Notes · Classical CivilisationUK · A-Levels

The World of the Hero: Homer

The World of the Hero is the compulsory component of the A-Level (40%), and Homer is its Greek half: an in-depth study, in translation, of ONE Homeric epic - the Iliad or the Odyssey. This topic teaches both poems so that either route is served: what the epics are and where they sit in the myth of the Trojan War; how they were composed within an oral tradition (the Homeric Question, formulae and epithets, type-scenes, the hexameter); the heroic code of kleos, time and arete; the narrative and themes of the Iliad (the wrath of Achilles) and the Odyssey (the homecoming of Odysseus); and the world the poems depict - gods and mortals, mortality, and Homeric society. Throughout it models the analytical method the examination rewards: reading a passage closely for technique, character, theme and value, and setting it in context.

6 sections~33 min reading time2 competenciesLevel Foundation 1 · Standard 4 · Advanced 1

T·0111 / 10

Exam profile

AO1 · Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the Homeric epics, their composition and their contextAO2 · Analyse, interpret and evaluate the poems - technique, characterisation and theme - developing a substantiated response

Operators:analyseinterpretevaluateexplaincomparediscuss

basic level

AS-Level studies the set epic through a defined selection of the poem; the analytical demands are the same.

higher level

The full A-Level requires command of the whole poem, sustained analysis of technique and theme, and secure use of context.

Depth

Text

Contents · 6 sections

The World of the Hero: Homer

The World of the Hero and the epics of Homer#

FoundationOCR H408 Component 1 (The World of the Hero: Homer)DfE GCE Classical Civilisation subject content

The World of the Hero (Component 1)

Fig. 1The compulsory component pairs one Homeric epic with Virgil's Aeneid, all in translation - a study of the hero across the Greek and Roman worlds.

The World of the Hero is the one compulsory component of the A-Level and its largest single element, worth 40 per cent of the qualification. It pairs a study of ONE Homeric epic - either the Iliad or the Odyssey - with a study of Virgil's Aeneid, all read in English translation, so that no knowledge of Greek or Latin is required. The Homeric half is the subject of this topic; because a student may be taught either poem, the sections that follow cover both the Iliad and the Odyssey, together with the composition, values and world they share. The two epics are the foundational works of Western literature, and everything the component asks - close analysis of the poetry, understanding of the heroic world, and command of context - is built on knowing them well.

The two poems tell different kinds of story. The Iliad is a poem of war: set in the tenth and final year of the Greek siege of Troy, it does not narrate the whole war but concentrates on a few weeks dominated by a single theme - the anger of the greatest Greek warrior, Achilles, and its terrible consequences. The Odyssey is a poem of homecoming: it follows the long, dangerous return of Odysseus from Troy to his kingdom of Ithaca, and the restoration of his household. Each poem is conventionally divided into twenty-four books and composed in the same six-beat metre, dactylic hexameter, but the Iliad is tragic, martial and concentrated, while the Odyssey is adventurous, domestic and far-ranging.

Both epics assume that the audience already knows the wider myth of the Trojan War, which they never tell in full. That story runs: the goddess Eris throws down a golden apple for the fairest; the Trojan prince Paris, judging between Hera, Athena and Aphrodite, chooses Aphrodite, who rewards him with Helen, the wife of the Spartan king Menelaus; Paris carries Helen off to Troy; and the Greeks, led by Menelaus's brother Agamemnon of Mycenae, sail with a great army to win her back, besieging Troy for ten years. The Iliad opens in that tenth year; the Odyssey begins after Troy has fallen. Knowing this frame is essential, because the poems allude to it constantly.

Homer himself is a shadowy figure. Greek tradition made him a blind bard, but nothing certain is known of him, and the poems were probably given their monumental shape in the eighth or seventh century BC, at the end of a long oral tradition (the subject of the next section). The world the poems depict is not a straightforward record of any one age: it fuses distant memories of the Bronze-Age Mycenaean palaces (where the war is set, around the twelfth century BC) with features of the poet's own, later society, producing a heroic world that never quite existed but feels wholly coherent. For the examination, what matters is not solving the puzzle of Homer's identity but understanding the poems as literature and knowing enough of their context to read them well.

