[lbo-talk] BOAN/Illiad

Shane Mage shmage at pipeline.com
Tue Feb 14 14:51:37 PST 2006



>...the
>political ethics and values glorified in the Illiad --
>glory in and through slaughter, mercilessness towards
>the defeated, unjustified anger and selfishness
>(Achilleus' behavior is childish, especially after
>Agamemmnon has promished to make good his losses),
>hierarchy and the mistreatment of commons soldiers who
>talk sense -- Odysseus beats Thersites to the
>laughter of the assembled Achaeans for saying rather
>well exactly the same thing that everybody else thinks
>and says abourt the war, including Achilleus who
>speaks of it in almost exactly the same words -- the
>murder and enslavement of innocents -- are utterly
dreadful. But the work is immortal as well as immoral.

I tend to disagree. The world of the Illiad is not "immoral," it is almost totally *amoral*. Nor is it "glorified" by Homer: the subtext of the work, totally known to its audience, is that this is a *doomed* world, whose (human) protagonists are bound for inglorious death, prolonged suffering, or eternal dishonor. Nevertheless, Homer has a definite moral attitude, shown in the very few instances where his personnages are confronted with a moral choice (ie., between natural subjective inclination and an action recognized as "right"):

-Zeus honors his pledge of neutrality, at the cost of the life

of his beloved son, Sarpedon

-Helen offers to return to Menelaos (and the fate of an adulterous

wife) in order to end the senseless slaughter

-Hektor puts on his armor and goes to what he knows is certain

death at the hands of Akhilleus

-Akhilleus puts aside his angry desire for ultimate revenge and

accedes to the plea of Priam to return the corpse of Hektor for

proper funeral rites.

Shane Mage

"Thunderbolt steers all things...It consents and does not consent to be called Zeus."

Herakleitos of Ephesos



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list