ANT215H5 Lecture 5: ANT215_Lecture 5
Lecture 5: The Homeric Past, The Language of Achilles and The
Heroic Life
• In the course of the Apology, Socrates invokes Homer as an authority.
• He is explaining why he will not give up the task of philosophy which for him
consists in relentlessly examining himself and others. And he points to the example
of Achilles.
• Achilles and Plato speak from radically different points of view
• One should not fear what one does not know about
• For Achilles, the most important thing is to accumulate honour. Overriding
principle of the good life (Socrates rejects this; honour is just like reputation)
The Society
• Iliad: ethnographic document - tells what kind of society was in the events of the
Trojan War
• “The World of Odysseus” by Moses Finley which asks what we can learn about this
ancient society from the Iliad and the Odyssey.
• The society depicted is actually the one between these two periods – what some
classical scholars, including Finley, call the Dark ages.
• a society of individuals who are hierarchically related.
The Poem
• Homer was a bard; a performer of epic poetry
• Formulas in Homeric verse include, for instance, phrases such as:
• eos rhododaktylos ("rosy fingered dawn")
• oinops pontos ("winedark sea")
• These phrases adapted in various ways to with the narrative and grammatical
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