The Iliad (Penguin Classics) Page 7

  Homer’s diction is superb and it matches his observation. It is easy to rejoice in these and be content. But some of us are not so quickly satisfied: we wish to know how he achieves nobility. I myself have come to feel that his is the poetry not so much of words but of ideas – if it is possible to separate the two. I approach an understanding through the examination of the epithets which he uses in such abundance. Every manufactured object that he mentions is well and truly made. A ship is always fast, well-benched and seaworthy; a spear is stout, long and sharp, and (we are charmed to note) it is its custom to throw a long shadow on the ground and also to be ‘wind-fed’ even when resting in a warrior’s hand; that is to say, it looks back to the time when its shaft was part of an ash-tree on the windswept mountain-side, or else forward to the moment when it is going to hurtle through the air. Natural phenomena such as the rose-fingered dawn and the ambrosial and mysterious night are all given adjectives which search out the quintessence of their quality or beauty. Homer’s men are all noble, peerless, brave, wise, or characterized by some other excellence; and his women are all lovely, or at least well-dressed and with hair beautifully done. What is the significance of this wholesale use of honorific epithets – epithets which often sound insincere or at least fall in most inappropriate places?* Scholars are inclined to explain them away as the decorative trappings of the Epic style, and as being for the most part a legacy to Homer from his predecessors’ work. This does not satisfy me. If Homer did take them over as trappings, his genius put them to a new use, which is a mirror to his own mind. When he calls a warrior brave or great-hearted just at the moment when he is behaving like an arrant coward, I do not think that he is being careless or conventional – he is seeing that warrior as he was, or will be, or indeed as he, in essence, is. When he talks of a beautiful and well-built chariot, he is not labouring under the delusion that all the workmanship of his day (excellent as it no doubt was) attained perfection. He has no use for a shoddy article, and what he sees in his mind’s eye is the perfect thing. He does the same with people. Everything I have written earlier in this essay, if it is true, shows what a realist he is. But the reality that he sees has for his eye a certain transparence, through which he sees and records the ideal or higher reality. He puts me in mind of his own picture of Zeus when, sitting on Mount Ida, he wearies of watching the unending battle and turns ‘his shining eyes into the distance’, where, among other more satisfying things, he can survey ‘the Abii, the most law-abiding folk on earth’.

  I do not mean by this simile that Homer, when he calls a villain ‘great-hearted’, is indulging himself in illusion or wishful thinking, but that he is seeing reality at two levels. To which I might add that he sees good as more real than evil. It is as though he had anticipated Plato’s Theory of Forms, according to which all earthly things are the imperfect and transitory copies of ideal Forms that have a permanent existence in Heaven. I like to fancy that Homer, more privileged than Plato, actually saw these Forms, and even, on one occasion, brought them down to earth. For it is this that he did when he gave immortal horses to Achilles. His attitude to animals in general repays the closest study;* but in these horses of Achilles, if the reader will follow them through their triumphs and their tears, I think he will admit that Homer has given us something unique. And he may also note an interesting point. When the Ideal is manifested in the work-a-day world, it does not put to shame the creatures of a day – it brings them nearer to itself. Thus, when Homer causes Pedasus, a mortal thoroughbred, to be put in as an outrigger with the divine horses of Achilles, he is careful to tell us that Pedasus, though he ‘was only an ordinary horse’, kept up with the immortal pair, and his subsequent death is one of the most poignant things we have to put up with in all the nightmare battles of the ‘lamentable war’.

  My theory that Homer’s poetry gives us reality and super-reality at the same time does, if it is correct, throw a little light on the central problem of the Iliad, the character of Achilles. We have seen in what a sordid light he is presented in the first Book. But this is only the beginning: we are to follow him through every stage of degradation to which the exasperating conditions of a long-drawn-out war can lead a character whose very strength is its weakness. Even his best friend and admirer Patroclus sees him as ‘warping a noble nature to ignoble ends’. His pride becomes a monomania, and even his grief at the death of Patroclus, based as it is on injured self-esteem, produces no softening, but leads instead to an outburst of insensate cruelty and rage. Yet all along the gods are honouring Achilles and, with them, Homer somehow makes us feel that, behind all this, true greatness lies concealed. And in the end, in the memorable scene in which Achilles gives up Hector’s corpse to his old father, we are allowed one glimpse of what the real Achilles is.

