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Пікірлер
@Susieq26754
@Susieq26754 5 күн бұрын
Anything with the name society in it, has no respect from me.
@monikarathbone3478
@monikarathbone3478 3 ай бұрын
Let the lessons of our unjust history keep us from repeating it💝💙💝for the love of humanity 👍 I am German born 1948 and afraid how quickly the lessons and horrors are forgotten or pushed aside 🙏
@lightbulb76
@lightbulb76 3 ай бұрын
America was never great. It was good and it was bad. Never great. Trumplicans have done NOTHING to make it great or even good. The lying king of chaos cannot in any way do anything but cause more chaos then say, “Only I can fix it!” as dead brains/bodies keep piling up beneath his feet so he can walk on them on the way to his throne:/
@johnbillings5260
@johnbillings5260 3 ай бұрын
As children we were taught that the government (lead by the President) had our needs in the forefront of their mind. As adults we see that the "forefathers" were absolutely idiotic to think that an imbecile wouldn't win and try to dismantle as much of the system as they could. I guess that we should have realized that when the majority of them owned slaves.
@j.kaimori3848
@j.kaimori3848 3 ай бұрын
Vote early so resources can go to swing areas.
@dumpie45sucks43
@dumpie45sucks43 3 ай бұрын
Trump is Hitlers evil brother.
@NoDJT
@NoDJT 3 ай бұрын
My whole family is voting for Harris to protect our right to vote. Voting suppression is being practiced by Republican leadership. We might fight against it!
@whitepanties2751
@whitepanties2751 Жыл бұрын
Modern readers will naturally sympathise with the laments of women on the Trojan side such as Andromache and Briseis. However, I wonder if Homer's original audience would necessarily have done so, having been brought up in a very different culture from ours? They presumably cheered for their Greek ancestors to win. Could they sometimes been indifferent to or actually have exalted in their enemies' families' tears? Achilles certainly does in Book 18 Iliad, telling his mother about the revenge he intends to take for the death of his friend Patroclus at the hands of Hector: 'Let me make Trojan women mourn forever, and let Dardanian women, thickly wrapped in folded fabrics, use both hands to wipe a ceaseless flood of tears from their soft faces.' This is Emily Wilson's translation. If she is accurate in referring to the grieving women's 'soft cheeks' (not all translations of this passage do), it emphasizes the women's vulnerability. Yet this evokes no sympathy from Achilles, who will see their endless grief as proof of his own success. He intends to destroy these unfortunate women's families by slaughtering their menfolk in large numbers, and possibly devastate their communities and reduce the women themselves to slavery. However, Achilles' wrath at the death of Patroclus is admittedly an extreme case. A possible parallel is the way that, quite unlike most modern war stories, in reporting the killing of enemies, the Iliad commonly tells us their names, often their fathers' names and sometimes other details like if they are newly married or whether brothers of theirs have already been killed in the war. This gives us a much stronger sense of e.g. the many Trojan warriors killed by Achilles as being individuals with families at home to whom they will never return, and who will mourn for them. I had always thought Homer and his audience, even if their sympathies were mostly with the Greeks, would perceive this as sad. However, could it be they sometimes actually relished it?
@whitepanties2751
@whitepanties2751 Жыл бұрын
I don't think there is any actual example of a woman's lament in the Iliad's sister poem the Odyssey, but the nearest thing, I suggest, is the widow who is prevented from lamenting over the body of her slain husband near the end of Book 8. She is not an actual character in the Odyssey and neither she nor her home city are given a name. However, she is imagined as a poetic simile for extreme sorrow, to describe how Odysseus melts into tears when a poet/bard's song brings back too many memories. If we accept the principle that a simile is a way to describe something less familiar by comparing it to something more familiar, then we have to accept that this means that in those days of frequent wars and raiding that such scenes would have been so common that many of the audience would either have witnessed them or have spoken at one or two removes to those who had, unless this had become a cliché of poets of the time. In Odyssey Book 8, lines 521 - 532 Odysseus' tears are compared to those of a wife in a city that is being conquered by invaders who has just seen them fight and kill her husband. She tries to cling to the body of her husband for the last time and weep over it, but is not even allowed this small comfort as the pitiless enemy warriors, eager to claim her as a slave, beat her painfully with [the wooden shafts of] their spears to make her get up, so they can drag her away into miserable slavery for the rest of her life. In Homer's culture, the fact that no one is able to carry out any mourning rites for the dead man would itself have been seen as a further humiliation to his spirit and to any surviving members of his family. This sad scene must have accorded with the experience of many women in Troy and other cities sacked by the Greeks. Multiple instances of such horrors must lie behind the epithet 'sacker of cities' that Homer applies, apparently as a badge of distinction, to more than one of his male characters, including to Achilles and Odysseus himself. It must also lie behind some of the women's laments in the Iliad discussed in this video, in which Andromache, Briseis and others either remember or anticipate it happening to them. Both Briseis describing her own experience in the conquest of Lyrnessos and Andromache descrbing it happen to her mother in Thebe mention that it happened 'all in one day' or 'in a single day'. It is hard to imagine the total and permanent transformation in someone's life to begin a day as an important lady, possibly with slaves of her own, with a husband, a home and sons or brothers. Yet a few hours later she is a widow, a lowly slave, all her male relatives have been slaughtered, and her own and her family's prized possessions have been seized by violent strangers who loot and destroy her home. She and her female friends and relatives, in the same situation, are separated, possibly never to see each other again, as they are enslaved and shared out as rewards for the victors. Such shock and suffering almost beyond comprehension must be implied but unspoken by the few words in which Odysseus mentions near the beginning of Odyssey Book 9 that landing at Ismaros (city of Trojan allies the Cicones) early in his voyage home from Troy 'I sacked the town and killed the men. And we took their wives and much plunder out of the town to share out among ourselves. And I did my best to ensure that they were distributed fairly.' It must also lie behind Achilles statement in Book 9 of the Iliad that he has already sacked 23 cities, and possibly his expressed intention, crying to his mother (!) in Iliad Book 18 after the death of his friend Patroclus, to make Trojan and Dardanian women 'weep forever'. The most surprising points about this are perhaps that this sort of thing does not repel more modern readers than it does from liking Homer, and that Homer apparently does not see it as incongruous to use it as a simile for Odysseus' own grief, when we know that Odysseus must have helped inflict just such suffering on many conquered women himself. This passage appears just after the bard sings about the sack of Troy and just before Odysseus mentions the sack of Ismaros, during both of which many abruptly widowed and enslaved women must have suffered and reacted like the wife in the simile. In both cases Odysseus played a key role in bringing this about. So Odysseus' own tears are effectively described by comparison to those he has inflicted on his own victims. Indeed, while presumably this means that there are captured Trojan and Cicones women as slaves on Odysseus' ships for the rest of the voyage, Homer / Odysseus as narrator totally ignores or forgets them as a distraction from the story, as they are not mentioned again. Comparing Odysseus' sobbing to that of conquered women, like those he has widowed, can seem a paradox, even hypocrisy, from a modern point of view. It reminds us that Homer's poems come from a very different as well as distant world from ours, in which the heartbreaking suffering of the losing side in a war is either accepted as fate, the will of the gods or just the way of the World, or even sometimes enjoyed and celebrated by the winners or those who identify with them.
