The Iliad and Poetics

Sir Roger Scruton-"Why Beauty Matters"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHw4MMEnmpc
The pursuit of beauty forms people and helps us understand our world because we have turned our backs on beauty, we get ugliness.

Remedy to chaos of life and suffering is beauty in art. Rather than subjecting us to our world which is ugly and chaotic, true art, or art as originally understood, lifts us up toward the ideal.

Modern art is satirical and about marketing and money. Anybody can do it...anything can be art...there is no skill required. the goal is to devalue art and diminish it
Art used to make a cult of beauty to help people rise up from the ordinary.

Beauty is no longer the goal, the goal is creative even if it is base and crass.
What does modern art help people with? Not ideal or better just your world as it is.
In our democratic society, you can't judge, there are no standards to beauty. We all know this is false. There are ideals of beauty but it does not diminish other people.

We are a consumer society based on utilitarianism where our appetites reign. Ugliness attacks beauty from one side and utilitarianism attacks from the other.
Before the 1960's beauty was put first in both art and architecture.

Plato said that people are passengers in their world trying to find union with God. Beauty is 1st love.

Book Three The Iliad
1.) List characters who have decision to make in Book Three, and identify the issues they confront.
The gods decide to intervene in the battle. 
Paris decides to offer to fight 1 on 1 with Menelaos
Menelaos accepts the offer 
Hector teases Alexandros (Paris) for not wanting to fight which leads to Paris challenging Menelaos to one on one fight to the death. 

Priam decides to go to the plain to watch the fight before decided that he can watch his son die. 
2.) Which character has to make a decision that seems like it will have the biggest impact on the rest of the Iliad? Remember, we all this the Necessary Question.
Offering the truce and oath to fight one on one, is the necessary question for this chapter that will have lasting consequences. 

3.) List characters who argue for the affirmative position of the Necessary Question, and list the reasons they present to defend their position.
Menelaos and Paris agree to the truce and oath that winner takes all and the war will be over. 

4.) List characters who argue fo the negative, and list reasons they offer for their opinion.
Zeus argues against the truce. Aphrodite is against the truce, and she intervenes to save Paris from Menelaos. She hides Paris in a mist before returning him to his chamber where Helen will visit him. 

Book 4
The gods are having a banquet and discussing the battle before returning to the front lines.
Athena and Hera have Menelaos as their man along with Ares on his side, but Aphrodite is the one who saved Paris from death.
"Clearly, Menelaos ...has won the single combat..." Says Zeus. Now the issue has become one of the broken truce. The two sides took an oath to abide by the rules of the truce. Hera will not abide. She wants to punish all of the Trojans-Priam's sons. Stopping the war now will not quench her rage. Hera (p. 84) asks Zeus to allow a messenger to go and make the Trojans the "...the first to sunder the truce they swore to." To this end, Pandros, a Trojan archer, sends an arrow at Menelaos just grazing his chest which sunders the truce and the fighting commences.