Resumo de Iilaid

Nearly three thousand years after they were composed, the Iliad and the Odyssey remain two of the most celebrated and widely read stories ever told, yet next to nothing is known about their composer. Authorship is traditionally ascribed to a blind poet named Homer, and it is under this name that the works are still published.Most modern scholars believe that even if a single person wrote the epics, his work owed a tremendous debt to a long tradition of unwritten, oral poetry. Stories of a glorious expedition to the East and of its leaders' fateful journeys home had been circulating in Greece for hundreds of years before the Iliad and Odyssey were composed. According to this theory, one poet, multiple poets working in collaboration, or perhaps even a series of poets handing down their work in succession finally turned these stories into written works, again with each adding his own touch and expanding or contracting certain episodes in the overall narrative to fit his taste.This earlier period, the Greeks believed, was a more glorious and sublime age, when gods still frequented the earth and heroic, godlike mortals with superhuman attributes populated Greece. The Greeks are often referred to as "Achaeans," the name of a large tribe occupying Greece during the Bronze Age.But Homer's reconstruction often yields to the realities of eighth- and seventh-century b.c. Greece. The feudal social structure apparent in the background of the Odyssey seems more akin to Homer's Greece than to Odysseus's, and Homer substitutes the pantheon of deities of his own day for the related but different gods whom Mycenaean Greeks worshipped. Many other minor but obvious anachronisms?such as references to iron tools and to tribes that had not yet migrated to Greece by the Bronze Age?betray the poem's later, Iron Age origins.The ruins that Schliemann uncovered sit a few dozen miles off of the Aegean coast in northwestern Turkey, a site that indeed fits the geographical descriptions of Homer's Troy. Although most scholars accept Schliemann's discovered city as the site of the ancient city of Troy, many remain skeptical as to whether Homer's Trojan War ever really took place. Evidence from Near Eastern literature suggests that episodes similar to those described in the Iliad may have circulated even before Schliemann's Troy was destroyed. Like the Odyssey, the Iliad was composed primarily in the Ionic dialect of Ancient Greek, which was spoken on the Aegean islands and in the coastal settlements of Asia Minor, now modern Turkey. Some scholars thus conclude that the poet hailed from somewhere in the eastern Greek world. Homer's epics are Panhellenic (encompassing all of Greece) in spirit and use forms from several other dialects. The Aftermath of the IliadHomer's audience would have been familiar with the struggle's conclusion, and the potency of much of Homer's irony and foreboding depends on this familiarity. Nine years after the start of the Trojan War, the Greek ("Achaean") army sacks Chryse, a town allied with Troy. During the battle, the Achaeans capture a pair of beautiful maidens, Chryseis and Briseis. Agamemnon, the leader of the Achaean forces, takes Chryseis as his prize, and Achilles, the Achaeans' greatest warrior, claims Briseis. Chryseis's father, Chryses, who serves as a priest of the god Apollo, offers an enormous ransom in return for his daughter, but Agamemnon refuses to give Chryseis back. Chryses then prays to Apollo, who sends a plague upon the Achaean camp.Furious at this insult, Achilles returns to his tent in the army camp and refuses to fight in the war any longer. With Zeus supporting the Trojans and Achilles refusing to fight, the Achaeans suffer great losses. The Achaeans make no progress; even the heroism of the great Achaean warrior Diomedes proves fruitless. Several Achaean commanders become wounded, and the Trojans break through the Achaean ramparts. Apollo knocks Patroclus's armor to the ground, and Hector Achilles discovers that Hector has killed Patroclus, he fills with such grief and rage that he agrees to reconcile with Agamemnon and rejoin the battle. Achilles then rides out to battle at the head of the Achaean army.Meanwhile, Hector, not expecting Achilles to rejoin the battle, has ordered his men to camp outside the walls of Troy. But when the Trojan army glimpses Achilles, it flees in terror back behind the city walls. Achilles cuts down every Trojan he sees. Finally, Achilles confronts Hector outside the walls of Troy. Achilles chases him around the city's periphery three times, but the goddess Athena finally tricks Hector into turning around and fighting Achilles. In a dramatic duel, Achilles kills Hector. Upon Achilles' arrival, the triumphant Achaeans celebrate Patroclus's funeral with a long series of athletic games in his honor. Each day for the next nine days, Achilles drags Hector's body in circles around Patroclus's funeral bier.At last, the gods agree that Hector deserves a proper burial. Zeus sends the god Hermes to escort King Priam, Hector's father and the ruler of Troy, into the Achaean camp. Priam tearfully pleads with Achilles to take pity on a father bereft of his son and return Hector's body. He invokes the memory of Achilles' own father, Peleus. Deeply moved, Achilles finally relents and returns Hector's corpse to the Trojans. Both sides agree to a temporary truce, and Hector receives a hero's funeral.

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