@whitepanties2751
@whitepanties2751 Жыл бұрын
Hello, is anybody there? Thanks to Prof. Sheila Murnaghan for this thought provoking video, on which I have in the last 2-3 weeks posted a whole series of comments. Even if few read them, I prefer to post my thoughts somewhere like this where they will be permanently recorded, and others can consider them if they wish, than just to scribble them in a private note book. Andromache's lament in Iliad Book 6, in which she recounts the disaster that has already befallen her parental family and city of her birth, includes: 'Achilles killed the king, my father, but did not strip the armour from his corpse. He felt compunction. So he burned the body, along with his ornate, well-fashioned weapons, and heaped a mound to mark the place.' Correct me, anyone, if I am wrong, but I think this is unique in the Iliad, for any warrior on either side to be so respectful to the corpse of an enemy they have killed, either to refrain from looting the body of valuable weapons or to give them a respectful cremation, burial and even build a mound as a memorial to them? Why Achilles shows this apparently unique posthumous respect for Andromache's father, King Eetion, we are not told. However, any such personal regard that Achilles felt for Eetion must be comparative only, as it does not stop Achilles killing him and his sons, enslaving his widow and pillaging and devastating his city. Loot Achilles took from the city of Eetion is mentioned more than once later in the poem, including the decorated partly silver lyre that Achilles is playing and singing to in his tent in Book 9. However, any sense that that detail shows us a softer, more artistic Achilles must be qualified by the thought that Achilles must have acquired the decorated lyre he is playing when he or his men killed its previous owner. I think the respect Achilles shows for the body of his enemy Eetion is included to highlight by contrast the opposite extreme to which Achilles later goes to disrespect the body of Eetion's son-in-law Hector. Homer is showing us that there is another way, and that in this, as other things, Achilles goes to extremes. Other miscellaneous points that I have only noticed or thought of since I began posting these comments, which may slightly qualify some of the conclusions: -While I am not going to analyze it, presumably we should also count the speech of Achilles divine mother Thetis in her cave under the sea, with the Nereids accompanying her, quite near the beginning of Iliad Book 18, bemoaning her son's grief and rapidly approaching death, as another female lament in the poem? -Further to my earlier posted comments below about the motives of slave women from Achilles' hut joining in Briseis lament for Patroclus in Book 19, as I read it, there is further evidence that the slave women are under compulsion to be seen to mourn Patroclus. That does not necessarily preclude some of them meaning it as well (and using it as a covert opportunity to express sorrow at their own situation). Around the middle of Book 18, I think beginning roughly around lline 345, Achilles in his rage and grief addresses Patroclus' dead body, and promises his fallen friend: 'I will choose twelve lovely Trojan children and slit their throats above your funeral pyre, because I am so angry at your death. Till then, lie there beside the ships' curved beaks and wait for me. Around you, night and day, Trojan and Dardan women in rich dresses will weep and cry. The two of us together laboured to capture them with spears and force, when we destroyed so many thriving cities, in which so many people used to live'. [I am using the Emily Wilson translation, subject to my British English Spell Check. Frustratingly, for those seeking to understand the Iliad who are not fluent in Ancient Greek, other English translations will all give slightly different impressions of what Achilles is saying.] Since Achilles cannot be sure that the slave women will actually be so upset at Patroclus' decease that they will want to 'weep and cry' around his corpse 'night and day', the implication must be that Achilles will order them to do so, with an actual or implied threat to punish them if they do not. As this comes only a few lines after Achilles promises to cut the throats of 12 fine Trojan youths, arguably as human sacrifices, or perhaps just as revenge, on Patroclus' funeral pyre, 'because I am so angry', compelling the captured Trojan women to ostentatiously mourn for one of their Greek conquerors Patroclus could even itself be a further act of revenge. It may demonstrate complete power over, even deliberately humiliate, these women from the enemy nation, by making them mourn the man who helped enslave them. Even if we do not see Achilles' aim as being deliberately cruel to the women, the presence of captive Trojan women, whom Achilles and Patroclus' enslaved when destroying their once thriving cities, mourning around Patroclus' pyre is intended to be a reminder of Achilles and Patroclus' terrible, destructive triumphs over the inhabitants of the region. -On a somewhat lighter note, I am currently reading Madeline (note the spelling, it is not Madeleine) Miller's Greek Mythology based novel Circe, mentioned in this video, and so far it is wonderful, better, to me, than what I have read of the same authoress's earlier and more Iliad related 'The Song of Achilles', although not everyone agrees with me about that.
