Homer's Iliad by Elton Barker

Hello my name is Elton Barker I'm a Reader in Classical Studies here at The Open University. You may have heard about Helen of Troy or the Trojan Horse or Achilles' heel. All of these references come from an Ancient Greek poem called Homer's Iliad and it's written down about the 7th 6th century BCE and is really the authority not only for this conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans but also for Ancient Greek values relating to heroism to aspects of fame to glory, essentially giving us a kind of a blueprint for how we should be behaving as proper Greeks. But what interests me is not so much those authority aspects as to thinking about how Homer pitched his tale to his audience. How he spun, if you like, his version of the Troy story and I'm gonna give one example or kind of give you a way in to think about the kind of radical aspect of Homer's Iliad and that's as you might want, is to start with the beginning. So, in his opening seven lines Homer introduces his tale. It's if you like a trail like one still uses for films for example . In this trail he tells us what the subject is going to be, that's going to be the wrath of Achilles, the anger of Achilles. Fair enough that's a good epic, you know a good epic subject. But if anger leads the deaths of heroes, which is maybe not what we expecting, maybe we're expecting his tale to be about the glory of people fighting and winning fame but worse than this, it's the death they're not just any heroes, but the Greeks themselves. So Homer instantly introduces a problem here between telling us about this anger of Achilles the great Greek hero and the fact this anger leads to the deaths of his own men. What's the issue here? What's the problem here? What can we learn from this beginning? Well I think one thing that's really striking is that Homer's setting up his Troy story to be a tail, not so much about this conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans, although we do get that, but it's going to be a conflict is going to explore internal relations between the Greeks themselves, so internal conflict. And that instantly makes the whole issue of conflict much more complicated because it now implicates us, the Greeks, into thinking about how conflict works out and how to resolve conflict. Now if you want to learn more, please do come along to The Open University where there's a module on this subject called A229 where you can learn more about Homer's Iliad and more about ancient Greek society