The Iliad Read online

  But skeptics there were (the late Sir Moses Finley among them) and their doubts soon proved to be well grounded. The tablets were for the most part inventory lists: quantities of olives, spices, wheat, records of land leases, registers of personnel, reserves of chariots, some of them recorded as broken. They are the day-to-day ledger entries of a bureaucratic monarchy that has its counterparts in the kingdoms of the Near East but has little to do with the world of piratical chieftains on the beachhead of Troy. There are Homeric names on the tablets, but though some of them are Achaean (Orestes, Adrastus), others are Trojan (Tros, Hector), and Hector, far from being a warrior prince, is a "servant of the god" and "holds a lease." As for the fire-blackened seventh layer of Schliemann's excavations at Hissarlik (the archaeologists' candidate for Homer's Troy), it can tell us nothing about its destruction--which may have been the result of earthquake rather than siege and sack. It is only one of many cities all over the Near East that went down to destruction in the late Bronze Age. The only evidence that its destroyers were an Achaean army led by the lords of Mycenae and all the cities listed in the Achaean catalogue in Book 2 of the Iliad is the poem itself, a poem that is supposed to have preserved the memory of these events over the course of some five illiterate centuries.

  The epic muse, however, is not the muse of history; her vision of past events is always suspect. The twelfth-century manuscript of the Chanson de Roland, a poem that almost certainly has oral origins, tells the heroic tale of the great invasion of Moslem Spain led by Charlemagne, and of the deaths of Roland and his friend Oliver in the pass of Roncesvalles, where the Frankish rear guard was attacked by Moslem hordes led by beys and pashas. The invasion took place in A.D. 778. Forty years later, Einhard wrote his famous Life of Charlemagne, from which we learn that the rear guard was attacked not by Moslems but by the Basques, who were Christians like the Franks. This substitution does not inspire confidence in oral poetic tradition as a historical source; it would suggest by analogy that the historic core of the Iliad may have been a battle between Trojans and Hittites or a war between Mycenae and Thebes.

  But though we may have our doubts, the Greeks of historic times who knew and loved Homer's poem had none. For them history began with a splendid Panhellenic expedition against an Eastern foe, led by kings and including contingents from all the more than one hundred and fifty places listed in the catalogue in Book 2. History began with a war. That was an appropriate beginning, for the Greek city-states, from their first appearance as organized communities until the loss of their political independence, were almost uninterruptedly at war with one another. The Greek polis, the city-state, was a community surrounded by potential enemies, who could turn into actual belligerents at the first sign of aggression or weakness. The permanence of war is a theme echoed in Greek literature from Homer to Plato. We Achaeans, says Odysseus in the Iliad, are "the men whom Zeus decrees, from youth to old age, must wind down our brutal wars to the bitter end until we drop and die, down to the last man. " (14.105-7)

  And in Plato's Laws the Cretan participant in the discussion says: "Peace is just a name. The truth is that every city-state is, by natural law, engaged in a perpetual undeclared war with every other city-state." There was no lack of declared wars, either. The citizens of Athens in the great century of Greek civilization, the fifth B.C., were at war, on land and sea, for more years than they were at peace. In the Louvre in Paris there is an inscription, dating from the early 450s, that lists the names of 171 men of one of the ten Athenian tribes, who died "in war, on Cyprus, in Egypt, in Phoenicia, at Halieis, Aegina, Megara in the same year." Athens at this time was fighting not only the Persian Empire but also her former ally against Persia, Sparta and its Peloponnesian League. She had been fighting the Persians continually since 480 and Sparta since 460. In 448 she made peace with Persia and in 446 with Sparta and the League. But the peace lasted only fifteen years. In 431 the Peloponnesian War began, to end in 404 with the surrender of Athens and the loss of her naval empire.

  The fighting Homer describes--duels between chieftains who ride up to the battle line in chariots, dismount, and exchange speeches, sometimes quite long ones, before engaging man-to-man with spear and shieid--is clearly a creation of the epic muse rather than a representation of actual battle conditions. The Mycenaeans had chariots in quantity, as Linear B inventories show (over two hundred chariots at Cnossos, for example), but such expensive equipment would have been put to better use, and although hand-to-hand combatants may shout at each other, they do not make speeches. Yet for Homer's later audiences and readers, the combats of heroes in the Iliad did not seem unfamiliar, since Greek battles, for centuries after his time, were fought by armored infantry at close quarters; archers were rare and cavalry was used only in pursuit, after the enemy infantry line had been broken and turned to flight. Though the citizen-soldier of the polis did not fight individual duels but faced the enemy as part of a disciplined line of overlapping shields, he still exchanged spear-thrusts with his opposite number in the opposing phalanx, and he could recognize as the real thing Homer's account of what metal can do to human flesh: Achilles lunged [at Demoleon] ...

  he stabbed his temple and cleft his helmet's cheekpiece.

