The Iliad Glorifies War. The idea that the Iliad is a 24 book celebration of war is an urban myth that indicates that many people have not read the book or seen the movie! Or worse they have not understood what they have seen or read :-) Alexander the Great was supposed to have carried a copy of the Iliad with him during his youth but I suspect not so much to learn battle strategy as to grapple with the problems that the Iliad poses: how does a man live when death can intervene at any time... what is important in life... what does it mean to be a hero... how does a man live when his fate is preordained? I have included a few quotes below to illustrate some of these points:
1. ';Thetis answered (Achilles) then letting the tears fall: 'Ah me, / my child. Your birth was bitterness. Why did I raise you? / If only you could sit by your ships untroubled, not weeping, / since indeed your lifetime is to be short, of no length. / Now it has befallen that your life must be brief and bitter / beyond all men's.'; Iliad 1: 413-418.
2. ';For I (Hector) know this thing well in my heart, and my mind knows it: / there will come a day when sacred Ilion shall perish / and Priam, and the people of Priam of the strong ash spear. / But it is not so much the pain to come of the Trojans / that troubles me, not even of Priam the king or Hekabe, / not the thought of my brothers who in their numbers and valour / shall drop in the dust under the hands of men who hate them, / as troubles me the thought of you, when some bronze-armoured / Achaian leads you off, taking away your day of liberty, / in tears....'; Iliad 6:447-456.
3. ';Then in turn the shining son of Hippolochos answered: / 'High-hearted son of Tydeus, why ask of my generation? / As in the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity. / The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber / burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning. / So one generation of men will grow while another / dies.'; Iliad 6:144-150.
4. ';Son of Peleus (Achilles), I (Hector) will no longer run from you, as before this / I fled three times around the great city of Priam, and dared not / stand to your onfall. But now my spirit in turn has driven me / to stand and face you. I must take you now, or I must be taken.'; Iliad 22:250-253.Is it true or false that Homer's Illiad seems to glorify war without qualification?
I completely disagree. It is about War, but there is so much more to it than that. It also concentrates on the drama between Achilles and the king, gods and humans, and fate. I didn't get any glorification from war, I got sadness because people lost their sons (and heroes from both sides) for nothing.
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