The component's title names its true subject: the hero, and the world that produces and tests him. Reading Homer, you are asking what it meant to be a hero - what the hero pursued, what he feared, what he owed and was owed - and how the poems explore the largest human questions through him: mortality and the shortness of life, honour and glory, the claims of family and community, and the relationship between mortals and the gods who watch, help and hinder them. Approach every passage by asking not only what happens but what it reveals about these themes and values, and you are doing exactly the analytical work (AO2) that the marks reward, grounded in secure knowledge of the poem (AO1).

Worked example

Placing the Iliad within the Trojan War

Explain where the action of the Iliad sits within the whole story of the Trojan War, and why that focus matters.

Recall the frame
The war springs from the Judgement of Paris and the taking of Helen; the Greeks under Agamemnon besiege Troy for ten years.
Locate the poem
The Iliad opens in the tenth and final year and covers only a short stretch of it - a matter of weeks - not the whole siege.
Name the true subject
Its subject is announced in its first word, the wrath of Achilles: the poem is organised around that anger and its consequences, not around the war's events at large.
Draw the significance
By concentrating on a few weeks and one man's anger, Homer turns a vast legend into a focused tragedy of honour, mortality and human choice - the concentration is the artistry.

Result: The Iliad selects a narrow window of the war's final year and organises it around the wrath of Achilles, converting the sprawling myth into a concentrated study of the hero.

Typical mistakes

Assuming the Iliad narrates the whole Trojan War (including the wooden horse and the fall of Troy) - it covers only a few weeks of the final year.
Retelling the plot at length instead of analysing how the poetry creates meaning and explores its themes.

Active revision

In your own words, state the central subject of each epic in one sentence, then place both within the sequence of the Trojan War myth (from the Judgement of Paris to the return of the heroes).

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Classical Civilisation (H008, H408) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA))

Composition and the oral tradition#

StandardOCR H408 Component 1 (Homer: composition and context)DfE GCE Classical Civilisation subject content

The conventions of Homeric epic

Fig. 2The recurring conventions of oral epic - from the invocation of the Muse to the extended simile and the type-scene - shape the texture of both poems.

The Homeric epics were not written at a desk in the way a modern novel is; they are the culmination of a long oral tradition of sung poetry, and understanding this transforms how you read them. For generations before they were fixed in writing, professional singers (an aoidos, or bard) performed heroic tales from memory, composing in performance rather than reciting a memorised fixed text. The great length and the distinctive repetitive style of the Iliad and Odyssey are the direct result of this method of composition. The scholarly debate about how, when and by whom the poems reached their final form is traditionally called the Homeric Question, and while it cannot be settled, its central insight - that the poems are oral in origin - is secure and examinable.

The key evidence for oral composition is the poems' formulaic style, analysed in the twentieth century by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, who compared Homer with living traditions of oral song. A formula is a fixed phrase repeated whenever the sense and the metre require it. The most visible formulae are the standing epithets attached to characters and things: swift-footed Achilles, resourceful Odysseus, ox-eyed Hera, the rosy-fingered Dawn, the wine-dark sea. These are not chosen freshly each time for their meaning in context but supplied ready-made to fill a particular slot in the metrical line - which is why Dawn is rosy-fingered even when it is not obviously relevant. Recognising the formula as a tool of oral composition prevents the beginner's error of over-interpreting every epithet.

The same economy operates at the level of whole scenes. Type-scenes are stock sequences - the arming of a warrior, a feast, a sacrifice, the launching of a ship, a supplication, a duel - narrated in a recurring order of standard elements, which the singer could expand or compress as the moment required. An arming scene, for instance, moves through greaves, breastplate, sword, shield, helmet and spear in a set order; the poet lingers or hurries to control weight and pace. Far from being mechanical, the type-scene lets the audience feel both the familiar pattern and the significant variation - so the unusually full arming of Achilles or Patroclus signals the importance of what follows.

All of this is bound to the metre, dactylic hexameter, a line of six feet whose rhythm the whole tradition is built to fit. Formulae exist in different metrical shapes so that a singer can name Odysseus, or the sea, or the act of speaking, in whatever part of the line the composition has reached, keeping the hexameter flowing without pausing to invent. The poems even show us bards at work inside the story: in the Odyssey, Phemius sings in Odysseus's hall and Demodocus sings at the Phaeacian court, including a song about the Trojan horse that moves Odysseus to tears - Homer's own portrait of the tradition to which he belongs, and of poetry's power to preserve fame and stir feeling.

