Iliad, as a literary artwork, reminds of human excellence and greatness in the field of poetry. Being one of the oldest epic poems, Iliad is a product of human excellence not only in terms of form, but also the themes Homer touches upon - anger, justice, the divine, love - have challenged many great minds, and are still disputable in modern times. In this sense, Iliad serves as an epic beauty, in which Homer aesthetically harmonizes the content and the form. Therefore, if liberal education is an experience in things beautiful, should the Iliad be regarded as a part of liberal education?
In order to analyze Iliad as a text for liberal education, it is important to understand what is meant by liberal education and the aim of this type of education. According to Strauss, “Liberal education is education in culture or toward culture.” Since culture here refers to the cultivation of mind, the aim of liberal education is to awaken the individual from his/her torpor embedded in mass democracy. To move from the concept of modern democracy shaped by the ignorant members of mass culture to the ideal democratic state, Strauss suggests individuals to transform the monologues of the greatest minds into a dialogue. That is to say, one should develop an awareness of cultural and historical differences and avoid the deterministic approach to learning inherent in modern thought. In doing so, by employing dialectics, individuals will be able to recognize and appreciate human excellence and greatness.
Given that framework, on what, for Homer, does human excellence or greatness lay? Is it possible for the reader to develop a dialogue with Homer to realize the true ground of the dignity of man and therewith the goodness of the world? Does Iliad as an epic poem scoping on Trojan War – one of the oldest literature on human violence - somehow relate to the goodness of the world? To answer these questions one can argue how powerful is the narration of Homer on violence, as the reader identifies with that violence in the most possible peaceful way. His fulgent storytelling goes hand in hand with what is natural, and nature itself. One of the good examples of this relation to nature is his representation of the battle field before Hector kills Patroclusin in Book 16:
Winds sometimes rise in a deep mountain wood
From different directions, and the trees—
Beech, ash, and cornelian cherry—
Batter each other with their long, tapered branches,
And you can hear the sound from a long way off,
The unnerving splintering of hardwood limbs.
Homer’s use of similes of this kind takes the story of the harsh violence into slow motion, giving time to the reader to stop and think about human nature for a better understanding of being. Direct references to the god made nature, and the pure essence of human actions are represented without any signs of vulgarity. Strauss says that “Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity.” Vulgarity here, referring to its Greek use, is expressed as a lack of experience in beautiful things. Iliad, consisted of many beauties like the simile represented above, in its completeness is a form of aesthetics. Therefore, one can agree when Strauss favors the classical literature and Greek philosophy as the two fields in which one can find beauty in its highest form. Though this belief is not exclusive of the modern approach to sciences, there is a greater emphasis on the need to read classical texts for their own sakes, for the beauty they offer to the reader.
In The Republic, book 10, Socrates discusses that the art works such as paintings or poems would be dangerous for the citizens of Kallipolis. Although he claims to admire the works of Homer, those poems have the potential to be dangerous in a way that they can provoke the irrational element of the soul and be a destructive influence on the minds of those who hear it. If the effect of Homer’s poems on the ordinary citizen is set aside and the effects on philosophers is considered, Socrates’s discussion reveals how powerful Homer is as a poet even for those great minds like Plato and Socrates. Their interest in Iliad and other poems is not only because it is a pleasure to read them; but because of their power for reproduction in philosophical form. That is to say, with an erotic perspective, one may defend the beauty in Homer not as a plain pleasure of verbal excellence; but also as an object of beauty, which leads great minds to create new ideas of human greatness.
To proceed in the line of discussion on Iliad as a part of liberal education, it is also as important for me to read and understand Iliad in its depth in order to have a full access to the works of the following great minds. Iliad’s epic beauty provided Homer an authority over the depiction of Gods and the Greek mythology in general. Since Iliad is the pioneer in bringing about the issues of the divine and justice in Western literature. In that sense, Homer can be perceived as a mediator between the history and his audience through the means of epic improvisations as it is argued in the introduction to Iliad there is no other reliable source to refer in terms of the period Homer describes. In that respect, it is that aesthetics present in Iliad which makes it as powerful as it is both for people of its age as a guide for tradition and religion, and of the contemporary as an historical source for Greek mythology and a marvelous piece of poetry.
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