Read an Excerpt
From the Introduction
The Iliad stands at the beginning of one strand of our literary heritage, so remote in time that nothing about its origins can be determined with confidence. Happily for us, it is also a story that we can read as we would any other, a construction in the imagination that we can enter and find ourselves listening to arguments among men and women and gods, watching actions unfold, and feasting our eyes and spirits on vivid depictions of a world in which, amid much that is strange, we are—in the most important ways—at home. The work of scholars is indispensable to our reading in a thousand ways, large and small, but all their contributions are secondary and instrumental to the use of our own powers to understand and appreciate a narrative poem. Nevertheless, if some of the questions we might hope scholars had answered can be cleared away first, so much the better.
One fixed point that is generally accepted is the year 700 B.C. The Greek alphabet, adapted and improved from the Phoenician, came into use in the eighth century, and it is thought that the Iliad and Odyssey had been written down by the century’s end. The two poems depict events, respectively, in the last stages and the aftermath of the Trojan war, which ancient tradition held had taken place around a time we would call 1200 BC, and modern investigations have identified Troy with a site uncovered in present-day Turkey, and destroyed more than once, one of those destructions occurring more or less when the ancients believed Troy fell. That would seem to give us a span of five hundred years within which a poet named Homer lived and brought the two works into being as oral compositions. But scholarship adores a vacuum—because there is then no limit to its inventiveness—and two possibilities that have been advanced are that the poems originated some six to eight hundred years before the events they depict, and that Homer never existed. Once one accepts that the Homeric compositions were preserved for any length of time by an oral tradition, it becomes thinkable that they never had a unitary author but simply came to be by accretion, and the earliest layers of sediment within them need not have had anything to do with Troy or Achilles or anything else that got incorporated along the way. But while Homer’s epics show many minor traces of inconsistency, each is remarkable for the unity of its conception, a fact recognized by Aristotle in his Poetics, and it is a reasonable presumption that unity of composition results from unity of authorship. That view is my own conviction as a reader, and I am pleased to have found it ratified by an expert who knows the whole range of the scholarly literature. Richard Janko, writing in a 1990 preface, reports, “I first began to investigate the diction of the Homeric poems in order to prove that they result from multiple authorship, but reached the opposite conclusion: that the Iliad and Odyssey were taken down by dictation, much as we have them, from the lips of a single eighth-century singer.” (The Iliad: a Commentary, Vol. IV, Cambridge U.P., 1992, p. xi)
That singer—a poet who chanted his verses in public performances—had his own ideas about what made a story worth telling. The Iliad takes place in the ninth year of the Greek siege of Troy, and ends before the war does. The Trojan war was a vast upheaval affecting inhabitants of two continents, one that precisely fit the pattern that a recent century came to call a “world war.” An allied expeditionary force crossed a sea to confront an enemy defending itself with the aid of its own large contingent of allies, disrupting the lives of everyone in the known civilized world for several years. Yet Homer focuses on one warrior who loses his temper at a late stage of the war and he does not carry his story to the war’s end. The Trojan prince Paris (also called Alexander) caused the war by running off with the wife of the Spartan king Menelaus, whose brother Agamemnon, the ruler of a wide region, organized and led the invasion of Troy. But Homer’s story begins with the unleashing of the wrath of one great warrior, Achilles, and proceeds no further after that wrath has run its course. The word “rage” has become popular as a translation of the topic of the poem, and its vivid implication of magnitude and intensity in anger make it not a bad choice, but the word “wrath” has a longer pedigree for this poem for good reasons, and I use it here. To call a being wrathful tells us at once that we are dealing with someone of exceptional power and consequence, one who is not merely a victim of rage but is in control of it, at least barely. Homer’s story is all about war, but he tells us to pay greater attention to wrath. The unity of the poem lies in the series of actions that structure it, and also by the central topic to which it returns repeatedly at critical points. Homer gave the definitive picture of the Trojan war to the generations succeeding his own time, the picture they chose to preserve, and he framed that picture around a central figure and an all-encompassing theme that are in no way predictable. They reflect the thinking and imagination of an author, and in our efforts to understand the way he told his tale we will also be coming to know something about him.
One of the most prominent and striking features of the world he draws us into is the fact that it is peopled not only by human beings but also by gods. For us, as readers, the gods are no more and no less comprehensible than the human characters. They all think and feel as we do, and the task of interpreting what they say and noticing things they leave unsaid is no different. The difference between the human and the divine in Homer’s vision is the fact that the gods are born to glory and ease. The lives of the human warriors in the Iliad are characterized by toil, misery, endurance, and a relentless striving that may or may not attain glory. But glory is an effortless attribute of anything a god chooses to do. If Hera is on mount Ida and wants to be on mount Olympus, all she has to do is think it and it is done (Book XV, 80-83). If Apollo wants to break open a wall the Greek army labored long and hard to build, he does so as easily as a child knocks down a sandcastle (XV, 361-366). If Apollo wants to turn the tide of a fierce battle, he has only to look at one army and hold aloft the aegis, a shield Hephaestus forged for Zeus, and he will make all the courage and spirit vanish from their breasts (XV, 306-323). But the gods not only perform prodigious feats with ease, they live at ease (VI, 138). When the commander of the Greek army is challenged by Achilles in Book I, a rift opens that will not be closed until it has been paid for with countless sufferings and deaths, but later in the same book, when a similar rift threatens to open between the ruler of the gods and his wife, all the gods are alarmed, but Hephaestus acts quickly to restore them to their accustomed calm enjoyments merely by making fun of himself and coaxing back their smiles (I, 573-604).
The Iliad takes place along the boundary between the divine and human realms. The hundreds of warriors it presents to us are all engaged in the war voluntarily, enduring hardships and hazards for a variety of reasons, among which is the chance of achieving a moment in which their lives transcend the normal human limits and shine out like those of the gods. From the other side of the line, the gods are drawn out of their normal lives of ease and pleasure and unconcern by an anxiety for particular human beings and a desire to change the risks of war in their favor. The humans will still die, and the gods will not. That barrier between the human and the divine is firmly fixed, even though it is not simply impermeable; Heracles and a handful of others were transformed into gods, and the Titans and a few other divinities of an earlier generation languish beneath even Hades’ realm in a condition much like being dead. Survival in Hades’ domain, as Homer envisions it, is not life after death, but a contraction of all vital powers into a withered soul that will never again be anything but dead. The human limits are deep in the nature of things, and none of the fighters goes into the war expecting anything different. They all know that glory may have to be purchased at the price of shortness of life. The one whom we see wrestling with this knowledge is Achilles. He is an appropriate figure to occupy the foreground of a story set along the boundary of the human and divine, because his father is human and his mother is a goddess. His father, Peleus, is the sort of notable ruler and warrior that most of the prominent men at Troy are born to, and his mother, Thetis, is a minor sea deity. We know him from the first line of the poem as the son of Peleus. He is a demigod and all-but divine, but still and finally wholly human, bound by the limits of the human condition. One gift he receives from his goddess mother is knowledge of those limits. He tells us that his fate demands that he choose between glory and a long life (IX, 410-416). What fate imposes on him is the necessity of choice, and while his particular choice and his knowledge of it are exceptional, the inescapability of such a fateful choice unites him with every other man at Troy.
