Comparing Women In The Iliad And One Night

In “The Iliad”, an ancient Greek epic by Homer, women are portrayed drastically differently from women in medieval works, like the collected work “The Thousand and One Nights”, from the book “The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Volume B”. The role of women in each of the two works is mostly emphasized through men, or the main male characters in the works. In the ancient Greek work, “The Iliad”, women are viewed as “prizes” and/or a source of honor to men, or in “The Iliad’s” case, warriors. Whereas in “The Thousand and One Nights”, women are presented as more wicked and powerful, a force to be reckoned with, one might say. To compare and point out the wide difference of how women are presented between the aforementioned works, two major points can be looked at. The first point of difference is how the male characters viewed and treated women in each of the two works. The second point be the significance of the actions taken by women (mortal women in particular,

In “The Iliad”, Homer paints a picture of warriors fighting in a massive war for years to save their honor, which in their case, is their women. When a warrior’s woman is taken from them, it is a shame on their names. For example, when Agamemnon takes the priest’s daughter, Chryseis, as a prize in the war between the Greeks and the Trojans, Apollo, a God of Olympus, is angered and sends a plague to the Greek camp, killing their soldiers, as Calchas, the prophet, explains, “It is for his priest, whom Agamemnon dishonored and would not allow to ransom his daughter, that Apollo deals and will deal death from afar.” (page 232, lines 100-102). In this example, Agamemnon views the priest’s daughter as his prize that he should get like any other Greek warrior in the war with the Trojans. His actions, in fact, reflect what many other warriors in that epic would do, protect their “prize”, that