Homer [ca 750 BCE]
           Poet's concern: quality of craft & materials, orderly (re)presentation of themes,
                    which include order of natural world, human society, & ring of ocean.
        Horizons of Homer's World:  Who? Where? When? What? Why?
              {for ancient pictures of Homeric World, click here}
            Characters? Places named or implied? Time frame? Actions & Reasons?
            Who: Thetis (goddess, mother of Achilles) & Hephaestus (god of crafts);
                    human kind in ordered representation of normal activities:
           city life & culture peace:  by night: brides, grooms, celebrants, musicians, dancers;
              by day: murderer & victim's family, heralds, crowds, elders in council;
 war:      attacking army, defenders (old men, women, children), ambush
                     party, herdsmen  making music (killed), gods of battle (Death). Country life & culture:
            [cultivation, care of FIELDS]
                                plowmen;
                                harvesters & women preparing feast, king;
                                grape pickers (boys, girls dance steps), musician (dirge).
             pastoral [herding animals in pastures, upland, wooded not fields]
                                    herdsmen

Dance floor [between city & country]
                         young men & women dancers, musicians, crowd of spectators, acrobats &
                           musicians;
                           METAPHOR {potter spinning wheel}
                           MYTHOLOGICAL EXAMPLE: Daidalus (craftsman of Crete, made
                            Labyrinth for King Minos but then wings to escape).
           Places. Imaginary {from our & Homer's point of view}:
                                workshop of Hephaestus on Mount Olympus;
                              Crete & Kingdom of Minos.
                        Ordinary {from Homer's point of view}: environment anywhere in the lands
                                inhabited by Greeks around the Aegean, Mediterranean & Black Seas.
           Times. Imaginary: ca 1200 BCE, ordinary world during Trojan War
                            [actual order of life in Homer's time, ca 750 BCE];
                            ca centuries before the War at Troy (ca 1200 BCE).
          Actions & Reasons?

 Questions raised in class:: do you notice any similarities with the previous readings
            (Sappho & Catullus)?
            To this Bijou remarked that Sappho drew a major contrast between war & love;
            likewise Homer makes a contrast between two cites, one city with marriage
            celebrations, the  other city with ambush & siege, war.
A good point (go I), Greeks love to point up contrasts.
        I added that contrasts typically  takes the form of a pair of opposite values, which
        we can symbolize thus,
           [+/-].
        Such a significant pair of opposites can also be called, for short, a
            Dialectical Dyad [DD], where "dyad" is a word derived from Greek that means
        a twosome [English roots] or duality [Latin roots].
            Other examples of dyads include the following:
            [male/female] & [day/night] & [left/right].
At this point in the discussion another student, Jerry , objected that, NO, there
        was strife also in the peaceful city. A man had been killed & his family was seeking
        revenge.
Again a good point (I agreed, so Homer presents us with another dyad:
        WITHIN the City at peace, Homer represents by night celebration of marriage,with
                music, dancing, so life goes on,
        BUT by day, in the market place (agora) Homer represents a dispute over murder.
            So even peaceful city life contains strife.
But (a further but) I insisted that we read the whole passage & look at how the case was
        handled: did the family of the murdered man take revenge?
        Did they go after the killer?
What happened instead? What does this tell us about the society? How was it organized?
What kinds of customs & rules did it have? How were people expected to behave?

    We went on rather rapidly to look at the picture of life outside the city: in the country, agriculture in three kinds & two kinds of pastoral work.
    In particular, we noted the presence of a king overseeing the harvest: we wanted to know what that suggests about the organization of the society? Kleptocracy?
    All too quickly we skimmed the care of animals, noting only that lions burst in from
the wild, beyond the boundaries of civilization, to attack the bull.
    Last scene, to return to: the elegant dancers on a dance floor like one made by Daidalos
on Crete for King Minos: that pushed our own horizons in time back much further,
extended our time chart:
        if we chart the War at Troy about 1200 BCE, where do we chart Daidalos?
As final questions to answer for next time: where do dancing & music occur on the shield?
What does this suggest about their importance in Greek life?

FOLLOW UP IN THE NEXT CLASS

Music & dance present at beginning, middle, end of design, so important in Greek culture.

Dancers move in orderly rows, disciplined, trained, practiced: like movement of soldiers on FIELD of battle, Greek soldiers in Greek style of battle: two lines form, man next to man, shields up, spears poised, then the two lines charge towards each other, clash: one line breaks. Dance floor placed between city & country (Greek term for it, orchestra): hardened earth floor serves for threshing grain, winnowing wheat from chaff & straw, then for dance & singing to thank the gods for the harvest. Spectators stand to watch, so the floor (orchestraI) becomes a "place for looking" (Greek theater). The dance & song praising the god tell tell of action (drama) so that the thanksgiving celebration for the harvest becomes the seed of theater.