The Iliad

by Robert Fagels

  And look, you see how handsome and powerful I am?

  The son of a great man, the mother who gave me life

  a deathless goddess. But even for me, I tell you,

  death and the strong force of fate are waiting.

  There will come a dawn or sunset or high noon

  when a man will take my life in battle too—

  flinging a spear perhaps

  or whipping a deadly arrow off his bow. ” (21.119—28)

  “Friend, you too must die ... ” That macabre word “friend” is sincerely meant; it is a recognition of equality, the equality of men of war, all of whom must face violent death. And Lycaon recognizes his death sentence. He lets go of Achilles’ spear and sinks “back down ... / spreading both arms wide” (21.130-31) in a resigned gesture of relaxation to take the blow of Achilles’ sword. And Achilles turns back to the slaughter. “Die, Trojans die—/ till I butcher all the way to sacred Troy” (21.146- 47). And die they do, all those who cannot get back inside the walls, through the gate where Hector takes his stand to meet, at last, his mighty opposite.

  The whole poem has been moving toward this duel between the two champions, but there has never been any doubt about the outcome. The husband and father, the beloved protector of his people, the man who stands for the civilized values of the rich city, its social and religious institutions, will go down to defeat at the hands of this man who has no family, who in a private quarrel has caused the death of many of his own fellow soldiers, who now in a private quarrel thinks only of revenge, though that revenge, as he well knows, is the immediate prelude to his own death. And the death of Hector seals the fate of Troy; it will fall to the Achaeans, to become the pattern for all time of the death of a city. The images of that night assault—the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cas sandra raped in the temple, Hector’s baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery—all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history, immortalized in lyric poetry, in tragedy, on temple pediments and painted vases, to reinforce the stern lesson of Homer’s presentation of the war: that no civilization, no matter how rich, no matter how refined, can long survive once it loses the power to meet force with equal or superior force.

  But Homer’s view of the war is more somber still. From the point of view of the powers that rule his universe, the gods, all the human struggles, the death of heroes, the fall of cities, are only of passing interest, to be forgotten as they are replaced by similar events played out by different actors. Troy will fall now, but so someday will the cities of its conquerors. And the great wars that brought glory and death to the heroes will not even be allowed to leave a mark on the landscape. When Hector was threatening the Greek ships, the Achaeans built a great protective wall around them, with a ditch in front. After the fighting was over Apollo and Poseidon destroyed the wall ...

  flinging into it all the rivers’ fury.

  All that flow from the crests of Ida down to breaking surf...

  The channels of all those rivers—Apollo swung them round

  into one mouth and nine days hurled their flood against the wall

  and Zeus came raining down, cloudburst powering cloudburst,

  the faster to wash that rampart out to open sea.

  The Earth-shaker himself, trident locked in his grip,

  led the way, rocking loose, sweeping up in his breakers

  all the bastions’ strong supports of logs and stones ...

  He made all smooth along the rip of the Hellespont

  and piled the endless beaches deep in sand again

  and once he had leveled the Argives’ mighty wall

  he turned the rivers flowing back in their beds again

  where their fresh clear tides had run since time began.

  So in the years to come Poseidon and god Apollo

  would set all things to rights once more. (12.21-42)

  Man’s highest efforts, his struggles on the face of the earth are, from the heavenly point of view, insignificant, his huge military constructions merely a surface disturbance to be readjusted. As even now, on the beaches of the 1944 Normandy landing—Sword. Juno, Gold, and Utah and Omaha, where once the great artificial harbors, the Mulberries, floated, loaded with vehicles and munitions—now the waves and the sand show hardly a trace of the gigantic enterprise ... at most an occasional rusted grenade pin or the worn rubber heel of a GI boot. As at Troy, things have been set to rights.

