“Achilles Dying” in the Achilleion Palace, Corfu, Greece. (Wiki-CC, photo by Dr. K)
When Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine in late February 2022, I glanced at Homer’s lliad, piled onto my kitchen table with other books in a tower of procrastination, with grudging respect. When Hamas reignited the mostly dormant Israel-Palestine conflict on October 7 of last year, I grabbed the Illiad by the spine to read it for a fifth time.
Coming of age in the early ’90s, I remember scoffing at President George H.W. Bush when he said during his January 1992 State of the Union speech, and at the opening of an election year, “… the world is still a dangerous place. Only the dead have seen the end of conflict. And though yesterday’s challenges are behind us, tomorrow’s are being born.”
I scoffed because, like many Americans, I was exhausted from all the Cold War platitudes of the Reagan years. I wanted to embrace the optimism that seemed to have dawned on the world as international communism sputtered into failure, promising with it a release from the nuclear arms race that hung around the world’s neck.
Today I know there is nothing wrong with optimism as long as it is laced with wisdom. When young, I mistook that wisdom for adult cynicism. Now I can easily admit that President H.W. Bush was merely expressing the necessity of hedging optimism with a realism sufficient to protect people who have been alive long enough to, it is hoped, feel a sense of optimism.
It is predictable, but also true, to say that the Iliad makes poetry out of war and conflict. It is more precise to say that the Iliad reminds us that war and conflict are always with us, whether in open conflagration and mounting body counts or simmering beneath the surface.
Like most Americans, and even my own daughter now in high school, I read the Odyssey, not the Iliad. High school teachers seem to prefer the Odyssey for its more chaotic, and symbolic, views toward life. Odysseus has a journey to make. He summons his resources. He resists the temptation of the sirens and outwits the Cyclops to become a person of self-command. Only at the epic’s end do events take a puzzling turn when he brutally murders his wife’s suitors. That bizarre ending gives high school teachers the perfect opportunity to teach that the past is a foreign country and that morals and ethical standards change. The ancient Greeks adored the hero who slew men who dared touch his wife. Today we try that same person in court, with a prison sentence to follow. High schools also probably teach the Odyssey to prepare their students for reading James Joyce’s Ulysses when they reach college, which is a charming hope but almost as naïve as I was in 1992.
Of course, the Iliad contains poetry—the “wine dark” sea, “Thetis of the silvery feet,” and basically all of Book XVIII, “The Shield of Achilles”—but mostly it churns out line after line of blood-soaked dismemberment and impalement, crashing bodies into one another with so much force that they almost pile themselves up after each battle. Akhaians (Greeks) cut down Trojans, with Homer brandishing another metaphor about lions hunting their prey. Trojans cut down Akhaians, and once you finish reading yet another battle scene, you can imagine the survivors pushing the dead into the Aegean Sea. It makes no sense that there would still be ground to walk upon when the land is littered with so many dead. Years ago, when a good friend and I read the Robert Fitzgerald translation (1974) at the same time, and then met to compare notes, we both agreed the most stunning, over-the-top death in battle was that of the Akhaian Diomêdês killing the Trojan Dolôn: “Even as he spoke, the man leaned forward, reaching to touch his chin, beseeching; but he brought his sword-blade in a flash down on the nape and severed the two tendons. In the dust the head of the still crying man was muffled.” (Book X; 500-504)
That, and other gruesome scenes, make it plain why current scholars believe (or at least debate) that a woman wrote the Odyssey, while the Illiad was likely composed by a syndicate of grizzled war veterans. It is sobering to imagine them working through their PTSD at an ancient campfire, reciting their accounts through tears, or even occasional laughter, in attempts to outdo one another in a sort of poetry slam competition.
Reading three different translations in the months since October 7 of last year, I was struck dumb all over again by the book’s relentless brutality. The through line of an absurd war over the beauty of one woman, Helen, to the absurd war over a border between two Slavic nations, is depressingly long. Perhaps the almost eight-decade war between two competing claims to the same ancient land in Israel-Palestine is easier to understand—though that hardly makes it less brutal.
In placing Achilles and Hector—and later, by extension, Priam—at the human center of the story, the book has more to teach us than just the eternal nature of war. War is simple in that people suffer and die. It is complicated because each person is forced to confront suffering in their own way. We hear this over and over again from scholars and classicists who tell us when we care to listen, but it remains true: The Iliad is our foundational text of what it means to be a hero but also mortal (Book XXI, 120-130), of what is at stake in decisions that will determine our future (the famous “Embassy Scene” of Book IX), and of what it means to find empathy for another person, even your sworn enemy (Priam and Achilles break bread in Book XXIV).
The Iliad was viewed as more epic than bleak for most of its scholarly life. French scholar Simone Weil, who wrote “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” in the middle of World War II, taught us to see it as more bleak than epic. “The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force … that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.”
Circling back to the anxiety of the nuclear arms race that troubled my generation, replete with films like Threads (1984), Weil’s reduction of the Iliad to an omen of almost complete annihilation is hard to dispute. Technology has scaled the rage of Achilles, once limited by the tools of ancient warfare, to proportions that threaten all humanity. The standard of soldiers proving their heroism on the battlefield is almost obsolete. Still, the optimist in me—it is hoped tempered by now with wisdom—prefers a wonderful introduction, written by Greek scholar Gregory Nagy, to the Everyman edition of Homer’s epic poem:
“The Iliad is the story of a hero’s pain, culminating in an anger that degrades him to the level of a savage animal, to the depths of bestiality. This same pain, however, this same intense feeling of loss, will ultimately make the savage anger subside in a moment of heroic self-recognition that elevates Achilles to the highest realms of humanity, of humanism. At the end of The Iliad, as he begins to recognize the pain of his deadliest enemy, of the Other, he begins to achieve a true recognition of the Self. The anger is at an end. And the story can end as well.” (Everyman, 1992, xiii)
Between reports of another launch of Russian missiles at Ukraine, after another news report on the missed opportunities for a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel, we keep waiting for anger—that mysterious, elusive, Godforsaken anger—to end.
