4thDayQuestions

Vinny Lambert wonders whether Iliad is more valued as a historical document or as a literary piece of art.

Not sure how to answer. I don't think we need to decide.
I would say that it is both, perhaps in different ways to different people.
As a historical document, it is not very good, but it is pretty much all we have for a lot of the time we think it corresponds to. It has historical information within it that can be teased out by triangulating between it, archaeology, oral studies, and other disciplines. There is a debate about whether the society and culture found in the Iliad is unitary, whether it existed ever as such, whether it is a mixup of different historical eras (if so, how to untangle them), or all of those to greater or lesser degrees depending on what aspect one is talking about (and all of the argument about this is speculative to a greater or lesser degree).
As for its literary merit, it has been found to be extremely artistic, inspiring, interesting, and worthwhile to many ages, often for different qualities.

Juliette McGinnis wants to know how Athene affects Pandaros' bowshot.

The only evidence we have is 1) primarily the passage in which it happens, and 2) any other passage that is relevantly similar (that is, where a god affects a mortal's action in a way that could be applied here).
Could it be that Pandaros "choked" when he had the chance to shoot an important leader? and that 'choking' is ascribed to a god who is helping the other side, just because some god is likely to be the cause of that sort of thing? Sometimes it seems to me that the gods are simply a way to take a pretty normal human's reaction, emotion, or action, and put that outside of the human, somewhat in the same way that we say "a rage came upon her like none she had ever experienced before" (something that "comes upon" a person seems to come from outside that person, no?). I call this "externalization," because it externalizes what we moderns consider internal to a person. Gods are frequently found doing things that look like that. It is obviously not how the Greeks saw those things, but then again, they do at times talk about what looks like the "same" reaction as caused by a god, but also as something internal to a person (think of when Achilles is about to lash out against Agamemnon, but Athene pulls him back by the hair: is that any different from a person themself quelling their own rage?).
That sort of interpretation has limits: Athena will go on to perform other actions that fit with what she did with Achilles, and so she has her own personality, whereas the way one controls one's own internal emotions does not have an external reality that can plausibly interact the way Athena does with the rest of the world. It's a limited interpretation in other words.
But doesn't it say that the god swept it aside? Couldn't she just reach out and push it aside? That would be a literalist interpretation. Shy physically reached out and swept that arrow away from Diomedes.

Thomas C notes that often Homer says a dying man experiences a mist over his eyes and his armor rattles down on him. What's up with that?

First, I'd say that it is a formula: this is just the sort of thing that might help an oral poet more easily remember and sing the song.
But there has to be some reason why it came up as part of the song in the first place and became a formula.
It is both visual and aural: it involves the senses and brings us both into the person's experience (mist covering the eyes seems like something the dying one would experience: seeing is equated to living) and adds a detail that is external and aural (the clattering armor). That brings to mind a crumpling and collapsing, the idea that these tools that were important and functional are suddenly just things lying there. In other words, it seems to me artistically effective.

Lauren A wants to know if there is any account from around Homer's time about what daily life was like when there was no war?

First off, I'd say that there are no accounts that are definitely contemporaneous with Homer.
But we do think that Hesiod is roughly contemporaneous. My impression is that most scholars think Hesiod is a bit later (50-100 years?), but there are some who think Hesiod was earlier.
And Hesiod, in the Works and Days, does relate some of the everyday experience of a man who moved across the sea to Boeotia and has a small farm there.
Also, look to the similes in Homer: one of their most repeated motifs is the life of a person back at home. You might also look to what is called the "Shield of Achilles," which is a description of the scenes on a shield which Hephaestus makes for Achilles. It is described in great detail in Book 18 line 478 and following: it has some everyday scenes. Basically, you have to look for this between the fighting scenes, here and there in little glimpses.
Also, war was normal: raiding and defending and fearing and worrying about people back home or people out on a raid or at war was the norm as far as I can make out. It's not that there never was peace, but that it wasn't the "normal" state any more than war was: war was just part of the fabric of life. Our time and place, in the US where there has not been a war for many decades, may in fact be the exception here, perhaps. Not on sure ground here, but I wonder.

Tori Jarvis wants to know how they stop to talk all the time? Wouldn't they be killed.

First reaction? It's a poetic convention, not a reflection of reality. Just as in just about every single superhero or Hollywood film I've seen the villain always boasts over his foe and thus allows the foe time to figure out how to escape , so here this may be "just" a convention to let the storyteller advance the plot, describe something, make it poignant.
Further reaction: war at the time involved very close contact. You had to be within arm's length of your opponent. And it took a lot of exertion. And it was not necessarily all about winning and killing: honor played a huge role. Perhaps taunting an opponent has some honor role that is real after all?
Back with the "convention" idea: it allows the storyteller to get in a lot of extra detail, to bring the encounter to life, to slow it down, to give some backstory, some colorful detail, to make it personal. So it's a vehicle for artistry: the technique shapes the message.
And within the convention there are sub-conventions. One reason for the talking is so the hero can vaunt over his opponent: this vaunting occurs again and again, within a typical sequence, and so is itself a small type scene that is part of a larger type scene. These sorts of conventions are repeated (that's what makes them conventions) and so might be part of the oral poetic technique, part of the oral story-building structure.
Vaunting, taunting, pleading for mercy, recognition scenes, exchanging weaponry, challenging, and more are all sub-types of this convention.

