Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War

by Naoise Mac Sweeney,Jan Haywood

  Jan: Troy’s Hall of Fame

  Cinema in the early twenty-first century witnessed a remarkable interest in all things ancient. This began in the year 2000, when viewers flocked to see Ridley Scott’s Oscar-winning epic, Gladiator, a film that told the story of the gladiator Maxmius Decimus Meridius and his struggles under the cruel emperor Commodus.38 Since then, various films have centred on specific individuals from antiquity, for instance Alexander the Great (Alexander, 2004) and Hypatia (Agora, 2009), while others have focused on significant historical events, such as the Battle of Thermopylae (300, 2007) and the volcanic destruction of Pompeii (Pompeii, 2014).39 One of the most commercially, though not always critically, successful of this roster of ancient world films is Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 epic Troy.40 The film tells the story of Paris’ love for Helen of Sparta, their flight to Troy and the Greeks’ subsequent attack (for in twenty-first-century popular culture, Homeric Achaeans are almost universally equated with ‘Greeks’; see below) on the Trojan capital. While Troy’s screenwriter David Benioff has cautiously professed an interest in Homer’s account of the Trojan War,41 and the director Wolfgang Petersen has spoken repeatedly of his classical education,42 the film shows limited engagement with the specific details of the text of the Iliad. Rather, Troy (modelled in part on Robert Wise’s 1956 epic film Helen of Troy)43 attempts to synthesize various elements of the wider Trojan War storyline, beginning with Agamemnon’s overlordship of the different Bronze Age Greek communities and culminating with the fall of Troy (though omitting several details, e.g., the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Cassandra’s prophetic statements on Troy’s demise).44

  Troy is not much more than a decade old, yet there has been a fairly constant flow of scholarly engagement with the film since its theatrical release. In 2007, the same year that witnessed the appearance of the extended director’s cut of the film,45 Martin Winkler oversaw an important set of essays that examined a wide range of issues, from the film’s tragic dimension to the long-standing cinematic tradition of adapting the Trojan War story.46 Since then, Jonathan Burgess has argued that the film’s rationalism comes at the expense of myth, since the Trojan War story is inextricably bound up with mythological traditions.47 Some have focused too on the significant emphasis placed on various love stories in the film, notably Paris and Helen’s much more conventional romance compared to that of the Iliad, as well as the romance between Briseis and Achilles, the latter figure presented as a warrior and a lover.48 More recently, Joanna Paul has offered a sensitive analysis of the film’s particular interest in heroic κλέος (glory) and Martin Winkler has published a second edited collection, which explores the director’s cut edition of the film and its particular relationship with the Homeric texts.49

  In this section, I would like to analyse in greater depth an important aspect of Troy that many have remarked on either implicitly or only in passing: the film’s undermining of popular expectations concerning cultural ownership and the classical Greek heritage, used as a means of commenting on early twenty-first-century global geopolitics and specifically on the so-called ‘War on Terror’.50 While the film is clearly interested in tracking the fortunes of its two central heroes, Achilles and Hector,51 as well as underlining the everlasting fame that these epic heroes attained for themselves, it does not shy away from offering a thorough critique of the Greeks’ motivations for war, as well as of the effectiveness of their leaders, most notably the cartoonish villain Agamemnon. This critique has a sharp political edge, when it is considered that America and the ‘West’ claims a Greek cultural heritage, positioning itself as the heir to Hellenic antiquity. If the Greeks of the film stand for the twenty-first-century ‘West’, and the Trojans of the film stand for the peoples of the modern Middle East, then this vision of the Trojan War is an intensely political one.

