Why have some of the most brilliant philosophers of the past centuries returned to ancient Greece for inspiration and insight into human psychology? Two great examples are Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century and Albert Camus in the 20th century. Nietzsche's book The Birth of Tragedy looked at the ancient Greek storytelling and more specifically at Dionysus, the god of passion. that allowed him to critique 2000 years of western rational philosophy and establish himself as one of the most original thinkers of the past 200 years. Albert Camus also looked at the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus to establish a philosophy called absurdism.
So today I will take you back to the ancient Greece to look at the source of all stories. At two of the most important literary works of the last 3000 years. What do they tell us about us? How can these tales shed light on our psychology today? And have we really changed that much when it comes to deeper psychological aspects of our lives?
The ancient Greek storyteller Homer immortalised himself by writing two of the most famous epics in western literature. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey have been two of the most influential books in the west for almost 3000 years. While the Iliad is the epic of the irrational passion where courage is the main fuel in the tank, the Odyssey however is the epic of a rational man who is driven by loyalty to his wife and son.
To put simply, the Iliad is the epic of the physical strength while the Odyssey is the epic of mental endurance. The two epics can give us the picture of before and after when it comes to human agency and rationality. Today I will summarise both and epics, then analyze their major themes and at the end I'll compare the two. So get yourself a glass of wine or goat milk and let's go back a few thousand years in Greek literature. But first, who was Homer?
Whether Homer was a real person or some mythical creature, we know a few things about him. He lived during the 8th century BCE. which is 300-400 years before the famous Greek philosophers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. While Socrates, through Plato's words, praises Homer's poetic skills, he also criticises him for not seeking the truth, arguing that he was not living in reality. For Socrates, concrete truths were found by asking tough questions.
Plato calls Homer not only a great poet who nourishes people's souls, but he also calls him an influential leader, perhaps a spiritual leader in his book The Republic. But Plato is also critical of the influence a poet might have in a society as poetry taps into the human's emotions, not reason. Aristotle calls him a great poet in his book The Poetics.
He also thinks Homer's epics were the pioneers of storytelling that influenced the Greek tragedies and setting a tradition of storytelling in which the story is more important than the narrator or the storyteller. In other words, Homer himself disappears in his own work because he allows his characters to tell their own stories. This gave birth to the Greek tragedies in which the characters were presented on stage to act out their own stories live.
Homer was blind which must have given him extra ability to rely on his poetic words. and sharpen his storytelling memory skills. Throughout history, blind people either massaged people as they relied on their touch or they were storytellers and poets as they relied on their memory. It's highly likely that the Iliad and Odyssey stories existed before Homer, so he was able to memorize and recite them as a travelling poet going from place to place to tell stories and poems. Homer's version of the two epics have endured because of their genius storytelling and poetic power.
The tales must have travelled from an older time when gods and humans lived together, at least in people's imagination. As you will see, the stories have many gods and humans interact quite frequently. As is the case with many epics, as people move from place to place, they take their myths and legends with them. For example, I discussed the Turkic epic of Dede Korkut which is set in modern-day Azerbaijan.
But this story has Uralic and Central Asian origin because the Turkic tribes migrated west and brought the stories with them. The same is true about Beowulf set in Denmark because the people who brought it to England were the Vikings and Danes. So Homer's epics existed in people's imagination and memory for centuries and Homer gave them his own signature poetic fragrance and storytelling flavour.
Homer's Iliad. This story centers on a famous war between the Trojans and the Achaeans or the Greeks. Whether the war was real or not is open to speculation.
Most scholars believe the story is a mythologized version of an actual war between the Bronze Age Greeks and their eastern neighbors, perhaps another Greek tribe or another Indo-European people, who also has Zeus as their god. Today we know the Trojan horse as a metaphor of infiltrating the enemy from within. Some people think that the social media, and TikTok in particular, is a Trojan horse infiltrating the youth to distract them while these companies harvest their data and sell them products and experiences. Anyway, let's go back to the ancient Greece.
So on the one hand, we have Achilles, the greatest Greek hero, and on the other hand, we have Hector, the greatest Trojan hero. We also have other characters such as Odysseus, another Greek hero, Paris, a Trojan prince, many kings as well as many gods. And these epic gods are also participants in the war. While gods have some supernatural power, they still fight, deceive and seduce one another. Now we come to the central question.
