1 jan 750 ano antes da era comum - *Iliad/Odyssey Written 750

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When Did the Events Take Place? No consensus

"Moses Finley says, "If, then, the world of Odysseus is to be placed in time as everything we know from the comparative study of heroic poetry says it must, the most likely centuries seem to be the tenth and the ninth, that is to say what we call the Dark Ages." Anthony Andrews says, "It may be that the epic tradition had at some stage used as a model for the army before Troy, an idealized version of some of those bands of colonists who settled the coast of Asia Minor in post-Mycenaean times." And if you look at the whole story that he tells, that really means quite soon after the fall of the Mycenaean world, probably maybe a century earlier than what Finley suggests.
The notion that this is about the Mycenaean world is an outlier, and then I would say the largest consensus is something like Finley's consensus, but people verging in both directions from that. pg. 22
I also spoke to you about the heroic ethic, which is the dominant element in this system of theirs. Another way of looking at it is that it is an aristocratic way of thinking and feeling. At the core of it, is the concept of arête. I guess the most neutral way to translate the word is excellence, prowess, the ability to do something or to be something, which is admired in the fullest way possible.

Now, if you look at the story of Western civilization, it provides a very interesting contrast within it and the, I'm sorry, the Greek experience that I'm talking about now based upon what you see in Homer, provides a contrast within a competition to the other great tradition of Western civilization, which is the Judeo-Christian tradition. I just want to make a few small points that indicate how that works. The Iliad begins--the first word in the Iliad is the accusative noun, mēnin, wrath, anger. I am singing about the wrath, the anger Achilles which brought so many men to their doom, is what Homer says. The first thing is the emotion of an individual man. The Odyssey begins even more strikingly with the word andra, the accusative of anēr, the accusative case of a man, and he says, sing to me goddess about that man, that man of many devices, that clever man Odysseus.
The Aeneid of Virgil based, of course, on the Iliad and the Odyssey, begins arma virumque cano, I sing of arms and the man, the man Aeneas. What are the Greeks talking about? I'm talking about individual men, extraordinary men and the events that emerge from them and the life they lead. Well, look at our Bible. It begins; in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth and it. The book goes right on to talk about God, what he does, sometimes why he does it, what is the effect of what he does, but the center of our book is God, not man. It's not just an accident that this reveals the characteristic of each one of these cultures. The Greeks had a humanistic outlook on life. They believed in the gods, they were religious people, but the core of their lives was shaped by human things in a way different from what was true of the Hebrews and the Christians later on, that is a Divine view. The secular approach is very, very Greek versus a religious approach.
pg.38

Now, let me carry on with this by talking about the views of society which are characteristic of the two traditions in Western civilization. What do we see in the Bible? When God decides to invent man, he places him in the Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden contains, first of all, just Adam and then when God decides, for his own reasons, that he needs a companion, he invents one other companion, Eve. Where they live is paradise. One man, one woman, that's all you need, it's great. Nothing could ever be so good. Well, what happens? They transgress. Eve persuaded by the serpent, persuades Adam to do what was forbidden by God. What is forbidden by God? It is to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge because if human beings obtain knowledge, they will be like the gods, and that is unacceptable. So when you do that, you have to be punished. What is punishment? To be thrown out of Eden, to be thrown out of this isolated condition of perfection. What is perfection? You don't have to work, you can eat without doing anything about it, you don't seem to do much of anything, which is fine. Everything is quiet, peaceful, no problems, no action, that's paradise.
A Greek would go crazy at the thought. It is a pre-social, a pre-political life. Life in society what Adam and Eve have to encounter now. They now have to form villages, cities, start living among each other, and so on. That is the punishment for the sin of seeking knowledge of good and evil and therefore of straining for divinity. Man, the message I think is, must know his place, which is humble and not close to divine. His hope rests simply with God not with himself. When he tries to take the things into his own hands, and in the process, to contravene the will of God, only terrible things can happen to him.

The Greek story is quite different. War is right at the center of it, and war itself requires political and social organization. There can be fighting without war but there can be no war without an organization that makes it something more than just plain fighting. It requires political and social organization. (40)

I think the best way to understand it is to think of it as meaning, man is a creature who lives in a polis, in a city state, in a Greek kind of a city state. In the same general passage he says, a man who is by nature without a polis is either more or less than a man. What he means by that is, if a man is superior to the polis doesn't need a polis, he is a god because men need a polis. If he is beneath the polis it means he's beneath what it is to a human being, and that tells you just how potent is this concept of a community for the Greeks and it emerges in its own way from the Iliad in the Odyssey (39)

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