In this story, I envisioned the Gods and Goddesses sitting high on Mt. Olympus staring down on the humans trying so
desperately to fight their own battles… until they decided to intervene. It was
most interesting to me that throughout the story it only took a few simple
sentences from a God or Goddess to eventually sway an entire army to do what
they wanted.
For example, Kevin D. referenced to Minerva in an
earlier blog post as being very aware of the Kairos and took advantage of the
chance to capitalize on the situation at the time by appealing to Odysseus...
"Are you going to fling yourselves into your ships, and be off home to
your own land in this way?" says Minerva. The Gods and goddesses will
always have the upper hand in these wars because of their opportunity to see
all pieces of the puzzle... thereby being able to appeal to whoever they want
and hopefully achieve the outcome they desire.
In our day, there are people in power that do the
exact same thing... they will use their power and position to achieve what they
want, even if it isn't exactly what should happen. Just as much as there will
be "Gods and Goddesses" of our day and age persuading people, there
will always be guys like Thersites who see a problem and feel the need to do
something about it... but with no authority to make their opinions credible
they are often humiliated by those in power. Not to say that those without
"Authority" don't have a voice, because if Thersites were appealing
to the family members and friends of the soldiers at war, he would have had a
much larger group to back him up. Unfortunately, it was just the wrong
audience.
I came to the conclusion that Rhetoric in all it's forms is powerful,
but those in higher power will more often than not have the upper hand in persuading
people to do what they want versus those who don't have such power.
In my physical science class we discussed how one of the ways people acquire knowledge is by learning through authority, or in other words, trusting what other sources say about a given topic. However, a major weakness of this learning method is that when authorities present conflicting explanations we then are at a loss of who to trust. It was interesting how, in a way, you showed the gods (or authorities) giving conflicting commands to the soldiers and the different reactions the soldiers had.
ReplyDeleteThere is so much I want to say about your post. Thank you for sharing. I will just say that "Authority" as you explained it made me think of the cage that many people feel like they are living in. It reminds me of the book Ishmael. Even though we feel like we are free people (I mean this is America, right?), we find that we are bound by so many superficial standards and norms. The food we eat, the things we buy, and even the fact that we are in college serve as evidences of the great authorities over us.
ReplyDeleteGreat post! The link you make between omniscience and power is really instructive. For us, maybe omniscience isn't possible, but there are definitely those who come closer to it than others. I think that you brush on a classic "knowledge is power" argument here. Those who have knowledge of their audience can sway them more easily. I'm a pre-business major, and a large part of what we do is market analysis, finding out about people so we can get them to behave in certain ways. This works in so many ways in our modern world, and is visible as well in the Iliad.
ReplyDeleteI think your totally right but I would even go one step further and say that swaying the entire army didn't just start with a couple of sentences from Gods and Goddesses, rather from achilles going to his mom and having her use her goddessness to get his way. In my eyes it really all started with Achilles and his pride.
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