Why are these two sides fighting? What is it all about? It's very simple. Throughout human history, the biggest wars were fought over territory or women. The Trojan War was over Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world who was abducted by the Trojan prince, Paris.
But before the abduction and the whole Trojan War, two powerful men were competing to marry Helen. Menelaus, the king of Sparta, and Paris, the Trojan prince, agree to have a duel and the winner gets to marry her. The Spartan king wins. It's all over. That could have been the end of the story, but there's another twist.
Nobody likes a quick duel and most importantly, the female gods think it was too fast. First Aphrodite, a goddess, intervenes and rescues Paris before he is killed by the king of Sparta. Then another two female gods Hera and Athena think this was too quick so they both instigate a full on war. These women are after some excitement.
Some of you dislike Jordan Peterson but he calls women the symbol of chaos and this 3000 year old epic proves his theory because all the female gods believe that band together to prolong the war. I guess it's also in nature that female animals all watch as males fight and the winner gets to mate. Just like a boxing match, you don't want a knockout in the first 10 seconds.
So what do they do? Hera convinces Zeus, the big G, to prolong the wars to the point of utter destruction of the Trojans. Athena triggers a Trojan soldier to shoot an arrow that injures the Spartan king. Just like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Bosnia that triggered the First World War in 1914, this arrow triggers a long and bloody war that goes on for 10 years.
Men fighting men, gods fighting gods, and there is chaos. Homer was sitting at a distance watching the whole thing. I'm kidding.
Homer was blind. The Greeks are united under the command of Agamemnon, the stubborn king of Mycenae, who is also the brother of Menelaus, the king of Sparta. whose wife's abduction by the Trojan prince is at the heart of the conflict. In return, Agamemnon holds captive the daughter of a Trojan priest. Back then, priests had the power to persuade gods to help them out.
The priest first offers money to the Greeks to free his daughter. But Agamemnon refuses, which results in Apollo the god of reason sending out a plague that devastates the Greek army. It's interesting that Apollo is the god who sends the plague. because he is the sensible god of reason. So you could say that science and reason are behind the plague.
That's why the ancient Greek medicine became known a phenomena throughout the world as they could inflict diseases as well as cure them. Achilles, another commander and most importantly the most powerful Greek hero, gathers all the leaders to give in to the demand of the enemy because he wants to end the plague as soon as possible. As a soldier, you can fight the enemy, but you cannot fight an invisible virus. Odysseus the Protector protagonist of Homer's second epic takes the captive lady back to the Trojans and the plague disappears.
But this creates a division within the Greeks when Agamemnon takes a captive belonging to Achilles. Oops. Agamemnon really needs to have a captive. Back then the Greeks were pretty petty. So what does Achilles do?
Not only he refuses to take part in the war, he also goes rogue by trying to sabotage his own site. He prays to his goddess mother to ask the big Greek G, Zeus, to defeat the Greeks to teach Agamemnon a lesson. Oh dear.
Zeus says okay. What? I guess back then gods were pretty easy going.
and listen to people. Also, most likely Zeus fancied Achilles mom, who was a nymph. Who knows? Well, with the help of god Zeus, the Trojans almost decimates the Greeks, and a complete defeat is installed by the heroic deeds of one man, Odysseus, who keeps the morale up among the Greeks. Things get so much worse for the Greeks to the point that Agamemnon, the Greek king, has to apologise to Achilles.
The Greeks desperately want their greatest hero to join the war. But Achilles digs his heels and refuses because he was dishonoured by Agamemnon. Back then, taking a slave was one of the worst sins you could commit against a fellow Greek.
It's not a tantrum, honour was massively important for the Greeks. Meanwhile, a bloody war is raging as Achilles is digging his heels, gods are fighting rival gods and humans are fighting enemy humans and Paris still refuses to return Helen. At one point, Zeus, the big G, orders the gods to stop and let the human sort out among themselves. Like a bunch of kids to see who wins.
