Scholars for A-level 'World of the Hero' Rated A+

Scholars for A-level 'World of the Hero' Rated A+ 'This ordering of the material is not the result of chance: the poet gets us into the Iliad with an artful display of his liveliest and most emotional manner.' Jasper Griffin. 'Achilles is just a 'superhuman adolescent' T.S. Elliot. "To say, as many commentators do that he 'sulked' is to use an entirely unjustified pejorative term. What he did was the least he could and still retain his self-respect and the respect of his men because of Agamemnon's behaviour." Andre Michalopulos. "Achilles was without doubt, the most capable and the most valiant of all the Achean warriors; he was also the most dreaded by the enemy. He was not the sort of man over whom the commander in chief could inconsiderately pull rank and take away his legitimate prize. Under the circumstances Achilles' furious reaction was normal." Andre Michalopulos. "He is all the more maddened by Agamemnon's insolence because the time left to him is brief. When death comes he wishes it to come with the full honours due to the great hero he is." Andre Michelopulos. "Conflicts between gods were known in Greek myth, and representations of the battles of the Olympians against the giants and the Titans were popular in epic and art. But all the Olympians are subject to Zeus...by the time of the Trojan war all human affairs, Greek and Trojan alike are under his sway." Mark W. Edwards. ' The gods will be presented in various aspects in the Iliad, but the dominant aspect is that of fearful power, cutting effortlessly through the frail tissue of human action.' Jasper Griffin "They do not present an ideal for human conduct as Jesus did; instead they adopt the priveliges of the powerful and transgress many of the standards they expect their inferiors to follow. Only as patrons of seers, craftsmen and others, and as supporters of courage and cleverness, do they represent object of imitation or admiration." Mark W. Edwards. "The heroes' quarrel is set to bring death and destruction; the gods by comparison, is aimless and even frivolous." Michael Silk. 'In book three the war between the Greeks and the Trojans personified in the hand to hand duel between Menelaus and Paris - the two men whose dispute over Helen is the cause of the entire war.' Bob Linn. 'The Greeks' martial pre-eminence reminds us that to fully understand The Iliad we must balance the suffering caused by war against the glory that comes from success in it.' William Allan. '...the poem delights in and celebrates battlefield prowess even as it foregrounds the miseries and losses of war. Homer presents the complexity of war, not a one-dimensional and lazy critique of it.' William Allan. 'Lost peacetime is, however, most often conjured up through the poet's imagery - in which we are often invited to imagine an act of great violence with the help of similes drawn from a pastoral world.' Charlotte Higgins. 'The onward rush of these almost joyful descriptions of war in the Iliad might cause some modern readers to question the values of the poem, or at least to measure out the long distance between us and the society from which it sprang.' Charlotte Higgins. 'The battlefield is seen with all the intensity of those who have decided to exchange long life for glory...there is the sadness of those such as Achilles' mother or Hector's wife - who watch the battle from afar and await the consequences.' Jan Parker. "What is said or done in The Iliad is never a mere narrative fact; it naturally reflects countless other cases of its kind." Paolo Vivante. "Far from being disruptive or superfluous, the scene with Hector and Andromache reveals the deeper unity of the poem." Paolo Vivante.