Numerous gods tried to convince Hephaestus to release Hera, but he refused until Dionysus came and got Hephaestus really drunk. This aid rendered to her is often cited as the reason Hera put aside her hatred of Dionysus [see Dionysus ].
According to another version of his birth myth, Hephaestus was born perfectly healthy, but when he intervened on behalf of his mother in a dispute between his parents, Hera and Zeus, Zeus flung Hephaestus off Mount Olympus.
Hephaestus fell for a full day until he crash-landed on the island of Lemnos. The Lemnians took care of him as best they could, but the god was left crippled. Hephaestus was grateful to the Lemnians and established his workshop on the island. When the volcano on Mount Aetna erupted, the Romans said that Vulcan was working in his forge. Having learned from Homer, the Roman poet Horace instructs prospective writers and story-tellers to leap in medias res , "into the middle of things".
That is, don't back up all the way in the story at the beginning—if readers or listeners need to know background, tell them in a flashback or let them gather what they need to know from dialogue—and Homer provides a quintessential example of why story-tellers should do this. He assumes his readers know the basic story, but he'll also tell them most of the background anyway, only not right at the start of the poem.
Rather, he vaults the audience in medias res. And what a superb place he chooses to launch into the story! Nine years into the war, the Greeks are exhausted and depressed.
They're fighting among themselves over essentially nothing, having all but forgotten why they came to Troy. Amidst the bitter in-fighting and self-recriminations, Agamemnon dishonors Apollo by stealing Chryseis, the daughter of one of Apollo's priests, which reveals an important pattern and a persistent problem in Agamemnon's character. Like the paranoid, spotlight-hugging politician he is, he tends to overstep his rightful place.
When Chryses comes to him and requests his daughter back and even offers a hefty ransom, Agamemnon refuses. The glory of owning Chryseis is worth more money to him. Angry and rejected, Chryses goes out to the seashore and prays to his patron deity for vengeance. Apollo answers by sending a devastating plague on the Greeks.
To address the issue, they convene an emergency assembly which under Achilles' fiery leadership rules that Agamemnon must return Chryseis to Chryses and end the plague. Now deprived of his booty which in his mind equates with his honor and prestige, Agamemnon demands compensation and, when none is forthcoming, he claims Briseis, a captive girl belonging to Achilles, a double compensation in that he restores his honor and at the same time insults Achilles, the instigator of the dispute.
The great warrior is furious at being stripped of his spear-prize and refuses to continue fighting. Since Achilles is the best Greek fighter, this gives the Trojans a great advantage. Stung with pain, he goes down to the shore and calls out to his mother Thetis, the sea nymph, who appears from the mist of the sea. Achilles asks her to go to Zeus and beg him to help the Trojans so that the Greeks will feel pain equal to his. Thetis, happy just that her son has stopped fighting and is thus in less danger of being killed at Troy, agrees and goes off to Olympus.
The gods happen to be having a banquet when Thetis arrives. She approaches Zeus privately and begs him to help her son.
Zeus consents to help the Trojans, but Hera sees them conspiring. She hates the Trojans—it will be a long time before she forgets the Judgment of Paris! She and Zeus get into a fight which their lame son Hephaestus tries to stop. His antics, as he limps around serving the gods, makes everyone laugh, and the book ends on a chord of uneasy joy and festivity.
It's appropriate in that the storyline of The Iliad will encompass only the forty or so days in which Achilles refuses to fight and then returns to the war. In reality, it includes much more through flashbacks and references to other parts of the Trojan saga. The "immortal one"—also translated "goddess"—is Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry. Here Homer beseeches her for inspiration. As an oral poet, he needs a constant flow of verse but we'll also see below that he doesn't rely on Muses solely.
He uses certain mnemonic devices i. In this case, the Muse helps those who help themselves. The "will of Zeus" refers to the ancient interpretation of the Trojan War as part of Zeus' plan to relieve the Earth of her burden of men and decrease the world's population. In other words, the population-control theory of war had proponents even this early in human history. The "plague of arrows" doesn't refer to arrows literally. The ancients saw the convulsions of a sick person as instigated from invisible outside sources.
Here Homer suggests that the sudden contractions caused by pain are like arrows shooting through his body. Homer is a master of insulting epithets. The terms of abuse which Achilles uses on Agamemnon are particularly inventive: "Most insatiate of men!
Commander of trash! He's rightfully wary of getting into a violent quarrel with Achilles, a far better fighter.
The Myrmidons , "The Ant-men," are Achilles' special troops. Presumably, they either look like ants because of the shape of their armor or have armor as tough as an ant's exoskeleton, perhaps both.
