ON FATE AND RAGE:
REMEMBERING THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE PERSIAN GULF WAR
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Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s secret citadel. Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of, many the pains he suffered on his spirit on the wide sea, struggling for his own life and the homecoming of his companions. Even so he could not save his companions, hard though he strove to; they were destroyed by their own wild recklessness, fools, who devoured the oxen of Helios, the Sun God, and he took away the day of their homecoming. From some point here, goddess, daughter of Zeus, speak, and begin our story.
MENIS HYBRIS ACHOS /03
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KLEOS KER NOSTOS /25
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CONTENTS 5
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PART I: MENIS Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage, Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls Of heroes into Hades’ dark, And left their bodies to rot as feasts For dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done. Begin with the clash between Agamemnon-The Greek warlord--and godlike Achilles.
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THE SAVAGE MADNESS OF MY HEART Ethics and War in the Homer Joel H. Rosenthal
When I was in 9th grade, confronting the Iliad for the first time, I had two questions. First, why is it so important that we read the so-called classics? And second what is a classic anyway? It is only now, all these years later, that I can finally answer these questions. We read the classics because they tell us something essential about human nature. A classic text endures because it touches on an unchanging truth of human experience. A classic is a time machine. It enables us to travel through time and across cultures; and it speaks to us in a language we recognize as essential, enduring and true. The history of the world is the history of violence and war, and the Iliad remains the original benchmark for our understanding of war’s human dimensions. 1. Alexander, Caroline. War That Killed Achilles. Penguin Books, 2022.
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As Caroline Alexander1 put it in her talk at the Carnegie Council a couple of years ago, the epic of the Iliad is much more than “a slugging story.” The poem invites us to reflect on the nature of war itself, and the use of force as it shapes our understanding of virtues such as honour and responsibility and vices such as excessive pride, vengeance and cruelty. I want to focus my remarks on the questions raised by Simone Weil, in her essay “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” written in 1939 in France. Writing under
2. McCarthy, Mary, Simone Weil. “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force.” Chicago Review, 1965.
3. Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Illustrated, Penguin Books, 2012.
the shadow of Nazi and fascist regimes who lionized military power and saw weakness as akin to illness, Weil2 asked: Is force inevitably all-controlling and malevolent? Or can it be tamed? Is it possible, in Weil’s words, to “learn not to admire force, not to hate the enemy…?” My focus arises from new attention given to these questions by Steven Pinker3 and others who use historical data and insights from brain science and moral psychology to suggest that violence is in decline. In his new book The Better Angels of Our Nature Pinker uses statistical evidence to show that over the centuries, human beings have become less inclined to kill each other and to engage in barbarous and cruel practices. As Pinker puts it, “Brutal customs, once commonplace have been abolished: cannibalism, human sacrifice, heretic burning, chattel slavery, punitive mutilation, sadistic executions.” Battle deaths worldwide have declined drastically—the rate of death has plunged from 300 per 100,000 of world population during World War II …to fewer than 1 per 100,000 in the 21st century. Pinker does not suggest we are reaching a state of perpetual peace. Rather, he concludes: “…we still harbour demons like greed, dominance, revenge and self-deception. But we also have faculties that inhibit them, like self-control, empathy, reason, and a sense of fairness.” It is these latter faculties that seem to be winning out. Pinker’s provocative argument suggests we might benefit from revisiting conventional ideas about human impulses toward conflict and cooperation. Weil, like many before her, emphasizes the base, vulgar instincts that lead us to fight not only for selfdefence but also for conquest. However, could it be that human beings are hard-wired for cooperation just as much as for conflict? After all, doesn’t human survival depend on cooperation as much if not more than on conflict? Pinker leads us to consider aspects of both nature and nurture that emphasize the capacity to cooperate. A “nature” argument for cooperation suggests we take seriously the moral instinct of empathy and the human capacity for reason. A “nurture” argument for cooperation suggests that standards and expectations have evolved in light of experience—that human society has created new rules and new institutions to reflect a kind of moral evolution. However we answer these questions, it seems logical to consult first with Homer. Homer provides a reference point, a point of reckoning. Do we want to make a case for moral progress when it comes to the use of force, violence, and war? This is a question worth considering. Weil begins by reminding us MENIS 9
of Homer’s subject: The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as a historical document; for others, whose power of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today, as of yesterday, at the very centre of human history, the Iliad is the purest a nd the loveliest of mirrors.
4. Homer, Bernard Knox. The Iliad. Van Haren Publishing, 1991.
The value of the Iliad according to Weil is Homer’s realism, his unsentimental treatment of war. Mayhem reigns. Barbarity is accepted matter-of-factly by the leaders, the soldiers, and especially the gods. I am sure that you, like me, were struck by the many graphic descriptions of spearing, disembowelling and the like. Veins, arteries, tendons, and vital organs are described in detail as countless lives are lost. Parts of the text are blood-soaked. Bernard Knox,4 in his Introduction to the Fagles edition mentions the scene that stuck with me in this regard: that of Patroclus’s slaying of Thestor: “Patroclus rising beside him stabbed his right jawbone, Ramming the spearhead square between his teeth so hard He hooked him by that spearhead over the chariot rail, Hoisted, dragged the Trojan out as an angler perched on a jutting rock ledge drags some fish from the sea, some noble catch, with line and glittering bronze hook. So with the spear Patroclus gaffed him off his car, his mouth gaping round the glittering point and flipped him down face first dead as he fell, his life-breath blown away.” War is hell. You get the picture. What surprises the modern reader is how routine it seems and how cavalierly it is accepted. Homer goes beyond the cruelty to point out another element of war that is just as relevant to our understanding of it. While war may be hell, it is also intoxicating. It fills us with adrenaline. Because it requires so much effort and self-sacrifice—because it fills men with elevated notions of duty and camaraderie—war becomes noble, even beautiful. It is the place, as Homer says, “where men win glory.”
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5. Homer, Robert Fagles. The Iliad. Van Haren Publishing, 1991.
In book two5 Homer writes: “Her shield of lightning dazzling, swirling around her, Headlong Athena swept through the Argive armies, driving soldiers harder, lashing the fury fighting in each Achean’s heart—no stopping them now, mad for war and struggle. Now, suddenly, battle thrilled them more than the journey home, than sailing hollow ships to their dear native land. As ravening fire rips through big stands of timber high on a mountain ridge and the blaze flares miles away so from the marching troops the blaze of bronze armour, splendid and superhuman, flared across the earth, flashing into the air to hit the skies.”
6. Jarecke, Kenneth, Iraqi POWs, Contact Press Images, 1992.
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7. Hedges, Christopher, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Tantor, 2007.
