Homer’s Iliad: Liberty and Responsibility
This is a Reading List based upon a Liberty Fund Conference on “Liberty and Responsibility in Homer’s Iliad.”
Liberty and Responsibility in Homer’s Iliad
Topic
Homer’s Iliad is one of the foundational texts of the Western tradition, and an essential work for understanding Greek civilization. The Iliad offers a rich and varied tapestry of the human condition in war, by considering the relationship of the human to the divine, the public to the private, and peace to war. Some questions that could be raised have to do with the differing conceptions of liberty and responsibility in Achilles and Hector. What are the sorts of obligations that bind them? What freedom do they have to act within these obligatory ties or to act outside of them? What does Homer’s depiction of the gods’ interventions in human affairs say about freedom? What about the role of fate? What does the depiction of the heroism in the Iliad tell us about the human condition and its possibilities?
Guide to the Readings
Edition used:
See also in the Online Library of Liberty:
- Collections: Literature
- Collections: War and Peace
For additional reading see:
Session I: Among God and Heroes
Homer’s Iliad
Session II: The Fragility of Mortality
Homer’s Iliad
Session III: Luck, Fate, and Doom
Homer’s Iliad
Session IV: Love and Death
Homer’s Iliad
Session V: The Shield of Achilles
Homer’s Iliad
Session VI: Remembering Achilles’ Humanity
Homer’s Iliad
Reading Lists
- Addison and Smith: Freedom and Responsibility
- American Liberty in Political Documents before 1787
- An Introduction to the Major Writings of Ludwig von Mises
- Banned Books
- British and French Sources of American Constitutionalism
- Burlamaqui, Bayle: Freedom Tolerance, Natural Law
- Cato’s Letters: Liberty and Responsibility
- Cobden: Liberty and Peace
- Constant’s Principles of Politics
- Emerson on Anti-slavery
- Eric Mack, An Introduction to the Political Thought of John Locke
- Gibbon and the Rise of Christianity and Islam
- Homer’s Iliad: Liberty and Responsibility
- Hume, Smith, and Ferguson: Wealth, Commerce, and Corruption
- Hume: History of England
- James Tyrrell on Authority and Liberty
- Jefferson-Hamilton Debate
- John Milton: Liberty in his Prose and Poetry
- Major Political Thinkers: Plato to Mill
- Mandeville: Vice, Virtue and Liberty
- Mill-Macaulay Debate on Government
- Old Testament and English Political Thought
- Political Sermons of the Founding Era
- Readings from the OLL Reader
- Rousseau and Hume: Contrasting Views of Liberty
- Shakespeare and Marlowe: Liberty in Four Plays
- Shakespeare: Liberty and Responsibility
- Socialist Tracts
- Sophocles and Aeschylus: Blood Justice and the Founding of Legal Order
- Tacitus: Liberty and Tyranny in the Annals
- The Ruling Class and the State: An Anthology
- Thomas Paine and American Liberty
- Thucydides: War, Empire, and Liberty