Myths and Science Fiction Summer Work Assignment: To be turned in when you return to school. Do not cut and paste information from the internet when completing the assignments. Information must be in your own words, thorough and well thought out. Chart must be neatly labeled and typed. 1. Read the information about the Iliad and then create a chronological chart summarizing the events starting with the Pre-story of The Iliad. Include in your chart the people and places involved in the events leading up to the Trojan War Details are important! At the end of your chart add in other details found in the General Information and Background section of the reading material, Including: The dates for the Trojan War. Information about The Iliad including who wrote the Iliad. The three themes of The Iliad. Include important details Use the template below for your chart. Note this is a short version of the chart you will need to add additional rows. Short description of event (include dates if available) Chronological Details of event Important Character (Name) Important details about character Trojan War Dates xxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx The Iliad Details about the Iliad Who Wrote the Iliad Three Themes of the Iliad Details about each theme xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
2. Research the Greek Gods below and for each God record in a chart the following information: God/Goddess Role(eg: God of the Sea) Symbol (there may be more than one) and what do these symbols represent Zeus Hera Poseidon Athena Apollo Artemis Ares Aphrodite Hephaestus Hermes Hades 3 Important Facts General Information for The Iliad. Although attributed to Homer, "The Iliad" is clearly dependent on an older oral tradition and may well have been the collective inheritance of many singer-poets over a long period of time (the historical Fall of Troy is usually dated to around the start of the 12th Century BCE). Homer was probably one of the first generation of authors who were also literate. However, it is by no means certain that Homer himself (if in fact such a man ever really existed) actually wrote down the verses. The Iliad was part of a group of ancient poems known as the "Epic Cycle", most of which are now lost to us, which dealt with the history of the Trojan War and the events surrounding it. Whether or not they were written down, we do know that Homer's poems (along with others in the Epic Cycle ) were recited in later days at festivals and ceremonial occasions by professional singers called "rhapsodes", who beat out the measure with rhythm staffs. The Iliad itself does not cover the early events of the Trojan War, which had been launched ten years before the events described in the poem in order to rescue Helen, the wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, after her abduction by the Trojan prince, Paris. Likewise, the death of Achilles and the eventual fall of Troy are not covered in the poem, and these matters are the subjects of other (non-homeric) "Epic Cycle" poems, which survive only in fragments. The Odyssey, a separate work also by Homer, narrates Odysseus decade-long journey home to Ithaca after the end of the Trojan War. The poem consists of twenty-four scrolls, containing 15,693 lines of dactylic hexameter verse. The entire poem has a formal rhythm that is consistent throughout (making it easier to memorize) and yet varied slightly from line to line (preventing it from being monotonous). The immortal gods and goddesses are portrayed as characters in The Iliad, displaying individuality and will in their actions, but they are also stock religious figures, sometimes allegorical, sometimes psychological, and their relation to humans is extremely complex. They are often used as a way of explaining how or why an event took place, but they are also sometimes used as comic relief from the war, mimicking, parodying and mocking mortals. Indeed, it is often the gods, not the mortals, who seem casual, petty and small-minded. The main theme of the poem is that of war and peace, and the whole poem is essentially a description of war and fighting. There is a sense of horror and futility built into Homer's chronicle, and yet, posed against the viciousness, there is a sense of heroism and glory that adds a glamour to the fighting: Homer appears both to abhor war and to glorify it. Frequent similes tell of the peacetime efforts back home in Greece, and serve as contrasts to the war, reminding us of the human values that are destroyed by fighting, as well as what is worth fighting for.
