by Homer
THE CENTRAL THEME OF THE ILIAD
The purpose of this section is to re-run the Iliad and offer some sense of the main issues underlying the narrative. At its heart, the epic raises for Achilles the question ‘What is a man’s life worth?’. Three preliminary points must be made.
First, battle is sometimes described in Homer as the place ‘where men win glory’ and, in a trivial sense, the glory of the Homeric hero bears comparison with that of a modern professional sportsman: both perform in the public arena, nothing else counts but winning, and the purpose of the exercise is to gain wealth and respect. So victory and its rewards, material and social, are the Homeric heroes’ priorities, the ultimate ambition being kleos, fame that stays with you after death; while judgement of success or failure lies in the first place with one’s peers, not with any internalized sense of self-worth (which does not mean heroes do not have that sense – Achilles certainly does). Defeat and insult are both taken extremely badly.
Second, heroes are complex and richly characterized humans, not unthinking fighting machines. They would far rather not have to fight at all. Hector freely acknowledges that Achilles is a better fighter than he is. Diomedes can absorb an insult when it is not deserved, because he knows what he is capable of (but he does not forget it). But most of all, since in the martial world of the Iliad failure usually means death, fighting is not glorified for its own sake. ARES is the most hateful of gods, and war is described with a whole range of painful epithets (‘with all its tears’, etc.). The heroes do not want to die. Time and again Homer emphasizes their desire to return home, to the family. Battle is a means to an end, a way of life that gives them the chance to win a reputation among their fellows and longed-for immortal glory, but as the moving Hector-Andromache scene shows, it is set within a larger human framework.3
Finally, we must not entertain the idea that the Greek army is like a modern army, with a clear command structure which automatically makes disobedience to Agamemnon ‘wrong’. Agamemnon is acknowledged as overall leader of the expedition by virtue of the number of troops he brought with him, but as the constant debates make clear, authority is not taken for granted: it is demonstrated by the ability to win an argument and to persuade the rest to acquiesce (whence the requirement for heroes to be effective speakers as well as fighters). Only on Olympus is there an undisputed master who can command automatic obedience – ZEUS – and that, in the end, is down to his sheer physical superiority.
The problem Achilles faces is that he is fated to live only a short life and therefore knows he has little time in which to earn eternal fame. So life to him seems peculiarly intense, and when in Book 1 Agamemnon says that he may well take Achilles’ girl Briseis in place of Chryseis, that is serious enough for a man like Achilles, known for his love of a quarrel, to threaten to abandon the army. His argument is set out at 1.149–171: (i) The Trojans never did me any harm, (ii) we are fighting for Menelaus’ and Agamemnon’s honour, but (iii) while I do all the fighting, I am given minimal reward, and (iv) now Agamemnon proposes to take away even what I have been given.
Agamemnon’s response precipitates Achilles’ exit: he both urges Achilles to leave the fighting and assures him that he will certainly take Briseis. In other words, Agamemnon is announcing before the whole army that Achilles, their greatest fighter, is surplus to his and the expedition’s requirements, and that he (Agamemnon) will do precisely what he likes with Achilles’ hard-won property. It is this violent, public, unjust and therefore deeply humiliating attack on Achilles’ assessment of his importance to the Greek army, followed by Agamemnon’s seizure of what is his by rights, that drives Achilles to contemplate killing Agamemnon, an act from which ATHENE barely restrains him. It is significant that no Greek objects to Achilles walking out: Agamemnon is clearly in the wrong and later admits it.4
But in Book 9, when Agamemnon relents and agrees to offer compensation, Achilles’ position has changed. There is now nothing that will induce him to fight. He repeats to the embassy the original accusation that he does all the fighting and Agamemnon gets all the rewards; but now he goes further. No material compensation can pay him back, because all the compensation in the world cannot equal the worth of one’s life.
