical or moral component you have in mind. It had nuanced characters, but even that seems to be ignored by our popular culture which focuses exclusively on sirens and such.
A lot of philosophical and moral questions are fairly universal. They get discussed in ancient law codes, scripture & modern parliaments. Is prostituion immoral? What defines rape? King Cyrus ruled on these. They're discussed in the Bible. You'll find similar debates in modern courts and legislatures.
For Odysseus, some big philosophical themes are hubris/pride, worthiness. Ancient Greek literature is pretty obsessed with these, especially pride.
These aren't really big moral themes/questions today, but they are pretty popular literary themes. Maybe it's universality. Maybe it's Greek influence. Maybe it's coincidence.
I don't think these texts surveillance be because of universality. I do think that because they survived, we learn that some things are pretty universal, that we have deep spiritual similarity to bronze age Aegean pirates.
I think there are some morals in the Odyssey. For example, the assembly at Ithaca in book 2 provides some insight into justice in ancient Greece. Telemachus appears to escalate through three authorities. First, is his own strength, second is the people of Ithaca:
Now we have no man like Odysseus in command
to drive this curse from the house. We ourselves?
We’re hardly the ones to fight them off. All we’d do
is parade our wretched weakness. A boy inept at battle.
Oh I’d swing to attach if I had the power in me.
By god, it’s intolerable, what they do—disgrace,
my house a shambles! You should be ashamed yourselves,
mortified in the face of neighbors living round about!
Fear the gods’ wrath—before they wheel in outrage
and make these crimes recoil on your heads. (2.57-67)
And when the towns people refuse to do anything, Telemachus escalates to the third authority—the gods:
“But if you decide the fare is better, richer here,
destroying one man’s goods and going scot-free,
all right then, carve away!
But I’ll cry out to the everlasting gods in hopes
that Zeus will pay you back with a vengeance—all of you
destroyed in my house while I go scot-free myself!” (2.141–5)
It seems that fear of the gods was the main source of justice in Greek society. Since there were no contracts or court system to build trust between individuals, people relied on oaths—and the fear of the gods if one broke their oath—to build trust. Similarly, if one could not find justice through strength of your fellow men, you could threaten the wrongdoers with a curse. If they feared the gods, they make respond.
In such a society an atheist or godless person could not be trusted. Right after Telemachus threatens the suitors with a curse, Zeus sends a sign down in the form of two eagles. One of the old townsmen, who excelled in reading omens and bird signs, said that the eagles were a sign from Zeus that the suitors would get what is coming to them. And the suitors respond:
“Stop, old man!”
Eurymachus, Polybus’ son, rose up to take him on.
“Go home and babble your omens to your children—
save them from some catastrophe coming soon.
I’m a better hand than you at reading portents.
Flocks of birds go fluttering under the sun’s rays,
not all are fraught with meaning.” (2.177–83)
To the Greeks that read this, I think the Odyssey would be affirmation that the gods did exist and that the suitors were in the wrong. Perhaps this could be interpreted as a moral lesson?
(Quotes are taken from the excellent Robert Fagles translation)
It does not seem that fear of gods would move people in town to do anything there. I read it more as expression of Telemachus anger and helplessness. He can do nothing except threaten gods, people in town know it and don't care. The gods don't come to help either. Only Athena helps them, but it is because Odysseus is her favorite and she is helping him whether he is right or wrong. Poseidon would not help Odysseus, because he blinded his son. Poseidon would not care one bit about what happen in the household and prefers Odysseus dead. Athena don't care about Poseidon son in particular.
It did not seem to me that gods would be source of justice. They are source of power and have own politics that is independent of right and wrong. They just are and are strong and characters invoking them don't necessary mean anything for gods actions. (It was also my impression that characters like to blame gods for their own bad decisions when they are about to talk about their own mistakes.)
You are welcome. I love thinking and discussing mythology and religion.
> It did not seem to me that gods would be source of justice. They are source of power and have own politics that is independent of right and wrong.
In general, I agree with this statement. I think one needs to stretch to find justice in the Odyssey, and even more so in the Iliad. That being said, I do believe there are some early inklings of justice and morality which evolved and grew with Greek civilization, and by the later classical period, Zeus was increasingly associated with Justice.
Also, Hesiod, who wrote at about the same time as Homer, certainly associated justice with Zeus. Here is a quote from Works and Days:
> You too, my lords, attend to this justice-doing of hours. For close at hand among men there are immortals taking note of all those who afflict each other with crooked judgements, heedless of the gods' punishment. Thrice countless are they on the rich-pastured earth, Zeus' immortal watchers of mortal men, who watch over judgements and wickedness, clothed in darkness, traveling about the land on every road. And there is the maiden Right, daughter of Zeus, esteemed and respected by the gods in Olympus; and whenever someone does her down with crooked abuse, at once she sits by Zeus her father, Kronos' son, and reports the men's unrighteous mind, so that the people may pay for the crimes of their lords who balefully divert justice from its course by pronouncing it crooked.
