Beyond the Visible
...r does not describe this battle as a massacre or in a way that people are use to understanding, mass fighting nearly impossible to focus on one person’s personal battle. Many of the characters asked for mercy and for their lives to be spared, but this was not the case in this battle, everyone was to be murdered. Hospitality was very significant. Hospitality created friendships between people and these friendships were to be honored in full. This creates “alliances” between characters. This alliance between characters has to do with characterization. Homer created very complex characters, which was very important to the Odyssey and the Iliad. The three main points that Griffin deals with when talking about Homer’s characterization are “first, characters in the poems can be different from each other; second, they can be seen to intend things which they do not explicitly reveal as their intention; third, they can be complex, in ways which are rather different in the two poems.” It is very obvious that characters differ from each other in both the Iliad and the Odyssey; such as Achilles and Agamemnon. The difference is seen in how Homer describes them in the poem. Achilles is god-like where as Agamemnon is referred to as the king of men. Odysseus is a good example of a character that does not reveal his intentions. He is deceitful when he tells Dolon to ‘be brave and not to worry about being killed’, then Dolon is killed despite his cooperation. The characters in both poems differ, in the Iliad the characters are fueled by fury and anger, such as Achilles, where as the characters in the Odyssey are fueled by emotion, such as Telemachus and Odysseus. Griffin describes the complexity with which the characters of both poems are developed and shown in great depth and detail. Although the characters of the poems were complicated so were the boundaries. Homers main characters were often compared to god or related to gods. But the difference there was that they were not. The gods were immortal and supernatural, able to meddle in the lives of the characters and cause chaos or tranquility. The idea of the god’s favoring kings and “relatives”, characters with distant relations to gods, played an important role in the poems. When Chryses, the priest of Apollo, comes to ask for his daughter back and Agamemnon sends him away frightened. Chryses prays to Apollo who plagues the Achaeans. Griffin gives the example of “Odysseus warning the Achaeans not to provoke their king Agamemnon: Great is the anger of kings nourished by Zeus…Zeus the Counsellor loves them.” In this section Griffin goes on to explain the relationship of the characters, the gods, death and immortality. In the next section of Griffin’s book he describes the writing style and points of the poems in basic sense. Griffin explains Homer’s “narrative manner”, which he goes on to say is objective due to the fact that Homer does not “indulge himself in such subjective and emotional outbursts” like other narrators. Griffin also goes on to state that when reading it is possible to portray emotion in a passage where there is one and also how emotion in certain passages is obscure. Griffin gives an abundance of these examples in this section of his book. The Iliad and the Odyssey are both placed in a mythological time period of gods and goddesses. Griffin points out how the world of men and the world of the gods intertwine and how they affect each other. The gods were able to interfere with the lives of mortals and mortals w...