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World Literature Assignment Help Essay The most important feature of Homer’s  Iliad  is the most obvious: the central issue in this poem is warfare.  In fact, the  Iliad  is our oldest, most famous, and most enduring story about men in battle.  So one might well begin by exploring certain features of this particular war narrative.  How does Homer depict the war so as to emphasize some features rather than others? Such a question is necessary because the phrase  war story  does not reveal very much about any particular fiction.   After all, warfare, particularly the Trojan War, can be and has been used to develop an astonishingly wide range of the different stories—dramatic adventures, chivalric tales, amusing satires, bitter social commentaries, historical epics, various styles of comedy, romance, and so on, often in combination.  For war is a very fecund basis for all sorts of different tales, as one might expect, given that it includes so many narrative possibilities.  So we might start by seeing if we can get a sense of some of the more salient features of Homer’s treatment of the war. One of the most initially surprising things about the  Iliad  is how many well-known details of the full Trojan War story Homer leaves out. The poem gives us no detailed sense of how the war started (either the short-term cause of Paris’ and Helen’s elopement or the long-term causes in the wedding of Thetis and Peleus and the Judgment of Paris), nor are many of the most famous incidents in the opening or closing stages of the war given any attention (for example, the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, the recruitment of Odysseus and Achilles, the abandonment of Philoctetes, the Trojan Horse, and the fall of Troy, among many others).  There are many references to the fact that Troy will eventually fall, but no details are provided.  First-time readers of the  Iliad  who have some familiarity with details of the famous narrative frequently comment, often with a sense of disappointment, on how few such incidents are included here.  One would think that any poet interes ted in holding his audience’s attention with some exciting narrative events would make much better use of at least some of these.  But one searches the  Iliad  in vain for most of one’s favorite stories from the Trojan War. Instead, the  Iliad  focuses on few weeks in the tenth year of the war. The action covers considerably less time than that, of course, because there are some major gaps (e.g., the nine days’ plague in Book 1, the twelve-day wait for Zeus, the twelve-day maltreatment of Hector’s corpse), and the focus is almost exclusively on what is going on in that relatively short time.  There’s an interesting double chronology at work.  Events move quickly from one battlefield experience to another—there is lots of exciting action.  At the same time, while there is little attention paid to a precise chronology, we also get a sense that a lot of time is going by; this war is dragging on and on, without anything changing very much (other than people being killed).  We do not experience this war as a complete event, with a beginning, middle, and end, an experience with clearly understood causes and a series of events leading to a definite conclusion.  We star t the poem in the midst of warfare, and we end the book, several weeks later, in exactly the same place.  The only thing we know for sure at the end is that the fighting will continue, as before. The warfare is also unremitting.  One bloody encounter is always followed by another without significant variation in the basic nature of the encounters and without pause.  All attempted truces are doomed to failure, other than those the parties make, ironically enough, to collect or celebrate the dead.  Even at night, when the fighting has generally stopped, the war dominates people’s actions, thoughts, and dreams.  There is none of that sense, so prominent in the  Odyssey, that an evening’s meal and sleep bring something to a conclusion so that when Dawn appears the next day, something new and different is about to begin. This narrative structure creates a sense that this war is less a particular and unique historical campaign than it is a lasting condition of life.  These warriors are doing what they have always been doing and what they will continue to do (a sense that is strongly reinforced, as we shall see, by their memories of the past and their hopes for the future).  There has been no clear beginning to all this, and there will be no clear end.  Of course, if we bring to the poem a knowledge of the details of the Trojan War, we know that the tradition tells us it does eventually end.  But the  Iliad  does not encourage us to think about that in any detail, apart from the references to the fact that Troy will fall someday, and, if we do, there is little in the poem to suggest that such an event would change anything very much (more about this later). In addition, the absence of any sense of enterprising romantic adventure in the poem (in spite of the fact that the traditional story of the Trojan War includes all sorts of possibilities for such events) generates a sense that individual resourcefulness in tactics, strategy, or trickery (a common feature of the  Odyssey  and of countless popular war fictions) is out of place here, because this war is larger than the efforts of any one man or small group of men.  