For analysis, the oral background should inform, not replace, close reading. It explains the poems' scale and their texture of repetition, and it should make you cautious about treating every recurrence as a deliberate symbol. But the tradition also gives the poet immense expressive resources: repetition builds grandeur and a sense of an ordered world; the reuse of a phrase or scene in a new, charged context can be deeply moving; and the very familiarity of the formulae throws unexpected departures into relief. A strong answer can note that a feature is formulaic and still analyse the effect Homer draws from it here - the mark of a reader who understands both how the poems were made and how they work.

Worked example

Analysing an epithet as formula and as effect

Show how the epithet swift-footed Achilles can be both a metrical formula and expressively meaningful.

Identify the formula
Swift-footed is a standing epithet supplied by the tradition to name Achilles in a given metrical slot - it recurs regardless of whether he is running.
Note the oral function
It lets the bard complete the hexameter smoothly and instantly, without inventing a fresh phrase for the hero's name each time.
Find the charged use
In the pursuit of Hector round Troy, the epithet's literal sense - Achilles's speed - suddenly becomes horribly apt, the ready-made phrase gaining force from the moment.
Combine the readings
The best analysis holds both: the epithet is formulaic, yet Homer can let the context light it up, so the traditional phrase carries new weight.

Result: The epithet is a genuine tool of oral composition that Homer can nonetheless charge with meaning in the right context - the two readings are complementary, not rival.

Typical mistakes

Over-interpreting every standing epithet (treating rosy-fingered Dawn as freshly meaningful each time) instead of recognising the metrical formula.
Talking about the Homeric Question as if it must be solved; the examinable point is that the poems are oral in origin, not the authorship puzzle.

Active revision

Find three standing epithets and one type-scene in your set poem; explain how each helps oral composition, then pick one and analyse an effect Homer gains from it in a particular passage.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for classical civilisation (Department for Education)

The heroic code: kleos, time and arete#

StandardOCR H408 Component 1 (Homer: heroic values)DfE GCE Classical Civilisation subject content

The values of the heroic code

Fig. 3The interlocking values of the heroic world: excellence (arete) earns honour (time), marked by prizes (geras) and preserved as glory (kleos), alongside the social codes of xenia and nostos.

The society of the poems runs on a heroic code - a shared set of values that defines what a hero is and what he must do - and mastering its key terms is the single most useful preparation for analysing Homer. At its centre is kleos: glory, renown, the fame won by great deeds and, above all, the immortal fame preserved in song. Because the hero knows he must die, kleos is the nearest thing to immortality available to him; to be sung of forever is to defeat oblivion. This is why heroes court danger and death in battle: the poems themselves are the fame they win, and Homer's audience, singing of Achilles centuries later, is the proof that the bargain works.

Closely bound to kleos is time (honour), the public esteem a hero receives from his community and his peers, measured concretely in the prizes and privileges he is awarded. A hero's time is shown in tangible geras - a prize of honour, such as a captured woman, armour or the best cut of meat at the feast - and any slight to it is a grave matter, because honour is not a private feeling but a public status that can be added to or taken away. Arete completes the triad: excellence or prowess, the quality that earns honour and glory, displayed supremely in battle but also in counsel, athletics and hospitality. Arete earns time; time is the visible reward of arete; and kleos is the lasting record of both.

Homeric society is a shame culture rather than a guilt culture: a hero is governed less by an inner conscience than by his standing in the eyes of others, by the fear of disgrace and the desire for esteem. What others will say - the reproach of the community, the taunt of an enemy - is a powerful motive, and to be shamed publicly is close to unbearable. This is why insults and public slights drive so much of the action, and why a hero will risk death rather than be seen to flinch. Hector's decision to face Achilles outside the walls, though he knows he may die, turns on his dread of the reproaches of the Trojans if he shelters inside.

The clearest statement of the code is Sarpedon's speech to Glaucus in the Iliad (Book 12): the two Lycian leaders enjoy the honour, land and feasting of princes, and precisely for that reason they are bound to fight in the front rank where the danger is greatest - privilege is earned by risk, and to take the rewards of a hero is to accept the obligation to die like one. The speech lays bare the logic of the whole system: honour is a bargain, and the hero pays for his standing with his life. It also frames the poem's deepest theme, for Sarpedon reasons that since death comes for all in a thousand forms, the only choice is whether to win glory or yield it to another.