Homer mentions a somewhat similar (although different) idea in book 19 of the Iliad:
"Zeus be my witness first, the highest, best of gods!
Then Earth, the Sun, and Furies stalking the world below
to wreak revenge on the dead who broke their oaths---
I swear I never laid a hand on the girl Briseis
Hesiod wasn't as influential as Homer, but he was still quite influential on Greek culture. There is a story that Hesiod and Homer had a poetry competition, and Hesiod won. Anyway, this idea of justice appears to have been present in both authors to a very limited degree.
The 1951 article, "The Gods of Homer," by G. M. A Grub, has an interesting discussion of morality in Homer and how it evolved. You can read the article for free, if you have a JSTOR account, here:
Grube's main premise is that the gods of Homer came from an earlier conception of the gods as "forces of nature." After Homer, or the poets before Homer, personified the gods, it was inevitable that they would become moralized over time. Grube believes that Homer is near the start of this process. This would explain why some of the stories in the Iliad and Odyssey represent the gods as being essentially unethical; these stores were from before the gods were expected to be moral.
I think most of the lessons from foundational stories are so internalised now that they seem stupidly obvious. To take your example of the sirens, why is that idea one that we resonate with? Because it's valuable as a metaphor and an archetypal example: we even use the term directly (ie. "siren song") to refer to real-life instances of the archetype. Other concepts that refer to the same archetype are the idea of no free lunch, if it's too good to be true then it probably is, and so on.
These archetypes are compounded lessons that we've absorbed culturally for millennia, and continue to reflect on via our own recreations in the various arts.
Frankly, given how small and unimportant sirens incident is, I assume it is because they are tempting and female and thus painters had an excuse to imagine and paint naked women (they are not described naked in the poem). As in, it is short fun part of the poem that sparks imagination.
It is short and more fun to paint or tell then Penelope being helpless alone in her chamber.
Perhaps, for sirens at least. But that was just an example. I haven't read The Odyssey myself so I'm not well placed to give further specific examples but I was trying to point to the idea that old cultural mythos and stories are there to provide instantiations of archetypes.
I'm not sure your disparagement of classical painters holds much weight though, given they painted plenty of naked women without needing an "excuse". The motivations seem more to do with notions of depicting beauty or purity than just being lecherous.
Sirens story as in poem has no beauty nor purity in it. Really. Sirens are not described and promises to give him knowledge, mostly about Trojan war. Nothing beautiful or pure about that.
And I think that some painters liked to paint naked women and customers liked those paintings without it being necessary disparaging. The line between "lecherous" and "beauty or purity" is mostly the one of framing - whether you are determined to see it as good or bad.
Nevetheless, it is a projection of own ideas into old story, because we want to see ourselves in the oldest known poems. People want our civilization to spring from that, so they project onto it. It is not like every sirens painting painter would read the poem, they heard the story as part of their education and imagined the rest.
> Sirens story as in poem has no beauty nor purity in it. Really. Sirens are not described and promises to give him knowledge, mostly about Trojan war. Nothing beautiful or pure about that.
I wasn't claiming they were. Just that that seemed to be the classical framing of them. I can see how luring in sailors with beautiful song could be transferred onto luring with physical beauty and how that could map to classical femininity, but the relation does not affect the original meaning.
> The line between "lecherous" and "beauty or purity" is mostly the one of framing - whether you are determined to see it as good or bad.
I don't think it is. Lechery is linked to sexual gratification, basically voyeurism. I'm essentially saying I don't think these paintings existed for sexual purposes. Beauty is more of an aesthetic appreciation, or can be used as a symbol for higher values (and ugliness as a symbol for moral ugliness).
> It is not like every sirens painting painter would read the poem, they heard the story as part of their education and imagined the rest.
This is why moral tales are a good framework for thinking, rather than always giving you the answer. They give us symbols with which to reason, and so much of our conversational reasoning is performed using metaphors and idioms.
> I can see how luring in sailors with beautiful song could be transferred onto luring with physical beauty and how that could map to classical femininity, but the relation does not affect the original meaning.
That has more to do with artist then original poem. Sirens promiss knowledge, in particular knowledge of who did what and how who ended during trojan war. Odysseus is tempted to learn what happened to his friends during war. The classical feminity of Christian culture is not the same thing as story in original poem. It changes meaning a lot, into a different story. Projection and replacement of original knowledge/war info into "classical feminity" is the sort of thing I was talking about.
As for beauty, I don't see much difference. Or rather, I don't find it important for anything except value judgement of painter. If painter used sirens as excuse to paint nude sirens out of sense of beauty, my original point applies the same. The poem does not really have higher values there anyway. It has less to do with poem itself and more to do with what artists wants to paint for his own reasons.
