Event Description
Join the Paideia Institute for a free online lecture with Adrian Kelly, on "The Poetry of Violence: Homer and the Archaic Age"
The Homeric Iliad is one of the most violent texts to survive from the ancient Greco-Roman world. Fully a third of its 15,000 verses are set in combat or provide blow-by-blow accounts of killing, and so it is no surprise that ancient receptions of the poet and his work focused on his pre-eminence, above all, as an artist of war. This image is less amenable to modern tastes, or perhaps more accurately to modern elite, scholarly tastes. Popular audiences are somewhat different, since the experience of vicarious violence is a powerful and repeated element in vehicles of mass entertainment. Movies like the John Wick series and multi-million-player gaming franchises like Call of Duty show us from several angles that human culture is all too ready to take violence and render it enjoyable.
The point of this paper is to suggest firstly that Homer and his audiences took seriously, and took pleasure in, this kind of description no less than modern audiences do. Our second suggestion is that this tells us something disturbing about humanity and its propensity for violence, which we are inclined to look away from and discount - the dominant framework for thinking about soldiers’ experience of war, for instance, is that of PTSD (as one saw in Christopher Nolan’s excellent film of the Odyssey, which takes much of the Homeric narrative and reframes it, and its characters' perspectives, in those terms), but neurological and psychological studies of veterans’ experience with vicarious violence show a much wider range of responses to combat memory: these range from the enjoyment which comes from using once more highly technical and hard to acquire skills, re-experiencing the close comradeship of the small combat unit, and reliving the adrenaline rush of battle, whilst also encapsulating a variety of therapeutic aims and processes as well. My contention is that a study of these veterans would help us to understand better the reactions of the Homeric audience, the vast majority of whom would have had direct experience of combat; certainly the adult males would have been in constant training for warfare from youth, and even the non-combatants would have been affected by the levels of mortality and constant nature of warfare in the archaic period. A PTSD-led discourse would lead us to expect aversion to the kind of entertainment that Homeric epic provides, and yet the opposite was true (and in all periods of human history). The study would have to be both psychological and neurological, to help us grasp better not just the hardly controversial fact that humans enjoy vicarious violence, but why they do – what is it about the psyche, what is it about the brain itself, which makes us respond so positively to the experience, and what lessons can we learn? In an age where warfare is increasingly conducted through remote means, from distantly piloted drones to mandate-autonomous AI, it is imperative that we understand ourselves and our relationship with violence a little better than we currently do.
Event Info
Oct 04, 2026 at 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM EDT
Online
Guest Speaker
