Readers of Stephen Mitchell’s fast-paced and very idiosyncratic new translation of the Iliad 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 such accretion being the whole of Book 10, whose tone and diction aren’t quite like those of the rest of the poem. 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.
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. Aristotle, one of the earliest critics to write about the poem, admired the work’s narrow focus. In his Poetics, Western culture’s oldest extant work of literary criticism, written around 335 BC—which is to say nearly half a millennium after the Iliad began its long career—the philosopher argued that
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 contains very few of the best-known episodes from 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 any of the horrors that took place during 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 focuses on just one episode from the tenth and final year of the war, and emphasizes a single theme: the anger of Achilles.
Why is he so angry? The Iliad can’t make sense if the reader doesn’t grasp a reality that would have been evident to the poem’s original audience, but which can sometimes be difficult for modern audiences to get their minds around: that the hero’s wrath, and with it the countless deaths he causes, is justified. Like the Trojan War itself, the trouble in the Iliad begins with the abduction of a young woman. In the first of the epic’s twenty-four books (the sections into which, at some point long after its composition, it was divided), Agamemnon is compelled to return one of his captured slave girls to her father, a priest of Apollo who comes begging for his daughter. (The god, who looks after his own, visits a plague on the Greeks until they comply.) The Greek commander makes up for this loss of property—and of face—by seizing one of Achilles’ slave girls. To us, the petty tit-for-tat might savor of the junior high school cafeteria (“You get to keep your own prize, yet I am forced / to … sit here, meekly, with nothing?” an incredulous Agamemnon sputters), but for the heroes in Homeric epic the spoils they amass—their quality, quantity, and provenance—are the symbols of their status, the markers of who they are in the world. This is why they fight. As Achilles tartly reminds Agamemnon, “I didn’t come here to Troy because of the Trojans. / I have no quarrel with them; they have done me no harm.” For this reason, the seizure of the girl is an intolerable affront; as the furious Achilles puts it, it makes him “a nobody.”
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 reenters the fray—Achilles, the greatest of all warriors, “the best of the Achaeans,” never lifts a weapon. He knows that, without him, the Greeks will suffer badly: their suffering, he declares, will be a “compensation.” It is a sign of the magnitude of his grievance that he is willing to let his allies die.
And indeed, we are told in the opening lines of the poem that his anger “hurled down to Hades the souls of so many fighters” (as Mitchell renders it, in the nicely strong five-beat line he favors). But Achilles’ 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 Mount Olympus. By the end of the poem, “the will of Zeus was accomplished.” The epic’s effortless oscillation between the mortal and immortal planes, between what is apparent and what, to the rest of us, is obscure, its special ability to see both foreground and background, detail and whole with equal clarity and comprehension, underpin its distinctive authority.
Some of the consequences of Achilles’ wrath are direct and obvious. The sinking fortunes of the Greeks, tracked in minute detail in the poem’s many battle scenes, are occasions to reflect on the horror, and the allure, of bloodshed. The rococo descriptions of the warriors’ deaths—Homer has more than sixty ways to say that someone died—remind you that violence in battle could have a different meaning for the Greeks than it does for us. For us, war is an aberration, and we tend to be squeamish about what happens in it; for them, it was a way of life—most Greek city-states were more or less continually at war—and Homer’s poem everywhere gives evidence of a kind of connoisseurship of martial violence. These heroes are artisans of death, with skills that we are invited to admire as we would admire the expertise of a potter or a blacksmith. In one memorable scene, Achilles’ beloved companion, Patroclus, spears a Trojan through the jaw and pivots the wounded man over his chariot rail “like a fisherman who sits on a jutting boulder / and hauls a tremendous fish up out of the sea / at the end of his line, caught on the bright bronze hook.” The contrast between the grisly violence of the battle scenes and such mundane evocations of ordinary life can give the poem a hallucinatory poignancy. Through the carnage, reminders of the peacetime world hover tantalizingly out of reach.
