I have generally kept the work that my students are doing on their blogs separate from anything that I’m doing on my own blog, saving responses and reblogs for the class blog.

But since we’re about halfway through the semester now, I wanted to spend just a minute bragging about their accomplishments. This week, they’ve been debating questions of justice related to affirmative action, wealth disparities, and the Lincoln SlutWalk.

Perhaps my favorite post of the week was just published by TheArtOfTheState; here’s a piece of it that really speaks to the amount they’ve learned:

Perhaps Socrates’s trial would have gone differently if he more embodied the archetype of the Odysseus-hero, if he were polytropos. Socrates, at least as he is portrayed by Plato, is not really a multidimensional hero. He does one thing very well, and that is to philosophize. He embarrasses those who claim to be wise by showing them that all of their ‘wisdom’ is a castle built on air.

If Socrates better embodied the traits of Odysseus, he may have been able to succeed in destroying the false wisdom of the elites of Athens without dooming himself in the eyes of the law. Socrates alludes to the suffering and humiliation in his life in his defense, but the aethlos experienced by Odysseus is simply staggering in comparison. Odysseus came from a place of unequalled glory and privilege and was stripped of everything, but overcame each tribulation. And in the end, all of the suffering and dishonor and suffering inflicted culminates in triumph for Odysseus. And he lives.

If Socrates viewed his trial in the other sense of the word, as a dishonor that could be endured— as aethlos, it is conceivable that he might have lived to fight another day.

Not only is the author breaking down the concept of heroism into its component pieces and examining them critically, but (s)he is also doing so across multiple works of Greek philosophy and literature. And, a point of personal pride, (s)he’s mixing in Attic Greek terminology in the process, counting on the fact that everyone in the class will know their meaning.

I don’t know whether the students are having any fun with their blogs — I recently chided them about sparse posting during the previous weeks and they’ve responded with a week of really intense writing — but I’m having a great time reading them.

In what might be the weirdest piece I’ve ever read in the New York Times, researchers describe their efforts to prove in the least definitive manner possible — looking at the social networks described in the Iliad — that events depicted therein — which are generally understood to have occurred — might have actually occurred:

If the social networks depicted appeared realistic, we surmised, perhaps they would reflect some degree of historical reality.

Why are they attempting to determine whether the events depicted in the Iliad actually happened, especially when they note that “Archaeological evidence suggests that at least some of the societies and events in such stories did exist”?

No explanation is given.

They also look at Beowulf and Tain Bo Cuailnge, whose events, respectively, fewer people and no one believe to have occurred.

And what do they discover, based on their social-network analysis?

To construct the social networks in each of the narratives, we created databases for the characters and their interactions, and we categorized their relationships as hostile or friendly.

The myth networks were found to have some of the characteristics, including the small-world property and structural balance (related to the idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend), typical of real-world networks.

Intentionally fictional narratives like “Harry Potter” also have these properties. However, “The Iliad” is assortative as well — a potential real-life indicator that these fictional networks lack. “Beowulf” is also assortative, but only if the main character, who is very different from the rest, is removed from the network. The “Tain,” like the fictional networks we studied, is disassortative.

These and other features may corroborate scholars’ belief in the narratives’ historical basis: i.e., the societies underlying “The Iliad” and “Beowulf” may have traces of reality, while that of the “Tain” appears more artificial.

In other words, the Iliad seems more likely to have a basis in reality than Beowulf. And both seem to be more realistic than the Tain, which everyone already believed to be entirely fictional.

Was any of this ever in dispute? Was there a lot of doubt that the Trojan War actually happened? And do we feel better about whether or not it took place because the social networks in the epic seem to be realistic ones?

**This post contains spoilers for anyone who hasn’t seen all five seasons of “The Wire” … which, at this point, is generally inexcusable. It also contains spoilers for anyone who hasn’t read Homer’s Iliad, which has been generally available to read for about 3,000 years. Just sayin’.**

It’s difficult to imagine, given my interests, that I missed Tim Carmody’s post last year on Jason Kottke’s blog in which he did a quick comparison of David Simon’s Omar Little and Homer’s Achilles. Carmody’s jumping off point is an interview in which Simon says:

Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality…

The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason… Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different.

Simon, of course, is talking about drama that’s a little bit more recent than the Homeric epics, but Carmody’s comparison — based on close readings of two scenes from the show and the poem — is still incredibly interesting.

His conclusion: “As Omar would say: ‘You come at the King, you best not miss.’ And as fans of the show know, Omar both has his revenge and meets a similarly mythic end. In Greek tragedy as in The Wire, the universe is indifferent to our heroism.”