The Trojans under Hector's command have the upper hand. The Greek trio of Agamemnon, Diomedes and Odysseus are all wounded. The situation is so dire for the Greeks that even some gods pity them so much that they disobey Zeus'command not to interfere. Hera, the goddess who wanted the utter decimation of the Trojans, does her thing by seducing Zeus to sleep so other gods can help the Greeks. When the big Jesus wakes up, he is furious so he sends Apollo to help the Trojans, who once again takes the upper hand.
The Greeks are pushed back against the wall. Witnessing the Greeks'dire situation, Achilles'buddy Patroclus begs him to stand up and fight. Achilles still refuses, but after a while relents to only allow Patroclus to join in the war wearing Achilles'armour. Patroclus is very successful in driving back the Trojans, destroying their ships, killing Zeus'son who was helping the Trojans, and managing to reach the walls of Troy. Before he can enter the city, Apollo, the god of reason, stops him by removing his power of reasoning which gives Hector the opportunity to kill Patroclus.
This death is an incredibly decisive moment in the Trojan War. It may have started as a war over a lady, but it truly ended with a revenge for man. Achilles'childhood friend, Patroclus. There is a theory that Achilles and Patroclus might have been more than just friends.
According to Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragedies, the two men might have had sexual relationship too. And even Shakespeare alludes to this. Anyhow, his death triggers the Greek hero to rise up into everything to avenge his death.
The death of his best friend enrages the Greek giant Achilles who roars like a lion. The whole battlefield stops for a moment. What is happening?
An earthquake? No, it's Achilles. He's on his feet.
Finally. He is for a revenge. A man's passion can move mountains.
He wants to kill Hector despite his mother, the goddess, warning him that if he does kill the Trojan hero he will also die young. Revenge is such a powerful force. But hang on a second.
Achilles has no armor. He gave it to his friend and when he died, Hector took it. Now first he has to get his armor, revenge his friend's death and save the Greeks.
That's a lot to ask. First Achilles'mother orders another uniform for his son. I mean a new set of armor.
In his shiny new armor, Achilles joins Agamemnon who once again apologizes by offering him lots of gifts. Achilles however is not interested in gifts so he heads towards the Trojans like a madman. He doesn't eat, he doesn't drink, he has one thing in mind, revenge. To make things a little more exciting, Zeus the big god allows gods to join in the war.
So now we have a bunch of gods on either side and a bunch of humans and most importantly the two greatest heroes Achilles and Hector face one another. This is going to be decisive. Achilles kills Trojan soldiers like he is cutting grass.
When the river god tells him to stop, he fights the god himself. The man has gone crazy. Revenge is so powerful. He is advancing like some killing machine.
Nothing can stop him except one man, Hector. Hector has a secret weapon, destiny. According to their fate, if Achilles kills him, he would die soon after.
Before Hector has time to remind Achilles about his fate, he stops him. It's all over. All this build up and the battle is quite swift.
which is a bit anticlimactic. To make sure the whole world knows, Achilles drags Hector's body around until he's forced by God to return it to the Trojans for a proper burial. Achilles, despite avenging his best friend's death, is still devastated in his grief for his best friend.
There's nothing he can do to bring him back. Although the Iliad doesn't talk about Achilles'own death, it was predicted that he would die and the Roman poet Ovid in the Metamorphoses makes it clear. clear that he died in the hands of Paris, the Trojan prince, who stole Helen, which started the whole conflict. Paris shoots an arrow that hits Achilles in the, you guessed it, heel.
Now we have the term Achilles'heel saying that all the strongest people have a weak point. The war began over a woman and ended with a revenge for a man. Analysis of the Iliad.
In the Iliad, one of the most important qualities a man could have is courage. Why? Because courage gives you one of the biggest values anyone would want. Courageous men are respected and respected is a man's main currency.
The true test of a man's courage is to defend his honor or his country's honor. It's during the war that a man can show his bravery. Everyone can talk, but very few can act.
actually show. So the Iliad is about the Greeks waging war over hell and the most beautiful women in the world. Just as male goats lock horn to compete for mating with the females, men go to war over women.