8. Junger, Sebastian. War. 1st ed., Twelve, 2010.
9. Homer, Bernard Knox. The Iliad. Van Haren Publishing, 1991.
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War binds men together in a set of trying circumstances that cannot be duplicated. They become attracted if not addicted to its energy. Contemporary journalists have examined this response in great detail. Christopher Hedges7 has written the book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning where he describes war as “a drug” and a vehicle that engages “lust and passions.” He describes the odd beauty of war— the “lust of the eye”—that appreciates the awesome spectacles of war machines and their destructive powers. (If any of you have ever stood on the bridge of an aircraft carrier or seen a naval fleet at sea, you will understand what he means—the power and capacity of these vessels is an awesome sight to behold.) Hedges emphasizes the solidarity that emerges among men who bond over the powerful instruments they command and the dangers they face together. Sebastian Junger takes up these themes in his recent book War, based on his embedded journalist experience with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan.8 In a talk at the Carnegie Council Junger said, “I went over there and I thought that it was going to be exciting, glamorous and intense, being a reporter in a war zone—and it was all those things. One of the things I became interested in is this strange reality: War is a terrible thing. It kills people, it ruins societies—it’s just obviously bad. We are all in agreement about that. So why is it also to some people so attractive? What is it about humans, men in particular…?” Junger speculates about a variety factors that draw men to war: thrill, adventure, duty, brotherhood. The experience of war is intense, and some cannot let it go. The Academy Award-winning movie The Hurt Locker focused on the theme of the magnetic attraction to war. At the end of the film, the protagonist, who has repeatedly volunteered for and survived the most hazardous duty imaginable, cannot abide the peacefulness of home upon the end of his tour of duty. He must go back. Like the moth to the flame, he is addicted to the danger and the fight. Bernard Knox9 sums up Homer’s realism this way: “Three thousand years have not changed the human condition in this respect. We are still lovers and victims of the will to violence, and so long as we are, Homer will be read as its truest interpreter.” “Lovers and victims of the will to violence”—this is a phrase worth repeating. The “lover” part may be hard to accept, but it would be foolish to deny. In addition to the perverse attraction to war, there is also a deeply ingrained idea that war is inevitable. Friedrich Nietzsche cited human nature as the source of this
10. Nietzsche, Friedrich Thus spoke Zarathustra, Ernst Schmeitzner, 1883.
11. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, Van Haren Publishing, 1653.
acceptance.10 There was, Nietzsche said, a will to power, that is inescapable. Ancient and modern political philosophers express this idea in different ways. Thucydides observed that men resort to war for three reasons: interests (meaning material benefit), fear, and honour. Thomas Hobbes observed that in the state of nature—meaning in the natural world—there is no controlling authority. According to Hobbes,11 we live an anarchic and unstable world where in pre-modern times life was “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.” Contemporary realists take this idea to mean that we live in a world of competition and constant threats that create a structural security dilemma. We can never trust opponents not to press their advantage. So we must always be willing to fight to maintain our power position. Homer presents war as a choice of the gods. As such, war seems to be a force beyond human reach, somehow foreordained, predestined, and inescapable. For example Achilles agrees to join the fray to avenge the death of Patroclus only after prompted by the goddess Thetis and the gift of armour she bestows on behalf of the gods. When Achilles finally swears off his rage, Agamemnon offers a final excuse for his troubles with Achilles: Agamemnon says: “Often the armies brought this matter up against meThey would revile me in public. But I am not to blame! Zeus and Fate and the fury stalking through the night, They are the ones who drove the savage madness in my heart, That day in assembly when I seized Achilles’ prize— On my own authority, true, but what could I do? A god impels all things to their fulfilment.”
12. Kelly, Sean. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Canon to Find Meaning in a Secular World. HighBridge, 2021.
By making war a choice of the gods, Homer seems to be indicating that the mortals cannot control behaviours and outcomes. The impulses come from above and below. The philosopher Sean Kelly makes an interesting point about this.12 As modern readers, we are used to the idea that individual actors should take responsibility for their actions. However, Kelley says that “Homer’s characters are, by contrast, primitive.” The gods are great forces outside of the human experience; and yet it is they who determine the outcomes. The gods represent the best and worst, and they show us both the possibilities and limitations of human behaviour. If nothing else, the gods remind us of the overwhelming powers of the natural world that are greater than ourselves. They are, in some ways, very human in that they pursue rivalries and jealousies. Their actions mirror the trials and tribulations of the mortals they direct. However, in the end MENIS 13
A god impels al their fulfillment daughter of Zeu us all/that fatal she with those d hers,/never tou earth, gliding o of men/to trap entangles one m now another./ 14 FATE AND RAGE
ll things to t:/Ruin, eldest us, she blinds l madness— delicate feet of uching the over the heads us all. She man, MENIS 15
they are gods: they live in perpetuity to continue never-ending cycles of conflict and emotion that transcend the life of any single individual. The interaction of gods and mortals reaches its dramatic peak in the most famous scene of all: Achilles’s slaying of Hector and the defilement of Hector’s body. The defilement of Hector’s body tests the line of humanity itself. On one side, we have unmitigated barbarity. On the other side, we have some measure of respect and empathy. Hector recognizes this test of humanity before he is slain. He says to Achilles: “I beg you, beg you by your life, your parents don’t let the dogs devour me by the Argive ships! Wait, take the princely ransom of bronze and gold, the gifts my father and mother will give to you— But give my body to friends to carry home again So Trojan men and Trojan women can do me honour With fitting rites of fire once I am dead.” 13. Turnley, David. Corbis, 1991.
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Of course, Achilles is having none of it. After killing Hector, Achilles proceeds to desecrate the body. Homer describes this in detail: “So he [Achilles] triumphed and now bent on outrage, on shaming noble Hector Piercing the tendons, ankle to heel behind both feet, he knotted the straps of rawhide through them both, lashed them to his chariot, left the head to drop.” Having strung Hector to his chariot, Achilles proceeds to “haul him three times around Patroclus’s tomb;” and then keeps the corpse in this degraded state for good measure while Patroclus’s funeral is being prepared. But this is too much—even for the indifferent and sometimes cruel gods. Apollo offers protection to the rotting body. He “warded all corruption from Hector’s corpse and round him, head to foot, the great god wrapped the golden shield of storm so his skin would never rip as Achilles dragged him on.” Zeus registers his disgust. Zeus says of Achilles: “What good will it do him? What honour will he gain? Let that man beware, or great and glorious as he is, We mighty gods wheel on him in anger—look, He outrages the senseless clay in all his fury.”
14. Fried, Sigmund, Totem and Taboo. Beacon Press, 1913.
The gods leave us with a clear message. In war, there is such thing as atrocity. Atrocity begins with the dehumanization of the other. In his writings on “Totem and Taboo,” Freud14 included an entire section on “The Treatment of Enemies,” written in the 1910s. Freud wrote, “Inclined as we may have been to ascribe to savage and semi-savage races uninhibited and remorseless cruelty towards their enemies, it is of great interest to learn that with them too, the killing of a person compels the observation of a series of rules which are associated with taboo customs.” He goes on to chronicle numerous examples of pre-modern cultures that have elaborate rituals expressing respect for the dead. For example, “When the See-Dayaks of Sarawak bring home the dead from a war expedition, they treat it for months with the greatest kindness and courtesy and address it with the most endearing names in their language. The best morsels from their meals are put into its mouth, together with tidbits and cigars…It would be a great mistake to think that any derision is attached to this treatment, horrible though it may seem to be to us.” To the contrary, this MENIS 17
15. Ishtiaq, Muhammad. “Homer’s Conception Of Honour And Glory” International Journal. vol. 7, 2019
treatment of the dead body is in fact a sign of respect. What Freud is saying is this: For death to have meaning, it must be marked in way that pays respect to the fundamental breach that has occurred by the taking of the life itself. Taboo is one way to think about this. We assign a certain forbidden tag to these breaches of humanity and civilization. Honour may be another way to express this same idea. Honour is a virtue used to reinforce virtuous acts; dishonour is the result of less-than virtuous behaviour.15 Honour is Homer’s tool for drawing the line between humanity and barbarity—there is indeed a line, and it is important. We see this idea very much alive in today’s news. Just a few weeks ago a video appeared of four U.S. Marines urinating on the corpses of three Taliban fighters. According to media reports, the response to the video was universal moral outrage and shame. This response—widely shared around the world and not least from military professionals themselves—had its roots in the recognition that this act of desecration was not only a violation of a professional code of conduct—it was a transgression of a basic moral requirement to respect the dead. We might ask ourselves why the United States and its allies go to such great lengths to enforce these norms, especially when our opponents make a great show out of violating them. The Taliban in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan is famous for its beheadings. Many of you will remember the grisly video of the execution of Nicolas Berg and reports of the beheading of Daniel Pearl. You will also remember photos of burned corpses hanging from a bridge in Fallujah. Of course, who can forget the images of dead U.S. Army Rangers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia after the “Blackhawk Down” mishap?15 Examples of defilement are really too numerous to mention.