> This is why moral tales are a good framework for thinking, rather than always giving you the answer.
Why do you think Odysseus is moral tale? It does not read like moral tale. Whatever moral tales are seems irrelevant to original poem. This one is even the part of story told by Odysseus himself when he is trying to please audience instead of by neutral narrator. The poem is pretty clear about Odysseus not being completely reliable narrator. Odysseus lies or pretends to be someone else often, so treating whatever he says as moral tale strikes me as odd.
The most important part of that episode is the way Odysseus develops a plan to hear their song and live to tell the tale. Today it might seem minor, but people have been fascinated by this character for centuries (Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, and so on).
To sum it up, Odysseus is the pursuer of knowledge par excellence, hero and everyman at the same time. And this is arguably one of the cornerstones of the (western, at least) way we see ourselves.
The goddess tells him what to do, he does not devise the plan. Odysseus is not everyman in any meaningful sense nor is he seeking knowledge except that short incident and even there knowledge seem to be info about war he fought in the past. And frankly, I dont think he really represents something you should strive for.
She gives him the choice to steer clear of them, or to risk his life and that of his party to listen to them. He decided to take the risky road just for the sake of knowledge, which was a powerful message in prehistoric Greece. Again, it is so ingrained in today's culture that it seems trivial.
> nor is he seeking knowledge except that short incident
Well let us just agree to disagree here. Most of the episodes boil down to "The gang lands to get (rest/food/water), Odysseus wants to know more about the place, many die".
Just look at Book Nine: the Lotus Eaters and Polyphemus incidents are totally Odysseus' fault. There was no need at all to explore these lands.
> And frankly, I dont think he really represents something you should strive for.
I agree with you: while in the antiquity he has been regarded as a model, today Odysseus represents who we actually are, as beings torn between knowledge and suffering.
1.) Both choices are risky. There is no way for Odysseus to avoid danger. There is high chance the other road would be even more dangerous then sirens.
2.) She tells him exactly what to do. He does not devise plan.
3.) No Odysseus is not seeking knowledge unless you are really trying hard to see it there. Looking what I can steel can be twisted into knowledge seeking, but I don't think it is too good interpretation.
4.) There is no reason to think Odysseus was seen as model in antiquity. That is projecting 19 century adventure books interpretation into much more nuanced and much better written text.
Odysseus is not torn between knowledge and suffering. He seeks to go home plain and simple and weeps when it fails. He wants to go home and he led all his men to death.
I think the big question the Odyssey asks is what does time and violence do to people. What did Odysseus' journey do to him, what did it do to his son who grew up without him, what did it do to his wife and father who had to go on living like he was dead, what did it do the political system back home with their leader and so many young men gone and a void there where the suitors begin to fill. And once they are all reunited after so many years, what then. Athena grants them a happy ending, restoring Odysseus' youth, but what about the rest of us.
Not the OP, but surely one of the most pertinent moral positions of the Odyssey is the idea that justice will prevail: the good guy wins and gets the girl, the bad guys lose.
I don't think that is the message of Odysseus at all. Story and its characters (including Odysseus himself) are way more nuanced then that. It is definitely not the simple cheap good guy wins the day story. And I also think that poem ending is more ambiguous - while it is clear that killing suitors is ok, the killing slave girls is less so.
> surely one of the most pertinent moral positions of the Odyssey is the idea that justice will prevail: the good guy wins and gets the girl, the bad guys lose.
There's nothing good about Odysseus; he's a bad person and, IMHO, one of the most annoying, obnoxious personalities in literature. He leads his group around murdering and pillaging, not to mention using and manipulating - he's renowned for his lying and trickery. He gets his men killed over and over due to his capricious, pointless acts of ego - at one point much of his fleet is sunk and men die because he pointlessly taunts enemies as they sail away. But if someone should act against him, he switches to victimhood and moral outrage - poor Odysseus! All his troubles and tribulations!
In the end he returns home alone, having gotten all his men killed, and encounters the 'suitors', who presume that with him missing for 20 years, likely he won't return. They are peaceably [EDIT: up to a point then that changed; see the reply below], though obnoxiously in some ways, competing to see who gets his throne and his wife's hand - leaving the choice to her [EDIT: though as the reply below states, she is being forced to marry one of them; she can't say no]. He slaughters them all, indiscriminately, for their presumption. The slave girls (did I mention that he takes and keeps slaves?) that are suspected (there is no trial or evidence or anything more than someone's accusation) of the grave crime of dalliances with the suitors, he unceremoniously has a rope wrapped around all their necks and hangs them together. Then he says, we need to replenish our stocks - depleted so unfairly by the mean suitors! - so we'll soon set out to raid and steal them.
