The Iliad - Anger, Trophies, and Ancestral Messages - Book Report/Review Example

April 8, “The Iliad Anger, Trophies, and Ancestral Messages “The Iliad”, on the surface, seems to be about war and the world of men who fight battles. Although the events cover less than two months, during the 10th and final year of the Trojan War, the poem is actually more about anger, especially how the anger of Achilleus drives certain events (Hopkins 2). The Iliad also gives insight into the roles of women in that period of Greek history. A variety of women are to be found in Homer’s epic. They are visible and three-dimensional, and also angry, no doubt, but used to repressing it. Homer is seemingly unable to see them as anything other than objects of some material value, however. He evidently does not see their humanity and spiritual value, presenting their stories as embroidery on male tales. It is the thesis of this paper that female characters in the Iliad are like trophies, and what they do or say does not affect what happens in any important way. Trophies are awarded for accomplishments and they attest to the competence of the person to whom they were awarded. Trophies are motivators of competition between opponents or groups of opponents. Trophies are useful as launching pads for bragging. Trophies indicate that the trophy holder is a winner, but they give no assessment of how much skill was demonstrated or what the criteria was. Trophies can give a biased picture of the trophy-holder as more than what he/she actually is. Trophies can also become an annoying distraction as they require dusting and polishing, arranging and protecting, all the requirements of object management. Some people buy themselves trophies, so they will look and feel more important and powerful than they really are. Trophies can arouse jealousy in others who have no recognized accomplishments. Trophies come in various levels of quality. Although they usually look elegant, and most often come with a pedestal, some are of a more fragile nature while others last well. Trophies are usually placed in a designated area, such as an enclosed cabinet, a wall of shelves with other trophies, or on a bookcase, and they are kept there in one place, being viewed from a single perspective. These characteristics of trophies, their place and use, apply to the Iliad’s women too. Helen was a top quality trophy. She was intelligent, expressive, self-motivated in spite of tremendous restraints. She was a hated foreigner, inadvertently responsible for the Trojan War and a lot of suffering. She is a captive, possessed object. Being a possessed object was par for the course in the time of the Iliad. Book 1, for example, tells about Khryseis and Briseis. Khryseis is captured in battle by Agamemnon who, finally agrees to return her, for ransom, and as a consolation gift receives Briseis from Achilleus, who had killed her parents and then been gifted with her as a war prize. The two guys get into conflict about how to fairly allocate these women and of course the women are not consulted for their own preferences, which are irrelevant (Hopkins 4). Helen is a descendent of the god Zeus, yet she is a possession without choice when Menelaos and Paris decide to fight a duel over her, with the understanding that the winner gets to take Helen (Roisman). Even royal mother, Queen Hecuba, leads a life that is mostly tearfully responsive to her sons’ and husband’s choices and preferences. Women are possessions, no matter what social class they belong to, no matter how many sons they have given birth to, no matter whose wife they are, no matter if they love and are loved, or not. There are several speeches by Iliad women which show that from Homer’s worldview, however restricted and owned by men, women are filled with praise and admiration for them. One such speech is made by Andromache, (24:725-745) when her husband, Hector died. She notes that the population of their city is grieving, along with profound grieving of his parents, and that she will be inconsolable because he did not die in bed with her, reaching for her with intimate words she could hold onto in her grief. Iliad women are sometimes portrayed as the loving partners of their men. Examples are Andromache and Hector, just mentioned, or Helen who eloped with Paris. Love is a strange concept when applied to a possession. A possession is considered to be inferior to its owner. So if the man claims to love his possession, in this case a woman, it can only be the love he has for an object. An object cannot love back, is not free to love back. She may think she loves him, as he thinks he loves her, but they are not recognized as peers. There is an imbalance of power. It is not about love at all, or it is a case of male narcissism in which the woman serves as a reflective device to support self-love, something a trophy is good for. Partnership, as we think of it in modern society, implies mutuality of love and support, and shared couple-determination. In the case of women in the Iliad, even those who are presented as loving partners lack the mutuality of love, as we know love, are supported through the duty of male protection but suffer profoundly, and do not have the influence on their husbands that would balance out the influence their husbands have on them. Andromache is devoted to her husband and tries, unsuccessfully, to convince Hector not to fight Achilleus, for example. Homer uses female partners to add depth to the men, to show them as good husbands, good fathers, and brave protectors of home and country. So, even partners are a tool of male posturing, like a trophy which has no meaning outside the person who holds