#1. Cole-Symes: How did the epics of Homer transmit the values of the Bronze Age to the aristocracy of the new Greek polis? What were these values?
1. A polis was not a unified city-state or its people.
a) Greeks saw poleis as the collective houses of various city-states that made them up, and the collective values and beliefs they had, but did not see themselves as a unified people.
2. Myths are written to reflect the values of the culture at the current time.
a) Homer and other writers wrote their poems to show their contemporary values and beliefs, even if the poem’s setting was far in the past.
3. The values in Homer’s epic poems are similar to the world he lived in.
a) These Greeks and the people of the myths valued being more powerful than those below them and keeping alliances.
Important Events:
1230s BCE- The Trojan War
900-800s BCE Greek poleis begin to form
800s BCE- Homer writes his epic poems, Iliad and Odyssey
Key People and a summary of their writings mentioned in the text:
Homer- Iliad and Odyssey (Both written sometime around the 800s BCE): Epic poems that take place around the 1230s BCE, written about the Trojan War and the return of some warriors home after the war.
Homer wrote his epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey in the 800s BCE, even though the events that unfold in them took place four hundred years before, in the 1230s BCE.1 These myths, like many other myths and stories in history, reflect the values of that contemporary time through the telling of those older …show more content…
Aristocrats often claimed to be decedents of one of the heroes from Homer’s writings.12 This shows that the aristocrats identified the values of the heroes and agreed with them and their actions carrying out these values so much that they wished to correlate themselves to the heroes, since they also had the same strong