In our earlier lecur, 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 have thought about myth over vast stretches of time.
In this lecture were going to turn the clock backwards and
move from our present-day period into the, the times that are going
to be represented in the mythic stories that we are going to be turning to next.
A 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 we
appropriate and read these myths and we want to pay some attention to that.
Roman times.
Here I've picked out the 1st century BCE as classical Rome,
so if you hear me referring to classical Rome I mean Rome during that time 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
roughly referring to 1st century BCE, 1st century CE, roughly in that time period.
Another important, moment for us, is going to be classical Athens,
5th century BCE, so when I say classical Athens, that's what I mean.
And then when I say Homeric times, I'm referring to the 8th century BCE.
Homer wrote around 750, as best we can tell, so
we say 8th century as a general target for what that date's all about.
And Homer himself was writing many years after the fact,
as you can see from our graph here.
He's actually writing nearly 500 years after the topic he is covering
the Trojan War which in, according to the legendary materials,
took place right around in the 13th 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 we're 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 13th century BCE,
and the reason we go ahead and say that has to do very much with this man.
Befo, if this course were being taught 150 years ago, assuming there was an internet
the professor at that time would say, well, the Trojan War is a legend.
We don't really have any evidence that it actually took place.
Heinrich Schliemann was curious about this.
His dates were 1822 to 1890.
He took a team over to the north coast of Turkey Asia Minor and
found that in the sites where there was supposed to be a great citadel of Troy,
he actually found that yes,
indeed there were the ruins of 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 wa, took place right around roughly corresponding to the time
that Greek legend said the whole, the, the Trojan War took place.
So after Schliemann, we know say that, you know there likely was
a Trojan War about which Homer and his legends are being told.
Now Schliemann never found anything that said, you know,
this shield belongs to Agamemnon or here lieth the sword of Achilles.
We don't have anything that got recovered in the archeological evidence that
verifies any of the details, including characters, personages, events, any of
the details that are recorded in the 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
a bit of perhaps warning.
It's, it's a dark world, and
a world built on the coursing energy of war, the coursing 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 oftentimes with violent and quick kinds 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 an anti-war epic or, or a pro-war epic?
It 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 is, is a real human experience, that is,
the experience of armed 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 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 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 ahead 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.
His rage is a rage that is so bitter and so awful, he now hates Agamemnon,
his own Greek leader, and so wishes that all of his compad,
compatriots should pay the price of Agamemnon's stupidity.
His rage then 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 tent, but in his place arise other
great Greek warriors to take the place of top dog among, 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 marshal 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 unbelievably a beautiful piece of epic poetry.
When we close out this 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 vengeance 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 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 the 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, well, 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 stratagems that come in.
It's a ten-year war and we've only talked about one little part of it.
Well, it's true Homer's Iliad focuses on only 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 kind of main one appears.
And may have 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 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, 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 a, a 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's 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 clobber those Trojans.
And off they go.
Helen, in case you may well have heard this,
is indeed the face that launched a thousand ships.
A medieval rendering of what one of these ships might have looked like.
Pretty good actually.
We've got archeological evidence that confirms what a Greek war ship looks like,
and it's not so bad.
And so Helen is the face that launches a thousand ships.
In the legend that's the number of 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 catalogue 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, a story starts to percolate in to fill in that kind of question and
we have a story about the Apple of Discord.
Some of you all will have heard this.
You can see here in a, a lovely painting giving us the whole background.
Peleus and Thetis have a wedding.
Peleus is a great mortal a well-known and prominent man.
He actually gets to have a wedding to a goddess, Thetis.
And the two of them get together, Peleus and
Thetis and when they do, they have a party and they invite everybody.
This is one of those times when gods and humans could actually live face to face,
so the gods came,
the humans came, and they all had a great party together in this very early time.
Peleus and Thetis, all are invited except this goddess, Eris.
Who is the god of discord, who is upset about not being invited.
She is not allowed to come, so she decides to take an apple and inscribe on it
a single Greek word that translates into the English for the fairest.
Tosses it into the middle of the wedding and Athena,
Hera and Aphrodite instantly think the apple must be for them.
They start to argue.
They look around and say, here is a human.
Let's make him solve the dilemma for us.
Paris agrees.
Again, not a very smart thing to do.
A more clever man would have probably put off that judgment on someone else.
And Paris makes his judgment, his famous judgment, saying that well,
looking at the three of you, yes, you're all beautiful.
Hera, you have offered me great power across the earth.
Athena, you've offered me infinite wisdom.
Aphrodite, though, you've offered me the most beautiful woman in the world, and
I'm going to make you now the winner of this apple, and you need to
give me my prize, which is going to be the most beautiful woman in the world.
So at that point, Paris thinks Helen's all mine.
Off he goes in starting this whole thing off.
So the whole Trojan War,
the grandeur of this magnificent event all boils down to an affair of the heart.
A small thing that
you can imagine the heartstrings being plucked of one human being.
That's the passion that moves this whole grandeur that
winds up being exhibited in war rage that really is definitive
of what the Greek experience is going to be of their mythic past.