Athene’s wrath at the desecration of her altar hounds the Greeks—including Odysseus—on their journey home. The Odyssey details his incredible ten years of wandering until being reunited with the long-suffering Penelope. As a contrast to this main plot, the Odyssey prominently mentions the successful homecoming of Nestor to Pylos; how the lesser Aias lost his life at sea; the delayed trip of Menelaos; and the fatal return of his brother Agamemnon. The cautionary tale of Agamemnon—slain by his wife and her lover Aigisthos soon after his triumphant return—is given as a warning for Odysseus by none other than the victim himself in the underworld (Odyssey, book 11).
These individual heroic fates were more fully narrated, it seems, in the Nostoi (Returns). As with the other non-Iliadic episodes just mentioned, our main source for this lost epic comes from late antiquity in the form of a condensed plot summary of the so-called Cyclic epics. These poems of the archaic period (seventh–sixth century BC) are attributed to a number of obscure poets thought to have lived later than Homer. They include the Cypria, which told of events from the wedding of Peleus through the first nine years of the Trojan War; the Aithiopis, which picks up where the Iliad ends and continues the story to the dispute over Achilleus’ armor; and the Little Iliad and Sack of Ilium, which together narrate the last days of the city and the departure of the Greeks. Although the Cyclic epics might have been designed after the composition of the Homeric poems, to fill in the gaps and provide details not narrated in them, it is also likely that earlier versions of their material existed even during the era in which the Iliad was shaped. Parallel motifs abound, for which it is difficult to assign priority. It has been suggested that the death of Patroklos and the fight over his body (Iliad books 16 and 17) are modeled on a more familiar story of the death of Antilochos, a son of Nestor, known to the Cyclic poets as well as later tradition. What is more important is the strong possibility that the early audiences for the Iliad had in their minds the entire Trojan saga as it came to be written down later in the Cyclic poems, including the origins of the conflict and the ultimate fates of the Greek veterans. Every Iliad character and theme would have taken on greater resonance and depth for such listeners. That a body of such lore, perhaps even in poetic form, already existed when the Iliad was composed can explain why the Homeric poet is at liberty to begin the poem in the midst of the war, without a long exposition, filling out the picture with fleeting references as the narrative progresses.
Having seen where that narrative fits in the broader scheme of the saga, one can speculate briefly about the deeper roots for the entire Trojan story. In a traditional culture of oral storytelling—such as that of archaic Greece—tales are constantly remodeled but their elements are often centuries old. The Iliad comes at the end of a tradition that may reach back for a millennium in the region of the Aegean, even—paradoxically—to a time before any historical Trojan War of the twelfth century BC. Starting about 1700 BC, paintings that show the siege of a city and attacking ships adorned the walls of Minoan houses. The Town Mosaic, a series of terra-cotta plaques from the palace at Knossos on Crete, depicts house facades, soldiers, and a ship (although the underlying narrative, if any, is unclear). A somewhat later series of fresco scenes in the West House at Akrotiri, on the island of Santorini (Thera), features a flotilla of ships, and warriors marching with body-length shields near a town, while women watch from the walls. Perhaps epics about famous sieges were already in circulation a thousand years before Homeric poetry was put into definite form, centuries before Greek culture came to replace that of the Minoans.
Further afield, Near Eastern parallels to early Greek literature have captured the attention of scholars in recent decades. Achilleus’ relationship with Patroklos looks remarkably like the bond between Enkidu and Gilgamesh, the protagonist of an epic tradition reaching back to 2000 BC and widespread for 1,500 years in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (modern Iraq). Recorded on cuneiform tablets, in various versions in Sumerian, Akkadian, Hurrian, and Hittite, the earlier epic tells of the gods’ creation of Enkidu, a man of the wild, to be a match for the city hero Gilgamesh. Together they win fame as slayers of the monstrous forest guardian Humbaba, yet this and the slaughter of the Bull of Heaven eventually entail Enkidu’s death. The Near Eastern story then shifts into an Odyssey-like journey to a mythical land where Gilgamesh seeks from Utnapishtim the secret of immortality. But episodes such as the hero’s encounter with his companion’s ghost (tablet 12; cf. Il. 23), his conversation with his goddess mother, and the discomforting of a love goddess who subsequently complains to her divine parents (Ishtar in Gilgamesh, Aphrodite in 5.348–80), remind one of the Iliad. Unlike the Homeric poem, Gilgamesh depicts a primeval struggle between forces of nature and culture. An overall tragic tone, however, and similar attitudes toward the ephemeral nature of fame and mortality, pervade both compositions.
