About Looking

by John Berger

Book 17 of the Iliad opens with Menelaus standing over the corpse of Patroclus to prevent the Trojans stripping it. Here Homer uses animals as metaphoric references, to convey, with irony or admiration, the excessive or superlative qualities of different moments. Without the example of animals, such moments would have remained indescribable. “Menelaus bestrode his body like a fretful mother cow standing over the first calf she has brought into the world.” A Trojan threatens him, and ironically Menelaus shouts out to Zeus: “Have you ever seen such arrogance? We know the courage of the panther and the lion and the fierce wild-boar, the most high-spirited and self-reliant beast of all, but that, it seems, is nothing to the prowess of these sons of Panthous …!” Menelaus then kills the Trojan who threatened him, and nobody dares approach him. “He was like a mountain lion who believes in his own strength and pounces on the finest heifer in a grazing herd. He breaks her neck with his powerful jaws, and then he tears her to pieces and devours her blood and entrails, while all around him the herdsmen and their dogs create a din but keep their distance — they are heartily scared of him and nothing would induce them to close in.”