[MUSIC PLAYING] NARRATORThe Iliad, an epic tale of gods and heroes set at Troy over 3,000 years ago. At its heart, the story of a great warrior afflicted by terrible rages-- Achilles, son of the sea nymph Thetis and a mortal named Peleus. The setting-- the war began almost 10 years ago when Helen of Sparta was stolen away by the Trojan prince Paris, a war manipulated by gods who take opposing sides. Total war, ancient style. We begin at Troy, the seize by King Agamemnon and his Greek army. The stubborn king offends Achilles, the Greeks' best warrior, by claiming his spoil of war with the maiden Briseis. Achilles leaves the battlefield, honour affronted. So Achilles's mother, Thetis, asks Zeus to let the Trojans have the upper hand to show the Greeks they need her sign. For now, there's a truce, although Paris-- a lover, not a warrior-- is almost killed in a duel with Helen's husband. Heading into battle, Trojan champion Hector says an emotional goodbye to his wife and child. The fighting resumes, spurred on by the gods, and the Trojans are winning. Achilles still refuses to fight. But the Greeks know their foes fear him. So his best friend Patroclus, tries to fool the Trojans by wearing Achilles's armour. He is killed in battle by Hector. Enraged, Achilles vows revenge. Wearing armour newly fashioned fashioned by Hephaestus, the blacksmith god, he re-enters the battle and slays Hector. Still incensed, Achilles defiles Hector's corpse. This angers Zeus. He helps Hector's father, Priam, find Achilles and beg for Hector's body. Priam reminds Achilles of his own father, and the two weep together, lamenting the vagaries of war. And our story ends with Hector's funeral and mourning at Troy. The main theme of the Iliad is Achilles’ anger. To summarise: The poem begins with Achilles getting angry with Agamemnon, for taking the woman he had been awarded as a prize, Briseis; it ends with the burial of Hector, the Trojans’ greatest fighter, killed by Achilles, angry with Hector for having killed his best friend, Patroclus. Did you notice what the Iliad doesn’t narrate? It doesn’t tell us how the Trojan War started, or how it will end. In fact the whole of the Iliad covers only about 51 days in a 10-year war, and even then the main chunk of the text only really concerns a mere 3 days of fighting!Optional activityAlthough the Odyssey won’t be discussed in detail in this course, you might enjoy watching this second Troy Story animation, which explains the plot of this poem about Odysseus’ arduous journey home from Troy to Ithaca and the problems he encountered once he arrived there. The skills you learn in this OpenLearn course should prepare you to read both poems, as they employ similar techniques of oral poetry.
Video 2 Troy Story II: the Odyssey
[MUSIC PLAYING] NARRATOROur tale, the Odyssey, starts with a nymph, a king and the aftermath of war at Troy. It's a decade since Odysseus left for his home, Ithaca, after the Trojan War. For seven years, he's been ensnared by the nymph Calypso. But he's pining for his wife Penelope and son Telemachus. The goddess Athena is rather a fan of Odysseus. She persuades her father Zeus to compel Calypso to free him. He's been gone 20 years, feared dead, and Penelope's fending off 108 suitors. She says she'll marry one when she finishes her weaving. Sneaky. Telemachus searches for news. But meanwhile, a higher power plots his father's downfall. The sea god Poseidon really dislikes Odysseus. Well, he did blind his cyclops son. On a Mediterranean cruise, that's unfortunate, and Odysseus is left stranded once more. But Odysseus entrances his hosts, the Phaeacians, with tales of his odyssey and his many escapes from, among others, the cyclops, Polyphemus, the sorceress, Circe, the sirens, the supernatural Scylla, and the whirlpool of Charybdis. His reward for this stirring story? Home. But Odysseus needs to stay incognito. Ever helpful Athena turns him into a beggar. And reunited with his son, they celebrate by agreeing Penelope's suitors must die. The fair Penelope arranges a competition. She'll marry whoever can string Odysseus's huge bow. The suitors lose more than the contest. Odysseus is home, and Ithaca's his again. Athena celebrates. Poseidon doesn't. The suitors families are angry, too. But they'll get over it with Athena's help. Odysseus is in the clear and ready for life with Penelope, or another adventure. [MUSIC PLAYING] Despite the fact that the Iliad is a (very) long poem, Homer is remarkably concentrated on a single, fleeting episode in a much longer conflict. At the same time, he still manages to evoke the war as a whole. To take one example: Homer relates that, when news of the Trojan hero Hector’s death reached the Trojans holed up in the city, they wailed ‘as if the whole of jutting Ilium was now smouldering / with fire all the way from its top to its bottom’ (Iliad 22.410–411). Homer doesn’t need to narrate the fall of Troy because: (i) his ancient audience knew the broader outline of the Troy