In class 2a (i.e., first class of week 2), I made the provocative suggestion that there are NO good (i.e., morally good) people among the Achaeans. No one, for example, that you would want your kids to hang around and adopt as a role model.
I was hoping to get a bit more argument, but since everyone who spoke up seemed to share the sentiment, let me try to provoke some thought in the opposite direction.
Sure, Agamemnon seems concerned only about expanding his influence, wealth and glory. Menelaus is out for revenge. (Though loss of Helen also arguably imperils his claim to the Lacedaemonian throne, as that throne passed matrilineally, and he was king because he married Helen, who was daughter of the former king.) You might even see Achilleus as either a selfish boy or a murderous psychopath who makes decisions based on voices he hears in his head. (Unfortunately, some of the bits where Achilleus comes off a bit better are not among those we're reading. But you may have a more nuanced view of him after the last book, in the scene with Priam.)
But there are others in the Achaean camp. How about Nestor? Odysseus? If you read Briseus' lamentation over the dead Patroklus, it sound like he was a pretty good guy. And among the Trojans, Priam seems pretty decent.
(I have a harder time finding any gods to like in the Iliad. Do you think they seem to be painted more one-dimensionally than the human protagonists? And if so, what might be the explanation for this?)
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I can't seem to put my thoughts together on this question, so I have another question that I think is pretty closely related:
In class discussion today it seemed that we were running into difficulty whenever we tried to graft our contemporary understanding of "moral good" onto Homer's story. Prof. Horst suggests in his comment that there are no characters "that you would want your kids to hang around and adopt as a role model," but maybe your average Mycenaean would have actually wanted their kids to have a Hektor or Achilleus to look up to. So how can we define "moral good" in a more stable, less culturally contingent way?
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