The Iliad

by Robert Fagels

  abroad to foreign shores, to a wealthy, noble host,

  and a sense of marvel runs through all who see him . . . (24.563-66)

  It seems to reverse the situation, as if Priam, not Achilles, were the killer. And yet it is carefully chosen. For Achilles, a child of the quarrelsome, violent society of the Achaeans we know so well from the bitter feuds of the camp, from old Nestor’s tales of cattle raids, ambush and border war, from the tales of Achaean suppliants fleeing their homeland with blood on their hands—for Achilles, the appearance of a distinguished stranger and his gesture of supplication evoke the familiar context of the man of violence seeking shelter. Achilles cannot imagine the truth. And now Priam tells him who he is—but not at once. First he invokes the memory of Achilles’ father—pining at home for a son he may never see again. And then he reveals his identity and makes his plea. It ends with the tragic and famous lines: “I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before—/ I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son” (24.590-91).

  And Achilles begins to break out at last from the prison of self-absorbed, godlike passion; “like the gods,” Priam called him, but that is the last time this line-end formula (exclusive to Achilles) appears. He will move now to man’s central position between beast and god. But the change is not sudden. The stages in his return to human feelings are presented with masterly psychological insight. Achilles took the old man’s hands and pushed him “gently,” says Homer, away, and wept. Not for Priam but for his own aged father, to whose memory Priam had appealed and who will soon, like Priam, lose a son. He raises Priam to his feet and sits him in a chair, and speaks to him in awed admiration: “What daring,” he asks, “brought you down to the ships, all alone ... ?” (24.606). It was indeed an action calling for the kind of extraordinary courage that is Achilles’ own preeminent quality. He comforts the old man, with what small comfort mortals can take for their lot. From his two urns of good and evil, Zeus dispenses now evil, now evil mixed with good. So it was with Peleus, Achilles’ own father, who had great honor and possessions. But then:

  “only a single son he fathered, doomed at birth,

  cut off in the spring of life—

  and I, I give the man no care as he grows old

  since here I sit in Troy, far from my fatherland,

  a grief to you, a grief to all your children. ” (24.630-34)

  That last phrase is a new view of the war; he sees it now from Priam’s point of view. And moves on from pity for his own father to pity for the bereaved king of Troy. “And you too, old man, we hear you prospered once ... / But then the gods of heaven brought this agony on you—” (24.635-40). This is a new way of thinking for Achilles; he sees himself as another man must see him—as he must appear to the father of his enemy, Hector.

  He tells Priam to bear up and endure, but the old man, his moment of danger past, his end accomplished, grows impatient and asks for Hector’s body at once. Suddenly we are shown that the newfound emotions have only a precarious existence in Achilles’ heart; at any moment they may be overwhelmed by a return of his anger, his self-centered rage. He knows this himself and warns Priam not to go too fast; he knows how tenuous a hold his new mood has:

  “No more, old man, don’t tempt my wrath, not now!

  ... Don’t stir my raging heart still more.

  Or under my own roof I may not spare your life, old man—

  suppliant that you are . . . ” (24.656-69)

  Achilles goes to collect the ransom, and when he orders Hector’s body to be washed and anointed, he gives orders to have it done out of Priam’s sight:

  He feared that, overwhelmed by the sight of Hector,

  wild with grief, Priam might let his anger flare

  and Achilles might fly into fresh rage himself,

  cut the old man down... (24.684-87)

  He knows himself. This is a new Achilles, who can feel pity for others, see deep into their hearts and into his own. For the first time he shows self-knowledge and acts to prevent the calamity his violent temper might bring about. It is as near to self-criticism as he ever gets, but it marks the point at which he ceases to be godlike Achilles and becomes a human being in the full sense of the word.

  He tells Priam Hector’s body is ready. And offers him food. It will be Priam’s first meal since his son’s death. And he speaks to Priam as Odysseus had spoken to Achilles before the battle: there must be a limit to mourning for the dead; men must eat and go on with their lives.

  “Now, at last, let us turn our thoughts to supper.

