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January 21 - February 6, 2020
“For it came about that, on account of the length of the campaign, the Greeks of that time, and the barbarians as well, lost both what they had at home and what they had acquired by the campaign,” wrote Strabo in the early first century B.C.,
But now, later ages marshaled the Iliad’s heroic battles and heroes’ high words to instruct the nation’s young manhood on the desirability of dying well for their country. The dangerous example of Achilles’ contemptuous defiance of his inept commanding officer was defused by a tired witticism—that shining Achilles had been “sulking in his tent.”
The greatest war story ever told commemorates a war that established no boundaries, won no territory, and furthered no cause.
A few Hittite documents and the Linear B entry, together with a wealth of Mycenaean pottery discovered at Troy itself, are evidence that in the course of their travels—for trade, plunder, or colonization along the Anatolian coast—significant contact had been made between the people of Mycenae and the inhabitants of Troy.
This epic rendering thus focuses less on the launching of fleets or the fall of cities than on the tragedy of the best warrior at Troy, who, as the Iliad makes relentlessly clear, will die in a war in which he finds no meaning.
Thus, drawing on its long tradition, the Iliad used conventional epic events and heroes to challenge the heroic view of war.
‘Either the great-hearted Achaeans shall give me a new prize . . . or else . . . I myself shall take her, / your own prize, or that of Aias, or that of Odysseus.’ ” And in this way Agamemnon unleashes the wrath of Achilles.
What Achilles is challenging is the bedrock assumption of military service—that the individual warrior submit his freedom, his destiny, his very life to a cause in which he may have no personal stake.
Were Agamemnon to submit to Achilles’ injunction and return his prize, he would surrender the last vestige of ceremonial authority he possesses.
His action neatly encapsulates the crisis of command: if the traditional trappings of authority are simply not recognized, then leadership of the gathered host is up for grabs. “
While Briseis is still a silent cipher at this point, her reluctance is quietly suggestive of a tender relationship with her captor.
In heroic society, a hero is cajoled, bullied, or persuaded into line by being reminded of the illustrious deeds his father committed. Deference to the tenet that the fathers of old are greater than the heroes of today is part of the moral cement that holds heroic society together.
It seems, then, that the minor sea goddess Thetis was pursued by the two most powerful gods of the cosmic order—Zeus and Poseidon—and that when her destiny was disclosed to her suitors, their ardor turned to fear and a marriage with a mortal—Peleus—was quickly arranged. Her offspring would not be the most powerful god in the universe, the lord of heaven, but instead the “best of the Achaeans,” a mortal who will die. A cosmic crisis was thus averted, but the price, to Thetis’ eternal sorrow, would be the certain, untimely death of her short-lived son, Achilles.
Honor for death
Achilles will assert his birthright—not as the lord of heaven but as the best of the Achaeans. Stronger than all his father’s generation, the legendary men of old, he will also operate beyond the reach of the conventional moral code of their society.
the authority of Zeus is that against which the combined forces of all the other gods cannot contend—this is what it means to be the lord of heaven.
The trial scene is simply one more example—starker and uncomplicated by any other agency—of Agamemnon’s unfitness to command.
The articulated awareness that the authority above may be inferior to the individual soldier below is the beginning of a dangerous wisdom.
Agamemnon, for whom rank and power, authority and honor are equated with a careful calibration of wealth and prizes, can have no idea of the monstrous scale of real, absolute power, authority, and honor. By taking back a prize of war, he has broken the rules that, had he been wise enough to perceive them, both afforded him his status and were all that kept Achilles’ terrible strength in check.
Thus, from the Iliad ’s first scenes, Homer has unambiguously established that the demoralized Achaean army fights under failed leadership for a questionable cause and wants to go home.
This second invocation, far more expansive than the invocation that announces the Iliad itself, intrudes abruptly into this majestic flow of images. Its purpose is to introduce a long list of 226 verses naming each of the twenty-nine contingents that make up the Achaean army.
Hektor’s Greek name and the fact that he features in no stories except the Iliad have led to the speculation that his character was Homer’s own brilliant invention.
The motif of paired brothers, one shining and one dark (like Abel and Cain), is also a common one in folklore and mythology.20 It is possible that Priam’s traditionally established, sprawling household provided both the inspiration and the latitude to expand the roles of different ones of his many sons.
Hektor is probably not a Homeric invention, then, but a brilliant Homeric development.
Disparagement of the Trojan responsible for the war is to be expected, of course, in a Greek epic performed before mostly Greek audiences.
