Quote:
Originally Posted by anamardoll
Yes, I know The Iliad and The Odyssey weren't initially written, but they are written down now, and when they were written down, they were written from the POV of men who were heroes and commanders and not from the cannon-fodder and the women being used in the camps. Which is what I said. 
For better or worse, you don't really get to hear from the POV of the guys dying on the field who thought the whole war was a stupid waste. I'm also fairly certain (unless I missed a crucial passage) that you don't get to hear much from Briseis about how she feels about being awarded as a "war prize" to Achilles. Even when she's handed over to Agamemnon, it's all about Achilles' hurt pride, and not -- you know -- about what Briseis feels about being used by these men.
I'm not saying it's bad literature, I'm saying that if the OP wants broader horizons, more POVs are necessary than just that of the men on the top doing the killing and pillaging.
Getting hung up on WHO eventually wrote them down does not change WHOSE p.o.v. was employed in the text we now have available to us. |
But if you do read those classics through modern eyes, you do ask those questions. And, of course, you learn a lot about the status of women and slaves. But in a pre-literate society it was never likely that you would ever get the view of the people on the bottom of the heap. The people who composed the epics would not themselves have been at the top, but they had to please everyone, including the top people or they didn't eat.
I think there is so much about the Greeks in particular that paved the way for modern thought that they are well worth reading. And by the time of the pinnacle of Greek civilisation in the 5th century, Athenian male society was much less hierarchical than in the heroic age and also than nowadays. They had a direct democracy and even a great philosopher like Socrates did military service and farming. By the time of Socrates and the great dramatists, Homeric times were almost as remote as the Middle Ages are to us. We still enjoy Arthurian romances as films as well as fantasies that have even less connection to reality. But what we enjoy will tell future historians what we were like.