The code also generates the poems' central conflicts, because its terms can collide. The Iliad begins when Agamemnon dishonours Achilles by seizing his geras, the woman Briseis: Achilles's time is publicly violated, and his furious withdrawal - a hero refusing to fight because the system that gives fighting its meaning has failed him - drives the entire poem. Beyond the battlefield, the code has a social twin in xenia, the sacred obligation of guest-friendship between host and stranger, protected by Zeus; and the Odyssey adds nostos, the homecoming, as a goal that can rival glory itself. Reading Homer well means tracking these values - kleos, time, arete, xenia, nostos - and watching what happens when they are honoured, tested or betrayed.

Worked example

Why Achilles withdraws from the fighting

Using the heroic code, explain why Achilles reacts so violently to the loss of Briseis in Iliad 1.

Identify the prize
Briseis is Achilles's geras, the prize awarded to him from the spoils - the tangible marker of the honour (time) he has earned by his prowess (arete).
See the public slight
When Agamemnon seizes her to replace his own lost prize, he strips Achilles of his geras publicly, an open assault on his honour before the whole army.
Explain the reaction
In a shame culture, such a public dishonouring is intolerable; Achilles withdraws because the honour that made his risking death worthwhile has been denied him.
Draw the theme
His withdrawal exposes the fragility of the code: the hero who lives for honour has no reason to fight once honour is withheld, and the whole Greek army suffers for it.

Result: Achilles's rage is not petulance but the logic of the heroic code: the loss of his geras is a public denial of his time, and without honour the bargain of the hero's life collapses.

Typical mistakes

Translating the Greek terms loosely (treating time as modern private honour or kleos as mere popularity) instead of as public status and immortal fame.
Describing heroes as simply brave, missing that their conduct is driven by a system of honour and shame that the poems examine critically.

Active revision

Take one hero from your set poem and analyse a passage in which his kleos, time or arete is at stake; explain what the episode reveals about the heroic code and its costs.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Classical Civilisation (H008, H408) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA))

The Iliad: the wrath of Achilles#

StandardOCR H408 Component 1 (the Iliad)DfE GCE Classical Civilisation subject content

The wrath of Achilles

Fig. 4The narrative arc of the Iliad: each stage of the wrath follows from the last, from the quarrel in Book 1 to the ransom of Hector in Book 24.

The Iliad announces its subject in its first word - menis, the wrath of Achilles - and the whole poem is the tracing of that anger from its cause to its exhaustion. In Book 1 a quarrel erupts between Agamemnon, the commander-in-chief, and Achilles, the army's greatest fighter: forced to give up his own prize, Agamemnon compensates himself by seizing Achilles's prize, Briseis. Dishonoured, Achilles withdraws from the fighting and asks his divine mother, the sea-goddess Thetis, to persuade Zeus to let the Greeks be beaten so that they will feel his worth. The private quarrel of two proud men thus sets the tragic machinery of the poem in motion.

With Achilles absent, the Greeks suffer heavily, and the middle of the poem shows the cost of his anger in book after book of battle. In Book 9 Agamemnon, alarmed, sends an embassy offering the return of Briseis and lavish gifts if Achilles will fight; but Achilles, still nursing his grievance and now questioning the whole heroic bargain, refuses - a refusal that turns the poem toward tragedy, since it is his own choice, not fate alone, that will bring disaster on those he loves. The embassy is a hinge of the poem: it shows Achilles at his most alienated, doubting the value of glory bought with a short life, and it makes his later grief the fruit of his own obstinacy.

The turning point comes through Patroclus, Achilles's dearest companion. Unable to bear the Greek defeats, Patroclus begs to enter the battle in Achilles's own armour; Achilles agrees, and Patroclus drives the Trojans back but is killed by Hector, Troy's greatest warrior, with the help of the god Apollo. Patroclus's death shatters Achilles: his grief and guilt turn his anger away from Agamemnon and toward Hector and the Trojans, and he returns to the fighting knowing - for his mother has told him - that his own death must follow soon after Hector's. Love and grief, not honour, now drive him, and the poem's emotional register deepens.

