On The Justice Views In Iliad And Their Impacts

The Homeric Iliad is a polemic epic. Although it is the description of a war, it turns out to bea landmark for the beginning of western history. In the book we can see a universal model of theworld, human and nature and a model of the structure of the physical world. And as an epic, itincludes the first record of the Greeks’ polis, of their gods, kings and heroes. What’s more, it alsoexpresses the values of the ancient Greeks.The aim of the diesis is to explore the basic meanings of justice views in the Homeric Iliadand their influences on the later thinkers of ancient Greece. The introduction focuses on thetheoretical and realistic significance of the justice views in epic. From God’s perspective, Godsin epic actually provide a clear, magnetic ideal and a natural and social order with regularities,which must be kept to at any time by men. From the perspective of men, facing the destiny, menshould be initiative and constantly striving to strengthen themselves instead of having a passivefatalistic attitude. And then this section summarizes the present domestic and overseas studies onthe justice views in Iliad and gives the main points, research methods and originality in thisthesis.The principal part of the whole includes chapter2, chapter3and chapter4. Chapter2ismainly about how justice begins. First，it explains the origin of good and evil, and the necessityof the eternal struggle between virtue and vice in the gods’ world. It is the mutual confrontationand support relations between justice and injustice that form the tension of them. At the sametime, it shows the derivation and the basic definition of the word "justice". Chapter3analyzesemphatically the internal meanings of justice. From the pyramid structure of the gods’ andhuman beings’ world, from the shield of Achilles and by analyzing the behaviors of the specificfigures, justice is embodied in a lot of meanings, such as order, reward, unequal proportion,punishment and so on. Chapter4shows that the justice views and a model of the universe in thebook deeply affect and develop the perception of nature and justice in the great thinkers ofancient Greece, taking Solon, Pythagoras，Heraclitus, Democritus, Protagoras, Plato and Aristotle for example.In the conclusion, the thesis centers about whose justice and what kind of justice. It sums up the enlightenments for us from the justice views in Iliad. These basic justice views provide the inspirations for the individuals and the collective particularly. In brief, these meanings still relate to people in our modern society. The principles of justice not only come from practice but also guide practice, so we need to consider which principle can be adopted according to the actual conditions.