The concept of heroism, and the honor that results from it, is also one of the major currents running through the poem. Achilles in particular represents the heroic code and his struggle revolves around his belief in an honor system, as opposed to Agamemnon's reliance on royal privilege. But, as fighter after heroic fighter enters the fray in search of honor and is slain before our eyes, the question always remains as to whether their struggle, heroic or not, is really worth the sacrifice. Menin or menis ( anger or wrath ) is the word that opens The Iliad, and one of the major themes of the poem is Achilles coming to terms with his anger and taking responsibility for his actions and emotions. Background The Iliad Troy The trading city called both Ilium and Troy prospered roughly 3500 years ago on the northwestern coast of what is today Turkey. Across the Aegean Sea on the mainland of Greece, and on many of the islands in between, other cities and towns also engaged in sea trade, often in rivalry with Troy. Eventually, somewhere between 1450 and 1250 BC, there was a war (or more probably a series of wars) between the Greek cities and the Trojan cities. Archaeologists have identified Troy with one of the many deteriorated layers of the site of Hissarlik. The archaeological site identified as Troy is called Hisarlık in Turkish, Hissarlik in English. Earliest levels date to about 3000 BC. Level VIIa is the one now usually associated with the Iliad, and it seems to have been sacked by Greeks about 1260 BC or slightly later (although traditional dating of the events of the Iliad preferred a time about 200 years earlier) and finally to have been utterly destroyed about 1100 BC. The site was definitively abandoned only in Roman times (level IX). For present purposes, it is easiest to think of the Trojan War as taking place about 1200 BC. Neither Greeks nor Trojans were organized into a unified state, so these conflicts took the form of clashes between alliances of city-states. We must suspect that these alliances were plagued by constant internal squabbling, crises of leadership, and somewhat unstable membership. Highly romanticized later legends present a unitary war, phrased in terms of the motivations of its human and divine actors, rather than against its economic background. The Pre-story of the Iliad: Helen As ancient sources tell the story, Tyndareus, king of Sparta, was married to a beautiful young woman named Leda. Leda was so beautiful, in fact, that she attracted the attention of Zeus, king of the gods, who visited her in the form of a magnificent if precocious swan. The result of this visit was that Leda laid two eggs, from which various children hatched, including a quite astonishingly gorgeous daughter named Helen and her egg-mate Clytemnestra. Tyndareus, although probably a bit perplexed at all this, tolerantly assumed the role of the children s putative father (making them all Tyndarids, since the Greek suffix -id refers, among other things, to someone s offspring).
Lyda, to everyone s surprise, laid an egg, from which Helen was born. Athenian wine jug, ca 350 BC, Kunsthalle zu Kiel (Kiel) Helen s more-than-human beauty eventually attracted many passionate suitors. As we might expect in a legendary account like this one, the suitors tended to be heads of states and commanders of armies, and they were so especially many and so especially passionate that Tyndareus worried that, if one of them successfully won Helen s hand, war might break out among the losers. Accordingly, before he let Helen pick a husband, he made all the suitors swear to accept her decision, and even to defend her husband should she ever prove unfaithful. When she made her choice, the glad and giddy bridegroom was a certain Menelaus, by suspect coincidence the wealthiest of them, who eventually also became king of Sparta. Paris Meanwhile in Troy King Priam and Queen Hecuba had many sons and daughters, but just before one of these babies was born, the queen dreamed that he would grow up to be a flaming torch and would destroy the city. The dream was taken as a serious omen, and when the child arrived, the king and queen decided that he should be destroyed. But he was so all-fired cute that they hadn t the heart to do this directly, so they decided he should be left to die of exposure on the slopes of a nearby mountain, where his cuteness would not be seen. The unpleasant project was entrusted to a random shepherd. Now the shepherd had no children of his own and reasoned that it was a shame to waste a perfectly good (and cute) baby boy just because of somebody else s silly dream, so he secretly kept the child and raised it as his son. The boy s name was Paris, and he grew up as a shepherd on Mt. Ida, following the model of his stepfather. (The modern Turkish name of the mountain is Kaz Dağ. This is the same mountain on the 1800-meter summit of which the gods were supposed to have watched the Trojan War. In Crete there is another, higher mountain also called Mt. Ida [Modern name: Idhi, 2456 meters] where Zeus was supposed to have been reared.) So Paris grew up tending sheep, composing songs, and being rustically picturesque. Oh yes, he also grew up to be astonishingly handsome. The Judgment of Paris On Mt. Olympus, home of the gods, Zeus had been having an affair with a certain Aegina, much to the consternation of his wife Hera, the queen of all the gods. It became a public scandal when Zeus s dalliance with Aegina resulted in the birth of a son, who was given the name of Aeacus. Aeacus grew up to be an agreeable enough young man, but Hera, who was never easy to get along with even in the best of times, absolutely loathed him, and she saw to it that Aeacus was packed off to rule over an unimportant island off the coast of Attica, which he promptly named after his mother Aegina, infuriating Hera all the more. She sent a plague and killed off the population (except for Aeacus himself, who, as the son of Zeus, was immune to plagues). Aeacus, undismayed, prayed to his father Zeus for a new population to rule, as numerous as the ants of the local sacred grove. Zeus, either in one of his literalistic moods or perhaps a bit inattentive, simply converted the ants of the island into people, who were therefore called myrmidons or ant people, from the word myrmix, meaning ant. Warriors from this island are referred to as Myrmidons throughout the Iliad.