Homer often depicts a god as a personification of a person's mental activity. In Book 22, for instance, Hector imagines that his brother has come down from the walls of Troy to help him, but as it turns out, it's only a delusion of the mind fostered by the gods. Likewise, Aphrodite in Book 3 represents the embodiment of Helen's lust for Paris. Here in Book 1, Achilles' decision not to leap up and kill Agamemnon is depicted as Athena coming to him, grabbing him by the hair and stopping him.
Simply put, where we would say that common sense held him back, Homer says the goddess of wisdom did it.
Nestor is the oldest and wisest of the Greeks at Troy. He's also one of the most long-winded, sharing with another aged hero Phoenix the dubious distinction of delivering the lengthiest speeches in The Iliad. But Nestor's intrusion here is also a wonderful character piece, revealing much about the old man, indeed old men in general.
At first he rambles, recalling the "good old days"—or does he just love the sound of his own voice? Old people have changed little in three millennia. After Agamemnon's admirably short reply to Nestor, Achilles breaks into the conversation and resumes the quarrel.
Gods forbid that Nestor should start up again! Patroclus will be very important later in Book A hecatomb is the sacrifice of a hundred cattle to a god, here Apollo. The appearance of Thetis from the sea is equivalent to the special effects so common in modern cinema. Notice how she rises from the sea "like mist from the inshore grey seaface," her dewiness matching the tears on her son's cheeks.
A wet and wonderful moment! Homer is a consummate entertainer and as such obeys one of the prime directives of sound storytelling: Recapitulate! There are always some dunces in the audience who fall asleep or come late or daydream or haven't the mental power to focus for more than a minute or two but whom the oral poet can't afford to lose, for if he does, they'll start talking or belching or worse. A good entertainer accommodates this segment of his audience, just as Shakespeare repeats himself for the "groundlings.
The recapitulation also arises perfectly naturally from the story at the halfway point of the book, exactly where the inattentive in the audience will surely start having problems with the plot. Also, as one might expect of an oral poet, Homer reuses some of his oral formulas in this recapitulation, e. What's remarkable here is that in the recapitulation Homer deftly changes the original, a much longer text.
Oral poets with less talent would simply repeat the previous text word for word, which would amount to hundreds of lines in this case. Homer, instead, skillfully accommodates the narrative and his poetic formulas to what the situation demands.
Inside Achilles' plea to his mother, Homer imbeds a very old myth about a rebellion within the gods against Zeus. This story serves several purposes at once: it tells a fine traditional tale, probably an audience favorite, it gives Thetis a lever to use on Zeus to encourage him to help Achilles, and it also draws a subtle parallel between Achilles' and Zeus' resistance to wrongful displacement.
Thetis bemoans Achilles' fate, because it is important for Homer to establish Thetis' primary motivation in The Iliad , that is, the vain hope that she can save her doomed son. The preparation of the barbecue is another such trope. These, no doubt, gave the poet a chance to rest his Muse and think ahead in the poem. She kneels before the seated Zeus, with her left hand on his knee and her right on his chin.
It's interesting that Thetis does not recapitulate Achilles' whole story, even though Zeus has been away and presumably hasn't seen the fight between Agamemnon and Achilles. Homer assumes you know Zeus is omniscient, and the lazy listeners in the audience have already had their chance to catch up on the story. If they have missed it twice, let them go back to sleep! Zeus sees wisely that the problem with granting Thetis' request is Hera's determination to help the Greeks against Paris and his fellow Aphrodite-loving Trojans.
Intentionally comical, the constant, cosmic-level, marital squabbling of Zeus and Hera is used by Homer more than once as a source of humor. When she sees Zeus and Thetis talking, Hera immediately figures out exactly what her husband's up to. From that, a fight typical of comedy erupts between the angry nagging wife and her scheming spouse. In this case, of course, the wife is right. Ultimately, Zeus retreats to the last refuge of married scoundrels and threatens to beat her, "to lay his inexorable hands" on Hera, if she doesn't shut up and leave him alone.
Her son, Hephaestus tries to patch things up and recapture the quickly fading spirit of conviviality at the gods' banquet.
He decides to serve the gods himself, and they laugh as he hobbles around. In ancient society spry young boys and girls usually waited on tables, so this is an inversion of the norm. A manifestation of its times, no doubt, Homeric humor will seem rather low-brow to some today, at least to judge by his characters who laugh at cripples, people's heads being chopped off, frightened babies howling and so on. The book ends with calm and quiet on heaven and earth, but it's an uneasy peace with the thunder of future strife rolling off in the distance.