And this, of course, is where Carmody and I part company. While it’s true that the universe seems to be largely indifferent to Omar’s fate, it’s not at all true that gods or men are indifferent to the fate of Achilles. Omar’s passing is barely noted by any of the other characters on the show, but the same certainly cannot be said of Achilles. While his death does not actually occur in the Iliad, it is heavily foreshadowed and a great many characters — including Achilles’ mother, Achilles’ servants, Achilles’ horses, and even Achilles himself — mourn him at the same time that they mourn the death of Patroclus, as they all recognize that Achilles’ own death is bound up with Patroclus’. Beyond the text of the Iliad itself, it’s important to note that there was a hero cult that grew up around the myth of Achilles and that survived into the Roman period.

Perhaps most importantly, the poet’s retelling of the heroism of Achilles survives today just as watching “The Wire” again brings Omar back to life. And this is where Omar and Achilles are connected again — and where Carmody’s thesis is refuted again — as the deeds of both characters will continue to be retold, discussed, debated, and celebrated well into the future. In the past few weeks alone, the President of the United States celebrated the life of Omar Little and the character won the Grantland Smacketology Tournament (which was designed to determine the greatest character on “The Wire” through a popular vote). The universe, I want to argue, continues to take note of heroes like Omar and Achilles, offering them the only sort of permanence available to mortals through the recollection of their deeds by the living.

Over at Grantland yesterday, Brian Phillips went all in on the sports figures as heroes trope, comparing the Big Three in contemporary men’s tennis to some of the warriors in Homer’s Iliad:

One of the great things about this era of the game, though — it goes along with the cruelty we were just talking about — is that it feels almost epic. That’s a word that gets thrown around a lot in sports, but I mean it literally here. Think about, say, The Iliad. It’s a book about combat, about wild golden armies tearing each other to shreds, but here and there in every battle there are heroes whom no one can touch. Hector and Achilles and Ajax and the other superheroes of the B.C.E. basically wade through the enemy, mowing down everything in their path. They’re not even in danger. There’s absolutely no chance that some minor Trojan is going to bring down Achilles; it’s not happening. And after hundreds of pages of this, when they finally start facing each other, you can’t freaking believe how intense the moment is, because you’ve been primed to think they’re invincible.

Isn’t that basically the state of tennis today? Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic have won every major tournament but one in the last seven years. The occasional Jo-Willie Tsonga crack-up aside, those three and Andy Murray are practically guaranteed to meet in every semifinal. They spend the early rounds of the tournament scything down ranks of lesser players, and when they finally play each other, you can’t freaking believe how intense it is. They’re all larger than life. They all seem essentially invincible.

It’s undoubtedly true that Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic are incredibly good at playing tennis. It is hard to imagine that anyone other than these guys will win a major championship. But that’s precisely where the comparison breaks down.

Achilles and Hector — and to a lesser extent Ajax and Diomedes — slash and cut their way through countless opponents without much trouble, but it all leads to the showdown between the two great champions that will have a decisive impact on the Trojan War. And when that showdown happens, it’s a let-down; it doesn’t resemble the epic struggle between Nadal and Djokovic at all.

Hector sees Achilles running toward him across the plain … and he takes off in the other direction. Hector has no chance in a fight against Achilles and he knows it. Indeed, the only reason he stops running is because Athena tricks him into thinking that one of his comrades-in-arms has come to help him; with the odds thus seemingly improved, he decides to stand and fight. But the odds haven’t actually changed at all, the battle ends very quickly, and Achilles in his savagery attempts to desecrate Hector’s corpse for weeks thereafter. There’s no six-hour match between two evenly-matched champions in the Iliad.

And this ties in directly with the part of the comparison that is the least apt:

Neither Achilles nor Hector seem at all invincible. They’re fragile human beings, just like us, and — as such — what is most interesting about them as heroes is that we know they both lose.

The larger-than-life struggle between Achilles and Hector cannot possibly end well for either; as any high school student well knows, both champions will meet their fates in this confrontation with one another. Hector cannot possibly survive his confrontation with the demigod Achilles, irrespective of the courage he displays prior to their meeting. Achilles, on the other hand, will emerge victorious from this battle but there is a prophecy that he cannot survive the war against Troy if he chooses to fight.

In this sense, the warriors of the Iliad are even more compelling than the Big Three because we already know a) how things will end and b) that things will end badly. Watching the drama unfold, watching the choices that each warrior makes in the waning hours of his life, serves as a powerful reminder for all of us that our own choices are desperately important because, like those great warriors, we too are finite beings with finite choices to make.