The embassy is stunned by this response, and has every right to be: if Achilles will not accept compensation, offered through the mediation of those who are his closest friends, what will he accept? This is simply not the way the material-oriented heroic world works. The leadership is equally stunned when it hears of the failure of the mission. Diomedes, however, points out that the embassy was always going to be a waste of time; Achilles has never been anything but his own man; he will fight when he wants to, and there is nothing that can be done about it. Diomedes is right, as is Achilles’ companion Patroclus, who later points out that, since a hero is supposed to benefit his people, Achilles’ angry absence from battle serves no purpose: ‘You and your disastrous greatness – what will future generations have to thank you for, if you do nothing to prevent the Greeks’ humiliating destruction?’
Diomedes sees that Achilles is not dissatisfied with the theory of material compensation for wrongs suffered. He is just being Achilles. If Achilles knew what he wanted to induce him back to the fighting, all he had to do was to say: the embassy would have promised it at once (and, incidentally, the Iliad would have ended there). But all he knows is that Agamemnon must ‘pay back the whole heart-rending insult’. No member of the embassy enquires what he means by this. They are doing all they can, and Achilles is not interested. No wonder Aristotle calls Achilles ‘a good man, but a paradigm of obstinacy’.5
But if the consequences for the Greeks are bad, they are catastrophic for Achilles. His decision not to rejoin the fighting is the beginning of the end for him. It is the first of a sequence of decisions he now takes in full confidence that he has judged the situation correctly, when in fact he has got it all utterly, and ultimately tragically, wrong. In Book 11, he feels the Greeks really will beg him to return now. But they do not. In Book 16, when Hector sets fire to a ship, Achilles agrees that Patroclus should go out to fight in his place to avert the immediate crisis: that, he feels, should solve the problem. He is wrong: Hector kills Patroclus. In Book 18 Achilles decides to avenge Patroclus’ death. That at least should bring satisfaction. It does not: killing Hector achieves nothing for Achilles’ state of mind. The burial of Patroclus and the funeral games at least bring some sense of reconciliation with Agamemnon, yet Achilles still cannot sleep and continues to mutilate Hector. But over-riding all of these considerations is the grim consequence of his decision to avenge Patroclus’ death: it will mean his own death soon after, and he takes the decision in the full knowledge that this is the case. Some tragedies take a man unawares. Hector is one such: it is only at the end that Hector realizes his time has come, though we have been alert to it well before that. Patroclus is another (though in true tragic fashion Book 16 is full of ironies and markers of his impending doom which none but the audience can see). Achilles looks his tragedy full in the face and does not flinch.6
What is a man’s life worth? Achilles gives his answer in Book 18 – a man’s life is worth revenge on the person who killed his beloved companion. It is in many ways a horrifying decision: Achilles is signing his own death warrant. But it is also in many ways a more than heroic one. The Homeric world of material compensation and heroic status, such critical issues for Achilles back in Book 1, seems far away. Achilles chooses to die not primarily to win everlasting glory (though he hopes his feat of arms will achieve this), but because he holds himself responsible for Patroclus’ death.
Nevertheless, even the immediate consequences for Achilles are grim: self-willed lover of conflict he may have been already, but the poet goes out of his way to emphasize how far he plunges off the scale of human normality as he seeks this single-minded revenge. He becomes maddened, almost bestial, in his desire for it, and the gods agree: Achilles is like a lion, destroying pity and knowing no
shame.
In his deranged state, it is little wonder that revenge brings Achilles no comfort. This is what makes Book 24 so remarkable. Consumed by his desire for revenge but confronted by its failure to resolve his anguish, Achilles ends his assault on the body of the dead Hector and returns it to his father Priam. But this is no last-minute conversion, no sudden seeing of the light, even though ZEUS assures THETIS that returning the body will bring Achilles glory. Achilles knows it is ZEUS’ will, and that he has no option. Further, his famous speech of consolation to Priam is more ‘counselling’ than consolation. He sees their tragedies jointly intertwined. Life, says Achilles, is at best a mixture of good and ill, as it has been for both Priam and Achilles’ father Peleus: by Achilles’ efforts Priam, a father, has lost his son Hector; by these same efforts Achilles has lost Patroclus, and his father Peleus will shortly have lost his son too. But there is also an extraordinary moment when Priam and Achilles gaze on each other in admiration – as if Priam sees something of Hector in the man who slaughtered his beloved son, and Achilles something of the old, lonely Peleus – soon to be yet more lonely – in the father of his worst enemy. Surely here we sense that there is more to life than revenge, more to manhood than the slaughter of men.
