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It discusses three examples that illustrate intense Greek efforts in the late fifth and fourth centuries to achieve peace by containing endemic inter-communal war and overcoming civil strife (stasis).
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It discusses three examples that illustrate intense Greek...
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Jan 13, 2022 · Irrespective of the historicity of the Greek assault on Troy, the city’s destruction, attested by abundant physical evidence, was part of a wider crisis in the entire Mediterranean and Aegean, where the great Bronze Age civilizations in mainland Greece, on Crete, in Anatolia, all collapsed.
- Journey from War to Peace
- The U-Turn of Book 22
- Is It Athene’s Fault?
- Or Was It Just A Long Time Coming?
- Maybe This Is All Normal?
- The Underlying Darkness of The Final Books
- Is It A “Peacetime” Epic, then?
A surface-level analysis of the Odysseymight present an image of Odysseus as a war hero returning home, with his journey being both a physical one through the – real and imaginary – Mediterranean, and an emotional one as he adjusts from 10 years of fighting on the beaches of Troy to the peaceful outside world. It follows, then, that the first chron...
Over the course of books 5 to 12 of the Odyssey, Odysseus can be seen learning to control his anger and restrain it for the purposes of diplomacy. How, then, does the battle of book 22, in which Odysseus and his allies killed the suitors and subsequently executed the maids, fit into this progression? Odysseus’ growing restraint for his temper, and ...
At this point, it may be pertinent to consider the influence of Odysseus’ patron – Athene, a war goddess - on his actions. Could Odysseus’ violent actions and reluctance to show mercy while on the peaceful Ithaca be the result of Athene’s influence on him? To answer this question, Athene’s advice to Odysseus may be examined, as well as how he acted...
It is difficult to determine the extent of Athene’s influence over Odysseus’ actions in book 22. The next step, therefore, is to look more closely at Odysseus’ behaviour while on his travels, and see if there were signs of this in his other actions, going against the general trend of him becoming less violent. There are a few notable examples, the ...
It is possible that Odysseus’ actions throughout his journey and on Ithaca may have been the result of his inability to leave the wartime state of mind behind him. The next step is to assess the world around him, focusing specifically on Ithaca, and determine if it was acceptable for Odysseus to bring the war back home with him in the way that he d...
The fact that we get to see the suitors in the underworld makes their deaths feel less final. This removal of the finality of death as we see in the Odyssey with the insights we are given into the underworld means that the concept of death has a lot less weight than it does in the Iliad. Outside of Patroclus’ ghost, the Iliadgives no insight into t...
Like many of the arguments presented thus far, it is difficult to definitively say whether the Odysseyis a ‘peacetime’ epic or not. There seems to be a lot of contradictions in where the story seems to be going, and in how it actually concludes. These include such things as the way in which Odysseus seems to be moving away from going into a new pla...
This chapter examines the concept of war and peace in ancient Greece. It explains that the Greek word for war, polemos , often retained the physical resonance of fighting, combat or battle and that the Greeks thought of war as an activity that the gods themselves engaged in and approved of.
It discusses three examples that illustrate intense Greek efforts in the late fifth and fourth centuries to achieve peace by containing endemic inter-communal war and overcoming civil strife...
Kurt Raaflaub addresses ancient Greece within ‘Greek Concepts and Theories of Peace’ (122-57). From the start of Greek literature, the Iliad , he postulates that the Greeks had ‘developed procedures to … avoid war and resolve conflicts peacefully‘ (125), though they were not always successful.
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discourse on peace pervade virtually all extant literature of the period. For my present purposes, I take the existence of this widespread Greek discourse on peace for granted. I want to get beyond its basic manifestations (laments about war and desire for peace) and explore its conceptual, theo-retical, and systematic aspects.
