What do the homeric epics describe

Nor do we have much better luck with Hesiod, except perhaps for whatever the singer says about himself in his own two songs. In the case of Homer, we do not even have this much to start with, at least not in the Iliad or the Odyssey : in neither song does the singer say anything about himself that could be construed as historical information.

It can even be said that there is no evidence for the existence of a Homer - and hardly that much more for the existence of a Hesiod. What we do know for sure, however, is that the Greeks of the Classical period thought of Homer and Hesiod as their first authors, their primary authors. So it is not only for the modern reader that Homer and Hesiod represent the earliest phase of Greek literature.

It is moreover a historical fact that Homer and Hesiod were eventually credited by the ancient Greeks with the very foundation of Greek literature.

Our primary authority for this fact is none other than the so-called Father of History himself, Herodotus, who observes in Scroll II In a traditional society like that of the ancient Greeks, where the very idea of defining the gods is the equivalent of defining the society itself, this observation by Herodotus amounts to a claim that the songs of Homer and Hesiod are the basis of Greek civilization.

Who, then, was Homer? It is no exaggeration to answer that, along with Hesiod, he had become the prime culture hero of Greek civilization in the Classical period of the fifth century and thereafter. It was a common practice of the ancient Greeks to attribute any major achievement of society, even if this achievement may have taken place through a lengthy period of social evolution, to the personal breakthrough of a culture hero who was pictured as having made his monumental contribution in the earliest imaginable era of the culture.

Greek myths about lawgivers, for example, tended to reconstruct these figures, whether or not they really ever existed, as the originators of the sum total of customary law as it evolved through time. The same sort of evolutionary model may well apply to the figure of Homer as an originator of heroic song. The model can even be extended from Homer to Homeric song. There is evidence that a type of story, represented in a wide variety of cultures where the evolution of a song tradition moves slowly ahead in time until it reaches a relatively static phase, reinterprets itself as if it resulted from a single event.

There were many such stories about Homer in ancient Greece, and what matters most is not so much the stories themselves but what they reveal about society's need to account for the evolution of Homeric song.

The internal evidence of the Homeric verses, both in their linguistic development and in their datable references, points to an ongoing evolution of Homeric song embracing a vast stretch of time that lasted perhaps as long as a thousand years, extending from the second millennium BCE. This period culminated in a static phase that lasted about two centuries, framed by a formative stage in the later part of the eighth century BCE, where the epic was taking on its present shape, and a definitive stage, in the middle of the sixth, where the epic reached its final form.

The basic historical fact remains, in any case, that the figure of Homer had become, by the Classical period of the fifth century BCE, a primary culture hero credited with the creation of the Iliad and Od yssey.

Little wonder, then, that so many Greek cities - Athens included - claimed to be his birthplace. Such rivalry for the possession of Homer points to the increasingly widespread refinement of his identity through the cultural significance of Homeric song. Of course the subject of the Iliad is not just the Anger of Achilles in particular and the age of heroes in general.

The Iliad purports to say everything that is worth saying about the Greeks - the Hellenes, as they called themselves in the Classical period. Not that the Iliad calls them Greeks.

The Greeks in this song are a larger-than-life cultural construct of what they imagined themselves to have been in the distant age of heroes. These Greeks are retrojected Greeks, given such alternative Homeric names as Achaeans , Argives , Danaans , all three of which are used interchangeably to refer to these heroic ancestors whose very existence in song is for the Greeks the basis for their own self-definition as a people.

It is as if the Iliad , in mirroring for the Greeks of the present an archetypal image of themselves in the past, served as an autobiography of a people. On the surface these ancestral Greeks of the Iliad are on the offensive, attacking Troy. Underneath the surface, they are on the defensive, trying desperately to ward off the fiery onslaught of Hektor, the leading Trojan hero. At a climactic point of the battle, Hektor shouts out to his men:. With all their ships beached on the shores of the Hellespont, marked for destruction by the threatening fire of Hektor, the ancestral Greeks are vulnerable to nothing short of extinction.

The Iliad makes it quite clear: if their ships burn, the Greeks will never return home, to become the seafaring nation who are the present audience of the Iliad.

In the Iliad , the very survival of this seafaring nation is at stake. But what exactly is this Greek nation? The very idea of nationhood is an incongruity if we apply it to the era when the Iliad and Odyssey took shape. From the eighth through the fifth centuries BCE, the geographical area that we now recognize as ancient Greece was an agglomerate of territories controlled by scores of independent and competing city-states.