Is this a good man? Did the good guy win? The Odyssey is a rich story of and study in personality and in human relations, and in politics; it's not at all about justice.
You left out that suitors are planning to kill Telemachus, son of Penelope and Odysseus. That is not a minor detail. The suitors are described as abusive. Penelope does not want them there and Telemachus does not want them there. Both complain about suitors wasting house resources, killing animals, giving nothing useful in return and slowly bankrupting household. Pretty much any character complains about their behavior.
Penelope does not want any of them, she is however forced to choose. Telemachus ask them to leave the house openly, they refuse and treat him badly.
Penelope wants Odysseus come home soon and hopes for him coming home, because only him is assumed to be able to get suitors out of house. So much for Penelope freely choosing from them.
Odysseus is pirate and warlord through and poem is not hiding it. It is about warlord without glorifying the said warlord the way action movies tend to glorify similar characters.
> You left out that suitors are planning to kill Telemachus, son of Penelope and Odysseus. ... Penelope does not want any of them, she is however forced to choose.
Agreed, those are major omissions on my part (due to writing quickly and not thinking it through, sorry). However, they don't change my overall point. The worst person in the story is Odysseus (unless I'm overlooking some secondary character), who would have done the same and worse, and if there was any justice he would have been captured, tried, and imprisoned long ago - by the Trojans before the story began, in fact.
> Pretty much any character complains about their behavior.
That's not a reason to murder people. Also, the narrator is very sympathetic to Odysseus and makes his enemies unlikable, as narrators do. I take the narrator's depictions of them with a grain of salt.
Only suitors are so unlikeable. The other characters are either described by Odysseus himself or not nearly as much unlikeable. And also, narrator describe moments when one of suitors attempt to calm their behavior. I don't think narrator goes out of way as contemporary "narrators do". This is imo where Odysseus is different then action movies and adventure books, altrough people project that attitude on the poem.
The characters complains are concrete and provide multiple vitnesses to the abuse. The suitors are described to be abusive, threaten people living in house, mistreat them, kill animals and refuse to leave with open threat of violence if you try to make them leave.
The good innocent boys interpretation is not supported by the text, even if you mistrust the narrator. You can make that case about cyclop where Odysseus is intruder, but not about suitors.
I think you are mistaken to judge a 3,000+ year old poem by your own moral standards.
I also think you need to pay closer attention to the text itself. You say that Odysseus "gets his men killed over and over due to his capricious, pointless acts of ego", but the seventh line of the poem says that Odysseus' men perished because of "their own recklessness" (αὐτῶν ... σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν). Their own recklessness. Not Odysseus' ego.
"It's not at all about justice."
The poem is intensely interested in justice. The very first speech in the poem (1.32ff.) is all about justice, as is the second speech (1.45ff.). Characters in the poem, both gods and mortals, reflect on justice all the time. It may not be what you consider justice, but it's justice in the poem's own terms.
> I think you are mistaken to judge a 3,000+ year old poem by your own moral standards.
I think you are mistaken to take this cliche and try to apply it to real people. I'm not really interested in your characterizations of me. Stick to the subject and leave other commenters out of it.
It's a mistake to take the narrator at face value. When Odysseus yells his real name to the Cyclops - without which Poseidon wouldn't have had a vendetta and kept them on that long journey - or when he taunts the giants who throw the boulders and kill his men and destroy his ships, it is his recklessness and not his men's that gets them killed. When he dallies in his flings with Circe and Calypso, while others wait and suffer, that's on his lust and ego. His men do some stupid things too, but it would not be hard to attribute that to his leadership - there are no bad followers, as they say ...
The narrator, either in earnest or maybe with some tongue in cheek, loves Odysseus no matter what he does. But if we are to read any story critically, we can't trust narrators any more than the characters they describe, something especially true in epics from the Odyssey to the Inferno to Moby Dick.
In the Odyssey people talk about the politics of power, how angering the gods gets bad results and so you'd better respect them; and they talk about fairness for themselves in the selfish way that everyone does - disregarding how they treat others. But those things aren't morality. The same things others are cursed for are what Odysseus is lionized for by the narrator and others. The only higher 'morality' is the politics on Olympus of Athena's and Poseidon's dispute over Odysseus' fate.
There is much discussion of the treatment of strangers and guests, one of those rules of the gods. However, I see it as more an issue of human relations - what do you do with strangers? whom do you trust? - there is no consistent enforcement by the gods or consequence when the rules are violated.
> I think the writer sells short the comparison of Homer to the bible. It goes a lot deeper than "the one book everyone knows."
I didn't get the feeling that the author sold short the analogy between the Bible and the Iliad. After all, he says:
> How close is the analogy with the Bible? In terms of sheer cultural ubiquity, pretty close.
