Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

  Simone Weil and many others have read the Iliad as an antiwar poem. But to see it as a polemic in that sense is to reduce it. Homer knows about the reality of suffering but never thinks of a world without conflict. On the shield of Achilles, the smith god Hephaestus creates dazzlingly opposed images of the good world and the bad, set against each other. But even in the good world of justice there is still murder and violence. We might long for peace, but we live in war, and the Iliad is a poem about the inescapability of it.

  All of that lies behind the Iliad’s massive oversupply of suffering. The poet’s conception that the Greeks have been on this beach for nine long, dreadful years—a historical absurdity—stands in for eternity. This is how things are. This is how things have always been. This is how things are going to continue to be. War is the air a warrior society must breathe. And alongside that everlastingness of grief, its repetitive return, is a deeply absorbed knowledge that suffering can only be told in detail. No counting of casualties will do; no strategic overview will understand the reality; only the intimate engagement with the intimacy of pain and sorrow can ever be good enough for the enlightenment that is Homer’s purpose.

  Scholars have worked out that 264 people die in the course of the Iliad. It doesn’t seem enough. One atrocity in some villages on the northern borders of Syria, one nighttime drowning of African refugees in the Mediterranean, one week of car bombs in Baghdad—any of them can outdo it. Only the epic engagement with Atē, the blind goddess of ruin, whose name means both “wrongness” and “wickedness,” can tell what those figures conceal. People are pitiably weak in the face of ruin, pathetically hoping that their prayers for happiness might prevail. That is why the goddesses of prayer in the Homeric universe are broken, tragic figures:

  they limp and halt,

  they’re all wrinkled, drawn, they squint to the side,

  can’t look you in the eye, and always bent on duty,

  trudging after Ruin, maddening, blinding Ruin.

  But Ruin is strong and swift—She outstrips them all,

  loping a march, skipping across the whole wide earth

  to bring mankind to grief.

  And the Prayers trail after, trying to heal the wounds.

  Christians might think of prayer as something that can summon divine power; Homer knows different. “Of all that breathe and crawl across the earth,” Zeus himself says, “There is nothing alive more agonized than man.” The term the great god uses is oïzuroteros, “more miserable,” from the word for a wailing lament, the unbroken, everlasting, ululating cry that echoes from one end of the Iliad to the other.

  When the poet is reaching for a comparison that will sharpen the pity of life and the futility of killing, it is fish that repeatedly drift into his consciousness. Perhaps because they are so disgusting, nibbling at the bodies of the dead; perhaps because a fish is so unable to look after itself when caught on a hook, in a net or on a spear, both fish and fishermen are for Homer absurd.

  Fish gasping for the sea are not simply poignant in their hopelessness. In the Iliad fishing is the source of some of Homer’s bitterest and jokiest comparisons. When Patroclus, the friend and childhood companion of Achilles, his great intimate in a world where no one else seems to love him, borrows Achilles’s armor at a moment of great crisis for the Greeks in the war at Troy, and strides out into the mass of the Trojans, he pins them against the ships drawn up on the sand. This is his aristeia, his moment of greatness, his time of horror. Patroclus rampages through the Trojan bodies, repetitively and brutally: “Patroclus keeps on sweeping, hacking them down, / making them pay the price for Argives slaughtered.”

  One poor Trojan, Cebriones, a bastard son of Priam, the king of Troy, is killed by Patroclus with a stone smashed into the front of his skull. Both Cebriones’s eyes fall out into the dust at his feet, and the body, jerked into death, somehow dives out of the chariot to join them. The beautiful, elegant, much-loved Patroclus mocks the corpse: “Hah! look at you! Agile! How athletic is that, as if you were diving into the sea. You could satisfy an army if you were diving for oysters, plunging overboard even into rough seas as nimbly as that.” Corpse as oyster diver; ridiculous victim, vaunting killer. At one point, in describing Patroclus’s safari, Homer sinks to nothing but a list of the names of those he destroys: “Erymas and Amphoterus and Epaltes and Tlepolemus son of Damastor and Echius and Pyris and Ipheus and Euippus and Polymelus, son of Argeas: corpse on corpse he piles on the all-nourishing earth.”

  Patroclus moves on, as Robert Fagles translated Homer’s phrase for the unstoppability of this, “in a blur of kills.” But then the rapidity, the appetite for more, stops and stills for a moment, and dwells on the detail of one particular death, one moment of heroic prowess.

  Next he goes for Thestor the son of Enops

  cowering, crouched in his beautiful polished chariot,

  crazed with fear, and the reins jump from his grip—

  Patroclus rising beside him stabs his right jawbone,

  ramming the spearhead square between his teeth so hard

  he hooks him by that spearhead over the chariot rail,

  hoists and drags the Trojan out as an angler perched

  on a jutting rock ledge drags some fish from the sea,

  some precious catch, with line and glittering bronze hook.

  So with the spear Patroclus gaffs him off his car,

  his mouth gaping round the glittering point

  And flips him down facefirst,

  dead as he falls, his life breath blown away.

  Man as fish, body as rag doll, killing as a form of acrobatics, the absurdity of the slaughtered corpse—this is vertigo-inducing, a plunge into the black hole of reality, fueled by the mismatch of sea-angling with war.

  Christopher Logue, the most brilliant of all modern interpreters of Homer, drove these lines farther into domestic savagery.

  Ahead, Patroclus braked a shade, and then and gracefully

  As patient men cast fake insects over trout,

  He speared the boy, and with his hip as pivot

  Prised Thestor out of the chariot’s basket

  As easily as lesser men

  Detach a sardine from an opened tin.

  The first fighting does not begin until 2,380 lines into the Iliad, but thereafter the blood flows, increasingly, with an increasing intensity and savagery, until the climax comes in the crazed berserker frenzy of Achilles’s grief-fueled rampage through the Trojans. The culmination is in the death of Hector, when steppe-man finally meets and kills the man of the city. The Greeks might think battle sweet, their warriors might see battle not as a burden but a cause for rejoicing, but Homer does not.

  Now the sun of a new day falls on the ploughlands, rising

  Out of the quiet water and the deep stream of the ocean

  To climb the sky. The Trojans assemble together. They find

  It hard to recognize each individual dead man;

  But with water they wash away the blood that is on them

  And as they weep warm tears they lift them on to the wagons.

  Great Priam does not let them cry out; and in silence

  They pile the bodies on the pyre, and when they have burned them

  go back to sacred Ilion.

  The Greek words translated here by Richmond Lattimore as “hard to recognize” carry multiple meanings. Chalepos (hard) means both “emotionally painful” and “difficult to do”; it is a word that can be applied either to grieving or to rough ground over which you cannot help but stumble as you walk. Diagnonai (to recognize, like diagnosis) means “to distinguish or discern,” to sort out a single important thing from a confused mass, to find individuality amid the blood and muck of the heaped-up bodies. So the phrase can mean either that it was physically difficult in the mounded carnage to make out who it was that was dead; or that finding your own dead amid the mass of others was the most harrowing of experiences. Or both. Those hot, silent Trojan tears, dákrua thermà, allied in these l
ines with the deep calm of the ocean and the water that washes the blood away, are among Homer’s greatest legacies to us, the persistent belief, amid all this damage, that there is value and beauty in human ties.

  * * *

  Homer’s portrait of the Greeks at Troy fits the historical situation in the centuries after 2000 BC, when newly empowered northern warriors, equipped with sailing ships and chariots, could batten on the walls of a rich trading city in northwest Anatolia, clamoring to get at its women and its goods. But it is also a portrait of something more enduring: a well-set-up, well-defended establishment is under attack from outsiders who long for, envy and wish to destroy it. The siege at Troy, often seen as a kind of war, as if these were two states battling with each other, is in fact more like a gang from the ghetto confronting the urban rich. Outsiders and insiders, nomadic and settled, the needy and the leisured, the enraged and the offended—the hero complex of the Greek warriors is simply gang mentality writ large.