@whitepanties2751
@whitepanties2751 Жыл бұрын
There are many references in Homer to Trojan and Trojan allied women being actual or anticipated customary 'spoils of war' to be enslaved by their Greek conquerors. However, the passage in Book 19, that gives the title to this video, in which the, apparently many such, women in Achilles' hut publicly join in the mourning for Patroclus, but each of them really for her own troubles, is one of the very few times that their suffering or point of view is considered. It shows us that Homer is aware of it, even if he usually appears to ignore it as unimportant or uninteresting beside the quarrels and battlefield deeds of male heroes and gods. What 'her own troubles' are is not specified, probably being too obvious to the original audience to need stating. We can assume that, as for Andromache and Briseis, it includes the violent death of their menfolk, sometimes in front of these women's eyes, the destruction of their towns and communities, so they no longer even have a home they could hope to return to, being reduced to humiliating slavery, even if they were previously of high status, relatives such as mothers and daughters separated as they are shared out among the Greeks, a life of drudgery and of beatings if they are not quick enough to obey, and very likely for some of them, sexual violation. It has been suggested that it is implied that these slave women take part in the public mourning for Patroclus because they have been ordered to do so. Women's lamentation is a customary response to the death of a man, and there are no women of Patroclus' own people, who would normally perform this function, in the camp, so the captured Trojan women have to as the only women available. There is a somewhat similar scene near the beginning of the previous Book, 18, when the news of Patroclus' death first reaches Achilles' part of the camp. This time, the slave women's grief-stricken reaction is presented as though genuine. To quote the Iliad translation published since this video was recorded by Sheila Murnaghan's colleague at the University of Pennsylvania, Emily Wilson, who pays more attention to issues of slavery than some translators: 'The women whom Achilles and Patroclus had captured and enslaved were struck by grief. They screamed and wailed and ran outside, surrounding the warrior Achilles. With their fists they pounded on their breasts, limbs weak with shock. Antilochus was sobbing, shedding tears, and holding tightly to Achilles' hands so that he could not use an iron knife to slit his throat.' [Is Homer momentarily forgetting that this is meant to be back in the Bronze Age, unless the knife is made from meteoric iron?] As to why the slave women would be loudly grieving even for Patroclus, who is of the 'enemy' side in the War, assuming that Homer is portraying how they might react realistically, possible reasons include: -Patroclus, although he can when necessary be deadly on the battlefield, is otherwise described as kind, so perhaps the slave women would genuinely grow to like him and/or, if he was a moderating influence on his friend Achilles, fear that they will be treated more harshly now he is gone. -While we should be cautious about too readily projecting modern psychological theories, worked out from observations of patients in modern day Western Europe or California, to people in the Aegean World 3,000 years ago, what is now called 'Stockholm Syndrome' may have a sufficient evolutionary genetic survival value that it may be an inherent part of human nature. That is, that a prisoner or hostage, and by extension slave, entirely at the mercy of their captor, may become not just outwardly obedient to but genuinely devoted to the interests of their captor, who may thus be influenced to treat them better. -Achilles' reaction to losing his best friend is to vow vengeance on the Trojans generally, and these slave women, who, having themselves been captured from Trojan towns, may be anxious not to become a target of that, and keen to demonstrate their alignment with Achilles and Patroclus' side. At all events, once the slave women in Achilles' hut have briefly come into focus in the poem, perhaps because of women's traditional role in mourning, in Books 18 and 19, thereafter they are allowed to fade into obscurity again. In the Iliad's companion poem the Odyssey, the main events of which take place after Achilles' death, two scenes take place in the Underworld, in Books 11 and 24, both of which feature Achilles' spirit, in conversation with Odysseus or with the ghost of the, by then also deceased, Agamemnon. They discuss such matters of interest to Achilles as how well his son Neoptolemus did as a warrior after Achilles' death and Achilles' funeral, attended by his mother from out of the sea, but the fate of his slave women after his death, even Briseis, is apparently not important enough by then for him to ask about.
@whitepanties2751
@whitepanties2751 Жыл бұрын
In trying to make sense of the captured slave women's reported tearful reactions to Patroclus' death, one point to consider is that to a woman enslaved by the Greeks in the Trojan War, something happening to the man she now belongs to means the uncertainty of being inherited or reallocated to some other master, probably not knowing if he will be better or worse than her last owner. Where, as in Achilles' and Agamemnon's huts, there are a number of slave women, we don't know how they get along with each other but there may well grow up a sense of solidarity between many of them, through shared situation and shared misfortunes. Being taken from one man's hut and given to another may break up mutual support and friendships they have formed. We are told in Book 9 that Patroclus had a slave concubine called Iphis, but what happens to her when Patroclus is killed, we don't know. We do know that a few days later Achilles will take 2 of the slave women in his hut to offer as prizes in the customary funeral games for Patroclus, these unnamed women's whole futures, including which man they will be slave, and possibly concubine, to and what part of Greece they will end up on, to be determined on the result of a chariot race or a wrestling match. In the latter case, the slave woman is the second prize, the first prize being a bronze tripod. I wonder what it feels like to have your future determined by being the Second Prize in a wrestling match? The two competitors for her and the tripod are Odysseus and Ajax. We don't know which of them gets her, as we are simply told that after prolonged grappling Achilles declares the match a draw, and Odysseus and Ajax should 'take equal prizes'. How exactly this is adjusted we don't know, as neither a tripod nor a woman is suitable to split half and half without destroying their usefulness.
