The Iliad

by Robert Fagels

  4.472 We are the ones: after the failure of the assault by the Seven against Thebes, their sons, among them Diomedes and Sthenelus, attacked the city in their turn, this time successfully.

  4.597 Third-born of the gods: this is a literal rendering of Athena’s title Tritogeneia, but the meaning of the word is disputed. Some ancient sources connect it with Lake Tritonis in Libya, where Zeus sent Athena to be reared, or with the river Triton in Boeotia. A modern explanation compares the Athenian Tritopateres. i.e., genuine ancestors: this would give the meaning “genuine daughter of Zeus.”

  5.lff. From time to time Homer inserts, in his account of the general melee, the preeminent deeds of one particular hero: such an excursus is known as an aristeia (from the Greek word aristos, “best”). Book 5 and the opening section of Book 6 constitute the aristeia of Diomedes: it is the longest and most murderous of all, except for that of Achilles in Books 20-22.

  5.5 The star that flames at harvest: the Dog Star, Sirius; see note 22.35.

  5.294 Ganymede: one of the three sons of Tros. the first king of Troy. He was “the handsomest mortal man on earth” (20.269), and Zeus carried him off to Olympus to be the cup-bearer and wine-pourer of the gods. For the genealogy of the Trojan royal line, see Aeneas’ account in 20.248-79, note ad loc and the Genealogy, p. 617.

  5.434-62 Dione comforts Aphrodite by pointing out that she is not the only god to be wounded by a mortal. Ares was imprisoned in a bronze cauldron by the young giants Ephialtes and Otus, and almost died before he was rescued by Hermes. Hera and Hades, the Death-god, were both wounded by Heracles, Hades apparently in the course of a battle at Pylos. None of these legends appears in other sources, and the ancient commentators were evidently puzzled by them. Homer may have invented them for the occasion. See note 2.748.

  5.733-38 What they say of mighty Heracles: Heracles rescued the daughter of Laomedon, Hesione, from a sea monster sent by Poseidon. His reward was to be the famous horses of Laomedon, but the king refused to pay. Heracles took and sacked the city.

  5.859-61 The gates of heaven: i.e., of Olympus, the house of the gods, consist, naturally enough, of clouds, and clouds are thought of as controlled by the Seasons of the year. So here they are, so to speak, the gate-keepers.

  5.926 The message into Thebes: Adrastus, king of Argos, gave shelter to Polynices, son of Oedipus of Thebes, and organized an army (led by seven champions, the “Seven against Thebes”) to restore him to the throne of Thebes, from which he had been expelled by his brother Eteocles. Tydeus, later one of the Seven, was sent with a demand that Eteocles give up his throne to Polynices.

  5.976 Helmet of Death: this helmet, which made its wearer invisible, is attributed to the Death-god, Hades, because his name in Greek, Aïdês, was thought to mean “the unseen one” (a = “not,” and the root *id = “see”).

  5.1017-18 You gave her birth I from your own head: according to legend, Zeus made love with Metis, a Titaness; she conceived a daughter, and Mother Earth prophesied that if Metis conceived again she would bear a son, who would dethrone his father. So Zeus swallowed her whole and then was seized with a raging headache; Hephaestus split his skull with an ax, and Athena sprang to light, full-blown, from Zeus’s forehead.

  6.153 Maenads: literally “madwomen.” They are the female devotees of the god Dionysus, who range the hills in ecstasy, carrying the thyrsus (the “sacred stave”), a staff wreathed with ivy and topped by a pine cone.

  6.157-60 And Dionysus was terrified: Homer’s picture of a frightened Dionysus taking refuge with Thetis is very different from the terrifying figure of the god presented in Euripides’ play The Bacchae.

  6.385 This anger: commentators have wondered why Paris should be angry and proposed various solutions (for example, that the anger is that of the Trojans against Paris), but Paris’ reply “from anger ... at our people” (396-97) is clear enough. Hector thinks Paris is sulking because he senses the resentment of his fellow Trojans and is angry with them.

  7.386-95 A single great barrow ... a landward wall: see 7.503-11, 12.4-42, Introduction, p. 38, and notes 9.78, 14.35-44.

