Hannah Arendt and the Homeric heroe

Abstract

The political philosophy of Hannah Arendt arises out of the assumption that the history of political philosophy, or the "tradition of political philosophy", throughout its lifetime was built against its object, the authentic political life, as created and defined by the ancient Greeks. The Greek polis, and particularly Athens democracy, will be the most important political paradigm for Hannah Arendt. In our paper we want to ask which Greek sources are used by the author to compose her own conception of the classical Greek city. In this search we arrived to Homer, the heroic life and the Trojan battlefield. To Hannah Arendt, the classical Athens intended only to restore and to reproduce the authentically political relationship that existed in the archaic Trojan battlefield.