Saturday, February 20, 2010

Hades as transition of epoch

The final book of the Odyssey begins with a scene of the suitors going to Hades. They are being dragged into purgatory, into the place of the dead by Hermie the God of knowledge and messenger. It is as Socrates said in Plato's Republic, see Chrysovalantis ( Val) Petridis Plato;s mythologizing the myth of Er by inkwater press 2009, that it is part of knowledge and what one learns that dictates where they go in the after life. Philosophers fare well in this situation. In the odyssey the suitors blame Penelope's indecisiveness for the trouble of their death as Achilles and Agamemnon and Achilles debate over who had the best death and the former describes the latter's death in detail. These two heroes represent the heroes who mark the beginning of the age that was ended with the death of the suitors, this age was a short transition between the minion empire and the4 end of troy. These were the heroes of the age of troy. Now the new age represented by Ulysses has begun. Here the decay of the old world dies as the heroes and suitors are bunched together as inferior to Ulysses. One can compare the suitors death to Achilles and one realise that the heroes of old being more virtuous that the suitors are not as virtuous as Ulysses. The idea of comparing the deaths in in the very argument of Agamemnon and Achilles. Both groups claim they died due to a woman, one Helen of Greece the other Penelope. However the heroes did not try to steal a wife rather retrieve her in glory and return her virtue to a free Greece. The suitors felt that they had lost cause Penelope took too long and as they should have heeded Ulysses was still alive and returned. Thus they knew they were doing something less virtuous that the old heroes who like them went to Hades and not the Elysian fields. So would Ulysses end f in hades? suitor Amphimedon Agamemnon friend is the one who accounts the suitors deaths and and blames their loss on Penelope. While Agamemnon contrasts the constancy of Penelope with the treachery of Clytemnestra.
'till next week

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