Kurt Raaflaub is a professor of Classics at Brown University. His article, titled "Homeric Warriors and Battles: Trying to Resolve Old Problems," gives more insight on how to interpret what we are reading in the Iliad. Specifically whether to take these scenes at face value and as accurate historical depictions or, instead, to view them as a collective memory of "a distant era of greatness" which has been fantastically exaggerated, in it's current form, by the poets of the Archaic Period.
Recall that the Iliad and Odyssey were both written in the Archaic Period (800-490), sometime around 750 BCE, but the events described in these two poems supposedly took place in the Bronze Age (3,000 - 1150 BCE). So that means we're talking a minimum gap of 300 years up to 1200 years. So listening to a poet recite the story of the Iliad would be similar to listening to your great grandfather recite stories about relatives who fought in the Revolutionary War of the United States. However, we have actual artifacts from the Revolutionary War to confirm or discredit these types of memories/stories and we really don't have much from the Early/Middle Bronze Age at all. What we do have does not necessarily confirm these stories, though one Archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, claims to have found the burial of Agamemnon, which we will read more about later.
Enjoy the rest of his article below if you're interested. It's about 14 pages long, including extensive footnotes, and is well written so it should be a quick read.
I was denied access to that link, I eventually found the article, but thought I'd let you know in case anyone else has the same problem...
ReplyDeleteThanks Ken. I found the article through a search of UIUC's Online Journal Catalogue, so it might be easier to just search for the article through the library's website than to use this link. I'll bring some copies tomorrow in case anyone is interested in reading it and couldn't access it.
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