Why was the Iliad and the Trojan war at large such a popular subject for the Greeks?

Why was the Iliad and the Trojan war at large such a popular subject for the Greeks?

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Because a great sociopolitical, and historical event.

You could ask the same of WWI, or WW2 for most western countries today.

Are you mentally retarded, or do you just lack imagination?

We have firm documentary evidence in genres steeped in facticity that WWI and WWII both occurred.

We have a mythology with no firm connection to actuality for the Trojan War.

It was the Great War of that time

Ancient history was heavily mythologized. No one ever critiqued the mythological version of events until Herodotus, who recorded them along with the facts, but also routinely expressed skepticism.

This is a pretty good video answering your Question, OP

youtube.com/watch?v=aofPdMbXzUQ

it was the beginning of western recorded history and the first real war that was more than just one battle of small tribes fighting

Ranke, mate, Ranke, 19th century. Do you have any temple records? Any tax records? Muster lists of a non-poetic nature? No, no you don't. So the explanation of the popularity has to lie within the myth, not within some remembrance of fact.

If you're like me you take a Marxist read into mythology.
When we analyze Greek mythology we see in it the echoes of past epochs, anachronistic advances in technology and a change in the mode of production.

The cycle of the Trojan War as well as other heroic tales such as Heracles demonstrate all these attitudes. Heracles for example is a warrior of grrat strength wielding a wooden club and meeting gods in their animal forms, indicating a residual story tracing to he Stone Age with the heroic age being a period in collective memory of the transition from primitive tribal communism into the brutal and often violent realities of static agrarian life.

Homer for example is filled with anachronisms. He has heroic similes comparing Diomedes and Hector to lions despite lions being rare if not legendary in Anatolia by the time Homer was transcribed in the early 6th century BC. In addition the heroes fight much more like Greek warriors of Homer's time than Mycenaean bht are still armed with antiquated weapons such as bronze and are cremated when historically they would have been buried. This was because their tales had layers of truth on top of contemporary poetic attitudes which indicates how technology had advanced. Slaves such as Briseis take prominent roles while those who challenge the social order such as Thersites are punished, thus justifying the contemporary slave social order by giving it a heroic, and thus quasi-divine, lineage. After all Achilles was the son of a king, Peleus, and a goddess, Thetis. The other heroes arr given the power and favours of Gods, and ride around in chariots but fight dismounted as heroic Greek soldiers of Homer's time did as opposed to fighting mounted as they would have in the times described.

So in this we see that change in attitude: the development of the slave mode of production. The justification kf the rule of a military-slaveowning nobility. The fundamental heroics of this class. The romanticization of the honour of bronze.

The war certainly happened, there is plenty of archaeological evidence.

People didn't think back then about temple records for proof and whatever, they learned history from their elders.

>there is plenty of archaeological evidence.
I had thought better of you.

Troy was a real city, which we've known since the 19th Century discovery of it. It got rekt, walls and all, around the same time the mythical war is dated.

You're projecting your mythology onto archaeological remains. I suppose because you're Orthodox that you're used to eisegesis being encouraged. Here's a tip: it might let you convince yourself that god exists, but it doesn't convince historians.

What mythology is being projected? We're just talking about the case of a war.

You start from the assumption that the war was real to confirm your assumption that the war was real. You read the archaeological evidence as support for a theory which requires you to have projected that theory onto the archaeological evidence. And there's no intermediating, supplementary, or "tight" leaps of exegetical interpretation you can rest upon to support yourself.

Your gross misreading makes me sick.

>You could ask the same of WWI, or WW2 for most western countries today.

This is not a good analogy. A better one would be something like stories about King Arthur. A vaguely historical tale from the distant, indeterminate past that relates to present day national identity.

moral ambiguity

presentation of the gods ad their functions and qualities

Kleos is shown as being greatly valued by society of the past

Greeks thought they were descendants of those heroes

And finally it gave them the idea of fate, which they formulated their lives under and was a constant theme later in attic tragedy.

Shut the fuck up you retarded piece of shit

I'm a historical materialist as well

But how do you explain things like Briseis being of noble lineage yet being reduced to a slave? Further the overall ale of the Trojan war tells us that Hecuba and Andromache, women of not only noble stature but also of upstanding character were reduced to pitiful slavery.

And assuming the Odyssey and the Iliad were written both by the same person, Odysseus kills the servants of his household due to no fault of their own , for serving teh suitors while he was gone.

The Greeks weren't stupid, they must have been aware of the moral ambiguity of such things. And it was certainly so, because intellectuals like Plato disliked Homer's amoral message.

Because Homer was writing in an amoral time that detailed the transition from Bronze to Iron and, in his own lifetime, from.the Greek Dark Age to the Hellenistic era

At the same time this is where the extended canon became.important: almost every Achaean hero winds up being punished for violating their covenants with the gods. Neoptolemus in particular is punished for what he did to Priam and how he treated Andromache. And of course Agamemnon for what he did to Cassandra. I don't think my analysis is perfect and I don't think Homer is either, just that his story and the fixation in ilium was in important one for the Greeks in their transition from the Bronze to Iron age and the advancement of their version of the slave mode of production.


Which again happens jn stories outside Homer, which was offensive to metaphysical and moral philosophers like Plato hence why hr and Socrates wanted to essentially edit and censor the Iliad and Odyssey

About Briseis: I think it's actually very important she's a noble. She's reduced to a traded item and this is seen as the lot of war. What was also important was the relationship to the gods: as a secular noble her being raped is of secondary importance to Chryseis who unites the nobility with the gods. Therefore Briseis can be traded whereas Chryseis causes a plague for being held back. However the trade of her as an item still causes the covenants of honour intrinsic to Greek warriordom to be violated, leading to the deadly conflict of the book and ultimate death of Patroclus. And of course Achilles is still punished for not listening to his liege King. I'd argue that despite Homer being largely amoral there is a bit of a moral lesson in this: the social order exists for a reason and when it's violated (even for just cultural reasons) it leads to discord.


Anyways I love Greek tales and the historical materialist view on them kf you have different ideas I'd love to hear them not many people I know like this stuff

>Homer was writing
That's not our understanding of the two major authors.

Sorry, he told his story in one era and the Athenian scribe was writing when Athens was still a tyranny

I've heard these theories about multiple authors but I'm more convinced from my study of ancient Greek it was a single author for most of the tale with several obvious areas having been added by the later scribes (though the areas most directly attributable to Homer are much heavier on loanwords and Ionic dialect pieces)