Is Unconscious Collective? The Ramayana and The Trojan War

There must be some principle of economics for, I don't know the contemporary euphemism, "offboarding" services. These are companies where, whence you are made redundant part of your termination package might be setting you up with a service that will help you find a new job. 

At some point, some threshold of pricing must be crossed where you are paying someone so much to help you find a new job, that you would be better off just paying the money to yourself and giving yourself a job title. Like "let me get this straight, I'm paying you to teach me how to convince someone to pay me?"

Now, from such services, there is genuine value to be assertained, if not realized. What I think most people do with such generous offers, is go in and apply for jobs just like their last job on their phones because they don't want to think about the trajectory of their lives/careers and what could be, they just want to restore normalcy.

Where that financial threshold clearly applies, is the fake-guru. Like someone you pay $2,500 to for a one day seminar on real estate investing. Where you look around the room and think "there's at least 50 people here...man, this guru could make more money off selling seminar tickets than off real estate investing!" Like fucking exactly! They get rich quick, not you. It's not so much a pyramid scheme as a shake down.

And then I suspect, there's another kind of business, where you pay someone to teach you how to write a novel or a screenplay. Not Margaret Atwood on Masterclass (has that gone bankrupt/defunct btw? I haven't seen an ad for it in ages.) but like, some guy. Some guy maybe with writing credits for Episodes 8 + 13 of Growing Pains season 4, and more recently...nothing. 

Depending on the price, these courses could be helpful or not. It also depends on how delusional the student. It's a calling I suspect that calls completely deluded people often. On the continuum of dubious to grift, screenwriting courses are probably above dubious. 

Youtuber "Film Courage" interviews a lot of people I've never heard of about screenwriting and film making in general. Many subjects have interesting things to say, but there's an archetype of screenwriting instructor that annoys the shit out of me: Adherents to "The Hero's Journey"

This post is about how, one should not adhere to the Hero's Journey, because it probably doesn't exist.

The Ramayana *Translated* Is Not Very Good

Which isn't to say it isn't important, that it isn't worthy of respect, that it isn't significant, influential, artistic, aesthetic etc.

I remember when I was a kid, hearing stories about Archimedes and his Eureka moments, and being blown away that once upon a time, someone who could do maths could be like the most important person in town. It seemed we primary school children, were being taught harder maths than Archimedes did, admittedly we didn't have to come up with measuring displacement. We just had to subtract one number from a total to figure out how much water had come out of a measuring cup.

But once you strip the Ramayana of the poetry of it's original intended language, storywise it is a story most contemporary writers could eclipse. That's okay, unless you elevate it to the status of religious scripture, which people might, I don't know. I'm vaguely aware, mainly through channels that debunk pseudoarcheology that India has it's extremes of Hindu-nationalism that can tout an almost certainly ahistorical "Out of India" hypothesis. Maybe they think the Ramayana is history or something.

Here's my quick and dirty summary of the Ramayana on a pure impressionistic level, as an outsider to the culture it shaped, with all due respect:

I listened to the Ramayana on Audiobook, while at the gym working out. Sometimes at the gym people would get on some noisy piece of equipment near me and drown out the audio playing through my headphones. This was not annoying with the Ramayana, because I never felt like I was missing anything, because the Ramayana feels like it is 80% people asking "Where's Rama?" or more precisely, incessantly proclaiming just how great Rama is.

As such, the Ramayana's main reason for not being great, is that it is almost entirely a contravention of "Show, Don't Tell" and "Informed Attribute".

The premise of the Ramayana, is philosophically interesting, and if it was in a genre of reductio ad absurdum it could probably prove the point that "perfection is unintelligible." Instead, I understand the Ramayana to be in not just the heroic epic genre, but a genre of moral instruction, in which case it's premise utterly fails, though it can impart some moral value claims.

The premise is: "Was there ever a perfect human being?" and the Ramayana is an attempt to say "Yes, Rama"

Is Rama a hero's journey? Well it depends, Campbell's original assertion of the hero's journey was a hero receives a call to action, leaves the ordinary world and journeys into the supernatural world, receives a gift or gifts from deities and then returns home and grants boons." or something sufficiently vague like that, in which case okay. The Ramayana fits the mold, because, you know, it's fiction in which stuff happens and it has a main character.

More formal templates of the Hero's Journey? No, probably not. Rama is born perfect, never does anything wrong (it's all womens' fault) is never in any peril, completes a task irrelevant to his banishment, goes home. 

