| Delahoyde & Hughes Orpheus
HOMER'S ILIAD:
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Questions for Book III:
- This book contains the famous "teichoskopia": the viewing from the wall. The party line is that Priam likes Helen, and so they have this scene together, removed from the fighting and engaged in small talk essentially; but isn't there possibly something more going on here? Why might Priam be asking the questions he does?
- Apparently it hasn't occurred to anyone these nine years to have Menelaus and Paris duke it out in single combat. What does it mean, mythologically, that Aphrodite can whisk one away from the battlefield in the middle of a fight? What is the relationship between Love and War?
- Paris and Helen together are a pretty grim vision. Helen is an odd one, all right, and note what Paris says about sex -- sounds pretty escapist. Why do you think Homer gives us such a sour picture of these two?
In the Iliad, Paris escapes death at the hands of Menelaus; Aphrodite sweeps him off the battlefield back to Helen's bed inside the walls of Troy. After his botched duel with Menelaus he desires Helen more than ever before. War is sexual. The intensity of war leads to an intensity of sex. William Broyles, an American soldier in Vietnam, writes in his essay Why Men Love War: "In sex I could see the beast crouched drooling on its haunches (Fuseli 1781), could see it mocking me for my frailties, knowing I hated myself for them but that I could not get enough." The story of The Judgment of Paris gives us higher moral reasons for the Trojan War. Paris violates the institution of marriage and abducts Helen, the beautiful wife of King Menelaus. The Greeks unite because of the sacred oaths to Helen's father Tyndareus and thus embark on the ten year siege against Troy, the citadel of King Priam, Paris' father, to get Helen back. Thucydides writes: "What enabled Agamemnon to raise the armament was more, in my opinion, his superiority in strength, than the oaths of Tyndareus, which bound the Suitors to follow him." War is part of the family of man and despite the validity and morality and the righteousness involved, Broyles--like Thucydides--recognizes that the love of war is not romantic hysteria, but born out of a innate lust that dominates everything else including morality.
The linear structure of the Iliad can be seen in the chronology of the three major duels--past, present, and future. The duel between Menelaus and Paris signifies the source of the Trojan War for Paris abducts Helen, Menelaus' wife--the past. The duel between Ajax and Hector in Book VII ends in a stalemate signifying the current frustrating stalemate of the Ten Year War between the Greeks and the Trojans--present. The climatic duel between Hector and Achilles brings about the death of Hector and effectively marks the fall of Troy--future.