  I say ‘is’, not ‘might have been’, for I take it that the function of tragedy is not merely to mourn the wastage of virtue and to cry over spilt milk, but to hint at some ultimate solution, to suggest that if we could only look at things with the Olympian eye of Zeus we should see that, after all, the milk we were crying about is not really spilt.

  At the end, I have added a Glossary giving a few facts about the more important characters in the tale. In compiling this I decided to say about these people only what Homer, our chief and earliest authority, permits, while adding in square brackets a little information that we glean from other writers. In the course of the work I hit on some interesting points, for example, the seniority of Paris to Hector, and the normality of Helen’s parentage. I was also able to strengthen some of the impressions I had received from the text itself. Homer’s main interest lies in the study of human beings and human gods. He is disposed to reject or tone down the grotesque and the supernormal. The beautiful Helen did not emerge from an egg, and, apart from one perfunctory reference to the Judgement of Paris, it was her human frailty and that of her seducer that led to the Trojan War. His handling of the gods and their many interventions and rescues in battle is much on a par with this. When Achilles is fighting the River-god Xanthus, we are left wondering all the time whether a demonic power is at work, or whether Achilles has not merely let himself in for the risk of being drowned by a river in spate. In a word, Homer is inclined to hover on the near side of the line that separates the natural and the supernatural – not that I, for one, object to crossing it now and then with such a guide.

  EVR

  Highgate,

  September 1949

  Note to the 8 th Printing

  Since the above Introduction was written, Michael Ventris’ decipherment of Linear B has opened a new era in Homeric studies, and Professor T. B. L. Webster, in From Mycenae to Homer, London (Methuen) 1958 and New York (Praeger), has taken full advantage of the opportunities now afforded of achieving greater exactitude in dating Homer’s poems and tracing them to their sources. His brilliant work has convinced me that I was mistaken in tentatively placing Homer as early as the tenth century BC; also that some of the earlier poetry to which I suggested that Homer is indebted was that of the Mycenaens themselves, whose literary work we still hope to discover.

  EVR

  June, 1959

  Notes on this Revision

  I here draw attention to a number of the conscious decisions I made about the technical and idiomatic updating of E. V. Rieu’s text.1

  1. The oral poet repeats epithets, phrases, sentences, speeches and even whole scenes throughout (see Introduction, p. xxviii), but Rieu did not always use exactly the same words just because Homer did. I have tried to settle on the same form of words for some of the most common repetitions, in most cases by selecting one of Rieu’s versions to impose across the board (but see 6 below). The Homeric way of introducing and closing speeches has also been restored; so too has the Homeric way of dealing with similes.

  2. The unHomeric language of king, empire and modern warfare has been removed. ‘Royal’, ‘king’, ‘prince’, ‘imperial’, ‘officer’, ‘battalion’, ‘fleet’, ‘squadron’, etc.,
have been replaced by non specific terms like ‘leader’, ‘contingent’, ‘ship’. ‘Heaven’ and ‘the heavens’, with their Christian connotations, have also gone, and I have tried (not always successfully) to avoid contemporary financial language like ‘payment’, with its implications of the exchange of coinage.

  3. Rieu, a most courteous man, ascribed a similarly courtesy to Greek heroes, making them say ‘Please’ and ‘Would you ... ?’ when the Greek expresses a straight command ‘Do X’. The command form has been restored.

  4. Rieu took the view that Homer often ascribed to gods what we would ascribe to nature, for example, or chance, and for lxiv notes on this revision that reason sometimes omitted them. But when Homer said the gods did something, he meant it: so in such cases divinities are restored.

