the iliad thesis statements

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The Iliad Themes – Meaning and Main Ideas

Home » Literature Explained – Literary Synopses and Book Summaries » Homer’s Iliad Explained – Characters, Symbols, & Themes » The Iliad Themes – Meaning and Main Ideas

Main Themes in Homer’s Iliad

The Iliad is set in the tenth and final year of the Trojan war. It’s the Bronze Age, so around the 13th century B.C. Much of the action takes place on the gruesome battlefield of the Trojan War. The Trojans and Achaeans were deadlocked in a deadly battle that they could hardly remember the cause of at this point, a decade into it. Much of the refusal to end the war ultimately comes down to a matter of pride, a major theme in this epic poem.

There are three motifs that enhance the overall themes of this poem. The motifs of armor and fire reflect the backdrop of war. In this poem, armor is more than simply a protective layer—it has its own heroic essence. When Hector steals Achilles’s armor after Patroclus wears it into battle to scare the Trojans, Achilles then receives replacement armor from the gods themselves. Divine armor makes a man able to withstand assault. Similarly, the motif of fire helps to represent the passions of war. Finally, burial is a significant motif. Burial enhances the thematic idea that human life is fleeting and impermanent as well as the idea that the body’s burial will be critical for the soul’s eternal rest.  

The Iliad Themes

What are the major themes in the Iliad ?

The Glory of War Heroes

Military victories values above personal life, the fleeting nature of human existence.

Avoiding battle, however, is a despicable behavior that will be punished by the gods and man alike. Despite the inherent glory of war that is celebrated in the poem, The Iliad also displays the brutality of war, as well. If anything, this serves to enhance the pride the characters feel having served in war. Because the Trojan war is ultimately seen as regrettable after a decade of fighting, both sides are satisfied knowing that Hector’s death and the return of his body to his father signal the end of the fighting. Despite the reason for the war getting lost over the years, all feel a sense of glory in having fought and then ushered in the close of the war.

Similar to the theme regarding the glory of war heroes, it would be deplorable to avoid war in favor of personal and/or family life. This sad truth can be seen when Hector removes his war helmet in front of his son to avoid scaring him. Hector cannot give up his identity as a soldier because it would not be the heroic way to live life. However, he has sacrificed a lot to achieve this honor. Hector is not the only one who feels this way.

Homer has most of the characters face a choice of either family or war. This can also be noticed when Achilles sends his dear friend Patroclus into battle wearing his armor. When Patroclus is killed, Achilles feels an intense grief and rage. The only acceptable way for him to handle these feelings is to return to battle and end the war by killing Hector. On the other side of things, we have Paris, who has chosen not to fight in the war to be with Helen. He is viewed with great disdain in this text.

Perhaps one of the most common and tragic thematic elements that often shows up in literature is the exploration of how quickly human life can seem to pass by. It is clear that even the greatest of men who have fought and triumphed in horrific battles cannot escape death. Homer makes mention of many of the characters’ deaths over and over throughout the poem, even Achilles, the story’s main hero, is revealed to be fated to meet an early end, although we don’t see that in The Iliad.

Still, it is important to recognize that mortality is something that follows all humans, no matter what they do. Because of this fleeting existence, it is important to fill one’s life with as much honor as possible and to act in accordance to the hero’s code. If a person cannot live forever, it is likely that their actions and words can have lasting impact—that impact should be one of honor, glory, and heroism.

ENG214.001 -- Topics in World Literature: Ancient to Medieval

Prof. Eileen Joy (Spring 2010)

CRITICAL ESSAY #1 -- Close Reading Critique: The Iliad

Due: Tuesday, February 23rd

Figure 1 . still image from the film Troy (2003)