@whitepanties2751
@whitepanties2751 Жыл бұрын
In discussing e.g. what Achilles and Briseis feel about each other, it is easy to forget that we are not talking about real people (who if they ever existed were probably not exactly like the characters in the Iliad) but what Homer imagined or wanted his audience to imagine, or, separate question, what we would expect a real person in that situation to feel. In the latter case our imagination may sometimes fail because e.g. none of us grew up in Bronze Age Aegean culture and few of us have ever been enslaved or enslaved anyone else in the sack of a city. Our modern ideas, based on how we imagine we would have felt, or on modern psychology, of how people in those situations 3,000 years ago would have reacted may not be entirely right. Subject to those caveats, Briseis' lament for Patroclus in Book 19, the only time she speaks in the Iliad, we should remember is spoken by a Trojan slave in the camp of the Greek warriors, so she may not be free to say all she feels. However, although in the battle scenes Patroclus can be a ruthless killer, I take Briseis' praise for his consistent kindness to her off the battlefield as a captured enemy slave to be genuine. It may be an indirect way to protest that others (Agamemnon? Achilles? Whatever warriors originally captured her?) have not been kind to her. 'Patroclus, in my desperate plight I loved you the most' is a clear statement that whatever she feels for Achilles is not devotion, but whether she actually hates him, tolerates him, moderately likes him, or what, we cannot directly say from what Homer tells us. In Book 1 of the Iliad we are told that Briseis walks 'unwillingly' away with Agamemnon's emissaries come to take her from Achilles' tent. Whether this is from affection for Achilles, disgust of Agamemnon, fear of change by someone nervous from all she has already suffered, or from attachments she has formed to others in Achilles' tent like Patroclus or the other women slaves there from, whom she will now be parted, or what, we do not know. Achilles is described by Homer as the most handsome of the Greeks. He is a Prince and, as a star warrior, the equivalent in his society of a rock star or movie star in ours. Such people usually find it easy to attract female fans, but whether such attraction could work on Briseis after Achilles led the army that killed or enslaved all her people is harder to say. (Briseis says that her brothers, whom she loved, and her husband in an arranged marriage, whom she does not say if she loved or not, were all killed on the day the Greeks conquered her city, but she does not say if it was Achilles himself who killed them.) Pat Barker, in her stark reimagining of this story in The Silence of the Girls, in one chapter has Briseis point out to the reader, lest they disapprove of moral compromises she has to make 'You have never been a slave'. Briseis' speech lamenting Patroclus is about 20 lines of text, and precedes a longer speech, also lamenting Patroclus, by Achilles. Briseis' lament, perhaps because it is so unusual to hear her point of view, tends to make more impression on modern readers, but in Homer's time it is possible that the speech of a princely male hero like Achilles attracted more notice than that of a slave girl. Briseis is mentioned once again in the Iliad in the last book, Book 24, as, now restored to Achilles, sleeping beside him in his hut, but how she feels about this, Homer does not tell us. -[The Iliad or its translators seem inconsistent as to whether Achilles' dwelling in the Greek camp is a tent or a hut.] What to make of Briseis statement that Patroclus had promised to persuade Achilles to free her and make her his wife and eventual queen, I do not know. Achilles never mentions any thought of marrying Briseis, even when the question of whether to marry one of Agamemnon's daughters or to find a wife for himself in Greece is discussed in Book 9. Was Patroclus lying to Briseis to try to stop her crying?
@whitepanties2751
@whitepanties2751 Жыл бұрын
Correction to my Comment: Briseis does say that Achilles personally killed her husband. She does not say if it was also him who killed her brothers. Emily Wilson, whose views I respect but don't always agree with, while acknowledging in the Introduction to her Iliad that the poem tells us that the captive Briseis goes 'unwillingly' from Achilles to Agamemnon, states bluntly that Briseis is 'moving from one enslaving r@pıst to another'. That goes beyond what the poem actually tells us. Nor does Homer say whether someone like Achilles, who by this stage in the Iliad already has a number of female slaves available to him, would give a newly captured slave girl like Briseis time to get used to him and her situation before having sexual intercourse with her, which may sometimes make the experience less bad for her. If we accept Homer's description of Briseis going 'unwillingly' from Achilles' to Agamemnon's hut as potentially realistic, that suggests things are not as bad between Achilles and Briseis as Emily Wilson's above comment assumes. If Briseis knew she was going to be r@pəd that night no matter whether she was with Achilles or Agamemnon, would she care that much which of them it was? Emily Wilson seems to take an almost legalistic position that in the World of Homer all sex between master and slave is r@pə, since all sex where a woman is not in a position to choose freely must be r@pə. While that may work in the modern World of #MeToo, it is not a realistic standard for the World of Homer. On that basis almost all marriages, even ones that appear to be happy and affectionate, would have to be considered r@pə, since women rarely chose when or who they married, but had this arranged for them by their parents. [I think because of this almost ideological approach that Emily W misunderstands why the 12 slave women are executed towards the end of the Odyssey, but that is another story.] I am not denying that slave women, and women captured in war, often did suffer sexual abuse, and that this was often terrible for them.
