Iliad | Death and the God-Like Hero

In the following excerpt, Jasper Griffin looks at the ways in which the Iliad deals with a past mythic age in which the gods involved themselves in the lives of godlike, heroic humans.

With small exceptions, the serious poetry of Greece is concerned with the myths; and the subject of Greek mythology is the heroes. These are two obvious facts. Epic dealt with die "deeds of gods and men," and so did the choral lyric, while even the personal lyric is full of mythical narratives and excursions. Tragedy too, tended to restrict itself to the mythical period, although the Capture of Miletus, by Phrynichus, and the Persians, by Aeschylus, show that this...

[The entire page is 5180 words long]

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