The kind of neckbeards on Youtube that whine about the CW's Batwoman series not adhering to the Hero's journey would be inconsistent if they didn't also reject the Ramayana, one of the bases for Campbell's monomyth, for not adhering to the hero's journey.

With the premise aside, really two things happen in the Ramayana 1) Rama gets banished to the forest for an inexplicable/arbitrary 14 years, though there may be cultural significance to the number 14 that I do not have the context for. 2) Rama's wife Sita gets abducted, and Rama has to rescue her, in a process that almost arbitrarily takes up the 14 years of his banishment.

For the story about this perfect dude to take place three women and one dude need to cause all the drama - a maidservent, a stepmother, Sita - Rama's faithful and devoted wife and Ravana a demon king. 

The wikipedia page on the Ramayana gives more or less, an accurate synopsis of the 13 hour audiobook I listened to. 

It begins with stuff, but most importanly Rama is born the eldest of 4 brothers, and everyone loves him, especially his father the king. Again cultural context is lost on me, so to a western sensibility the father-son relationship just strikes me as unhealthy and inappropriate. To be clear, the Ramayana is very chaste, this isn't Greek mythology we are talking. 

It's more that Rama's father can't bear to not have Rama by his side, he can't handle not seeing Rama for a month and worries he will die, when a holy man asks to borrow Rama to slay some demons for him. He later does die when he is forced to banish Rama for 14 years to a forrest. Why does he die? Because Rama is just so awesomely great, he dies from a broken heart at having to wait so long for Rama to return taking no consolation from his three wives and two remaining sons. That's how perfect Rama is.

Why is Rama perfect? Largely because he is so devoted to his father, and...honestly he's like strong too, but there isn't much else to Rama's character. 

He meets his wife by stringing a bow that breaks, and he marries Sita and then they go home to be with Rama's father.

Rama's father thinks Rama is so awesome that he wants to have him crowned as his successor before he dies. He's worried that the people don't think Rama is awesome, so he asks his subjects and they all say that Rama is great and good and humble and pious and devoted and great and honest and good and sweet and humble and great...

This goes on for some time, but it's decided, Rama his eldest and best son, will be king. 

Then from nowhere a maidservant, no doubt lowborn and of the working class, persuades the King's second or third wife that if Rama is crowned they'll all be out on their arses. The highborn queen at first is like "No way" because Rama is great and good and humble and pious and devoted and great...

...that goes on for admittedly less time when everyone in the kingdom got a turn to say "where's Rama?" but she changes her mind and the maidservent reminds this queen that the king owes her two boons because she rescued him once and to use those to ask that Rama be banished for 14 years, and that her direct son be crowned in Rama's stead.

Then she goes like full crazy, and cannot be talked out of this by anyone.

The closest we get to Rama having any personality or character in my translated Ramayana is that he says his catchphrase "So be it" when he is informed of the banishing, and once he sees how devoted his wife Sita is to him that she would rather die than stay behind, he agrees to have her come with him to live in the forest. Then he goes back to, for the rest of the Ramayana, someone that everyone keeps informing us is great.

Then it takes seemingly forever for Rama to pack his stuff and leave, with it mostly being various people saying "Rama don't go!" and Rama saying "I have to, my daddy gave his word."

Eventually in the forest with Sita and his brother, a demoness takes a liking to Rama and Rama spurns her saying he is married. She tells her brother the demon king Ravana who likes the look of Sita and decides to abduct her. He persuades his sister to transform herself into a gaudy tasteless golden bedazzled deer, which Sita tells Rama to catch for her. Rama because nothing is ever his fault and he is perfect says "I think it's a demoness playing a trick." but Sita insists he go catch it, and Rama says "So be it."

When he kills the tacky golden deer, the demoness cries out in Rama's name "Sita, I'm dying!" Sita is being safeguarded by Rama's devoted brother, who also being a man is no idiot and reassures Sita "It's probably a demoness playing tricks." but Sita insists he go check on Rama, leaving her unguarded because Sita can't walk or whatever, she's a princess.

Once she is unguarded, Ravana who doesn't give a shit about his dead sister, comes and abducts Sita.

The rest of the epic, for me is almost pure tedium with little interpretive or symbolic value. Some shapeshifting monkeys are involved, I don't know if in the original this provides some comic relief or something, but basically they find Sita who refuses to sleep with her captor, then Sita refuses to be rescued by a monkey who is "pretty much as awesome and great and good and noble and kind..." as Rama, so the monkey attacks the demon city and then goes back to report to Rama.