Here, then, in the West’s first work of literature, we see the intensive literary exploitation of a great human theme which seems to touch us all, however particular (and alien) the setting. It is not so much about what happens – the action is very limited – as what is going on in the mind of its central figure, Achilles. It will be a model for much future literature.
The Iliad is also the world’s first tragedy. Two hundred years before the Greek tragic poets invented the medium for the stage, Homer had grasped its essential nature in the figure of Patroclus (see above, and note 6) and even more of Achilles – an initially wronged hero, of divine ancestry, who finds his world inexplicably turning to ashes as a result of the decisions he has freely, if intemperately, taken, whose greatness lies in his refusal to disclaim the responsibility for his actions, even though his own death will be the inevitable consequence.7
THE GODS
The ancient Greek historian Herodotus argued that Homer (and Hesiod, a near contemporary epic poet who composed Theogony, ‘The Birth of the Gods’) gave the Greeks their divinities.8 His point was that, from time immemorial, gods had been worshipped, through ritual, as faceless powers representing almost any aspect of human existence (see ‘Personification’ in Appendix 1), who needed appeasing in order to stop them acting against humans with all the blind, irresistible force of (say) gravity. But Homer and Hesiod for the first time gave gods an individual, human face and made a community out of them, informing us of their birth, family relationships, character and everyday activities.
This humanness of the gods is evident in the most mundane details. ZEUS is their head, and they quarrel, as all families do. They have a daily life. After a hard day’s work they enjoy an evening meal (ambrosia) and drink (nectar), tease each other, listen to the entertainment, and go to bed with their wives in their houses on Olympus. Even more amazing, these immortals do things during the day which frequently bring them nothing but pain, notably battling on behalf of their mortal favourites. The queen of Olympus, HERA, comments on the sweat she expended assembling the Greek army to attack Troy; APHRODITE complains that the Greek hero Diomedes has wounded her on the wrist (ZEUS smiles and tells her to concentrate on the pleasures of the marriage-bed); ARES the war-god complains that Diomedes has stabbed him in the belly (ZEUS tells him to stop whining).9
Gods in Homer have their favourites and regularly interact with humans in the Iliad, usually without disguise.10 APHRODITE, for example, was goddess of the force we associate with sexual desire, and since Paris selected her as the winner of the golden apple, she gave him Helen and supported him and the Trojans throughout the Iliad. Nevertheless, there could be tension in such relationships. Here, for example, APHRODITE has instructed Helen to return from the battlements and make love to Paris. Helen refuses:
‘No, go and sit with him yourself. Forget you are a goddess. Never set foot on Olympus again but go and agonize over Paris, go and pamper him, and one day he may make you his wife – or his concubine. I refuse to go and share that man’s bed again – it would be quite wrong. There is not a woman in Troy who would not blame me if I did. I have enough trouble to put up with already.’
This is quite remarkable. Helen is not afraid to argue with a very goddess, and in the most abrasive terms. She speaks as woman to woman. If we associate ancient gods with the mysterious, the numinous, the irrational or the terrifying, Helen’s response to APHRODITE does not suggest she feels this way about the goddess.11 But the situation changes abruptly with APHRODITE’s reply:
Enraged, celestial Aphrodite spoke to her:
‘Obstinate wretch! Don’t get the wrong side of me, or I may desert you in my anger and detest you as vehemently as I have loved you up till now, and provoke Greeks and Trojans alike to such hatred of you that you would come to a dreadful end.’
