by Saint Fang

Created on: December 28, 2009

Heroes of Iliad - Past and Present

Everyone has a different idea of what makes someone a hero. Some think that a hero is someone who is brave. Others may say that a hero is someone who protects others. Over the years, the idea of what makes someone a hero has changed. During World War ll, people may have considered soldiers heroes. Of course, during the Vietnam War those who refused to go to war were the heroes. Even different cultures have different ideas of what heroes are. Iliad is a book that represents how the idea of the hero has both changed over time and how the idea is different in Greek culture.

The idea of the hero in Iliad can be represented by analyzing the writer, Homer, and the characters Achilles, Hector, and the Gods.

Usually, to truly understand a book, one needs to understand a bit about the author. Unfortunately, this is close to impossible with Homer. Homer is one of the most mysterious writers in history. As one website says, "Almost nothing is known about Homer, but scholars hypothesize that he was an Ionian Greek (probably from the coast of Asia Minor or one of the adjacent islands), that he was born sometime before 700 b.c., and that he lived in approximately the latter half of the eighth century b.c." (Literary Criticism 2). As the quote says, scholars hypothesize, but no one really knows who Homer was or what his life was like. Much of what is known about him comes from legend, such as his supposed blindness. "According to legend, he was a blind itinerant poet (the Greek word homros means blind man); historians note that singing bards in ancient Greece were often blind and that the legend, therefore, may be based on fact, but that it is also possible that Homer may have lost his sight only late in life, or that his purported blindness was meant to mask his illiteracy" (Literary Criticism 2). The story of the life

of Homer is completely surrounded by myth, legend, and speculation. There has even been some question as to if Homer even existed, saying that there may have been more than one storyteller, therefore more than one "Homer". The speculation that seems to be most popular is that Homer was some kind of storytelling performer, which is how he learned the type of poetry that Iliad is told in. "As a public performer, Homer probably learned to weave together standard epic story threads and descriptions in order to sustain his narrative, relying on mnemonic devices and phrases to fill the natural metrical units of poetic lines"

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