16. Duffy, Rónán. “Trouble Is That Gaddafi Is Mad.” The Journal. 28 Dec. 2021.
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I think it is precisely the fact that we seek to separate ourselves from this kind of behaviour that we try to be vigilant in stopping it where we can. We do not want to be like the Taliban. We do not want to be like the Libyan rebels who beat and killed their deposed leader Mohmar Qaddafi on the streets of Tripoli.16 This is why the tales of abuse in the prisons of Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantanamo touched a nerve for so many. This is why mass killings in Haditha during the Iraq war and My Lai during the Vietnam War trouble us so much. Abuse is dishonourable. And it is the virtue of honour that we should seek as decent and civilized human beings. Marines urinating on corpses is as old as war itself. The fundamental urge for revenge is
17. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, Van Haren Publishing, 1653.
understandable. Exhaustion and fear take their toll. Young men must in some way de-legitimize their enemy; otherwise, how can they be asked to take their lives unless they are deemed somehow unworthy to live? Homer’s depiction of Achilles’s rage helps us to understand this. In order to fight, the hero must see the enemy as deserving of death. However, even in death there are limits. Even in death—or perhaps especially in death—there is an affirmation of certain values and principles. Finally if there are some aspects of war that are unchanging, are there some that evolve? That is, to return to the question raised by Steven Pinker, are the values we bring to war today really the same as they were back in the days of Argives, Acheans, and Trojans? Or have we evolved morally? I think the evidence given to us by Homer in his poem and the headlines we read in today’s newspapers leads to an answer of yes and no. My no rests on the cases mentioned above. We still see untold cruelties, humiliation and shame due to war. The brutalities continue, accompanied by emotions ranging from rage and vengeance to self-sacrifice and heroism. As long as there is war, there will be violence and transgressions of this kind. This is 100 percent predictable. Whatever you decide on this question of moral progress, there is no escape from the fundamental aspects of the human experience of war that are, in some ways, unchanging. Human emotions and sentiments are both time-bound and timeless. We have no better example of this than an encounter with a text like the Iliad. I hope that you finished the poem with a sense that we have come a long way in 3,000 years, and yet we still have a long way to go. There is excitement in that. And I suppose there is also some comfort in recognizing that our struggles are similar to the ones faced by those who came before us, and those who will come after./
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PART II: HYBRIS But here is my threat to you. Even as Phoibos Apollo is taking away my Chryseis. I shall convey her back in my own ship, with my own followers; but I shall take the fair-cheeked Briseis, your prize, I myself going to your shelter, 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.
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GREAT AND GLORIOUS AS I AM What the Iliad tells us about War Charlotte Higgins
18. Dio Chrysostom: Discourses 37–60, Penguin, 1946.
The Iliad is the first great book, and the first great book about the suffering and loss of war. We love to tell stories about war. Tony Blair wove his own when giving evidence at the Chilcot inquiry yesterday: the latest, unpoetic attempt to make sense of an east-west clash of powers. He might note that “spin” goes back to The Iliad: the first-century writer Dio Chrysostom18 argued that Homer, for reasons of his own, suppressed the truth about the Trojan war – in reality, the Greeks lost. “Men learn with difficulty... but they are deceived only too readily,” he wrote. Why is the first book a book about war? Perhaps because war is inextricably bound up with humanity’s urge to tell stories. Civilisation – with its settlements, its boundary lines, its hierarchies – breeds conflict and narrative alike. In The Iliad, two characters have the narrative urge, and something approaching a synoptic view of the scenes surging around them. Achilles sings stories of heroes’ deeds in battle, and Helen embroiders scenes of fighting on an elaborate textile. Many wishing to make sense of wars in their own time have reached for The Iliad. Alexander the Great, perhaps the most flamboyantly successful soldier in history, slept beside a copy annotated by his tutor, Aristotle.
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19. Plutarch, Life of Alexander, Random House Publishing, 2004
20. Bespaloff, Rachel, and Mary McCarthy. On the Iliad. Princeton University Press, 2019.
21. Alexander, Caroline. War That Killed Achilles. Penguin Books, 2022.
22. Samet, Elizabeth. Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point. First, Picador, 2008.
“He esteemed it a perfect portable treasure of all military virtue and knowledge,” according to Plutarch’s biography. 19 Simone Weil’s essay, “L’Iliade ou le poème de la force”, published in 1940, holds that “the true hero, the true subject at the centre of The Iliad is force”, which she defines as “that X that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing”. Her contemporary Rachel Bespaloff, a Geneva-raised philosopher who wound up in the United States, also turned to Homer’s poem as a “method of facing” the second world war.20 For her, it tells a profound, human story – “Suffering and loss have stripped Hector bare,” her essay “On The Iliad” begins. We are still turning to The Iliad, amid our own wars: the Australian writer David Malouf’s recent novel, Ransom (Chatto & Windus), is about the encounter between Priam and Achilles in The Iliad’s final book, while Caroline Alexander’s new study of the poem, The War that Killed Achilles21, sees it as a meditation on the catastrophic effects of conflict. While she does not indulge in crass equivalences, it is hard not to be alerted by her reading to the devastation caused by the conflicts in the Middle East. Today’s students at West Point, the elite US military academy where one may minor in “terrorism studies”, study The Iliad as part of their literature course. In her 2007 book Soldier’s Heart22, Elizabeth Samet, literature professor at the institution, recalls a visit by the late translator-poet Robert Fagles, who recited, in Greek, the first lines of the epic. The 1,000 plebes in his audience must now be in command positions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military language of the conflicts even brings with it distant echoes of Homer: Operation Achilles was a Nato offensive in 2007 aimed at clearing Helmand province of the Taliban. The Trojan war – a more or less mythical event – was a 10-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greeks, its purpose to restore Helen to her Spartan husband, Menelaus. The Iliad charts not the famous causes of the conflict (the Trojan prince Paris’s abduction of Helen) nor its spectacularly bloody end (the Greeks’ ruse of the wooden horse and the brutal sacking of the city). Instead, the subject of the poem is menis, fury – specifically, the wrath of the Greeks’ best warrior, Achilles.That wrath is provoked by his commander-in-chief Agamemnon’s misguided decision to seize Briseis, Achilles’s captive woman, as compensation for his own bit of living loot, Chriseis, whom he has been obliged to restore to her Trojan father. Achilles, his pride and honour outraged, withdraws from the fighting and persuades his mother, the goddess Thetis, to ask Zeus to turn the tide of war HYBRIS 23
against the Greeks, knowing that they will suffer appalling losses. He stubbornly resists all appeals to return to battle, but eventually agrees to send his beloved comrade, Patroclus, into the fray. When Patroclus is killed by the Trojans’ best fighter, Hector, Achilles whirls into a frenzy of redoubled, redirected rage. He joins the fighting, and begins a lengthy and pitiless slaughtering spree. Finally, he kills Hector in single combat and attaches the corpse to his chariot, dragging it triumphantly around the walls of the city. (In 2004, the bodies of American contractors were attached to the backs of cars and dragged through the streets of Fallujah.) At the end of the poem Hector’s frail and elderly father, Priam, enters the Greeks’ camp and persuades Achilles to restore to him his son’s body.
