andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
>
> 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,
Two points.
It has been possible for later poets (and novelists) to extract characters from the _Odyssey_ and the _Aeneid_ and put them vigorously to 'work' in different contexts while maintaining some kind of continuity with the "originals." Most appearances of Odysseus in later literature quite clearly link to his character (or to aspects of his character) in the _Odyssey_. This is true for Shakespeare, Tennyson, Joyce, and Pound. For the most glaring contrast, consider how the most elementary 'facts' of the narrative in the Iliad are ignored by Shakespeare in his presentation of Achilles. Wrenching of the story of the Iliad for later uses has from the beginning depended on not just ignoring but aggressively suppressing most of the details of that poem, the whole web of relations and expectations in which the poem's action is embedded. I'll go out on a limb and claim that no later use of Achilles has ever incorporated any even remote recognition of his comparison of Priam to his own father. My reference to 19th century reading of the poem can stand for a whole series of earlier anachronistic uses of it.
On Euripides: His eye is on the current savagery of 5th-century wars. And of course the death of Hecuba is no part of the _Iliad_ but belongs to other accounts of the Trojan cycle. That is, the ripping apart of the Iliad for later literary (and political) purposes begins early. For current purposes I think it fair to condense this as "19th-century reading."
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More on Hector. Hector 'knows' he is going to die -- abstractly! But his death is brought about precisely by his deceiving himself on that point! Though at the final moment it depends also (as the whole action does) on deliberate deception of a mortal by a deity. (Pound paraphrases one exchange between Odysseus and Athene in the Odyssey as Athene saying, "You, a mortal, ask me, a goddess. Nevertheless I shall tell you the truth.")
Elsewhere she says that the reason she likes Odysseus so much is that he is such a good liar. In other words, his lying was a virtue, not a vice, in the world portrayed in the Odyssey. It really is important to remmber that both these poems came several centuries before Plato, and that the kind of questions Socrates asked were inconceivable in the world of the Homeric epics. The Odyssey, among other things, is about kingship; but it is utterly unimaginable that when Telemachus is dining with Helen and Menelaus anyone at the table should suddenly have asked, "What is a King? or -- even more unimaginable -- "What is kingship?" There is a huge gap not only between Homer and us but between Homer and Plato, and I think it worthwhile to try to bridge that gap when we read the homeric epics.
You are correct, of course, earlier in your post of denying that the attribute "atomistic" could be applied to a character in Homer. And that may touch on the greatest imaginative leap that is necessary to read Homer: The individual of the modern world did not exist, and a focus on an individual's "character" or "motives" in the epics is profoundly misleading. (That can be an error, of course, in reading Athenian tragedy and (arguably) even in reading Shakespeare.) It is not Achilles as an isolated individual, existing prior to and autonomously of all social relations, that posits "glory" as that which gives meaning to human life: it is the whole of his world that speaks through him in positing that 'value.' He would not only not be Achilles were he not to aim at glory, he would not _be_!
Carrol