The Bible's cultural influence on the West is immense and goes much beyond being "the one book everyone knows." Many of Jesus' ethical ideals have become so engrained in our culture we are not even aware of where they came from. For example, the idea expressed in John 9, that a person who is blind from birth is not blind because of the sin of their parents or a sin he was expected to commit. This blame thinking was pervasive in antiquity; you can see a glimpse of this ideal in Book 2 of the Iliad.. Thersites is specifically called out for being ugly and club-footed, before he berates Agamemnon until Odysseus knocks him on the head. Everyone in the assembly praises Odysseus saying "terrific strokes ... he's put a stop to this babbling, foulmouthed fool!" We no longer believe that ugliness and badness are associated. Note that while I suspect this transformation in values is because of the New Testament, I have not researched this carefully and would appreciate being corrected if someone knew more about this. Even if this particular example is not correct, I suspect there are many other similar examples of the influence of the hidden Bible on our culture.
I think the author of the review is not trying to discount the association between the Bible and the Iliad, but instead is trying to dismiss the misconception that the Iliad was a "sacred text" like the Bible is.
The Iliad is filled with references to the gods, sacrifices, libations, oaths, prayers, and other trappings of religion---but it is poetry that was meant to entertain and Homer took poetic license. And the Greeks knew he took poetic license--that he "lied." The stories about Hera seducing Zeus and Ares having an affair with Aphrodite are comic, and were comic to the Greeks like they are to us. It appears that the Iliad influenced religious practice significantly, but it still doesn't seem right to call it a religious text.
Thus, I think the author of the review makes a fair comparison between the Bible and the Iliad.
I didn't mean that he's wrong. I agree about the shared language created by the King James in Georgian England and The Iliad across a lot of times and places.
I just think that's only the tip of an iceberg. Some of the other points of analogy (like both emerging from the same dark age, on different outskirts of a collapsed civilization) are worth mentioning too.
Maybe I phrased that badly. What i meant was "yes, and also."
I see, I misunderstood you and thought you were suggesting that the Iliad was in fact a "sacred text." I see know you were not saying that.
I like several of your other comments:
> Homer is often thought to be describing events during the bronze dark age, the period between the collapse of middle eastern bronze age empires and the rise of iron age empires (like the greek one).
> This is what the bible is too, to a large extent. The exodus, judges, King David, prophets, heros... Stories about the legendary dark age written by decendants during the early iron age.
> As civilization (and population) re-grew these stories formed a cultural core. Judeans got swept into the aramean, babylonian, persian and later hellenic empires. The library of knowledge grew enourmously. But, the old stories still remained at the heart of the cultural.
I wish reviewers would stop latching on to the concept of “relevance” when describing the merits of an ancient text. Such a strangely utilitarian way of thinking about literature, as if its value lies in what it can do for us today.
Also, this seems to me to be utterly unfounded:
“Which poem is better, the Iliad or the Odyssey? I don’t have hard numbers to back this up, but today it seems pretty clear that the Odyssey wins hands down in the mass popularity stakes.“
>Also, this seems to me to be utterly unfounded: “Which poem is better, the Iliad or the Odyssey? I don’t have hard numbers to back this up, but today it seems pretty clear that the Odyssey wins hands down in the mass popularity stakes.“
The "which is better" is unanswerable but in terms of popularity, the evidence seems to show that The Odyssey is more well-known to today's readers.
One reason is that many USA high schools use The Odyssey instead of the The Iliad in reading assignments.
As for another datapoint to popularity, compare the number of ratings & reviews of The Odyssey (~760k) vs The Iliad (~305k) on Goodreads[1][2]. Similar popularity differences can be found on Amazon for other translations.
The 2004 film Troy may have increased awareness of The Iliad but it still seems like The Odyssey is more popular.
The Odyssey is the archetype for an entire genre of "road trip" stories throughout history. It's also, more broadly, a key point of influence for many aspects of the Campbellian hero's journey. The Iliad simply hasn't exerted the same level of influence on storytelling.
The roadtrip part is smaller part of the Oddysey (maybe 30% definitely less then half), most of that is politics at home and getting control of the house. It is much different then other example of the narrative structure listed as examples of hero's journey.
That’s probably true, The Odyssey is a coherent story with a single protagonist and works better as a whole narrative. The Iliad is really a collection of stories, but taken together it’s a treasure trove of characters, events and ideas.
The Golden Apple, the beauty contest of the goddesses, Helen’s elopement with Paris, the Greeks burning their boats, the story of Achilles and his famous vulnerable spot and death, the wooden horse, the destruction of Troy.
Its a huge fund of anecdotes, sayings and archetypes that infuse western society.
Most of the stories you mention in relation to the Iliad don't actually appear in the Iliad, you know.
Also, if anything can be described as "a collection of stories", it strikes me that Books 9-12 of the Odyssey (Odysseus' stories about the Cyclops, the Laestrygonians, the Lotus-Eaters, Scylla and Charybdis, the Cattle of the Sun, etc.) fit the bill much better than anything in the Iliad.