But even as it traces the intense trajectory of Achilles’ wrath—which, ultimately, will pit that greatest of the Greek champions against Hector, the prince of the besieged city and the greatest of the Trojans, in a climactic single combat—the 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 Cinema-Scope. 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’ 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. (It may be the end of the war, but it’s the beginning of the poem, and Homer has to come up with some way of introducing the main characters.) The “Embassy,” in Book 9, in which the Greeks send a trio of chieftains to appeal to Achilles, shows a subtle grasp of psychology and rhetoric.
So the poem grows and grows. There are scenes set in soldier’s huts, scenes set in great palaces, scenes of sacrifice, scenes of quiet and mirth. Some scenes are set in the Greek camp, whose grubby inhabitants are separated by ten years of fighting from the habits and institutions of civilized life; others are set in Troy, the preeminent city, with its lofty walls and elegant courtiers and perfumed bedrooms and seemingly inexhaustible wealth, a place that reminds us of what is at stake when countries go to war. There are sex scenes. One of the most charming passages in the poem, in Book 14, describes how Hera dolls herself up and seduces Zeus, a ruse meant to distract him from the fact that one of the pro-Greek gods is violating his order not to interfere with the progress of the war; crocuses and hyacinths sprout and bloom beneath them as they make love. Indeed, the inconsequential quarrels of the gods on Mount Olympus, who can’t die in battle and who watch the Trojan War much as we watch football games, seem to mock the dire strife between the men below.
There are scenes of extraordinary domestic intimacy, filled with tender emotions that stand in vivid contrast to Achilles’ titanic feelings. Undoubtedly the most famous of these is the one in Book 6 where we get to see Hector, the defender of Troy (his name means something like “the one who holds things together”), returning from the battlefield to spend time with his troubled wife, Andromache. She fears for his safety and begs him to stay out of the fighting—a thing they both know he can’t do, not least because with him, as with Achilles, honor is at stake: “It is my place / to be brave and scorn danger and always fight in the front line.” What’s remarkable is that he goes to that place, knowing full well that “a day will come when the sacred city of Troy / will be devastated, and Priam, and Priam’s people.” Even though he knows his people and his family will die, what Hector can’t bear, he tells his wife, is the thought of her as some Greek’s slave,
bent over the loom of some stern mistress
or carrying water up from her well—hating it
but having no choice, for harsh fate will press down upon you.
And someone will say, as he sees you toiling and weeping,
“That is the wife of Hector, bravest of all
the Trojans, tamers of horses, when the great war
raged round Troy.” And then a fresh grief will flood
your heart.…
The poignancy of this resigned vision of an inevitable future is exceeded, if that’s possible, by what comes next: the famous moment when Hector, who is still in his armor, leans over to pick up his young son, and the boy recoils screaming until his father takes off his terrifying helmet. It’s unlikely that there will ever be a greater symbol for the way in which war makes us unrecognizable—to others, to ourselves.
But this war will render Achilles unrecognizable, too. 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 Achilles’ revenge, designed to enhance the reputation he values above all other things, sets in motion a dreadful loss of his own. In Book 16, the tenderhearted Patroclus begs his friend to let him help the Greeks, and has dreamed up a clever plan as to how to do it: he’ll wear Achilles’ armor into battle and thus fool the Trojans into thinking the great hero is back in the fight. Achilles consents, while warning his friend not to push too hard: for after all, Patroclus is no Achilles. (You could say that the whole point of the poem is that only Achilles is Achilles.) But Patroclus does get carried away—he, too, is made unrecognizable by war—and ends up challenging Hector, who kills 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. Pathei mathos, Aeschylus wrote in his Agamemnon, one of the innumerable texts of later Greek literature that descended from the Iliad: we “suffer into knowledge.”