  None of the bronze plate could hold it--boring through

  the metal and skull the bronze spearpoint pounded,

  Demoleon's brains splattered all inside his casque ... (20.449-54)

  A few lines later Achilles kills another Trojan: speared him square in the back where his war-belt clasped,

  golden buckles clinching both halves of his breastplate--

  straight on through went the point and out the navel,

  down on his knees he dropped--

  screaming shrill as the world went black before him--

  clutched his bowels to his body, hunched and sank. (20.470-75)

  There is no attempt to gloss over the harsh realities of the work of killing ("work," ergon, is one of Homer's words for what men do in battle) and no attempt, either, to sentimentalize the pain and degradation of violent death. But Meriones caught him in full retreat, he let fly

  with a bronze-tipped arrow, hitting his right buttock

  up under the pelvic bone so the lance pierced the bladder.

  He sank on the spot, hunched in his dear companion's arms,

  gasping out his life as he writhed along the ground

  like an earthworm stretched out in death, blood pooling,

  soaking the earth dark red ... (13.749-55)

  Men die in the Iliad in agony; they drop, screaming, to their knees, reaching out to beloved companions, gasping their life out, clawing the ground with their hands; they die roaring, like Asius, raging, like the great Sarpedon, bellowing, like Hippodamas, moaning, like Polydorus.

  And death is the end: Homer offers no comforting vision of life beyond the grave. In the Chanson de Roland Archbishop Turpin promises the heroes of Charlemagne's army a place among the blessed, a promise fulfilled in the poem, for when Roland dies an angel and two saints carry his soul to Paradise. For Homer's heroes no such rewarding prospect presents itself. For most of those whose life is violently suppressed in the poem, the formulas used concern themselves simply with the physical destruction of the body, followed by the extinction of life in it: "and hateful darkness seized him," "darkness engulfed his eyes." Where, very rarely, a phrase suggests the departure of the life for some other destination, it is not Paradise but the House of Hades, lord of the dead. Only one soul in the poem comes back from that house: it is Patroclus, who haunts Achilles' dreams, calling for his burial so that he can rest at last. "Even in Death's strong house," says Achilles, "there is something left, a ghost, a phantom--true, but no real breath of life" (23.122-23). Patroclus is concerned for proper disposal of his body and indeed it is for the body, not the soul, that the Homeric heroes feel concern: many of the champions who fall mortally wounded have been fighting to gain control of the corpse of a prominent foe or to save the corpse of a comrade from the
enemy. Archbishop Turpin finally prevails on Roland to blow his horn and summon Charlemagne by pointing out that though it is now too late for the king to save them, he may be able to bury their bodies in a church and save them from wolves, pigs and dogs. But as is clear from their prayers and from the visitation of the angels who come to take the soul of Roland to Paradise, it is the soul, not the body, that is their real concern. The contrast between the two attitudes is clear to see in the Homeric parallel to the angelic escort that comes for Roland. Zeus sends Apollo to rescue the corpse of his son Sarpedon, almost unrecognizable now since it is "covered over head to toe, buried under a mass of weapons, blood and dust" (16.743-44). Apollo lifts the body out of the melee, washes the blood off it in a running river, and gives it to the brothers Sleep and Death, who are to transport it to Sarpedon's home in Lycia for due burial with tomb and gravestone. "These," says Zeus, "are the solemn honors owed the dead" (16.789). But the poet does not encourage illusions about the fate of the body once the life has gone out of it; if not rescued for burning and burial, it may shrivel in the heat of the sun, it may become food for the birds of the air, the dogs of the earth, the eels and fish of the waters. And if not protected by divine interference, its wounds will be host to flies, which will breed worms.

  Nevertheless the Iliad is a poem that celebrates the heroic values war imposes on its votaries. War has its deadly fascination for those who have grown up in its service. "It is well that it is so terrible," said Lee, as he watched Hooker's doomed columns start across the river at Fredericksburg, "or we should grow too fond of it." And though the warriors of the Iliad often rail against their condition, they can also enjoy to the full war's intoxicating excitements. They revel in the exultation of victory as they taunt a fallen adversary with threats of exposure of his corpse, or with a bitter sarcasm, as when Patroclus mocks one of his victims, who, his face crushed by a stone, dives from his chariot: "Look what a springy man, a nimble, flashy tumbler!" (16.868). Even Hector, by far the most civilized of all the warriors at Troy, can list with pride and a kind of joy his credentials as a seasoned fighter.

  "War--I know it well, and the butchery of men.

  Well I know, shift to the left, shift to the right

  my tough tanned shield. That's what the real drill,

  defensive fighting means to me. I know it all,

  how to charge in the rush of plunging horses--

  I know how to stand and fight to the finish,

  twist and lunge in the War-god's deadly dance. " (7.275-81)

  And though, in a series of recurrent formulas, war is characterized as "dreadful," "man-killing," "hateful," to list only a few of the epithets, it can also appear, again in a recurrent formula, as "bringing glory to man." Warriors are described as "eager" or even "yearning" for battle, and one of the common words for combat, charme, comes from the same root as the word chairo--"rejoice." In one passage, in fact, this etymology is emphasized as two warriors, holding the line in a desperate situation, are described as charmei gethosunoi--"rejoicing in (the joy of) battle."