  5. Rieu used Homer’s terms for Greeks, of which there were three – literally, ‘men from Achaea’ (Achaeans), ‘men from Argos’ (Argives) and ‘descendants of Danaus’ (Danaans). These Homeric names have very considerable historical interest, most obviously because Homer does not call Greece or the Greeks by their received ancient and modern names, ‘Hellas’ and ‘Hell enes’. Homer does mention a region called ‘Hellas’ (e.g. 2.683, see map 4), though no one (to my knowledge) knows why that local name should later have become applied to all Greece.2 But since Agamemnon’s expedition did in fact consist of Greeks from what we know as the central and southern Greek mainland and islands (Mycenaean Greece), Homer’s ‘Achaeans’, ‘Argives’ and ‘Danaans’ have all been called ‘Greeks’ throughout this translation.3

  6. The meaning of the repeated epithets is often disputed. As ancient commentaries make clear, even Greeks themselves were baffled by many of them. One has to take a position on this. So I differ from Rieu in some of the more common disputed epithets as follows:

  agkulomeêteo⊚ not ‘of the crooked counsels’ but ‘sickle-wielding’

  aigiokhoio not ‘aegis-bearing’ but ‘who drives the storm-cloud’

  atrugetoio not ‘unharvested’ but ‘murmuring’

  eriounos (of HERMES) not ‘the luck-bringer’ but ‘the runner’

  euruopa not ‘far-seeing’ but ‘far-thundering’

  glauk⊚pis not ‘of the Flashing Eyes’ or ‘bright-eyed’ but ‘grey-eyed’

  I have consistently translated dîogene ês as ‘Olympian-born’, dîotrephês as ‘Olympian-bred’, helikôps as ‘dark-eyed’, and hêrôs as ‘warrior’. ‘Rosy-fingered Dawn’ and ‘winged words’, of course, stay. I have given up on mônukhes hippoi, ‘single-hoofed horses’, translating simply as ‘horses’; likewise euknêmîdes Akhaioi, ‘Greeks with fine greaves’, have usually become ‘Greek men-at-arms’ (though it is indeed historically very interesting that around 1200 BC Greeks were, apparently, the only soldiers to wear these leather or metal shin-guards).

  7. As in Rieu, silent, interpretative glosses have been added to the text where they aid understanding; and names of fathers and epithets have occasionally been omitted, or changed for the sake of clarity (e.g. ‘Patroclus’ in place of ‘the son of Menoet- ius’). For a list of omitted fathers’ names, see Appendix 2.

  8. The new chapter summaries and marginal notes will enable readers to keep a firm grip on a plot notorious for its digressions and sheer multiplicity of characters.

  9. Line numbers in this revision are from Homeri opera I-II (Iliad), edited by D. B. Monro and T. W. Allen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920, third edition).

  NOTES

  1. One obvious example: my warriors do not wear cuirasses or corselets but body-armour. In the Homeric context, no one (I trust) is going to imagine this bears any relation to police uniform. I add here that I have followed the Oxford text of the Iliad (ed. D. B. Monro and T. W. Allen, 1920, third edition), except in a few places where I have missed out lines or chosen different readings.

  2. The word ‘Greek’ derives from Latin Graecus, which itself derives from the small Greek town Graea (2.498), probably ancient Oropus (by the mouth of the River Asopus, map 4). The Latin name would be explained if Graeans joined the earliest colonization movement to south Italy in the eighth century BC (a tradition suggests they did) and were the first Greek-speakers to have been encountered by Italians.

  3. I add here that there are enough proper names in Homer to cope with anyway – c. 1,100, of which more than half occur just once.

  The Main Characters

  GREEKS

  Achilles [A-kíll-eez]. Son of the mortal Peleus and the divine Sea-nymph THETIS, from Phthia [F-thée-a] in Thessaly [Théss-a-lee]. Leader of the Myrmidons [Mér-midd-ons]. Patroclus is his dearest friend. Achilles’ anger drives the story of the Iliad [Íll-ee-ad]. ATHENE is always by his side. Homer foretells his death at the hands of Paris and APOLLO. Called ‘swift-footed’ because of his speed at chasing down an enemy in flight.

  Agamemnon [A-ga-mém-non]. Son of Atreus and ruler of Mycenae [My-sée-nee] in Argos. He is leader of the expedition to Troy because he brings the most ships. He is the elder brother of Menelaus (the pair are referred to together as the ‘sons of Atreus’). He was murdered by his wife Clytaemnestra [Kleye-tem-néss-tra] on his return to Greece.

