Our story of the Trojan War it's so
powerful. It not only creates an impulse for poets
to start talking about what happened before it.
And we get all the prequels that we talked about in our previous lecture.
There is also a lot of energy spent trying to figure out what happened after it and
we have a lot of sequels to the events on the plains of Troy.
There are whole sets of legends that get built up around the aftermath and each of
them hearkens back to facts about the war, the things that really happened there.
And the main over arching theme. Is that things were just awful there and
nasty. The Greeks tell this story to themselves
about an awful war. And in fact the Greeks don't come off
looking so good in that war. Remember we talked about the, the, the
parts that Homer focuses on in his Iliad. Talk about Greek on Greek struggles.
They don't seem to work well as a team. They've got bad leadership.
There's nasty motives that motivate Achilles and all the ugly things he does.
Well the Greeks don't put a kind of glossy eyed view over any of the materials that
happened in this past. And then also.
Also what happened at the end of the war. The Greeks are, they remain, yeah they,
they hold up in their mythology stories about themselves doing awful things.
Famously awful things. There are a few moments in particular that
stick out in Greek imagination about them going to far in their victory in the Greek
war after they conquer Troy and, and get over the walls.
They, there's awful things that happen but even before hand in order to get into that
city of Troy they have to penetrate with spies in a raid in order to.
Attract from the from the Temple of Athena a tiny little figure called the Palladium
this is a statute that represents Athena and that is well loved by the goddess
herself. Now when the Greeks sneak in and pull this
little figurine out of Athena's temple, what they are doing is they're removing a
magical element that had a protective aura over the city of Troy.
According to what they knew they would be incapable of overturning the city of Troy
as long as the Palladium resided in, in Athena's Temple.
By removing it they now removed this extra special aura protection around the city
and they can conquer it themselves. But in so doing they violate Athena.
She's upset about that. She doesn't like it that her Palladium has
been taken out of her statue, so out of her temple.
So they have actually done a sacrilegious violation against Athena in order to
conquer Troy. Furthermore.
Nasty crimes galore, of, of different kinds of violence happen.
The Greeks talk about themselves as murderers.
They kill people in, in, horrible wartime rage.
This is the kind of thing that happens in, in, in war poetry, so they, they probably
could have said to themselves, well, you know, we went too far and that's what war
is like. But the Greeks didn't say that to
themselves. The versions of the stories that they
preserve say we went too far even by our own standards, and that was awful.
For example, they took the little Prince Astyanax a tiny little baby at the time in
the city of Troy, and just hurled him from the walls, an innocent little infant.
Hurled him from the walls and the, the body of the infant dies by being
splattered on the ground. Hurled off of a distance of many tens of
feet. That's not something the Greeks are proud
of, and yet they keep telling it in their stories about an example of their own
excesses. Similarly and maybe most famously, the
Princess Cassandra is raped. And she's raped by warrior Ajax.
And she's raped on the alter of the temple of Athena.
The number of violations that happen here, the excesses that are built into this act
are so extreme and so vile that the rape of Cassandra gets held up in this short
list of crimes that the Greeks commit when they conquer Troy.
And again, this is all preserved within the Greek tradition and they preserve it
in such a way that shows that they're not just chalking it up to the excesses that
heroes sometimes resort to when violent things are happening.
It's, they just go too far. Now when they do go too far they set up a
whole set of other stories. There are stories about the aftermath of
the Greek war Greek, Greek war against the Trojans.
That each of them hark back to this, this nasty episode, these nasty episodes that
happened there. The, the amount of negative energy that's
stirred up in Troy when the Greeks conquer it, is just to much to stay confined to
that area, and it leaks out. And it follows the Greek hero's on their
way home. The journey's home, in Greek it's called
the, there called the Nostoi are the famous sequence of stories that talk about
the heroes, the Greek heroes, making their way home.
And in each case they're, they're working out.
The nastiness that get, got built up for them over in Troy.
Some cases, the journey home was a little bit easier than others Nestor gets in,
famous Greek hero that we're going to meet in the Odyssey, gets himself home pretty
quickly without too much trouble. Menelaus has a long sojourn, he's blown
off course in Egypt, he meets the Old Man of the Sea and has adventures there, we'll
learn about him and the Odyssey. Agamemnon famously gets himself home,
that's not a problem, but when he gets home there's awfulness that's waiting for
him. We're gonna learn about that.
A lot, when we're reading the odyssey, Agamemnon's journey home.
But the most important of all these Nostoi, is the one we're going to spend
the first weeks of class reading, and that's Homer's Odyssey, which gives us the
story of the journey home of a particular Greek hero the one that we're going to
spend most of our time focusing on in the first few weeks of the class, that is this
great man Odysseus. We'll spend some time reading his story
when we turn to Homer's Odyssey, we'll look at the first few pages of that in our
next video, but before we do we need to spend a little time talking about this
man. We have already mentioned his name, Homer.
We've talked about his dates around 750 BC.
And there's a portrait of him and you may even recognize this as a traditional
representation of Homer. Unfortunately, what this is though, is
just a traditional representation of Homer.
We have no idea what Homer actually looked like.
In fact, what we know of Homer survives from The Iliad and The Odyssey.