The climax is the duel in Book 22, where Achilles kills Hector outside the walls of Troy as Hector's parents watch from above. It is a terrible scene: Hector, abandoned by the gods, faces death with a last resolve to win glory even in dying, while Achilles, consumed by grief, shows no mercy and then abuses the corpse, dragging it behind his chariot. The killing satisfies the demands of vengeance and honour, but Homer presents it as much as horror as triumph, and Achilles's savagery to the dead marks how far grief has driven him from ordinary humanity - a dehumanising of the hero that the poem does not endorse.

The Iliad ends not with the fall of Troy but with an act of shared humanity in Book 24. The aged Trojan king Priam, guided by the gods, comes alone by night into Achilles's tent to beg for the body of his son, and Achilles - moved by the sight of the old man, and thinking of his own father whom he will never see again - relents, weeping with Priam for their common griefs before returning Hector's body for burial. The wrath that opened the poem is finally spent in pity and fellow-feeling; the greatest of warriors recovers his humanity in the recognition that all men, enemies alike, must suffer and die. This quiet, tragic close - not victory, but a shared understanding of mortality - is the poem's profoundest statement.

Worked example

Analysing the ransom of Hector

Analyse how the meeting of Priam and Achilles in Book 24 resolves the theme of the poem.

Set the situation
Priam, an old king and a bereaved father, comes as a suppliant into the tent of the man who killed and dishonoured his son, to beg for the body.
Identify the turn
Achilles is moved by the sight of Priam to think of his own father, and the two enemies weep together - Achilles for Peleus and Patroclus, Priam for Hector.
Read the effect
The shared weeping dissolves enmity into a recognition of common human suffering; Achilles, so recently savage, recovers pity and grants the ransom.
State the theme
The scene answers the wrath with compassion and frames the poem's deepest idea: that mortality unites all men, and true greatness lies in that recognition.

Result: Book 24 resolves the wrath not through further violence but through a shared grief that restores Achilles's humanity and states the poem's tragic vision of a mortality common to all.

Typical mistakes

Thinking the Iliad ends with the fall of Troy or the wooden horse; it ends with the funeral of Hector, before the city falls.
Reading the killing of Hector as a simple heroic triumph, missing Homer's presentation of Achilles's savagery and the tragedy of both men.

Active revision

Analyse how Homer restores Achilles's humanity in the meeting with Priam (Book 24); explain what the scene contributes to the poem's treatment of grief, mortality and the hero.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for classical civilisation (Department for Education)

The Odyssey: nostos and the hero of many turns#

StandardOCR H408 Component 1 (the Odyssey)DfE GCE Classical Civilisation subject content

The structure of the Odyssey

Fig. 5The design of the Odyssey: from the Telemachy through the wanderings to the disguised homecoming, the defeat of the suitors and the recognition of Penelope.

Where the Iliad is a poem of war and honour, the Odyssey is a poem of homecoming, and its governing idea is nostos - the return home. Its hero, Odysseus, has survived the Trojan War but must struggle for ten more years to reach Ithaca, his kingdom, his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus. The goal is not glory on the battlefield but the restoration of a home and a household (oikos), and so the poem's values shift: endurance, self-control and, above all, intelligence matter more than raw prowess. The Odyssey is a different kind of heroism, tested not in the front rank but on the sea, in strange lands and finally in the disguised hero's own hall.

Odysseus is defined by his cunning. His standing epithet is polytropos - the man of many turns, of many wiles - and his characteristic quality is metis, cunning intelligence, in contrast to the straightforward force (bie) of an Achilles or an Ajax. It is metis that devised the wooden horse that took Troy, and metis that saves him again and again on the journey home: he survives by trickery, disguise, patience and quick thinking rather than by strength alone. This makes him a more ambiguous hero than the warriors of the Iliad - resourceful and admirable, but also a liar and a manipulator when survival requires it - and the poem is fascinated by the uses and the dangers of cleverness.

The poem's structure is artful and worth knowing. It opens not with Odysseus but with the Telemachy (Books 1-4), following his son Telemachus as he searches for news of his father and grows toward manhood, while Ithaca is overrun by arrogant suitors consuming the household and courting Penelope. Odysseus himself appears only in Book 5; the tale of his wanderings - the Lotus-eaters, the Cyclops, Circe, the visit to the Underworld, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis - is then told by Odysseus in his own voice at the court of the Phaeacians (Books 9-12), a famous first-person narrative. The second half (Books 13-24) brings him home in disguise, to test the loyalties of his household, defeat the suitors and be reunited with Penelope.