Interesting that most modern adaptations remove this vehemence. E.g. - in the movie Troy or the Netflix series no one is like Paris you moron this is all your fault.
brother. In the entire epic, no Trojan ever attempts to mitigate or diminish either Paris’ crime or the unfair, intolerable burden it has placed on the Trojan people:
heroism is achieved by striving in the face of unconquerable destiny.
Elsewhere in the Iliad, warriors are said to “weave” speeches and counsels, plots and schemes; by setting certain events in motion, such masculine weaving, then, shapes reality.26 The women of Troy weave only the representations of events.
the Iliad consistently, if sympathetically, portrays Helen as the remorseful agent of her own disastrous decision. “ ‘Did this ever happen?’ ” are her wondering words.
Aphrodite’s bestowal of Helen on Paris is undoubtedly inspired by the story of the first fateful seduction, when Paris came to Sparta—yet another scene belonging to the early phase of the war but restated here for dramatic effect.
The vanquishing warrior may carry the action, but the audience’s emotional attention is diverted to the fallen foe. This personalizing quality ensures that most of the Iliad ’s deaths are perceived—perhaps only fleetingly—to be regrettable.
glory is usurped by sympathy for the human being, possessed of a family and life story, who has been extinguished.
subtly, but with unflagging consistency, the Iliad ensures that the enemy is humanized and that the deaths of enemy Trojans are depicted as lamentable.
fore the price of glory.
The vividly evoked vulnerability of demigods such as Aineias will also have bearing upon the nature, and limitations, of the epic’s most outstanding demigod
This occasional blurring of boundaries between human and divine spheres serves to harden rather than obscure the essential, unassailable differences between god and man.
“never the same is / the breed of gods, who are immortal, and men who walk on the ground.” The gods can play at war, but mortal heroes—healed or wounded, rescued or abandoned—must eventually die.
Nestor’s suggestion that plunder be gained by stripping the dead corpses, rather than by taking ransom, is a potent reminder that the war at Troy is principally about the acquisition of possessions.
So go yourself to the temple of the spoiler Athene, while I go in search of Paris, to call him, if he will listen to anything I tell him. How I wish at this moment the earth might open beneath him. The Olympian let him live, a great sorrow to the Trojans, and high-hearted Priam, and all of his children. If only I could see him gone down to the house of the Death God, then I could say my heart had forgotten its joyless affliction.
Hector is just whining about how he wishes Menelaos killed Paris because Paris is ruining his life. Amazing.
Just as Glaukos’ exchange with Diomedes established that friendship is not confined to allies, so Hektor’s relationship with Paris establishes that hatred is not confined to the enemy.
Perhaps not a warrior by nature—“ ‘I have learned to be valiant’ ”—the husband and father shoulders the burden that has fallen unfairly upon him and fights the war he hates for a cause he disowns out of honor and duty.
Notwithstanding its terrible scenes of wounding and dying on the field of war, the Iliad hints that there are fates—Andromache’s—that may be worse than death.
Hektor will prevail in battle until the time that “ ‘there stirs by the ships the swift-footed son of Peleus,’ ” the father of gods and men had stated, “ ‘ on that day when they shall fight by the sterns of the beached ships / in the narrow place of necessity over fallen Patroklos. / This is the way it is fated to be.’ ”
Now, despite what Achaeans or Trojans might in their innocence believe, the audience knows what Zeus knows: Achilles’ comrade Patroklos will die, Achilles will “stir,” and Hektor will at that time be stopped from fighting.
The theme of tempering a child to make him invulnerable or immortal belongs, as do so many of the themes pertaining to Peleus and his household, to the world of folklore or fairy tale, rather than to heroic epic.
Its components—áchos laós—have been variously interpreted to mean either “grief/pain to the people” or “fear to the fighting men”; the latter has strong parallels in Germanic and Celtic languages.
In the Iliad, the epithets most commonly associated with Achilles among his companions are “shining, godlike” and “swift-footed”; the epithet used by Thetis, however, is minunthádios—“lasting but a short time,” “of persons, short-lived
She can negotiate with Zeus for her son’s honor, but not for his life. For the immortal mother, her son’s fame, his prowess, his legendary feats count for nothing in the face of the fact that she knows that she will endure to see him die; an immortal goddess, she knows her grief will be everlasting.
Emerging from all this is the fact that Achilles, the most effective killer at Troy, is also the most adept in the art of healing.
