Homer's Iliad

Now, I am an Odyssey kind of guy. Most modern men (and women) are. After setting out for England to complete my graduate studies in 1990, (and fighting the one-eyed monster and several screaming sirens along the way), I am still trying to find my way home. Nevertheless, it is important to our understanding of ourselves to try and understand why it is the Iliad that speaks the most to men over the centuries. It is not just that warfare was a way of life in ancient or early modern times; James Joyce wrote his great work Ulysses between two World Wars in the middle of the bloodiest century ever. I think the answer may lie in two key concepts that occupied a higher place in the pre-modern world than in our own: honour and self-mastery.

We should not attribute an ideal of honour to the ancient Greeks that is more noble than it actually was. Indeed, Greek society allowed much petulance. Personal honour determined social status, and (in times of war, at least) a great part of such honour was represented by the spoils of victory--including the possession of such fine trophies as Helen, Khryseis, and Briseis. But there must be a reason why Homer starts his epic poem in medias res with a quarrel among Greeks that characterizes both Achilles and Agamemnon. We are meant to learn a lesson about honour. While Agamemnon has (in his own eyes, at least) saved his honour, by taking Achilles's female prize Briseis instead of Khryseis, who is returned to her father for a ransom, this is only achieved by angering and alienating Achilles.

"Most noble son of Atreus, covetous beyond all mankind, how shall the Acheans find you another prize? We have no common store from which to take one. ...We have followed you , Sir Insolence! for your pleasure, not ours--to gain satisfaction from the Trojans for your shameless self and for Menelaus. You forget this, and threaten to rob me of the prize for which I have toiled, and which the sons of the Acheans have given me."

The jealousy, greed and selfishness of Agamemnon is of a different order and magnitude than that of Achilles, who, despite the vindictiveness displayed by his dragging of Hektor's body in Book XXII, rises above it in response to Priam's supplication. While the Iliad is a poem of war, and one which glorfies force, it ultimately fails as fascist propaganda. The wrath of Achilles, first toward Agamemnon, who has cheated him of his earned spoils, and then toward Hektor, who has killed his beloved Patroklos, dissolves once he learns the claims of other peoples' grief, and sympathy for their loss. He matures as a man.

There is also another scene much earlier, in Book IX, when Achilles has withdrawn from the battle and questions the ethos of glory and shame that seems to govern the rest of the poem. This is the moment of consciousness that gives this first great work of Western literature its critical edge, groping toward a better sense of honour:

"we are held in a single honour....A man dies still if he has done nothing, as
one who has done much."

For the greatest warrior in the known world, this was quite an admission. He is a hero who both embodies and questions the nature of Hellenic civilization. And there is little doubt that the Greek poet Homer regards the Greeks' sacking of Troy as a loss to all of civilization.

Sometimes I wonder whether we are coming full circle--whether religious war and environmental degradation and the commodification of everything might lead to a similar situation for humankind, with only a thread of literary consciousness to remind us of this harder-won sense of honour.