There is a window on the world and a thought world that is made very rich and
explicit through that those poems that give us an idea about what kind of
thoughts the person behind the poems had. But we don't know anything that
corroborates who this poet was. In fact in the scholarship from the
previous century, there were many people that had a strong view that actually there
were Homers that to talk about a single poet behind an, an epic poem like Odyssey
or the Iliad was not a smart thing to do. Because likely what happened was that this
was a corporate effort of a lot of people who were singing songs in public.
These wandering bards would, we know, we actually know from Homer's tale, wandering
bards went around and sang songs, for wealthy clients.
And, when they did, they sung parts of the Trojan War legend and other things having
to do with heroes like Odysseus, and Achilles and Agamemnon.
So the idea was developed that there's a kind of corporate set of these, and whole
chunks of these were kind of edited together to create the documents of the
Odyssey and the Iliad. And there would be no sense talking about
a single Homeric voice. Instead we talk about many Homeric voices.
The idea in the scholarship has taken a backseat now.
Mostly what's happened is that the coherence of the story itself has just
been the strongest piece of evidence, for the scholarly field to think that likely
what we have here is indeed the result of a single poetic hand.
At least the Odyssey itself is, and The Iliad itself is, it could be that they
were written by different poets, but it is likely that they were each written by a
single poet and it may well be the case that those were the same.
Those poets were the same. We don't know that for sure and the
scholarship is tinkering around the edges of that question still.
But it is no longer such an urgent question for us to try to find the half
dozen or a dozen or, who knows, fifteen or twenty voices that might be behind the
Homeric legend. And instead, it pretty much seems, at
least to most of us who are studying the material these days, that there was a
single editorial hand, at least or strongly poetically talented editorial
hand. Let's go ahead and call that person a poet
and we might as well go ahead and stick with the name Homer.
It works pretty well to describe based on what the traditional association of that.
A person. Yes, so, now we have this figure that's
behind the poems such that we know them. The figure is writing in a script, and
luckily, the script doesn't look anything like this, it probably would not have
survived to us in, in the form that it did, had the Greeks only had a script that
looked like this. This is an early example of Greek writing,
that does not use an alphabetic script. It's pictographic, you'll see it seem on
first glance to resemble Egyptian hieroglyphics or maybe even have some to
resemblance to a cuneiform kind of text. You'll know that those are early writing
systems developed in Egypt and the ancient Near East.
Those were made to hold, keep records of kings and keep track of historical events,
important events that were of consequence for wealthy and aristocratic classes of
people. It also was used in Egypt and in the
ancient Near East to record literary evidence.
So we have epic poems and stories that survive from very early periods.
In this pictographic scripts in Egypt and in and in ancient Greece.
The early Greek version of a picto-graphic script, known as linear A and B as
exhibited in this slide was never used to record any literary.
Evidence. So we may well have had wandering bards
going around in the early first millennium BCE or even before in the second mill,
millennium BCE likely we did have wandering bards going around telling
stories but none of them survive. Luckily the one that does survive is
Homer. And Homer survives because of the
technology that you see behind me. The alphabet arrives into Greece right
about the time that Homer's epics are current in his society.
Lucky for us that it made it in time. Invented as best we know by Phoenician's
on the far side of the Mediterranean the far eastern edge.
Make sure I got that right off the Mediterranean.
And the alphabet was an incredibly useful, technology.
It is written down in different characters.
There are Hebrew characters, Greek characters, there's an Arabic script
later, and Roman script. But whatever script is used, there's
really only one alphabet. Some have more vowels than others.
Some have different ways of treating certain kinds of consonants.
But it's, it's a single technology. And it's so useful it spreads like
wildfire, around the Mediterranean, and through the ancient near east.
And it's. Thank goodness for this invention that
Homer, is going to survive. The specific language that Homer spoke is
a very interesting one. His diction is an epic.
Diction which draws from lots of different dialects around the Greek world.
It's not written in one particular dialect.
It's actually written in a kind of hotchpotch of, of many different ones.
It would be as though a contemporary American poet was capturing the accents of
the North-East uh-huh, in, or my own beloved Philadelphia or Boston.
Together with accents of the American South or accents of Chicago or the or the
Westcoast. And had a kind of mish mash of them all
together. The Homeric dialect and represents a kind
of aggregation of a corporate Greek way of speaking.
The lines in Homer are very straightforward.
He writes in a dactylic hexameter that is a, a line made of six metrical feet, and
each of those feet is made up of a dactyl, a long and two shorts, a dum dit, dit.
So the basic element of Homeric epic poetry comes down to a long and two
shorts. String six of these together with an n
caps at the end, that's what the x means, that can be either long or short.
String six of these together and you've got a.
Homeric line. String 15,000 of them together, and you've
got. The Iliad, 12,000 of them together, and
you've got The Odyssey. Pretty extraordinary feat for him to be
able to write, elegant, beautiful, metric poetry over the course of many tens of
thousands of lines. It's also the case that any of these
dactyls. A long and two shorts can be replaced by a
spondee, two longs. On occasion, this metrical information
will be useful for us to have. So I wanted to make sure that we had it.
Next, we get to get started. We're gonna open The Odyssey and see what
Homer has to tell us about this greatest of Greek heroes.
This character Odysseus. We're gonna meet in him wonderful
qualities of a person that is bringing all his human characters his human qualities
to bare. Trying to solve all kinds of difficult
situations and get himself out of trouble. And also lots of times getting himself
into trouble. We'll turn to that next.