- Hi, everyone, Steve here, and I'm recording from home.
Specifically, for this version of the course, because usually
at this point in the long semester we would watch an interview
I recorded a couple of years ago with professor Tom Palaima
of the Classics department.
And, I love this interview, and you can still go and watch it,
but it's also quite long, and we're trying to read a lot of the "Iliad"
in a short amount of time.
So I wanted to record a shorter lecture where I'm going to talk about
this book, overview the plot, overview some of the key
episodes and interactions and themes.
And then, if you're still interested, we've left
the interview with Professor Palaima on the site, and you
can watch that, completely optional; there are no quizzes
or instapolls attached to those lectures specifically, but
for the time being, we'll just focus on this.
And, where we are in this part of the lecture series on the "Iliad"
is in "Iliad" Book 6.
And in thinking about how to read this poem, the selections that
we wanted, we thought about whether we would include
Book 6 or skip over it, and I think this book is really important.
It's really important not so much from a plot perspective, but more from
a thematic perspective and thinking about what Homer is trying
to accomplish in the "Iliad," what the "Iliad" is about, and where we
stand in relation to that.
And the topic of this lecture is war and violence in the "Iliad,"
focusing specifically on that book.
So, that's what we're going to cover, and in Book 6, we've leapt a little bit
from where we left off.
Where we left off was in the middle of Book 2, the episode around
Agamemnon telling the troops that he plans to take them home
and abandon the war effort, and the upstart rebel of the Greek
army attempts to chastise Agamemnon, publicly gets beaten.
So then, we have all that episode, and then we have
a series of descriptions of the ships of the Greeks.
Books 3, 4, and 5, are then battle books,
battle narratives; there are some memorable episodes in these,
perhaps you've had a chance to read them yourself.
We have things like the duel between Menelaus and Hektor, or sorry,
Menelaus and Paris, which ends in a draw.
The Greeks and Trojans briefly truce while that draw is going on, but then
they break out into fresh warfare.
And leading up to Book 6, Diomedes, one of the Greek heroes,
is inspired and filled with strength by the Goddess Athena and he is on
a rampage.
So, Achilles is now off the field, he's withdrawn from battle, and
the Greeks at the moment are enjoying something of an ascendancy,
and it's not going to last forever, and when we get to Book 9,
which is our next book we'll see that there are considerable
reversals in this regard.
But what we have in Book 6 are really two parts.
The book is split into two very distinct movements, or acts
if you like, and in the first act we see the Greeks rampaging
on the field of battle.
We see the opening episode is one in which Menelaus,
Agamemnon's brother, briefly considers sparing a Trojan
who he has at his mercy, and Agamemnon criticizes him for
thinking about clemency, for thinking about Mercy.
We have this interesting episode that we're definitely going
to come back to, in which Diomedes the Greek and Glaukos the Trojan,
exchange gifts with one another on the battle field, and that's where
they were going to end up.
But the reason that this book is useful for us, in this particular
sequence is that the second half of the book takes place behind
the walls of Troy, in the city of Troy itself, and so up until this point
the poem has been a very Greek-centric poem.
It's been one that's focused on the squabble between
Agamemnon and Achilles, the doings of the Greeks on the battlefield.
There are some Trojan perspectives, but like for example there's
a famous sequence in which Helen is asked by Priam, King of the Trojans
to tell him about the leading fighters of the Greek army.
So we see Priam and Helen interacting with one another.
But in this, we get a much more extended sequence that is really
focused on the figure of Hektor, the leading fighter of the Trojans.
The figure who, just as Achilles is to the Greeks, Hektor is
for the Trojans, and he is invited by one of his cousins who is
a priest called Helenus to go and propitiate the Gods, propitiate Athena,
and he comes inside the city walls covered with gore and the mess,
the pollution of battle, and he's encountered by his mother,
he's encountered by Helen and Paris, and finally we have this
very memorable sequence, in which he interacts with his wife Andromache,
and Astyanax, his young toddler son.
And all of this is very important for us because the "Iliad" becomes in this
book a poem not simply about the Greeks and their attempts to
conquer the city of Troy, but a poem that has very much two focuses,
that doesn't want to leave us solely from that one dimensional perspective
of the invaders, and their cause, but looks at the defendants,
Trojans in their desperate attempts to survive, not to conquer, not to
win spoils, but just to live.
And as such, we get an entirely different perspective.
We get the perspective of women importantly.
We notice that up until this point, in the selections that we've read
we haven't had any speaking female characters.
A lot of the action of Book 1 is of course about female characters,
the slave women, Briseis and Chryseis, but they don't
speak at all.
We have goddesses who speak, but here we'll have mortal women
Hektor's mother, and his wife, Andromache.
The heart of this sequence, is the interactions between Hektor
and his wife.