Aeacus and his wife had a son named Peleus, who was eventually married to a sea nymph named Thetis. (Peleus and Thetis were later to become the parents of Achilles, the mighty Greek hero of the Iliad, and we shall see Thetis turning up from time to time to whisper in Achilles ear.) The wedding of Aeacus son Peleus to the nymph Thetis was apparently quite an important social function among the godly set, but unfortunately Eris, the goddess of strife and ever a trouble-maker, was not invited. In vengeance, she tossed a golden apple among the guests as a prize for the fairest goddess among them. There were three self-proclaimed candidates, who immediately began squabbling: Hera, queen of the gods, Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, and Athena, the goddess of wisdom. (The quarrel was not queenly, beautiful, or wise, but even goddesses slip up now and again.) It was decided to put the choice to a mortal man (preferably a dazzlingly handsome one) and Zeus accordingly sent them down to Mt. Ida, where they found the appealing Paris innocently tending his sheep. In a scene that would live forever among Western artists under the name The Judgment of Paris, the three beautiful goddesses asked him to choose objectively among them and to say who was the most superlatively magnificent. Each of these goddesses seems to have been a bit insecure about her looks, and all three were quite competitive, so each of them began to offer him bribes to choose her over the other two. Hera, queen of the gods, offered him military power; Athena goddess of wisdom (and war) offered knowledge; and Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, offered the most beautiful woman in the world as his wife. (That woman will, of course, turn out to be Helen.) Paris could not resist the idea of a beautiful wife and accepted Aphrodite s offer, leaving Hera and Athena furious and set on vengeance. Later Paris was said to have become the lover of a nymph named Oenone [Οινωνη] and to have fathered a son by her. She was quite annoyed when he decided to run off with Helen, and sent their son Chorythus [Κορυθος] to help the Greeks. The lad was even more astonishingly handsome than his father, and Helen fell in love with him on sight. Paris therefore killed him. It is a good story, but it need not detain us here, except to emphasize that Greek myths tended to have untidy boundaries, long after Homer, Greeks and Romans could not stop thinking about the Troy story, and the world eagerly awaits a novel about the life of Chorythus. Paris Returns to Troy In the long pull of mythic history, Hera s hostility to Troy proved particularly devastating. She already hated Trojans because they descended from a certain Dardanus, an illegitimate son of her ever philandering husband Zeus. Furthermore, once Troy was founded, Zeus became infatuated with a very handsome Trojan prince named Ganymede, whom he carried off to be his cup bearer. And of course, Zeus s amorous adventures had been responsible for the birth of Helen, the prize whom Hera s rival Aphrodite offered to Paris. For Hera, there could be nothing good about Troy. In contrast, Aphrodite s delight at being selected by Paris echoes down the centuries in a much later Roman tradition that she became (under her Roman name Venus) the special protector of her son Aeneas, a Trojan who did not perish at Troy, and who became the progenitor of the Roman people, despite the efforts of the ever outraged Hera (whom the Romans called Juno). After judging Aphrodite to be the fairest of the three goddesses, Paris left Mt. Ida and went down into the city of Troy to seek his fortune and decide how to find the most beautiful woman in the world. In Troy his handsome face, engagingly rural manner, and skill at picturesquely rustic games brought him to the royal court, where his origins eventually came to light. The king and queen, pushing aside their misgivings, welcomed back their long lost son, just a wee bit embarrassed at having tried to have such charming lad done in as a baby. Paris Meets Helen After a good spell spent amusing the court ladies of Troy, Paris was sent off with a merchant fleet of his own to see the world and, of course, to look for the wife Aphrodite had promised him. Eventually he heard of a divinely beautiful candidate, none other than Helen, wife of the red-haired Spartan king, Menelaus. With Aphrodite s intervention, and while Menelaus was temporarily away on business, Paris seduced and/or kidnapped Helen and sailed away to Troy. When Menelaus got home he was just as furious at Paris as Hera and Athena had been before.