  THE GODS

  The subject of the poem is the rage of Achilles against Agamemnon, a human passion, but the prologue speaks also of gods. “What god drove them to fight with such a fury? / Apollo the son of Zeus and Leto” (1.9-10). A few lines earlier we have been told that as heroes fell in battle, “the will of Zeus was moving toward its end” (1.6). Are the events of the poem the creation of the will of Zeus and Apollo, or of the will of Achilles? To what extent is Achilles a free and responsible agent? It is a question raised by many other passages in the poem, as gods inspire, restrain, terrify or rescue individual heroes. How far can men whose actions so often seem to be the product of direct divine intervention be held responsible? Is there, in fact, in Homer any fully formed concept of free and responsible human action? It would seem at first as if the answer were No. In the quarrel in Book I Achilles refrains from killing Agamemnon on the spot because Athena grasps him by the hair and forbids it. But a closer look at this and similar passages where human action is prompted by divine suggestion reveals that the Homeric conception of divine interference is an extremely subtle one. Athena seizes Achilles by the hair just as he draws his sword, but we have been told that before he drew it, he had considered the alternative.

  Should he draw the long sharp sword slung at his hip,

  thrust through the ranks and kill Agamemnon now?—

  or check his rage and beat his fury down?

  As his racing spirit veered back and forth,

  just as he drew his huge blade from its sheath,

  down from the vaulting heavens swept Athena ... (1.224-29)

  She comes, as it were, as the representation of that more cautious course he had considered, to urge its claims. And it is remarkable that she uses language not of command but of persuasion. “Down from the skies I come to check your rage / if only you will yield” (1.242-43). The Greek word here translated “yield”—pithêai—is actually a form of the verb peithô, “to persuade.” There is a correlation here between divine intervention and independent human action; they seem to work together, or rather they seem to be the same thing viewed from two different angles. And there are of course passages in the Iliad where a man comes to a decision, choosing between alternatives, with no divine suggestion or intervention at all. We see Odysseus in the thick of battle, his flanks threatened, debate with himself whether to run for it or fight on; he comes to the conclusion that he must stay and fight. His impulse to run is countered by his fear of being thought a coward; the warrior code asserts its authority even in the face of almost certain death (11.477- 86). But this is still a free decision, as Homer makes clear when later he puts Menelaus in the same situation, gives him many of the same formulas of debate, for and against retreat, and has him come to the opposite conclusion—he withdraws from the battle ( 17.101-21 ). Usually, however, important human decisions involve the participation of a god; divine intervention and human responsibility coexist.

  This is not the only pair of philosophical irreconcilables that Homer rides in tandem: he presents us also with Destiny and its voice Prophecy on the one hand, together with the will of Achilles and Zeus on the other. Events are determined, we are expressly told at the beginning of the poem and elsewhere, by the will of Zeus, who is presented to us in the poem as a figure more stable, more majestic, than the other gods. And yet on more than one occasion the will of Zeus is thwarted by fate, as in the case of Sarpedon, his beloved son. As he s
ees him closing in combat with Patroclus, Zeus laments: “Sarpedon, the man I love the most, my own son—/ doomed to die at the hands of Menoetius’ son Patroclus” (16.515-16).

  Many attempts have been made to reconcile these two ideas, to assert the overriding power of Zeus’s will on the one hand, or that of a nameless destiny on the other, but in fact the coexistence of these irreconcilables is not a phenomenon confined to Homer’s imagined world. In any civilization which makes a place in its thought for free will (and therefore individual responsibility) and pattern (and therefore overall meaning), the two concepts—fixed and free—exist uneasily cheek by jowl. The only escape from this logical contradiction is the prison of rigid deter minism, a pattern fixed from the beginning and not subject to change, or on the other hand, the complete freedom and meaningless anarchy of an unpredictable universe. And Greek thought, like ours (or those of us at least who still live in the humane traditions of the West), tries to embrace the logical contradiction of freedom and order combined.

