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If you were to ask a Greek of the fifth
century BC to describe the heroic age of
his culture and civilization he would be
describing to you an age which preceded
him by at least five or six hundred
years and he would describe the heroic
age as an age of warriors, soldiers who
fought for material possessions, fought
for their fame and glory and fought so
that their name might be remembered for
all generations. Now many of those
concepts are rather alien to our culture
nowadays and some of them are even tad
repugnant that you would fight for
material things and for your fame and glory. Even though these
men are famous we remember their names
it's kind of fuzzy as to what they
actually did, what specific battles they
fought in. But if we were to ask a
reasonably well educated audience in
what battle did Achilles and Hector
fight in? In what war was clever
Odysseus involved? What war was started
off by the abduction of a Greek princess
and what war involved a great wooden
horse? And everybody would know it's the
Trojan War. So we have a war that is
three thousand years old and even to a
mildly educated audience they know that
the players the characters the Warriors
but we get closer and closer in history
and things become vague. How is it that
Troy and the Trojan War are so famous?
You might say it's because Troy was a
famous city, a great city, but in fact it
wasn't. You could walk from one end of
the Citadel to Troy in under two minutes.
It's a very small Citadel. Now there's a
great Lower City but the Citadel is
small. You might say well it's the length
of the war. Even if we allow for poetic
exaggeration that the war lasted for ten
years,
so what? Athens and Sparta were engaged
in a war for twice as long as that.
We have in western history the 30 Years
War, the Hundred Years War. Why should a
ten year war be so important. You could
say well maybe the Trojan War changed
the course of history.
Hardly. How about the size of the armies?
even if we allow again for poetic
exaggeration that Helen's face launched a
thousand ships, that pales in comparison
to the size of the armies that the
Assyrians and the Egyptians at the same
time were fielding. So if none of these
factors account for Troy's fame what
actually does? Well rather than make you
wait until the last lecture for the
answer we'll find the answer in the
words of Alexander the Great. After one
of his many battles in which he was
victorious he was as usual sulking and
pouting in his tent and one of his
companions asked him the reason for this
morose behavior and Alexander said had
he a man like Homer to celebrate his
deeds his name would live forever like
that of Achilles. In other words the
reason Troy is famous is because of the
man who sang about it and the book or
the poem that he composed. Homer and the
Iliad are what made the fame of Troy.
Homer is of utmost importance in the
history of Greek and Western literature.
Now we're going to leave aside for the
moment the whole question of who Homer
was. We'll talk about that in the last
two classes. But the Iliad is the dawn of
Greek literature and the dawn of Western
literature. It is the Iliad that set the
literary and the civic standards for the
Greeks for hundreds of years. The Iliad
became the classic of Greek literature.
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