  7.523-25 Those ramparts I and Apollo l reared for Troy in the old days: Apollo and Poseidon, as a punishment for their part in a revolt against Zeus, were sent to work for a year at the orders of Laomedon, king of Troy, Priam’s father. While Apollo acted as a shepherd to the king’s flocks, Poseidon built a wall around the city. At the end of the year, Laomedon cheated the two gods of the wages he had promised. Poseidon reminds Apollo of this in 21.505-22.

  8.45 Nothing I said was meant in earnest: Zeus tones down the violence of his previous statement to the gods as he speaks to his favorite daughter, but of course he has not changed his mind.

  8.82 Fates of death: the Greek word is kêrês. A kêr was a man’s individual fate, especially his death. Sometimes the word is used impersonally to mean death or doom, and sometimes a kêr is a personified spirit of death, as on the shield of Achilles, 18.623.

  8.149 Irreversible chaos: because Zeus’s promise to Thetis would have been broken, the will of Zeus thwarted, if Diomedes’ triumphant advance had continued.

  8.331 Tripod: a large pot or cauldron standing on three legs so it can straddle a fire. Often highly ornamented for presentation as a gift or prize, its metal construction made it unusually valuable and rare.

  8.399 Or Ares’: we translate the reading of the ancient critic Zenodotus (êe = “or”) rather than the reading of most manuscripts, and the Oxford Classical Text (êdt = “and”), at line 349 in the Greek.

  8.334 Cronus and Iapetus: the two most important of the Titans, the family of the gods that ruled before Zeus and the Olympians. (Cronus was the father of Zeus, Iapetus of Prometheus.) Zeus and his brothers and sisters overthrew Cronus and the Titans in a ten years’ war: the Titans were all confined in Tartarus, the lowest depths of the world of the dead. See note 14.244.

  9.73-75 These lines (63-64 in the Greek), obviously proverbial in expression, have been thought out of place here: what is their exact reference? And why the mention of civil war? But Nestor, though he must press Agamemnon to make a conciliatory move toward Achilles, must not go too far: Agamemnon is still a powerful king, a dangerous enemy. So his remarks are general—he could be attributing the danger of dissension, even fighting, among the Achaeans to Achilles, to Agamemnon, or to both of them.

  9.78 The trench we dug ouuide the rampart: Homer’s description of the wall and the ditch is unclear, even confusing at times. Here it seems that the Achaeans had left a level space between the rampart and the ditch: it is in this that the sentries are to take their posts.

  9.176 Bride-price: expensive gifts offered by the suitor to the bride’s father. This seems to have been the normal custom in heroic times (see, for example, 16.209, 16.225 and 22.555), but it is here combined with the later custom—a dowry offered by the bride’s father.

  9.505 Death will not come on me quickly: this line, which repeats in different wording the thought of the previous line, was condemned by two of the great Alexandrian editors of the lliad, Zenodotus and Aristarchus, as an interpolation.

  9.558-62 These lines (458-61 in the Greek) are not to be found in the manuscript tradition. Plutarch, writing in the first century A.D., quotes them and adds that Aristarchus, the most severe of the Alexandrian editors, expunged them, because he was shocked by them (if that is what Plutarch’s word phobêtheis means in this context).

  9.646-729 The story of Meleager, as we know it from later sources, is very different from Homer’s version. Elsewhere (in Aeschylus and Bacchylides, for example) Althaea was told by the fates that her newborn son Meleager would live as long as the log on the fire remained unconsumed. She took it off the fire, extinguished it and hid it in the chest. Later, when, in a quarrel over the spoils of the Calydonian hunt, Meleager killed Althaea’s brother, she put the log back in the fire and he died. Homer’s account makes Meleager’s situation such a close parallel to that of Achilles that critics have suspected that he in
vented it. (See Introduction, pp. 50-52, and note 9.672.) This suspicion is reinforced by the fact that Cleopatra, who urged him to go back to the battle, as Patroclus does Achilles, has a name consisting of the same two elements as Patroclus’ name (patr- and cl-), in reverse. And Homer goes out of his way to explain that Cleopatra was called by another name—Alcyone (Hatcyon)—by her parents.