Running through the whole poem is the theme of xenia, guest-friendship, which the Odyssey tests more searchingly than any other text. Good hosts and bad recur as a moral measuring-stick: the monstrous Cyclops Polyphemus, who eats his guests instead of feeding them, is the very negation of xenia and is punished for it; the generous Phaeacians embody it and speed Odysseus home; the suitors in Ithaca are abusers of hospitality, guests who devour their host's substance, and their destruction is presented as just. Odysseus's own disguise as a beggar turns hospitality into a test - how a stranger is treated reveals character - and the reward and punishment of hosts is a central strand of the poem's justice.

The homecoming turns on recognition and on Penelope's own intelligence, which mirrors her husband's. For years she has held the suitors off by cunning - famously weaving and secretly unravelling a shroud to delay remarriage - and when Odysseus returns disguised she does not fall on his neck but tests him, springing the secret of their marriage bed, built by Odysseus around a living olive tree and immovable, to be sure of his identity. The reunion of two wary, clever people, each testing the other, is the emotional climax of the poem, and it crowns nostos with the restoration not just of a king to his throne but of a marriage and a household. The Odyssey ends with order and the family restored - a comic and hopeful resolution as distinct from the tragic close of the Iliad as the two poems' worlds.

Worked example

The Cyclops: xenia and metis

Analyse how the Cyclops episode explores hospitality and cunning.

The bad host
Polyphemus violates every rule of xenia: instead of feeding his guests he devours them, and mocks the gods who protect strangers - the antitype of the good host.
The cunning response
Odysseus survives by metis: he gives his name as Nobody, blinds the drunken giant, and escapes tied beneath the rams - trickery, not force.
The danger of cleverness
But his cunning has a flaw of pride: by boasting his true name as he sails away, he lets Polyphemus curse him to Poseidon, prolonging his sufferings.
Draw the meaning
The episode defines xenia by its violation and displays both the power and the peril of Odysseus's cleverness - the very quality that saves him can undo him.

Result: The Cyclops episode uses a monstrous bad host to define hospitality and to showcase Odysseus's metis, while warning - through his boastful lapse - of the dangers of the hero's own cleverness.

Typical mistakes

Retelling the adventures as a string of monsters without analysing their themes (xenia, temptation, the dangers and rewards of metis).
Forgetting that Odysseus tells the wanderings himself to the Phaeacians, and that the poem opens with Telemachus, not with Odysseus.

Active revision

Analyse the Cyclops episode (Book 9) as a study of xenia and metis: how does Homer use Polyphemus to define good and bad hospitality and to display Odysseus's cunning (and its dangers)?

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Classical Civilisation (H008, H408) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA))

Gods, mortals and Homeric society#

AdvancedOCR H408 Component 1 (Homer: gods, mortals and society)DfE GCE Classical Civilisation subject content

The Iliad and the Odyssey compared

Fig. 6The two poems compared: a tragedy of war and honour beside a poem of homecoming and cunning, sharing the heroic code, the gods and the oral-epic style.

The gods are constant, active presences in both poems, and understanding the divine machinery is essential to reading Homer. The Olympians are anthropomorphic - human in form, appetite and emotion - and deeply partisan: in the Iliad they take sides in the war, Hera, Athena and Poseidon backing the Greeks, Apollo, Aphrodite and Ares favouring Troy, and they intervene directly in the fighting, rescuing favourites, deflecting spears and even being wounded. Above them Zeus holds a certain authority, weighing destinies and restraining the others, but the divine world is a family riven by rivalry. The gods lend the human action grandeur and a second, cosmic stage, and their quarrels can be treated with a lightness - even comedy - that throws the mortal tragedy into relief.

The relationship between divine will, fate and human choice is subtle and much discussed. Events are often doubly motivated: a hero acts for his own reasons and a god is also said to prompt him, so that human and divine causation run together rather than cancelling each other out. Over both stands fate (moira or aisa), the appointed portion, above all the fixed span of a life; even Zeus, who weighs the fates of Hector and Achilles in his golden scales, is shown bowing to what is destined rather than overturning it. Yet fate does not abolish responsibility: heroes make real choices, and the poems hold divine, fated and human explanations together in a way that deepens rather than diminishes the mortals' dignity.

