Homer’s specificity within the Iliad allows the audience to learn the collective Ancient Greek sense of a collective identity. Homer’s poetry can be considered to a great extent behind why the Ancient Greeks viewed the Trojan War as such a significant historical event. The Trojan War is a significant historical event in the era of Ancient Greece and has been continually mythologised by different cultures to illustrate strength and overcoming adversity. Audiences learn that the Ancient Greeks put a heavy significance on the role of death and the afterlife within their society, especially how the dead are remembered through the living.
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As an allegory, these central ideas are significant in illustrating what the audience learns about the Ancient Greek world from lyric poetry. The audience is shown a dilemma through Achilles as to whether one should aim to live a long and happy life without any reverence for the afterlife or die heroically as a young man and war hero. Audiences are introduced to the heroic archetype Achilles – a central figure to Ancient Greek mythology, who demonstrates the socio-cultural and political attitudes of the Ancient Greeks. Homer’s Iliad not only is revolutionary for the time, through the introduction of the epic poem, but from a modern perspective is influential in illustrating the nature of the archaic Greek world. In other words, in the minds of the Ancient Greeks, while those in the present “hear only rumour,” the stories told from older generations are there to learn from as “nor do we know anything.” Homer tells the audience, “Muses, who have your homes on Olympus – for you are goddesses, and ever-present, and know all things, and we hear only rumour, nor do we know anything.” In this long passage in the Iliad the argument is illustrated that through the Muses one could preserve the actions of the past. We know this because the Iliad was copied down centuries after Homer’s death it had become so memorable that people brought the stories down through generations until it was written down between 750 BC and 700 BC (though the events of the Trojan War depicted in Homer’s epic originate from the Bronze Age). Homer’s argument was through an “inspiration of the Muses,” who were the daughters of Memory, and said that poetry can save the memories of the past – the people and the events that transpired. As an educator of the people, Homer illustrated his understanding of the influence of playwrights in teaching the polis in a section of the Iliad. His epic poetry illustrates how people, their actions and the past can be remembered, even memorialised. Memory is a significant theme explored in Homer’s Iliad.
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This demonstrates how the Iliad was impactful for so long as a formative text for the Ancient Greeks to be taught socio-cultural customs and beliefs. Plato’s expression illustrates the impact Homer had not only during his time but the long-standing impact his work would garner centuries after his death.
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Plato, a famous Athenian philosopher would later tell us that Homer had gained a reputation as being “the educator of all Greece.” As the main form of Ancient Greek education occurred through the teachings of playwrights, modern audiences can see just how influential the classical figure of Homer was to the Ancient Greeks and how true Plato’s expression is. Undeniably, the most famous and well-preserved poetry from the era was Homer’s, in particular, his Iliad. The archaic lyric poetry is narrative storytelling of heroes and myths and was always created with the purpose of teaching morals and beliefs to society. However, the most influential are arguably the archaic methods of storytelling seen in Homer’s epics. Lyra, which came to be known as lyric poetry, has multiple forms. The origins of lyric poetry can be originated to Ancient Greece, being heavily insightful in the modern understanding to the beliefs and customs of the early Greeks. Originally the mythical stories were told orally and later performed by playwrights at the cities’ festivals, until the Ancient Greeks re-discovered the tool of the written word and Homer’s epics quickly became physical texts. Storytelling was a prevalent tradition throughout Ancient Greece.