    For your first essay--a CLOSE READING CRITIQUE exercise--develop a narrowly-defined argumentative thesis about what you see as an important aspect of the Iliad (Books 1, 9, 16, 18, 22, & 24) in relation to one of the topics listed below. Write a paper of approximately 4 typed (double-spaced) pages . NO outside sources are to be used for this paper, which should solely represent your own analytical thinking. On the other hand, the online notes I have provided for you on the syllabus can be consulted in order to help you generate ideas and refine your thinking with respect to some kind of general knowledge about the poem itself and its mythological and historical background, and you may incorporate information from these notes in your paper if you feel it is relevant to your argument. If you also want to incorporate commentary on Coppola's film Apocalypse Now , that is okay, too. The most important thing about this paper, in addition to having an argumentative thesis (that, hopefully, does not just re-state something obvious about the poem and its characters and story), is to make sure that you ground your analysis in a CLOSE reading of the poetry itself: its language, characters and plot, and descriptive details. Whatever it is you want to argue (and you have free rein to develop any argument you like; there are no "right" or "wrong" interpretations in this course, only stronger and more weakly argued ones), just be sure to connect your main observations and ideas to specific passages and details in the poem itself.

Possible Topics:

• "areté"

note: traditional areté [manliness, virtue] in Athens meant acting the hero -- like Jason in search of the Golden Fleece, or Hector ultimately deciding to stand firm and meet Achilles in battle even though he knows he will likely lose. A man's role was to "help his friends and harm his enemies." By so doing he earned timé [honor, public esteem] and kleos [glory, or reputation]. If he failed to help his friends -- or to harm his enemies-- he lost status. But areté also transcended gender categories and meant, loosely, "reaching your highest human potential," and using everything at your disposal to do so.

• destiny/fate
• the individual vs. the group
• power & authority
• vengeance/justice
• relationships between men
• the role of the Greek gods

SOME GUIDELINES FOR WRITING

(I would like to note here that the following comprises some of my own thinking, tips culled from The Holt Handbook [6th ed.; pp. 723-26], and from Professors DeLombard's and White's "Papers: Expectations, Guidelines, Advice and Grading," available online here .)

    First, Please keep in mind that when I ask you to do a close reading of a literary work in order to make an argument about what you see as one of the important aspects of that work, that you do not read to magically discover the ONE correct meaning the author has supposedly hidden between the lines. The "meaning" of a literary work is created by the interaction between a text and its readers, and therefore, most works of literature can convey many different meanings to different readers. Do not assume, however that a work can mean whatever you want it to mean; ultimately, your interpretation must be consistent with the stylistic signals, thematic suggestions, and patterns of imagery in the text. Therefore, in a close reading, whatever observation you want to to make about what you think the author/text is doing/saying, be sure to ALWAYS support your interpretation with direct reference to the text itself (both by providing brief summaries of key content and also by the use of direct quotation).

Here are some TIPS on how to go about doing a close, interpretive reading:

According to DeLombard's and White's guidelines on writing a literary analysis (see hyperlink above for their website, "Papers: Expectations, Guidelines, Advice, and Grading"), "In order to become a good interpreter of literature, you will have to make the important distinction between summary and translation, on the one hand, and interpretation or analysis, on the other. When you summarize, you repeat what the text actually says; when you translate, you explain to your audience in some detail many of the points an astute reader would reach on his or her own -- think of translating something from French into English for a person who speaks both languages. Neither summary nor translation is really a worthwhile endeavor in that neither tells the reader anything he or she did not already know. By contrast, when you interpret or analyze literature, you produce your own ideas about how the text creates meaning. In order to produce these ideas, you will need to perform close reading, to look closely at the language of the text in order to demonstrate not just what you think the text means, but more importantly how it means what you think it does. See the difference? It's an important one" ( DeLombard & White ).

DeLombard and White also provide some useful tips for getting started on interpreting and analyzing, rather than summarizing or translating:

• to demonstrate to your audience how you read the passage that you have quoted; in other words, by paying close attention to the language of the text , to explain how the passage means what you say it means
• to show how your reading supports the larger point of the paragraph .
• The next rule is as simple as it is helpful: always analyze literature in the present tense . Because you are interpreting a given piece of literature in the present rather than summarizing what "happened" in it, you should always stick to the present tense when interpreting. Literature, indeed, although written in the past, is still happening as you read and discuss it, right? Historical background and biographical information should be discussed in the past tense, but when writing about the literary text itself, stick to the present, which will almost force you to interpret rather than summarize.

Summary and translation reproduce what the text says. Persuasive interpretation says what the text means by showing, through close reading, how the text means what you say it means.