@whitepanties2751
@whitepanties2751 Жыл бұрын
Briseis' lament in Book 19 Iliad includes her account of the conquest of her home city of Lyrnessos by the Greeks, which contrasts with Achilles' version of the same event given in Book 20, when he is taunting the Trojan Aeneas, who escaped it alive. Each version leaves different things implied, unstated, and emphasizes different things. Achilles: 'You [Aeneas] scurried to Lyrnessus, but I sacked it, advancing on the city with the help of great Athena and her father Zeus. And I enslaved the women as my trophies, and took away their day of being free.' One of these 'trophies' is Briseis. Achilles does not even mention killing the men of the city, which is presumably so taken for granted in warfare of that day, certainly among the Greeks, as to go without saying. To Briseis, who knew these men, it seems to be the main thing that stands out for her (indeed, her own enslavement and that of the other women of her city is implied rather than stated): 'For me, one trouble always follows on another. I saw the man to whom my parents gave me cut down before our city with sharp bronze, along with my three brothers, whom I loved. All of us shared one father and one mother, all of them slaughtered on a single day. But you [Patroclus], when swift Achilles killed my husband and sacked the city of divine King Munes, you would not let me weep at all. You said that you would make me the lawful wife of godlike Lord Achilles.' Somewhat surprisingly, Briseis presents Patroclus not letting her 'weep at all', if this is meant literally, after the terrible losses she has suffered, as an example of his kindness, rather than of insensitivity. At least one female reader has suggested that this passage, while put into the mouth of a young woman, is obviously composed by a man, who does not understand what a woman would really feel, with its implication that 'There is no need to cry about your husband being killed because you can marry another', as though that 'makes it alright'. I don't know if anyone else has a view about that? It is sometimes taken, including in this video, that the mention of Briseis' husband and King Munes of Lyrnessos in the same sentence means that they were the same person, which would makes Briseis the former queen of the city. However, unless there are clues in the Greek original not brought out in translation, the Iliad does not actually say if Munes was the same person as Briseis' husband or not. Briseis' account of the slaughter of her menfolk during the conquest of her city is reminiscent of Andromache's in Book 6, except Andromache herself must have heard about it afterwards, as she was not present, having been sent to Troy to marry Hector: 'Godlike Achilles killed my father. He breached the towering gates and sacked my city, Thebe, where we Cilicians once lived in peace. Achilles killed the king, my father...And I had seven brothers. All of them went to Hades on one day. Swift-footed Lord Achilles killed them all, amid their bright white sheep and shambling cattle. My mother, who had ruled so long as Queen beneath the shady woodlands of Mount Placus, was brought here by Achilles as a slave, along with all the other looted treasure. But he accepted ransom from her father to set her free.' It must be quite something to go from being a queen to a slave in one day, and to lose your husband and all your sons at the same time. All 3 accounts mention the word 'day', emphasising the suddenness of the complete, catastrophic transformation of these women's lives: 'ending their day of being free', 'all in one day', 'in a single day'. To Achilles, however, it is a source of triumph, making all the women of Lyrnessos 'trophies' (I think this is the Greek 'geras', also sometimes translated 'prizes', applied both to looted objects and to captured women). Indeed, in Book 19 Achilles says how he had hoped that even if he died Patroclus would show Achilles' son: 'Everything - the wealth I won, the captured women, and my high-roofed home'. as proof of Achilles' achievements.
@whitepanties2751
@whitepanties2751 Жыл бұрын
Possibly the nearest thing to a woman's lament in the Iliad's sister poem the Odyssey (I think of the Iliad and Odyssey as brother and sister poems), that may tell us something about how Homer and his audience viewed women's suffering in war, is the simile of an unnamed weeping woman in the sack of an unidentified city by invaders near the end of Book 8. Homer uses this to describe how Odysseus is weeping after listening to a bard sing of Odysseus' past triumph in the Trojan War. Odysseus' tears at this point play a role in the plot. His host King Alcinous notices him crying and asks him to tell his story. Odysseus' story then takes up Odyssey Books 9 to 12 and includes many of the most famous episodes in the poem, including the Cyclops, Circe and the visit to the Underworld. However, it seems a strange, almost contradictory way to describe the tears of Odysseus, who is known as 'the Sacker of Cities'. I quote from the 2018 Emily Wilson translation, (in which Sheila/Bridget Murnaghan, who presents this video, is mentioned in the Acknowledgements): 521 - 532 'Odysseus was melting into tears; his cheeks were wet with weeping, as a woman weeps, as she falls to wrap her arms around her husband, fallen fighting for his home and children. She is watching as he gasps and dies. She shrieks, a clear high wail, collapsing upon his corpse. The men are right behind. They hit her shoulders with their spears and lead her to slavery, hard labour and a life of pain. Her face is marked with her despair. In that same desperate way, Odysseus was crying.' Particularly sad and ruthless is that the enemy warriors conquering her city do not even allow her a minute to weep over the body of her slaughtered husband, but immediately he is dead they painfully beat the grieving young widow (as they have just made her) with the wooden shafts of their spears to make her get up so they can drag her off straight away into slavery. She is just part of the material profit they make from the war or raid in which this scene takes place, she is a 'trophy' or 'prize' of war, with no rights at all from this point onwards. Homer can see her grief, yet how much he is really bothered by it I do not know. The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. From a modern perspective, is almost hypocritical to use the suffering of a woman in this situation as a simile for Odysseus' crying, as women like her must have been among his victims. This passage comes straight after the poet describes Odysseus role in the sack of Troy, and almost immediately before (early in Odyssey Book 9) Odysseus leads his men to sack the Trojan allied Cicones town of Ismaros. In both cases we are explicitly told that he and the other Greeks ruthlessly bring death to the men of the conquered city. In both cases, although it is not directly mentioned, we know and Homer's audience must have known that this must have involved in Troy thousands, and in Ismaros perhaps hundreds, of women shocked, sobbing and traumatized by witnessing the massacre of their menfolk, in some cases probably personally killed by Odysseus, in other cases slayed by the army of which he is a key leader. The scene of the crying woman dragged away from her fallen husband's corpse into slavery near the end of Book 8 must have been repeated across Troy and Ismaros many times. Yet in the description of the fall of Troy in Book 8, the women in the city, and how they are affected by it, are not even mentioned, although we know from other references that they will be enslaved. In the raid on Ismaros in Book 9, we are told in a few words, seemingly matter of factly and without emotion, that after killing the Cicones men, the Greeks take 'the wives' to share out among themselves along with the other spoils. Thereafter, Homer ignores them. By the end of the voyage and the final shipwreck, we are told that Odysseus is the only survivor, so presumably, unless they have somehow escaped or been sold or abandoned in the meantime, any captured Trojan and Cicones women on his ships have died by this point, but are not important enough to the plot or in themselves for their fate to be considered. Elsewhere in the Odyssey, capturing and enslaving women in war and raiding, which usually implies killing their men, seems to be a normal, accepted activity. As when Odysseus is surprised to meet Agamemnon among the ghosts of the dead in the Underworld in Book 11, and in Book 24 Agamemnon is in turn surprised by the arrival in Hades en masse of the Suitors slain by Odysseus. In both cases they, almost word for word the same, run through the most likely reasons for a man who is not old and was in good health to have died suddenly: 'Was it Poseidon rousing up a blast of cruel wind to wreak your ships? Or were you killed on dry land by enemies as you were poaching their fat flocks of sheep or cattle, or fighting for their city and their wives?' Anyone who may read this is welcome to give their own, possibly different views. However, I don't think that by likening Odysseus' tears to those of a wife in a conquered city, Homer is implying any guilt by Odysseus, or any disapproval from Homer or his audience, for having made many women weep in this way. I liken it to the way Homer more than once uses similes relating to the emotions felt by a hunted animal, yet no one suggests that Homer disapproved of hunting. The modern argument 'How would you like it if someone did that to you or your family?', rooted in the Judeo-Christian 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you', meant little in the pagan World of Homer 3,000 years ago. The tears and screams of a woman bereaved and enslaved all at once in the sack of her city were apparently sufficiently familiar, either from personal experience of war or by having heard about it, to Homer's audience, to be a useful comparison to convey extremes of grief. However, that men might engage in war prepared or hoping to put some poor woman somewhere through that tragic grief was accepted as the way of the World, and when it did happen was to be accepted as the will of the gods, or fate.