And we learn about their relationship of course, and we also learn about
Hektor and I think that it's unfortunate about the abbreviation, the
abbreviated version of the poem that we're reading, that we're not reading
the entire thing, that we don't get as much of Hektor as is in the poem
as a whole.
And Hektor is really one of the central characters, that, especially
with Achilles being off the field, for much of the first half
of the poem, he's off sulking in his tent, not participating in
the war, Hektor really comes to the fore, such that if we think
about who the main character of the "Iliad" is, you could say it's Achilles,
of course the opening line draws us directly to Achilles, the wrath of
Achilles is the topic of the poem, but Hektor is... stands shoulder
to shoulder with Achilles, and his story in this poem is
as equally important and more important in some parts than
whatever is going on with Achilles and the other Greek fighters.
And we really get that first sight of what's going on for Hektor,
and what his arc is about is very much informed by this interaction
he has with his wife, when he sees his wife, she pleads with him
to remain behind the city walls and not to go back out to fight,
where she worries that he is going to meet his death.
And it's very pathetic scene, as in filled with pathos,
filled with pity, we feel a tremendous amount of
sympathy with I think both Andromache and Hektor.
And particularly we see the way that Hektor is torn apart
by what he sees as kind of conflicting duties between what
he owes to his city, to his community, which, as
the greatest fighter of the Trojans, he is duty bound to protect them.
Not only as the greatest fighter, but also as the son of the king.
But also to his family, to whom we get a real sense of deep love
and affection.
And this quote here really sums it up.
Andromoche says to Hektor: "I have none but you!
Be merciful! Stay here upon the tower!
Do not bereave your child and widow me!"
And Hektor, in his response says that he is compelled to go
back out and fight, and not so much in recognition of his duty to the
community as on its own but also in his duty to protect Andromache
and their son.
He says: "Not by the Trojans' anguish on that day am I so overborne in mind
"as by your own grief, when some armed Akhaian takes you in tears,
your free life stripped away."
And what he's saying is that he doesn't worry so much about his own death,
as he does worry about what that death will mean for the fate of his city.
He knows that without him as the leader, without him as the greatest fighter,
Troy is doomed.
But that raises a terrible paradox at the heart of Hektor's personal struggle
that we'll see all the way through the poem.
Particularly as we reach the end of Hektor's story in Book 22, a fair ways
from where we are now.
What Hektor struggles with is that he knows that his only
possible course of action as a dutiful Trojan is to go out and fight.
But he also knows that that decision entails eventually
the destruction of Troy, because his fighting probably means his death,
and we as audience members in the poem, probably know if we know
the story of Troy, that that's going to come.
I mean even if we don't know about Hektor's fate, then we know that
Troy will fall.
Troy is going to fall, and Troy is going to fall in some part because
of Hektor.
And so, his duty is also going to entail his destruction
and the destruction of everything that he loves, sooner or later.
But he has, he feels, no other choice.
And, so we see, in this poem, the desperate straits
that the Trojans are put into day after day.
And Andromache is really an extraordinary character
in this regard.
Andromache gives something of her own story, her own autobiography.
We find out that she was someone who lived outside the city, and her
community was the victim of the early phases of the Greek invasion.
And her family was completely destroyed by the Greeks,
that she says: "My father, great Achilles killed, when he besieged and
"plundered Thebe, our high town, citadel, of Kilikians.
"He killed him, but reverent at last in this, did not despoil him.
"Body, gear and weapons forged so handsomely, he burned, and
heaped a barrow over the ashes."
I give you this quote because what I want to say about this book
and what I want to do in the next part, and I look over
the rest of the book and think about its analysis
is look at the ways that what Homer is doing in this book,
by showing us the Trojans, by showing us behind the walls
of the Trojans, by giving us this community who are the defenders,
who are fighting for their survival, wants to show us what the cost
of this war is.
And the cost is partly the human toll, is the deaths of the people who were
involved in it.
Andromache's father.
Andromache's own trauma in seeing the death of her father, and being
forced behind the walls of Troy, out of her home, where she is
solely dependent on Hektor, who himself is faced with
a terrible choice, a terrible duty that he has to face.
But also, there is a social cost. There is a destruction of the things
that make society work.
The rituals, the relationships, the way of being that war destroys,
that it perverts, that it debases, and Homer wants to ask us
if there is anything left in those social relationships
and the very human dignity that it confers.
And what's interesting about this quotation in particular, is that it
ties up both of these things and leaves us lingering.
That Andromache asks, Andromache says:
"My father was killed by Achilles."
Her town was destroyed, her society doesn't exist anymore
in some sense, even though she's a Trojan, she was a part of the smaller
village or town community, Kilikians.
But then she also gives us the detail that Achilles didn't
despoil her father; he didn't subject her father to
the indignity of pillaging his body and leaving him
a naked corpse on the battlefield.