Paris carries off Helen. French, ca 1580 Regarding women as property, Menelaus clearly blamed Paris rather than Helen, but that may not be quite fair. Ancient authors differ about whether Helen was the poor, hapless victim of godly frivolity (Homer s view) or a roguish coquette who enjoyed toying with men (Hesiod s view, and probably the correct one. But given Aphrodite s tinkering, a good lawyer could probably convince a jury that both of them were acting without knowing what they were doing. In any case, enraged at Paris, Menelaus vowed to take vengeance on him (and, of course, to recover Helen). After all, Tyndareus had made all those many passionate suitors swear to defend her husband s claim to her if it should be challenged, and Paris had clearly challenged it. Menelaus first appealed to his brother, Agamemnon, who just happened to have married Helen s egg-mate Clytemnestra, so he was also Menelaus brother-in-law, and furthermore was one of the suitors who had taken the fatal oath. This made it extremely awkward to refuse. Furthermore, he was the king of Mycenae, a major city at the time, which meant he had resources needed to make war. (So dominant was the city of Mycenae that Late Bronze Age peoples of eastern and southern Greece are today all referred to as Mycenaeans. They referred to themselves and are referred to in the Iliad as Achaeans, Argives, or Danaans, although reasonable translators simplify this by always calling them simply Greeks. The huge, ruined citadel of Mycenae is today one of the major archaeological sites in Greece.) Together Menelaus and Agamemnon made a whirlwind tour of Greek city-states, reminding Helen s former suitors of the oath Tyndareus had made them swear and thus building up an army and fleet of ships to win back Helen and trash Troy. The oath to defend Menelaus against Helen s infidelity probably helped, but the chances are that nobody liked Trojans very well anyway, and a spate of Trojan-bashing probably struck them as a merry romp. Furthermore Troy had been trashed before, and had turned out to be full of treasures, so the expedition promised to be profitable. About the only leader who thought the whole plan was idiotic was Odysseus of Ithaca, who figured Helen couldn t possibly be worth all the fuss. He pretended to be insane in hopes of being left in Greece, but he was tricked into revealing his sanity, and was duly forced to honor his agreement. As he correctly foresaw, once he got mixed up in the war, his life was never to be the same again. Achilles The centaur Chiron teaches the young Achilles. Josiah Wedgwood, ca 1788, Huntington Gallery (Pasadena)
The man who was destined to be the greatest warrior of all the Greeks was Achilles, the son of Peleus and of the sea nymph Thetis, whom we met before when their wedding plans vexed Eris, the goddess of strife. An athletic prodigy, Achilles was taught how to use a bow and arrow by a picturesque centaur named Chiron, a friend of his father Peleus. (Chiron also taught music to the god Apollo, medicine to the physician Asclepius, and martial arts to the hero Jason. Thetis, being a supernatural and foreseeing that her vigorously athletic son was likely to perish should he go to war, hastily sent him off with instructions to dress as a girl and live with the daughters of her friend Lycomedes, king of an island called Scyros, to the east of Euboea, which was pretty much the middle of nowhere. However, the wily Odysseus, king of Ithaca, who himself had been dragged reluctantly into the war, decided to share the honor, and traveled to Scyros, where he disguised himself as a merchant and went to King Lycomedes palace. Nobody here but us girls! they all shouted (Achilles in his best falsetto). Achilles is tricked into shedding his female disguise. Louis Gauffier, 1791, National Museum (Stockholm) The merchant Odysseus offered them jewelry and elegant garments, but also a shield and spear. Then, by a carefully contrived coincidence, a war trumpet suddenly blew, and Achilles, caught off guard, revealed his impressive masculinity by unthinkingly casting off his woman s garb and grabbing the implements of war. It is implausible that he had been fooling anybody anyway, but thus clearly exposed, he was immediately drafted for the war by Odysseus. The whole business of hiding in drag among Lycomedes daughters was occasionally used by his fellow soldiers to mock Achilles, and has been an event of interest to artists ever since. The War The Greek forces used the port of Aulis as a gathering point. However, ill winds prevented their leaving the harbor. Divination revealed that Agamemnon, the Greek leader, had offended the goddess Artemis. (Sources vary on just how drunken boasting seems to have been involved.) The goddess demanded the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia if the ships were to leave. Iphigenia was sent for with the false promise that she was to be wed to the studly Achilles. On her arrival she was duly sacrificed, despite Agamemnon s regret that duty required this of him. (An alternative version of the story has her rescued when Artemis substitutes a deer for her and makes her a priestess at a distant shrine.) The Greek forces, after raiding, marauding, and plundering many a Trojan ally or other hapless settlement en route (including Mysia, which was an ally of theirs but which they inattentively mistook for Troy), managed to secure the offshore island of Tenedos when Achilles slew king Tenes. (This was a bad idea, since Tenes was a son of the god Apollo, who remained annoyed with Achilles throughout the Iliad.) They landed eventually on the shores of Ilium opposite it, and threw up a great wall of earth as a shelter for their camp. Behind this wall, close to the boats, they built themselves a village of huts, where they ended up living for ten long years as they tried to sack Troy while the Trojans tried to burn them in their boats. First one side and then the other had victories on the flat Plain of Ilium between the town and the Greek camp. Homer s Iliad, probably written sometime about 800 BC or a little after (so four or five hundred years later), is set in the ninth year of war. At the point where Homer s story opens, the Trojans have still never quite managed to force the Greeks out to sea (preferably in a violent storm), and the Greeks have never quite succeeded in their plans to storm their way inside Troy, slit Paris from his guggle to his zatch, grab Helen, take all the money, and leave the city a smoldering heap with no commercial future. And everybody on both sides is quite tired of the whole project and inclined to be a bit testy about it.
And thus begins one of the greatest stories in the history of world literature. Article by: Jordan, David K. "1. Before the Iliad Begins." Jordan: A Beginner's Guide to the Iliad (1). UCSD, 16 Mar. 2008. Web. 05 May 2016.