Each city-state, or polis , was a social entity unto itself, with its own government, customary laws, religious practices, dialect. The topic of the city-state brings us to the hidden agenda of the Odyssey. The fragmentation of Greece in this era was so pronounced that, looking back, it is hard to find genuine instances of cultural cohesion.

One early example is the Olympic Games; another is the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi; still another, and the most obvious, is the poetic legacy of Homer and Hesiod. The Homeric Iliad and Odyssey together can be viewed as a marvel of cultural synthesis, integrating the diverse institutional heritage of this plurality of city-states, this kaleidoscopic Greek-speaking world, into a unified statement of cultural identity, of civilization.

The cultural universalism of the Iliad and Od yssey can best be appreciated when we consider the extent of the diversity that separated the Greek city-states from each other. Nowhere is this diversity more apparent than in the realm of religious practices. How people worshipped any given god, as we know from the historical evidence of the Classical era and thereafter, differed dramatically from one city-state to another.

Yet the Iliad and Odyssey spoke of the gods in a way that united the varied cultural perceptions and sensitivities of a vast variety of city-states, large and small. The religious dimensions of these gods, with Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, and Apollo in the forefront, were destined to be shaded over by this Homeric process of synthesis, but their divine reality became highlighted as a cultural permanence in the same process.

The modern reader may be struck by what seems on the surface to be a distinctly irreligious attitude of Homeric song towards the gods, but the universal cultural edifice of these gods' lofty abode on Mount Olympus was in fact built up from a diversity of unspoken religious foundations. When Herodotus is saying that Homer and Hesiod, by way of their songs, had given the Greeks their first definitive statement about the gods, he is in effect acknowledging the Olympian synthesis that had been bestowed on civilization by Homeric and Hesiodic song.

It is the history of Greek civilization, then, that the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey define. To say that an epic like the Iliad is about the Greeks and what it is to be a Greek is not far from saying that the Iliad is about Achilles.

We have seen how this hero, as the very first words of the song make clear, is the focal point of the Iliad. Given the importance of the Iliad to the Greeks, we may interpret this single fact to mean that Achilles is also a focal point of Greek civilization.

Just how important he is, however, can be illustrated beyond the testimony of Homeric song. Let us take for example an inherited custom connected with the premier social event for all Greeks, the Olympic Games. We know from ancient sources that the traditional ceremony inaugurating this seasonally recurring pan-Hellenic event centers on Achilles: on an appointed day when the Games are to begin, the local women of Elis, the place where the Olympics were held, fix their gaze on the sun as it sets into the Western horizon - and begin ceremonially to weep for the hero.

The prestige accorded by ancient Greek civilization to the figure of Achilles, and the strong emotional attachment that goes with it, is worthy of our attention especially because modern readers, both men and women, young and old, often find themselves relatively unresponsive to this sullen and darkly brooding hero.

Few today feel empathy for his sorrow, which the hero of the Iliad himself describes as an everlasting one. The modern reader finds it much easier to feel empathy for Hektor, the champion hero of the Trojans, whose heartwrenching farewell to his wife and small son, soon to become his widow and orphan, is often singled out by modern readers as the most memorable scene of the Iliad. For the ancient Greeks as well, we may be sure, the figure of Hektor evoked empathy.

The difference, however, is that for them, the pathos of Hektor resembles most closely the pathos of Achilles himself. Just as Hektor's death evokes the sorrow of unfulfilled promise, even more so does the death of Achilles. While Hektor is the idealized husband and father cut down in his prime, Achilles is the idealized bridegroom, sensual in his heroic beauty and likewise doomed to an untimely death.

In the songs of Sappho, it is Achilles who figures as the ultimate bridegroom. The Iliad, taking its name from Ilium, another name for Troy, concerns the last year of the year siege of Troy, with the central figure being Achilles, the son of Peleus, king of the Myrmidones in modern-day Thessaly. The story focused on Achilles as a warrior and a person, more than on the siege. The first book of the Iliad covers the quarrel between Achilles, the greatest warrior of the Greek army, and Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae.

The anger of Achilles, the leader of the Myrmidons, is directed against Agamemnon and Hector. Chryseis, the daughter of a priest of Apollo, is captured by the Greeks and becomes a prisoner of Achilles.