  9.675 Their own city walls: the language is confusing here, and interpretation disputed. We have taken the lines to mean that the Aetolians beat the Curetes back to their own walls (as the Achaeans did the Trojans before Achilles withdrew from the battle): this fortifies Phoenix’s parallel.

  9.679-88 Marpessa: Idas and the god Apollo were both in love with Marpessa, and Apollo carried her off. Idas confronted him, and Zeus prevented a fight, asking Marpessa to choose between them. She chose Idas, and called her daughter Halcyon in commemoration of the time she wailed like the seabird on being parted from him,

  9.741 The great decree of Zeus: we take the phrase Dios aisêi (608 in the Greek) in this sense, a reference to Zeus’s promise to Thetis to make the Achaeans regret their treatment of Achilles. Other possible interpretations are: “‘by the dispensation of Zeus’; i.e., by [Achilles‘] status and position in the world” (Willcock), “by the just measure [of Zeus]” (Leaf), “honored already in Zeus’s ordinance” (Lattimore).

  9.772 Accept the blood-price: see note 18.581-92.

  10.315 The lucky sign: it was lucky because the heron was on their right hand. This idea that signs on the right are lucky and on the left unlucky is common in many cultures and languages: our word “sinister,” for example, is the Latin word for “left.” See 12.230-39, 24.377-91.

  11.4 Storm-shield: Homer does not make it clear exactly what Strife holds in her fists: we suggest that it is the aegis of Zeus. See 5.846-50 and note 2.529.

  11.892 Their real father. Poseidon: like Heracles and many another Greek hero, the twin Moliones had two fathers, one human and one divine. The Greek has no equivalent of the word “real,” but it seemed called for by the situation—it is Poseidon who saves their lives.

  12.61-64 There are more confused memories of war-chariots here: obviously a war-chariot pulled by horses could not leap over a wide ditch, though a man on a horse might.

  12.205 Blaze of war: since fire is not much use against a rock wall, we have taken the Greek phrase as a metaphor.

  13.6-8 A world away: all these peoples—Thracians, Mysians, Hippemolgi and the Abii—are located to the north of Troy.

  13.14 Samos facing Thrace: the island usually known as Samothrace, not the large island of Samos off the south-central coast of Asia Minor, or the island off the western coast of Greece, part of Odysseus’ kingdom, later known as Cephallenia. See note 24.97.

  13.247 [Poseidon‘s] own grandson: i.e., Amphimachus (1), whose death is described in 221-23.

  13.632 The whole vein: there is of course no such vein. Aristotle, who quotes the passage (HA 513b 26-29), identifies it with the vena cava, but this vein is not near enough to the surface to be “sheared ... clear.”

  13.759-60 No blood-price came his way... in battle: see note 18.581-92.

  13.918 Fresh reserves just come from Ascania’s fertile soil: this passage does not square with the Catalogue in Book 2, where Ascanius and his contingent are already in place with the Achaean forces. “Once again, the normal accuracy of the poet causes us to notice a small inconsistency” (Willcock, vol. 2, p. 224).

  14.35-44 The picture of the Achaean ships berthed on the beach is, at times, somewhat obscure. We have understood the lines to mean that the first ships to land (ten years before) were those of Diomedes, Odysseus and Agamemnon. They had been drawn up on the beach, “far away from the fighting”; a defensive wall was built ahead of their stems (they were positioned ready for relaunching). This is not of course the same wall as that later built around the whole of the Greek encampment (see note 7.386-95). As the next contingents arrived, they could not be accommodated in the enclosure; their crews dragged them up in rows (presumably on either side of the first ships to land) and filled the whole stretch of the bay.

  14.148 One of Adrastus’ daughters: Tydeus married one of them, Polynices the other (Diomedes, son of Tydeus, married Aegialia, who was, according to some authorities, the daughter, according to others, the granddaughter, of Adrastus).

  14.244 Ocean, fountainhead of the gods, and Mother Tethys: the word translated “fountainhead” suggests that Ocean and his wife Tethys were the parents of the Olympian gods. This is contrary to the standard version, Hesiod’s Theogony, an account of the genealogy of the gods, which made Ocean and Tethys children of Uranus and Gaia, like all the Titans. There, Ocean is the father of all the rivers and the springs. During the war of the Olympians and the Titans, Rhea, wife of Cronus and mother of Zeus and Hera, had sent Hera to Ocean and Tethys for safekeeping. See note 8.554.

