Type-scenes spring from the routines of life, and consequently are marked with all the minor variations and major significance life holds. The second subtype is thematically connected with the first, but even more importantly it frames the entire Iliad. Rather than begging for life on the field and alluding to the wealth of fathers, the suppliants in the first and last books of the poem are fathers, asking for their children back. Chryses (1.12) offers apoina for his daughter Chryseis, the war prize of Agamemnon, who turns the priest away with wrathful words. Plague, death, and quarrel ensue, leading to the withdrawal of Achilleus. After the slaying of Hektor, Priam offers apoina to Achilleus (24.502) in order to retrieve his son’s corpse. This time, the supplicated warrior, prompted by the gods and stirred by memory of his own father, accedes to the request.
The fundamental basis of this art of repetition and elaboration is the use of epithets. To any reader of Homer, such recurrent phrases stand out in the memory: “Achilleus of the swift feet,” “strong-greaved Achaians,” “Menelaos of the great warcry.” As discussed above, the study of such elements led Milman Parry to speak of the traditional, and ultimately oral-performance, origins of Homeric verse making. But identifying a practical function for the formula (defined as any group of repeated words used under the same metrical conditions to express one idea) is one thing; they undoubtedly enabled performing poets to compose in the very act of performance (just as the best freestyling rap artists do today). Finding how the formula can aid literary interpretation is another. For all its predictability—with Achilleus being “brilliant” (dios) when two syllables are called for, “of the swift feet” (podas ôkus) when the hexameter line requires four—the formulaic phrase still contains meaning. Achilleus is never “of many machinations” (that is for Odysseus) even though the epithet can be made to fit the meter.
The formulaic system is neither mechanical nor empty. It simply embodies an unfamiliar aesthetic: rather than the exquisite, right word, specially selected for each passage (a Romantic poetic requirement), epic style creates audience expectations by consistent depiction—and then, for maximum effect, at key moments, violates the norm. Agamemnon, to take one instance, is addressed eight times in the Iliad and twice in the Odyssey with a full-line formula: “son of Atreus, most lordly, and king of men Agamemnon” (Atreïdê kudiste, anax andrôn Agamemnon). Yet at the very start of the poem (1.122) Achilleus calls him “son of Atreus, most lordly, greediest for gain of all men.” To a tradition-aware audience familiar with the formulaic system, this is shocking, more than it can ever be for the modern reader. For the line’s meaning depends not just on what is said (a pretty straight insult), but on what is obviously not said and known to be omitted. Achilleus has artfully and boldly replaced the title anax andrôn, referring to his foe’s acknowledged kingship, with a phrase implying that the king is without ethics. Such a pointed rhetorical usage implies a compositional method dependent on a connoisseur audience, an audience that must have developed a hypersensitivity to formulaic variation based on repeated hearings of many poems in this style. Comparative work in modern performance traditions, from Bosnia to Egypt, shows that this is the way oral-traditional art operates.
The final effect of such repetitions, from the shortest formula up to large-scale structural elements that recur in the Iliad, remains difficult to summarize. It can best be experienced from repeated reading. It makes for familiarity and certainty—sometimes comforting, sometimes bleak, since human brevities are seen for what they are. Sky, earth, houses, and above all, the sea and ships (which even in this, the landed epic, are still crucial)—these will typically be starry, black, close-built, swift (even when beached). We can depend on these archetypes, as if divine, in a world full of gods, to endure.
This rough sketch of stylistic devices cannot do justice to their complex and varied uses within the poem, for comment on which the reader is referred to the extensive line-by-line notes in this volume. Nor can discussion of style, however expansive, answer such questions as what the poem “means,” taken as a whole. For that, each generation must make up its own mind; as the next section will show, readers and writers in every era see the poem in different ways. While each generation can seek to learn from the previous, its own view will necessarily vary depending on historical, social, and cultural circumstances. It has been taken as a story of one man’s hubris, an arrogance bred from a sense of entitlement and power. Yet sometimes the hubris is pinned on Agamemnon, sometimes on Achilleus. Another interpretive bent would concentrate on the character of a heroic fighter faithful to an ideal and ready to die in its defense. But are we then talking about Hektor, loyal to Troy to the end? Or Achilleus, defender of the very notion of the reciprocal privileges of heroism, as represented by marks of honor? Is the Iliad a celebration of heroism or an interrogation of its basic—potentially flawed—assumptions? Whom should we emulate, if anyone, in this somber depiction of men and women under extreme conditions? Is it an elegy for a lost golden age, when people lived more out-sized and exciting lives? Or is it a warning about the catastrophes such lives engender? Is it a poem meant to shore up the ideological underpinnings of a fading aristocracy of self-centered warlords? Or does it capture the first glimmerings of a communal consciousness of the type that emerged in increasingly democratic (or at least nonelite) institutions within the city-state? The experience of the Iliad inevitably becomes one of self-exploration and self-definition in the face of such open-ended interpretive options.
RECEPTION AND TRANSLATION
Every modern reader of the Iliad stands in the shadow of those scores of previous readers who preserved and interpreted the poem. The text itself survived transitions of medium from oral poem to papyrus scroll to handwritten codex, then (in 1488, in the Florentine edition of Demetrius Chalcondyles) made the leap to the new technology of the printed book, and finally has become available, with the rest of Greek literature, in digital form. Alongside this remarkable transmission runs a rich history of reception. Painters and poets, composers and dramatists, choreographers, comic book artists, film directors, and makers of video games have made use of Homeric materials, in astonishing variations—too many even to be mentioned, let alone to be treated in detail here.
At the same time, it could be argued that no single successor has been able to match the power of the original. The movie Troy (2004), directed by Wolfgang Petersen, proved how daunting is the prospect. While thousands of works allude to or represent Achilleus, Hektor, Helen, and Paris, it is difficult to pinpoint a single artistic effort that takes on the task of reproducing the Iliad whole—freshly imagined but with equal epic scope. By contrast, the Odyssey has seen a number of artful full-scale recastings just in the past century, from James Joyce’s Ulysses to Derek Walcott’s Omeros. What makes the reception of the Iliad different?
A straightforward answer might point to the relative challenges of plot-driven versus character-driven stories. The Odyssey provides a satisfying ending: spouses reunited, a family reintegrated, a community revived. Indeed, the poem has been viewed as the template for subsequent comedy and romance. The Iliad is not such a happy tale; its strength lies elsewhere. Achilleus is as interesting and complex a character as Odysseus, but the latter cannot master his fate on a homecoming buffeted by Athene and Poseidon, whereas the former, with god-like rage, initiates and controls almost all the events in his tragic story. The Iliad is about the individual wrath of Achilleus; the Odyssey, about a man who, despite divine wrath, made it home.
Achilleus’ character has grounded the post-Homeric treatments of the Iliad story. Successive generations turned him into an embodiment of manhood, of plain-spoken courage (opposed to the cunning, smooth rhetoric of Odysseus), an icon of valor, and sometimes a warning against uncontrollable feeling. His figure is ripe for contesting. The tragedian Aeschylus produced, sometime in the early fifth century BC, a trilogy about several episodes of the Trojan War, of which a few fragments remain. In the opening drama (Myrmidons), his Achilleus sat si
lent and unmovable as the embassy of Greeks begged for his return. A generation later, Aristophanes in the Frogs (lines 911–15) mocked Aeschylus (and by extension his Achilleus) by depicting the playwright as massive and mute in the face of the clever talker Euripides. In the Iphigeneia at Aulis of Euripides (produced 405 BC), Achilleus is somewhat naive, upright, and blunt, though less laconic. His fame has been exploited in a plot to lure Agamemnon’s daughter into being sacrificed, under the false promise of marriage to the great hero. Achilleus, on discovering the ruse, characteristically reacts with a pledge to rescue her even though the entire army threatens him with stoning. Iphigeneia’s would-be protector is saved only by the girl’s acceptance of her fate.
