The text below is meant to be read aloud at the start of the discussion section. It compresses the week's lecture into a few minutes and hands the room to the five tasks. The fuller notes that follow are for setting each task up in turn.
This week's lecture began with a surprising fact: when a team of evolutionary biologists dated the Iliad by treating its vocabulary the way one dates a divergence between species — counting which everyday words are still cognate across Homeric Greek, Modern Greek, and ancient Hittite — they arrived at the eighth century BCE, almost exactly where classicists had already placed the poems by completely different means. The convergence makes a single point vivid: the language of the Iliad is a datable object, and the poems are an Iron Age record of a Bronze Age world, carried across the centuries between by a tradition we can no longer hear.
From there the lecture made four moves. First, the poems were composed without writing, for performance — a fact proved not in a library but in the field, when Milman Parry recorded living illiterate singers in 1930s Yugoslavia and found that Homer's fixed epithets are the working tools of oral composition. Second, the poems remember a real Bronze Age — the boar's-tusk helmet, the burnt city at Hisarlik — but transmute it past the point where we can recover history from song. Third, the deepest structure of the Iliad is older than Greek: the hero and his doomed companion, the death that turns the poem, the lesson of the underworld, all of it told a thousand years earlier of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. And fourth, the poems run on four words that do not mean what we expect — aretē, excellence, not virtue; timē, honour as external recognition; klẽos, the song that outlives the body; and nostos, the homecoming.
The argument that ties it all together, and that carries us into next week, is this: the Homeric hero and the classical citizen are incompatible. Everything that makes Achilles magnificent — the absolute priority of his own honour, his contempt for collective authority — is exactly what the polis cannot tolerate. Achilles withdraws to his tent and lets his comrades die; the hoplite who does that breaks the line, and the line is the city. As we discuss, hold that tension in view. It is why Plato wanted Homer banished, why Penelope's cunning matters as much as any man's, and why the next lecture, on the hoplite and the polis, begins exactly where this one ends.
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Setting up the five tasks
The first three tasks move from close comparison, through a framing argument, to the reading of text against image, each pairing a Homeric primary source with a comparative or secondary one. The last two step outside the poems to the evidence around them — the linguistic data used to date the Iliad, and the excavated destruction layers at Troy. Each was signalled in the lecture; the notes here mark the line between that framing and the work the groups will do. A thread runs through all five: Homer is the hardest text to read precisely because everyone thinks they already know it, so each task is built to interrupt the familiar story and make you look at what the evidence actually says — whether the evidence is a poem, a column of cognate words, or a layer of ash.
Task AThe death of a companion: Enkidu and Patroclus
This is the comparison the lecture built toward in its Gilgamesh section, and it is the most exact of the three parallels. Groups read the death of Enkidu in Gilgamesh Tablet VIII against the death of Patroclus and its aftermath in the Iliad, and list the specific features the two accounts share: the companion as the hero's "second self," grief that refuses to give the body up, and the death as the pivot that changes the hero's whole purpose. The decisive third stage is the one the lecture pressed — are these similarities close enough to argue a connection, or could they arise independently from the universal human experience of losing someone? The point to reach is the separation of a genuine structural parallel (the companion-death as the engine of the plot) from the looser resemblances grief would produce in any tradition, and then to weigh the same three explanations we used for the myths: coincidence, direct borrowing, or indirect oral transmission along the eastern routes. The full-group question asks what it tells us that audiences in both traditions wanted to hear this particular story about war and mortality.
Task BGrief and its uses: Achilles, Priam, and Plato
This task takes the lecture's central tension — the hero versus the city — and locates it in a single scene and a single quarrel. Groups read Iliad XXIV, where Priam comes by night into the tent of the man who killed his son and the two enemies weep together, and then set it against Plato's argument in the Republic that exactly this kind of emotionally overwhelming poetry is too dangerous to be allowed in the education of citizens. The central question is one students adjudicate rather than look up: is grief for an enemy a weakness or a moral achievement? Does the capacity to weep with Priam make Achilles more or less fit for the civic role Plato wants his guardians to fill? The lecture flagged the delicious paradox the task turns on — that Plato cannot stop quoting the poet he proposes to banish — and the full-group question asks what it means that a tradition can be judged educationally dangerous and remain culturally indispensable at once. This task bridges directly into the lecture that follows, on the polis: the gap between Achilles and the ideal citizen is the gap between two ideas of what a human life is for.
