Genius In The Iliad

In poetry they are all but supreme; no epic is to be mentioned with Homer; no odes to be set beside Pindar; of the four masters of the tragic stage three are Greek. Little is left of all this wealth of great art: the sculptures, defaced and broken into bits, have crumbled away; the buildings are fallen; the paintings gone forever; of the writings, all lost but a very few. We have only the ruin of what was; the world has had no more than that for well on to two thousand years; yet these few remains of the mighty structure have been a challenge and an incitement to men ever since and they are among our possessions today which we value as most precious. There is no danger now that the world will not give the Greek genius full recognition. Greek

The Trojan War was fought for ten years and ended with the destruction of Troy. Heinrich Schliemann (1822 –1890) located and excavated ancient Troy, and in 1873 he discovered Priam’s gold and jewels, which is now on display at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Besides Troy, Schliemann also discovered the Mycenaean sites of Mycenae and Tiryns in 1876. His work lent weight to the idea that Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid reflect actual historical events and pushed back the beginning of Greek history by 600 years to 1400 BC. The Odyssey describes the ten-year adventure of Odysseus (Ulysses) returning to his native kingdom of

In these poems, Homer introduces the concept of Virtue (aretê in Greek), excellence, the ideal of perfection of the epic heroes’ bravery, cunning, strength, nobility, and achieving immortal glory. The virtue of courage and competition is also introduced with the famous phrase, derived from the sixth book of Iliad translated as:

“to strive always for the highest aretê, and to excel all others” or "ever to excel and be better than the rest" Homer, per Kitto, “enshrined all wisdom and all knowledge…combined with his hopeless fatalism, with the fierce joy in life and the exultation in human achievement and in human personality. We hear in the Iliad and in most Greek literature, the tragic note produced by the tension produced by two forces: passionate delight in life and clear apprehension of its unalterable framework:” The following few lines of the Homeric poetry of the Iliad describes man’s generations on earth, and their fate.

“As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity, 


The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber; 


Burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring