Resounding for Millennia, the Homeric Laughter The Strange Case of Hephaestus

Résumé

After the word as a beginning in monotheistic discourses, and Chaos in the theogony or the genealogy of Gods by Hesiod, laughter was undoubtedly also at the origin of the world. Satan naturally laughed at the nakedness of Adam and Eve! Who certainly laughed, out of bitterness, or to console themselves or give themselves courage, when they found themselves alone on earth, faced with the immense task of populating and colonizing it! Then humans have a laugh from time to time in front of the embarrassment of one of their own, or, in the face of certain vagaries of life, or simply not to lose this strange faculty. Faculty that has had a place in the great civilizations that have succeeded and retained by history. Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome. These last two constituting the immovable base of the West and of the current world practically in its entirety. The great institutions, just like the great philosophies, the arts and the knowledge first emerged in ancient Greece. Where, Homer remains the privileged witness of the high deeds, as well those of the Gods as of the humans. This is how laughter is present there, so powerful, thundering, that it always resounds in the same way as the Iliad and the Odyssey, majestic epics, essential references to many disciplines. At the end of canto I of the Iliad, Zeus and his guests, Gods of course, offered themselves a laugh to their measure, on one of the banquets of Olympus, at the expense of Hephaestus, and his lameness while serving them drinks. Unfortunately, men always laugh at their physical or moral failings, and the day they stop quoting Homer, humanity will have taken a huge leap into the unknown.