  14.356 All unknown to their parents: Zeus and Hera are incestuous brother and sister, both born of Cronus and Rhea, as well as husband and wife, king and queen of the gods.

  14.390-91 Demeter bore Zeus a daughter, Persephone, and his children by Leto were Apollo and Artemis.

  15.32-39 Grief for Heracles: Hera, who hated Heracles and persecuted him throughout his life, since he was the son of Zeus by a mortal woman, Alcmena, had caused a storm to blow him off his course on his return from sacking Troy. See 14.300-16, 18.139-41, 19.112-46, Introduction, p. 42.

  16.278-79 The Selli / sleeping along the ground: the priests of the oracle of Zeus at Dodona were an ascetic brotherhood, sleeping on the ground and going barefoot, probably to maintain contact with the chthonic deities.

  16.715-16 These lines (614-15 in the Greek) are omitted by many of the manuscripts and excised as an interpolation by many editors.

  17.623 His mind had changed, at leasr for a moment: i.e., Zeus now gives victory to the Achaeans. Some scholars think it means his mind had changed about allowing the gods to intervene, but that change of mind comes late, in Book 20. “At least for a moment” is not in the Greek but seems justified since in fact Zeus changes his mind again a few lines later (672-75).

  18.43-56 All the Nereids: the translation attempts to render the Homeric names of the Nereids with reference to their root meanings in the Greek. The translator has followed the lead of William Arrowsmith’s excellent version, the first in modern English to treat the passage in this way (The Craft and Context of Translation, ed. Arrowsmith and Shattuck [Austin, Tex., 1961], p. 19). In their translations of the Odyssey, W. H. D. Rouse (1937) and Robert Fitzgerald (1961) have done the same in rendering the Phaeacian princes’ names (8.111-16 in the Greek), all of them fittingly nautical for a seafaring people.

  18.462 My great fall: it is not clear whether this was the fall described in 1.712- 16, or indeed whether Hephaestus’ lameness was the result of that fall or a birth defect. The point of the story is simply to provide a reason for his willingness to help Thetis.

  18.569-71 The Wagon: the constellation also known as the Big Dipper and the Great Bear. As seen from the northern hemisphere, it never disappears below the horizon or, as Homer puts it, “plunge[s] in the Ocean’s baths.” The Great Bear is referred to as “she” (570) because she was originally the nymph Callisto, who ranged the woods as one of the virgin companions of the goddess Artemis. Zeus made her pregnant, and when this could no longer be concealed, Artemis changed her into a bear and killed her. Zeus in turn changed her into the constellation.

  18.581-92 A quarrel had broken out: as in many tribal societies, compensation for a killing might be offered to and accepted by the victim’s relatives. (See 18.108, 21.32.) If it were not offered, the relatives would pursue the killer to exact blood for blood: his only recourse would be to go into exile, as so many of the Achaean heroes of the Iliad did (Patroclus, for example, 23.103-8, and Tlepolemus, 2.756-66). The language in this passage is ambiguous: it may mean that one side offered payment and the other refused (the interpretation we have followed) or that one man
claims he has paid and the other disputes his statement.

  18.595 Or share the riches with its people: i.e., they would cease hostilities if offered half the city’s wealth.

  18.666 A dirge for the dying year: the Greek word is linos. This was a dirge, a mouming song, appropriate for vintage time—the end of summer. The name may have come from the Greek expression of sorrow, corresponding to our “Alas!”—ailinon. But there was also a mythical figure, Linus, a great musician, who was killed and for whom there were ceremonies of mourning.

  19.106 Ruin, eldest daughter of Zeus: see note 2.130.

  19.145 Born of your own stock: Perseus was the son of Zeus and Danaë. See 14.383-84 and note 2.748.

  19.494 Cut down by a deathless god and mortal man: eventually, beyond the compass of the Iliad, Achilles will fall at the hands of Paris. According to legend, Paris is either assisted by Apollo—who guides a fatal arrow to Achilles’ right heel, the one vulnerable part of his body—or replaced by the god, who assumes his likeness and shoots Achilles down directly. See 22.422-24 and notes 1. 1, 3.174.