"The Iliad simply hasn't exerted the same level of influence on storytelling."
This is highly subjective. The influence of the Iliad on European literature, art, and culture has been absolutely colossal.
Indeed, given that the Odyssey was itself influenced by the Iliad, you might say that anything the Odyssey influences should ultimately be credited back to the Iliad.
I don't know what to make of this; The Odyssey has more reviews but The Iliad has better reviews on average. Are we defining popularity as "known by many" or "liked by many"?
The specific quotation being discussed from the article is "today it seems pretty clear that the Odyssey wins hands down in the mass popularity stakes".
> I wish reviewers would stop latching on to the concept of “relevance” when describing the merits of an ancient text. Such a strangely utilitarian way of thinking about literature, as if its value lies in what it can do for us today.
On the other hand, it's a line of thought that leads to stuff like Shay's Achilles in Vietnam and Achilles in America, stuff which has value.
In the past, if you were wealthy and powerful, or nationalistic, you'd try to trace your ancestry or your people's lineage back to Troy. Caesar did it, the Habsburgs did it, and so did Trithemius, for some reason.
That is Johannes Trithemius, a 14th and 15th century librarian and abbot with a marked interest in the occult. (Turns out he was also an early practitioner of cryptography.)
Early on, Trithemius built an awesome library at his monastery, but then they split up and he became a counselor to the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian. The Emperor was of Habsburg descent, and the Habsburgs and other Franks were claiming Trojan ancestry... so Trithemius wrote an elaborate fake history of the Franks, leading back to Troy, and had it published.
There's a lot more to this guy than just that. He wrote "Steganographia" and "Polygraphia", which are dripping with occult influence but turn out to be a combination of fake alphabets and substitution ciphers. But because of his man-crush on Maximilian, he committed this extremely intricate forgery and obliterated his reputation. That's how significant the Trojan War was in the 1500s.
Fun fact: Polygraphia's fake alphabets include Theban, which Wiccans now use to write spells, and two fake Frank languages (one that he said was used by a fake Frank philosopher) to bolster his fake Frank history.
Oh and he invented the bibliography. Here's one now.
One of my literary touchstones is "War Music", a re-telling or re-imagining of the Iliad by the British poet Christopher Logue. I've read a couple of translations, but this is the one that really set my head alight because he takes liberties with the content (including occasionally delicious anachronisms like "the thumping of helicopters overhead") without taking liberties with the story. It feels faithful to the original yet very modern in its expression. He was dedicated to performing poetry, and I think this comes out in the text - I found myself hearing the sounds of the words in my head as I read it.
Can I also recommend Adam Nicolson's "The Might Dead: Why Homer Matters", as an excellent read, which explains how and why Homer is still relevant today.
>Paradoxically, in spite of its Christianization, the Byzantine Empire: ". . . saw to the transmission of the old authors. The classical tradition was thus maintained in Byzantium where, from 425 to 1453, the schools of Constantinople remained its pillars. This is why it is unsuitable to speak about the “Renaissance” in the Eastern Roman Empire. In the West, on the other hand, the rediscovery of Homer was a striking fact for the first Italian humanists."
The Christianization of the Byzantines was not some crude "Old Testament as literal truth" kind of dogma, but a mix of New Testament ideas with neo-platonism and influences from ancient Greek thought. The early theologians (considered "saints") had all studied those philosophies and had extended knowledge of ancient Greek thought.
Early Christianism was much more subtle than the crude version of Christianism post protestantism (protestantism itself being a fundamentalist movement, to go "back to roots" and back to the book, it's easy to understand why. It was a version of the religion for simple minded Germanic folk at the time that couldn't handle much subtlety).
Homer, to get back to the point, was official reading in Byzantine school education.
Worth noting, that unlike the western empire, that had the rule of the pope, the Byzantium had separate church and state.
> Worth noting, that unlike the western empire, that had the rule of the pope, the Byzantium had separate church and state.
This is an utterly bizarre misinterpretation of Orthodox Christianity. The position of head of the Orthodox Church was in the gift of first the Eastern Roman Emperor and then the Ottoman Emperor until the end of the Ottoman Empire. The Emperor didn’t have total control, the Church was an autonomous power centre of some note but the balance of power between the Church and the temporal power was more similar between Islam and Orthodox lands than the Eastern and Western Churches.
Caesaropapism's chief example is the authority that the Byzantine (East Roman) Emperors had over the Church of Constantinople and Eastern Christianity from the 330 consecration of Constantinople through the tenth century.[4][5] The Byzantine Emperor would typically protect the Eastern Church and manage its administration by presiding over Ecumenical Councils and appointing Patriarchs and setting territorial boundaries for their jurisdiction.[6] The Emperor exercised a strong control over the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and the Patriarch of Constantinople could not hold office if he did not have the Emperor's approval
Caesaropapism is an old understanding of the state of affairs in the Byzantine empire, which has been abandoned by modern scholars.
