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“Rage: Sing; Goddess, Achilles’ rage” (line 1)
� � Author � Time/Date of Composition � Contextual Information � Form � Major Themes
Preview
� Author
(“Bust of Homer” from the British Museum)
� � The Iliad is credited to a person called Homer, but…
We don’t really know if Homer ever existed � “In modern times the elements of pre-historic Greece
have begun to come to light, but Homer grows no more familiar. He remains ‘Homer,’ ‘the poet or poets of the Iliad and Odyssey,’ ‘the bard,’ almost totally anonymous because he so rarely reveals himself in his epics” (Beye 75)
Author
� � It is possible The Iliad and Odyssey are the work of
one or more oral poets who learned to write. The texts may also “represent a collaboration between one or more oral poets, and a scribe” (Puchner et al 122)
Author
� � Interesting fact: there is an authorial “voice” in the
poem. The poem begins: “Rage: Sing; Goddess, Achilles’ rage” (line 1). Consider who is the one commanding the goddess? Scholars usually assume it is the author, whether that be a single person (Homer) or a collection of people
Author
� � The written version was written down around the 8th
Century BCE, although it probably existed as an oral story for a long time before it was written down � May reflect an ancient battle at Troy
Time & Date
� Context - Mycenae
� Major Mycenaean cities included Sparta and probably Athens � Agamemnon is king of
Mycenae � Menelaus is king of
Sparta
(Ancient Theater of Sparta from The Greek Reporter)
� � The Greek Bronze Age included the rise and fall of
three civilizations � Cycladic à lived on islands in the Aegean Sea and the
Cyclades Islands � Minoan à Lived on the islands of Crete � Mycenaean (or “Helladic”) à Lived on the Greek
mainland
Context - Myceneae
� Context - Mycenae
� The Mycenaeans were a people who lived from around 1,900 – 1,100 BCE � The term Mycenaean
comes from the name for their major city, Mycenae
(Lions Gate in Mycenae by Andreas Trepte via Wikimedia)
� � The Mycenaean civilization collapsed around
1100/1200 BCE; no one knows why � Theories include: earthquakes, invasions, or in-fighting
� After the collapse, people in Greece fell into a dark ages that lasted for the next 400 years
� The dark ages were characterized by a loss of affluence and the loss of the knowledge of writing
� The loss of writing is why they’re called “Dark Ages”
Context - Myceneae
� Context - Troy
� In the 19th Century, Heinrich Schliemann discovered a site in northwestern Turkey that corresponds with Homer’s Troy
� Not everyone agrees a Trojan War happened, but most think it’s this archaeological site was the historical city of Troy � In fact, Ilias “is another
name for Troy” (Puchner et al 123) (Walls of Troy via Wikimedia)
� � During the Dark Ages and before the rediscovery of
reading and writing, Greek peoples had a strong tradition of oral poetry � Poetry composed and recited without writing
� Bards traveled extensively, telling stories of the Bronze Age, thereby preserving that history in a pseudo realistic/fictional way � The stories were probably accompanied by music
Form – Oral/Written
� � The Mycenaean people had a form of writing called a
syllabary � Syllabary is a system of writing in which a symbol
corresponds to each syllable, not to each letter � Some modern examples: Japanese katakana &
hiragana; Cherokee � The Iliad is divided into 24 books corresponding to
each letter of the Greek alphabet
Form – Oral/Written
� Form – Oral/Written
(Mycenaean Syllabary – Linear B by Sharon Mollerus via Wikimedia)
� � Greek and Latin epic poetry is composed in a six-
part line called a hexameter � All lines of Greek poetry are divided into six parts, or
feet, according to syllables (long or short) � Short syllables = short vowel with a consonant at the end � Long syllable = long vowel or two or more consonants
Form – Epic Poetry
� � The Iliad is further characterized by:
1. Character delineation à developing characters, usually evidenced through speeches (Beye 86) & through epithets, or descriptive adjectives that accompany someone’s name (Beye 88)
2. Catalogs à “a passage in which something is being enumerated or listed” (Beye 89)
Form - Epic Poetry
� 3. Battle narrative à comprised of “the names of the victor
and the victim in each encounter, often an anecdote relating to either of them” and “then a realistic description of the fatal wounding (Beye 93)
4. Repetitions à about 1/3 of The Iliad is comprised of repeated lines; probably a feature of its roots in oral poetry (Beye 97)
5. Similes à epic similes ranging from very long to short ones; usually compares narrative action with something from home or from nature (Beye 108-9)
Form – Epic Poetry
� � Rage/Anger � War, Honor, and Aggression � Hubris
Major Themes