It is not something which the individual warrior can, through his individual efforts, alter in any significant way.  Whatever he and his comrades do today, then tomorrow, if he is still alive, he will have to continue doing.  By the end of the  Iliad,  we have witnessed some extraordinary human conduct, glorious courage, horrible destruction, and more, none of which has changed the course or the nature of the war in the slightest.  Confronted with this situation, the men seem trapped, as Odysseus observes: Zeus sees to it that from our youthful days to our old age we must grind away at wretched war, till, one by one, we die. (14.104) [14.85] Some readers find this narrative rhythm disconcerting. Where are we going with the story?  There is a lot of action,  but overall nothing is changing and there is little if any sense of closure.  For those who expect other things from a war fiction, it is rather surprising and perhaps disappointing to discover that most of the exciting narratives we associate with this war come from other sources—the  Odyssey,  Aeneid, and  Metamorphoses, for example—where the vision of war is very different from what Homer is developing in the  Iliad. I would like to suggest that all these relatively obvious details help to create a sense that this vision of war is thoroughly fatalistic.  The war is neither a temporary problem nor a discrete historical event nor a unique adventure.  It is, rather, the basic, unchanging, and inescapable condition of life itself. It is man’s fate. Before exploring this point further, we should first clarify precisely what the terms  fate,  fatalism, and  fatalistic  mean here, for in these modern, decidedly non-fatalistic times we may not all grasp the concept clearly.  To assert that Homer pictures the war as man’s fate is to claim that Homer views it as the essential condition of life into which these men are born. They do not choose to have the world this way, and many of them express their dissatisfaction with this state of affairs and their desire for something different.  But there is nothing they can do to change that condition.  Whatever started this war and whatever will end it (if it ever does end) are beyond human control. It is necessary to add here the important point that, understood in this sense, these terms carry no necessary sense of optimism or pessimism. It is possible to be a confirmed fatalist and yet sense that the basic conditions of life are as good as they possibly could be or are arranged for man’s benefit (as in, say, a faith in providential Christianity), or, alternatively, to have a decidedly pessimistic sense of the world one is born into.  All these terms indicate, as I say, is that life is, so to speak, a game where the rules are made up and controlled by others and where human beings have no ability to change the situation. The terms  fate  and  fatalistic  also do not mean that human actions are predetermined.  This point is crucial to grasp for an understanding of the  Iliad  and almost all classical Greek literature.  Human beings may be unable to alter the situation, but in at least one essential since they are free agents.  They are free to choose how to react to these given conditions.  In the  Iliad  the men have chosen to be warriors; more than that, most of them are determined, in their freedom, to act as heroically as they can, to live up to a code which insists that they confront this grim fatal reality with a range of human qualities (courage, loyalty, physical strength, and so on). We  will be going into this feature of the poem in greater detail in another essay.  For the moment it’s essential to grasp the point that central to lives of these men is their free assertion of their individuality in the face of a harsh fate which they cannot alter.This fatali stic quality of the poem emerges also in the way Homer insists upon the universal scope of war. As we read the story, we are always dealing with a particular event involving specific individuals, but we are also aware of a larger picture, for these events are part of a much longer time period.  The famous digressions, which have occasioned a certain amount of hostile comment, serve to remind us again and again that warfare is a condition of life itself.  Flashbacks to earlier times insist that personal armed combat is what life is about (e.g., Phoenix’s long tale of Meleager, Aeneas’ boasts about his ancestors, Andromache’s story of her family, the constant reminders of the achievements of Diomedes’ father, Tydeus, and so on).  The particular events of this battle are always being played out against a historical backdrop of very similar incidents.  One of Nestor’s important functions in the poem is to remind us all the time, both by his pre sence and by his reminiscences, that human life has always involved fighting on the battlefield: â€Å"Son of Atreus, yes, indeed, I wish, I was the man I used to be back then when I cut down lord Ereuthalion.But gods don’t give men everything at once.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Then I was young.  