In fact the link you posted admits so:
"However, Caesaropapism "never became an accepted principle in Byzantium."[10] Several Eastern churchmen such as John Chrysostom, Patriarch of Constantinople[6] and Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria, strongly opposed imperial control over the Church, as did Western theologians like Hilary of Poitiers and Hosius, Bishop of Córdoba.[11] Saints, such as such as Maximus the Confessor, resisted the imperial power as a consequence of their witness to orthodoxy, . In addition, at several occasions imperial decrees had to be withdrawn as the people of the Church, both lay people, monks and priests, refused to accept inventions at variance with the Church's customs and beliefs. These events show that power over the Church really was in the hands of the Church itself – not solely with the emperor."
You’ve gone from saying that the Orthodox world had separation of Church and State to pointing out that there were periods when the fusion between the two was less than perfect.
If anyone reading wants to understand how weird Western Christendom was compared to comparable civilisations Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order is a good place to start.
If you’re interested in the relationship between Ummah and state in Islam which is very similar to Church State relationships in the Eastern Roman Empire look at Timur Kuran’s work.
>You’ve gone from saying that the Orthodox world had separation of Church and State to pointing out that there were periods when the fusion between the two was less than perfect.
The separation was having two different sources of power -- as opposed to one, and those sources having relative autonomy.
Whether the two occasionally collaborated, or one occasionally imposed its will on the other and vice versa, is something different than having both religious and state power concentrated into one entity (caesaropapism).
Nothing in historical affairs is "perfect". Separation of church and state in the modern West has not been "perfect" either, even where e.g. the constitution guarantees it.
Modern scholars on Byzantium disagree with that it was an example of caesaropapism -- and your own source tells as much.
You think I’m saying Caesaropapism is true. I never said that, while you did say
> Worth noting, that unlike the western empire, that had the rule of the pope, the Byzantium had separate church and state.
The Wikipedia article on Caesaropapism is enough to disprove that, which is why I used it. The fact that there were disputes between the Emperor and Church does not change the facts that (a) It was usually the Enperor (b) By any modern standard there was no separation of Church and State.
The Saud family do not provide all the imams in their kingdom, nor do they unilaterally decide on doctrine in case of disputes. The ummah have substantial autonomy and can and do argue take part in political discussion.
If you’re willing to call that separation between Church and State we disagree only on labels. Otherwise you’re wrong.
I wasn’t arguing for Caesaropapism, just against separation of Church and State in the Eastern Roman Empire.
This is a really bizzare comment. The early Protestant reformers were all highly educated academics. Luther was a classically educated professor of theology. Calvin was a university educated lawyer who had published commentaries on Seneca (a Stoic philosopher). Philip Melanchthon was a university lecturer on oratory and Latin literature, and published a Greek grammar. It is a bit of a stretch to paint them as simple-minded Germanic folk (especially since Calvin was French). All of them were familiar with the theology of the early church fathers and appeal to it in their writings.
While the pope had plenty of temporal power in the renaissance, it's certainly incorrect to say that any pope ruled anything that could be called the western empire before that. Instead of a strict separation of church and state, the Byzantine emperor Justinian appointed 3 successive popes after re-conquering Italy from the ostrogoths.
Luther certainly was not a simple-minded German folkperson, however in his time the Mass was commonly in Latin, which was not understood by the folk. One of important results of the Reformation was the translation of the Bible and liturgy in the language of the people (this happened in Czech lands already at the time of Jan Hus, but not elsewhere). The Catholic hierarchy was also perceived to be highly corrupt and the teachings not accessible by the common people, so the Reformation aimed to change all that. This is sort of what I feel where the OP is going with his comment.
The new theology caught on as a simplified "back-to-basics" doctrine for the masses, and shed a lot of the subtlety of earlier theology.
Instead of being less indoctrinated protestants became more fundamentalist and less nuanced than Catholics -- which can be seen in a very crude example in today's "bible belt" version of christianity (and even someone like Nietzsche alluded to that kind of influence by Luther).
>It is a bit of a stretch to paint them as simple-minded Germanic folk
Not them (as people), their doctrines (and eventual audience). It was a simplified and fundamentalist approach to theology -- and owes a lot to its translation to common folk language and the political interests of the day for its quick adoption.
>Instead of a strict separation of church and state, the Byzantine emperor Justinian appointed 3 successive popes after re-conquering Italy from the ostrogoths.
That was a power move, in an always tense political climate in the Eastern empire. There were the opposite moves as well -- the patriarch at war with the emperor, criticizing public policy, and so on, depending on the balance of power.
Such incidents aside (across a millennium of state history), they remained two separate domains, not a single unified source of church and state power.