Task CPenelope and the bow: reading text against image
The third task does the thing this course will increasingly ask of you — it sets a text beside an image and asks why they disagree. Groups read Odyssey XXI, where Penelope herself descends to the storeroom, takes down the great bow, and designs and controls the contest that will destroy the suitors — Penelope as agent, exercising mētis exactly as Odysseus does. They set this against the Penelope Painter's name-vase (c. 440 BCE, now in Chiusi), where she does not act at all but sits in patient sorrow beside her loom, the faithful waiting wife. The sharp question is whether these are the same character or two figures sharing a name — and what it reveals that fifth-century Athens chose to remember the woman who waits rather than the woman who acts. The full-group question asks whether the Odyssey's praise of female intelligence makes it a more democratically intelligent poem than the Iliad, or whether it domesticates that intelligence in a way the Iliad never needs to. (A note on the source link: the Beazley Archive has migrated to the Classical Art Research Centre; the working record for the vase is BAPD 216789 at carc.ox.ac.uk, with images also on Wikimedia Commons under "Penelope Painter.")
Task DRe-dating Homer: can we do the Pagel analysis better now?
This task returns to the study the lecture opened on and turns it from a result to be admired into a method to be interrogated. Groups first separate the two things the 762 BCE date depends on: the mathematics, which is sound and not in dispute, and the human linguistic judgement — the 173 word-by-word decisions about whether Homeric Greek, Modern Greek, and Hittite are truly cognate — which required a Hittite expert, covered only 173 of the 200 Swadesh items, and was recorded as bare yes/no with no measure of confidence. The decisive observation the lecture flagged is that the uncertainty lives in the coding, not the sums, and that the coding is exactly what modern tools can now redo: more items recovered, each judgement cross-checked against published etymological dictionaries rather than one scholar's call, and an explicit confidence attached so the doubt is carried through to the date rather than hidden. The task is mostly conceptual — a critique of where error enters — with an optional hands-on extension in which groups re-code five or six cognates themselves using an LLM and a dictionary, letting the dictionary win where they disagree. The full-group question is the one this course keeps returning to: an LLM will answer every cognacy question confidently, including the ones it gets wrong, so the skill being trained is verification, the machine as finding-aid and never authority, exactly as in the ostracism task of the writing discussion. And a second question worth holding: even a perfect, narrow date would tell us when the language reached a certain stage, not when the poems were composed — for the oral tradition is centuries older than its writing-down.
Task ETroy in the ground: VI, VIIa, and the war that may not have happened
The fifth task sends students down into the stratigraphy that the lecture's Troy section opened up, and it is the most concrete in the set. Groups work with the two great destruction layers at Hisarlik: the magnificent Troy VI, whose end around 1300 BCE carries the signature of an earthquake — walls shifted off true, no general burning, no slaughter — and the poorer, overcrowded Troy VIIa, destroyed by fire around 1180 BCE, with storage jars sunk into floors and scattered unburied dead, which Carl Blegen read as the marks of a siege. Against these they set the excavators' long quarrel — Dörpfeld for Troy VI, Blegen for VIIa, and Korfmann's later discovery of a substantial lower city that made Troy a far larger and more plausible prize. The opening work is to list the physical features that distinguish an earthquake from a sack, and to judge which layer, if either, could lie behind the Iliad. The decisive move the lecture pressed is to hold two questions apart: the archaeological one (was this city violently destroyed, and when?), which the layers can answer, and the historical one (does the Iliad record that destruction?), which they cannot, because a burnt city is silent about who burned it. The task brackets directly with Task D: the linguistic evidence puts the poems' language in the eighth century and the stratigraphy puts a plausible destruction in the twelfth, four centuries apart, and the only thing spanning the gap is the oral tradition — which is precisely what unsettles any confident talk of "the historical Trojan War."