Homer’s Epic of the Family

Oct 18, 2018 by

by Paul Krause, The Imaginative Conservative:

This is the ultimate message of Homer’s two epics: Where family is found, life is found; where family is found, true beauty is found; where family is found, piety is found; where family is dissolved, only death and destruction follows…

The Trojan War, for our Homeric heroes, begins with marital infidelity and succumbing to temptation, but ends with marital fidelity and overcoming temptation. While the gods are ever present in the Iliad and Odyssey, I wish to examine the otherwise purely human aspect of Homer’s two great epics and how they relate to family, and the role of marital infidelity and fidelity as it relates to wholeness and life. After all, family is one of the great Homeric concerns.

The Iliad and Odyssey can be read as standalone works. However, the two great poems should be read together. Both works revolve around the Trojan War. Both stories are intimately tied together as one story, especially through the person of Odysseus who is a major character in the Iliad and the namesake of the Odyssey.

Pseudo-Apollodorus presented Odysseus’ hand in the origins of the Trojan War by fostering the compromise which would lead all of Greece to go to war against Troy. The suitors of Helen would swear an oath to support the eventual husband of Helen irrespective of who would become her husband. Thus, Odysseus’ legacy as a family man is continued well after Homer. And if Pseudo-Apollodorus’ chronology of Odysseus is to be accepted simply on literary grounds, Odysseus was considered to be a family man prior to the Trojan War.

The place of family in finding the meaning of life is best reflected by the two heroes of the Iliad, Achilles and Hector. Achilles abandons his mother and out-of-wedlock son to win his immortality through the fame that will come in war. The sword decides all, and the idea that fulfillment in life can be found by the glory of conquest and war is all too well known to the ancient world. Nevertheless, Achilles was torn by his desire for the battle-cry and his weeping mother; he eventually sides in favor of the call of the battle-cry, but not without some consideration to his family.

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