Against the deathless, careless ease of the gods, the poems set the mortality of men, and this contrast is the source of their pathos. The gods can be wounded but not killed, can suffer but not truly lose; men die, and it is precisely because life is short and death certain that human deeds carry weight and human choices matter. Achilles's foreknowledge that glory will cost him his life, Hector's acceptance of death for honour, the endless dead of the battlefield - all draw their force from the gulf between mortal and immortal. Homer's heroes are great not in spite of death but because of it: mortality is the price and the meaning of the heroic life.

The poems are also our richest window onto the values and structure of the heroic society they imagine, and reading them as social documents (with due caution) is part of the exam's context. That world is aristocratic and honour-bound, organised around the great household (oikos), the exchange of gifts, the feast, the assembly and the sacred bond of xenia. Its women are vividly drawn and variously placed: Helen, whose beauty caused the war and who judges herself bitterly; Andromache, the loving wife facing widowhood; Penelope, the faithful and clever queen; and the many enslaved women who are the spoils of war, reminders of its human cost. War itself is shown in its full horror as well as its glory - the grief of the bereaved, the enslaved captives, the dying young men - so that the poems celebrate the heroic ideal and count its cost at once.

One of Homer's most powerful techniques for holding these worlds together is the extended (or Homeric) simile, and analysing it rewards the advanced reader. At moments of battle and death the poet reaches for long comparisons drawn from ordinary, peacetime life - a lion among cattle, a farmer's irrigation channel, a mother brushing a fly from her sleeping child, snow falling silently on the fields - so that the world of war is repeatedly measured against a world of nature, work and home. The similes widen the poem's scope beyond the battlefield, remind us of all that war destroys, and lend even a minor death a sudden tenderness or grandeur. To analyse a simile - to see the ordinary world it opens and the effect of setting it beside the heroic one - is to read Homer at his most characteristic and most humane.

Worked example

Analysing a Homeric simile

Explain how an extended simile drawn from ordinary life shapes the reader's response to a scene of battle.

Identify the two worlds
A simile sets the heroic action beside an image from peacetime life - farming, weather, animals, the home - two worlds briefly held together.
Read the point of comparison
The comparison may catch the physical action (a warrior falling like a felled tree) or the emotion (grief like a mother's), making the distant scene immediate.
Feel the widening
By opening a window onto ordinary life, the simile reminds us of all that war interrupts and destroys, enlarging the poem beyond the battlefield.
State the effect
The device lends dignity or pathos to the moment and measures the heroic world against the human one, so that Homer celebrates and mourns at once.

Result: The extended simile enlarges a moment of war by setting it beside the ordinary world, lending it immediacy and pathos and reminding the reader of the human cost that the heroic ideal exacts.

Typical mistakes

Treating the gods as either all-powerful puppeteers or mere decoration, missing the balance of divine, fated and human causation.
Ignoring the extended similes and the poems' portrayal of war's victims, which qualify the celebration of heroism.

Active revision

Choose one extended (Homeric) simile from your set poem and analyse it in detail: what ordinary world does it open, and how does setting it beside the heroic action shape the reader's response?

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for classical civilisation (Department for Education)

References & sources

Sources

OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA)

OCR AS and A Level Classical Civilisation (H008, H408) specification

Department for Education

GCE AS and A level subject content for classical civilisation

The World of the Hero: Homer

6 sections~33 min reading time2 competenciesLevel Foundation 1 · Standard 4 · Advanced 1

The World of the Hero: Homer

Key points

Placing the Iliad within the Trojan War

Key points

Analysing an epithet as formula and as effect

Key points

Why Achilles withdraws from the fighting

Key points

Analysing the ransom of Hector

Key points

The Cyclops: xenia and metis

Key points

Analysing a Homeric simile

Sources

The World of the Hero: Homer

Key points

Placing the Iliad within the Trojan War

Key points

Analysing an epithet as formula and as effect

Key points

Why Achilles withdraws from the fighting

Key points

Analysing the ransom of Hector

Key points

The Cyclops: xenia and metis

Key points

Analysing a Homeric simile

Sources