23. Sattin, Anthony. The Young T. E. Lawrence. W. W. Norton, 2015.
24. Homer, Robert Fagles. The Iliad. Van Haren Publishing, 1991.
Not all soldiers have seen the point. TE Lawrence esteemed Homer sufficiently to translate him (rather unsatisfactorily), but he was scornful of the poet’s knowledge of military affairs. Homer, he thought, must have been “very bookish” and “a house-bred man”. In her book Samet records one of her students, declaring that “Alexander was a fool to carry this poem around with him.” He had found nothing to emulate in either Agamemnon or Achilles – until he read through to book 11 of the poem, when he “got” it. This is the section known as Agamemnon’s aristeia – his day of glory in the field. Perhaps what appealed to the student was the scene in which the commander arms for battle, around 30 lines of minutely described military hardware down to the bronze-tipped spears that flash in the sunlight’s glare: lovingly summoned-up boys’ toys. Or perhaps, after all, it was the account of Agamemnon’s brutal military prowess that transfixed him, the commander knocking the life out of every young Trojan he encounters, deaf to their cries for mercy: “And he pitched Pisander off the chariot on to earth and plunged a spear in his chest – the man crashed on his back as Hippolochus leapt away, but him he killed on the ground, slashing off his arms with a sword, lopping off his head and he sent him rolling through the carnage like a log.” The onward rush of these almost joyful descriptions of slaughter in The Iliad might cause some modern readers to question the values of the poem, or at least to measure out the long distance between us and the society from which it sprang. Homer was no peacenik. “Homer and Tolstoy have in common a virile love of war and a virile horror of it,” Bespaloff wrote in “On The Iliad”.
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It is futile to look to Homer for a condemnation of war: “People make war, they put up with it, they curse it, they praise it in songs and verses, but it is not to be judged any more than destiny is.” 25. McCarthy, Mary, Simone Weil. “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force.” Chicago Review, 1965.
But it’s easy to see why Lawrence struggled to admire The Iliad’s descriptions of battle. Though they are never lacking in drama, they are frequently implausible, even to a civilian eye, not least in the way that soldiers die – impossibly cleanly and instantaneously. Rare are the cases in which the combatants are tended to by literature’s first field surgeons, Machaon and Podalirius, or on one occasion by Patroclus himself, who turns medic to help his comrade Eurypylus. The agony of death-throes, the cries of pain from soldiers too wounded to move, are absent from the poem. Compare this account, by John Charles Austin, from John Carey’s Faber Book of Reportage, describing the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in June 1940: “A horrible stench of blood and mutilated flesh pervaded the place... We set our faces in the direction of the sea, quickening our pace to pass through the belt of this nauseating miasma as soon as possible. ‘Water... Water...’ groaned a voice from the ground just in front of us. It was a wounded infantryman. He had been hit so badly that there was no hope for him.” HYBRIS 25
Like the genera leaves, the lives men./Now the w the old leaves a earth, now the l bursts with the and spring com again. /And so one generation another dies aw 26 FATE AND RAGE
ations of s of mortal wind scatters across the living timber /new buds mes round with men: as n comes to life, way.” 27
At the centre of the poem’s most urgent observations on the nature of war is its hero, Achilles, an extreme character in all senses – The Iliad’s most bloodthirsty warrior, the quickest to anger, but at times the most tender. He is tinged with the supernatural: his mother is a goddess; his armour is forged by the god Hephaestus; even his chariot-team consists of immortal horses, the gift of Zeus. He sees the war with an enhanced perspective; as Alexander points out, he is clear-eyed about the utter pointlessness of the conflict. During his outburst to Agamemnon in book one, Achilles says: “The Trojans never did me damage, not in the least, they never stole my cattle or my horses, never in Phthia where the rich soil breeds strong men did they lay water my crops. How could they? Look at the endless miles that lie between us... shadowy mountain ranges, seas that surge and thunder. No, you, colossal, shameless – we all followed you, to please you, to fight for you, to win your honour back from the Trojans.” 26. Smith, Sean. “US Army Veteran’s Story” The Guardian, 2017.
27. Bespaloff, Rachel, and Mary McCarthy. On the Iliad. Princeton University Press, 2019.
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“This war is stupid and pointless. It’s not our country and it’s not our fight,” is a view typical of those recorded by Guardian photographer and film-maker Sean Smith when he was embedded among US troops in Iraq. The Odyssey is a poem as full of twists and turns as the mind of its wily hero, Odysseus. It contains flashbacks, embedded narratives, exotic locations, fairytale characters and a chronology – sometimes stretched, sometimes compressed – that covers a decade. The Iliad, in contrast, is a linear tale, circumscribed in geography and time-frame: we are placed variously in the Greeks’ camp, the plain outside Troy, the city itself, and in the gods’ home on Mount Olympus. Its characters are nearly all soldiers and gods, with mere bit parts for women, children and other non-combatants. It covers about 40 days during the 10th year of the war. One of its most arresting characteristics, however, is the way it casts us forward and back, hinting at both a lost, peaceful world “back home”, and the horrors of the post-conflict world to come. This is a quality that does much to lend the poem its pathos, and its constant sense of loss. Take its regularly used epithets: these familiar phrases (“wine-dark” sea, “rosy-fingered” dawn) have often been seen as simply as the more or less meaningless metrical building blocks that would have helped a bard to improvise lines of verse on the hoof. Sometimes, though,
28. Alexander, Caroline. War That Killed Achilles. Penguin Books, 2022.
they seem to be carefully chosen. The last line of the epic is “And so they buried Hector, breaker of horses.” That epithet, “breaker of horses”, has been used of the hero dozens of times, yet it never ceases to stop me in my tracks. Breaking horses is a gentle art, the occupation of peacetime (even if those horses are being readied for future war). None of that for Hector now. There’s a curious resonance between that line and an account, again published in Carey’s collection, by a young farmhand who fought on the other side of the Dardanelles, in Gallipoli, in 1915. The lad is on sentry duty in the trenches. “I knew the next sentry up quite well. I remembered him in Suffolk singing to his horses as he ploughed. Now he fell back with a great scream and a look of surprise – dead.” Lost peacetime is, however, most often conjured up through the poet’s imagery – in which we are often invited to imagine an act of great violence with the help of similes drawn from a pastoral world far from the battlefields of Troy. In the 11th book, the Greek warrior Ajax slowly withdraws from a bout of hand-to-hand fighting: “Like a stubborn ass some boys lead down a road… stick after stick they’ve cracked across his back but he’s too much for them now, he rambles into a field to ravage standing crops. They keep beating his ribs, splintering sticks – their struggle child’s play till with one final shove they drive him off but not before he’s had his fill of feed.”
29. Homer, Robert Fagles. The Iliad. Van Haren Publishing, 1991.
In book thirteen27, an arrow bounces off Menelaus’s shield like chickpeas off a shovel; the following book has a boulder thrown by Ajax that sends Hector “whirling like a whipping top.” Such humble, almost humorous images have a cumulative effect, creating a lightly sketched vision of a parallel world that sits at the back of the mind as we absorb the “foreground” action of the battle for Troy. Occasionally, such images contain their own violence, blurring into to the scenes they are helping us conjure. In the 12th book, the armies are said to fight like farmers rowing over a disputed a boundary stone – war writ small. It is the Trojans, meanwhile, who provide the most obvious focus for the fragility of civilian life, and the horrors that await the city’s old, its women, and its very young. One feature of the poem is that it accords equal dignity to both sides in the war: the Trojans are not dehumanised into “ragheads” or “gooks”. In book six comes the famous, moving scene in which Hector, returning to the city after a bout of battle, encounters his wife Andromache and son HYBRIS 29
30. Homer, Robert Fagles. The Iliad. Van Haren Publishing, 1991.
Astyanax. This is a passage of tenderness and tearing grief, as we witness the hero’s love for his wife and hers for him; and the sweet fragility of their child. It is this passage that helps Samet find in Hector the blueprint of the “citizen soldier”, a warrior fighting to save his home and his values – a neat Americanisation.