    I expect to see a thesis near the beginning of your paper. In other words, I want you to have some kind of point you would like to make/argue in relation to the topic you have chosen. A thesis is NOT a statement in which you simply point out the obvious; for example, "Achilles is a strong warrior who lets his anger get the better of him." A thesis needs to be ARGUABLE, and the more arguable the better.

Here are some TIPS on how to develop a good thesis (also from DeLombard & White ):

"Your introductory paragraph should do two things: introduce your reader to your topic and present your thesis . It is important to distinguish in your mind between your topic -- what you will write about [say, the issue of areté in the Iliad ]-- and your thesis -- what you will argue or attempt to prove in relation to your topic. A thesis may be defined as an interpretation that you set forth in specific terms and propose to defend or demonstrate by reasoned argumentation and literary analysis. Your thesis, then, is the position that you are attempting to persuade your reader to accept."

"Your thesis may be more than one sentence long. If you have a good thesis, however, in most cases you will be able to articulate it in one sentence. If you require two, that's fine, so long as you make sure that the argument is coherent and that the transition from the first to the second sentence is clear and effective."

"Please carefully consider this important hint : You do not need a refined thesis in order to start writing. If you begin with a provisional thesis and then do good and careful close readings, you will often find a version of your final thesis in the last paragraph of a first draft . Integrate that version into your first paragraph and revise from there. Do not worry too much about your thesis, therefore, until after you've written out your close readings! A good final thesis should emerge from , not precede, your analyses."

Below are five steps that will help you work through the process of developing a strong thesis. First , though, please think about these three guidelines (taken from DeLombard & White):

• A good thesis is specific , not general. Avoid all sweeping generalities, about human beings, about poetry, about life, about anything "through the ages," etc. If you follow the five steps below, this should not be a problem.
• Your thesis should matter to you, and you should be able to imagine that your thesis would matter to any other member of our class. Does your thesis address important issues that the course has raised? Does it pass the " Who cares? " test?
• Finally, your thesis statement should give the reader some sense of what the structure of your paper will be. If your thesis contains two or three parts, then your reader will expect you to discuss those two or three parts in the order in which you've given them in your thesis statement.

Now here are five more steps that you can take to develop a thesis and start writing the paper (taken from DeLombard & White):

• Reread the texts you intend to discuss and take good, clear notes on passages that seem particularly relevant to the assignment.
• Keeping the topic in mind, look over these notes and then select the one specific thing that grabs you the most, the one particular image or metaphor, or limited set of images or metaphors, about which you feel in your gut that you have the most to say.
• Next, using your notes make a list of every instance of that image or metaphor, and then from that list choose the two or three passages that call out most loudly for interpretation.
• Following my suggestions on close reading above, write out your interpretations of the instances that you've chosen, dedicating one rough paragraph to each. Remember, your goal here is to say not just what you think your passages mean, but rather to show how they mean what you think they mean. What work do they perform, and how do they perform it?
• Finally, look at what you've written and let your thesis emerge out of your interpretations, out of your ideas concerning the work that your image or metaphor, or set of images or metaphors, performs in your texts.

    Other Considerations:

• Give your paper a creative, interesting title.
• Combine paraphrase, summary, and quotation with your own interpretation, weaving quotations from the poem smoothly into your paper.
• When quoting lines and passages from the Iliad , cite book and line numbers: "Anger, be now your song, immortal one" (1.1).
• Avoid unnecessary plot summary. Your goal is to argue a thesis and to support that argument with pertinent details from the work itself. When plot development supports a point you want to make, then a very brief summary is acceptable. But plot summary alone is NO substitute for analysis.

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Great Essay Topics For The Iliad: 10 Ideas To Consider

The Iliad has been passed down for millennia, and is thought to have been told orally long before it was written down by the mysterious Greek poet Homer. Recorded by Homer during the Greek Archaic Age, The Iliad is one of mankind’s oldest war stories, an epic tale of battle and intrigue full of larger-than-life heroes and mischievous gods. It’s a huge, expansive epic poem, with dozens of human and divine characters. There are many situations, characters, and themes to explore in this venerable tale, so coming up with essay topics for the Iliad isn’t as hard as you might think.

