Honor In The Iliad

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Honor is very prevalent throughout The Iliad. The text demonstrates that honor is necessary to Greek heroes because it is the foundation of society and family in Greek history. In The Iliad, honor guides peoples actions, decides the fate of themselves and others and their responses and homer gives us the perfect example of that. The author of The Iliad, Homer, places special value on the importance of proper burial. This is because it shows a strong sign of honor to the deceased and the deceased’s family. It is aimed that all Greek heroes are to obtain everlasting honor because it makes certain his place in the social memory of his society resonating even after death. Homer portraits how honor plays a role in the lives of Greeks and the manner …show more content…
Homeric heroism is savage and unforgiving. That is why the hero often finds himself in a pressure- filled kill or be- killed situation. Success means survival and greater honor; failure means death and elimination from the competition for honor. But victory in battle is not enough in itself; it is momentarily and can be easily forgotten. Therefore, the victor sought to acquire a permanent symbol of his victory in the form of the armor of the defeated enemy. While reading this book, I noticed that furious battles tend to break out over the corpse as the victor tries to strip the armor and the associates of the defeated warrior try to prevent it. Occasionally, prizes from the spoils of war are rewarded for valor in battle as in the cases of Chryseis and Briseis, who belong respectively to Agamemnon and Achilleus. The importance of these captive girls as symbols of honor is evident in the dispute, which arises in Book 1. The Homeric hero is also fiercely individualistic; he is primarily concerned with his own honor and that of his household, which is only an extension of him. As is particularly true of Achilleus, the Homeric hero is not likely to be as conernce about his fellow warriors as he is about himself and the members of his household. Loyalty to the community or city had not yet achieved the importance it was going to have in later

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