Pride and Power: Appeals to the Greeks

In Book two of the Iliad, it seems as though there were two major themes that the rhetorical and persuasive speeches gravitated towards: the pride of the audience and the emphasis of hierarchy. These two themes will be the focus of this posting.

Pride

The pride of the Greek warriors seems to be one of their major weaknesses; for it is often this pride that can be manipulated by their leaders to convince them to charge into hopeless situations. When all of the men are rushing back to their ships, anxious to see their families again, Ulysses is able to manipulate them into staying and fighting. The interesting part is that he calls the respectable people cowards, in a typical appeal to pride, but he attacks the common men with almost the opposite assault on one’s pride. Rather than just calling them cowards and asking where their courage has gone, he also tells them that they have never been of worth. Even to a common man this would have been highly offensive and such a man would feel the need to prove his worth. In this society war was one of the only ways for men to prove themselves, so they literally ran back to the battlefront. This strategy of Ulysses shows that he had an excellent grasp on how to rhetorically convince different audiences.

Hierarchy

The social power order was very evident in the interactions between the characters in this passage. The most obvious example of this was in Agamemnon’s staff. While his staff was not a spoken rhetoric, it symbolized the authority he had over the men. When he went to address the army he brought the staff to remind them why he was in charge. Then, when Ulysses decided to convince the men to stay and fight, he retrieved the staff and, in some cases, even beat the men with it. This leads to an interesting dynamic, one that I believe was also recognized by Katie Johnson in her posting about Agamemnon’s actions. If Agamemnon told the men to leave, why did he let Ulysses take his ancestral staff to convince them to stay and why did he tell them to leave in the first place? I believe the second question has to do with Agamemnon’s military strategy, but the first can be answered on page nineteen. Agamemnon tells his counselors that he is going to tell the men to go home but that he wants them to convince the armies to stay. I believe that this may be his way of increasing loyalty. He wanted the men to think that he was their nice commander that would have let them go home to their families but they chose to stay and fight. The men will fight with more conviction if they believe that it was their decision to be there than if they see themselves as being forced to stay. But that is just my theory; does anyone have any other ideas?