  The first part of this discussion will explore the film’s preoccupation with fame, illustrating how various figures aspire for future glory, though, and to some extent differently from Homer’s Iliad, they remain uncertain of the nature or intensity of that fame. It also considers the general characterization of the Greeks as opposed to the Trojans, and begins to explore the problematic portrait of the Greeks in Petersen-Benioff’s film.52 The analysis then moves on to explore the characterization of Agamemnon and his imperialistic agenda, as well as the problematic interactions between the central Greek protagonists, a refraction of the Homeric poet’s depiction of the Achaeans, and a clear response to the film’s wider social-political context. I will propose that Troy – a film that responds to the wider Trojan War tradition, but is nevertheless clearly indebted to the Iliad – is much harsher in its critique of the Greek leadership than the Homeric account. I will also suggest that the film responds to the Iliad’s search for causation in unexpected ways, providing a serious challenge to our understanding of the war’s purpose and its consequences. Troy’s bleak narrative of cynical geopolitical manoeuvrings ultimately reframes our view of the causes of the conflict, redirecting audience sympathies away from the impotent Greek forces towards the innocent people of Troy.53

  Remembering Troy

  Troy does not claim to be a faithful adaptation of the Iliad (the film’s closing credits declare that it was ‘inspired by Homer’s “The Iliad”’); indeed, there are various differences between the narratives of the film and poem respectively, not the least Agamemnon’s murder at the hands of Briseis (for the Homeric version of his death, see Od. 4.519–37, 11.405–35; cf. further discussion below), as well as Menelaus’ death in a duel with Hector. Yet there are some specifically Iliadic resonances.

  Notably, the film’s concern with memory and remembrance strikes a familiar chord for those viewers that are familiar with the Homeric texts. Throughout the film, characters speak of their desire to achieve κλέος, that is, everlasting fame; κλέος thus becomes, as Paul puts it, ‘a site of competition between heroes’.54 At the outset of the film, for instance, the Ithacan hero Odysseus breathily muses ‘Will strangers hear our names long after we are gone, and wonder who we were, how bravely we fought, how fiercely we loved?’ Odysseus’ concern about posterity once more comes to the fore at the climax of the film, in which he hopes that ‘If they ever tell my story, let them say I walked with giants … Let them say I lived in the time of Hector, tamer of horses. Let them say I lived in the time of Achilles’. Similarly, following Agamemnon’s decision to support Menelaus’ desire to reclaim Helen, the aged king Nestor emphasizes to Agamemnon that ‘this will be the greatest war the world has ever seen’. Even the film’s greatest warrior Achilles is depicted as extemporizing on the heroic memory that will be afforded the Greeks; when flyting with Hector outside the temple of Apollo, Achilles observes, ‘They’ll be talking about this war for a thousand years’. After Hector rejects these words,55 Achilles emphasizes that although their bodies may wither, ‘our names will remain’ – a line that speaks intertextually towards the famous scene in Book 9 of the Iliad, in which Achilles sings of the glories of men (see p.15 above).

  Various critics of the film have been quick to denigrate the special emphasis that multiple characters place on future memory.56 Perhaps the most sustained critique of all derives from the film critic Jonathan Romney, who asserted that ‘The clunking irony is that a film which so harps on posterity will barely be remembered a year from now’.57 And yet, Petersen-Benioff’s emphasis on the significance of posterity for these Bronze Age heroes in fact chimes with the Iliad’s own frequent self-conscious references to poetic memory.58 In both film and poem, it is the principal agents of the story such as Odysseus and Helen that are concerned with the κλέος that is conferred by their actions, rather than some Homer-like figure. And in both poem and film alike, the heroes remain uncertain of the future fame that will be attained, precisely because the Iliadic world does not appear to be occupied by bardic figures. It is not the case, therefore, that the film’s special interest in glory and lasting memory is specifically un-Homeric or that the lack of a bard
figure deviates away from the Iliadic tradition. That being said, the related question of what it is precisely that Troy’s characters hope future generations will remember when they recall their names is likely to lead to a rather different set of ideas compared to the Iliad.

  Goodies and baddies

  Crucially, what Troy’s audiences might recall about the film’s Trojans is markedly different from what they might recall about its Greeks. Thus, in turning to the presentation of the Greeks and Trojan characters in the Iliad and Troy, we can begin to detect more clearly the film’s wider cultural contexts, as well as its more explicit deviations away from its Homeric source material. It has long been acknowledged that the Iliad draws no clear cultural or ethnic distinction between its Achaeans and its Trojans.59 This is not to propose that the poem elides any distinction between the two sides,60 but that the Iliad avoids a narrowly partisan outlook in favour of a more universalizing approach that demands sympathy for all involved. The film, in contrast, sits squarely in a cultural context that automatically equates the ‘Greeks’ with America and the ‘West’.

