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Homer and The Trojan War - College Essay

Homer and The Trojan War

According to Homer's Illiad, the cause of the Trojan War went back to the Judgment of Paris. Paris, the Prince of Troy, was aksed to judge among three goddesses who was the most beautiful. For choosing Aphrodite, he was given the most beautiful human woman in the world as a prize. Unfortunately, that woman happened to be married to the King of Sparta, and when she fell in love with Paris and eloped with him to Troy, it was taken as a deadly insult, requiring the combined forces of the whole of the Myvcenean Peloponese (and perhaps beyond) to attack the city-state of Troy. After astalemated ten-year siege, the Greeks devised a stratagem. They built a huge wooden horse, at night filled it ...

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as far away as Crete) just to avenge a stolen wife!
Homer wrote the Illiad and the Odyssey from stories handed down in the bardic tradition some 600 years after the war is supposed to have taken place. That is about the time that separates us from the beginning of the Renaissance, and how accurate are our impressions of life then? How accurately do we know the political intrigues among the city-states of that time? We have a considerable literature to let us know how life was, and what happened then. Homer had none. He had only a heroic bardic tradition, and moreover, a tradition that had been handed down through a period known as "the Aegean Dark Ages".
A better analogy to what Homer knew of the time of the Trojan War would be what Chaucer might have known of the Roman Empire, or of the warrior-chief we call "King Arthur" who we know from stories written following an oral history. What Homer knew had come down to him in precise verses. The verse form and the redundancies of ...

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Homer and The Trojan War. (2011, May 26). Retrieved January 11, 2026, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Homer-and-The-Trojan-War/99438

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 5/26/2011 08:36:31 PM
Submitted By: enkd03
Category: English
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 685
Pages: 3

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