Now old age follows me.But I’ll be with my horsemen, advising them, giving them  their orders, an old man’s right.Fighting with spears is for the younger men  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  born after me, men who rely on strength.† (4.373) [4.318] Similarly, when Hector thinks of his young son’s future, the best he can envisage for him is that he will be a great warrior, victorious in battle (6.583), a situation all the more poignant, of course, because many readers bring to the incident a knowledge of how Hector will soon die and how the young infant will be killed when the Achaeans sack Troy.  Hector has already acknowledged that he will die fairly soon, and no one in the poem has more to lose from continuing the battles than Hector.  Nonetheless, the only future he can imagine and desire for his son is one which has produced the situation he and Andromache now face. Homer’s treatment of the combatants also serves to bring out the universal, fatal condition of this war.  The  Iliad  contains hundreds of different names of people from all over the known world.  It is virtually impossible to keep track of everyone (and one doesn’t really have to, since most of the major actions involve relatively few people), but it is equally impossible to escape the sense that on this canvas we have representatives from all parts of civilization, not simply two separate groups fighting their own private quarrel.  And what’s even more remarkable, all these combatants are decidedly similar.  Most of them speak the same language, worship the same gods, live by the same code of life, share the same rituals in prayers, sacrifices, burials, and so on.  Warriors on opposite sides are members of the same extended family, and their forefathers have entertained each other and fought as allies in the past.  Some of those on different sid es have the same name (e.g., Agelaus, Antiphus, Adrestus, Medon, Noemon, Orestes, and so on).  Such a marked similarity between the two main groups of allies works against any attempt to find a rational cause of this war in some ethnic or religious conflict and thus adds weight to the impression that warfare transcends any geographical or cultural differences between the groups fighting each other. We need to dwell on this point for a moment.  In our Western traditions, we have for a very long time coped with the disturbing aspects of war by subjecting it to moral analysis. We like to see warfare as an army of righteousness against an army of evil, good versus bad, with the forces of goodness prevailing, so that we can justify the inescapable horrors war brings with it.  And many critics have extended this tradition to the  Iliad, seeking to establish some moral basis for the war which would make its atrocities somehow more palatable.  I’ll have a good deal more to say about this tendency in a later essay.  What I want to insist upon here is that Homer appears to go out of his way to make this division between the opponents difficult to sustain.  This war has not arisen out of cultural or political or economic conflict.  It is something bigger than all such conflicts, and it has the effect of making all the combatants, whatever minor differences one wishes to point to here or there, all equally subject to its force. After all, why are these men fighting?  Or, more importantly, why do they believe they are fighting?  The treatment of Helen, the ostensible cause of the war, makes her, for all her importance in the received tradition, relatively insignificant.  She is hardly a sufficient explanation for what is going on.  If the abduction counts at all, it is a minor pretext for what these men do all the time anyway.  The suggestion that the Trojans might debate the issue and give her back (7.402) evaporates almost immediately, and the war continues as before.  King Priam expressly indicates that Helen is not to blame (3.175) since the only sensible way to account for this war is to ascribe it to the gods. Such a view of war is profoundly different from what most of us now believe.  We think we have the ability to avoid warfare and that, if we must fight it, then we will do so only when we have a moral imperative to do so (i.e., when we are the â€Å"good guys† and our opponents â€Å"the bad guys†).  And even under such circumstances, we will expect the war to be as short as possible.  The notion that war is not a temporary and unwelcome intrusion upon human life but a fatal condition of life is thus potentially disturbing, a challenge to beliefs we particularly cherish.  A central thrust of these essays is that such a challenge to our sensibilities is one of the most important things about this poem because it is a vision of the world which contradicts what we wish to believe about it.  Of course, many of us can and do seek to evade that challenge by attempting to convert the grim fatalism into a reassuring moral allegory in line with our traditions, but that, it strikes me, removes from the work its most valuable qualities. Bibliography Homer, A. T. Murray, and William F. Wyatt.  Iliad. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Osborne, Robin.  Greece in the making: 1200-469 B.C. Milton Park: Routledge, 2009. Warry, John Gibson.  Warfare in the classical world. New York: Barnes Noble, 2000.