Something held Achilles back, something gave him that
sense of reservation that we'll see in other parts of the book
war does not allow.
So, let's look at the way that Homer leads us through this
ebb and flow of seeing the horrors of war and seeing places
where people can choose a different path, where even though they are
tempted towards violence and destruction, they still might
have something different at their disposal.
So first of all I think it's worth just lingering there, thinking
about the destruction of war and the destruction of social relationships.
Again, we have this idea of just human loss.
The relationships are literally destroyed, because humans die and and that
impacts those around them.
But we also have the kind of desecration of human relationships
as well, the way that categories of relationships, so parent, child
sister, husband, brother, wife, become something entirely
different.
We see that earlier in the book when Hektor first enters the city and
his mother Hecuba, even though he's an adult male, she tends to him
desperately as though a mother would to any child, from a
position of caring, of tenderness, wanting to take care of him,
and Hektor has to kind of shrug that off and say not now, I have other
things to do.
He's also covered with gore from the battlefield.
But we have this funny - I say funny - it's kind of funny almost
"ha ha" but it's curious in that Hektor and Andromache at the
end of their conversation turn to Astyanax, their child, and
this is what happens: "as he said that Hektor held out his arms to
take his baby, but the child squirmed around on the nurse's bosom, and
began to wail, terrified by his father's great war helm -- the flashing bronze,
the crust with horsehair plume, tossed like a living thing at every nod.
His father began laughing, and his mother laughed as well."
So it is a little sweet sequence, and by the way this is one of the very few
moments in the entire "Iliad" where people laugh.
So it's worth paying attention to. But what it's about is that
Astyanax, who's a baby, who's a tiny child, is terrified of his father,
that his father is unrecognizable, as a soldier.
And so that relationship is made impossible in some sense
by what Hektor has to do.
Now the flip side of this is what we see on the Greek side, and we know
that this threat is very real, because outside the city walls we see the
behavior of the Greeks in the first half of the poem, and this is no
place better summed up, than what happens when Menelaus is confronted
by a Trojan who he has at his mercy, and the Trojan attempts to ransom
his life.
He says, if you spare me, you can hold me hostage, my father is fabulously
wealthy, he'll pay you, give you lots of pillage and plunder.
And Agamemnon embarrasses, humiliates his brother, as he is
considering this, and what he says, the king of the Greeks, says
something that is so brutally violent, we can't help but see
what is on the other side of this tender family moment
between Andromache, Hektor, and Astyanax.
He says "what now soft heart." He's saying this to his brother
Menelaus, "were you so kindly served at home by Trojans?"
Referring to the fact that Menelaus' wife Helen was abducted or went
away with the Trojans to Paris.
"Why give a curse for them? Oh, Menelaus, once in our hands
"not one should squirm away from death's hard fall!
"No fugitive, not even the manchild carried in a woman's belly!
"Let them all without distinction perish, every last man of Ilion,
without a tear, without a trace."
And Agamemnon's unbelievable cruelty, his unbelievable violence
which extends all the way to an unborn child, is something that
punctuates that experience of family tenderness we see behind
the walls.
And so, we have these two aspects of violence and war that Homer wants to
show us, we see the actual destruction of relationships, we see in the
relationship between Hektor and Astyanax his son, the way that
a relationship that in peacetime would have ben experienced with intimacy
joy, tenderness, is twisted into something that for Astyanax is terrifying.
But then also we see something in the way that these relationships
and the social rituals that undergird them are impacted,
and the book opens with this character called Axylos Teuthranides, that's a bit
of a mouthful, and it describes his death via the hands of the Greek hero Ajax,
or Aias.
So I'm going to read this to you: "Aias then slew Axylos Teuthranides
from the walled town Arisbe. A rich man and kindly, he befriended
all who passed his manor by the road. But none of those could come between him
and destruction now, as the Akhaian killed him, killing with him Kalesios,
his aide and charioteer -- leaving two men dead to be choked
in earth."
And, I'll lead you to the interview with Professor Palaima in this because
he talks a lot about this and how fundamental it is.
Because what it draws attention to just on the surface of the poem
is this character who's described in very flattering terms.
He's kindly, he befriended all who passed his manor by the road.
But none of them could help him now. No one was available.
Or maybe if they were, they were too terrified to stand in between
him and his death.
And what it particularly refers to is a Greek concept of friendship that
is maybe little bit obscured in translation, but this idea of
he befriended all who passed his manor.
Everyone who came past, he made friends with.
This refers in Greek to the concept of Xenia, of being a Xenos, which is the idea
of friendship towards strangers, towards people you don't know.
We get the English word from it Xenophobia, which is a Greek phrase
meaning the fear of strangers.