  Turning to Petersen-Benioff’s version of the war, it is soon apparent that theirs is a much more partisan account. While Achilles’ inhuman μῆνις (‘wrath’) is a direct response to his improper treatment at the hands of the leader Agamemnon in Book 1 of the Iliad, in Troy Achilles’ anger is less clearly delineated. Agamemnon’s commandeering of his γέρας (‘war-prize’) Briseis near the beginning of the Iliad is a significant episode which has eruptive consequences; in Troy, the seizure of Briseis does not signal a decisive change in Achilles’ mental state, but merely adds to an extended list of grievances that he harbours against the king of kings. Not only are Achilles’ motivations for dissent watered down, but he is also refashioned as an individualist who is disposed to irrational, even cruel acts of violence. In one particularly memorable scene, as Achilles and his Myrmidon troops outpace the other Greek contingents, landing first on the shores of Troy, he and his men raid the temple of Apollo, slaughtering the temple servants.61 As if to underline the sacrilegious nature of the Greeks’ behaviour, Achilles then decapitates the honorific statue of the sun god – a shocking act of religious intolerance that bears little resemblance to the Iliad’s characterization of Achilles, and one that could hardly appeal even to the film’s most secular audience(s), who are accustomed to living with various religions and faiths.62 That being said, it is unlikely that audiences would express no sympathy for Achilles. The casting of Brad Pitt to play Achilles is clearly designed to appeal to one of the film’s key audience demographics,63 and the affection that he develops for Briseis in particular draws out the complexity of Achilles’ character, which emphasizes his independent status amongst the Greek warriors.64 In this way, Achilles is largely exempted from the loathsome expansionist polices adopted by the Greeks.

  Perhaps the most striking disparity of all between the Homeric texts and Petersen-Benioff’s film can be discerned in the latter’s portrayal of Helen’s husband Menelaus as an ineffectual brute who displays open contempt to his wife back at Sparta,65 and his brother Agamemnon as an obvious ‘mega-villain’66 – an advance even on earlier Trojan War films such as Robert Wise’s Helen of Troy (1956), in which Menelaus and numerous Greek kings are depicted as cynically debating the possibility of a campaign against the Trojans before the flight of Menelaus’ wife. Indeed, the film’s relentlessly negative presentation of the two sons of Atreus proves a decisive contrast with the Iliad, in which the two flawed leaders are given a more sympathetic reading.67 The next section of this discussion will thus explore further the implications of Troy’s unsympathetic portrayal of Agamemnon, as well as demonstrate Petersen-Benioff’s more sympathetic rendering of the Trojans.

  A clash of civilizations

  In the popular imagination of the twenty-first century, the classical world and ancient Greece in particular belongs to the cultural heritage of the modern ‘West’. From the Doric columns of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC to the inclusion of ancient Greek texts on the reading lists of American ‘Great Books’ courses;68 from the discourse surrounding western democracy to the debates over international financial assistance for Greek national debt – the idea of the ‘West’ as the cultural heir of ancient Greece is both widespread and pervasive.69 This notion is particularly true of contemporary American political discourse, preoccupied as it is with democracy.70

  When faced with a twenty-first-century account of the Trojan War, therefore, in America and the ‘West’ sympathies would automatically tend to lie with the Achaeans/Greeks rather than with the Trojans. As we have seen in the previous section, this was not always the case at other points in history. The ubiquity of this assumption is evident from the sense of rupture we feel when faced with its inversion. For instance, Maureen Dowd wrote the following editorial in The New York Times shortly after the terrorist attacks of 9/11:

  The most famous story of the Western world, the proto-type of all tales of human conflict … is the Wooden Horse. Despite repeated warnings, the Trojans relaxed their guard and let their fortress be breached. After the Trojans feasted and fell asleep, the hidden Greeks emerged. ‘Mad with murder’, Homer writes, they wielded their swords and hacked men and women to ‘the last thrust’ … We are chilled as we learn more about how the Middle East terrorists mad with murder breached our walls.71

