Homer creates Helen as a complex and suffering figure with a good mind, who strives for autonomy, expression, and belonging, within and despite the many constraints to which she is subject. The first part of the paper focuses on the constraints within which Helen operates: she is a captive and possession, she is subject to the wishes of the gods, and she is an abhorred foreigner viewed as the cause of suffering and strife. The second part examines her six encounters (...) in the epic to show how she maneuvers within those constraints while retaining and increasingly asserting her own personhood. (shrink)

This paper attempts to show how the Rhesus poet uses references to the Iliad to draw the character of Hector. Its underlying assumption is that the play was written for two audiences: ordinary Athenians, for whom the play would stand on its own, and well-educated ones, who would have been able to identify the play’s many borrowings from and allusions to Homer and to compare - and chiefly to contrast - the play’s version of events and the Homeric rendition. It (...) focuses on four episodes (Hector and the Chorus, Aeneas, Dolon, and Rhesus), in each of which the playwright uses Homeric material to show up or critique both Hector’s limitations as a military commander and the limitations of the men on whom he must rely. The analysis suggests that Homer, for all his greatness, presented an unrealistic ideal that real people could not emulate. It shows war not as an arena for great and courageous men to prove their aretē, as it is in the Iliad, but as a confused and sordid plane of brutality with little if any redeeming value. (shrink)