@whitepanties2751
@whitepanties2751 Жыл бұрын
Apart from the story of Meleager, told by Phoenix near the end of Iliad Book 9 (which is not very relevant to the plot and I believe there is linguistic evidence to think was a later addition, quite possibly by a different poet, to the original text), women's laments in the Iliad are necessarily all from the Trojan side, as, apart from Helen, only Trojan women are present in the war zone, where Homer concentrates his attention. He never crosses the Aegean to show us the Greek women left at home having to keep their households running without their menfolk not knowing if their men will return alive, and occasionally hearing news of who has died, so we do not hear their possible laments. I assume that Homer's original Greek audience were mostly proud of their ancestors' legendary victory and were mostly cheering for Achilles to return to battle, the Greeks/Achaeans to win and to conquer Troy. I wonder, therefore, what effect the women's laments in the poem had on them. Were they still cheering for the Greeks to win the war knowing that this meant Andromache becoming a slave and the destruction of what remained of her family? Did they still see Achilles as a glorious, if flawed and temperamental hero, when reminded what he had already done to Briseis' family and what she must have suffered in consequence? I think we have to be cautious about projecting our own 'Have compassion even for your enemies' Judeo-Christian (or Buddhist or other modern religion) influenced values into the pagan Bronze Age, when the usual morality was more 'Do good to your friends and harm to your enemies', but I don't know what to conclude. If anyone who may read this has any thoughts about that they are welcome to Reply, or Post their own Comment.
@whitepanties2751
@whitepanties2751 Жыл бұрын
I think this video, for which thanks, deserves more views and likes than the small number it has received since it was posted. Perhaps I should have been an academic, as for some reason I like the process of sorting out my own thoughts on subjects like this to write them down even in obscure places where not many people may read them. Hence I may post a series of comments on this video, working through it backwards so that the comments will then appear here in the right order. If anyone does read them they are welcome to 'Like' and to Reply saying why they agree or (politely please?) disagree, or go off in some other direction that interests them. Other points about Pat Barker's Silence of the Girls in addition to my longer comment below: -Some people say they love both the novel and the Iliad, although 'Silence' reminds us of the sadness and cruelty often implied behind the Iliad. Perhaps you have to think of them in different mental compartments. I like parts of the Iliad, and find the soap opera of the gods less emotionally demanding than the scenes of the mortals at war, although those can be exciting. However, I am interested in history and approach the Iliad in part as, despite the supernatural and fantastical elements, a historical source for how people lived and thought all those centuries ago. -Silence of the Girls does present a more rough and brutal view of Achilles than some other modern fictional recreations that put more emphasis on possible romance between him and Patroclus and/or Briseis. However, we don't know for certain what any of these characters were really like, if they existed at all, so arguably novelists and readers should be free to fantasize how they like. (We don't expect documentary realism from The Jungle Book or James Bond either). However, at least on the whole, I find Pat Barker's more rough and brutal portrayal more believable and likely to be closer to the realities of Ancient wars. -Ms Barker said she included some deliberate anachronisms in the book. I don't know if it is for that reason or is just inaccurate that the novel refers to lemons, coins and a military hospital hundreds of years before, as far as we know, such things were invented (lemons being a hybrid arising from a complex series of crosses other citrus fruits). -I have founf complaints by some readers that the use of modern British slang and swear words by Pat Barker's ancient Greek characters in 'Silence' is jarring, because 'Such expressions hadn't been invented then'. Actually, unless the characters were to speak in a very early form of Ancient Greek, which few of us can understand, they will have to speak in anachronistic language of some sort. It is likely that men in a military camp would have used some form of cruder and more colloquial language than the poetic language suitable for public performance of Homer.
