Page 90 - Western Civilization A Brief History, Volume I To 1715 9th - Jackson J. Spielvogel

Other important activities occurred in the Dark Age as well. Greece saw a revival of some trade and some economic activity besides agriculture. Iron came into use for the construction of weapons. And at some point in the eighth century B.C.E., the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet to give themselves a new sys- tem of writing. Near the very end of this Dark Age appeared the work of Homer, who has come to be viewed as one of the great poets of all time.
Homer and Homeric Greece
The Iliad and the Odyssey, the great epic poems of early Greece, were based on stories that had been passed down from generation to generation. It is generally assumed that early in the eighth century B.C.E., Homer made use of these oral traditions to compose the Iliad, his epic of the Trojan War. The war was sparked by Paris, a prince of Troy, whose kidnapping of Helen, wife of the king of the Greek state of Sparta, outraged all the Greeks. Under the leadership of the Spartan king’s brother, Agamem- non of Mycenae, the Greeks attacked Troy. Ten years later, the Greeks finally won and sacked the city.
But the Iliad is not so much the story of the war itself as it is the tale of the Greek hero Achilles (uh-KIL- eez) and how the “wrath of Achilles” led to disaster. As is true of all great literature, the Iliad abounds in uni- versal lessons. Underlying them all is the clear message, as one commentator has observed, that “men will still come and go like the generations of leaves in the for- est; that [man] will still be weak, and the gods strong
52 Chapter 3 The Civilization of the Greeks
The Slaying of Hector. This scene from a late fifth-century B.C.E. Athenian vase depicts the final battle between Achilles and the Trojan hero Hector. Achilles is shown lunging forward with his spear to deliver the fatal blow to the Trojan prince, a scene taken from Homer’s Iliad. The Iliad is Homer’s masterpiece and was important to later Greeks as a means of teaching the aristocratic values of courage and honor.
and incalculable; that the quality of a man matters more than his achievement; that violence and reckless- ness will still lead to disaster, and that this will fall on the innocent as well as on the guilty.”1
The Odyssey, Homer’s other masterpiece, is an epic romance that recounts the journeys of a Greek hero named Odysseus (oh-DIS-see-us) after the fall of Troy and his ultimate return to his wife. But there is a larger vision here as well: the testing of the heroic stature of Odysseus until, by both cunning and patience, he pre- vails. In the course of this testing, the underlying moral message is “that virtue is a better policy than vice.”2
Although the Iliad and the Odyssey supposedly deal with the heroes of the Mycenaean age of the thirteenth century B.C.E., many scholars believe that they really describe the social conditions of the Dark Age. According to the Homeric view, Greece was a society based on agri- culture in which a landed warrior-aristocracy controlled much wealth and exercised considerable power. Homer’s world reflects the values of aristocratic heroes.
Homer’s Enduring Importance
This, of course, explains the importance of Homer to later generations of Greeks. Homer did not so much record history as make it. The Greeks regarded the Iliad and the Odyssey as authentic history recorded by one poet, Homer. These masterpieces gave the Greeks an idealized past with a cast of heroes and came to be used as standard texts for the education of generations of Greek males. As one Athenian stated, “My father
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