In the Iliad we have vivid accounts of heroic duels between those whose name and fame still resound – like Ajax, Hektor, Agamemnon – and the turning points and horrors of mass fighting; encounters of the pre-eminent fighters on both sides on the battlefield, interleaved with scenes in the camps and home life in Troy citadel: Helen, Paris, Andromache, baby Astyanax.
We will follow those stories – Paris and Helen, Hektor and Andromache, Achilles and Patroklos – but also their victims: the pathos of those whose only fame is their death at the hands of a great warrior – like one who ‘came to fight decked like a girl with gold, though his gold could not save him from sad fate’.
We have both ends of the telescope: the excitement as well as the horror of hand-to-hand, spear-against-spear fighting; battle as seen opportunistically by the pre-eminent fighters and tragically by the bard who records the pathos of young lives lost, who die ‘like an oak, poplar, or towering pine...’, ‘a bullock that mountain herdsmen have roped’ or ‘drooping, like a garden poppy heavy with seed and spring rain’.
These are set against the legendary – and possibly historical -Trojan War, between two very different alliances: Trojan allies called in to defend this important trading city from the Greeks, and of those whom Agamemnon and Menelaus have gathered to reclaim Helen (whom we know as Helen of Troy but was Helen throne princess of Sparta). As allies on both sides remind their leaders, this is not an ideological war, nor is it personal: Trojan allies have no cause to fight the Greeks; Agamemnon’s allies fight because he as commander-in-chief has promised them glory and reward. So, why do they fight? We will look at all kinds of answers to that: those of the Commanders, the heroes’ and – from the comments and framings - of the Narrator.
So, we will read the heroes’ stories and key passages of the Iliad through their layers. For the Trojan war is a place of myth – The Judgment of Paris, Helen of Troy, Great Mycenaean Kings like Agamemnon and Menelaus – of epic warfare but also of tragic encounters in the perspective of those who come after, whose re-tellings are coloured by dark as well as nostalgic, heroic, rose-tinted lenses.
Session titles:
- Heroic Values: in search of ‘immortal fame’
- Troy and Myth - Paris and Helen
- The wrath of Achilles; the deaths of Sarpedon and Patroclus
- Achilles, Hektor and Tragedy
- What is resolved in book 24?