Given Homer composed his epics spontaneously for public performance—and to be enjoyed and appreciated fully they are best read aloud—one must concede that Homer is an amazing juggler, able to keep so many balls in the air at once. He tells a story, composes verse on the spot, individualizes each character's speech and, on top of all that, he doesn't forget where he is in the story, even though he has no written text or notes in front of him.
How does he do it? By backing up and looking at the general structure of Book 1, it's possible to see one way he manages to keep the story on track. He arranges the general course of action in what is called ring composition. It might be better called "bilateral symmetry," a biology term that means the symmetrical balancing of analogous body parts, such as hands, feet, eyes and ears.
Close analysis of Book 1 reveals a similar design of compared or contrasted parts. The opening scene, for example, entails the rejection of Chryses by Agamemnon and the subsequent plague, while the final scene describes the gods' feast and joy, making in this instance a strong contrast to the grim opening.
The second major episode of Book 1 is a council of men in which Achilles and Agamemnon quarrel, and the next-to-last episode is the banquet of gods in which Zeus and Hera quarrel.
The latter quarrel is a direct consequence of the first. Inside those episodes, Odysseus leaves the Greek camp with Chryseis and later arrives at her father's home and gives her back to him.
And finally sandwiched inside those is the scene where Achilles goes down to the seashore and begs his mother to help him. Drawn out schematically, this is how the book is structured:. While the separate parts aren't exact reflections of each other, just a loosely analogous configuration of sections, such an outline benefits an oral poet in performance who needs to remember where he is and is headed.
This sort of arrangement also gives a pleasant sense of coming full circle. That is, it's clear to listeners that this section of The Iliad is ending because the last scene reflects the first, the same way we know The Wizard of Oz is coming to a close when Dorothy gets back to Kansas because that's where the story began. By the time Homer's gods turn in for the night at the end of Book 1, the poem has raised and advanced certain problems and, even if things are still far from resolved, there's a sense of closure.
It's interesting to note that Greek art, especially vases from pre-classical Greece, reflects a similar fascination with symmetrical patterns and balanced groupings of geometric configurations. Overview of Books Lacking the time to scrutinize all twenty-four books of The Iliad in the depth that we have studied Book 1, let's skim over the action of the next few books, noting only some of the more famous and notable passages. Book 2: Agamemnon calls the Greeks together and the army marches against Troy, as Homer lists the Greek warriors in a long "catalogue of heroes.
Book 3: The Greek and Trojan armies meet but don't fight. Instead, Menelaus and Paris, the rival husbands of Helen, fight one-on-one. As the soldiers put down their arms, Priam and the Trojans, including Helen, watch from the walls of Troy in amazement. Paris is about to lose, when Aphrodite magically whisks him off the battlefield and back to Troy. Menelaus is declared the winner and acknowledged as the rightful husband of Helen.
Meanwhile, back at Troy Aphrodite assumes the guise of one of Helen's servant and prepares Helen to receive Paris as a proper wife should. Seeing through the goddess' disguise, however, Helen objects and refuses to make love to Paris. Aphrodite lowers her mortal mask and forces Helen to submit to Paris. Books 4 and 5: The Greeks and Trojans stand for a moment on the verge of peace, but Athena and Hera, hating Troy and wanting to see the city fall, induce a cowardly Trojan to break the truce by shooting an arrow at Menelaus.
The fighting erupts again. The fortune of battle seesaws back and forth, amidst much death and carnage. Book 6: Enter Hector, the prince of Troy and the greatest Trojan fighter. Returning to Troy from the battlefield, he finds Paris sitting at home with Helen and gives his brother a serious dressing-down after which Paris sheepishly agrees to rejoin the fighting. Then Helen seductively encourages Hector to sit down with her, but he refuses.
On his way out of town and back to battle, Hector runs into his wife Andromache with their son Astyanax. She begs him not to go back into battle, not to die and leave her a spear-prize for some Greek, to which Hector responds with the famous "Warrior's Creed," a speech outlining a soldier's duty and fate 6. He reaches out to take little Astyanax and hug him, but the baby frightened by his father's flashing, plumed helmet recoils in terror.
His parents laugh! With a final word of consolation for Andromache, Hector and Paris return to war. Books 7 and 8: Zeus turns the battle in favor of the Trojans, as he had promised Thetis he would do for Achilles' sake. The Trojans fight so well they're able to camp near the Greeks' ships. If they were to burn the ships, the Greeks would have no way home.