  Iliadic behavior echoes through modern urban America. As the criminologists Bruce Jacobs and Richard Wright documented from the streets of St. Louis, Missouri, American gang members talk about themselves, their lives, their ambitions, their idea of fate, the role of violence and revenge, in ways that are strangely like the Greeks in the Iliad.

  Revenge is at the heart of their moral world, a repeated, angry and violent answer to injustice, to being treated in a way that does not respect them as people. There appears to be no overriding authority or legitimacy on the streets of St. Louis. Authority resides in the men themselves and their ability to dominate others. “This desire for payback,” Jacobs and Wright say, “is as human and as inevitable as hunger or thirst.” Crime itself on these streets becomes moral, and revenge a form of justice.

  Like the Greeks, these gangsters are “urban nomads,” not set up in their elaborate houses, but living nowhere in particular, “staying” or “resting their head” in different places according to mood or what is going on. They are rootless, dependent on themselves, displaying their glory on their bodies, in their handsomeness, their jewelry and in the sexiness of the women on their arms and in their beds.

  They can only rely on themselves: “maintaining a reputation for toughness dominates day-to-day interaction.” And because any act of revenge has to deter the enemy from taking revenge in his turn, there is an accelerator built into the process. Any insult, any slight, any suggestion that you are not a man worthy of respect summons severe, intense and punitive retaliatory violence. Achilles longs to kill Agamemnon after he has humiliated him in public over a slave girl he loves. The St. Louis gangsters take revenge without a thought.

  One evening a man called Red knocks into a stranger at a bar by mistake and spills his glass of cognac on him. In response, the stranger “bitch-slaps” him, not with a closed fist but with an open hand, usually reserved for women. “Everyone was watching,” Red says, “so it made me look bad.” Red leaves the bar and waits in the dark in the parking lot. When the man comes out he shoots him, not once but several times. This is the only way in a warrior society that you can be yourself or protect the fragile boundaries of the self, forever under attack from those around you who are all feeling the same.

  Homer usually talks with a mysterious decorum about acts of extreme and horrifying violence, perhaps as a product of the poem evolving over generations, so that a kind of linguistic dignity is laid over the top of the violence itself; but have no doubt, the words of the gangsters reflect a Homeric reality, nowhere more than in book 10 of the Iliad. The behavior that book describes is peculiarly horrible, a stripping away of any skin of dignity and nobility. Like “two lions into the black night/Through the carnage and through the corpses, the war gear and the dark blood,” Odysseus and Diomedes slink off toward the Trojan line.

  They come across a young Trojan, Dolōn, out in the night and set off to chase him, “like two rip-fanged hounds that have sighted a wild beast, a young deer or a hare.” They catch him, and he stands in front of them in terror, gibbering and in tears. The two Greeks interrogate him, smiling, getting out of him any information they can, but he knows what is to come. He begs for his life, reaching up to the chin of Diomedes, asking for mercy, but Diomedes

  strikes the middle of his neck

  With a sweep of the sword, and slashes clean through both tendons,

  And Dolōn’s head—still speaking—drops in the dust.

  This is the most shocking moment in Homer, part of a hideous murder-run in the dark, with many dead, and booty taken, including wonderful horses and chariots, at the end of which Odysseus laughs aloud, has a swim in the sea and then a beautiful bath. Its amusement and delight at violence leaves a hollow in the reader’s heart, which is scarcely filled by the way the Greeks “vaunt” over the bodies of the people they have killed, calling them fools, telling the world of their own excellence, their right to stand over the dead and damaged body of the rival. This is also how gangsters “trash talk.” “I got your punk ass,” Bobcat tells one of his victims, “and now look at you … Now if you’d paid this cheese [money], you’d have been all right, but now you fucked up, you bleeding and shit … you talking about your ribs broke. Now what the fuck?”

  Words are a way of making it hurt. This is the hero delivering justice, telling his victim, and his audience around him, just how powerful he is in the world. “Catching and punishing those who have wronged them makes offenders feel mighty,” Jacobs and Wright say, “while at the same time it masks their objective impotence.” “I had an adrenaline rush,” one of their informants told them about a particularly horrible piece of violence, “like I was the shit, like I was in control.” “I felt like I was in some pussy,” another said after using a baseball bat to break the legs of a man who had vandalized his car. “You know [like I] busted [a] nut”—or ejaculated.