6. Jarecke, Kenneth, American Tanks, Contact Press Images, 1992.
Andromache appeals to her husband to use defensive tactics, to stop leading his men from the front. She is already a victim of war: her father and seven brothers have been killed in a previous conflict by Achilles himself; her mother is dead, too. “You, Hector – you are my father now, my noble mother, / a brother too, and you are my husband, young and warm and strong! / Pity me please,” she begs. Hector sorrowfully refuses: honour dictates he must lead his men in the field, though he has little doubt of the defeat that is coming. It is not so much the pain of his parents, his brothers, dying that haunts him, he says. “That is nothing, nothing beside your agony when some brazen Argive hales you off in tears. wrenching away your day of light and freedom! 30 FATE AND RAGE
Then far off in the land of Argos you must live. labouring at a loom, at another woman’s beck and call, fetching water at some spring, Messeis or Hyperia, resisting all the way.”
31. Shay, Jonathan. Military in the Rear View Mirror: Mental Health and Wellness in Post-Military Life. Historical Society, 2019.
The child Astyanax recoils at the sight of his father’s frightening plumed helmet. Hector picks him up, and Andromache smiles through her tears. He prays that the boy might one day be prince of the Trojans, their best fighter, better even than his father, “a joy to his mother’s heart”. It is perhaps in the relationships between the combatants that modern soldiers might most readily see their own emotions mirrored. In his book Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, American psychiatrist Jonathan Shay finds parallels between the pathologies of Vietnam veterans whom he has treated, and Homer’s Achilles. He argues that Achilles is suffering from what we would now call combat trauma, the death of Patroclus causing his character fatally to unravel. In particular, Shay compares the comradeship and passionate loyalty of American soldiers in Vietnam to that between Achilles and Patroclus – who grew up together, fought alongside each other, and whose relationship is the subject of some of Homer’s most tender writing. In book 16 – shortly before he agrees to let Patroclus enter the fighting – Achilles finds him weeping: “Why in tears, Patroclus? Like a girl, a baby running after her mother, begging to be picked up, and she tugs her skirts, holding her back as she tries to hurry off – all tears fawning up at her, till she takes her in her arms... That’s how you look, Patroclus, streaming live tears...”
32. Gillan, Audrey. “Nobody Knew about PTSD: The Survivors of a Friendly Fire Attack 17 Years On.” The Guardian, 11 Aug. 2020.
Such fierce tenderness is echoed in the conversation of today’s British troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Former Guardian war reporter Audrey Gillan was, in 2003, embedded with the Household Cavalry in Iraq. The regiment was initially reluctant to host a female journalist, but she was later told by the driver of the personnel carrier that became her home “Don’t worry, I will never, ever leave you. I will pick you up and carry you if I have to.” In 2008, Gillan spoke to soldiers from the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment who had been involved in a particularly brutal firefight in Basra four years earlier. Lance Corporal Martin Hill remembered the end of a fellow soldier: “He was dead. You could see his skin changing colour and his eyes were dilated. We went HYBRIS 31
through every emotion possible then. Blokes were screaming out and crying.” This is a long way from ramrod backs and stiff upper lips. When Antilochus brings Achilles the news of Patroclus’s death in book 18, “A black cloud of grief came shrouding over Achilles Both hands clawing the ground for soot and filth, he poured it over his head, fouled his handsome face and black ashes settled on to his fresh clean war-shirt, Overpowered in all his power, sprawled in the dust, Achilles lay there, fallen... tearing his hair, defiling it with his own hands…”
33. Shay, Jonathan. Military in the Rear View Mirror: Mental Health and Wellness in Post-Military Life. Historical Society, 2019.
Shay records one of his patients recalling his own fury: “I really loved fucking killing, couldn’t get enough. For every one of them I killed I felt better. Made some of the hurt went away [sic]. Every time you lost a friend it seemed like a part of you was gone. Get one of them to compensate what they had done to me. I got very hard, cold, merciless. I lost all my mercy.” Achilles also gets hard, cold, merciless. Even by the standards of The Iliad, his killing spree is grotesque. He cannot sleep or eat; he thinks only of killing: “what I really crave / is slaughter and blood and the choking groans of men”. He slakes his bloodthirst by felling men, by filling the waters of the Scamander so full of bodies and gore that the river deity himself rises up from the depths in anger. It is “all day permanent red”, to borrow the memorable title of one of Christopher Logue’s poetic reimaginings of The Iliad. Achilles captures 12 Trojan men whom he will sacrifice on Patroclus’s pyre – again, even by the standards of The Iliad, a horrific act; today, we would call it a war crime. In book 21, he downs the Trojan prince Lycaon. You captured me once before, says Lycaon, but then, merciful, you spared my life. Do the same now. Achilles responds: “Come, friend, you too must die. Why moan about it so? Even Patroclus died, a far, far better man than you. And look, you see how handsome and powerful I am? The son of a great man, the mother who gave me life a deathless goddess. But even for me, I tell you, death and the strong force of fate are waiting.” After the loss of Patroclus, all life – Lycaon’s, his own – is, for Achilles, utterly meaningless. We are all going to die; we (or at least you) may as well die now.
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Yet this is an aberration: life does have meaning in The Iliad, a meaning that is bound up both with a warrior’s kleos, the glory he achieves in the field, and, paradoxically, with a hero’s willing, onward surge towards death. How are we, then, to read the poem amid the horrors and contradictions of our own wars, conflicts that have destroyed countless Andromaches and Astyanaxes? Bleak as The Iliad is, it is made all the bleaker by its divine characters. The poem’s gods, who urge on the fighters and intervene to help their favoured heroes, are flimsy and flippant compared to their mortal counterparts, a source of troubling light relief rather than profundity. The life-and-death struggles of the human characters seem weightier and more agonisingly present when set against the meaningless existence of the gods. This is a hard world: the war isn’t “for” anything, certainly not some greater good, but is merely part of the blind workings of an inexplicable fate that even Zeus, king of the gods, must bow to. When the warriors die, there are no flights of angels to sing them to their rest, only the prospect of a ghastly, ghostly, absence of meaning. As Hector’s soul departs his dying body, it does so “wailing his fate / leaving his manhood far behind, / his young and supple strength”. The Iliad is a cavalcade of loss, an endless parade of men summoned briefly to life only to be consigned to death – such as young Gorgythion in the eighth book, subject of one of the poet’s most poignant similes. To post-first-world-war readers, it is hard not to add a further layer to these lines – Flanders fields a carpet of blood-red poppies. At the end of the poem comes the scene between Priam and Achilles, when the frail, grieving father finds it in himself to kiss those “terrible, man-killing hands / that had slaughtered Priam’s many sons in battle”, when Achilles sees reflected in the face of Priam the likeness of his own beloved father. Weil underestimated the power of this passage. Achilles is not simply an unfeeling “thing”, reduced by the unspeakable power of force. The truth may be harder to take. He is at the same time a mass slaughterer and the gentlest of men. Only a few lines of verse stand between the Achilles who wipes away the tears of his beloved Patroclus and the one who piles up hecatombs of the Trojan dead. Find in this comfort, if you can./
HYBRIS 33
SING, O MUSE OF THE
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WRATH OF ACHILLES
35
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PART III: ACHOS I beg you, beg you by your life, your parents don’t let the dogs devour me by the Argive ships! Wait, take the princely ransom of bronze and gold, the gifts my father and mother will give to you— But give my body to friends to carry home again So Trojan men and Trojan women can do me honour With fitting rites of fire once I am dead.