@whitepanties2751
@whitepanties2751 Жыл бұрын
I listened to Pat Barker's novel 'The Silence of the Girls', mainly told from the point of Briseis, Achilles' beautiful captured slave, on Audiobook read by British theatre actress Kristin Atherton. For those who want to experience the book, I recommend it in that form. Although she does not make her reading melodramatic Ms Atherton does nicely capture Briseis ironic and regretful tone, as well as having an attractive sounding voice. (This led me to seek other Audiobooks Kristin Atherton has narrated, which led to my enjoying listening recently to her reading a completely different type of book [apart from the central character's worldly, ironic tone] 'One Last Secret' by Adele Parks.) Pat Barker said in an interview that she may eventually write 4 books in the same series as 'The Silence of the Girls' and 'The Women of Troy'. The third, 'The Voyage Home' is supposed to be published in August 2024 and to be about the murders of Agamemnon and Cassandra (I feel sympathy only for the second of those victims!) on return to Greece after the War, presumably inspired either by Aeschylus' plays and/or the briefer and different account in Homer's Odyssey. I don't know if Briseis somehow manages to remain a significant part of the story or which, if any, character narrates it. 'The Silence of the Girls', which I shall hereafter abbreviate to 'Silence' as the alternative abbreviation 'SOG' does not sound sufficiently dignified, is very well written and contains some memorable, striking and insightful phrases. However, in fairness to potential readers, it is not for the faint-hearted. The cruelty and sadness of the situation of a woman captured and enslaved (as a great many were, according to the legends, including even former royalty and aristocracy) in the Trojan War, to be used for domestic drudgery and compulsory sex with their Greek warrior masters, may be too much for some sensitive readers. For that reason, although I am glad to have experienced 'Silence', and have read some reviews of and excerpts from the second book I decided not to read it in full. Strangely, in a way, since women in particular suffer so much in the story, while there are very favourable reviews of Silence on Goodreads and Amazon by both male and female readers, the majority of those posting favourable reviews are female. I suppose because they like the fact that women's experiences and a woman's voice are made central to it. (A few chapters are for plot convenience narrated by Achilles rather than Briseis, but his character does not come across so strongly.) Some KZbin and Podcast reviews of Silence, presumably because they will be demoted in search rankings if they mention certain words and subjects, in my opinion do not do as much as they should yo warn potential readers about some very distressing subjects like r@pə and massacres, not just of the adult men on the losing side but even of little boys and pregnant women [the Greeks don't want any male Trojan babies to survive who might grow up to try to avenge their fathers]. These are not, fortunately, described graphically or at length, except to some extent near the beginning when the novel describes the conquest of Briseis' city of Lyrnessos, when her husband, brothers and father are killed and she becomes a slave. However, such things are, albeit briefly, quite frequently referred to or hinted at. If KZbin and podcast reviewers who go into more detail than this video does about Silence do not want to refer to these aspects of the novel explicitly, I think they should make it clear that there are things in it that they can't talk about and that if it were a film it would have an 18 certificate, and the book itself is not suitable for readers much younger than that. While the situation of most women in a conquered town enslaved by the winning side in wars and raids in those days must have been heartbreaking, whether it was always quite as bad as Pat Barker imagines I don't know. She based it partly on reports of what happens in modern chaotic war situations like in the eastern Congo. However, marauding soldiers r@pıng and looting in such situations today may not care what becomes of their victims afterwards. In the World of Homer, while women enslaved in war had no rights, they did have a value, just as a horse did. It was not usually in a master's self-interest to treat either his horse or his captured slave so badly that they were left so injured in mind or body that they could not serve him effectively in future, and lost their value as property. Also, Pat Barker takes literally a horrible statement by Agamemnon in Book 6 of the Iliad that all Trojan males must die at once when the Greeks conquer Troy, even little babies inside their mothers' bellies. Consequently, while, fortunately she does not describe it, she hints that this means that when Troy falls there is a massacre of all boys and of every pregnant woman, just in case the baby inside her is male. However, characters in the Iliad often say things in the heat of the moment, for rhetorical effect or to win an argument that are improbable or contradictory and not to be taken literally. Even if the Greeks were utterly ruthess, the younger women in a captured town were a valuable part of the loot. In the days before modern contraception, at any one time a high proportion of them would have been pregnant, so whether the Greeks would really have destroyed them all I question. It is unfortunately conceivable, if the Greeks really wanted to eradicate the Trojan male line, they would have counted how long it was since she was captured and disposed of any likely to have been sired by a Trojan rather than a Greek man. Sorry this has grown so long and thanks to anyone who reads this to the end.
@jamesbullard4897
@jamesbullard4897 Жыл бұрын
Bs
@jamesbullard4897
@jamesbullard4897 Жыл бұрын
Now this leadership has led us to nuclear war
@surrealistidealist
@surrealistidealist Жыл бұрын
Unfortunately, this video doesn't seem to play. Hopefully it's just due to a temporary glitch that works itself out in a few minutes.
@philadelphiaethicalsociety7681
@philadelphiaethicalsociety7681 Жыл бұрын
This video is still being processed for viewing by KZbin as of 2:00pm eastern time. I suggest you try again after 5:00pm eastern time today to view it and it should play fine.
@surrealistidealist
@surrealistidealist Жыл бұрын
It works now! Thanks!
@franciserdman
@franciserdman Жыл бұрын
This was a great talk - I also get depressed about the inevitability of climate change. It is a good point to be made, that just as, in the Shoah, every life saved still mattered, even in the face of the unimaginable scope of the disaster, similarly, with climate, saving lives still matters, however "inevitable" it is (indeed, it is already happening). So the less carbon, the fewer hurricanes, wild fires, etc. - so there is still a moral argument to be made to shift away from carbon where possible - not that it will stave off disaster, it likely will not, but making it "less bad" still matters for those whose lives would be saved as a result.
@franciserdman
@franciserdman 2 жыл бұрын
As an "online member" of AEU I am a big fan of Adler and really enjoyed this talk. It would help if there were closed captions - the audio wasn't the best and my hearing alas is also not the best.
@peppy6052
@peppy6052 2 жыл бұрын
Hello, we are coming for you
@Henryfordisright
@Henryfordisright 2 жыл бұрын
They cry in pain as they strike you!
@asonofgod7267
@asonofgod7267 2 жыл бұрын
Wow, as usual chews have absolutely no self-awareness at all. U r the founders of 99.99 % of the issues we are facing today, as you have always been, and not once did you stop and say: "Hey, we are sorry for doing that". Amazing.
