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July 17 - July 20, 2020
This book is not about many of the things that have occupied this scholarship, although inevitably it will touch on the same themes. This book is not an examination of the transmission of the Homeric text or of what Homer has meant to every passing age. It is not an analysis of the linguistic background of the epic, and it is not about the oral tradition behind the poem; it is not about formulaic expressions or whether “Homer” should refer to an individual or a tradition. It is not about Bronze Age Greece nor the historicity of the Trojan War. This book is about what the Iliad is about; this
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The translation used throughout this book, with one exception, is that of Richmond Lattimore, whose landmark Iliad was first published in 1951 by the University of Chicago Press. It was Lattimore’s translation that introduced me to the Iliad at the age of fourteen and inspired me to learn Greek, and my appreciation of its plain diction but epic gravitas and tone has only increased over the years. I am very grateful to the University of Chicago Press for permission to quote from this work.
The greatest war story ever told commemorates a war that established no boundaries, won no territory, and furthered no cause. The war is cautiously dated to around 1250 B.C. Its story was memorialized by the Iliad, an epic poem attributed to Homer and composed some five centuries later, around 750-700 B.C. Homer’s Iliad is the only reason that this inconclusive campaign is now recalled.
Instead the 15,693 lines of Homer’s Iliad describe the occurrences of a roughly two-week period in the tenth and final year of what had become a stalemated siege of Troy. Thus the dramatic events that define the Iliad are the denouncement by the great Achaean warrior Achilles of his commander in chief as a mercenary, unprincipled coward; the withdrawal of Achilles from the war; and the declaration by Achilles that no war or prize of war is worth the value of his life. Homer’s Iliad concludes not with a martial triumph but with Achilles’ heartbroken acceptance that he will in fact lose his life
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Helen’s name, for example, can be traced to the Indo-European *Swelénā, from the root *swel—“sun,” “solar glare,” “burn,” “grill.” Her prototype was a Daughter of the Sun, the abduction of the Sun Maiden being a recurrent motif in old Indo-European myth.
The epic’s journey can be traced in the history of two extinct peoples: the Bronze Age Greeks—known to Homer as “Achaeans” and to modern historians as Mycenaeans, after their principal settlement—and the Trojans, a Hittite-related people of western Anatolia.
a warrior ever justified in challenging his commander? Must he sacrifice his life for someone else’s cause? How is a catastrophic war ever allowed to start— and why, if all parties wish it over, can it not be ended? Giving his life for his country, does a man betray his family? Do the gods countenance war’s slaughter? Is
a warrior’s death compensated by his glory? These are the questions that pervade the Iliad. These are also the questions that pervade actual war. And in life, as in epic, no one has answered them better than Homer.
The anger of Achilles is the engine that drives the epic. How that wrath is aroused, however, the fact that Achilles’ protagonist is Agamemnon as opposed to any of his other companions, is of singular importance.
What interests Homer are issues of authority and leadership on the one hand and duty and individual destiny on the other, issues brought swiftly to the fore by Achilles himself:
“I for my part did not come here for the sake of the Trojan spearmen to fight against them, since to me they have done nothing. Never yet have they driven away my cattle or my horses, never in Phthia where the soil is rich and men grow great did they spoil my harvest, since indeed there is much that lies between us, the shadowy mountains and the echoing sea; but for your sake, o great shamelessness, we followed, to do you favour.”
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. In modern times, the speech finds its counterpart in Muhammad Ali’s famous refusal to fight in Vietnam:
I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. . . . No Viet Cong ever called me nigger. . . . I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder, kill and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slavemasters over dark people.
“. . . but for your sake, o great shamelessness, we followed, to do you favour, you with the dog’s eyes, to win your honour and Menelaos’ from the Trojans. You forget all this or else you care nothing. And now my prize you threaten in person to strip from me, for whom I laboured much, the gift of the sons of the Achaeans. Never, when the Achaeans sack some well-founded citadel of the Trojans, do I have a prize that is equal to your prize. Always the greatest part of the painful fighting is the work of my hands; but when the time comes to distribute the booty yours is the greater reward, and I
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“ ‘Run away by all means’ ” is Agamemnon’s retort, and recklessly he repeats, and now confirms, his earlier threat to strip Achilles of his prize, a captive woman named Briseis:
“. . . that you may learn well how much greater I am than you, and another man may shrink back from likening himself to me and contending against me.”
Achilles’ instinct is to draw his sword and kill the king; he is checked, hand on hilt, by the sudden intervention of the goddess Athene, visible to Achilles alone, who offers sympathetic words but counsels him to stay his hand. Whether Athene’s appearance is taken literally or metaphorically—the sober second thought sent by the goddess known for wisdom—Achilles is receptive and sheathes his sword.
Nestor is the spokesman for the status quo, for the tradition-hallowed belief that institutional power equates with unquestioned authority.
Among the many idiosyncratic features of Achilles’ language are his unique words, his use of striking similes, of violent words and invective, and his “tendency to invoke distant places”:
“I for my part did not come here for the sake of the Trojan spearmen to fight against them, since to me they have done nothing. Never yet have they driven away my cattle or my horses, never in Phthia where the soil is rich and men grow great did they spoil my harvest, since indeed there is much that lies between us, the shadowy mountains and the echoing sea.”
“Tomorrow, when I have sacrificed to Zeus and to all gods, and loaded well my ships, and rowed out on to the salt water, you will see, if you have a mind to it and if it concerns you, my ships in the dawn at sea on the Hellespont where the fish swarm and my men manning them with good will to row. If the glorious shaker of the earth should grant us a favouring passage on the third day thereafter we might raise generous Phthia.”
John Keegan offers a summation that is true of all: Men whom the trenches cast into intimacy entered into bonds of mutual dependency and sacrifice of self stronger than any of the friendships made in peace and better times. That is the ultimate mystery of the First World War. If we could understand its loves, as well as its hates, we would be nearer understanding the mystery of human life.35
“Courage is a moral quality,” wrote Lord Moran in 1945, in his classic examination of the same, drawing upon his memory of behavior he had witnessed—and medically treated—in the trenches of an earlier war; “it is not a chance gift of nature like an aptitude for games. It is a cold choice between two alternatives.”
the conclusion of the Iliad makes clear that Achilles will die in a war that holds no meaning for him whatsoever.