story; and (ii) he has shown by this point in the narrative that, with the death of Hector, Troy is doomed to fall. It’s clear already, then, that the Iliad doesn’t tell the whole story of the Trojan War. In what follows you’ll start to think about what Homer does focus on.2 Homer’s IliadIn the last section you discovered how the Trojan War begins and ends in the mythical narratives, and you learned that the Iliad doesn’t deal directly with either: in spite of its length, its story is focused on a handful of days in a 10-year conflict. In this section and the next, you will spend most of your time looking at the opening, or proem, of the poem – more specifically, the first seven lines. Although this is a very short extract of the text, it actually contains a large amount of useful material that you can tease out for thinking about the Iliad as a whole. You might be surprised to see how much you can learn from just these few lines! You’ll start by finding out how the poet signals his version of the narrative for an audience who knew (at least roughly) the basic trajectory of the war and the key characters involved.Activity 3The first seven lines of the Iliad function in some ways like the preface to a novel or a trailer for a film in that it gives the audience an insight into what is to come in the rest of the poem. In this version, translated by Anthony Verity, some words and phrases that may be unfamiliar to you have been glossed underneath the text. Read this text now.Sing, goddess, the anger of Achilles, Peleus’ son,the accursed anger which brought the Achaeans countlessagonies and hurled many mighty shades of heroes into Hades,causing them to become the prey of dogs andall kinds of birds; and the plan of Zeus was fulfilled.Sing from the time the two men were first divided in strife—Atreus’ son, lord of men, and glorious Achilles.GlossaryAchaeans: one of the words used by Homer to describe the Greeks.Hades: the Underworld; also used of the god of the Underworld.Atreus’ son: Agamemnon, leader of the Achaeans.What information can you identify that relates to the story of the Trojan War outlined in my synopsis in the previous section? What is the audience not told? Does it seem like the poet is assuming anything of his audience? Homer mentions four characters: an unnamed goddess, Achilles, Zeus, and ‘Atreus’ son’. But he doesn’t introduce them as characters: or, at any rate, he only provides the most minimal of details. Agamemnon isn’t even named: he’s ‘Atreus’ son’ and ‘lord of men’ (Iliad 1.7). (You probably found that you needed to use the glossary in order to understand that these phrases referred to Agamemnon.) Note, we’re also not told that Achilles and Agamemnon are Greeks (or Achaeans) or that they’re at Troy. Homer seems to assume that his audience will know who and where these characters are and what they’re doing there already.You’ll come back to the unnamed goddess, Zeus, and ‘Atreus’ son’ shortly. Before doing so, read the passage again, focusing on Achilles, the central character of the epic. What do we learn about him? Does anything seem surprising?Rather than saying that his poem will sing of the Trojan War, Homer chooses to focus on a specific episode within the Trojan War: the anger of Achilles. Given this background information about Achilles being an Achaean, did you notice something striking about his anger? Homer tells us that Achilles’ anger ‘brought the Achaeans countless / agonies’ (Iliad1.2–3). This Achaean hero causes death and destruction for his own side. Moreover, it comes about because he was ‘divided in strife’ (Iliad1.6) with the ‘lord of men’ (Iliad1.7). Instead of a promise of war between the Achaeans and Trojans, Homer trails a conflict between two of the Achaeans’ primary heroes – the leader of the expedition and their best warrior. This should make us sit up and take notice, even if we are a seasoned audience of epic song.Please note: Homer uses three names for the Greek army: they are Achaeans, Danaans or Argives. Although the term ‘Greeks’ is used in this course, he never uses the term in this collective sense. (In Homer ‘Hellas’ (Greece) denotes a northern region in the Greek mainland.)From this opening, then, you have seen how Homer positions his particular poem about the Trojan War in and against the story tradition relating to this conflict. Why do we talk about ‘Homer’ though, when, as you have seen, no mention of an author is given in the opening lines? The simple truth is that we don’t know anything about Homer. The Iliad and Odyssey are oral poems that were composed in performance, meaning that they were crafted in the process of being sung, rather than being created in advance and recited or rehearsed as we might expect from a poetic recital. Because of this ‘composition in performance’ element, whoever the poet (poetēs comes from the Greek meaning the ‘one who makes’) was would have been clear for all members of that audience to see. By the same token, since there is no eye-witness account of