That the relative merits and characters of Odysseus and Achilleus were a hot topic among Greek intellectuals in the early fourth century is clear from Plato’s dialogue Hippias Minor. In another Platonic work, the Apology, the philosopher’s teacher Socrates is portrayed as consciously following the example of Achilleus by refusing to avoid his own death penalty (28b–d). At yet another point, however, Plato makes his old teacher demonstrate that the epics are inappropriate for teaching the guardians of the ideal state, since Homer depicts the gods as angry, lustful, and deceptive, and heroes as overpowered by their emotions (Republic 377–91e).
Roman treatments were more one-sided. Cicero (106–43 BC) shared Plato’s distrust of passion (as did the Stoics, Cicero’s philosophical masters). In the Tusculan Disputations, Achilleus becomes the antitype of the sapiens, the wise man in charge of his feelings. The Homeric hero’s anger (ira) verges on madness (insania) (Tusc. 3.9.18). Virgil, who alludes to Achilleus twenty-six times in the Aeneid (19 BC) insists on his role as the killer who once threatened the Trojans—the ancestors of Rome. Turnus, the final nemesis of the champion Aeneas, is predicted to be a sort of reincarnation of the Greek, alius Achilles: “in Latium another Achilleus is brought forth, the offspring of a goddess, as well,” says the prophetic Sybil (Aen. 6.89–90). The Achilleid by the later Roman poet Statius (45–96 AD) remained unfinished (a fate that would befall identically named compositions by Goethe in 1797 and Richard Wagner in 1850). But even in the extant 1,127 lines covering his early years, Achilleus emerges as violent or dangerous, a menace to young animals and girls. The Greeks consider him belligerum numen, “a divinity of war” (Achilleid 1.504). This image of the warrior would predominate in the centuries to come.
The twenty-five-year-old Edward Gibbon, future author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789) noted the hero’s contradictory appeal, recording in his diary for July 2, 1762:
I reviewed the whole eighteenth book of the Iliad. Homer is never more thoroughly awake: the first part of it shews him to be a perfect master of the tender passions. Achilleus receives the news of the death of Patroklos, with a mixture of fury and tenderness suitable to his character. We begin to love him; and the very excess of his rage, though terrible, pleases us, because it is directed only against the murderer of his friend.11
The nineteenth century saw monumental expression of varied aspects of this powerful character. Overwhelming grief—that which beset him and which he later aroused—made the hero an apt reference point for the “Achilleion,” a summer palace built in 1890 on Corfu by Empress Elizabeth of Austria, in memory of her son Rudolf, dead at thirty. Triumph in war is commemorated by the statue of Achilleus dedicated in 1822 at Hyde Park Corner, London, to the Duke of Wellington, and cast from cannons taken at Waterloo. French painters of the period, in particular, sought to capture the complex moods of Achilleus as we know them from the Iliad: resignation (Lefebvre’s Thetis Consoles Achilleus, 1858), fear (Schopin’s Achilleus Pursued by Scamander, 1831), and pity (Priam at the Feet of Achilleus—depicted by Langlois in 1809 and Wencker in 1876) stand out among dozens of large-scale realistic representations.
The sufferings of the first World War, however, damped enthusiasm for the heroic embodiment of violent passion and revenge. In the Gallipoli campaign of 1915 more than 130,000 soldiers died on both sides of the conflict over the Dardanelles—a few dozen kilometers from the site of ruined Troy. The English poet Laurence Binyon noted the irony that this far-away place was for many young men already deeply familiar:
Isles of the Aegean, Troy, and waters of Hellespont
You we have known from of old
Since boyhood stammering glorious Greek was entranced
In the tale that Homer told.
There scornful Achilles towered and flamed through the battle
Defying the gods; and there
Hektor armed and Andromache proudly held
Up his boy to him, knowing not yet despair.12
As in his earlier ode For the Fallen (1914), Binyon looked more to the modern winning of Homeric fame—“pale legendary glories by our own youth outdone”—than to the grimness of death. The mood is similar in the verses of another Englishman, Rupert Brooke, who died in April 1915 from septicemia contracted at Gallipoli and is buried on Skyros—the island where Achilleus, before the war, hid among the daughters of Lykomedes. The young soldier Patrick Shaw-Stewart (1888–1917), who survived Gallipoli, is more realistic. Overlooking the ruins at Hisarlik, he invoked the ancient hero as a companion and protector (or was it rather to be his substitute, like Patroklos?):
Was it so hard, Achilleus,
So very hard to die?