So she spoke, and Helen, child of Zeus, was terrified. She wrapped herself up in her shining white robe and went off in silence. (3.406- 20)
APHRODITE’s reply speaks for itself. No human crosses a god. Gods, in other words, work to extremes. They love you or hate you, support you or disown you, are close of distant.12 It is part of the magic of Homer that he is so effortlessly able, like Mozart, to reconcile the intimate with the divine.13
Whatever their relationship with their favourites, however, Homer’s gods are immortal and all-powerful and, ultimately, will brook no effort by mortals to threaten their superiority. They can be utterly ruthless: APOLLO mercilessly strips Patroclus so that he can be killed, HERA easily barters away her three favourite towns if only Troy is destroyed. They can also be kind, like IRIS comforting the old king Priam; they can be magnificent, like POSEIDON racing across the waters on his chariot.
Yet even the gods must acknowledge ZEUS as their master: when he nods, Olympus shakes and his will is determined, however much they may try to resist it. So if humans talk about, and to, the gods in almost off-hand terms, as if gods were just other, rather more powerful human beings, Homer knows there is more to them than that. When he describes gods in the third-person narrative, they can be majestic beings. For all their occasional triviality, Homer provided the Greeks with a vision that, particularly in the person of ZEUS, could eventually translate into a principle of order, and even monotheism.14
Nevertheless, one can see why many serious-minded later thinkers (like Plato15) took such exception to Homer’s treatment of the gods. It is worth quoting here the famous conclusion of an ancient critic we know as Longinus (first century AD?): ‘in relating the gods’ wounds, quarrels, revenges, tears, imprisonments and manifold misfortunes, Homer, or so it seems to me, has done his best to make the men of the Trojan War gods, and the gods men.’16 Longinus finds this shocking and explains that the behaviour of the gods must therefore be interpreted allegorically. This was a common response to Homer from as early as the fifth century BC and became even more so in the Christian era when the church acknowledged the primacy of Graeco-Roman education but had to find some way of turning pagan gods into good Christians.
As for destiny, or fate, it is important to remember that, in the absence of sacred scriptures and so of dogma, Greeks were not theologians. For Homer, fate was a purely literary devicewhich he summoned or shelved as he saw fit: it was the will of the poet. By the same token, Homer assigned responsibility for men’s actions to both divine will and human impulse at the same time.17 He could not distinguish between the two (any more than we can): it is as if men and gods were both fully responsible for what happened.
These features generate a sharp sense of human vulnerability and greatness. The epic is being recited by a third-person, omniscient narrator, Homer. He always tells us, his audience, what is happening on Olympus (the comparison with Greek tragedy, where in the absence of the om
niscient narrator the world is far more bleak and unknowable, is marked). But his heroes, for the most part, have no idea. This contrast generates pathos, as frail humans battle, without complaint and often with glorious confidence, against these impossible odds. Their deaths in particular can be very moving. Even the gods weep.18 Perhaps more important, the story is elevated out of the particular and takes on a more general human significance. War between heroes on the battlefield of Troy somehow seems to stand for life itself, in all its glory and hopelessness.
POETRY AND HISTORY, FACT AND FICTION: WAS THERE A TROJAN WAR?
Homeric poetry is oral in style (see next section) and its language is of ancient origin. As a result, it is likely that epic poetry was handed down by oral poets from as early as late bronze-age Greece, the so-called ‘Mycenaean’ age which ended c. 1100bc. That may explain how Homer (c. 700 BC) appears to ‘know’ about bronze armour, for example, and fighting from chariots, unknown in Homer’s day, and can describe a city like Mycenae as ‘rich in gold’ (which indeed it was in the late bronze age, but not in his). It is not, then, impossible, that details of a war between Greeks and Trojans round Ilium could have been passed down too. This is one of the grounds on which scholars have claimed to find history in Homer.
Unfortunately, we cannot conclude from this that the Iliad contains a specific history of a specific Trojan War. First, oral epic poets were not ancient historians, working from historical sources (let alone a text). Homeric epic in fact contains no historical understanding of the Mycenaean world at all: one would never guess from Homer, for example, that writing (Linear B) was used in the bronze age to record the workings of an economically complex, palace-based society.