  Even Niobe with her lustrous hair remembered food,

  though she saw a dozen children killed in her own halls ...

  Nine days they lay in their blood ...

  then on the tenth ...

  ... Niobe, gaunt, worn to the bone with weeping,

  turned her thoughts to food. ” (24.707-22)

  It is an admission of mortality, of limitations, of the bond that unites him to Priam, and all men.

  He has a bed made for Priam outside the tent, for any Achaean coming into the tent and seeing Priam would tell Agamemnon. Achilles assumes the role of the old king’s protector; even in his newfound humanity he is still a man alone—his sense of honor will not allow him to let Priam fall into the Achaeans’ hands. And he promises to hold off the fighting for the twelve days Priam needs for the funeral of Hector. He has come at last to the level of humanity, and humanity at its best; he has forgotten himself and his wrongs in his sympathy for another man. It is late; only just in time, for when the fighting resumes, he will fall in turn, as his mother told him and as Hector prophesied with his dying breath. The poem ends with the funeral of Hector. But this is the signal for the resumption of the fighting. The first line of the poem gave us the name of Achilles, and its last line reminds us of him, for his death will come soon, as the fighting resumes. The poem ends, as it began, on the eve of battle.

  The tragic course of Achilles’ rage, his final recognition of human values—this is the guiding theme of the poem, and it is developed against a background of violence and death. But the grim progress of the war is interrupted by scenes which remind us that the brutality of war, though an integral part of human life, is not the whole of it. Except for Achilles, whose worship of violence falters only in the final moment of pity for Priam, the yearning for peace and its creative possibilities is never far below the surface of the warriors’ minds. This is most poignantly expressed by the scenes that take place in Troy, especially the farewell scene between Hector and Andromache, but the warriors’ dream of peace is projected over and over again in the elaborate similes, those comparisons with which Homer varies the grim details of the bloodletting, and which achieve the paradoxical effect of making the particulars of destructive violence familiar by drawing for illustration on the peaceful, ordinary activities of everyday life. Dead men and armor are trampled under the wheels of Achilles’ chariot as white barley is crushed under the hoofs of oxen on a threshing floor (20.559-67); hostile forces advancing against each other are like two lines of reapers in the wheat or barley field of a rich man, cutting their way forward (11.76-82); the two fronts in tense deadlock at the Achaean wall hold even like the scales held by a widow, working for a pitiful wage, as she weighs out her wool (12.502-5); the combatants fighting for possession of Sarpedon’s corpse swarm over it like flies over the brimming milk buckets in spring (16.745-47); Menelaus bestrides the body of Patroclus as a lowing cow stands protectively over its first-born calf (17.3-6); Ajax is forced back step by step like a stubborn donkey driven out of a cornfield by boys who beat him with sticks (11.653-62). These vivid pictures of normal life, drawn with consummate skill and inserted in a relentless series of gruesome killings, have a special poignancy; they are one of the features of Homer’s evocation of battle which make it unique: an exquisite balance between the celebration of war’s tragic, heroic values and those creative values of civilized life that war destroys.

  These two poles of the h
uman condition, war and peace, with their corresponding aspects of human nature, the destructive and creative, are implicit in every situation and statement of the poem, and they are put before us, in something approaching abstract form, on the shield which the god Hephaestus has made for Achilles. Its emblem is an image of human life as a whole. Here are two cities, one at peace and one at war. In one a marriage is celebrated and a quarrel settled by process of law; the other is besieged by a hostile army and fights for its existence. Scenes of violence—peaceful shepherds slaughtered in an ambush, Death dragging away a corpse by its foot—are balanced by scenes of plowing, harvesting, work in the vineyard and on the pasture, a green on which youths and maidens dance. War has its place on the shield, but it is the lesser one; most of the surface is covered with scenes of peaceful life—the pride of the tilled land, wide and triple-plowed, the laborers reaping with sharp sickles in their hands, a great vineyard heavy with grape clusters, young girls and young men carrying the sweet fruit away in baskets, a large meadow in a lovely valley for the sheep flocks, and, above all, the dance, that formal symbol of the precise and ordered relations of people in peaceful society.