Since we cannot avoid wars as our history since the dawn of time can show us, battlegrounds are where men display their courage in the real world. Showing courage during war is a sure sign to a woman that he is a good candidate for mating. So men fight to earn the respect of other men and women. That's why throughout history and across all cultures, cowardice has been the biggest sin a man could commit. While most of the actions in the epic take place during the stalemate in which neither side has a decisive advantage over the other, the attention shifts to the Greek side's internal problem, an incident of disrespect between the de facto leader Agamemnon and the greatest hero Achilles.
So if all men crave respect, then all men hate to be disrespected. And that's why Achilles refuses to fight even though his country is in danger. Because he was disrespected. For the Greeks, they are mortal humans and immortal gods.
Half god and half human were also mortal. For example, Achilles'mother was a goddess while his father was a dude. For the mortals, how they died was often decided at birth.
For example, it was known that Achilles would die soon after if he killed Hector. And we also know that Hector would be killed by Achilles. Not just that, these heroes were also destined to fight in wars like an innate instinct.
So some men returned home to reproduce and some died in wars. Either way, they made sure their people prospered. It's nature's way the stronger people survive at the expense of the weaker.
Imagine Homer's story on a chessboard. The order goes like this. Gods come first as they are the players who can influence the game. Then come the leaders and heroes, then soldiers and finally their families who wait anxiously to see who wins.
Although gods were capable of changing someone's fate, they sometimes refused to intervene. Instead, they would let fate take its course. It's like a play where the script is written and the characters simply play their roles set beforehand.
God's interference in human affairs can be read as Freudian unconscious telling us that we are not always in control of our actions. Homeric gods were human-like, often rational and sometimes emotional and vengeful. In some battles, gods were the decisive force.
Just as modern warfare, having a robust air force means between winning and losing. So gods were the air force for the ancient Greeks. Fate plays an important role in the epic.
Gods often decide the fate of humans. In other words, the characters have little free will. You could replace god with biology and survival of the tribe or Jungian collective unconscious desire to be a hero. As a result, human actions are not their own. They are predetermined by other forces, gods or their own unconscious.
Or the blind will as Schopenhauer argued. In Schopenhauer's philosophy, we are mostly driven by a blind will. For example, our sexual drive determines a lot of what we do in life.
So the Trojan war was over the chance who gets to mate with the most beautiful woman in the world. Homer's characters are not complete zombies. They can determine some of their actions. But if you dig deeper, most of their actions are controlled.
by emotions or passion. For example, Achilles anger is something he has little control over. He takes revenge because he is furious.
His fury is not his rational thought. So human free will is very limited. Only gods can change the course of an event.
But humans despite trying to challenge gods, they fail to change things completely. There are times when a man is caught between two opposing gods, which shows the fate of the innocent civilians caught between two opposing armies. When there is war, those who engage in war suffer, but also those who have absolutely nothing to do with the war.
So the Homeric gods or perhaps military leaders mythologized. I think Homer's epics must have had a massive influence on the Greek tragedies, one of the pinnacles of world literature and culture. A lot of the themes of tragedies were based on human passions such as pride, revenge, fame, glory, honor, rage, etc. While rational strategies and tactics often win battles in the modern world, In the Iliad, however, most of the decisive moments are often shaped by human passion, either negatively or positively. For example, Agamemnon is a stubborn leader who does everything to keep his honour, often at the cost to his army.
Achilles too refuses to fight because he was dishonoured, only the death of his best friend triggering his own deep passion to take revenge. Throughout history, soldiers who died for their people are honoured. It was no different for the Greeks. Giving your life to defend your people was the highest sacrifice. In his next epic, The Odyssey, Homer tells the story of one of those who survives the Trojan War and returns home, but not without many challenges.
So while the Iliad is about a war, the Odyssey is about a journey home. Homer's Odyssey As we saw in the Iliad, the Trojan war ended when Achilles rose up to revenge his friend's death by killing Hector, the Trojan hero. The Odyssey starts from there. Once the war is over, everyone heads home.
It's like the end of the day in the office, there's a rush hour as people commute home. Everyone disperses. Odyssey, the king of Ithaca, takes a train home to his wife Penelope who is waiting for him. It's a short journey, just a few boat rides and some walking. But no, we are in ancient Greece where gods and goddesses are pretty annoying as they delay his journey so it takes him 10 years to commute back home.
