I don't know why you blow off this reading as stupid as opposed to a bit one-sided. Seems plausible to me, except for calling Achilles "atomistic." The poem, itself says as much: Achilles explains that is exactly why he walking out -- not so much because of greed as because he feels slighted, which is unbearable given that he has chosen glory over long life. Agamemnon has a harsher and less sympathetic view, but finally, under pressure of need, grudgingly admits that Achilleus has a point. Odysseus, sent as Ag's emissary, expresses sympathy with Achilleus' pov, but everyone knows that devious-devising Odysseus with say any damn thing to get what he wants.
The appraisal of the Achilleus as a glory-hungry selfish jerk (and Odysseus as two faced liar) is not in fact 19th century, but goes back a long way -- for example to Euripides, see his Hecuba, with Euripides' savage portrayal of the great hero's spirit as insistent on the blood of Hecuba's daughter, and has continued through, for example, Seneca's Trojan women (Achilles is dead but Ulysses is presented as an apparatchik and the dead A's agent, as it were), through Shakespeare's ruthless deconstruction of both characters and Agamemnon too in Troilus and Cressida.
I think that probably since the poem was first sung people saw Hektor as a far more sympathetic character than A; Lattimore talks about this in his in introduction. His story is at least as much about what it is to be human, with its depiction of the way he faces his certain death, the knowledge of the loss of his wife (with whom his relations are far more complex and mature than A's with his "prize," Briseus of the fair cheeks, about whom we mainly learn that A never fucked her as it is natural for men to do with women, and is rather fond of her), and the loss of his (Hektor's) son, parents, and city.
A turns out not to be a total brute; he's an intelligent and cultivated individual; but apart from his overweening pride, willingness to have his comrades slaughtered by Hektor, his running whining to Mommy that he's not get his share of glory, his refusal of Ag's & Od's generous offer to get him back to fighting, the only other person he really cares about is Patroklos. He's respectful and civil to Priam when the old man comes to claim the body of his son, that's his main claim to growth. Hektor was born that grown up. Despite having 50 kids, Hecuba seems to have done a better job teaching her boy to be decent that Thetis, maybe because Thetis spends all of her time under water. (Of course Hecuba did not do so well with Paris.)
I can't agree with your appraisal of the Odyssey either, but I must bill, so more later.
Don't bitch about your age and Greeklessness, I.F. Stone learned Greek hen he was older than you and even wrote a good book about Socrates based on what he'd read.
--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> Gar Lipow wrote:
> >
> > Achilles (in the Illiad) the ultimate
> > atomistic warrior - fighting for personal honor,
> personal gain -
> > walking out on his fellow warriors in the face of
> unfair division of
> > loot.
>
> You don't know a fucking thing about it. You read it
> as though it had
> been written in the 19th c.
>
> > (As much offended pride as disappointed
> greed/lust.)
>
> Utter nonsense!
>
> > Returning
> > to battle to avenge the dealth of his lover. I
> can't help wonder if
> > Homer's Odyssey
>
> The Odyssey is a fine poem, but it is childish in
> comparison to the
> Iliad.
>
> > did not represent a transition in the view of
> heroism
> > - from Achilles to Odyeseus as the perfect
> warrior.
>
> In Achilles Homer enacts humanity's discovery of
> what it means to be
> human.
>
> I read the Iliad -- Lattimore's translation -- to
> each of my three kids
> at about 10 or 11. Nothing, not anything, in prose
> or verse, is the
> equal of the Iliad. The great sadness of my life is
> that I never learned
> Greek and can only read it in translation. See the
> following posts I
> wrote a couple years ago on it.
>
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2004/2004-October/023277.html
>
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2004/2004-October/023300.html
>
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2004/2004-October/023306.html
>
> Carrol
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
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