The Immortal Heroes of Homer’s Iliad Essay -- Iliad essays

The Immortal Heroes of Homers Iliad In Homers Iliad, a warrior can only attain heroism and immortality by embracing an primaeval demise. Jean-Pierre Vernant describes this paradox in his essay, A Beautiful Death and the mar form in Homeric Epic. According to Vernant, heroes accept the fact that life is brusk and devote themselves completely and single-mindedly to war, adventure, glory, and death (53). 1 Curiously, this is because heroes overcome death only when they embrace it (57). The importance of death stems from the fact that the individual is define by his reputation and esteem among others, as Vernant points out when he argues that. . . genuine death lies in amnesia, silence, demeaning obscurity, the absence of fame. By contrast, real humankindfor the living or the deadcomes from being recognized, valued, and honored. Above all, it comes from being exalt as the central figure in a song of praise, a story that endlessly tells and retells a destiny admired by all. (57) He made on it a great vineyard heavy with clusters, adorable and in gold, but the grapes upon it were darkened and the vines themselves stood out through poles of silver. About them he made a field-ditch of dark metal, and drove all around this a fence of tin and there was only one path to the vineyard, and on it ran the grape-bearers for the vineyards stripping. Young girls and young men, in all their swinging-hearted innocence, carried the kind, confection fruit away intheir woven baskets, and in their midst a youth with a singing lyre played charmingly upon it for them, and sang the bonny song for Linos in a light voice, and they followed him, and with singing and whistling and light dance-steps of their f... ...g death and this is what makes a hero. Perhaps the final proof of this heroic immortality lies in the fact that the exploits of Achilleus and the other heroes of the Trojan War remain to this day the state of passion and controversy. In this way, they have purchase d a measure of fame and glory beyond anything they could have imagined. Truly, these heroes are immortal. NOTES1 Jean-Pierre Vernant, A Beautiful Death and the Disfigured Corpse in Homeric Epic, in Mortalsand Immortals Collected Essays (Princeton Princeton University Press, 1991).2 Homer, Iliad, trans. capital of Virginia Lattimore (Chicago The University of Chicago Press, 1951), .3 Homer, Odyssey, trans. Richard Lattimore (New York Harper & Row Publishers, 1965).4 Homer, Iliad. 5 Edith Hamilton, Mythology (New York Mentor, 1969), 294.6 Homer, Iliad.7 Vernant, 60.8 Homer, Iliad.