When this does not come about, the god Apollo sends a plague into the Greek camp, and Agamemnon is forced to return her. In the second book Odysseus has the task of motivating the Greeks, and it includes details on the Greek and the Trojan forces. Fighting begins again in the fourth book and continues in the fifth book. The sixth book introduces Hector, prince of Troy, and adversary of Achilles.

In the seventh book he fights Ajax, and in the eighth book the gods, some of whom are helping the Greeks, and others supporting the Trojans, withdraw from the fighting. In the ninth book Agamemnon tries, and fails, to get Achilles to return to the fight, and the 10th book involves Diomedes and Odysseus on a mission to spy on the Trojan positions at night. The 11th book shows the Trojans scoring a small victory when Paris manages to wound Diomedes, and Achilles decides to use his favorite, Patroclus, in the campaign.

The 12th book marks the Trojans driving the Greeks back to their camp, with Poseidon coming to the aid of the Greeks in the 13th book, and Hera helping Poseidon in the 14th book. At this point Zeus, the king of the gods, stops Poseidon from interfering, and in the 16th book, Patroclus, worried about a possible Greek defeat, borrows the armor of Achilles and leads the Greeks against the Trojans.

The Trojans retreat, but Hector manages to kill Patroclus. The 17th book has the two armies fighting over the body of Patroclus, and the next book covers the grief of Achilles as he hears about the death of Patroclus.

In the 19th book Achilles decides to join the fighting again, if only to avenge the death of his friend, and in the 20th book Achilles goes into the thick of the fighting, encountering Hector in the 21st book.

In the next book the death of Patroclus is avenged when Achilles kills Hector and then ties the body to his chariot and drags it back to the Greek camp. Odyssey The Odyssey is more of a romance than a heroic tragedy. It concerns the attempts that Odysseus or Ulysses, in Latin makes to return to his home on the island of Ithaca and to his wife, Penelope, and son, Telemachus.

Although the term odyssey describes, in English, a long journey, less than half the text is actually concerned with the travels of Odysseus. The Odyssey runs to 12, lines of dactylic hexameter. The first book begins with Odysseus already on his way home from Troy, anxious to get back to Ithaca and see his son.

The second book describes the suitors who want to marry Penelope. They all maintain that her husband is dead and threaten Telemachus, who sets sail for Pylos. In the fourth book King Menelaus tells the boy that Odysseus was stranded in Egypt on his way back from Troy after the war. In the ninth book Odysseus visits the land of the Lotus Eaters and, in perhaps the second-most famous incident in the book, ends up on the island controlled by the Cyclops, who have only one eye.

He composes a poem, which is a reflection of the Homeric gods, their anthropomorphic psychology, their imperfections and their human passions. The poet starts with the image of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the parents of Greek hero Achilles. But soon the elders bring the bad news that Achilles was killed at Troy.

Cavafy is eager to engage in a dialogue about the mechanics of mortality and immortality in the Homeric world. Apollo is the symbol of the deceptive god who represents the unpredictability of human life and death. Thetis, meanwhile, embodies the archetype of a very human mother who tries to strike a balance between her immortal nature and the mortality of her own son.

With the poem Trojans written in and published in Cavafy manages to move beyond Homer and comes closer to the creation of his own poetic universe. The poem is inspired by a famous episode of the Trojan War in the Iliad in which the leader of the Trojans, Hector decides to face the best of the Achaeans, Achilles in a duel outside the walls of Troy. In his poem Achilles and Hector are not anymore the Homeric leaders of the Greeks and the Trojans who gained glory and fame through their battles at Troy.

The poet transforms the Homeric heroes into universal symbols of our mortal life: Hector and the Trojans represent us, the common mortals who are paralysed by the fearful idea of death and try to flee its inevitability.

We humans including Cavafy are the Trojans whose efforts are destined to fail when facing the supernatural force of Achilles, who symbolises the unstoppable reality of death. The walls of Troy symbolise our lives and they contain both individual and collective memories and emotions.

Cavafy in the Trojans has transformed the Trojan War into the war of our lives, the war of survival of humanity against nothingness. Cavafy expresses through the Trojans his own sorrow for the mortal outcome of the human experience. The first version of Ithaca was written in and was entitled Second Odyssey. It was written in and belongs to his philosophical poems inspired by Greek mythology.