it. Helen’s sense of isolation and powerlessness is expressed in her weaving. She is weaving the stories of experience, historical and personal. She does so in total silence. Her communication is without voice, and this shows her as a victim. Weaving is a pastime that is acceptable for a woman in Helen’s society, but I see weaving as a way that Helen endured, moving under and going over, and back under and again over, weaving the continuity of life. By the end of the poem, Helen had moved from the silent expression of her weaving to the public speaker (funeral scene) role, which would imply her empowerment in spite of restraints (Roisman 34). The only women with significant power and influence over men are the goddesses. They exert power and influence over the gods as well. Athena is wise and capable, inspiring Achaean warriors in battle. Hera tricks Zeus. Aphrodite unites Paris and Helen after rescuing Paris. Their influence and interference brings about change and redirection especially in the world of mortals (Evin). But gods and goddesses are ideals, archetypes. Although mortal women are aware of them, and may even share bloodlines with them, they are unable to grab hold of the power of will and independence modeled by goddesses. Trophies fall into categories of those bestowed in honorable recognition of genuine accomplishment, those denoting approximate status (such as Internet gaming trophies earned for sequential levels) and those which are shameful (self-purchased, obtained through cheating, or without authentic meaning). Iliad women also fall into similar categories: that of "honorable gift" (for example, Briseis), wife and mother status (for example, Andromache) and "shameless person" (for example, Helen, who even refers to herself as “wanton”) (Chen). All categories are marginalized in the world of male heroes. The status of being a mother should be worthy of respect but, for women in the Iliad, male parents are respected as fathers and ancestors, but women parents are rarely mentioned, unless they are immortals (Hopkins 3). Women are seen as physically inferior, since they do not distinguish themselves in battle. This makes them socially inferior and worthless as ancestors. Just as trophies are placed in a corner or on shelves, outside the main center of the home, so women, even as mothers, are marginalized. A major factor I believe accounts for women’s marginalization is that the Iliad is about heroes, and heroes are men. They are often the sons of gods or goddesses, yet they themselves are not immortal. On the contrary, they stare death in the face continuously. They know they will die, but they want to distinguish themselves enough that poems and songs will forever memorialize them. This is their path to immortality (Hopkins 4). They want people to remember their strength and courage and big deeds out in the world. Women are not suited, by physicality or by temperament or by ambition, and of course never at all by culture, to undertake immortality through a life of battle. Even if they wanted to, they are confined to the home, mostly, and have no opportunity. They can only wait to see whether their man will come back dead or alive. They can only shed tears over his inevitable death and watch his sons follow in his steps. The loss of protection, incurred by the death of a husband and sons, places the widow at greater risk of rape, enslavement and death. Her grieving is also for herself, the hopelessness of her situation. The trophy is without choice, without a real life. She can never be a hero, and being a hero is all that matters, so she does not matter. Women had a very different sphere of religious practice than the men, and even different deities, all of which was marginalized. One of these practices, seen in the Iliad and lasting long after that time, involved the sacred cries of women. Their worship was noisy in prayer, sacrificial offerings, ritual and ecstatic sacred experience (Kroeger 29). They were so restrained and imprisoned in their daily lives that religion provided a unique escape, in which they vented violent emotions (28). Men, whose religious worship was quieter, more dignified, discriminated severely, even violently, against women’s wild sounds and free body movements (29). “The Iliad” is a poem that actually pre-dates Homer by quite a long time. It was recited over centuries in order to pass on whatever knowledge and understanding was thought necessary for society to function and hold together (Hopkins). Oral tradition is alive and dynamic. Once it is written down, it is frozen and can no longer be adapted to keep up with the times. Some content held constant, of course, whether orally transmitted or read from a written version. For example, the characters involved, who won and who lost the Trojan War, and the heroic deeds comprised content that likely stayed the same over centuries of oral transmittal. This core content was not what is most essential, however. The Iliad used this core content to transmit the traditions, beliefs, rules and values of a society to successive generations. We are not strangers to these traditions, beliefs, rules and values. They are different from ours, yet somehow familiar. The language and rhythm used are part of the ritual performance, the storytelling of the content and meaning being passed on. Through the endless repetition of this epic performance, our ancestors are able to speak with us. On the one hand, they are speaking to us since we listen and cannot discuss it with them. On the other hand, what they speak is incorporated into the center of our consideration, available for our thoughts and adaptation. This is not Homer speaking