Here are ten ideas to consider for an essay about the Iliad:

• What role does Fate play in the Iliad, both in terms of the outcome of the Trojan War, and in terms of the destinies, emotions, and psychology of the individual characters?
• Discuss the nature, role, and “heroic code” characteristic of the Homeric hero.
• Discuss the portrayal of father-son relationships in The Iliad, referencing the relationship between Priam and Hector as well as the relationship between Achilles and Peleus.
• Discuss the actions and motivations of divine figures in The Iliad.
• Discuss the Homeric portrayal of “kleos,” the concept of glory that is earned through heroic battle.
• Discuss the Homeric theme of respect or honor (“timê”) earned through a man’s lifetime of cultural accomplishments.
• Discuss the theme of wrath in The Iliad.
• Is Achilles a sympathetic character? Discuss his personality, characterization, and motivations, such as the concept of “The Wrath of Achilles” that permeates the epic.
• Discuss the Iliad’s portrayal of female characters, both human and divine.
• Discuss the role of vanity, wrath, and personal gain in the reasons for the Trojan War
• Discuss the roles of the Gods as agents of fate, including the fact that they themselves are fully subject to Fate.
• What is the “moral” of the Iliad? What is its statement about human nature?
• Compare aspects of the Iliad, like literary style and the role of the gods, with The Odyssey.
• Discuss the role of Zeus (or another major divinity) in the story.
• Discuss the events and themes surrounding the death of Patroclus, Achilles’ close companion.
• Compare styles and themes in The Iliad with a later epic poem, such as the Aeneid or Dante’s Inferno.

These ten ideas are just a small sample of possible essay topics for the Iliad. It’s such a rich, multifaceted, and expansive work that the possibilities are nearly endless. Whatever topic you choose to write about, make sure it’s at least interesting to you, and you’ll do a great job.

“   Every writer, no matter how good he is with his first attempt should proofread his paper.  ” –  Donna Brians

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Simone Weil’s The Iliad or The Poem of Force: A Critical Edition

1 Responses

Sheila Murnaghan , University of Pennsylvania. [email protected]

This new edition of Simone Weil’s famous essay on the Iliad gives it a very different status than it has in the version in which I, and probably many other readers of BMCR, first encountered it. My old copy is a pamphlet published in 1956 by Pendle Hill, a Quaker study center near Philadelphia. There Weil’s essay, which began its life in English in the November 1945 issue of Politics , is offered as an aid to spiritual meditation in a tradition of pacifism. In a brief introduction, it is contextualized as a response to a defining catastrophe of the then contemporary world. ” The Iliad, or The Poem of Force was written in the summer and fall of 1940, after the fall of France. It may thus be read as an indirect commentary on that tragic event, which signalized the triumph of the most extreme modern expression of force.” Holoka’s new edition also accords the essay great respect, but in a different form. Now it is not an authoritative tract that speaks for itself but a classic work of literature requiring the same treatment as a Greek or Latin text. We are given a French text drawn from a recent scholarly edition, to which we can compare the new, studiously faithful translation that is also provided (the earlier, somewhat freer translation having been guaranteed simply by the credentials of its author, Mary McCarthy); in addition, the text is elucidated through an introduction and a commentary.

The Pendle Hill pamphlet conveys a degree of certainty about what this essay is good for that is less evident in a scholarly edition produced after a greater lapse of time. If we are not reading it as spiritual seekers whose consciousness is dominated by World War II, what can we expect to find there? Is it a document of primarily historical interest whose worth lies in what it tells us about the thought of Simone Weil and about the uses of antiquity in mid-twentieth century France? Or is it informative as an account of the Iliad itself?