  For Dowd, the paradigmatic value of the Trojan War was of special relevance following the atrocities in Manhattan. Just as the Trojans had let their guard down, the Americans too had failed to ward off their own modern-day murderous Greeks: the Middle Eastern terrorists. Readers may take issue with Dowd’s depiction, which reveals perhaps rather less about the shape of the complicated political landscape in the new millennium and rather more about Dowd’s own intellectual heritage, but it is nonetheless striking that Dowd equates the Americans with the Trojans. The effect is disarming for readers expecting to see a parallel developed between Americans and the Greeks. In fact, through the use of Manichean language (‘terrorists mad with murder’) Dowd demands that the reader perceive afresh the Greeks’ deception, attacking the Trojans not through military force but, as Goldwyn notes, from within the city walls.72

  Dowd’s editorial in the New York Times was only one of several journalistic appeals to the Trojan War myth following 9/11. Just days before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Nicholas Kristof observed in the very same newspaper:

  Agamemnon was the Donald Rumsfeld of his day, needlessly angering his key allies – and outraging Achilles by swiping his concubine Briseis … We Americans are the Greeks of our day, and as we now go to war, we should appreciate not only the beauty of the tale, but also the warnings within it.73

  Like Dowd, Kristof uses the reference to the Trojan War to highlight the potentially problematic repercussions arising from US foreign policy. Kristof differs from Dowd, however, in maintaining the popular association between the modern United States and ancient Greece. The way he does this is particularly Iliadic, making an uncomplimentary comparison between the then Secretary of Defence of the United States, Donald Rumsfeld, and the Achaean leader Agamemnon, whom he characterizes as ‘outraging Achilles by swiping his concubine’. And as we shall see in a moment, Kristof’s negative characterization of Agamemnon chimes closely with Brian Cox’s portrayal of the Mycenaean king in Troy.

  Returning to Petersen-Benioff’s Troy, it is clear that their film needs to be situated within its wider geopolitical context.74 In order to understand the negative portrayal of Agamemnon and the Greeks in the film, we need to understand the contemporary political situation – only then can we appreciate the political statement that the film-makers were making. The script of the film was in production in late 2001, when the world-changing events of 9/11 prompted new discussion of a ‘clash of civilizations’ in popular political discourse. The script was then finalized in the following year, amidst bellicose political rhetoric in the United States surrounding the ‘War on Terror’ and eve
r-rising death tolls from the occupation of Afghanistan. The spring of 2003 saw both the controversial invasion of Iraq in March, and the start of filming for Troy in April. The movie was released in America in the following year – 2004 – amidst spiralling levels of violence in Iraq. The entire production process of Troy was therefore carried out against the backdrop of the ‘War on Terror’. Indeed, in one especially revealing interview, Wolfgang Petersen confirms that the Iraq War and the penumbra of events surrounding it indelibly influenced the film-making process:

  You develop such a story [for your film], and then almost the identical thing happens when you turn on the television. You can’t help thinking that this Homer was a real genius, that he exactly understood us humans who apparently need wars again and again; also that someone like Agamemnon reappears again and again. Still, Homer was never interested in black–white, good–bad. Such a concept doesn’t exist in reality. Only in the mind of George W. Bush … But this direct connection between Bush’s power politics and that of Agamemnon in the Iliad, this desire to rule the world, to trample everything underfoot that gets in your way, that became evident only during filming. Only gradually did we realize how important Homer still is today.75

  Petersen’s reflections on the film and its wider associations and relationships clearly relate to the so-called ‘War on Terror’. Although he makes no direct reference to Iraq, his comments on Bush’s ‘power politics’ and his ‘desire to rule the world’ recalling the behaviour of Agamemnon in the Iliad underline the director’s view that the Greek invasion was a spurious one, which echoed (at least for Petersen) Agamemnon’s immoral desire to control the Aegean Sea region.