Critical Quotes Flashcards
Barratt, the Homeric similie
But in the similes the materials are all taken from the listener’s own experience, and the appeal is to the associative, rather than the creative, imagination, which is more easily stimulated, and requires less mental effort.’
‘poeticises the action, adds the element of beauty’
McKeon
‘the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles reflects the tension between the inherited honour of the aristoi…and the more individualised honour of arete’
Solon’s reforms complicated loyalty to birth vs polis (due to basis of citizenship being wealth not birth)
White - organisation of society
‘the community of Achaean warrior-chiefs is one of equals: it works by a politics not of authority but of negotiation and persuasion; it is organized not legally but rhetorically, by a set of conventions through which claims to honor can be made and resisted.’
White - dichotomy
‘The poem is a movement of countering appeals, none of which is discounted or trivialized, including both the impulse to engage in battle and the awareness of its costs. In creating responses of these opposed kinds, one after the other, the poet puts the reader in a position where no single response can work for him’
But none of the characters share the value of equality of life? [Dispute]
White - Priam and Achilles
‘The relationship between Priam and Achilles at the end offers, at last, the standard by which the heroic culture is judged and found impossible’
White - development of meaning
The poem does not operate as a string of unconnected appeals from the bad to the good but as a process of statement and counterstatement, a series of appeals and qualifications by which one event or statement or attitude is placed in a context of others, and it is through the relationships so established that the poem gives meaning to its material.’
Snell - honour
once ‘honour is destroyed the moral existence of the loser collapses’
Taplin - Achilles’ shield
Usually shows a scene of peace - ‘showing him, and us, a proper re-established oikos to contrast’
Bolgar
‘lay an understandable emphasis on those traits which the pictured past shared with the emergent civilisation of the polis, on the popular assembly, the interplay of prestige and eloquence, and the reasoned exploitation of practical possibilities…specifically primitive themes…are depicted with a slightly cynical exuberance in which the absence of belief is manifest’
Finlay - myth
Notes that myths were actually believed, as ‘vicarious experience’
Weil
‘‘The true hero, the true subject matter, the center of the Iliad is force.’
Mondi - the sceptre
Symbolises Zeus’ thunderbolt on earth
Finlay - the sceptre
Suggests it has a protective function - protecting the speaker if others disagreed with their speech
Gieseke - Achilles’ development
‘The Achilles who emerges at the close of the poem is an individual suited to be a leading citizen in the sort of social order that he has until then uncomprehendingly carried with him on his shield’
Prominence of city on the shield points to the signficance of the polis in new cultural life
Must grow to become like the family and state-orientated Hector, his foil
Bell - attitudes to gods
‘‘Homer’s gods are thus both the source and the object of humorous scrutiny. We see them as they see mortals, as comical figures in an endless spectacle.’