There is among classicists a tendency to present Weil as an exceptionally good interpreter of Homer. This is well represented on the back of Holoka’s edition in a comment by Jasper Griffin: “No discussion of [the Iliad ] is more precious than the passionate, profound, and penetrating essay of Simone Weil …” Griffin’s statement here echoes earlier comments by himself and, among others, Colin Mcleod (“I know of no better brief account of the Iliad than this.”) and Oliver Taplin (“it … conveys a fundamental understanding of the Iliad .”) Weil was a stellar student in a rigorous, elite educational system and was well trained in the Greek language and in classical literature, but the deference of these scholars is based less on those qualifications than on her life experience: her role as a witness to the events of World War II and her remarkable determination to enter into and grapple with the sufferings of those around her. In her brief life, Weil not only endured the fall of France but actively renounced the privileges of her comfortable life, seeking out demanding factory labor, joining the Republican forces in Spain, and fatally refusing, while an exile in England, to eat more than the rations of her compatriots in France. In addition, she devoted herself to reading, thinking, and writing about moral and theological issues. In their response to her essay, these eminent Homerists betray diffidence, even anxiety, about the adequacy of a scholar’s relationship to works of classical literature, especially those like the Iliad that deal with historical crises and matters of war and violence. Weil’s authority derives for these admirers from the fact that she saw close up events that could be considered to resemble those described in the poem. In a similar way, the inherently distinguished criticism of Bernard Knox, another of Weil’s admirers, is often accorded an extra measure of respect because of his record as a soldier.

Holoka’s own assessment blends several possible approaches. He concludes his Introduction with the claim that the essay’s value lies in the access it provides to Weil’s “distinctive outlook on the human condition,” and he shares the assumption behind the Pendle Hill pamphlet that access to Weil’s outlook can be uplifting. “It transcends the goals of conventional historicist or positivistic literary analysis by affording both a novel interpretation of an ancient masterpiece and an intrinsically valuable moral experience” (11). But he also grounds his claim that the essay should be taken seriously as an interpretation of Homer by noting that Weil follows the time-honored academic practice of supporting her statements with close citation of the text.

It is certainly true that, the more frequently Weil quotes the Iliad , the more convincing she is. For most of the essay, she uses passage after passage to ground her central claim that the Iliad is above all a clear-eyed witness to the effects of force on the human spirit. Elaborating on her opening assertion that “The true hero, the true subject matter, the center of the Iliad is force,” she makes a series of related points: the poem’s many detailed accounts of death on the battlefield, with their focus on individual body parts, document the way force reduces human beings to things; sympathetic depictions of displaced and enslaved victims of warfare show that this dehumanization can apply as well to the living; victors are as much subordinated to force as the conquered, since it seduces them into a blind confidence contradicted by the ever-seesawing fortunes of war; the Iliad records the pervasive effects of force with a deep sorrow (which she terms “amertume” or “bitterness”) that is entirely without partisanship, “all that is destroyed is regretted.” With these observations, Weil provides a powerful, irrefutable counter to any reading of the Iliad that sees it as simply a celebration of warfare or a partisan glorification of the victorious Greeks. In the last few pages, however, she floats free from the text to offer a sweeping set of generalizations about the Greek spirit, which assimilate Greek culture to her own Christianity. “The Greeks had a force of soul that allowed them, for the most part, to avoid self-delusion; they were compensated for this by understanding how to attain in all things the highest degree of insight, purity, and simplicity.” This spirit was also found in the Gospels, but nowhere else: it eluded the Hebrews and the Romans and was quickly lost in the contaminating later history of Christianity. Clearly, the breathless reader can only learn from these pronouncements what the past meant to Weil, as she formed it into a personal spiritual map.

Through her passionate attunement to the way the Iliad records the evil and futility of war and her strong, heartfelt prose style, Weil does Homer a great service, commending his poem to modern readers who might not see beyond its martial subject matter. But her interpretation is reductive as well as sensitive, and she cannot do justice to the full complexity of Homer’s challenging vision. Her most conspicuous blind spot concerns the poem’s commitment to heroism, a concept she obliterates with her strange formulation that force is the poem’s “true hero.” In the Iliad , there is no other way of life than war, which generates the most meaningful, noble, and glorious actions along with destruction and self-destruction. Killing in battle may be recognized as brutal and dangerously heady, but it is also an artform and an exhilarating achievement. For the poem’s characters, clear-sightedness about the costs of war does not preclude investment in its promise of immortal fame. Weil quotes Hector’s pitying vision of Andromache’s future enslavement, but not his fantasy that Andromache’s captured form will stir in an observer a memory of Hector’s own exploits or his prayer for his son to follow the same course. Homer understands the allure of war as Weil does not, and it is notable that she never mentions what for most readers is the heart of the poem: its account of how Achilles, having articulated a thorough-going critique of the supposed reasons for fighting, is nonetheless drawn back into battle.