  Here young boys and girls, beauties courted

  with costly gifts of oxen, danced and danced,

  linking their arms, gripping each other’s wrists.

  And the girls wore robes of linen light and flowing,

  the boys wore finespun tunics rubbed with a gloss of oil,

  the girls were crowned with a bloom of fresh garlands,

  the boys swung golden daggers hung on silver belts.

  And now they would run in rings on their skilled feet,

  nimbly, quick as a crouching potter spins his wheel,

  palming it smoothly, giving it practice twirls

  to see it run, and now they would run in rows,

  in rows crisscrossing rows—rapturous dancing.

  A breathless crowd stood round them struck with joy

  and through them a pair of tumblers dashed and sprang,

  whirling in leaping handsprings, leading out the dance. (18.693-707)

  And all around the outermost rim of the shield the god who made it set the great stream of the Ocean River, the river that is at once the frontier of the known and imagined worlds and the barrier between the quick and the dead.

  The imbalance of these scenes on the shield of Achilles shows us the total background of the carnage of the war; it provides a frame which gives the rage of Achilles and the death of Hector a true perspective. But it is not enough. The Iliad remains a terrifying poem. Achilles, just before his death, is redeemed as a human being, but there is no consolation for the death of Hector. We are left with a sense of waste, which is not adequately balanced even by the greatness of the heroic figures and the action; the scale descends toward loss. The Iliad remains not only the greatest epic poem in literature but also the most tragic.

  Homer’s Achilles is clearly the model for the tragic hero of the Sophoclean stage; his stubborn, passionate devotion to an ideal image of self is the same force that drives Antigone, Oedipus, Ajax and Philoctetes to the fulfillment of their destinies. Homer’s Achilles is also, for archaic Greek society, the essence of the aristocratic ideal, the paragon of male beauty, courage and patrician manners—“the splendor running in the blood,” says Pindar, in a passage describing Achilles’ education in the cave of the centaur Chiron. And this, too, strikes a tragic note, for Pindar sang his praise of aristocratic values in the century which saw them go down to extinction, replaced by the new spirit of Athenian democracy. But it seems at first surprising that one of the most famous citizens of that democracy, a man whose life and thought would seem to place him at the extreme opposite pole from the Homeric hero, who was so far removed from Achilles’ blind instinctive reactions that he could declare the unexamined life unlivable, that Socrates, on trial for his life, should invoke the name of Achilles. Explaining to his judges why he feels no shame or regret for a course of action that has brought him face-to-face with a death sentence, and rejecting all thought of a compromise that might save his life (and which his fellow citizens would have been glad to offer), he cites as his example Achilles, the Achilles who, told by his mother that his own death would come soon after Hector’s, replied: “Then let me die at once—” rather than “sit by the ships ... / a useless, dead weight on the good green earth” (18.113- 23).

  And yet, on consideration, it is not so surprising. Like Achilles, he was defying the community, hewing to a solitary line, in loyalty to a private ideal of conduct, of honor. In the last analysis, the bloodstained warrior and the gentle philosopher live and die in the same heroic, and tragic, pattern.

  THE SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION OF HOMERIC NAMES

  Though the English spelling of ancient Greek names faces modem poet-translators with some difficult problems, it was not a problem at all for Shakespeare, Milton, Pope and Tennyson. Except in the case of names that had through constant use been fully Anglicized—Helen, Priam, Hector, Troy, Trojans—the poets used the Latin equivalents of the Greek names that they found in the texts of Virgil and Ovid, whose poems they read in school. These are the forms we too are familiar with, from our reading of English poets through the centuries: Hecuba, Achilles, Ajax, Achaeans, Patroclus.

  Recent poet-translators have tried to get closer to the original Greek and have transliterated the Greek names directly, not through the medium of their Latin adaptations. One translator, for example, presents his readers with Hékabê, Akhilleus, Hektor, Aías, Akhaians and Pa tróklos. Another shares most of these spellings but, perhaps finding the combination kh unsuited to English, strikes a compromise—Achilleus, Achaians. All translators compromise when it comes to such fully naturalized forms as Helen, Trojans and Argives (Helenê, Trôes and Argeioi in the Greek), and they also retreat from strict transliteration in cases like Rhodes (Rhodos) and Thrace (Thrêikê).