  Ajax, son of Oïleus [Áy-jax]. Leader of the Locrians. He is distinguished as the ‘lesser’ Ajax from his greater namesake.

  Ajax, son of Telamon [Áy-jax]. From the island of Salamis [Sáll-a-miss], the ‘great’ Ajax, defensive bulwark of the Greeks (he never leads an attack), renowned for his huge shield ‘like a tower’.

  Antilochus [Ant-íll-ock-us]. Son of Nestor; a young warrior prominent in the fighting and also in the games. Has a brother Thrasymedes [Thrass-imm-éed-eez].

  Atreus [Áy-tr-yoos]. Father of Agamemnon and Menelaus.

  Automedon [Or-tóm-edd-on]. A Myrmidon, and attendant of Achilles. Serves as attendant and charioteer to Patroclus when he fights without Achilles.

  Calchas [Kál-kass]. Son of Thestor; the chief augur and prophet of the Greek expedition.

  Diomedes [Die-om-éed-eez]. Son of Tydeus [Tíe-dyoos] and grandson of Oeneus [Óy-nyoos] – a young but brilliant and much-respected warrior. He is always talking about his father, who was killed in the unsuccessful siege of Thebes (‘The Seven against Thebes’) and had earlier enjoyed a number of athletic victories there, thanks to ATHENE. A great favourite of ATHENE’s.

  Eurypylus [Eur-ípp-ill-us]. He is wounded by Paris and tended by Patroclus.

  Helen. Daughter of ZEUS, sister of Castor and Pollux and Clytaemnestra. Married to Menelaus of Sparta, she caused the Trojan War by running away from him with Paris to Troy.

  Heracles [Hérr-a-kleez]. A man who became a god. Involved in a earlier battle against the Trojans. He was a son of ZEUS by Alcmene [Alk-mée-nee], so HER A hated him. In his early career he was compelled to carry out twelve labours for Eurystheus [Eur-íss-th-yoos]. He then took revenge on men who had insulted him, including the Trojan ruler Laomedon, whom he killed. HERA in her rage at this drove him along the coast to the island of Cos, and ZEUS punished her by hanging her up with anvils attached to her feet. Attacked even the gods from time to time.

  Idomeneus [Eye-dóm-enn-yoos]. Son of Deucalion [Dew-káy-lee-on], from Crete. An older fighter, slow but steady.

  Lapiths [Lá-piths]. Race of people from Thessaly who fought the half-horse, half-man Centaurs.

  Machaon [Mack-áy-on]. Son of ASCLEPIUS, the famous healer. He tends Menelaus and is later wounded, but saved by Nestor.

  Meleager [Mell-ee-áy-ger]. A hero cursed by his mother, Althaea [Al-thée-a], for killing her brother in a dispute. He at once withdrew his services from the battlefield – like Achilles.

  Menelaus [Men-ell-áy-us]. Son of Atreus. Ruler of Lacedaemon/ Sparta, and younger brother of Agamemnon. His wife Helen was seduced and abducted to Troy by Paris.

  Menestheus [Men-ésth-yoos]. Leader of the Athenian contingent.

  Menoetius [Men-oí-tee-us]. Father of Patroclus.

  Meriones [Merr-ée-on-eez]. Son of Molus. Nephew and attendant of Idomeneus, and
second-in-command of the Cretan forces.

  Nestor [Néss-tor]. Son of Neleus [Née-lyoos]. Ruler of Pylos [Píe-loss]. The oldest of the Greek chieftains fighting at Troy, he has the reputation of being a fount of wisdom. Called ‘Gerenian’ [Gerr-ée-nee-an] – no one knows why.

  Odysseus [Odd-íss-yoos]. Son of Laertes [Lay-ért-ees]. Ruler of Ithaca and hero of Homer’s Odyssey. Known for his quick-thinking. A great favourite of ATHENE’s.

  Patroclus [Pat-róck-lus]. Son of Menoetius. From Opous; attendant and dearest friend of Achilles.