Meanwhile, just as everyone previously in the story has done little more than talk about how awesome Rama is, everyone but Ravana in Ravana's kingdom pretty much tells Ravana that they are all going to die because Rama is so awesome. Ravana won't listen, so people either betray him for Rama's army or reluctantly go to their deaths vs Rama his brother and the monkey kingdom.

Eventually, and I mean eventually everyone dies, Rama rescues Sita but then demands proof that she staid true to him, she proves it somehow, I forget. They all go back to the kingdom, then honestly I wasn't paying attention, Rama has to banish Sita again, but she is pregnant with twins. They reunite once the twins have been taught to recite the Ramayana, and Rama is so pleased to hear how awesome he is, that Sita reveals herself and then proves her devotion by calling on the God's to kill her if she has been absolutely devoted to Rama. The earth opens up and Sita is taken away into death, and Rama knows for the second time that Sita has remained true. Some celestial beings appear and tell Rama not to be sad because he is an incarnation of Vishnu and Sita is an incarnation of Vishnu's wife so they will be reunited when he dies. 

The end of the Ramayana.

It's not great.

The Trojan War - Morally Ambiguous

Homer's Illiad (which translates to "Troy") begins in the 9th year of the Trojan war, Apollo fires plague arrows into the Greek camp. Someone figures out that if the Greek commander in chief Agamemnon releases one of his Trojan captives the plague will end. Achilles goes to tell him to release the prisoner, but Agamemnon turns all anti-vax, and demands one of Achilles slaves as compensation for having to give up a prisoner presumably because he has rights.

Achilles decides he's done with the stupid war and refuses to fight. The reason for the war gets revealed that Paris a son of Troy seduced and/or abducted Helen the most beautiful woman in the world, enacting a clause among Greek Royalty that said everyone had to avenge anyone who stole Helen for themselves. A pact devised by Odysseus to resolve the stalemate over who would get to marry Helen and how would they be safe from all the spurned suitors.

Shenanigans ensue and eventually Agamemnon eats crow and sends Odysseus and Achilles best friend to plead with Achilles to fight again. Achilles refuses, as he is not bound by the original pact, he was too young to contend for Helen when the pact was made. Achilles' best friend Patrocles persuades Achilles to let him wear Achilles armour and fight the Trojans in his stead. 

The ruse works and the Greeks make gains on the Trojan army, until Hector kills Patrocles. This pisses Achilles off bigtime and he fucking loses his shit. Hephaestus (Vulcan) makes Achilles new armour overnight, then Achilles goes out kills fucking everyone including Hector, he's in such a rage that instead of honoring Hector and releasing Hector's body to the Trojans for proper burial rights, he instead drags Hector's body behind his chariot for two days.

Patrocles comes to Achilles as a ghost and asks for his own proper burial so his shade can be released into the afterlife, and to have his bones and Achilles put in the same urn so they can meet again in the afterlife. 

Some Trojans sneak out with treasure to try and recover Hector's body, they meet Achilles who feels ashamed and gives the Hectors body, the Illiad ends with Hector's funeral. 

The Trojan war ends after Paris kills Achilles with an arrow in the heel, some guy uses Hercules arrows to kill Paris, Helen loses all loyalty to Troy, Odysseus fetches Achilles suspiciously identical son Neoplotnus ("New Warrior") to fight in Achilles place. Odysseus comes up with the Trojan horse idea, the plot works even though Cassandra is like "No don't bring it in the city the Greeks will kill us all!" but nobody listens to Cassandra. 

They bring the horse into the city, Helen almost foils the plot but doesn't, the Greeks take the walls, open the gates, signal the Greek ships to reland and attack and Neoplotinus goes full blood frenzy Genghis Kahn Anglo-Saxon rape and pillage mode.

Nobody comes out looking good.

End of the Trojan War.

Now, Homer's Illiad opens in the 9th year of the war, and my summary probably excludes some moral ambiguity that is worth considering - for example where Rama stoically accepts his exile because his father's honour trumps the interests of Rama, Rama's brothers, his wife and the subjects of the kingdom, both Odysseus who suggested the pact to defend Helen's marriage, and Achilles who was not part of the pact attempt to dodge the draft so to speak, Odysseus by pretending to be insane and Achilles is disguised as a woman (which leads to the unplanned birth of Neoptolemus) and Odysseus uses his cunning to expose the ruse and enlist Achilles. 