  In some of Homer's descriptions of killing, the victor's joy of battle and the hideous suffering of the victim are evenly balanced. As in the account of the death of an obscure Trojan charioteer, Thestor, who, terrified by the approach of Patroclus, cowering, crouched in his fine polished chariot,

  crazed with fear, and the reins flew from his grip--

  Patroclus rising beside him stabbed his right jawbone,

  ramming the spearhead square between his teeth so hard

  he hooked him by that spearhead over the chariot-rail,

  hoisted, dragged the Trojan out as an angler perched

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

  some noble catch, with line and glittering bronze hook.

  So with the spear Patroclus gaffed him off his car,

  his mouth gaping round the glittering point

  and flipped him down facefirst,

  dead as he fell, his life breath blown away. (16.478--89)

  The hallucinatory power of this passage stems partly from the deliberate, craftsmanlike way Patroclus delivers his blow, partly from the hypnotized, terror-struck passivity of the victim. Its realism has been questioned: could one man really pull another out of a chariot in this way? Perhaps he could--if the spearhead were triangular and the blunt rear angles of the blade became wedged in the flesh and if, as seems likely, the wounded man would follow the motion of the spear in withdrawal, rather than resisting it. But clearly Homer is walking the borderline of credibility here. He does it for a reason: that simile. It emphasizes the grotesque appearance of violent death by a comparison with a familiar fact of everyday life: Thestor is gaping like a fish on the hook. The spear-thrust destroys his dignity as a human being even before it takes his life. But the simile does something more: it shows us the action from the point of view of the killer--the excitement of the hunter dispatching his prey, the joy of the fisherman hauling in his catch. The lines combine two contrary emotions: man's instinctive revulsion from bloodshed and his susceptibility to the excitements of violence. And they are typical of the poem as a whole. Everywhere in Homer's saga of the rage of Achilles and the battles before Troy we are made conscious at one and the same time of war's ugly brutality and what Yeats called its "terrible beauty." The Iliad accepts violence as a permanent factor in human life and accepts it without sentimentality, for it is just as sentimental to pretend that war does not have its monstrous ugliness as it is to deny that it has its own strange and fatal beauty, a power, which can call out in men resources of endurance, courage and self-sacrifice that peacetime, to our sorrow and loss, can rarely command. Three thousand years have not changed the human condition in this respect; we are still lovers and victims of the will to violence, and so long as we are, Homer will be read as its truest interpreter.

  This was recognized by Simone Weil in an essay written long before she left her native France for wartime London, where she filled her brilliant notebooks with reflections on Greek literature and philosophy in the short time left to her to live. This classic (and prophetic) statement--L'Iliade ou le Poeme de la Force--presented her vision of Homer's poem as an image of the modern world.

  The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad, is force. Force as man's instrument, force as man's master, force before which human flesh shrinks back. The human soul, in this poem, is shown always in its relation to force: swept away, blinded by the force it thinks it can direct, bent under the pressure of the force to which it is subjected. Those who had dreamed that force, thanks to progress, now belonged to the past, have seen the poem as a historic document; those who can see that force, today as in the past, is at the center of all human history, find in the Iliad its most beautiful, its purest mirror.

  She goes on to define what she means by force: "force is what makes the person subjected to it into a thing." She wrote these words in 1939: the article was scheduled for publication in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, but before it could be printed Paris was in the hands of the Nazis and her compatriots, like all Europe, were subjected to force and turned into things--corpses or slaves.

  "Its most beautiful, its purest mirror . . ." The most marvelous lines in the Iliad owe their unearthly, poignant beauty to the presence of violence, held momentarily in reserve but brooding over the landscape. They are the lines that end Book 8 and describe the Trojans camped on the plain, awaiting the next dawn, which will launch them on their attack on the Greek fortification.

  And so their spirits soared

  as they took positions down the passageways of battle

  all night long, and the watchfires blazed among them.

  Hundreds strong, as stars in the night sky glittering

  round the moon's brilliance blaze in all their glory

  when the air falls to a sudden, windless calm ...

  all the lookout peaks stand out and the jutting cliffs

  and the steep ravines and down from the high
heavens bursts

  the boundless bright air and all the stars shine clear

  and the shepherd's heart exults--so many fires burned

  between the ships and the Xanthus' whirling rapids

  set by the men of Troy, bright against their walls. (8.636-49)

  These are surely the clearest hills, the most brilliant stars and the brightest fires in all poetry, and everyone who has waited to go into battle knows how true the lines are, how clear and memorable and lovely is every detail of the landscape the soldier fears he may be seeing for the last time.

  THE TROJANS

  The city, the polis, as the Greeks called it, was for them the matrix of civilization, the only form of ordered social life they could understand; it is the exclusive form assumed by ancient Greek culture from its beginning to its end. The city was small enough so that the citizens knew one another, participated in a communal life, shared the common joy of festivals, the sorrow of public bereavement, the keen excitement of competition, the common heritage of ancestral tombs and age-old sanctified places. The destruction of a city is a calamity all the more deeply felt because of the close cohesion of its inhabitants and their attachment, reinforced over generations from a mythical past, to its landmarks and buildings.