I'm in the middle of a prompted essay about Homer's Iliad (Fagles)
The second half of the prompt basically reads "How is war fought, and how (if at all) does it align with aristocratic ethos"
It's the ethos part that has me stumped. I'm aware of what ethos, pathos, and logos are, but we have not talked about persuasion in relation to the text.
When I asked for clarification I got a cookie cutter "I'm not going to do it for you, we covered it in class response".
We covered Time, arete, and kleos and how they were relevant, but not ethos... Am I missing something here? Is there a broader definition of the term that I'm not privy to?
I'm not looking for someone to go through the text and spoon feed me the answer! Just a little clarification.
"Ethos" is being used here as an English word: the overall character of the values being talked about. In the prompt, replace "ethos" with "ideology" if it makes you feel better. It comes to the same thing.
I'm not sure what you mean about "persuasion in relation to the text", since the prompt doesn't mention persuasion.
If you're looking for some background reading, I suggest (as an antidote to the Griffins and Lloyd-Joneses of the world) the Iliad chapter in Peter Rose's 1992 book Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth: it's a Marxist take which emphasises the Iliad's movement away from aristocratic values, for example seeing Agamemnon as representing a claim to position based on wealth and power, not on inherited qualities.