the Iliad or Odyssey being composed, we have no information about their poet or whether indeed the same poet composed both epics. It was when these two poems came to be written down and re-performed at an Athenian festival held every four years in honour of Athena called the Great Panatheneia, around 550 BCE or so, that the name of ‘Homer’ appeared in conjunction with them. Indeed, at this early point, Homer’s name was also attached to other poems about the Trojan War, as if the name was shorthand to describe the genre of these poems, heroic epic. However, by the time of Aristotle (384–322 BCE), to talk of Homer’s poems meant the Iliad and Odyssey. Only these two orally composed heroic epics have survived the test of time (apparently) complete.Please note: heroic epic is a genre of poetry that focuses on the stories of heroes (as in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey) to be distinguished from the epic poetry of Hesiod (in the same hexameter verse) that focuses on gods (Theogony) or men (the Works and Days).3 Homer’s oral art IThe fact that the Iliad was composed orally means that it has a number of features that are specific to this type of poetry. Even though all we have is a written version of the text, we can still identify a number of these oral features.Activity 4Read through the opening seven lines of the Iliad again. What stylistic features of this kind of poetry do you find striking or odd, or would like to know more about?Sing, goddess, the anger of Achilles, Peleus’ son,the accursed anger which brought the Achaeans countlessagonies and hurled many mighty shades of heroes into Hades,causing them to become the prey of dogs andall kinds of birds; and the plan of Zeus was fulfilled.Sing from the time the two men were first divided in strife—Atreus’ son, lord of men, and glorious Achilles.There are several features that might have stood out to you. You might have noticed the address to the goddess, the mention of singing, and the way the heroes are described – for example, Achilles as ‘Peleus’ son’ in the first line. The first of these features, the address to the goddess, is not distinctive to oral poetry, but is something that appears in a lot of ancient poetry. The goddess in question is one of the Muses, a group of goddesses who were said to inspire all creative endeavours. So here, the poet is asking the Muse to tell the story of Achilles’ anger through him, suggesting that he is a vessel for divine inspiration.The other two features highlighted – singing and the descriptions of the heroes, which we call ‘epithets’ – are closely linked to the oral nature of the Iliad. While we read Homer in a book, and are able to because of a long manuscript tradition going back centuries of copying his poems (see Figure 6), Homer’s early audiences would have received his poems by listening to them being performed orally. Each of Homer’s poems would take some 3 days to perform, and would likely be performed in a public festival setting, like the Athenian Great Panathenaia festival mentioned above. If we remember that these poems were usually composed in performance, we can begin to understand some of the distinctive features of Homeric poetry, including ones that don’t translate well into English but are very effective in the original ancient Greek. 3.1 Meter and word orderThe sung nature of oral poetry is particularly apparent from the fact that there is a strong metrical structure, or rhythm, to the poetry in the ancient Greek. Various metrical structures can be seen in more modern poetry; for example, Shakespeare’s sonnets make use of iambic pentameter (five metrical ‘feet’ of two syllables each, one unstressed and one stressed: da-DUM). The poetic genre of the Iliad – heroic epic – has, in the original Greek text, a very strict metrical structure. For each line of verse, in the Greek there are six metrical feet – hence the full name of Homer’s poetry: hexameter – composed of a combination of short and long syllables. You don’t need to recognise the precise structure of the hexameter metrical line, but it is important to know this is the fundamental basis for how the poetry works. Activity 5Listen to the first audio, which is a recording of the English translation of the first seven lines of the Iliad. Then listen to the second audio, which is a recording of the first seven lines of the Iliad being recited in ancient Greek, in order to hear the rhythm. Finally, listen to the third audio, which discusses the metrical structure of these lines.
Audio 1 Reading of lines 1–7 of the Iliad in translation
Sing, goddess, the anger of Achilles, Peleus' son,the accursed anger which brought the Achaeans countlessagonies and hurled many mighty shades of heroes into Hades,causing them to become the prey of dogs andall kinds of birds; and the plan of Zeus was fulfilled.Sing from the time the two men were first divided in strife—Atreus' son, lord of men, and glorious Achilles.
Audio 2 Lucy Jackson reads lines 1–7 of the Iliad in Greek