>>25280256
bump

Legit in what sense? I think it's fine to interpret things however makes sense to you and to harvest from the classics insights into the modern world. But I doubt that's how the Greeks themselves understood the Iliad. It's a story about impassioned Gods directing the fates of men who themselves are arranged hierarchically by the intensity of their passions. I imagine they would have seen war as an inevitable manifestation of that. Phrasing it as a question, "Why do we fight...?" implies some kind of agency where there is none. The inevitability of war was known to all. It's this question that denotes a modern post-war pacifism. The poster has been most probably shocked by Ukraine-Russia, if not also the other major conflicts; his security as a man in a developed and peaceful country now suddenly threatened, so the Western psychic trauma from the world wars re-expresses itself in the same way as it did in the interwar period and then again in the 60s and so on.

>>25280885
>But I doubt that's how the Greeks themselves understood the Iliad

Yeah, that's why I made this thread. I don't care about contemporary opinions on Homer's poems. I want to know what they thought about it back in the day

bumpazo

>>25280256
>>25280967
I'm not familiar with any ancient authors who take Homer that way. Sentiment-wise, it almost sounds like a certain reading of Plato where glory and honor don't get you the good you desire, but mostly Homer is either 1) commented upon as having shaped Greek attitudes towards the Gods, for good or ill (Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Herodotus, Plato), or 2) quoted or appealed to *almost* like a scriptual authority, whose renditions are treated as overruling those of other poets. But otherwise, I don't think I've read any ancient author taking it as an anti-war poem or implicit critique of war.

As an interpretation, I don't think it's totally implausible, but it has to be dialed back. There's definitely a theme throughout that the war as its been understood (as getting Helen back for Menelaus, under Agamemnon's direction) has the soldiers ready to abandon everything, but the only thing that works to keep them there is appeal to honor, and after the first few books, they start explicitky fighting more and more for glory, and that is brought into tension as a motivation through Achilles, who isn't sure whether glory is worth it, extending to his depiction in Hades in the Odyssey. So something of that take has merits. But I don't see how it goes so far as supporting a view that the deaths of the men who fight are meaningless.