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Notes on video lecture:
How Was the Iliad Poem Born?
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on June 10, 2015 (go to class or lectures)


Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
slave, papyrus, 500, unremembered, recovery, literary, bat, Greece, Agememnon, Neoptolemus, Thucydides, backwater, Melos, victory, tragedies, outside, private, administrative, fixed, consequence, Palamedes, seven, generation, entire, sacrifice, forgotten, 10, modern, alive, forgotten, departed, sacked, Dark, 1200, infancy, grief, rest, Herodotus, Priam, Iliad, sixth, insubordinate, achievement, justified, literally, oral, arts, defeated, historical, not
the Iliad
product of an tradition, as with the the Odyssey
composed over years after the events they describe
most scholars believe there is some kernel that got preserved in the memory of the Greeks
was handed down from one to another
maybe the war didn't last years
maybe it didn't involve the Greek world
maybe Achilles was just an officer who caused a lot of trouble and went on a rampage
in any case, the event was sufficiently momentous and traumatic never to be
Mycenaeans
the Greeks who kept the memory of the war were very different from the heroes of Homer's poem
Mycenaean sites and palaces began to be destroyed around BC, about a generation after the fall of Troy
it is unclear way
there was a but it didn't last
it could be that the Mycenaean destruction was done mostly by the Dorians who invaded from the north shortly after the Trojan War
Greeks that composed the poems
when the poems were being composed, Greece had become a cultural
a place of little to other parts of the world
the had virtually died out
little evidence of communication with the world
Linear B, a script that the Myceneeans used for purposes, was forgotten
these Greeks of the Period, so to say, looked back on a former Greece which could send out a huge force to wage a war
"The Trojan War may have had the appeal of an event in which a people is indeed victorious but so exhausted itself in victory that this was its last ."
the story is shaped by this period of decline
had lost all its unity
today we may question the historicity of the Trojan War, but the Ancient Greeks did
wrote history of Persian wars
wrote at history of the Peloponnesian War
saw the poems at their supreme achievement
studied and learned by heart
recited in public and
we have more scraps of Homer preserved on than we have from any other Greek writer
provided the Greeks with an image of the gods but were not religious texts as e.g. the Old Testament texts were for other cultures
first written down in Athens around the middle of the century BCE
from then on the texts of both poems were essentially
a number of surviving, and no doubt many lost Greek , were focused around the theme of the war
Aeschylus [Αἰσχύλος]
Oristia [Ὀρέστεια]
Sophocles
Ajax
chronicles the fate of the warrior Ajax after the events of the , but before the end of the Trojan War
Philoctetes [Φιλοκτήτης]
describes the attempt by and Odysseus to bring the disabled Philoctetes, the master archer, with them to Troy
one of the tragedies of Sophocles to have survived in its complete form
Euripides
Hecuba
takes place after the Trojan War, but before the Greeks have Troy (roughly the same time as The Trojan Women, another play by Euripides)
central figure is Hecuba, wife of King , formerly Queen of the now-fallen city
depicts Hecuba's over the death of her daughter Polyxena, and the revenge she takes for the murder of her youngest son Polydorus
Andromache [Ἀνδρομάχη]
dramatises Andromache's life as a , years after the events of the Trojan War, and her conflict with her master's new wife, Hermione
Trilogy
1. Alexandros
the recognition of the Trojan prince Paris who had been abandoned in by his parents and rediscovered in adulthood
2. Palamedes
Greek mistreatment of their fellow Greek
3. Trojan Women
the fates of the women of Troy after their city has been , their husbands killed, and as their remaining families are about to be taken away as slaves
often considered a commentary on the capture of the Aegean island of and the subsequent slaughter and subjugation of its populace by the Athenians earlier that year
the Greeks could never lay the Trojan War to , as it raised deeply troubling questions about
warfare in general
the treatment of the
returned to questions Homer raised
how can such a war be ?
is the cost of military worth it to the victors?
as Achilles asks: why do young men themselves in war?
it may not be in their mind when they set out for war, but once they see what war really means, that question is going to come up
Trojan War has been an inspiration for Greek writers
Constantine P. Cavafy
Nikos Kazantzakis
Giorgos Seferis
poem: The King of Asini
in Book II of the Iliad there is a catalog of ships
contingents of ships that sailed to Troy under
1186 ships
50 men per ship
60,000 men in total
shouldn't be taken , of course
one contingent came from Asini
Homer said only of it "and Asini" which meant they were part of the war as well
about the search for someone, something long
"Shieldbearer, the sun climbed warring, and from the depths of the cave a startled hit the light as an arrow hits a shield: ‘’Ασíνην τε. . .’Ασíνην τε. . .’. If only that could be the king of Asini we've been searching for so carefully on this acropolis sometimes touching with our fingers his touch upon the stones.
extends out from the Trojan War conquest
to all those who have laid down their lives and are
Vocabulary:
scholion, n. [σχόλιον] grammatical, critical, or explanatory comments which are inserted on the margin of the manuscript of an ancient author ⇒ "A Byzantine scholion to the play Andromache suggests that its first production was staged outside of Athens, though modern scholarship regards this claim as dubious." |
People:
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######################### (1900-1971) [Γεώργιος Σεφεριάδης]
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Spelling Corrections:
Agememnon ⇒ Agamemnon
Myceneeans ⇒ Mycenaeans