Despre cavalerismul lumii homerice
On the Chivalrousness of Homeric World

Summary/Abstract: The premise from which this text begins is that of the existence of a Homeric world. Without doubt, Homer is the teacher of Greeks. In Xenophanes’ Symposium, the character Nikoratos states that his father forced him, in order to become the perfect man, to completely learn Homer. One may debate only one issue, namely that according to which Homer’s ethics, the ethics of his epics, is an ethics of chivalrous type. Can one speak of a Homeric chivalrousness? Marrou, for example, inclines towards Homeric chivalrousness. He states that the Homeric heroes were not some brutal big soldiers, that they already are chevaliers, not some primitives as romanticists characterize them. If we were to take into account the exemplary cases, it is difficult to say about Achilles that he would be a chevalier, at least in the medieval sense of the term. Nothing is chivalrous, besides determination, in Achilles. Of course, we may find models of chivalrousness in the rest of Iliad. Anyhow, Achilles is not the one, with all his little exceptions. In Odyssey things change, for here the woman interferes, but in a completely different way than she did in Iliad. What is important to underline is not just the appreciation exclusively aesthetic of Iliad, but its content that transforms it in “a manual of ethics, a treatise on ideal”. The Homeric ethics is by excellence on of honor, of the fact of being the best.

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