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The Odyssey details the death of
the hero Achilles. He is killed by an
arrow fired by Paris, which is guided
to the one vulnerable spot of Achilles’
body—his heel—by the god Apollo.also lays Achilles’ rage to rest. But
despite this apparently peaceful
ending, we know that this calm
will be short-lived. The battle will
resume, Troy will fall, and at some
point Achilles will die. The story
is not over yet.
Indeed, Homer’s second epic
poem, the Odyssey, ties up some
of the loose ends by following the
fortunes of another of the Greek
heroes, Odysseus (known to the
Romans as Ulysses), as he makes
his way home to Ithaca from Troy
after the war. In the Odyssey,
the hero recounts the eventual
destruction of Troy, and the death
of Achilles, but this is very much
background to the story of his
own arduous journey.Western cornerstone
It is almost impossible to overstate
the impact of the Iliad and the
Odyssey on the literature of ancient
Greece and Rome, and therefore the
whole of Western literature. They
were not simply the first literary
works in Europe, but monumental
examples that firmly laid the
foundations of the epic genre.
Homer’s expert use of complex
and highly visual similies gave his
poetry unprecedented depth, and
his mastery of dactylic hexameter
provided an inspirational musicality
to his verse. The meter used by
Homer was adopted for subsequent
epic poetry in Greek as well as
in Latin, and the hybrid dialect
he used became the recognized
Greek of literature.
Perhaps most significantly of
all, Homer turned an oral tradition
of stories about folk heroes into a
literary form—the epic. He also set
out the characteristics of that form;
for example, that the main narrative
should follow the hero’s quest or
journey, and that this should be set
against a historical backdrop, withmultiple interweaving or episodic
plots. Homer also set the standard
for the subtext of the epic, where
personal and social values often
stand in opposition.
The Iliad and the Odyssey
inspired a number of Greek poets
to write epics on similar themes,
but they also influenced the new
form of drama that developed in
the classical period. While Homer
was popular reading in ancient
Greece, the Iliad and Odyssey were
standard texts in ancient Rome,HEROES AND LEGENDS
inspiring poets to develop a
distinctive Latin epic poetry.
This reached its height in Virgil’s
Aeneid, which in addition to being
a homage to Homer took as its
starting point the fall of Troy.Eternally influential
Reverence for the Homeric epics
did not end in classical times.
Homer’s works were widely read
and studied in the Middle Ages
and their stories have been retold
countless times in different forms.
Homer’s ancient poems can
be considered the antecedents of
medieval sagas, as well as the
novel. Since the beginning of the
20th century, other forms of mass-
audience storytelling—from movies
to television series—have followed
the epic model, and are deeply
indebted to Homer for their
structure and cultural relevance. ■Zeus knows, no doubt,
and every immortal too
which fighter is doomed
to end all this in death.
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