Furthermore, the dude who exposed Odysseus' draft dodging madness, Odysseus frames as a traitor and is stoned to death in an act of petty revenge.

Collective Unconscious or Common Ancestry?

"But Mr. Greene of course there will be similarities of words and punctuation...we both write in English." ~ Sir Francis Bacon to Robert Greene, Upstart Crow.

First up I should disclose, I am unaware of any formal theory that the Ramayana and the Illiad are in any way related. Similarities are superficial, differences quite meaningful. Furthermore, I'm limited by my availability heuristic to think of examples beyond the purview of a proto-Indo-European oral tradition - for example a Mexica or Maya legend about an abducted princess resulting in a war, even a Japanese one.

The idea of a "collective unconscious" is this idea based on the works of Chung and refined by well...people...most notably Myers-Briggs and Joseph Campbell, that there's just kind of imagery in our subconscious. To be honest, I couldn't begin to pretend to know what metaphysics is actually promoted by the idea of a collective unconscious. 

What I would guess, is the idea that there is certain resonant imagery within our phenotype, our DNA or something. What this would suggest, is that if I put a bunch of human embryos on a space ship and sent them to Titan a possibly habitable moon of Jupiter, where they were birthed into some kind of biome, raised by robots and fed synthetic food that met their nutritional needs and given art supplies, the collective unconscious would predict this isolated, artificial culture in an entirely different environment would produce imagery like "The world tree" or "tree of life" they would tell stories about serpents, despite never seeing them, and tell tales about finding their father in the belly of a whale or something. But I'm not sure, because of the extended phenotype. For example, hermit crabs have something in their genes that have them adopt shells as they outgrow shells.

Obviously there's some collective unconscious insofar as we use unconscious heuristics to make sense of the world - we unconsciously register the smell of smoke, feces and carrion as bad. We unconsciously associate horizontal symmetry with living animals. If people take a dose of DMT and hallucinate crazy shit that has the appearance of matter, as opposed to echolocation or heatsignitures, I assume that our visual cortex is bugging out to create images divorced from our retinas but not our experience. I had one trip down the k-hole, and it was suffice to say fucking nonsense and it took so long to come down the short trip was not worth the 2 hours of boredom before the hospital would discharge me. But even kaleidoscopic visions of tropical beaches must be unconscious imagery brought forth, but then, I'd expect more ancient egyption art involving hammocks and cocktails with little umbrellas in them if it were to substantiate a collective unconscious.

It's this idea that there is this deeper meaning intrinsic to us as humans, something we all share.

There's two alternative explanations to the similarities between Yggdrasil the Norse World Tree and other mythological trees - is because trees are pretty much everywhere humans have been. Same with similarities between snakes in mythology - Leviathan, Jormangandr and Quetzalcotl for example, can be explained by the presence of snakes where these myths come up, just as a collective unconscious fails to explain why European dragons are apex predators and Asian dragons benevolent deities, or why Sub-Saharan Africa, Polynesia and India largely have no prominent dragon traditions.

Who Do You Think You Are? Language Edition: By Background: Map created from DEMIS Mapserver, which are public domain. Koba-chanDrawings: पाटलिपुत्र (talk) - This file has been extracted from another file, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=97177975

Then there is, when it comes down to the particulars - common ancestry, which is to say, at one point these "monomyths" were actually just a mono-myth. The big one being the "Chaoskampf" a proto-indo-european myth about skyfather, a storm god, battling a giant snake. From which we get Zeus slaying Typhon, Heracles son of Zeus slaying Hydra, Thor taking down Jormangandr, Sigard and Fafnir, Beowulf and dragon, Susanoo and Orochi etc. 

Which is to say, the serpent slaying myth is not one that is conceived of or created independently.

Consider in 1,000 years time some post ice-age where some future archaeologist doesn't understand the phrase "based on the DC comics characters created by Bob Kane" and proposes a theory that Batman (1989), Batman Forever by Joel Schumacher, Batman Begins by Christopher Nolan and The Batman by some guy all suppose that deep inside all human beings is the image of a man in a bat costume that fights crime.

No. The simpler explanation is that all these different realizations of Batman, with different actors, different villains, different effects and different costumes and vehicles, are just remakes of the same source material. (For another example, consider all the Bond rip-offs that have been churned out by US directors and Actors chafing at the fact that they can't direct Bond movies because they aren't British - Indiana Jones (ToD), Mission Impossible, Jason Bourne, XXX, Fast and Furious (Eventually), True Lies, John Wick...which leads into derivatives of a derivation - Nobody and Beekeeper and then parodies of Bond - Get Smart, Kingsman etc.)

