Chapter NineteenLecture Two

The Trojan WarThe Gathering at Aulis

The Gathering at Aulis

• Menelaus appeals to Agamemnon• Odysseus resists going

– Pretends to be mad– Telemachus– Palamedes

• Calchas says Troy won’t fall without Achilles

More False Starts

• The stories of Achilles’s near invincibility• Thetis, Achilles’ mother, hides him in a

harem• Achilles exposed through the “gifts for the

girls”

The Journey to Troy

The Journey to Troy

• Mysia and Telephus• Telephus gets his wound healed• The sacrifice of Iphigeneia at Aulis

– Clytemnestra brings her because of Agamemnon’s lie that she’s to be married to Achilles

– In some versions a doe is substituted for her at the last minute

Iliad

in the ninth year of the war . . .

The Journey to Troy

• Philoctetes left on Lemnos because of his snake bite– Has the bow and arrows of Heracles and so

will have to be retrieved later in the war• Protesilaus the first Greek killed in the war

Helen on the Wall

Helen on the Wall

• Odysseus and Menelaüs try to negotiate, but to no avail

• Iliad begins not at the beginning of the war but in the tenth year– Not about the Trojan War but about what

happens to the Greeks when Achilles gets angry and leaves the army

Helen on the Wall

• Helen (implausibly) describes the Greek warriors to King Priam– Why should she be doing this only in the tenth

year?

The Anger of Achilles

The Anger of Achilles

• Chryses• Chryseïs• Briseïs• Achilles nearly kills Agamemon, but goes

away when Athena intervenes• Pleads to his mother Thetis to ask Zeus to

make the Greek suffer

The confrontation

• Iliad, 1.68 – • timê and geras

Hector and Andromachê

Hector and Andromachê

• Hector’s scene with his wife Andromachê and their infant son, Astyanax

• This scene, and other such domestic scenes, suggests that Homer was very sympathetic with the fate of Troy and its warriors

Embassy to Achilles

Embassy to Achilles

• After things go badly for the Greeks, Agamemnon repents and sends Ajax, Odysseus and Phoenix to Achilles to try to persuade him to come back

• He rejects their gifts and petition

Embassy to Achilles

• The Greeks are nearly defeated• Achilles allows his friend Patrocles to go

into battle in his armor• Patrocles is killed by Hector

The Death of Hector

The Death of Hector

• Achilles gets new armor• His slaughter is so great that the river

god Scamander takes after Achilles and nearly kills him

• Eventually he kills Hector in single combat

• He abuses the body of Hector

The Death of Hector

• But Achilles relents when Priam visits him and lets him take his body back for burial

• The Iliad ends with a line about the burial of Hector– This is the symbolic end of Achilles’s anger

which started the epic

Homer, Inventor of Plot and Character

Plot and Character

• The Iliad is a story about something – Achilles’s anger – and ends when his anger is released

• Thus it has a plot and isn’t just “one darn thing after another”

• His characters aren’t just action figures; they express their inner selves in action

End