to us, but those from centuries before him, who spoke to him. What are the messages our ancestors are trying to send? One message is the destructive force of anger and, at the same time, how anger is a catalyst for events. The Iliad shows that through the rage, gore and loss of battle and the example of the anger of Achilleus. To borrow a goddess from Hindu tradition, Kali dances both destruction and creation, and her dance is the change that we experience. Another message is how our lives are in the hands of fate and the capricious movement of forces which, having no rational self-organization, interfere with ours. The gods are natural disasters, the winds of trauma, luck that turns on a whim. We are blind to the next corner we will turn. Yet, flawed as we are by the outcomes of events we are not fully responsible for, and as filled with rage as we are, still we are motivated to defeat the apparent meaningless of it all and make stories out of our lives that are worth the telling. We fight random waste and the battles of life by rising as heroes to the challenge. We accept the inevitability of our death, but we do not settle for mortality. We struggle to transcend mortality with personal style and spirit. Men are, in philosophy, associated with spirit and intellect, while women are associated with the body, emotion and nature. The ancient Greeks, according to what can be understood from “The Iliad” and the few other ancient writings that are preserved, were like most cultures in living that distinction in a concrete way. Men feared the capriciousness of nature, the madness of emotion, and the weakness of the body. Men feared the very distinct power of women who can unpredictably give and withhold life, affirm or castrate, nurture or consume man, and who can use their sacred cries, in worship, to contact supernatural power. Woman was conquered to the full extent possible, for male protection, and imprisoned in a world based on male values. Just as a hunter might mount the head of a slain elk, or make a rug from the skin of a conquered bear, Iliad men made women into trophies. From this mode of organizing culture, women were dehumanized enough to take the edge off of their danger. But this was, and continues to be, a world out of balance. Real strength lies in the fullness of man and the fullness of woman together, not the particularity of any man and any woman, but the fullness of their natural meaning. Without that integration, civilization cannot move ahead appropriately. This message is also clearly contained in “The Iliad”, but is camouflaged by shadows and our own distorting influences. If I were to paint a picture of “The Iliad”, to further illustrate the thesis of this paper, I would have to paint the world of men in bold and vibrant colors, with distinct outlines, depth and movement. I would paint the world of women in gray silhouette, with exaggerated shapes. Their world is seen but not fully felt. There is an anesthetic influence that leaves us numb, in a way, unable to fully grasp women’s experience. We are cut off from them as they have been forcibly cut off from the totality of themselves. Possessions are not human. Trophies cannot change their own location or situation, much less the outcomes of the world that swirls around them. They are hung up to swing, for punishment, and released before death by husbands who claim to love them (Cantarella 91). They cry out to the gods, but the gods are busy with a game of human interference and may or may not pay attention. They weave one day into the next but cannot make sense of the pattern. This reality message was sent to us most likely by a woman. British historian and linguist, Andrew Alby, argues with evidence and speculation that Homer was not the author of “The Iliad”, and that it probably was written down by a woman, about 650 BC., long after Homer’s lifetime. Apparently women have historically been the preservers of oral tradition that we still have documented today (Viegas). It might be that a woman sent us a message, in preserving “The Iliad”. This message is not only about anger but also about the crippling outcome of fear. She would not have been in a position, perhaps, to state this is an outright manner, due to the status and treatment of women in her culture, in those days. Trophies usually have a message on them, if you look closely. Female characters in the Iliad are like trophies, and what they do or say does not affect what happens in any important way. My thesis applies to events in the Iliad, but a message might have reached from beyond the grave, a warning to decode in our time. Works Cited Cantarella, Eva. "Dangling Virgins: Myth, Ritual and the Place of Women in Ancient Greece." Poetics Today (1985): 6(1/2), 91-101. Print. Chen, Rong-nv. "Females in Iliad." Seeking Truth Journal (2008): 3-26. Web. Evin, Kyrille. "Old Vehicle in a Barn." 15 December 2009. Wordpress.com. Web. 8 April 2012. Hopkins, Amanda. "Homer. Iliad 1-6." Transcript of Lecture on the Epic: Tradition Module. University of Warwick: Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, 13 October 2011. Kroeger, Catherine. "The Apostle Paul and the Greco-Roman Cults of Women." Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (March, 1987): 25-38. Print. Lattimore, E, R. (1951), "Introduction" to The Iliad of Homer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Roisman, Hanna. "Helen in the Iliad; Causa Belli and Victim of War: From Silent Weaver to Public Speaker." American Journal of Philology (Spring 2006): 127(1), 1-36. Print. Viegas, Jennifer. "Scholar: Iliad, Odyssey Penned by Woman." 28 August 2006. Discovery News. Web. 8 April 2012. Read More