The war lasted 10 years and now 10 years of commute. So Odyssey has been away for 20 years. That's why in English language, the word Odyssey means long grueling journey. But the real question is this, what is happening back home?
Is his wife okay? Well, lots been happening. His wife Penelope and their 20-year-old son Telemachus, who was an infant when he left home, are now swarmed by a bunch of rowdy men. 108 of them to be precise.
What do they want? They are all competing to seduce Penelope and marrying one of them. Not just that, they have taken their rooms in the palace of the absent king, eating his food, drinking his wine, massaging their feet, all the while seducing his wife and sleeping with his maids.
Where is Odysseus? Nobody knows. Some say he is dead, some say he is alive. So his son Telemachus, now a young man himself, embarks on a journey to find his father to come home and restore order in the palace.
With the help of the goddess Athena, who has disguised herself as someone else, Telemachus gets on his boat and heads towards Sparta where he meets the Spartan king Menelaus and his wife Helen, the Helen of Troy as she is the commonly known today, whose abduction had caused the Trojan War. They tell him about their treacherous journey from Troy through Egypt and also tells him that a nymph called Calespo has been keeping his father Odysseus as captive for 7 years. Why?
Because the nymph is in love with him. She offers Odysseus immortality if he marries her. But Odysseus refuses.
He wants to go home to his wife. Here we also learn that the Greek commander Agamemnon was murdered by his own wife and her lover on his way back home. Going to war is one thing, but returning home is a whole different story.
Not many make it home. Finally, after 7 years, smaller gods begged the big Jesus to intervene in order to release Odysseus. Today people contact their embassy, but back then, if you contacted your god, who contacted their god to arrange a prison release?
Finally, Odysseus is free to return to his beloved wife Penelope. He builds a raft and he is excited to be heading home. But his freedom is short lived. Poseidon, the god of sea, the Zeus's own brother, destroys the raft.
Now you might wonder why? Well we later learn that Odysseus's men on their way home stole some cheese and meat from Cyclops, the son of Poseidon. You cannot steal someone's cheese without angering their father who happens to be a god or a mafia boss. As a result Odysseus was cursed to wander for 10 years.
Now you know why his commute was so long. In today's world, men usually get drunk and wander for hours before getting home. Or might get stuck in a strip club captive to some dancers. In the olden days, it was the blue cheese and nymphs who kept men wandering around. After his raft is destroyed, Odysseus swims like crazy and barely makes it alive on shore on an island, where he falls asleep from exhaustion.
And he is naked. He is woken up by a girl who takes him to her parents house where he stays for a few days to recuperate and find a way home. Here he first lies about his identity, but later reveals his true identity and tells his story after the fall of Troy. This part of the epic is narrated by the hero himself and flashbacks. He tells everything, how he and his men escape the Cyclops with the help of Aeolus, the god of wind, who gives them a bag of wind and can help them towards their hometown, Ithaca.
They are very close to their hometown, but unfortunately when Odysseus is asleep, his men thinking the bag contains gold, opens it and the wind turns into a storm that blows them away from Ithaca. They drift from island to island and place to place, meeting all sorts of people from cannibals to witches to six-headed monsters and crazy whirlpools. As a result of all these crazy events, Odysseus loses his men one by one and finally he remains the sole survivor. After hearing his unfortunate tale, his hosts, the Phaeacians, agree to help Odysseus return home.
They offer him some treasure so he can return to his home Ithaca as a hero. In the dead of the night, they take him to a port in Ithaca. But there is a little twist, Odysseus is asleep. When he wakes, the goddess Athena shows up telling him that he is in Ithaca. She also hides his treasure and disguises Odysseus as an old beggar.
He visits one of his friends, a swineherd, where he also meets his son Telemachus who has just returned from Sparta. Odysseus reveals himself to his son. But as he goes to his own house, he still pretends to be a beggar. He has a plan. All his wife's suitors laugh at him.
You smell man. He ignores it and walks to his wife to test her. He tells Penelope that he once knew her husband Odysseus. Penelope still has no idea so she devises a competition among the suitors to find a winner as who is the strongest to string a bow that belonged to Odysseus. The disguised Odysseus also participates and it turns out the old beggar is the only one who manages the task.