Ruby RJ wants to know if there is a way to know whether any of this actually happened?

Not yet. We have no archaeological find of, say, a pot with an inscription that says "I belonged to Agamemnon when he led the Achaians against Troy with Menelaus." Nothing.
But archaeologists have found weapons, armor depictions, building remains, and many other things and depictions of things that match the things mentioned or described in Homer. It's just that none of them can be tied directly to any particular event that is the Trojan War, because none of them have writing.
One exception is a very few clay tablets like the one I showed you the other day, that have names and description of sacking of towns, etc., but they don't really match the Iliad specifically at all.
There is a very prominent bunch of scholars who think that it is clear that the level called Troy VIIb at a site in Turkey called Hissarlik is the Troy of the Trojan War. They are very reputable scholars and their theory is perhaps the best one.

Nick T wants to know how oral tradition has changed over time and how an oral culture changes when it gets writing?

That's a huge topic.
First off, it's a little hard to study the change over time, because the people studying would not be oral, but rather literate people, and usually they "contaminate" the source. Also, once writing is present, orality starts to change, and so it is hard to truly experience orality, what it is like, without being purely oral and not literate, and that would remove the meta-level you are asking for.
But we do have examples in more modern times when a culture went from oral to literate, and scholars have been studying them. Parry and Lord, who discovered the orality of Homer, studied bards in the former Yugoslavia, for instance.
How a culture changes when it gets writing? Suddenly in Greece after Homer, all the authors are individuals and no more oral epic gets written down. Every other work we have from Ancient Greece has a more specific and definite individual as an author!
Without writing, law is not law as we know it: it is not verifiable independent of individuals who know it and maintain it. History is not history as we know it: ditto. Science doesn't exist. Fiction doesn't exist. All of that is a consequence of literacy. Perhaps not an inevitable consequence, but it was a consequence in Greece.

Noah S wants to know how Classicists deal with unknown words in an unrecoverable context?

There is almost no such thing: there is always some context, even if it is just that the word was inscribed on a stone or a pot. But usually, the word or words are in sentences, and then you basically have a sentence with a _____ in it. You can easily ____ these holes, because there are ready _____ to base one's guesses on. You can't be sure your guesses are right, but you can be relatively confident and even say how confident you are. And words are very rarely completely unrelated to other words: there is almost always some plausible connection to be made. Sometimes, the connection may be speculative, but that doesn't make it wrong. It's just a best guess.

Eggy G wants to know if the gods' taking sides in the war causes strife in Mt. Olympos.

Oh yes it sure does. Just re-read the scenes of the counsel of the gods. There is one in book 5, the Diomedes book, where the gods chide each other. Hera and Zeus go at it regularly, but not just those two.

Tucker H wants to know if the Trojan War, assuming for a moment that it was an actual historical happening or reflects some actual historical happenings, was the first contact between Asia and Europe.

So, first off, they were not Asia and Europe at the time: remember that we humans make physical plots of land and sea into "places" by naming them, by living in them, by attributing importance to them, by remembering what happened in them. We create places.
Asia and Europe are places, and it does not seem to me that in the ancient Mycenaean times they were Europe and Asia. They were cut up differently. There was the Mycenaean sphere of influence or area, the Lycian area, etc. And none of those matched Asia versus Europe.
You may think I am making heavy weather of this, but it's a very important point.
In fact, when later Greeks looked back from the early 5th century, they interpreted the clash between Trojans and Greeks as a defining moment not just historically but also geographically. And yet, what we think of as "Europe" was still mostly forested empty land with people who were illiterate and materially far behind the Greeks, the Trojans, the Egyptians, etc. It's only in hindsight that we find that this was a defining moment.
The Mediterranean basin seems to have united peoples as much as it split peoples.
And the peoples didn't really fit into our modern notions of Europe and Asia. We can look at some maps to see this more clearly at different eras: and it depends very much on what era you are talking about. To the East and South of Greece, there were mostly large empires. To the west and north, there were peoples who seemed primitive to the Greeks. To the South and West there were Phoenicians.

Amos G wants to know if the oral poetry was a product of the culture or more just the lack of writing.