But it's actually more than that, because it ties up not only the idea of
the relationship between insiders and outsiders, but the very possibility
of host and guest relationships. We can translate Xenophobia
as something also like "guest-fear," or "host-fear"
or "hospitality-fear."
Because it ties up all of these ideas, this fundamental, social mechanism
in antiquity, in the Greek world, that you owe to people you don't know
an elementary level of respect, dignity and hospitality.
And this character cultivated that throughout his life, but in war,
it was absolutely meaningless, and the possibility of hospitality
towards a stranger as a social good is completely wiped out.
So, we have three ways in which the war destroys society.
Again, summing up, we have the destruction of people,
the destruction of, the perversion of relationships,
and the destruction of the possibility of quasi-ritualized social interaction
under this idea of guest-friendship.
So, you might look at this, and think, "Well this is terribly pessimistic.
This is miserable," and think that what Homer's presenting to us
is the idea of war, not only as something that is destructive
in its own terms, but maybe even is terrifying because it reveals
what we fear we are, that stripped of all of our social inhibitions,
social relationships, and customs, and institutions, there's nothing
but violence and cruelty and destruction.
But there's one other part of this, and I'll leave you with this,
this last little bit of the poem, of Book 6, that's right in the middle,
right at the turning point between when we see the Greek world
and the Trojan world, and that's this interaction between
Diamedes and Glaukus.
Diamedes is a Greek, and he's been infused with the strength
of Athena, so he's rampaging. He's at the apex of his warrior
heroism, and he meets Glaukus, who's a Trojan, and normally Glaukus would
die immediately.
But what happens instead is that Diamedes asks
Glaukus who he is and who his family is, and Glaukus stands out
on the battlefield, he has magnificent armor and Diamedes is curious
about this, so Glaukus tells his story.
And it turns out that he's descended from a hero called Bellerophon.
And he tells the story of Bellerophon, this mythical hero,
who has his own stories that we can read about outside of the "Iliad."
And Diamedes realizes that his ancestors were guest friends
with Bellerophon as well, that they were bound by this institution
of Xenia, that this institution that so terribly failed Axylos
at the beginning of the book, and Diamedes doesn't decide
to violate that, but instead says, well since our ancestors were
bound by this institution, we should not be enemies, but we should
exchange gifts and respect the fact that at one time, our families
were at peace.
So they exchange armor as a sign of this friendship.
And what's interesting is that if Homer had left us with that,
maybe we'd have a different poem, maybe we'd have a poem that
was a little bit optimistic, but even here Homer says something that
is a little bit curious, he says that "both men jumped down to confirm
the pact, taking each other's hands. But Zeus had stolen Glaukus' wits away
the young man gave up golden gear for bronze, took nine bulls' worth
of armor worth a hundred."
And so, he even in this moment where we think maybe there is some hope,
Homer kind of pulls away and says that actually Glaukus was fooled, that he
got really shabby armor in exchange for giving away his really fancy
golden gear.
It's not quite at this level, but in terms of modern warfare, if like Glaukus
gave away his automatic rifle, his automatic weapon and in exchange
got from Diamedes like a pea shooter or water pistol, or something like that.
Like that's the joke, that Homer is trying to say.
And I think that's what's so interesting about this, is that all the way through
the poem, Homer isn't trying to say he's optimistic or pessimistic,
or that he's pro war or anti war.
The war is just a fact of life, but it really falls to us, by showing us
the Greeks and the Trojans, both sides, by showing us
Xenia, its collapse. Guest friendship, its collapse, its restitution.
And also showing in this one particular transaction, that there
is a kind of a twist here too, that Diamedes got away with something
that he wouldn't have done if he hadn't stopped, and we have to
wonder to ourselves, what Homer means by this.
What does it mean that Zeus had stolen Glaukus' wits away?
Does it mean that Glaukus should have stayed and fought?
Probably meeting his death?
Does it mean that Glaukus should have found some other way to
resolve this conflict?
Who knows?
And I think that the point is we get to have our own reactions
to this, and we can have different responses at different points
that we read the poem. It's kind of a mark of where we are.
So I invite you to think about what's your response.
Maybe you just reject Zeus altogether, or maybe Zeus is the fault here.
Maybe Diamedes did establish something meaningful.
And what does that say about us?
How are we reacting to the violence? To the tenderness?
To the comedy? To the possibility of social relationships
existing in some form even amidst all this violence?
So, that's Book 6, I do think it's an extraordinary book.
I do think that the poem would be very different without it.
And if you're interested, I do invite you to contemplate Tom Palaima's
perspective, he's a historian of war, he's a great scholar on the "Iliad"
and of recent representations of war as well.
So, if you are curious, then very much do take a look.
But otherwise, this has been Book 6, and now we'll jump along to Book 9.