  In Homer the combination is a subtle one; the idea of destiny, of what is fixed, is flexible. Zeus can predict the future—the deaths of Patroclus, of Achilles, the fall of Troy—and in all these cases it is impossible to say whether the result is destiny or his will or both. But sometimes the possibility is raised that what is fated will actually be annulled by divine will—or even by human. So when Achilles in his rage storms against the routed Trojans and comes right up to the walls, Zeus stirs the gods to go into battle to delay the swift advance of Achilles. “Now,” he says, “with his rage inflamed for his friend’s death, / I fear he’ll raze the walls against the will of fate” (20.35-36).

  “Against the will of fate....” These lines so upset some ancient editors, men schooled in philosophy and especially the Stoic and Epicurean quarrels about fate and freedom that, in the interests of logical consistency, they tried to suppress the offending lines and substitute the following passage: “But it is not fated that the well-built city of Troy should be sacked in Achilles’ lifetime. It will be taken by the wooden horse....”

  It is thought possible, then, in Homer’s vision, that Achilles can somehow break the pattern; in fact he must be prevented. And Zeus can break it too. He laments the fate of Sarpedon—and is tempted to save him. But his consort Hera recalls him to a sense of duty.

  “Do as you please, Zeus ...

  but none of the deathless gods will ever praise you.

  And I tell you this—take it to heart, I urge you—

  if you send Sarpedon home, living still, beware!

  Then surely some other god will want to sweep

  his own son clear of the heavy fighting too.

  Look down. Many who battle round King Priam’s

  mighty walls are sons of the deathless gods—

  you will inspire lethal anger in them all. ” (16.526-34)

  And her argument prevails. Destiny could, theoretically, be defied, but only at the risk of chaos. Zeus lets Sarpedon go down to death.

  The Olympian gods are a family like many a family on earth. It has an all-powerful, philandering father, who cannot be defied but may be deceived, a watchful, jealous and intriguing wife, and sons and daughters who vie for their parents’ favor as they pursue their individual aims. These gods play their part in the poem, in close contact with the human beings. And gods and men, for Homer, are very much alike—in shape, in speech, even in motive, in passion, in forms of action. The most passionate of the gods involved in the struggle are Hera, the wife of Zeus, and Athena, his daughter; they hate Troy and the Trojans with a bitter, merciless hatred. We are not told why they nurse this savage hatred for the Trojans until Book 24, where the famous Judgment of Paris is mentioned (24.31-36 and note ad loc). It is typical of a certain school of thought about Homer that these lines, the only explicit mention of the Judgment of Paris in the Iliad, have been suspected as a later addition; the beauty contest of the goddesses is too frivolous a motif for the high tragedy of the poem. But this leaves the unsuccessful goddesses’ raw hatred for Troy unexplained. It seems clear from the casual, almost cryptic, way Homer refers to the story that it was perfectly familiar to his audience, and Hera’s motive for hating Troy, the insult to her beauty, is perfectly consonant with the picture of Hera as the jealous divine wife Homer presents elsewhere in the Iliad—in her plot against Heracles, Zeus’s child by a mortal woman ( 14.300-8), and her brutal assault on Artemis, Zeus’s child by another goddess (21.557-66). Hell hath no fury like a goddess scorned. And this personal motive has its opposite side: the unfailing support given to the Trojans by the winner of the beauty contest, Aphrodite, and her intervention to save Paris from his fate at the hands of Menelaus (3.439-41).

  The reasons for divine intervention are trivial, human, all too human. Yet these gods, imagined in the likeness of man in all his strength and weakness, but magnified in scale, are figures symbolic of those aspects of our lives that seem incomprehensible and uncontrollable. Athena prompts the archer Pandarus to shoot Menelaus (not that he did not want to) and so destroys what for a moment seemed a chance to end the war (4.99-159). Both sides, now Achilles is absent, want peace, but the war goes on. We too have seen and may see again similar situations, and when the catastrophe comes on us in spite of the universal desire to avoid it, we fall back on explanations that are perhaps more sophisticated but no more satisfactory: the irrationality of human nature, the will of history (Croce’s phrase), the will of God or even pure accident—and in the last analysis these explanations are just as metaphysical as Homer’s gods.