The Ramayana is not a story about a hero or storm god slaying a serpent, nor is the Illiad, but the stories are similar to eachother - they are both attributed to a poet, both feature a hero representing an ideal (Rama, Achilles) and a loyal companion (Lakmaya, Patrocles) and another hero that relies more on trickery (the monkey king, Odysseus). Both feature an obligation to be far from home, and both are driven by the abduction of a woman. 

Apart from these broad strokes though, they are oil and water. But they are possibly the same story. Their authorship is contemporaneous, but both describe events in the past, the Trojan war in particular appears to be somewhat of an oral tradition in which the attested Iron Age poet manages to describe accurately Bronze age lifestyle 500 years after events. Furthermore, some batshit crazy amateur eccentric millionaire archeologist actually found Troy in modern day Turkey.

Aboriginal culture in Australia is at least 35,000 years old and as such, likely has the oldest myths in the world. None of these myths appear like Pangaea-pre-continental drift old. As far as I'm aware, though there's serpents in Northern Australia mythology like the Rainbow serpent, there's nothing resembling the Chaoskampf, there's no Chthonic heroes that venture into the underworld and come across a dog that guards the entrance (this is a myth found in Native American populations and is presumably pre-columbian and European traditions like Cerberus "Spot" though similarities could be due to the presence of dogs, and perhaps because dogs aggressively defended corpses they were eating.) 

But I would bet that the Ramayana and Illiad have common features because they were the same story that migrated outwards - The Greeks situated that story on Troy, the Indians situated it somewhere in India, though it does involve some ocean crossing too. Again the Aboriginal example indicates that Oral traditions can preserve phenomena like a Volcano eruption for periods greater than 10,000. But they tend not to preserve info like migrating to continents like Australia and the Americas. My guess is what gets preserved is a matter of relevance.

(The other most famous Indian epic, the Mahabharatam (which contains the Bhagavad Gita, the only part I've read) was mostly composed after Alexander the Great invaded in 300BCE, and though it is 10 times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined, the simplest explanation for similarities is just cultural transmission. Particularly if those similarities involve a war or conquest, and there was a story told by a group that came to war and conquer. )

The Greeks focused on concepts like fate and glory, and told a story where it is quite hard to tell who the good guys are, even the pantheon of gods are divided with Athena and Poseidon helping out the Greeks, Apollo and Aphrodite helping out the Trojans.

The Ramayana is a straight up morality play. It's chaste, pushes if anything filial piety, and after consuming both, pretty much any of the characters from the Illiad I would be fascinated to sit next to at a dinner party, be it Helen, Cassandra, Hector, Paris, Agamemnon, Achilles, Neoptolumus, Odysseus etc. like even the bit players who sat on an island with a bad ankle for 9 years, or objected once to the whole project come across as genuinely fascinating.

Were I to find myself seated next to Rama, I would be tempted to look at my phone after he told me "I love my father." and of course, I anticipate his brother and wife saying things like "Where's Rama?"

I would see myself incredulously asking "So you were born perfect, then got heavenly weapons, then you didn't know where your wife was, then you found her, then you used your heavenly weapons to destroy the captors, then you and your wife and your brother went home?"

Admittedly, there could be some not-on-the-nose moralistic genuine drama in the Ramayana somewhere and I just tuned out. Maybe when Rama has to kill someone to end the monkey king's exile, and the monkey king gets drunk instead of immediately helping Rama find his wife.

If you accept the premise, that Rama was the perfect human being, what can we squeeze out of the Ramayana? I think much of it, while nowhere near as graphically heinous as what the Greeks and Trojans did, is actually quite bad in an ethical sense because the Trojan war doesn't claim Achilles is perfect, but that he is great and glorious. The Illiad features numerous disputes, many characters do not like Achilles, resent him, argue with him, including many of the gods. 

Not so with Rama, even Rama's enemies tend to prefer him in character to their own boss Ravana. The Ramayana says in terms of what I got out of its message - respect the elites and don't mess with the natural order. Obey your father. Women mind their own business, and exist either in some kind of cloistered situation or accompanied at all times by a husband or male relative, and honour/reputation trumps welfare.