  This is an area in which no one can claim perfect consistency: we too offer a compromise. Its basis, however, is a return to the traditional practice of generations of English poets—the use of Latinate spellings except for those names that have become, in their purely English forms, familiar in our mouths as household words.

  Rigid adherence to this rule would of course make unacceptable demands: it would impose, for example, Minerva instead of Athena, Ulysses for Odysseus, and Jupiter or Jove for Zeus. We have preferred the Greek names, but transliterated them on Latin principles: Hêrê, for example, is Hera in this translation; Athênê is Athena. Elsewhere we have replaced the letter k with c and substituted the ending us for the Greek os in the names of persons (Patroklos becomes Patroclus). When, however, a personal name ends in ros preceded by a consonant, we have used the Latin ending er: Meleager for Meleagros, Teucer for Teukros. The Greek diphthongs oi and ai are represented by the Latin diphthongs oe and ae (Boeotia for Boiotia, Achaean for Akhaian) and the Greek diphthong ou by the Latin u (Lycurgus for Lykourgos).

  This conventional Latinate spelling of the names has a traditional pronunciation system, one that corresponds with neither the Greek nor the Latin sounds. Perhaps “system” is not the best word for it, since it is full of inconsistencies. But it is the pronunciation English poets have used for centuries, the sounds they heard mentally as they composed and that they confidently expected their readers to hear in their turn. Since there seems to be no similar convention for the English pronunciation of modem transliterated Greek—is the h sounded in Akhilleus? is Diomedes pronounced dee-oh-may‘-days or dee-oh-mee’-deez?—we have thought it best to work with pronunciation that Keats and Shelley would have recognized.

  As in Achilles (a-kil‘-eez), ch is pronounced like k throughout. The consonants c and g are hard (as in cake and gun) before a—Lycaon (leye- kay’-on), Agamemnon (a-ga-mem‘-non); before o—Corinth (kor’-inth), Gorgon (gor‘-gon); before u—Curetes (koo-ree’-teez), Guneus (goon‘- yoos); and before other consonants—Patroclus (pa-tro’-klus), Glaucus (glaw‘-kus). They are soft (as
in cinder and George) before e—Celadon (se’-la-don), Agenor (a-jee‘-nor); before i—Cicones (si-koh’-neez), Phrygia (fri‘-ja); and before y—Cythera (si-thee’-ra), Gyrtone (jur-toh‘-nee). The final combinations cia and gia produce sha—Lycia (li’-sha)—and ja—Phrygia (fri‘-ja)—respectively.

  There are however cases in which the pronunciation of the consonants does not conform to these rules. One of the names of the Greeks, for example—Argives—is pronounced with a hard g (ar‘-geyevz not ar’- jeyevz), by analogy with the town of Argos. And the combination cae is pronounced with a soft c, since the diphthong ae is sounded as ee—Caesar (see’-zar) is a familiar example.

  The vowels vary in pronunciation, sometimes but not always according to the length of the Latin (or Greek) syllable, and the reader will have to find guidance in the rhythm of the English line or consult the Pronouncing Glossary at the back of the volume. Final e is always sounded long: Hebe (hee‘-bee); final es is pronounced eez, as in Achilles. In other positions, the letter e may represent the sound heard in sneeze or that heard in pet. The letter i may sound as in bit or bite: Achilles (a-kil’ -eez) or Atrides (a-treye’-deez). The two sounds are also found for y—Cythera (si-thee‘-ra) or Lycaon (leye-kay’-on)—while o is pronounced as in Olympus (o-lim‘-pus) or Dodona (doh-doh’-na). In this spelling system, u except in the ending us and in combination with other vowels (see below) is always long, since it represents the Greek diphthong ou. But it may be pronounced either you as in dew—Bucolion (bew-kol‘-i-on)-or oo as in glue—Guneus (goon’-yoos).