The Iliad ends as it began, with a desperate parent pleading to get his child back. In the last book of the poem, Priam comes in secret to Achilles’ tent to beg for the body of Hector, whom by this point Achilles has slain. The two enemies share a moment of unexpected tenderness, one that suggests that Achilles’ capacity for recognizable human emotions has been enlarged: moved by the sight of the courageous old man, he weeps, thinking of his own father back home—the father and the home he’ll never see again, because, as we know, he has chosen a short, glorious life. This connection to his already lost past breaks something loose in Achilles. The hero who, before, had been willing to let his own comrades die in order to enhance his honor now breaks bread with the enemy king, treating the old man honorably and giving him, in the end, what he wants. In his introduction to Robert Fagles’s 1990 translation of the Iliad, by far the preeminent and most popular English rendering of the past generation, the late classicist Bernard Knox, who among other things was an expert on Sophocles, argued that at the beginning of the poem, Achilles is marked by the same “stubborn, passionate devotion to an ideal image of self” that distinguishes tragic heroes such as Antigone and Oedipus; what makes the trajectory of the Iliad so moving is that at the end, this stubborn hero starts to turn his attention outward, toward, as Knox puts it, “community.” In a culminating oscillation between private and public, the closeup and the sweeping pan, the finale of the poem is divided between the moment of breathtaking intimacy between Achilles and Priam and the grand funeral the Trojans give Hector. Together, the two scenes represent the final, most distant, unimaginable yet inevitable consequences of the wrath of Achilles.
And so, paradoxically, by maintaining its tight Aristotelian grip on its single theme, the Iliad manages to suggest the whole range of human action and emotion—of an existence that, unlike that of the gods, has meaning precisely because we, like Achilles, know it will end.
As if to underscore this, Homer puts a picture of human existence into his epic—a literal picture. In Book 18, after Achilles finds himself in need of new armor, Hephaestus, the blacksmith god, forges a shield for him. Homer devotes fully 130 lines to the description of this intricate object. In what is surely the most elaborate bit of repoussé in history, the shield presents images of a city at peace and a city at war, of weddings and a lawsuit, of people dancing and people arming for ambush, of gods and mortals and animals, of pastures and vineyards, of plowing and sheaving. There are scenes that look suspiciously like scenes from the Trojan War itself (“wives / and children were standing upon the wall to defend it / along with the men who were too old to fight now”), and scenes that, like so many of the extended similes in the poem, offer a mirage-like vision of a life that many of the combatants haven’t known for too long, a life of feasting and singing and peace. To complete his masterpiece, the god sets a boundary around this teeming scene: “the powerful river of Ocean flowing / … along its outermost rim.”
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, at once expansive and movingly intimate, enormously rich but necessarily confined within a boundary that shapes it and gives it coherence. You could say that Western civilization has likewise armed itself, over 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.
Most ancient Greeks
believed that there was a poet called Homer who wrote down his poems; a notable exception was Josephus, the Jewish historian, who argued that the early Greeks were illiterate (unlike, needless to say, the early Hebrews). The historian Herodotus thought that Homer must have lived around four hundred years before his own time, which is to say around 800 BC. In about 150 BC, a scholar called Aristarchus, the head of the library at Alexandria and the greatest ancient expert on Homer’s texts, surmised that the poet had lived about a century and a half after the Trojan War itself—that is, around 1050 BC. It was generally thought that Homer wrote both the Iliad (a product of his passionate youth) and the Odyssey (the fruit of his wise and humorous old age), but some ancient scholars, called the Separatists, thought the poems were written by two different people. (The history of Homeric scholarship is filled with factions whose names make them sound like the parties in a religious war or the participants at a Freud conference: Separatists and Unitarians, Oralists and Analysts.) No fewer than seven cities in ancient times claimed Homer as a son—the ancient version of “George Washington Slept Here.”
The modern history of the controversy begins late in the eighteenth century, when a French scholar discovered a manuscript of the Iliad from the tenth century AD that came complete with transcriptions of the marginal notes of ancient commentators (Aristarchus’ included). The notes made it clear that those earlier commentators had access to different and sometimes competing versions of the poems. This discovery soon led a German scholar named Friedrich August Wolf to argue that the texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey that we possess had not been fixed in writing until relatively late. Homer, he argued, couldn’t write but had composed a series of ballads (or “lays”) that were short enough to be memorized and that were transmitted orally for generations, perhaps by guilds of professional reciters; these were finally assembled, by someone who knew how to write, into the immensely long poems we have today.
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