Homer and the Problem of Justice: A Seminar on the Iliad

Main reading: 

Homer, Iliad, trans. Caroline Alexander (Ecco, Harper Collins, 2015).

Supplemental reading from:

Homer, Odyssey, trans. Albert Cook (Norton, 1996)

Plato, Hippias Minor, trans. James Leake, in The Roots of Political Philosophy (Cornell, 1987).

Thucydides, Melian Dialogue, adapted from Thomas L. Pangle trans. (rev. 2025).

Introduction

We all have beliefs about justice that shape our view of how to live, of what a good or admirable person is, and of what kind of society we want to bring about. However, these beliefs are not truths each of us personally discovered on our own. Rather, they are shared beliefs, the product of our common upbringing in a democracy: the principles of freedom and equality. When discussing a subject as political and hotly contested as justice, it is easy to get caught up in the loud and crowded online discourse, or be swept along by the roaring tides of enthusiasm and denunciation that drive our angry, partisan times, and let the passing prejudices of our time and place determine what we believe. But do we really want to settle for mere opinions on the things by which we live our lives? When the stakes are so high, don’t we need to be as rigorous as we can, to know we’re right? Without knowledge and clarity about justice, which binds all political societies together and underlies our hopes and our sense of self-worth, there can be no knowledge and clarity about ourselves.

Fortunately, we have extraordinary teachers that can show us the way: a genuine education that searches for the truth about justice and tests the opinions that our first childhood and political education instilled in us, but took for granted without inquiry. From the earliest times, men have pursued justice as the highest end—“let the skies rain down righteousness” (Isaiah 45:8)—a justice that calls forth, that demands, the greatest sacrifices of themselves and their peoples. Yet, perhaps even in their finest moments, these great men have been shaken by doubts about the goodness of justice (Iliad, 9.312-27, 401-9; Job 9:20-24; Eccl. 9:2-6). It is Homer, whose epics helped found Western civilization and literature, who raises the gravest doubts about justice through his hero Achilles, the man passionately dedicated to the life of virtue (11.783-784). In fact, the central theme of Homer’s Iliad is Achilles’ anger at the injustice he suffered, the dishonor of his valor by Agamemnon, and the profound disillusionment and questioning of his life that followed. We will examine in detail Homer’s account of this hero, and of other analyses Homer offers of the problem of justice in the form of rival heroes: crafty Odysseus, who continually tests but never fully trusts the gods or their support for justice; god-seeing Diomedes, who sees the limits of gods, or the difference between god and man; and steadfast Hektor, who never abandons his men and his duties as their general. 

The Iliad is also akin to the Bible—as Herodotus says, Homer (along with Hesiod) defined the gods, their appearances and attributes, for the Greeks. One might think it dubious to search for justice, taken as a universal human longing or principle, by reasoning about a particular religious work, and certainly a pagan and mythic one. But it may be precisely the modern bracketing of religious faith into a private realm—and with it, serious and public reflection on the transcendent and divine, the highest moral demands or ends, and the afterlife and death itself—that poses today the main obstacle to self-knowledge. Homer gives us the freedom and tools to look deeply into and cross-examine our most cherished beliefs exactly by presenting them openly and explicitly, in a raw, if strange and unfamiliar, form. This is above all true of his presentation of the gods. By bringing out the extreme, the infinite, the supernatural, the perfect, the uncompromising, the most alluring and seductive in our hopes and wishes—by making explicit what our hearts most desire—Homer is not hiding, but revealing what we are: only the divine and supernatural reveals the truly human, all-too-human. Homer suggests that our attachment to justice, and so also the problem of justice, cannot come clearly to light without bringing to the surface our faith in beautiful and immortal beings. 

We begin with a more accessible—less “mythic” and more “realistic” or “worldly”—introduction to the classical understanding of the problem of justice by looking at the Melian Dialogue of Thucydides, often cited as the first defense of realpolitik (“the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must”). We conclude with Socrates’ judgment on Achilles and Odysseus in Plato’s Hippias Minor—a judgment that requires us to re-evaluate the worth of justice itself.