Does Homer condemn or glorify war in the Illiad? How?

Answer 1

This is an article by Marc Aronson, which answers your question better than I can be bothered to do so.

"The Iliad is often described as a glorification of war. The vividness and detail of the descriptions-which ribs the spear entered between, what sound it made, a long simile comparing the spurting blood to a freshet in spring-would seem to support this. In a way, The Iliad is the ancestor of those Hollywood movies that switch to slow motion to show shells exploding and bodies flying through the air. It lets us not simply hear or read about battle, but smell and feel and taste it.

But Homer doesn't describe only battle this way; everything is evoked in rich detail: The waves striking the shore, the donning of armor, the flames from the Greeks' cooking fires in the evening. It's for this reason that Homer is such a valuable reporter on Greek life of the period, filling in the sorts of details not found in tombs and middens.

Though Homer praises the martial virtues of strength and courage, The Iliad doesn't resemble an Army recruiting film. Though he flits from earth to Olympus and back to tell his tale, the war is seen largely through an infantryman's clear-sighted eyes. Leaders are foolish, selfish, spiteful. Achilles, the book's and the Greeks' star, is a vain, hot-tempered churl, willing to let his fellow Greeks be slain by the score just to spite Agamemnon, with whom he's feuding. The gods are a curse upon the soldiers, keeping the war simmering for their own ends, breaking truces, feuding above like the generals below.

When a soldier dies in The Iliad, he doesn't ascend to Valhalla in glory. Far from it. His soul journeys down to the underworld, a land of shadows whose inhabitants spend eternity pining for the feel of sunlight, the taste of wine, the sight of their wives and homelands. Homer's standardized description of death makes no mention of honor, courage, justice, self-sacrifice. The phrase is rather, "And darkness covered his eyes," a chilling catch-phrase that never loses its power for me. I would argue that for Homer war is a tragedy-a bloody, unnecessary, disaster foisted upon us, cruelly taking the lives of men of valor before their time.

War for Homer is also a moral mixed bag. Though the Greeks start out as the righteous plaintiffs, soon neither side has a monopoly on virtue. After ten years of fighting, the men can barely remember why they're fighting. The war has assumed a momentum of its own, drawn out by spells of tedium. It was said that only Palamedes's invention of dice from the knucklebones of sheep kept the Greek soldiers from going mad. No glorification there. Rather, The Iliad is the spiritual grandfather of Catch-22, MASH, of Jarhead.

It's this honesty, I think, that has kept The Iliad alive all these years. Propaganda is predictable, one-dimensional. Literature is just the opposite. It's the humanity of the Trojan War story that originally appealed to me. How can you resist a story that starts with a seer advising a pregnant queen to kill her baby when it's born lest it bring ruin upon their city? How can you not keep reading when the king and queen can't bear to kill the child, entrust the deed to a herdsman who leaves the baby on a mountain, then finds it still living five days later, and decides with his wife to raise it in secret, taking a dog's tongue to the king and queen as evidence that the baby is dead? Driving past the Argonaut Motel near my house, I realized that the ancient world still lives. And that accompanying the story with actual newspaper articles paralleling the events described was the perfect way to bring one of our oldest stories into the present."

Answer 2

i'm not constructive we glorify conflict yet we do look to act as in spite of the actuality that its our really selection.We glorify ourselves in each and every case on each and every project we do.we haven't any extra delight than our early generations did really we've a lot less delight in our u . s . and extra delight in being powerfull.we may be able to look back in time to any large u . s . and note their upward thrust and falls got here apon with conflict and if we proceed to police the global we as a u . s . will fall because the romans did-no extra glory no extra delight no extra u . s . a . of america.the major factor of all this isn't that we glorify conflict yet we brush aside communique as means to an end and the further we attempt this different international locations will be extra pissed at us and attack us extra usually

Answer 3

I must have missed that episode of the Simpsons.