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WE MEN ARE WRETCHED THINGS Rereading the Iliad in Time of War Mariana Torgovnik
34. Torgovnick, Marianna. The War Complex: World War II in Our Time. 1st ed., University of Chicago Press, 2005.
35. Mehta, Nina, and Elisabeth Bumiller. “Stranger in a Strange Land.” The Women’s Review of Books, vol. 8, no. 3, 1990.
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My recent book “The War Complex” required rethinking the legacy of World War II. Called “the good war” in common parlance, World War II remains a potent and emotion-laden memory. But when it was over, fifty to eighty million people (estimates vary widely) had died? soldiers but also, and in greater numbers, civilians. Hitler’s forces had murdered many innocents, and Japan had unleashed slaughter in China and Southeast Asia and bombed Pearl Harbor. But the Allies, the good guys in the tale, had killed roughly 600,000 German civilians and 400,000 Japanese. So if World War II was necessary and justified, it was nonetheless terrible and even rotten. Genocide, the cold war, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and the knowledge that governments will sacrifice large numbers of soldiers and civilians in wartime: such consequences of World War II have shaped the modern psyche.1 After 9/11, they enabled the Bush administration to use allusions to World War II to build support for the Iraq War, calling the war on terror, in D-day commemorations, “the storm in which we fly” (Bumiller) and invoking the mushroom cloud as a symbol of mass death (Rice). Rethinking World War II and the United States’ current wars benefit from reading the earliest Western literature on the subject
36. Hedges, Christopher, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Tantor, 2007.
37. Black Hawk Down. Dir. Ridley Scott. Columbia, 2001.
because The Iliad and other ancient works remain not just compelling but also quite sobering. For teachers of literature, it offers another advantage. Because they are revered, serving as touchstones in the culture wars, classics like The Iliad enable us to criticize the dynamics of war not just among ourselves but in ways that make sense to the general public. The Iliad explores unflinchingly what is literally the oldest argument in the book for continuing rather than ending combat. The argument depends on the familiar but still-moving fact that warriors fight day to day not for abstract causes but for the soldiers fighting alongside them? for their buddies (Gray; Hedges). It claims that armies should honour past sacrifice by fighting on, a sentiment that always manages to sustain the momentum of war because withdrawal or even negotiated peace seems to dishonour the fallen.The argument circulates freely in discussions of the Iraq War. When a politician or pundit uses the almost obligatory code words “honouring the troops,” the phrase often segues into the assertion that to make their deaths and sacrifices count we cannot “cut and run.” During the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain and Sarah Palin often remarked that Americans don’t surrender, and Palin maintained that talking of withdrawal was equivalent to waving “the white flag” or even to treason . At the crudest level, the honour-the-troops mantra enforces revenge according to ancient blood laws?a magisterial theme in Homers The Odyssey and Aeschylus’s The Eumenides too? though there’s more to it than that. For while we might be inclined to sneer at the rhetoric of McCain, Palin, and their allies, some of them have children serving in the war. They’re not just mouthing words? they apparently mean them. The belief that ending combat dishonours the dead forms a basic line of thinking we have heard before and will, no doubt, hear again. The theme resonates through Western literature as well as through popular culture in the late twentieth century, in films like Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down, which make the argument and refute it at the same time. In Black Hawk Down, a group of soldiers in Somalia is surprised each time one member gets injured or killed? though such things do happen in combat? and throws more and more men at the situation. In Saving Private Ryan, a squad is decimated in its attempts to find Ryan, a foot soldier who has suddenly become his family’s sole surviving son. The theme goes as far back as Western literature’s first war epic, where it’s revealed as a mechanism that keeps war going. As The Iliad begins, Greek troops have been besieging Troy for almost a decade. ACHOS 39
38. Gray, Glenn. The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle. New York: Harcourt, 1959.
39. “President Richard Nixon - Address to the Nation on the War.” YouTube, 2009.
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Few of them support or even remember the reason for the war except for the Argive commanders, Agamemnon and his brother, Menelaus. The war began with the abduction of Menelaus’s wife, Helen. Like the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the siege was promoted as something the Greeks could not afford to delay once troops and resources were in place; Agamemnon even sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to expedite the fleet’s launch. Then as now, populations can oppose a war and want (as Achilles’s mother, Thetis, did) their children not to fight but still feel the need to support the bloody thing once it’s begun. In Troy, what most keeps the men engaged is having lost a brother, a friend, a comrade to the enemy?as virtually everyone has done after ten long years. One man’s loss spurs another to kill so that war’s business becomes (to paraphrase Dickens, on the law, in Bleak House) to make business for itself. War becomes a self-perpetuating, self-generating machine, a motor that just keeps going. A Lycian named Sarpedon offers a typical incitement to his side after the Greek Patroclus (substituting for his friend Achilles) has slaughtered many of the Trojan allies. “Lycians, where is your pride?” asks Sarpedon. “Where are you running? / Now be fast to attack! I’ll take him on myself, / see who he is who routs us, wreaking havoc against us? / cutting the legs from under squads of good brave men” (16.50205).2 In the next sequence?the all-too-typical outcome? Sarpedon and Patroclus are killed. They die as men do in The Iliad, in full and grim detail. Hacked heads, spilt bowels, cleaved brains, pierced abdomens: the gore rivals that of combat video games today. In The Iliad, Trojans and Greeks both use the argument that each death demands another to satisfy the requirements of comradeship and group pride. Americans have heard the same make-every-death-count argument a lot, most recently about the Iraq War but before that about the Vietnam War. Referring to “fallen soldiers” and “grieving mothers,” Presidents Johnson and Nixon stumbled again and again on the belief that, as Nixon said in 1969, “now that we are in the war” the only honourable thing to do was to continue it. When the Vietnam War finally ended, the results were messy, as they would have been in 1969. But some forty thousand additional American soldiers had died, as well as additional Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. The insurgency in Iraq is smaller than the guerrilla war in Vietnam. Americans have had a maximum of around 250,000 troops on the ground at any time (around 130,000 as of this writing), compared with more than half a million at the height of the Vietnam War. In the
40. “U.S. Wounded.” icasualties.org. Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, n.d. Web. 6 July 2009.
Iraq War, as in the Vietnam War, World War II, and the Trojan War, the majority of victims have been the elderly, women, and children? in short, the civilians whom wars are supposedly fought to protect. Euripides displays the civilian cost graphically in The Trojan Women as Andromache (Prince Hectors wife and an appealing figure) laments her son Astyanax’s murder and the Trojan women’s enslavement. As of June 2009, according to the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, the United States military has sustained 4,321 fatalities and more than 40,000 injuries, many of them maiming (“US Deaths”; “U.S. Wounded”). Iraq Body Count lists the number of Iraqis killed through 10 June 2009 as between 92,485 and 100,984 (“Documented Civilian Deaths”). Millions more have been made refugees.
41. Jarecke, Kenneth, American Army, Contact Press Images, 1992.
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42. Torgovnick, Marianna. The War Complex: World War II in Our Time. 1st ed., University of Chicago Press, 2005.