At the furthest remove, some plot elements of the Iliad might go back to the period when Greek was not yet fully differentiated from the dialects that would evolve into Latin, Persian, Sanskrit, and early forms of the western European languages (the Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic groups). On the basis of detailed grammatical resemblances among the historically attested tongues, an unrecorded parent language, dubbed “Indo-European,” has been reconstructed. It was probably spoken by tribes living in what is now southern Russia around 3000 BC. The hypothesis of a shared Indo-European linguistic origin accounts for resemblances among individual words: thus Greek patêr, Sanskrit pitar, and Latin pater—all meaning “father”—derive from one older stem. Similarly, names for some divinities—Zeus (Greek), Dyaus (Sanskrit) and Jupiter (an archaic Latin compound, meaning “sky father”)—can be traced to a common original. Shared elements in legal procedure and religious ritual are also convincingly explained by assuming that Indo-European speakers carried their culture with them as they moved out from their common homeland toward the Balkans and the Mediterranean, on the one hand, and on the other to central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Furthermore, pieces of poetic diction, metrical patterns, and narrative motifs appear to show a common Indo-European heritage. The Iliad’s backstory of an abducted bride who is won back by warrior brothers appears in the Sanskrit epic Ramayana (circa fourth century BC), while aspects of Hittite law and ritual have been detected in Homeric language, and the Homeric concept “unwithering fame” (Homeric kleos aphthiton) is paralleled exactly in the archaic literature of India and Ireland.
More work remains to be done on all the sources that may have contributed to the masterwork of the Iliad. It is clear that the poem will always be much more than the sum of such parts, a new and distinctively Greek vision, albeit it with very ancient origins.3
THE VISION OF THE ILIAD: THE LIMITS OF MORTALITY
The Iliad depicts the events of a few weeks in the last year of the siege of Troy. Within this concentrated space, the poem gives a sense of greater magnitude by alluding to all of the most important episodes in the ten-year saga, going back to the abduction of Helen. At the same time, while recounting in detail fierce attacks and pitched battles, it also manages to impart an indelible vision about the nature of human existence.
In the universe painted by the Iliad, humans are at the blazing center. Their motivations and concerns generate the action in the poem, while the gods are often reduced to the role of enablers or spectators. The passionate decisions of heroes like Achilleus and Hektor—to avenge a companion’s death, to take a stand outside the Trojan walls—are what determine the arc of the Iliad’s plot. The style of the poem collaborates with this vision: the spaciousness of the epic means that every thought and gesture, spear cast and threat, intimate conversation and lament can be recorded. The poetic consciousness behind the Iliad demands that these must be recorded: the meticulous attention to living detail is another way of expressing the centrality and worth of human experience, whether Greek or Trojan.
Because men and women, human psychology and social institutions, are at the heart of the Iliad
, it is inevitably a poem about death, the chief element that distinguishes mortals from gods. The opening lines highlight the destructive wrath of Achilleus, which to the harm of his enemies as well as his own companions, “hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting of dogs, of all birds.” The last scenes of the poem center on the funeral for Hektor, victim of Achilleus’ anger. All through the intervening books, death shadows every action. We hear of the slaying of scores of warriors—240 named, many others anonymous—and view the sometimes spectacular demise of several at excruciatingly close range: Deukalion decapitated (20.481), Erymas, his skull smashed, his mouth spewing blood (16.345), Mydon trampled by his own horses (5.588). Constantly at the edge of our vision is the specter of mass destruction, either of the Trojans defending their doomed city or of the attackers, beset by plague and slowly wasting away (1.49–52). Death is neither abhorred nor celebrated in this world, however. Instead, just as the Iliad distills the Trojan saga into a few days of intense fighting, it crystallizes by means of this one theme—death in battle—the essence of what it means to be human. Life is a struggle each person will ultimately always lose; the question is how one acts with that knowledge.
