AN OVERVIEW OF HOMER'S CHALLENGING EDUCATION

Homer’s poems educate the Greeks by surprising and shocking them, and thereby provoking them to question their beliefs. According to Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plato, Homer was the founder of Greek civilization.^[42] He was “the greatest single force in making of the Greeks a kindred people and in giving them a mutually understandable language and common ideals,” according to John Scott (1963, 98).

Homer, Plato, and the Homeric Education on the Gods 17 audience’s belief in their own superiority by focusing on the Achaian war against the Trojans and by presenting the Greek Achaians as superior in justice and nobility to the Asian Trojans. And yet, Homer focuses instead on the anger of Achilles, the best of the Achaians, against his fellow Achaians, an anger that the poem presents as destructive and excessive but also as, to a considerable extent, justified.^[43] Moreover, throughout the poem, Homer expresses tremendous sympathy for the justice and nobility of the Trojan enemies of the Achaians, and the poem concludes with a sublime expression of compassion for the Trojans by the Achaian hero Achilles himself.^[44] Similarly, the Odyssey is the story of an Achaian hero who fights for many years against the Trojans and then, after 20 years away from the land of his fathers, finally returns to his family and to his fellow Achaians.

Homer’s poems also dare to challenge the most sacred beliefs of the Greeks, their beliefs concerning the majestic, awe-inspiring gods. Although the characters of both the Iliad and the Odyssey cherish a faith in gods who care for humans, protect the just from harm, and punish the wicked,^[47] Homer challenges that faith by presenting the immortal gods as beings who are, in truth, all too often indifferent to the demands of justice and to the trials and tribulations of mere mortals.^[48] Achilles and Odysseus in particular are prompted by their troubling and sorrowful experiences to wonder whether the carefree gods are capable of truly caring for or even understanding such beings as ourselves.^[49] In this way, Homer’s poems encourage a questioning of the providence of the gods and a reliance instead on human governance and human wisdom.

The poems of Homer educate their audience by focusing their minds on conflict: the strife between Achilles, on the one hand, and Agamemnon and the Achaians, on the other; the confrontation between Odysseus and the Achaian suitors of his wife; the war between the Achaians and the Trojans; the quarrels among the gods themselves; and the clashes between the will of the gods and the prayers of human beings.

A key feature of the conflicts presented by Homer is that they all challenge what would seem to be the instinctive, conventional expect­ations of Homer’s audience regarding their community and their gods. Achilles, Agamemnon and his army, Odysseus, and the suitors are all Achaians. They all belong to the Achaian land Nestor invokes when trying to quell the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon (1.254). They are all great-spirited, flowing-haired Achaians, who fight for one another and seek honor from one another because they all ostensibly belong to a united, natural community. And yet, as the Iliad tells us in its opening lines, the wrath of Achilles, of the greatest hero by far of the Achaians, caused “countless woes” to befall his fellow Achaians.^[51] And in the final book of the Odyssey, Eupeithes, the father of one of the suitors,

Homer, Plato, and the Homeric Education on the Gods 19 denounces the Achaian hero Odysseus before an assembly of Achaians for having devised great harm to the “Achaians,” first by losing all the men he led to war against Troy 20 years before and then by killing the 108 suitors upon his return. So persuasive is this denunciation that, in response, “pity seized all the Achaians” (24.421-438).⁴³ Similarly, the enemies of the Achaians, the Trojans, are portrayed by the Achaians Nestor, Menelaus, and Agamemnon as simply unjust, led by a king whose son Paris stole the wife of the Achaian king Menelaus (Iliad 2.350-356, 3.106, 3.351-354, 6.55-60, 13.620-639). And yet, in Homer’s account, the Trojans prove to be in many ways quite sympathetic and admirable: critical of the “evil” Paris even though he is a Trojan prince; regretful at having agreed to protect Helen after she voluntarily fled her husband Menelaus to follow Paris; courageous in defending their city and families from the Achaians; moving in their lamentations over the death of their defender Hector; and led by a king whose nobility arouses the wonder and compassion of the Achaian hero Achilles himself.⁴⁴ Finally, the gods, led by Father Zeus, the Father of Gods and Men, would seem to be unified in their support of Zeus and his just providence for human beings. As Eumaeus affirms, “For the blessed gods do not love cruel deeds, but honor justice and measured deeds of human beings” (Odyssey 14.83-84).

Allen, but I have found especially helpful Richmond Lattimore’s translations of the poems.

⁴³ See Benardete 1997, 10; Haubold 2000, 108.

⁴⁴ Iliad 3.39-57, 3.146-160, 3.171-180, 3.451-454, 6.237-241, 6.399-502, 7.345-397, ⁸.53^-57^{, 1}5.4^o4^-499^{, 1}5.557^-55^8, 17.^{220-226, 22}.37^-9¹, ²².437^-5¹5^{, 2}4.47^1-67^o, 24.702-804. See also Odyssey 4.140-146, 4.266-289, 11.378-384, 14.67-71.

⁴⁵ Iliad 4.30-49; Odyssey 1.48-79. See also 13.128-164.

ourselves the relation between humans and their communities and the relation between humans and gods, with the assistance of the singer, Homer. But the examples of Achilles and especially of the singer Homer himself, ultimately point to the satisfaction and even the pleasure to be found through such an examination.^[52]

Through both his poems - especially through his first and more funda­mental poem, the poem Plato focuses more on in the Republic,^[53] the Iliad - Homer educates his audience and readers, by beginning from their conventional beliefs concerning the gods and human excellence, then challenging their beliefs, and finally leading them to a more thoughtful and more enlightened understanding of the role of the divine in human affairs and of what constitutes a fully admirable human being.

Homer, Plato, and the Homeric Education on the Gods 21 honor, divine reward, or some other form of happiness greater than mere existence. Through his instruction concerning the gods and human excel­lence, then, Homer imparts to his audience as a whole a humanistic, somber, and even tragic^[54] understanding of the need for mortal humans to fend for themselves and for one another without looking to the gods for assistance; to recognize the inevitable sorrows of mortal life; and to face the enduring conflicts, actual or potential, of human life such as those between loyalty and virtue, between ambition and friendship, and between the longing to serve others and the longing for one’s own fulfillment. Homer’s education ultimately points to the enigmatic figure of the singer Homer himself, whose skepticism toward the gods, clear­sighted and compassionate understanding of death, and all-encompassing and incisive contemplation of the world gradually emerge in the course of the poems, and who thereby comes to sight as the true exemplar of human excellence. The Homeric education, then, is an education in reason and humanity, a process of enlightenment that points its audience ultimately beyond the life of the simply pious, loyal, and dutiful citizen toward that of the more self-reliant, thoughtful, but tragic warrior, and, ultimately, toward the contemplative and humane singer.