It was a definite presence of a strong and specific cultural phenomenon, not just an absence of writing. Writing, however, spelled its end, but over a long period. Oral culture elements survived for a long time, even when people no longer even knew that that's what they were. Folktales are instances of orality: they get passed from person to person and have different versions and ways of being told orally, sometimes in spite of being put in books here and there.

Tim B says the gods seem fickle and uncaring and yet everything they do is in response to someone who prays to them. It feels contradictory. Is it just that they are narcissistic?

They certainly are self-centered.
They do things for their offspring too, not just for prayers and sacrifice.
But basically, you've characterized much of what they do.
And yet, they are not just super-sized egotistic characters. They are also natural forces: that is logically incompatible. A person cannot also be an impersonal force, can they? And yet that's what they are.
Also, why would it be that super-powered beings would be at best just as bad as humans and not much better morally? Eventually, thinkers among the Greeks started to ask that question and to realize that it made little sense. Xenophanes, who lived in the late 6th/early 5th century is famous for saying that if horses had gods, they would be in the shape of horses, which is taken to mean that we humans think the gods are humans because we are human, not because the gods are. He also says that a god that is a god would not commit adultery and worse: that god would be good, really good. Interestingly, he also had all the puzzle pieces to make a killer argument for monotheism: we have little evidence that he actually put the pieces together, however. So eventually, Greeks started thinking harder about gods. But by then they were literate and "mythology" was treated with more scepticism, even if the same gods were still worshipped with sacrifice and prayer. It's a slow development that led to monotheism of several sorts in Greek culture and cultures that derive from or are influenced by Greek culture, including Christianity, which is a sort of meeting of Greek/pagan culture with Bible culture.

Griffin A asks why some gods switch sides.

I think that has to be asked on a case-by-case basis. There is no one-size fits all explanation. I can't think of any that do right now.

Max S wants to know if the story was told as it stands to please all people, as I and others suggested in class, or was it told that way so that the heroes didn't always just beat up grunts and meaningless foes. Could it just make for a better story, in other words, maybe?

I'd like to hear more about what you mean.
I suspect you are asking a question that only a bard could answer, and perhaps not even he, because he is but the representative of a tradition, a tradition which itself has no single authoritative spokesperson, but only individual practitioners who are all individuals and although they can claim to speak for the tradition, by the very act of their doing so they both underscore and create their own individuality.

Isaac S found the argument for pacifism unconvincing.
Tyler G asks if pacifism would have been a concept to Homer or any other Greek.

I agree, fundamentally. And yet, there is surely a strain in Homer that clearly sees and depicts the horror of war in a strong way. It's so strong that it's very hard to ignore. It's no simple glorification of war.
I suppose in the end, I think it would be hard to explain to a Greek the whole idea of pacifism (and hence also of being a "hawk"), just as it would take a while to explain to a Greek or to a member of most cultures the idea that slavery is fundamentally wrong because of its horrors, or the rampant sexism of a culture is fundamentally wrong (usually even because of values the culture itself holds). In other words, we'd have to do a fair bit of backpaddling to make it clear exactly what pacifism is, how it could even be a thing, and why it is attractive. War as a field of honor, a way of life thing, not even just an inevitable phenomenon, a tool of power, and a necessary evil. It is deeply rooted in so many cultures.
So Tyler is right to ask, and I think pacifism was not really a concept. You don't find conscientious objectors or the like, although you do find people who want to avoid fighting (Odysseus and Achilles had to be tricked into coming to the war, I believe).

Logan Langley wants to know if most Greek epics and tragedies are written in dactylic hexameter.

All epic is. The ancient Greeks (and Romans) defined epic as whatever is written in dactylic hexameter, even if it is a parody of the Iliad called the battle of the frogs and the mice (the Batrachomyomachia). Later, because so much of the best epic was epic in our meaning, the word acquired our meaning.
Tragedies are very complex metrically: not so much dactylic hexameter, but several other metrical patterns, some of which are very complex.

Cassia H-S wants to know what caused the shift from orality to writing things down.

Can't say. But it was somewhat inevitable.
Writing is really attractive technology, just as TV and cellphones are. Once a culture comes into contact with another culture that has writing, its members want writing.
My guess is that trade and travel was the immediate cause: some Greek traveled somewhere where he (probably a he) could learn writing and did so, and then brought it back, perhaps taught it to others.
I'll tell y'all the story of our alphabet some time if we have time: it's a good one.

Nathan G asks how much originality is lost as the culture transforms from oral to literate, particularly in how the epic is performed.

I would guess that the performance of epic didn't change drastically.
Other performances (theater) cropped up, perhaps under the influence of writing.
But writing made it possible to have individual authors, and so originality and innovation really accelerate instead of being lost when writing arrives.
When we say that the epic was performed, what we mean is that the singer sang/recited it to a lyre. In our eyes, I wouldn't be surprised if the "performance" would lack variety. It's the same rhythm incessantly. Tragedy and other songs of later times, however, had a great deal of variety.