Book 9: The Greeks panic. They desperately need to have Achilles return to the fighting. Agamemnon decides to give back Briseis, Achilles' spear-prize and, in addition, offers Achilles much ransom in compensation for the dishonor of taking the girl. He organizes an embassy of three heroes—Ajax, Phoenix and Odysseus—to implore Achilles to return to the battle. When these ambassadors arrive at Achilles' tent, the crafty tactician Odysseus speaks first, pointing out the Greeks' distress and all that Achilles can gain from Agamemnon by returning to battle.
Achilles coldly turns him down. Second, Phoenix, an old friend of Achilles' family, calls on the young man's sense of family honor, recalling such delightful home-scenes as the time baby Achilles retched all over him. He fails to persuade Achilles, too. Finally Ajax, the stout fighter nicknamed "The Bulwark" because of his determination to stand his ground, makes a succinct appeal to Achilles, warrior to warrior, a plea to give the beleaguered Greeks some sorely needed help.
If any request were going to succeed, it would be this one, but Achilles adamantly refuses to return to the fighting a third time. He sends the embassy back, their mission a failure. This marks an important turning point in the story. Although Agamemnon has offered to repair the damages done to Achilles' pride, the great hero's wrath won't allow him to relent, and for this overbearing passion he will pay dearly.
The price will be the life of his closest friend Patroclus, a story told in Book As the focus of The Iliad shifts to the Trojans, we should look briefly at the mythological background of Troy. The Trojans, we noted above, are sometimes called Dardanians. The Dardanus for whom they're named was the ancestor of Priam, the king of Troy at the time of the Trojan War. As a young man, Priam married Hecuba and had one-hundred children—fifty boys and fifty girls—though only nineteen were Hecuba's.
Oriental potentates were expected to keep concubines who regularly produced children considered secondary to the primary wife's offspring.
The first-born and foremost of Priam's children by Hecuba was Hector. In antiquity, the tale of how a son of the king and queen of Troy came to be a shepherd was best known from a play written by Euripides, the Athenian tragedian whose work we will study later. Though the play itself entitled Alexander is lost, we know the plot from an ancient hypothesis, a summary of the story.
It's interesting to note that, just like the author of The Cypria , poets living centuries after Homer's lifetime were still filling in gaps or unexplained circumstances in the Homeric epics, in this case why a Trojan prince was raised a shepherd and had two names, Paris and Alexander.
The Hypothesis of Euripides' Alexander with some additions from a story preserved by Hyginus, a compiler of myths, Fable The pregnant Hecuba, Queen of Troy, had a nightmare that she gave birth to a burning torch out of which came many serpents.
It was interpreted as a premonition of her child's destructive nature, that he would bring about the fall of Troy. So when the child was born, a boy they called Alexander, his father Priam, King of Troy, gave the child to shepherds to abandon on a mountain so that the child would die without bloodguilt on his father's hands.
The shepherds didn't have the heart to kill the child and so they raised him as their own, calling him Paris. Hecuba in grief for her son persuaded her husband Priam to establish athletic games in the "dead" boy's honor. Twenty years later, the boy, who acted nobler than his rustic breeding, began to irritate the other shepherds because of his high-class arrogance.
This boy named Paris had a favorite bull, which, as a prank, they stole and gave to the city as a reward for the winner of the games played in the boy's honor. When Paris complained, they brought him tied up before the King.
Paris begged to be allowed to play in the games, which usually excluded common people, in order to win back his prize bull. Priam consented. Paris beat all the other contestants—including Priam's other sons, Paris' brothers unbeknownst to them—and enraged them who thought they had been beaten by no better than a slave.
Deiphobus, another son of Priam and Hecuba, urged his mother to kill the insulting intruder. When Paris appeared, Deiphobus drew his sword on him, but Paris sought refuge at the altar of Zeus. Cassandra, the mad prophetess and another child of Priam and Hecuba, recognized Paris as Alexander and called him "the torch" of Troy, but as always her words were not understood and her warning went unheeded.
Although Hecuba wanted to kill him, Priam prevented her and, guessing at what Cassandra meant by "torch," sent for the shepherd to whom he had given the baby Alexander twenty years ago. When the old shepherd arrived, he was forced to admit the truth.
So Priam recognized and accepted his son. Ironically, this romantic play with its seemingly happy ending was, in fact, the first play in the dramatic trilogy which ended with Euripides' famous depiction of the horrors of the war, The Trojan Women. One other royal Trojan to be aware of is Cassandra , the mad prophetess mentioned in the hypothesis above.
She was a very beautiful and pious girl with whom Apollo fell in love. The god promised her the gift of prophecy, if she would go to bed with him. She agreed, but as soon as he bestowed on her the ability to tell the future, she refused to make love to him. While Apollo couldn't take back the gift of prophecy—she'd already seen the future—he could take away from her the power of persuasion.