43. Homer, Robert Fagles. The Iliad. Van Haren Publishing, 1991.
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When I wrote The War Complex, it took weeks and sometimes months to ascertain death and casualty statistics from World War II that I thought would be fixed and widely available. But some events (like firebombings and the slaughter along the Soviet front) resist easy record keeping, and even the fullest archives can disguise or distort the facts. Figures for ongoing and politicized events like the Iraq War are parsed and disputed, some times in confusing ways. The recent animated documentary Waltz with Bashir identifies one reason why the official record often masks the truth: our minds dissociate from what we find too painful. Even statisticians’ minds seem to dissociate at times, because what happens in war contradicts routinely the values (family, personal survival, the well-being of the nation) for which wars are said to be fought. Again, the ancient story of The Iliad tells the tale. The turning point takes place when Achilles, the Greek killing machine, avenges his friend Patroclus, even though he knows from a prophecy that remaining in Troy will cause his own death, which will come sooner than he thinks. He slaughters hordes of Trojans, up close and personal, in astonishingly gory ways. As is typical of Greek epic, each man killed is identified in terms of his birthplace, his parents, his wife, or his children immediately before being dispatched, so that each character’s appearance in the poem is, simultaneously, a form of memorial. Finally, he kills the Trojan hero, Hector. The Iliad ends with Troy mourning Hector and anticipating devastation. Achilles knows he will never return home. Homer’s audience knows that more death and suffering will flow from the Trojan War for years to come. In some of the most touching moments of The Iliad, Achilles rejects the whole rotten system. Lamenting that “day after bloody day I’ve hacked my passage through, / fighting other soldiers to win their wives as prizes,” he realizes that every Argive and Trojan, in fact “[a]ny decent man, / a man with sense, loves his own, cares for his own / as deeply as I” (9.396-97,414-16). Common feelings unite men who fight and kill each other? an insight that might lead to peace, not further war. The Iliad is an essential epic, relevant today. It reminds us that the values inscribed in the argument to stay the course and honour the fallen are those of friendship, comradeship, brotherhood, community, nation, home, and love?the very values trashed by the conduct of war. In 1971 John Kerry, a Vietnam War veteran and later a senator from Massachusetts and the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “How do you ask a man to be
44. Kerry, John. “Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement.” 1971
the last man to die for a mistake?” Kerry’s question has arisen in every war since World War II and might be asked now about the Iraq War and a potentially catastrophic expansion of the war in Afghanistan. Recent history and some of the world s greatest literature tell us that more deaths, not peace or victory, will likely follow any single death./
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AND SO T
THEY BURIED HECTOR, BREAKER OF HORSES
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HARSH FATE WILL PRESS UPON YOU Battle Lines Daniel Mendelsohn
45. Homer, Robert Fagles. The Iliad. Van Haren Publishing, 1991.
For sheer weirdness, it would be hard to find a passage in the Western canon that can compete with the tenth book of Homer’s Iliad—the one classicists call the Doloneia, “the bit about Dolon.” Not the least of the book’s oddities is that it’s named after a nobody: Dolon is a character whom the poet conjures merely so that he can kill him off, a few hundred lines later, in literature’s nastiest episode of trick-or-treating. There’s a nighttime outing, some creepy interrogation, even outlandish costumes. For nearly a century, the dominant orthodoxy has been that the Iliad evolved over centuries before finally being written down. By this point in the action, we’re in the tenth year of the Trojan War, and things are going badly for the invading Greeks. Achilles, the greatest of the allied warriors, has angrily withdrawn from the fighting after being insulted by his loutish commanderin-chief, Agamemnon; without his help, the Greeks are pressed back against the sea, frantically defending their beached ships. A desperate appeal to the sulky Achilles has failed to persuade him to reënter the fray. At their wits’ end, the sleepless Greek leaders call a late-night conference and send two able warriors, the ferocious Diomedes and the crafty Odysseus,
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to spy on the Trojan positions. After donning some rather unconventional gear (Odysseus, we are told, is wearing a cap decorated with rows of boars’ teeth), the two pick their eerie way through piles of corpses leftover from the day’s battle. Presently they come across Dolon, who happens to be coming from the opposite direction to spy on the Greeks. (He’s wearing a wolf’s pelt and a marten-skin hat.) The Greeks capture this rather pathetic Trojan—his teeth chatter audibly after he falls into their hands—and tease him for a while, reassuring him that he will come to no harm even as they smoothly extract the information they want. Then, as Dolon begs for his life, Diomedes cuts off his head, which still gibbers away as it rolls in the dust. The pair then make for the camp of some allies of the Trojans, where they kill a handful of sleeping men and steal some fabulous horses.
46. Hésiode, and West. Theogony. Amsterdam University Press, 1966.
47. Hedges, Christopher, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Tantor, 2007.
When I was first studying the Iliad, as an undergraduate classics major thirty years ago, the standard interpretation of this episode was that its very grotesqueness was the point. Everything about it—nocturnal violence instead of glittering, daylit contests of arms, stealth instead of open confrontation, animal pelts instead of gleaming bronze armour—inverts the norms of Homeric warfare, as if to suggest just how complete the Greeks’ reversal of fortune is: military, ethical, moral. Readers of Stephen Mitchell’s fast-paced and very idiosyncratic new translation of the Iliad (Free Press; $35) will have to take my word about all this, because Book 10 doesn’t appear in it. Mitchell’s is the first major English translation of the poem to implement the theories of the eminent British scholar M. L. West, stripping away what West argues are the impure, later additions to the original written text (one of these being the whole of Book 10). Merely to claim that there was an original text of the Iliad, definitively set down in writing by the poet who created it, is sensational stuff in the world of classics: for nearly a hundred years, the dominant orthodoxy has been that this greatest of all epics was the oral composition of a series of bards, evolving over centuries before finally being written down. Whatever its flaws—and Mitchell’s translation won’t suit every taste—this taut new version is likely to reignite controversies about just what the Iliad is that go back nearly as far as Homer himself. One of the earliest aficionados of the Iliad was Aristotle, who admired an aspect of the poem that most of us don’t associate with epics: its narrow focus. In the Poetics, Western culture’s oldest extant work of literary criticism, written around 335 ACHOS 47
B.C.—which is to say nearly half a millennium after the Iliad began its long career—the philosopher declared: Homer may be said to appear “divinely inspired” above the rest, since he did not attempt to treat the war as a whole.... Instead, taking up just one section, he used many others as episodes... with which he gives his composition diversity. Although many people know that the Iliad is about the Trojan War, it doesn’t, in fact, contain much of what you tend to associate with that greatest of all mythological conflicts. There’s no Judgment of Paris, nor do you get the Rape of Helen—the Trojan prince Paris’s adulterous abduction of the world’s most beautiful woman, which sets in motion the gigantic Greek recovery expedition, led by her brother-in-law, Agamemnon. The poem does not include Achilles’ death, from an arrow wound to the heel, nor will you find the Wooden Horse or the Fall of Troy. A work that contained all those episodes, Aristotle argued, would be “too extensive and impossible to grasp all at once”; instead, Homer cannily focusses on just one episode from the tenth and final year of the war, and emphasizes a single theme. The Iliad is about precisely what, in the first of its 15,693 lines, it says it’s going to be about: the wrath of Achilles. 48. Homer, et al. The Iliad: The Stephen Mitchell Translation. Blackstone, 2018.