Now with his weapon in hand, he strings arrow upon arrow killing the suitors one by one. Then he grabs a sword to finish off all the men. Once the massacre is over, Odysseus reveals his identity to his wife Penelope, by telling her about the olive tree he used to make their bed from. Now the couple are back together after 20 years of separation. And conveniently, the gods make that night last a bit longer than other nights.
So the couple has plenty of time with each other for a happy ending. At the end, Zeus also erases Odysseus'memory of murdering all 112 suitors so he can move on with his life as normal. This divine intervention allows him to remove his post-traumatic stress of committing such violence.
Just imagine killing 112 people in your own house. That must take some mental energy to cope afterwards. Today's psychotherapists help soldiers.
Back then, it was God who healed psychological traumas. Analysis of the Odyssey In the Iliad, Homer talks about the heroes who died in the war. But here in the Odyssey, he shifts his focus on those who survived the war and wanted to go home. Work at the office is done and they want to be home. But it turns out going home is not as easy as it seems.
Often more difficult than the war itself. Those who perished the war were heroes and those who remained alive had to go through many challenges to get back home. You could say that a soldier's fate is never easy in life. You either die in wars or killed on the way home. For example, Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks was killed by his wife and her lover.
Instead of a hero's welcome, he was murdered. The whole of Greece went to war to bring back a woman, during which many men died. That's why men are called expendable sex. From a biological evolutionary perspective, it makes sense.
You only need one man to impregnate hundreds of women. So in essence, you don't need too many men. But you certainly need a lot of women for a society to survive and flourish. That's why in the Iliad, the whole Greece went to war over a woman.
So Homer's epic showed that human culture is regulated in large part by biology. In some way, you could say cultural myths represent something deeper in human psyche which is derived from biology. Odyssey too had to pass many trials and tests to return to his wife, Penelope. He spent ten years on the road. For example, Clispo hides Odysseus for seven years using all sorts of seductive tactics to keep him.
But she ultimately fails. Homer shows that the length a man goes to achieve his goal or reach his destination. Why?
He has a wife. My friend's son Aman goes to fight and does everything to return to his home and kid. Odysseus spends seven years staring at the sea while crying.
Crying an ocean seems apt here. Endurance and suffering. As a result, the psychological toll of having an agency becomes central in the Odyssey. So while courage was an important theme in the Iliad, in the Odyssey, the theme of loyalty becomes very significant.
Odysseus perseveres every challenge or obstacle to get home. home safely. He is no longer judged for his bravery as was the case with Achilles.
He is judged by his ability to return to his wife and son. In the Iliad, the death of a man was important in the survival of the tribe. So individuals are only important if they sacrifice themselves for the greater good of the community.
In the Odyssey, the goddess Calispo offers Odysseus the chance to become immortal, but he refuses. Not only that, she dearly loves him. In And add to that, Odysseus has no idea if his wife Penelope is faithful at all. But despite all that, he remains loyal.
I think the main reason is that he has a child with Penelope, so the urge of a man to stick around is incredibly strong. Even today, the majority of divorces are filed by women, not men. As it turns out, Penelope also remains faithful to Odysseus.
What's interesting in Odyssey is that the man spent 10 years in the war and 10 years wandering through the Greek islands. Some 20 years which is perhaps half of a man's life spent on a single war. Homer shows the price every soldier pays during the war.
Now think of all the wars in human history. There have been thousands of them. Then think of all the men who participated in those wars.
We are talking about millions and millions of men. So the Odyssey is the story of just one of those men. This is not to glorify wars.
War seems to be inevitable. Biology has hardwired us to fight and go to war. As Charles Darwin argued that only the fittest or the most adept can live and procreate, while the weak perish and leave no genetic legacy behind.
It's unlikely that wars will ever stop for as long as humans are around. Maybe it's pessimistic outlook, but think of it this way. Perhaps Homer was looking back at the time when people went to war, thinking he was just a storyteller of a bygone era. But guess what happened since then?
Thousands of more wars happened since Homer. You could say you can't have heroes without conflicts. You can't have stories without conflict. You can't have epics without epic battles.
That's probably the nature of human beings. There are some similarities between the epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey. As in both epics, the heroes travel great lengths, even to the end of the earth, on the island of the dead, and both return home for their legacies.