Homeric heroes respond to this fate with a mixture of resignation and resistance. “As is the generation of leaves,” says Glaukos to Diomedes, “so is that of humanity” (6.146), as he tries to defuse his opponent’s attempt to compare heroic genealogies. A similar broad view of the cycle of human existence marks the words of Apollo to Poseidon (21.464), except the god makes a different point: that he and fellow divinities should therefore not waste their effort on mankind. Achilleus at the end of the poem, with his new, hard-won clarity about the working of the world, tells the old Trojan king Priam of the stewardship of Zeus, who mixes disproportionately from “an urn of evils, an urn of blessings” (24.528). Unlike the Odyssey, the Iliad contains no extended depiction of the underworld, Hades’ realm, a grim holding area where strengthless ghosts maintain little more than their names. It is simply a place where (as Achilleus exclaims on seeing his companion’s ghost) “there is left something, a soul and an image, but there is no real heart of life in it” (23.103). Whereas modern readers assume that one’s inner spirit is somehow the “real” self, the Iliad describes the opposite: the psykhai (souls, spirits) of dying heroes fly off to Hades while their “selves” (autous) are left behind (in the form of their dead bodies). In line with this view of the afterlife, it is well understood that a life on earth of striving, even of pain, is preferable to an eternity of gloom.
Counterbalancing the darkness of death and loss is the brilliance of glory, which ensures that a person’s name, a marker for his or her self, lives on forever. The most detailed description of the ideology underlying the heroic quest for glory comes in the words of Sarpedon of Lycia to his companion, Glaukos (12.315–28):
. . . It is our duty in the forefront of the Lykians
to take our stand, and bear our part of the blazing of battle
so that a man of the close-armored Lykians may say of us:
“Indeed these are no ignoble men who are lords of Lykia,
these kings of ours, who feed upon the fat sheep appointed
and drink the exquisite sweet wine, since indeed there is strength
of valor in them, since they fight in the forefront of the Lykians.”
Man, supposing you and I, escaping this battle
would be able to live on forever, ageless, immortal,
so neither would I myself go on fighting in the foremost
nor would I urge you into the fighting where men win glory.
But now, seeing that the spirits of death stand close about us
in their thousands, no man can turn aside nor escape them,
let us go on and win glory for ourselves, or yield it to others.
Several points are worth noting: first, if mortals could live forever—that is, could be like gods—glory would be useless. Only death gives value to renown. Second, glory is a commodity to be exchanged: one wins it by the effort to kill an opponent, and the vanquished give it, like a gift, to the conqueror. In this zero-sum game, there is only so much glory to go around. Third, glory has both an economic and symbolic reality. Warriors are honored by the community with special privileges, grants of land, and feasts because on its behalf they risk death. This in turn gives them a wide reputation, spreading the fame of their people, which gives grounds for the community’s expenditure and ensures that their lives will not be forgotten. At the same time, the rewards of their fighting, whether cattle, weapons, or women, are visible marks of the honor they hold in the community, and a means of maintaining status among fellow warriors. For this reason, the quarrel between Achilleus and Agamemnon is deadly serious. Forced to return the young woman Chryseis, his prize of honor (geras), to end a divinely sent plague, Agamemnon in turn takes Achilleus’ war prize, Briseis, prompting the hero’s boycott in protest at his consequent loss of honor. In Achilleus’ view, status alone motivates Agamemnon’s greater geras, despite his own equal efforts (1.161–68). Their clash over entitlement emphasizes the disequilibrium between authority and ability, a mismatch familiar still today between those with power and those with talent.
