1.5 The Trojan War & The World of Homer (16:08)

From the "Greek and Roman Mythology" course - https://www.coursera.org/course/mythology - by Professor Peter Struck, University of Pennsylvania

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.