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Notes on video lecture:
Homer, the Heroic Code, and the Wastage of War
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on August 16, 2015 (go to class or lectures)
Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
vignettes, heroic, Zeus, unnecessary, monotonous, corpses, earnest, Poseidon, bribed, coital, love, unreality, folly, influencing, deaths, atheism, underworld, pathos, gods, work, battlefield, intervene, psychological, artificial, frivolous, fun, Andromache, Hera, genealogy, wastage, end, rarely, comrade, scales, running, encounters
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takes place as a series of individual                     , not has a continuous narrative
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                     for some modern readers
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two warriors engage, one is hit, his limbs collapse, darkness descends, and then we're on to the next engagement
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only once do we get a sense of the sweep of the                       
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when          holds up his golden scales to determine which side should prevail
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the Trojan War comes across to us cumulatively
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we see hundreds of                    of soldiers getting killed
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yet it's as if we see a heap of                piling up as the poem continues
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much seems                      to modern readers
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Aeneas, before engaging in fight with Achilles, delivers a 50-line speech about his                   
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but this doesn't diminish what is highly realistic
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the gods take sides and influence the course of action
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deeply and personally committed to the outcome
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         hates Troy because the Trojan prince Paris denied her the prize in the divine beauty contest between her, Athena, and Aphrodite
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he awarded it to Aphrodite who              him with the promise of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen
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Greek and Trojans all believe in the same         
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the principle shrine in Troy is a sanctuary of Athena
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one might think that this would make the action less real
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but the gods don't constantly                   
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many of their interventions are irrelevant or                       
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Hector and Achilles are fighting
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climactic episode in poem
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Athena disguises herself as a                of Hector to deceive him in the belief that he can win against Achilles
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a way of saying that Hector was not thinking realistically about the situation
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has                            plausibility
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Book 8: Zeus brings up his              to see who will prevail that day
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but he's not actually                        the outcome of the battle
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it doesn't indicate the Zeus is                the show
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it is used to indicate that Achilles absence from the battle field is turning the tide
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for some readers, the presence of the gods in the Iliad adds a layer of                   
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there are moments when the gods appear to be pulling the strings
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Hera comes onto Zeus and makes          to him hidden within a golden cloud on the summit of Mount Ida
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Zeus goes into a post-             slumber and the battle goes in the favor the Greeks
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but this is just Homer having a bit of       , and is expressing a sense of humor
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when Homer invokes divine intervention, he              departs from a human psychology
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one can assume that homer's audience, for the most part, believed in the gods
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there's no evidence of                or agnosticism in Greek society until the second half of the 5th century BCE, nearly 200 years later
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the gods intensify human drama
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immortality is a                    state of being
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if you live forever, nothing matters in the end, because there is no       
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whereas if you're mortal, every moment is deadly               
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in book 1
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Hera and Zeus get into an argument
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resolved in a moment
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the argument mirrors the argument that Achilles and Agamemnon had just had
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results in the              of hundreds of men
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in Book 21
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Apollo refuses to fight with                 
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Apollo pro-Trojan
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Poseidon pro-Greek
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Apollo: "Oh, earth shaker, it would be plain            for me to fight you for the sake of mere mortals, they're like leaves: they flourish, grow warm with life, and then they fade away and die. So let's abandon this quarrel and leave them to fight their own battles." And so they stop. The frivolity of the gods' world emphasizes the direness of human conflict.
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what Homer offers us in the Iliad and the Odyssey is a critique of the              code
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heroic code: winning fame is what life is all about
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the tragedy the unfolds in the course of the Iliad is because of the fact that the heroic code doesn't actually         
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what we get is an emphasis upon the              and the wastage of war and the plight of the innocent victims
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                    , Hector's wife
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Priam, Hector's father
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it turns into survival at any price, and prefers to accept degradation in order to survive
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Achilles he can choose his destiny
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1. have a long life and die unremembered
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2. have a brief life and be remembered forever
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he chooses the latter
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when Odysseus meets him in the                     , it's clear that Achilles regrets his decision, "I'd rather be working for someone else", i.e. someone working as some with no social status whatsoever
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the                of war is Homer's central message

Spelling Corrections:

geneology ⇒ genealogy
absense ⇒ absence

Ideas and Concepts:

On the difference between gods and men, via this morning's Trojan War class: "Immortality is a frivolous state of being. If you live forever, nothing matters in the end, because there is no end, whereas if you're mortal, every moment is deadly earnest. We see this concept come to the forefront in Book 21 when Apollo refuses to fight with Poseidon. Apollo, pro-Trojan, says to Poseidon, pro-Greek:"Oh, Earth Shaker, it would be a folly for me to fight you for the sake of mere mortals. They are like leaves:they flourish, grow warm with life, and then they fade away and die. So let's abandon this quarrel and leave them to fight their own battles." And with that, these two deities simply drop their quarrel:the frivolity of the gods' world emphasizing the direness of human conflict."
On the incongruency of space program names via this morning's Trojan War class: "Why were the NASA missions to the Moon called the 'Apollo missions' when, in Greek mythology, Apollo is the God of the sun, while his twin sister Artemis is the goddess of the moon? There doesn't seem to be a very deep mythological reason for this. The Apollo name was decided in 1960 by a committee at the Lewis Research Center, where the largest parts of whole program were planned. Specifically the name was conceived by the director of the center, Dr. Abe Silverstein, in early 1960, because he thought the image of Apollo riding his chariot across the Sun was appropriate to the grand scale of the proposed program. Shortly before his death in 2001, when he was asked for the reason why he chose Apollo as the name in an interview with the New York Times he replied with 'No specific reason for it, it was just an attractive name."
Background of the Trojan War
Was the Trojan War a Historical Event?
How Was the Iliad Poem Born?
The Homeric Question and the Trojan War
The Structure of the Iliad
Homer, the Heroic Code, and the Wastage of War
The Warrior's Experience of War