Thus, poor Cassandra was left knowing the fate of Troy but unable to convince anyone to do anything about it. Consequently, she went mad. Before leaping back in medias res , we should address another important feature of Homer's style. The entire Iliad takes place in the vicinity of Troy—twenty-four books of poetry in any single location, even one as beautiful place as the northwest coast of Turkey, is bound to pall—so to give his listeners a break from the monotony of locale, Homer frequently sweeps us off for a moment to another place by using a simile , an explicit comparison introduced by "like" or "as" or some such expression.
An example of a simile is "He swims like a fish. It's interesting to note that in his other great epic, The Odyssey , a story full of adventure and travel and magic, Homer uses fewer similes than in The Iliad because he doesn't need to relieve the tedium of always being in one place all the time. The similes in The Iliad are in some ways the best part of the poem, in part because they're rarely simple or straightforward comparisons. More often Homer compares things that on the surface aren't very similar at all.
For instance, at 8. The hero is most like the flower because his bent figure resembles the flower's curved stem. In other ways they're different: the hero is an aggressive warrior, while the flower is passive vegetation; the hero is dying, while the flower will thrive after the rain; the hero is in a noisy, dirty field of battle full of death and destruction, where the flower is in a serene rainfall in spring full of rejuvenating life.
In sum, the dissimilarity ironically dominates the simile. But such differences don't make the simile inept; to the contrary, they make it brilliant. Into the midst of combat and carnage, Homer suddenly injects a peaceful scene of springtime and a fertile rainfall that lift us momentarily from din and destruction of Troy.
Then after only two lines—in performance, that's only a few seconds—the serene simile evaporates and the noise of war returns. Like the crash of tympani and horns following a few quiet bars in a symphony, the clangor of deadly battle is so much more effective when contrasted with the bloom of a soft, nourishing rainfall.
Here's another example of such a simile in Homer. At Book 4. In the confusion following Paris' sudden disappearance, Athena inspires a cowardly Trojan to break the truce and start up the fighting again by shooting an arrow at Menelaus. Read this passage now and look for two similes. Did you find them? First, Athena deflects the arrow from Menelaus "the way a mother would keep a fly from settling on a child when he is happily asleep" 6.
An exquisite comparison, the virgin goddess and the mortal mother both protect their "little ones" by swatting away the sting of an aggressor, the small fly and the small-minded Trojan both of whom are trying to take advantage of an unsuspecting innocent.
However, the scenes contrast also: a peaceful mother with her child asleep versus the war-goddess protecting her favorite in the midst of battle. The juxtaposition of such opposites, just as with the hero and the poppy mentioned above, is called an oxymoron "sharp-blunt" , examples of which are "bittersweet," "a deafening silence," "the living dead," and "sophomore," literally "a wise fool," i.
Second, Homer compares the blood dripping from Menelaus' wound to "when a Meionian or a Carian woman dyes clear ivory to be the cheekpiece of a chariot team" 6. Another oxymoron, the bleeding wound and the dyed cheekpiece contrast at least as much as they coincide. Indeed, their only real point of similarity is the red color dripping over the ivory and the thighs. According to history , his mother Hera, when she saw him so ugly, wanted to hide him from the rest of the world and threw him out of Olympus.
There is a version that says that, during a fight between his mother and Zeus , Hephaestus interfered in order to help his mother and Zeus took him by one foot throwing him out of Olympus, where he fell on an island called Lemnos , being lame for this reason.
After Hephaestus was expelled from Olympus, he was picked up by Thetis and Eurynome , who took care of him and protected him on the island of Lemnos , a place that was his home and saw him develop as one of the best artisans of the gods. Sometime later he made a magic lathe for Hera, his mother, with the aim of getting revenge, and when she sat down, she was trapped without being able to get up.
To free her, Dionysus got Hephaestus drunk and took him back to Olympus, where under certain conditions, Hephaestus agreed to free her. He married Aphrodite , the goddess of love, who was repeatedly unfaithful to him. Hephaestus was always rejected by Aphrodite , which is why he had no offspring with her. On some occasions, Hephaestus has been seen as the father of Etna of the Palicos, but this is uncertain.
He had children known as daimones with the nymph Cabiro , who inhabited the island of Samothrace, but their names are not known.
He was the father of the following mortals :. He was very skillful in manufacturing weapons and maneuvering them because he was very agile. He had a mechanical attitude and a fairly widespread skill, possessed great magnetic intuition and had pyrokinesis , which was considered to be the ability to dominate and create fire.
According to the Iliad, the forge of Hephaestus was located on Olympus Mount , although it could also be found in the volcanic heart of the Aegean island of Lemnos.
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