In Book X of the Republic, Plato states: “all poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers, and that the knowledge of their true nature is the only anidote to them.” Plato believed that imitation of sensible objects removed the poet, and the observer, from truth and reality by inspiring the emotions of pity and fear. Plato argued that philosophical knowledge is far superior that the mere imitative nature of art.

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Plato’s banishment of the poets in the Republic is based upon an ideological and moral accusation: poets are imitators of things removed from reality and they cater to the emotions—the irrational nature of pity and fear. These two concepts, “imitation” and “pity and fear,” are at the heart of Aristotle’s Poetics. The Poetics posits a defense for these two criteria, and, according to Aristotle, represent integral elements in all poetics, especially tragedy.

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Exchanging pleasantries about the weather, Socrates and Phaedrus walk on the outskirts of Athens; the balmy day seems an appropriate setting for their discussion of love. The oppressive heat compels the peregrinating duo to take shelter next to a river until the temperature cools enough to allow them to continue. Phaedrus addresses much of the subject matter contained in Gorgias, rhetoric and right living, and closes with a discussion of writing. Yet these discussions are products of the pair’s original topic: love.

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What was the purpose, children, for which I reared you? –Medea (l. 1003)

While I have always been aware of the iconoclasm of Euripides’ Medea, I was struck even more by it this read through and the moral implications of the play’s status as a tragedy. Is Medea a tragedy? While it does contain many aspects of an Aristotelean tragedy, it seems to lack — at least for me — any semblance of anagnorisis, the tragic hero’s understanding and acceptance of his/her tragic flaw and a greater wisdom that comes from that understanding. Medea does leave the audience with a sense of pity and terror, even perhaps more than Oedipus Rex in its unnaturalness, if that’s possible. Euripides’ play seems to suggest that in order for the patriarchy to understand its inherent double standards, one must strike it at its very center: those who would continue its tradition.

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Apollo, friends, Apollo–
He ordained my agonies–these my pains on pains!
But the hand that struck my eyes was mine,
mine alone–no one else–
I did it all myself!
What good were eyes to me?
Nothing I could see could bring me joy. –Oedipus

When Sophocles wrote Oedipus Rex, the cultural and intellectual zeitgeist of Athens was undergoing a paradigm shift, from the privileging of one cosmological view to that of another. The gods were dying and being replaced by Socrates and his ilk: those who wanted to eschew the days of superstition and prophecy in favor of a more secure faith in the educated man’s ability to figure the universe and his place in it out for himself without depending on the mystical prognostications from spastic oracles. While somewhat successful — we all know what happen to Socrates (“I drank what?”) — this trend nevertheless made its impact on the time and the future of Western thought.

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The following questions should help you begin thinking about the major themes, characters, and ideas in the primary text.

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The Iliad (a song about Ilium, or Troy) along with its companion epic the Odyssey form the foundation of ancient Greek culture and address the extremes of human experience through war and peace. Both epics are primary, or oral, epics that draw on an enormous wealth of cultural stories in unified structures that we attribute to the poet Homer, in eighth century B.C.E. The epics are written in an unsentimental style: the Iliad depicts the ambivalence of war in meticulously accurate details. Both the nightmare of war and its excitement find expression in the Iliad, just as the Odyssey’s pages quest for a home, or a peace that seems hard-won after the devastation of war.

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For in my heart and soul I know this well:
the day will come when sacred Troy must die, [. . .]
That is nothing, nothing beside your agony
when some brazen Argive hales you off in tears,
wrenching away your day of light and freedom!
–Hector to Andromache, the Iliad, VI.396-97, 405-07

Book VI of Homer’s Iliad shows the contention in the heart of Hector, Ilium’s champion, but also a husband and new father: he is torn between his responsibilities as a hero to his people and as a the head of the household. Like so many soldiers going off to battle today, Hector is a new father who must risk his life to maintain his people’s way of life. Hector knows that Troy is doomed, but he must do his duty as champion and prince, even though it means the enslavement of his wife and child. In Hector’s plight, we see what is perhaps the utmost position of humanity in war: to lose does not mean just the death of the hero, but his death precipitates the death of the society that he protects.

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Book 16 of the Iliad epitomizes the height of the chaotic struggle between the Achaeans and the Trojans as each try desperately to gain the upper hand. Lost in the rage of battle and spurred on by Zeus, Patroclus gains the upper hand after killing Sarpedon, the adopted son of Troy, yet only to be taken down by Apollo, then killed by Hector. In this battle, there is a contention between desire and fate, the gods’ and man’s struggle for they want placed beside that of inexorable fate. Here, Patroclus is the warrior fighting beyond his fate, not great enough to level the walls of Troy, but just a soldier who, like many young men, is fated to die outside the walls of Ilium.

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Odysseus finally returns home in Book XIII of the Odyssey, but “could not tell what land it was / after so many years away … The landscape looked strange, unearthly strange / to the Lord Odysseus” (XIII. 238-39, 245-46). Odysseus spends the next seven books carefully making his way around Ithaka, making allegiances, and practicing his trademark dissembling and contending in order to insinuate himself into the presence of the suitors to make them eventually “atone in blood!” (XI.132). The lessons of the voyage must come into play if Odysseus is to reclaim his house and kingdom so that he may set his lands in order and finally put the chaos of this wanderings behind him. Book XXI sets the stage for the slaughter of Book XXII. Telemachus has finally accepted Odysseus as his true father and now stands beside the returned king at the end of Book XXI: Odysseus has cast aside his beggar’s rags and now stands regally before the doomed suitors, bow in hand, son by his side, and electrical effects from the gods themselves. You couldn’t ask for anything better out of Hollywood.

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