Eadoin M notices the word "car" and assumes it is a chariot, but wonders about it.

Right you are. To that translator, "car" worked. Evidently it has a different denotation and connotations to you. That makes it a problem with translation.

Bryan M asks if there was much change from when the story was first told to when it was written down.

Yes. A lot.
We can tell, because we find things like throwbacks to Mycenaean Greek features. It's technical and has to do with things like how we can tell that there are two sorts of sounds/letters that were lost but left their traces. I can try to explain it, but not here, and I need to prepare. I will say that I am absolutely positive that the language changed a lot. The epics preserve many old forms that were obsolete already when the poems were written down.
One thing I can explain quickly: there are shields described in the epic (the one that big Ajax uses, for instance) that cover the whole body. Those shields are found by archaeologists in layers that are from the 15th or 16th century BCE, well before the supposed time of the Trojan War. They were out of fashion, not used, in later times. And yet, the Homeric Epic preserves a memory of them!
So there had to be change.
Also, it is highly likely that a bard from one area might tell a local variant of the song OR alternatively that a bard would travel. When in Athens, he would sing a version that highlighted whatever was relevant to Athens, but when in Miletus, he would highlight things relevant to that area (local heroes, places, etc.).

Ryan S asks why the epics characterize people individually rather than talk of the great sweep of battles, the grand movements of hundreds/thousands.

Good question. Here and there in the epic, there is talk of the masses. The metaphors of the sea and leaves and wind and rivers are often used to capture such things. And the rank and file is mentioned here and there too.
But in the end, this was a fiercely aristocratic and individualistic culture of competition. That is what the poet really knows and spends many lines on. I don't know that from anywhere but the poems themselves.
I could point out that it is probably a lot more engaging as a story that way.
Think of how movies do this: mostly, they pick out individuals and follow them, even in scenes that have thousands of "extras."

Ani H wants to know how Homer viewed the gods, given that they cause so much conflict.

Hard to say, just as it's hard to say whether Homer was a war-monger or a pacifist dove.
Homer doesn't often use "I" and never really gives his own considered opinion.
I can't say that it never occurred to Homer to discuss that, indirectly via characters. Listen to what mortals and gods have to say about what the gods do, and you will hear some opinions that you yourself might voice, criticism of the gods for all manner of things. But they are not the voice of the poet or even the predominant voice in the epic. Those criticisms are just individual voices in a sea of individual voices among which are opposing voices.
That makes it hard to say what "Homer" thought about anything.

Caroline D and Melody X notice that Diomedes wounded Aphrodite: a mortal wounded a goddess. They want to know more about that.

After Aphrodite goes away from the fighting, there is a wonderful little list of times when humans injured or captured gods. Interesting.
It is even suggested that Ares once almost died from being tied up in a pot for months. Almost died? Isn't he immortal?
I don't have anything terribly smart to say about this. But I will say that it is powerfully interesting and I'd like to know a lot more about it.
Notice too that Athena, I think, lifted the mist from Diomedes' eyes so that he could see the gods on the battlefield, which means that the rest of the humans couldn't see them (that is born out by discussions where people like Pandaros say "he must have a god with him, because I've shot him twice now, but he keeps coming back."). She also told Diomedes not to wound any other gods, but that he could go after Aphrodite. Then, later, when Diomedes was hanging back because he saw that a god was helping Hector and didn't want to mess with another god, because Athene told him not to, she came to him again and said "go ahead. In fact, I'll help you go after Ares." and so Diomedes went after Ares himself!

Sierra noticed that it is really common for the gods to come down and help humans and interfere.

Yep.
Humans are like TV for the immortals, but they can reach in and change things in what they see: they sit in Olympus or on a nearby mountain and tune in to the battle, and if they don't like what they see, they go down and adjust things.

Raphael R asks how the poets managed not to get tripped up by the meter.

Because the meter is part of what helped them compose. It seems like a tough pattern to follow, to us. But to the bards, it was a pattern that they were intimately comfortable with, from years of practice, and it actually helped them remember and perform.
Think of how many song lyrics most people have in their heads, precisely and accurately. Music/rhythm can help memory, not hinder it.

Robb Demars asks who had the coolest weapons.

Patroclus persuades Achilles to let him impersonate Achilles and enter the battle with Achilles' armor to help the Greeks. But Patroclus was killed and stripped of Achilles' original armor and weapons. So Thetis went to Hephaestus and got him to make entirely new weapons, the coolest!
Or maybe some "cobalt" weapons: I forget who had them. Anyway, even though they are all "one-offs," made one at a time by individual smiths, it's not quite like the magical swords and things of Tolkien. They are still kind of similar to everyone else's, but you sure do get bragging rights if you strip Hector or Achilles of their weapons! and you know they have good ones.