Representación grafica de cada una de las preguntas Grafica 1

Achilles:

Through heroic death, human excellence ‘no longer has to be measured indefinitely against others and keep proving itself in confrontation; it is realised at one stroke and forever’. The heroic youthful death in battle is in a sense a pre-empting of the decrepi-tude of old age: “The way to escape old age is by dying in the flower of one’s youth, at the acme of one’s virile strength. Through death the hero is now fixed forever in the brilliance of an unchanging youth. Conversely, when the old die in battle they become ugly, even obscene.

Thus Priam in Homer’s Iliad:

It looks well enough for a young man killed in battle to lie there with his wounds upon him: death can find nothing to expose in him that is not beautiful. But when an old man is killed and dogs defile his grey head, his grey beard and his privy parts, we plum the depths of human degradation.”

After Hector has been killed by Achilles, other warriors gathered round looking at the dead body, admiring its beauty – and mutilating it: ‘They gazed in wonder at the size and marvellous good looks of Hector. And not a man of all who had collected there left him without a wound’. Then Achilles subjected the body to ‘shameful outrage’, dragging it in the dust. Before combat Hector had tried to make a bargain with Achil-les, suggesting they agree that the victor refrain from this defilement of the other’s

corpse. Achilles had refused. The mutilation and defilement of the body was an at-tempt to rob the corpse of it beauty in death.

Bellerophom:

His mother, Eurymede, is a princess, and his father is King Glausus, but he is also re-puted to be the son of Poseidon. We hear nothing of his childhood, but on reaching manhood he travels to his future kingdom, overcomes a monster, marries the king’s daughter and becomes king. We hear nothing of his reign, but later he becomes hated by the Gods, and goes into exile. His fate is obscure, though it includes an attempted ascent to the sky. His children do not succeed him, his burial place is unknown, but he was worshipped at Corinth.

Hermes:

Of all the Ouranic Gods Hermes was closest to the Chthonic. In myth he wings his way through the skies as messenger of the heavenly court, but his cult was chthonic, his preferred symbol of phallus, and Hermes Psychopompos he was the God who led the dead to the underworld. Hermes preserved the primitive characteristics of the Trickster, as in the famous prank where he stole the cattle of the sun from Apollo. It is from Hermes Psychopompos, who had wings on his legs symbolising his position as messenger of the Gods, that the medieval tradition of portraying the Devil with leg wings arose. How much Christians and other have been fooled, but as says the prov-erb, “You can fool some people some time, but you cannot fool people all the time.”

Jason:

His mother, name uncertain, is a princess, and his father is King Aeson. His uncle Pe-lias tries to kill him at birth, but he is spirited away, and brought up elsewhere by Chi-ron. We hear nothing of his childhood, but on reaching manhood he makes a journey, in which he wins the Golden Fleece, marries a princess, kills his uncle, and becomes king. He is driven from the throne and city. His death is obscure, and his children do not succeed him. His burial place is unknown, but he has several shrines.

Odyssey and Circe:

Book XII of Homer’s Odyssey recounts the famous story, of Odysseus’ encounter with the seductive song of the Sirens. Circe warns him beforehand of the danger: ‘The thrilling song of the Sirens will steal his life away.’ They charm and seduce men irre-sistibly. All who succumb never return home but die right there. The Sirens are sur-rounded by the corpses of such men – ‘high banks of mouldering skeletons which flutter with the rags of skin rotting upon the bones’. The Sirens are said to sing from within a flowering meadow (meadow or leimon, was a word used to designate female genitalia). So, even before Odysseus actually encounters the Sirens, a connection is made between sexual desire and death, and the fatally seductive object is feminine.

Moreover the desire is overwhelming – literally irresistible. Circe tells Odysseus that to survive the encounter his companions must stop their ears with wax, to be deaf to the Sirens’ charm. Circe then says to Odysseus:

“For your own part, perhaps you wish to hear their singing? Then have yourself lashed hand and foot into your ship against the housing of the mast, with other bights of rope secured to the mast itself. Ensure also that if you order or implore your men to cast you loose, their sole response shall be to find you tighter with cord upon cord.

(Homer, Odyssey).”

This is done. When the encounter takes place we learn something more about why the Sirens are so seductive. They implore Odysseus to come to them; they treat him as a hero and promise him on his way the possessor of divine knowledge: “we know all things that shall be hereafter upon the fecund earth.” The Sirens celebrate in his presence that very Odysseus whom the song of the Iliad immortalises: ‘the virile male warrior’; in their song Odysseus sees himself not as he is, ‘struggling precariously amid the dangers of the world, unsure of the future, but as already immortalised in legend’. That is a crucial aspect of what is so seductive about the encounter. As pre-dicted, Odysseus finds the Sirens irresistible and commands his men to free him. They refuse, binding him tighter.

The episode challenges interpretation even as it demands it; and in a way which re-minds us that it originates from a culture which in certain respects is as strange as in other respects it is antecedent and familiar. And, if it is appropriate to talk of the un-conscious in relation to this episode, it also reminds us that the unun-conscious is subject to cultural difference and is stranger and more alien than we would like to believe.

What is being seduced is mortal, sexual desire for beauty, strangeness and otherness, and mortal sexual desire for a legendary immortality. But those mouldering remains tell us that this overwhelming desire leads not to an exalted, immortalising death of the kind which the Greek most feared: without funeral, without tomb, and rotting anonymously on the shore, indistinguishable from the other corpses in the pile. The lure of death, to be free of finitude, contingency, danger, to be immortalised in legend is confounded by the anonymity of actual death. In a sense, then, the act of self-overcoming involves a refusal not of mortality but of immortality.

Sigurd or Siegfried:

His mother, Sieglinde, is a princess, and his father King Siegmund who is her brother, and whom she visits in the guise of another woman. On reaching manhood he kills a dragon, marries a princess, and becomes a ruler. For a time he prospers, but later there is a plot against him and he is killed.