The separation of church and state thing is arguable. I suppose when one of the titles of the Emperor is “Equal Of God”, that does make him somewhat immune from ecclesiastic authority.
There was all kind of tension and power plays between the two kinds of authority. Titles don't reveal everything. Even popular revolts (especially helped by the army), for example, would often dispose of one emperor and get another in power.
At the same time we have an utterly boring/dogmatic salad of tales, such as the Bible and Quran, which remain important in the modern world - due to the still prevalent ignorant multitude. They would not mind if you desecrate the Iliad though. It belongs to a different audience.
The legacy of be blical stories is far deeper tham dogma. The other day, i watched a (very sacreligious) cartoon (castlelvania e1). In it, Dracula's wife is burned at the stake for witchraft, by the church. On her way out, she calls out to dracula. "Forgive them! Don't take vengence. They don't know what you're doing."
This is exactly what the author is talking about. The dogma isn't there. If the scene was boring or banal it wouldn't have been recreated in the cartoon.
Still, its a reference everone gets, and the metaphor is extremely deep.
Seems like you just wanted to excuse to talk about how stupid people and barbarism are the only reason we still have religion. There’s a less obnoxious version of that argument I tend to agree with, but I don’t see how it’s relevant here. Can’t we have a nice thread talking about the importance of stories and how they transcend time without turning it into a political shit-flinging contest?
(That said, the equivalence the other poster is suggesting is stupid.)
You are right, we went off on a tangent here after an equivalence was made between the Iliad and other ancient tales which tend to belong more to the "dogmatic" category and have a different modern audience.
The Iliad is a marvelous tale that I have enjoyed reading since childhood. Western Civilization owes a lot to such stories as they tend to inspire people at an individual level.
Replace bible with quran, and savages with "savages from the US south" and you have an equally repugnant statement (with the same level of whatever accuracy exists there.)
Extremist fanaticism exists in all religions - and your garbage xenophobic bigotry doesn't belong on HN.
Ok, why don’t you go ahead and put two YouTube videos up: one of you burning a Bible, one of you burning a Quran. We’ll see which one gets you into more trouble :)
(Note: please don’t actually do this, you would be putting yourself into mortal peril for the rest of your life)
Well, in our modern world, we still face passionate denunciation of women and people hating on gays Etc because someone wrote something thousand of years ago. So it's okay though point out problems with these originalist documents.
natmaka, are you aware that those websites preach racism?
linked from 'about' page:
https://www.counter-currents.com/2012/05/new-right-vs-old-ri...
quote: "Second, because of the leading role of the organized Jewish community in engineering the destruction of European peoples, and because the United States is the citadel of Jewish power in the world today, the North American New Right must deal straightforwardly with the Jewish Question."
No, I wasn't aware, nor do I share the opinions expressed in the documents you point to, but if I find a pertinent and interesting document I point towards it whatever the website publishes otherwise.
Even if I knew I would have proposed this link to a document in my opinion pertinent and where I don't find any racism-preaching (this particular website/the Web/the universe all have their share of shit).
I'm all for exposing and debunking dumb and dangerous doctrines instead of feigning not to know about them and letting some think that they have to be true because no one criticizes them, therefore I don't refrain to directly link to such material, while expressing at least that (and, better, why) I don't agree (as you just did).
The author discussed in the documents I linked to is Dominique Venner. He wrote a book titled "Histoire et Tradition des Européens: 30 000 ans d'identité" which seems pertinent to me in this thread because it exposes a thesis about the relative importance in European cultures of Homer's literary work. Venner was considered far-right, I don't know he was nor if it extended to sheer racism and such fuckery, but it may explain why one may find many material from/about him on such websites but not much elsewhere as, IMHO sadly, censorship and ad hominem are far too common. Racism is as dumb and dangerous as censorship.
I think the writer sells short the comparison of Homer to the bible. It goes a lot deeper than "the one book everyone knows."
Homer is often thought to be describing events during the bronze dark age, the period between the collapse of middle eastern bronze age empires and the rise of iron age empires (like the greek one).
This is what the bible is too, to a large extent. The exodus, judges, King David, prophets, heros... Stories about the legendary dark age written by decendants during the early iron age.
As civilization (and population) re-grew these stories formed a cultural core. Judeans got swept into the aramean, babylonian, persian and later hellenic empires. The library of knowledge grew enourmously. But, the old stories still remained at the heart of the cultural.
Something similar happenned in greece. Greeks civilisation grew. greek scholarship got advanced, and worldly. They later created a world empire, existed under the roman empire. Still the stories remained, a stable foundation for more culture to graft onto.
In both cases, we have stories from the bronze age, that somehow remained important enough for 100 generations to remain at the heart of cultures today. Stories of desert nomads and aegean pirates on the margins of civilisation.