Gilgamesh fails to find immortality but comes to the realization that his legacy will be his great city he built. Odyssey too arrives home to safeguard his own legacy, his kingdom, his wife and son. While the Iliad and Odyssey supposedly have the same author, they are very different. First, the Iliad is a longer book with 15,000 lines while the sequel, the Odyssey has about 12,000 lines. In Greece however, children read the Odyssey first at a younger age because it doesn't have the violence of the Iliad.
There is a theory that Homer wrote the Iliad when young, full of passion and vigor for war, when one is driven by courage and honor, while he wrote the Odyssey at an older age, when he was full of wisdom, when one thinks about loyalty and legacy more than courage. I should point out that modern Greek speakers cannot fully understand the original epic, so most read in translation of the originals. On the outset, the Iliad is about war and the Odyssey is about a journey back home.
The Iliad is told by an omniscient narrator while parts of Odyssey is told by Odysseus himself. The Iliad is about two peoples or nations at war while the Odyssey is about one man trying to get home. But there are some deeper psychological differences.
One of the biggest difference between the Iliad and Odyssey is the ability to defy your fate. In the Iliad, most of the heroes die a fateful death. In some way you cannot avoid your fate. But in the Odyssey, the hero Odysseus defies all sorts of challenges to get home. And he does.
He has to go through hells and back but he successfully passes. In the Iliad, gods play an important role while in the Odyssey, it is the mortal humans who affect a lot of the actions. While Achilles was a superhero in his strength and sheer physical power as well as his strong ego, Odysseus is another type of superhero who uses his wits and intelligence to make it home despite all odds against him. Even in the Iliad, when we meet Odysseus, he appears a very rational man who is a go-between between the two.
two stubborn men, Agamemnon and Achilles. So you could say that Homer's Iliad is a physical epic, the sheer physical power of fighting in a physical war. While the Odyssey is a mental epic of overcoming mental challenges like being imprisoned, lost at sea, evading enemies and concealing your identity to test others. Achilles born a hero while Odysseus is a more self-made hero. Achilles died because of his physical weakness, his heel.
While Odysseus survives and makes a home because he relies not on his physical power alone but also his wit and intelligence. So the Iliad is a tragic tale of heroes dying either for their honour or foolishness while the Odyssey is a hopeful tale of a man returning to his wife and child. The Greeks too slowly moved away from their tragedies towards a more rational philosophy in the centuries that followed these two epics. It was their rationality that gave the Greeks their supremacy.
for centuries and even today. Western civilization has a massive debt to the Greeks and their rational philosophers. In both epics, a character's physical traits are elaborated by Homer more than their rational thoughts. First, Homer is said to have been blind which makes his own physical characteristic relevant in his life. Therefore, he was perhaps more conscious.
For example, Cyclops, a people, instead of two eyes, had one eye on their forehead, which perhaps symbolizes his own blindness. But there is a deeper issue here. Homer was writing at a time when rational philosophy of the individual, as we know today, didn't exist. In fact, the Greek giants of Socrates who championed rational thinking came centuries later.
So in Homer's epic, he emphasises human passion more than intellect. As Nietzsche said in Greek tragedies which came after Homer, reason and passion balance one another. While later Greek special Socrates ignored passion and solely focused on reason.
setting the Western philosophy to become a rational endeavor. So to be a true hero for the ancient Greeks, one must act with passion. That's precisely what Achilles does, first by refusing to fight due to his hurt pride, and later taking revenge for his friend. But in the Odyssey, things change a bit, where wit and intelligence become far more important than sheer passion. In the Odyssey, even God tells humans not to rely on God or blame God for their actions.
Zeus says, In other words, the focus of responsibility shifts from God to humans. It is time humans take responsibility for their own actions. No longer they can hide behind the excuse of fate or destiny. So while in the Iliad, gods were supreme.
In the Odyssey, the focus shifts to a human's agency and autonomy. So Zeus like a father telling his son to grow up and take responsibility and don't blame gods for their suffering. Today we blame others, often the system for our shortcoming.
So through these two epics, Homer is teaching us that when it comes to life, courage and responsibility are two of the most important qualities a man can have. Thank you for watching.