Ideally, the short-term glory by which a warrior is recognized while alive, comprising material marks of honor, is a foretaste of long-term fame, one’s reputation after death. The reputation desired by Iliadic heroes is that represented by the very medium itself of Homeric poetry, which bestows kleos—“fame,” “report,” or “glory bestowed by poetry.” Kleos is literally “that which is heard” (cf. the verb kluô, “hear,” cognate with English “loud”). The Iliad describes several warriors as having chosen to go to Troy “for glory” (meta kleos: for example, Iphidamas 11.227). Other characters express awareness of their eventual commemoration. Helen believes that she and Paris will be “subjects of song” (aoidimoi) for future generations (Il. 6.358). Hektor imagines something akin to poetic epitaphs mentioning him (7.89–91).
Achilleus is seen performing stories of fame (9.186–89), while accompanying himself on a lyre. The hero of the Iliad apparently sings about past figures, such men as Meleagros, whose unfortunate tale, an example of the “glories of heroes” (klea andrôn hêrôôn), is recounted to him later in the same episode by the aged Phoinix (9.524–25). The Iliad itself, meanwhile, is explicitly characterized by the poet as what has been heard from the Muses, in contrast to and relying on what the goddesses, with timeless knowledge, once observed when events were unfolding (2.484–86). For Achilleus, however, “unwithering fame” (kleos aphthiton) must come at the price of death at Troy, in contrast to a return home without glory (9.413). He was never fated to enjoy the short-term rewards of war, over which he has quarreled. Instead, his desire to punish his fellow Greeks because they do not honor him enough only hastens his own death. Hard-pressed because Zeus has been persuaded by Achilleus’ mother to turn the tide against them, the Greeks beg Achilleus to return. But, in his magnificent reply to their embassy in book 9, the hero rejects the entire system of honor as material payment, tainted by injustice as it now appears to him. He seems to believe, as well, that the choice his mother Thetis once told to him—that he can leave Troy for a life of anonymity—is a real option. He declares to Odysseus that he will take ship the very next morning. After the speeches of his old guardian Phoinix and his fellow fighter Aias (9.432–642), he hedges, softening his attitude until he finally concedes the possibility of returning to battle if the Trojans manage to push all the way to the beached Greek ships. Meanwhile, an audience familiar with the character of Achilleus knows that he will never sail back home, abandoning long-term glory. The only suspense comes from not knowing exactly how and when he will return to the war that will eventually spell his death.
Here, another aspect of the Iliad vision becomes crucial: the importance of companionship. For this theme the poem seems to draw most deepl
y on actual experiences, ancient but instantly identifiable to moderns, as shown by the work of the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay with veterans of the Vietnam and Iraq conflicts. It is a universal theme in war stories, glimpsed in documents like a Japanese kamikaze pilot’s letter to his parents a week before his death: “My co-pilot is Uno Shigeru, a handsome boy, aged nineteen, a naval petty officer second class. His home is in Hyogo Prefecture. He thinks of me as his elder brother, and I think of him as my younger brother. Working as one heart, we will plunge into an enemy vessel.”4
In the battle scenes of the Iliad, the closeness of male friends, with the consequent desire to take revenge for a companion’s death, is regularly the prime motivation for one warrior to attack another. The core of the poem is shaped out of one such episode, writ large. Patroklos, an older fighter who has been sent to guide and advise Achilleus, begs out of pity for the devastated Greeks to be sent into the fray dressed in Achilleus’ own armor, to terrify the Trojans at least long enough for the troops to get a brief pause to recover. Still nursing his wounded pride, Achilleus accedes to this request by his nearest and dearest companion. Patroklos succeeds in mowing down scores of the enemy but is killed by Apollo, Euphorbos, and Hektor, acting in sequence. Grief and rage over Patroklos’ death induce Achilleus to abandon his boycott, enter the battle, and slay Hektor, even though he knows this means imminent death for himself. The poet never makes moral judgments, but leaves it to Achilleus to voice in self-reproach one of the deepest conclusions of the Iliad—that personal honor, no matter how precious, cannot take precedence over the life of a friend (18.97–105).
The Iliad of Homer Page 3