  This elision of self-enlargement, sexual gratification and extreme violence to other men’s bodies lurks in the subtext of Homer. A theater of sex and violence is at the heart of both the Iliad and the Odyssey: the stolen woman Helen; the twice stolen woman Briseis (once from her family, all of whom Achilles has murdered, once from Achilles, who comes to love her); the recurrent boast that the Greeks will kill the Trojan men and take their women, as they have taken other women from other cities; the sexual battening on Penelope by the suitors; the savage retribution exacted by Odysseus on those who have wanted to have sex with Penelope, and then on the women of his own household who had had sex with those suitors. This is a core reality in Homer, which finds its explicit echoes in gangland.

  Colton Simpson, from South Central Los Angeles, was fourteen in 1980. His mentor Smiley, his “road dog,” his running mate, glows to him like a hero, just as Achilles and every Indo-European hero has always glowed: “When he smiles it’s as if the light, the sun behind him, fills me, fills each and every one of us standing there before him.”

  When the law is no good, the only justice that makes sense is retaliatory, and that is the governing ethic of the Greeks in the Iliad. It is the dark heart of the gang on the beach, where personal affronts attack identity, where counterstrikes tend to be excessive, where minor slights are interpreted as major blows to character, where warriors rely on the honor that accrues to those who demonstrate prowess in disputes, where honor is accumulated much like real capital and bringing someone down for what he did to you raises your worth in the eyes of your peers, where intolerance earns respect and strength is protective. Every one of those phrases in italics is used by Jacobs and Wright to describe life in the murderous slums of St. Louis, Missouri; every one also describes the world of the Iliad.

  The city itself floats in the half distance, a dream world of order, where the warrior is not constantly under test, where he can rely on those who are around him and who love him. The marginalized gang members, shut out beyond its walls, can only look on with envy and loathing.

  Violence in the warrior gang is a means to survive and prosper. Without violence they would shrive
l and fade, beaten by the city, by the pointy heads and the Brahmins. Violence is only doing what justice requires them to do. Violence is their destiny. And it should come as no surprise that these gangs must also have their epics. “No one forgets who was killed where and for what purpose,” the Berkeley sociologist Martín Sánchez-Jankowski wrote. “Some Chicano gang members can tell you who was killed twenty years ago, before they were born, because this history has been passed down to them, these members have attained a degree of immortality, which mutes the fear of death and much of its inhibiting power.” The gangs treasure kleos aphthiton, deathless glory, because in their vulnerability and their transience, the way in which there is nothing beyond their bodies and the memory of their actions, they need it more than anyone who is lucky enough to live in the law-shaped, law-embraced, wall-girdled city.

  There is a code of conduct within the gang, as there is among the Greeks. Neither rape nor fighting with weapons was allowable within any of the thirty-eight gangs studied by Sánchez-Jankowski. The same kind of sanction exists within the Greek camp, although the natural fissiveness of all gang life is reflected there too. Achilles and his men come within a whisker of leaving Agamemnon’s coalition. Nevertheless, there is a rawness in modern gang life and their talk—the gang term for a gaping wound is “a pussy”—from which Homer holds back. The LA gang world takes delight in the explicit elision of sex and violence, dominance and abuse, in a way that Homer buries and dignifies. The latent sexuality that is threaded through the poems never quite breaks the surface. Homer can be horrifyingly direct and concrete but is never ugly, as if the language has been washed and cleansed in the centuries over which the poems evolved. The trash talk of the Greeks on the beach is conveyed in terms that could be heard in the halls at Pylos. The words of the desperate men in South Central LA and East St. Louis perform some archaeology on that Homeric language, stripping away its civility, exposing the body and the suffering beneath; but that should not be seen as some kind of return to truth. Homeric truth, the meaning of Homer, is about the integration and fusion of qualities, the acquired wisdom of Homer knowing warrior rage intimately but seeing and hearing it through the words of the city.