While I can easily imagine Greek patriots taking a tribal attitude to the Illiad and thinking Greeks good, Trojans bad, the Romans apparantly identified more with Troy than the Greeks and had the opposite attitude reflected in Virgil's Aenid. Obviously Greco-Roman culture is the biggest definer of what we now call "The West" even though both Alexander's empire and the Roman empire at times included Asia and North Africa. But the moral ambiguity is built in.

Furthermore, for example, Cassandra who can prophecy accurately but is cursed by Apollo to never be believed, is a timeless idea that reflects contemporary attitudes toward elites, particularly climate scientists and medical experts, but even corporate whistleblowers. There's an analogue in the Ramayana which is Ravana relative to literally fucking everybody, and to me, it is less useful to depict a villain who doesn't listen to anybody, than to preserve and spread the idea that people don't listen to what has become in the west "Cassandras" people who accurately forecast the doom of some venture.

If Odysseus is an analogue to the Monkey King, again I prefer the teachings of the character of Odysseus, who is questionable in morality, but not tactically - the Monkey King's trickery involves largely changing size, Odysseus actually schemes and plots and while claiming divine lineage is very much a mortal man.

All of which is to say, if there's a collective unconscious, pertaining to the Ramayana and the Iliad, so what? The similarities are not where the profundity lies. It's in the differences. Reconsidering, perhaps for the Greeks, Achilles was also an answer to the question "Was there ever a perfect human being?" alas, what makes the Iliad superior for moral instruction, is that Achilles is not presented ever as morally perfect, nor for having any positive personal traits besides valour/courage, though particularly after Patrocles death he is really driven by blind rage, and is even criticised for his desecration of Hector's body. 

This is exactly what I mean. The moral of the Iliad, if you presented it to a group of kids can't even be said to be "Beware Greeks bearing gifts" because that is a post Iliad event. Maybe it's "Beware Greeks" or maybe it is like most Greek mythology "avoid the gods wherever possible" but really it is a very human, very complicated mess of a story. By contrast, with the Ramayana it's moral instruction is very clear because it is in the genre of an epic morality tale, it is easy to imagine what teacher would say in summation to a group of rapt children: "Know your fucking place, especially women."

Conclusion

Surprise surprise: "Westerner prefers Western cultural artefact." yeah, but that isn't the conclusion, nor the point of this article. The point is if you are a Campbellite-Jungian advocate of the collective unconscious, know that that is a tedious thing to be. 

For one thing, it posits some metaphysical super-structure that isn't necessary to explain the phenomena of cultures telling similar stories. There are two simpler explanations - 1) the stories are similar responses to similar environments. or 2) the stories are derivations from the same source.

The collective unconscious does not predict Aboriginal mythology, folk lore and oral traditions. It especially doesn't predict how different Aboriginal stories are from each other. 

It is one of those tedious beliefs that require active ignorance of the contradictory evidence to maintain, it is almost as annoying as pseudoarcheology, if not another form of it.

More to the point, the value of stories does not lie in their shared symbolism or even plot points. The value lies in what stories can tell us about ourselves. The technology of storytelling is that it is flexible.

I would never advocate to read one and not the other, unless it was a genuine dilemma - like you could only buy one paperback to take on the next train trip, or you only had one audible credit for the month. But if you have time to read both, read both. That's what I did, and though the translation of the Ramayana produced a bad, tedious and boring story that I listened to before Troy; I didn't waste my life listening to it. It remained informative, second-order interesting, in it's inability to functionally describe an example of a human being, I think it stands as a lesson that perfection is subjective, it is a very old example of a story preserved at failing it's very premise. Rama is perfect but one can never find out why he is perfect.

Similarly, without the context of living in the Bronze or Iron age, it's hard to actually see how the Iliad glorifies war at all, beyond the fact that if you were in the Trojan war, you got into a popular epic. But it sounds by all accounts like it was a truly awful ordeal, a good time had by none. Prior to revisiting Troy, I was kind of left with the impression that The Great War aka World War I, and particularly the book "All Quiet on the Western Front" ended the romanticisation of war. 

At the same gym where I listened to the Ramayana and Stephen Fry's Troy, I spent Anzac day, where on the monitor set to the ABC they were playing Peter Jackson's documentary that collected testimony of Anzacs and archival footage of WWI. What I learned was the post war reality of the soldiers - I had thought romanticizing war had remained intact such that veterans didn't come home to jeering and spitting and booing until Vietnam in the 60s and 70s, but the accounts of the WWI veterans painted a very similar picture - nobody wanted to know them, talk to them and especially not give them jobs when they got home. 

The Ramayana and the Trojan War are not the same story.