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Comment by miek | Hacker News Reader

This is insightful but entirely tangential to the heart of the quote you posted.

"... the Homeric poems easily clear the bar [of showing the perspectives of both victims and perpatrators]"

Homer's writing was very empathetic to Odysseus's victims. The movie sanitized the tragedy.

This quote is also easily misinterpreted: "But the representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie’s imagined world."

A warlord from those times would not be reluctant. War was central to life, considered a duty of a leader in those times, but not in the sense of piracy as you put it. To grow and increase wealth was to protect your kingdom and increase odds of surviving not only war but downturns of all types.

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I did not read the odyssey yet, but I just finished the illiad and there the Warlords are measured in how much livestock they stole and Achilles gets mad about not getting his fair trophy share, which is measured in women.

Hectors wife is worried about her husband, and he tells her, that there is nothing to worry about, when he is dead, because if he dies, the city is sacked and she would become a slave and this would be that and since he would be dead, why should she worry then at all.

Oh and then there is the parley scene, where one of the main points is who gets whoms bronce armour after the duel is over.

Total maniacs from a modern viewpoint.

At the end of the day, if you are judging a society's moral code from 3,000 years later... it's not going to make much sense.

The only logical approach IMO is to judge it from within its own context.

What are you even talking about man. I don't know how you misinterpreted that so badly. He is saying yes I might die but if I don't risk my life you will be a slave, so I am going to fight for you:

"And tall Hector nodded, his helmet flashing: “All this weighs on my mind too, dear woman. But I would die of shame to face the men of Troy and the Trojan women trailing their long robes if I would shrink from battle now, a coward. Nor does the spirit urge me on that way. I've learned it all too well. To stand up bravely, always to fight in the front ranks of Trojan soldiers, winning my father great glory, glory for myself. For in my heart and soul I also know this well: the day will come when sacred Troy must die, Priam must die and all his people with him, Priam who hurls the strong ash spear . . . Even so, it is less the pain of the Trojans still to come that weighs me down, not even of Hecuba herself or King Priam, or the thought that my own brothers in all their numbers, all their gallant courage, may tumble in the dust, crushed by enemies — That is nothing, nothing beside your agony when some brazen Argive hales you off in tears, wrenching away your day of light and freedom! Then far off in the land of Argos you must live, laboring at a loom, at another woman's beck and call, fetching water at some spring, Messeis or Hyperia, resisting it all the way — the rough yoke of necessity at your neck. And a man may say, who sees you streaming tears, 'There is the wife of Hector, the bravest fighter they could field, those stallion-breaking Trojans, long ago when the men fought for Troy.' So he will say and the fresh grief will swell your heart once more, widowed, robbed of the one man strong enough to fight off your day of slavery. No, no, let the earth come piling over my dead body before I hear your cries, I hear you dragged away!”"

> Achilles gets mad about not getting his fair trophy share

He's mad because he is camped out on a beach for a decade helping Agamemnon, which he has no obligation to do, and Agamemnon steals his sex slave for little reason and tells him to fuck off. Achilles then refuses to war for this guy, very reasonably.

I think you must have skimmed this book very rapidly because you seem to not understand what you read.

> What are you even talking about man. I don't know how you misinterpreted that so badly. He is saying yes I might die but if I don't risk my life you will be a slave, so I am going to fight for you:

In the passage you cited he does not say that he is fighting for her; he is fighting for his honor, the glory of his father. Everything else he states are consequences. He doesn't reassure her, he offers her fate rather than hope.

> He's mad because he is camped out on a beach for a decade helping Agamemnon, which he has no obligation to do, and Agamemnon steals his sex slave for little reason and tells him to fuck off. Achilles then refuses to war for this guy, very reasonably.

Reasonable if your point in going to war is for riches; they are just a bunch of pirates and bandits, thats my point. Before the Illiad I had the idea of the noble greecs in their shining bronce armour. That was my misconception to be fair. So this was something that got me from the start. The only thing that seems to outweight riches is glory, it seems.

So my reading of the whole thing is, and please correct me if I misunderstood it , that the man fighting these wars are total manicas, they fight for glory, and women and tripods. They choose the best and wised of man (Nestor) on how good a cattle thief he is - ok not entirely he is also valued for his age and eloquence, but he got there beeing a pretty good cattle thief. They plunder the land and destroy everything around it and themselves. And I think the Illiad backs this up...

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