Thou knewest and I know not—
So much the happier I.
I will go back this morning
From Imbros over the sea;
Stand in the trench, Achilleus,
Flame-capped, and shout for me.13
For the rest of the blood-soaked century, the tale of Achilleus mostly symbolizes pain. W. H. Auden subverts the shining world of the shield fashioned by Hephaistos in book 18, making it depict instead the horrors of total war, which Thetis cannot comprehend:
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.14
Execution and rape, casual knifings and mindless obedience: the human reality makes a goddess blanch.
It must be noted that a different Achilleus coexisted in the imagination of the West: the lover. His relationship with Patroklos in the Iliad is one of close companionship, but already by the fifth century BC, Aeschylus explicitly made it homoerotic, with Achilleus recalling the thighs and kisses of his friend.15 Plato in the Symposium (180a) has a member of the drinking party, Phaedrus, declare that the gods rewarded Achilleus with afterlife in the Isles of the Blest because he had stood by his older lover. The Middle Ages celebrated Achilleus’ love for women: Briseis (a natural extrapolation from Homer); Deidameia, by whom he fathered Neoptolemos (not mentioned in the Iliad, but said in the Cypria to be his wife); and, most spectacularly, Polyxena, daughter of Priam. In the Hecuba of Euripides (circa 425 BC), the ghost of Achilleus is said to have appeared above his tumulus at the shore, commanding the Greeks to sacrifice Polyxena for his honor. His son Neoptolemos carries out the command. By the time of Seneca’s Trojan Women (circa 53 AD), the sacrifice had been transformed into a wedding-to-death, with Achilleus demanding a bride to consort with him in Elysium. Some centuries later, The History of the Fall of Troy (fifth century AD?) attributed to one Dares of Phrygia purports to be the eyewitness account of the Trojan War by a soldier on the losing side. In this late antique Latin text, a full-blown romance has develop
ed. Achilleus falls for Polyxena at first sight and even agrees to abandon his warring against her family’s city if he is allowed to marry her. Lured by Hecuba, supposedly for this purpose, to the Trojan shrine of Apollo, he is ambushed by Paris and slain. The romantic version, with yet more flourishes (and moralizing) became highly influential in the Middle Ages, through a hexameter epic on the fall of Troy by the crusader-poet, Joseph of Exeter (circa 1184) and Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s twelfth-century Roman de Troie. It is this theme that finds its way to Dante’s Inferno (circa 1310–1320) where the poet is commanded by his guide Virgil to observe the spirits of the lustful sinners (canto 5, lines 6–66):
Elena vedi, per cui tanto reo
tempo si volse, e vedi ’l grande Achille
che con amore al fine combatteo
In Laurence Binyon’s translation (1933):
See Helen, for whose sake the long years drew
Ill after ill; see great Achilles there
Who fought with love in the end and whom love slew.
Paradoxically, the two strands of ancient traditions intertwine, as killer and lover merge.
One could spend years following up such ramifications of the Homeric tale. The invaluable Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300–1900s allots fourteen close-printed pages to the afterlife of Achilleus; similar statistics can be found for Hektor, Helen, and Paris. The Iliad is the ultimate reference point for such disparate works as Ingres’ painting of Hektor bidding farewell to Andromache (1801); Schubert’s Lied on the same theme (1815); Helen at the Scaean Gate by the Symbolist artist Gustave Moreau (circa 1880), Offenbach’s comic opera La belle Hélène, and Edgar Allan Poe’s poem To Helen (1823); Milton’s Paradise Lost and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida; dances by Martha Graham; series of illustrations by Rubens, de Chirico, Flaxman, and D. G. Rossetti; watercolors by Romare Bearden; and choral works by Gustav Holst. In brief, when traced through its offshoots the poem offers entry to an entire education in Western culture.
The Iliad of Homer Page 8