@factsdonotlie2u247
@factsdonotlie2u247 2 жыл бұрын
Freedom of Speech is guaranteed in The First Amendment. Such hypocrites writing books condemning the foundational documents of Declaration of Independence and warring with our laws to overthrow them like the anti-Christ system in Daniel 7:25 then try to pull this smoke screen. “All men are created equal” means no room for narcissistic caste systems.
@Daniel24445
@Daniel24445 2 жыл бұрын
It seems everyone needs a crash course on the founding interpretation of The every freedom in The First Amendment these days as well as The Supremacy Clause. Jefferson warned about tyrants and usurpers attempting to mold the constitution like wax. All laws contrary to the constitution are “null and void”. Marburg vs. Madison 1803.
@AJX-2
@AJX-2 2 жыл бұрын
worldwide antisemitism is a rational response to worldwide semitic behavior
@christinacody8653
@christinacody8653 2 жыл бұрын
Good talk!
@daniesisley6015
@daniesisley6015 2 жыл бұрын
Great videos!!! Best subs provider -> 'promo sm'!!!
@delightfulBeverage
@delightfulBeverage 2 жыл бұрын
I'm not superstitious, but at the same time, I like to think of myself as an enemy of Enlightenment values.
@JamesHawkeYouTube
@JamesHawkeYouTube 2 жыл бұрын
* I hear corrections for "gendered language" and know that I am in academia and I move on.
@JamesHawkeYouTube
@JamesHawkeYouTube 2 жыл бұрын
Modern is not synonymous with better, or right or true. The biggest problem is that we live in a world that has based its cosmology and existential awareness on an erroneous medieval Jesuit heliocentric cult. People all really do think they are travelling around a dark endless vacuum of "outer space" on a gigantic spherical rock with air pressure. Think harder.
@urdude67
@urdude67 2 жыл бұрын
I was ready to listen, but he opened up with his biases. I will read the 1992 version of his book.
@KenNovakIL
@KenNovakIL 3 жыл бұрын
Thanks, Hugh. As an Ethical Humanist I address my “please help” prayers to my fellow humans in nearly every non-business email I send, signing them with “Service, justice, health, peace, love, ken” (decapitalizing my first name in a bit of wordplay that includes my asking for the knowledge to work toward the preceding goals). In practice, these are reminders to myself more than to anyone else, as I type them out each time I close an email, rather than using the auto-signature function. Service, justice, health, peace, love, ken
@janet6348
@janet6348 3 жыл бұрын
This was a beautiful commentary on a beautiful man. I am 71 & white & I have so much respect & love for this man & I thank you for reminding us of the essence of him. I never met him, but I am so grateful that I lived in his lifetime. Thank you for this video
@acajudi100
@acajudi100 3 жыл бұрын
Thank you for the wonderful and truthful books! Karma never loses and address, and the evil and greedy demons will reap what they have sown. They take nothing with them, once dead.
@andreygazarian1732
@andreygazarian1732 3 жыл бұрын
It's very important to find someone to blame. Business as usual I see.
@jeffhall3039
@jeffhall3039 3 жыл бұрын
0:45 vor.monster
@dannycoffman5766
@dannycoffman5766 3 жыл бұрын
Wow we could be related.
@moreofyou2425
@moreofyou2425 4 жыл бұрын
Wow....Awesomeness ... Perception and perspective is everything.. And the chance or not so chance reconnection.... Thank you all.
@edwardkates3480
@edwardkates3480 4 жыл бұрын
I really enjoyed this. It took me back to being in the classroom with Emily, and how wonderful you conveyed the love of humanity. It was good seeing Marquise.
@VenetianSnus
@VenetianSnus 4 жыл бұрын
Fantastic
@positivelyhumanist1851
@positivelyhumanist1851 4 жыл бұрын
That was really interesting. I only wish the sound quality was better so I could hear more. Thank you from Wales, UK
@AsellusPrimus
@AsellusPrimus 4 жыл бұрын
Great video! I agree with you. The film obviously works to make you feel a certain way, mostly by omitting any expertise or updated information that could contradict it. Yet it also has an undeniable message about how environmentalism is being approached without fundamentally questioning our way of life. I also want to say that I think the "population" message in the film is overstated by critics. Yes, suggesting that there are too many people on the planet tends to punish the impoverished masses instead of the elite few who are responsible for the most consumption. But the film really just touches on this aspect, as it relates to the fact that our current way of life can't be sustained for billions of people.
@surrealistidealist
@surrealistidealist 4 жыл бұрын
Rest in Peace, Richard. 😭 ❤
@maximkhailo8763
@maximkhailo8763 4 жыл бұрын
Excellent analysis of the film. I agree with you that it's a major, major flaw that scientists weren't interviewed in the film. David Wallace-Well's Uninhabitable Earth is an excellent read and it seems what the scientists are saying in private is much more scary than their tempered public statements. Makes me wonder if they could even get anyone to say anything public without a cloak of anonymity. One thing I will say is that the general public has NO idea how much the financial world is talking about climate change and green energy. It's a MAJOR topic in financial press. For every one climate related article New York Times has, the financial press has ten. They know it's bad and they are setting up the chess pieces now. For example, this article yesterday www.ft.com/content/2ea426f2-b338-4921-882b-7c99076489fe "Sir Christopher, through his charity The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, has written to seven of the world’s biggest asset managers, calling on them to force companies around the world to set out transition plans towards a low-carbon world." Finance decides which companies do what. Which energy is used where. If people don't get democratic control of finance, then environmentalists will be left behind. It seems they already have been...
@JoeLiptock
@JoeLiptock 4 жыл бұрын
Robert Edwin is a person that made a difference in my life. So Blessed to have been one of his students!
@marionrogers890
@marionrogers890 4 жыл бұрын
Awesome