著者

小川 正廣 OGAWA Masahiro

出版者

名古屋大学文学部

雑誌

名古屋大学文学部研究論集. 文学 (ISSN:04694716)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.61, pp.9-28, 2015-03-31

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Since the beginning of the 20th century the Homeric epics have been the main focus of historical discussions on "the Trojan War" in the Mycenaean Age and the actual societies and cultures of the later periods. In this paper I envisage the Iliad as not so much a historical document as a fictional work and propose to make clear the poet's social vision which should have appealed to his contemporary audience near the end of the Dark Age. The literary world of the Iliad, as J. Goold has pointed out, is made up of the four model societies: those of the Greeks at Troy, Troy itself, the gods on Olympus and the Greeks at the age of Homer, of which the last one is described briefly on the Shield of Achilles and in similes. From this general view I proceed to put in the foreground the depiction of the city at war - a secularized and reduced Iliad - on the Shield (Il. l8.509-540) and to look from there into 'the vanishing point' on which the 'parallel lines' of the other three societies should converge in a poetic perspective. At the end of this dynamic structure the victorious Achilles, who insults the defeated Hector's dead body and has become a helpless victim of physical force, is saved from this fatal mechanism of perpetual violence by the divine familial affection and the old king Priam's action of paternal love for his son. And just after the reconciliation, the entire narrative concludes with Hector's funeral which symbolizes the continuation of Troy's social life. Thus Homer seems to show his original view in which the type of his Trojan society, an urban civilization with the great potentialities of mediating social conflicts and resolving mental crises, can repair the grave defects inherent to such an excessively competitive organization as his Greek army and provide good guidance for the people of many emerging city-states of his time.