  The gods intervene also in a more direct fashion: they sometimes take part in the fighting. They do so to protect human favorites or, on a grander scale, to instill courage and combat-fury into individual heroes and even whole armies, as Poseidon does (14.422—610) in defiance of Zeus’s nonintervention order. This is not a modem way of looking at battle, but it is a striking way of expressing one of the mysteries of combat—the unpredictable currents of aggressive courage or faltering panic which sweep through armies, the mysterious factor known as morale. It is not a factor that can be fed into the computer (though that expert on the subject, Napoleon, said it was three times as important as materiel), and everyone who has been in battle knows how intangible and unpredictable it is, how hard-pressed, outgunned men can suddenly take the offensive and turn the tables, how victorious advancing units can develop an uneasiness about their flanks that can turn into panic. And in fact battle is always unpredictable. In the early years of the fifteenth century, as the English armies, masters of southern and central France in a hundred years’ war, found themselves besieged and threatened by French troops they had beaten scores of times, who were now led by a peasant girl from Domrémy, men fell back on explanations no less unworldly than Homer’s gods. Joan herself claimed that the Archangel Michael had appeared and told her to kick the English out of France, “bouter les Anglais hors de la France,” and the English firmly believed that she was sent not by an angel but by the Devil, and burned her as a witch at Rouen. And historians still find it impossible to explain, in purely rational terms, how she could have accomplished what she did.

  Sometimes, however, the Homeric gods do more than protect and encourage; they actually join in the fighting, usually against one another, though in Book 5 Ares kills a Greek warrior and is in his turn wounded by Diomedes, who has already wounded Aphrodite. When Zeus encourages them to join in the fighting, as Achilles comes out to attack the Trojans, gods fight against gods: Athena against Ares and Aphrodite, Hephaestus against the river-god Xanthus, Hera against Artemis. The only one of these contests that is treated with epic dignity is that between Hephaestus and Xanthus, fire against water, against the immense strength of the river that came close to drowning Achilles. But when Athena downs Ares with a stone and then punches Aphrodite in, of all places, the breasts, when Hera smiles as she boxes the ears of Artemis with her bow, no reaction other than laughter seems possible. These wounds heal quickly, and even if they did not
, the gods are exempt from the ultimate consequence of action: they cannot lose their lives—no matter what they do; they will survive. And given this crucial difference between gods and men, only men can have true dignity on the battlefield; the presence of gods there is an impertinence. The immunity of the gods, who fight their mock battles while men stand and die, casts into higher relief the tragic situation of the men who risk and suffer not only pain and mutilation but the prospect, inevitable if the war goes on long enough, of death, of the total extinction of the individual personality.

  The gods are immortal; they are not subject to time. They have all the time in the world. And so they are not subject to change, to the change brought by age, to the change brought by learning from suffering and a realization of limitations. They will always be what they are now and have always been; they are all the same at the end of the Iliad as at the beginning. They do not change, do not learn. How could they? They are the personification of those mysterious forces which through their often violent interaction produce the harsh patterns of human life—the rise and fall of nations, the destructiveness of the earthquake, the terror of the flood, the horrors of the plague, but also the sweetness of passionate love, the intoxication of wine, the extra strength that surges through a warrior’s limbs at the moment of danger.

  As personalities (and that is how Homer and the Greeks always saw them), they are very different from one another, but they have, besides immortality, one other thing in common—a furious self-absorption. Each one is a separate force which, never questioning or examining the nature of its own existence, moves blindly, ferociously, to the affirmation of its will in action. The Homeric god recognizes no authority outside itself—except superior force. How are arguments settled in heaven? Like this: “Obey my orders,” says Zeus to Hera,