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This is the crux of the poem. For, as Achilles later reminds his fellow Greeks, he has been allowed to choose between a long, insignificant life and a brief, glorious one: if he stays to fight and die in Troy it is precisely because he doesn’t want to be a nobody. Agamemnon’s insult makes a mockery of his choice—it empties his short life of what meaning it had. Hence the uncanny, even inhuman rage. (The noun that Homer uses, mênis, is otherwise used only of gods; in the Greek, it’s the first word of the poem.) The extent to which the young warrior’s world has been turned upside down is reflected in the radical course of action—or, rather, inaction—that he now decides upon. Before, he had fought to prove who he was: now he will demonstrate his worth by not fighting. For nearly the entirety of the poem—from Book 1 to Book 20, when he finally reënters the fray—Achilles, the greatest of all warriors, never lifts a weapon. He knows that, without him, the Greeks will suffer badly: their suffering, he declares, will be a “compensation.” And, indeed, his anger “hurled down to Hades the souls of so many fighters” (as Mitchell renders one of the poem’s introductory lines, in the nicely strong five-beat line he favours). But his mênis touches Heaven, too: in those same lines the poet adds that it brings to fruition a divine scheme, one we get to see unfolding in the many scenes set on Mt. Olympus. But even as it traces the intense trajectory of Achilles’ wrath, the
49. Torgovnick, Marianna. The War Complex: World War II in Our Time. 1st ed., University of Chicago Press, 2005.
50. Alexander, Caroline. War That Killed Achilles. Penguin Books, 2022.
51. Gray, Glenn. The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle. New York: Harcourt, 1959.
Iliad simultaneously spirals outward, giving you a picture of everything else that is at stake in this (or any) war story. Just to list the great set pieces—episodes so fully achieved that tradition has given them their own names—is to run through a remarkable variety of subjects, themes, and techniques. The “Catalogue of Ships,” in Book 2, is a prodigious history lesson, complete with the names and numbers of every contingent of the Greek fleet; the sheer recitation of it must have been an astonishing tour de force in performance—epic poetry’s answer to CinemaScope. The “Teichoscopia” (“Watching from the Wall”), in Book 3, set atop the walls of Troy, gives us glimpses of Troy’s richly civilized society, one character’s psychology, and the mechanics of the poem itself. Here Helen, by now the regretful, slightly embarrassed and embarrassing guest of Paris’s family (“bitch that I am,” she moans), points out to King Priam and his elegant courtiers the various Greeks on the field of battle below, men she knew in her former life. The pathos of such stoicism in the face of inevitable disaster is exceeded, if that’s possible, by what comes next. Hector, who is still in his armour, leans over to pick up his young son, but the boy recoils screaming until his father takes off his terrifying helmet. It’s unlikely that literature will find a better symbol for the way in which war makes us unrecognizable—to others, to ourselves. This war will render Achilles unrecognizable, too: both the means and the effects of his transformation are what make the Iliad the first genuinely tragic narrative in the Western tradition (just as the Odyssey, with its successful homecoming and climactic marital reunion, is the first comedy). For his wrath causes an unexpected and catastrophic loss of his own: the death of his friend Patroclus. In Book 16, Patroclus takes the field dressed in Achilles’ armour in order to give the Trojans a scare. It works for a while, but he’s no Achilles, and the Trojans slay him. The harrowing scenes of grief that follow demonstrate a truth that Achilles grasps too late: his reputation wasn’t, after all, the thing he valued most. That the insight is inseparable from the loss is what gives the poem its wrenching grandeur. Pathetic mathos, Aeschylus wrote in his “Agamemnon,” one of the innumerable texts of later Greek literature that descended from the Iliad: we “suffer into knowledge.” All of which is to say that when Achilles returns to battle— returns to deal out death—he is armed with a vision of life. You could say that Western civilization has likewise armed itself, over ACHOS 49
The Trojans nev damage/they n cattle or my ho in Phthia where breeds strong m lay water my cr colossal, shame followed you/to to fight for you, honour back fro 50 FATE AND RAGE
ver did me never stole my orses, never/ e the rich soil men/did they rops./No, you, eless—we o please you, , to win your om the Trojans. 51
the bloodstained centuries and millennia, with the Iliad—another richly detailed work of art that provides an image of every possible extreme of human experience, a reminder of who we are and who we sometimes strive to be. It’s because the Iliad is both so vast and so fundamental that the nature of its text, what stays in and what comes out, is so important.
52. Arnold, Matthew. On Translating Homer. Independant, 2021.
53. Homer, et al. Iliad: Lattimore Translation. Penguin, 1951.
Most of the time, the elisions are small, and they do eliminate some hiccups. For instance, West brackets a line in Book 13 in which Hector springs down from his chariot, on the not unreasonable ground that Hector hasn’t been riding in a chariot. Sometimes they are larger, and will alter your sense of a passage. Here, too, it’s not necessarily for the worse. In that scene between Hector and Andromache, her moving address is followed by seven lines in which this Trojan matron suddenly gives her husband advice on the deployment of his troops. Aristarchus thought there was something fishy about these verses, although West suggests that they were an expansion by P: Mitchell omits them. Mitchell’s stripping away takes other, subtler forms. In a translator’s note, he cites the now-canonical judgment of the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, who, in an 1861 essay called “On Translating Homer,” enumerated what he saw as the four cardinal qualities of Homeric verse: rapidity, plainness of syntax and diction, plainness of thought, and nobility. Homer’s Greek is capacious enough that he can achieve all four, but English translators have generally had to choose one or two at the expense of the others. (The sole exception is probably Alexander Pope, whose Iliad, set in rhyming couplets and published between 1715 and 1720, is among the greatest translations of any work in any language.) Richmond Lattimore’s craggy 1951 translation, which imitates Homer’s expansive six-beat line and sticks faithfully to his archaisms (“Odysseus... laid a harsh word upon him”), has nobility but not rapidity; classicists tend to favour it. The enormously popular version by the late Princeton scholar Robert Fagles, published in 1990, has a gratifying plainness—my students have always preferred it—but doesn’t get the grandeur. Other interpreters go their own way: the stark “War Music” of Christopher Logue is more an adaptation than a translation; Stanley Lombardo’s 1997 version goes for a tight-lipped, soldierly toughness—a post-Vietnam Iliad. All this, along with many other subtle effects, is gone from Mitchell’s Iliad, which, in its eagerness to reproduce what Homer says, strips away how he says it. (Mitchell’s translation, which
52 FATE AND RAGE
54. Porter, James. Homer: The History of an Idea,” UCP 2021.
he has said took him only two years, is marked by a certain hastiness: he misses many opportunities to render Homer’s rich linguistic effects.) It’s as if the translator, like the scholar who inspired him, were trying to get at some purer Iliad. In this, both men are indulging in a very old habit. In an article called “Homer: The History of an Idea,” the American classicist James I. Porter suggests that the very idea that there is a Homer whom we can somehow get back to, if only we work diligently enough, is a cultural fantasy of purity that dates back to ancient times. (Homer, he writes, “is, and probably always was... an idea of something that remains permanently lost to culture.”) But the Iliad isn’t pure, at least not in that superficial way; its richness, even its stiffness, is part of what makes it large, makes it commanding, makes it great. The Iliad doesn’t need to be modernized, because the question it raises is a modern—indeed, existentialist—one: how do we fill our short lives with meaning? The August 22nd issue of Time featured, on its “Briefing” page, a quote from a grieving mother about her dead son. The mother’s name is Jan Brown, and her son, Kevin Houston, a Navy seal, was one of thirty-seven soldiers killed in a rocket attack in Afghanistan this past summer. What she said about him might shock some people, but will sound oddly familiar to anyone who has read the Iliad: “He was born to do this job. If he could do it all over again and have a choice to have it happen the way it did or work at McDonald’s and live to be 104? He’d do it all over again.” Whoever Homer was and however he made his poem, the song that he sings still goes on. /
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/DESIGNED BY AILISH PHILLIPS /ALL RIGHTS RESERVED /MARCH 2035 /ISBN 728-282-543-2883 /PRINTED IN DUBLIN Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.