It would be like asking Babe Ruth to leave a World Series game in order to get coffee for the team. With some justice, she fears that Hektor will suffer the same fate, and she knows that her life as a widow in a conquered city will be hellish. I think of the old newsreels of columns of young men marching off to World War I, smiling and confident that after a brief period of glorious fighting they will return healthy and triumphant to their families. Explain the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles in Book I. It does not pretend to portray everyday actualities. This technique helps to explain some things that we may find peculiar when we read the poems. Was it fought over Helen of Troy and did it include great heroes from all over Greece and Asia Minor? Furthermore, I have not referred to the “author” of The Iliad, since, according to this account of the poem’s origin, it had no single author. This information makes Achilleus’ choice even starker, and he only really chooses after Patroklos has died, when he almost instinctively re-enters the battle and commits himself to death at Troy, a decision he seems to regret in The Odyssey. ALL YOUR PAPER NEEDS COVERED 24/7. The relative authority of religious texts develops … Be prepared for that to happen. Now, as much as I would like readers to continue reading the invaluable things I have to say, I hope they will instead put this book down and read The Iliad. Glaukos’ words here, however, are insufficient. Even the river, which has become plugged up with the bodies of warriors he has killed, tries to stop him; and he goes so far as to capture twelve young Trojans whom he later slaughters at his leisure during Patroklos’ funeral. Long before the beginning of The Iliad, a relatively minor goddess named Thetis fell in love with a mortal named Peleus. They are certainly beyond words, as we see when the narrator tells us that Achilleus was so moved by grieving for his own father that he gently disengaged from Priam’s grasp, And the two remembered, as Priam sat huddled at the feet of Achilleus and wept close for manslaughtering Hektor and Achilleus wept now for his own father, now again for Patroklos. (Digression: The two cities on Achilleus’ shield are represented by the friezes on the two sides of the urn in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Keats, who loved Homer’s work, created the urn based on this passage. Literature, the Humanities, and Humanity by Theodore L. Steinberg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. Virgil (Vergil) wrote The Aeneid, a story about a Trojan hero.The Aeneid has been compared with Homer's Iliad and Odyssey -- partly because Virgil was influenced by and borrowed from Homer's works.Written by one of the earliest great poets, The Aeneid has inspired a number of the greatest writers and poets in … No one gets all good. Later in the poem there will be a scene when Achilleus appears to be covered by a divine fire and sends the Trojan army running just by shouting. Zeus, who knows that Sarpedon must lose in this encounter, tells Hera that he is thinking of snatching his son out of the battle and wafting him back to his homeland. Homer has a point to make here that transcends representational realism. In addition, Agamemnon claims again that Zeus is responsible for his quarrel with Achilles. There are two more brief points that I should mention about The Iliad. In making this demand, Agamemnon indicates the kind of proud bully that he is; and in unnecessarily alienating his best warrior, he gives some indication of his strategic acumen. That is a huge choice for a young, vigorous man to make, and it helps to explain many facets of Achilleus’ behavior. This sense of cosmic importance is a large part of what makes the poem an epic. When Hektor finds Andromache on the ramparts, husband and wife have one of the most central and revealing conversations in the poem. What upsets him most, however, is her fate, for she will be carried off into slavery by the conquerors, who will not only abuse her physically but who will also mock her as the widow of Hektor. The Iliad begins, like so many epic poems, in medias res, that is, in the middle of the story, and the audience is expected to know the background.