In her indifference to Homer’s positive vision of heroic action, Weil also misses the Iliad ‘s sense of itself as a medium for conferring glory and providing entertainment. For her, the poem is a “flawless mirror” of force, conveying to its readers the fate to which all are subject. But the Homeric world encompasses both a less austere concept of poetry as transmuting suffering into something satisfying and pleasurable and an unavoidable gap between the experiences of audiences and the events retold in poetry. Weil speculates that the Greeks who produced and treasured the Iliad were themselves defeated victims of war, like the Trojans and like herself, specifically those displaced by the so-called Dorian invasion. But the Iliad hints, and the Odyssey shows in detail, that the audiences of poetry may be quite detached from the stories in which they delight. The Odyssey may reveal the ironies produced by this detachment, as in its portrait of the different responses of Odysseus and the sheltered Phaeaceans to the tale of Troy, but both epics leave no doubt that hearing the struggles of others recounted in song is a joy to be savored. For Homer, the pervasiveness of human pain inspires respect for the consolations humans devise in the face of that pain and a sense that there is no point in suffering more than one has to, which is the message behind Achilles’ exhortation to Priam to put grief aside. It is not surprising that this dimension of the Iliad was invisible to Weil, who believed that suffering is inherently ennobling and sought it for herself when she did not have to — and is perhaps more readily apparent to those who lead the quieter, safer lives of scholars.

In their extravagant praise of Weil, Griffin et al. no doubt reflect a worry that the technical concerns of scholarship can obscure the urgent issues addressed by the Iliad . But their own writings show that scholars can take on those issues, and in a way that is more complete and better informed than Weil’s. So do works by scholars such as James Redfield and Seth Schein who also express reservations about Weil’s interpretation (see especially pp. 82-84 of Schein’s The Mortal Hero ). Holoka’s new presentation of Weil’s essay as a text to be studied rather than an oracular utterance gives the essay an ongoing currency that it certainly deserves and helps us to appreciate it for what it is: a shaft of light illuminating one aspect of a complicated poem and an inspiring example of how an ancient Greek text can serve a modern reader struggling with her own life and times.

[[For a response to this review by John Mackinnon, please see BMCR 2004.02.37 .]]

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• > The Iliad: A Commentary
• > History and fiction in the Iliad

Book contents

• Frontmatter
• Abbreviations
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 The Homeric gods: prior considerations
• 2 Typical motifs and themes
• 3 The speech-element in the Iliad
• 4 History and fiction in the Iliad

4 - History and fiction in the Iliad

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

The historicity of the Iliad has been a matter of continuing interest and concern ever since antiquity, with new impetus from Robert Wood in the eighteenth century and Schliemann in the nineteenth. It can hardly be ignored in these introductory chapters. Yet at best only a provisional treatment can be offered–it would be ‘safer’ to avoid the issue and attempt none at all – since so much remains to be discovered and rethought. Further reflexion on the modes of destruction and probable dates of Troy VI and VIIa (see pp. 40f.), further study of the Hittite archives (pp. 42f.), further excavation around Besika Bay on Troy's Aegean shore (pp. 49f.), further consideration of the nature of the oral tradition and its Near Eastern antecedents (pp. 20f.), will all alter the way we look at the Iliad in relation to its historical background, as well as the characteristics of the oral tradition as a whole.

One preliminary question can hardly be avoided: does ‘historicity’ really matter? Clearly in some ways it does. The history of the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages in the central and eastern Mediterranean is of obvious importance in itself, and there are still many respects in which the Homeric epic affects that history. Archaeologists sometimes suggest that for armour, weapons, buildings and other concrete matters the information of the poems has been overtaken by actual discovery; even that is not yet entirely true, but there are broader concerns which are less easy to resolve.

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• History and fiction in the Iliad
• Edited by G. S. Kirk
• Book: The Iliad: A Commentary
• Online publication: 05 June 2012
• Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511620270.005

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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive .