Sure, the moral evaluations and psychology of our world and Homer's (and Euripides' and Shakespeare's) all differ -- E.R. Dodds and W.D.H. Adkins and most recently and effectively (to my thinking) Bernard Williams all make this point in various ways wrt to the Greeks. But while it can't hurt to try to grasp what the Iliad meant to its audience or how they saw Achilleus, it also can't hurt to reinterpret the story through our own moral and psychological prism -- as Euripides and Shakespeare did, for example. Or to do that to the Iliad itself narrowly construed as a text. We can attempt to engage in Verstehen, empathetic understanding, without abandoning our our perspective and values, as if indeed we could abandon our own perspective and values. (I leave aside the issue of the possibility of changing them.)
Doing this, we can see that Achilleus' might, greed for glory, easily injured pride, arrogance, sulkiness, selfishness, childishness, and magnanimity to the father of his defeated foe are part of an ethos where a warrior's virtues were what mattered; likewise Odysseus' loose way with the truth and his clever duplicity. But even there it part of the greatness of Homer than he can step far enough back from the values that his audience probably actually espoused, admiring A & O, to present an alternative, or several. "If you are very strong, that is the gift of the Gods," Agamemnon says to Achilleus in their first dispute -- in a sentence repudiating the entire Homeric ethic. And Hektor is a real alternative image of the Homeric hero, a genuinely tragic figure touched with real nobility throughout, and not just a moment of it in book 24. Or the critique of the war he puts in the mouth of Thersites, who is beaten up and laughed at for his pains, but which is repeated and taken more seriously frequently throughout the story, e.g., when Menelaus and Paris attempt single combat to settle things.
Btw, Hektor knows that he is going to die as certainly as Achilleus does -- see his discussion with Andromache in Book VI:
http://www.online-literature.com/view.php/iliad/5?term=andromache
Well do I know that the day will surely come when mighty Ilius shall be destroyed with Priam and Priam's people, but I grieve for none of these--not even for Hecuba, nor King Priam, nor for my brothers many and brave who may fall in the dust before their foes--for none of these do I grieve as for yourself when the day shall come on which some one of the Achaeans shall rob you for ever of your freedom, and bear you weeping away. It may be that you will have to ply the loom in Argos at the bidding of a mistress, or to fetch water from the springs Messeis or Hypereia, treated brutally by some cruel task-master; then will one say who sees you weeping, 'She was wife to Hector, the bravest warrior among the Trojans during the war before Ilius.' On this your tears will break forth anew for him who would have put away the day of captivity from you. May I lie dead under the barrow that is heaped over my body ere I hear your cry as they carry you into bondage.
(Robert Fagle's translation, which I have made into prose for readability.)
Achilleus is incapable of this sort of empathy -- probably ever, his decent treatment of Priam is more in the nature of what an honorable man does and the recognition that it would bring him no glory to kill an old man unless he's actually engaged in sacking the city.
I think you a dead wrong about the impossibility of attributing character or motives to the characters of the Illiad and the Odyssey. Williams is good on this in taking apart similar claimed by Bruno Snell, pointing out that the characters do this all the time. Paris is cowardly, self-satisfied, and lustful; Hektor is noble, loyal, empathetic; Achilleus is as I have described him -- and they all act for motives. We can easily answer the question, Why does Achilleus return to the fight? (Because he wants revenge for Patroklos.) Hektor, near the passage above, explains why _he_ returns to the fight (what would people think? Besides, the men need me.) These are not, of course, 19th century bourgeois individuals in a novel by Dickens or Jane Austen or Tolstoi or Balzac. Their social world, values, motives and character are different from ours. But that doesn't mean they don't exist.
--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> 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."
>
> ---
>
> 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
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