They, too, are immortal in their architecture, art, law, government, languages, mythology , literature , and philosophy. The cultures of Greece and Rome live around and through us every day. Students who study Latin soon see that Latin is everywhere, and that they have been speaking and reading Latin all of their lives. Likewise, students who study Greece and Rome soon see that those cultures are everywhere, and they have been living as Greeks and Romans all of their lives. The story of Greek and Roman literature begins with the story of Troy.
Our students at Highlands Latin School read the Iliad and the Odyssey in the seventh grade, and at first, the warrior culture of these early Greeks seems very alien. They were not sensitive and sentimental like us. They were not politically correct at all. Achilles was certainly not a nice Christian gentleman like Abraham Lincoln. But the Iliad , we discover, is a book about the Civil War.
It is a book about all wars, about the people and characters that you find in every war—and in every town—the wise, the foolish, the clever, the noble, the base, the ambitious, the old, and the young. It is about their pettiness, their heroism, their adventures, their sacrifices, and their sufferings. The Iliad is mostly about people, not war, and it gives us unforgettable and universal character types. There is no passage in all of literature more moving than when Priam comes to beg for the body of Hector and kisses the bloody hands of Achilles, who has slaughtered so many of his sons.
The two enemies, one old and one young, sit down and weep together over what they both have lost. Hector is the real hero of the Iliad , and he dies at the hands of Achilles, who desecrates his body and drags it around the walls of Troy, Venus then restores his body to perfection before it is returned to Priam. What if, all those centuries back, Greek poets performing in Anatolia had declined to adapt their Greek epic to the sensibilities of their changing audiences?
What if they had been deaf to the ongoing history of war and displacement they encountered? What if Homer had Achilles send old Priam packing; abuse, humiliate or kill him? Would history really have turned out differently? Probably not; but something of consequence would have been lost to the world. That the gods we worship might not answer, and on occasion humanity must rise to fill their place.
That glory is inextricably allied to wrenching loss. That the victor shares the humanity of the most vulnerable of the vanquished; that there is no such thing as unalloyed victory in war. Caroline Alexander was the first woman to publish a full-length English translation of The Iliad Penguin, A poll of writers and critics, stories that shaped the world, will be announced in May.
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Introducing Homer's Iliad Start this free course now. Free course Introducing Homer's Iliad. Introducing Homer's Iliad Introduction The Iliad and the Odyssey , the two epic ancient Greek poems attributed to Homer, are widely considered to be foundational texts in Western literature.
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Our partners OpenLearn works with other organisations by providing free courses and resources that support our mission of opening up educational opportunities to more people in more places. In the world of the shield, however, there is an attempt at arbitration, and when the family of the deceased refuses the initial offer, there is further arbitration with a prize being given not to the best warrior in the city but to the person who devises the best peaceful resolution.
No wonder there are festivals and marriages in this city—the city operates on the basis of law and intelligence, not on the law of the jungle. The other city depicted on the shield is quite different. This is a city characterized by ambushes and treachery, by Hate and Confusion and Death. This is, in short, a city that embodies all the horrors of Troy, and it stands in sharp contrast to the other, ideal city. The shield of Achilleus, then, depicts the natural world as a world of harmony, but it describes two possibilities for the world of human beings.
One of those possibilities offers peace and harmony, but the other offers war and destruction. The choice, Homer seems to say, is ours, though clearly the Achaians and the Trojans have made their choice.
It is not enough, however, to say simply that they should choose differently, for they have chosen the way they have been taught to choose. The men are celebrated for their fighting ability, not their peacemaking ability. Only men who are past their primes, like Nestor, are looked to for intelligent thought. Odysseus, the wisest and wiliest of all the fighters, is an anomaly, and he comes in for his share of abuse in this poem as a result.
Another brilliant poem based on this passage is W. But The Iliad is not a poem of simple contrasts. If the warriors were all evil men, it would be easy to dismiss them, but many of them are quite appealing. Hektor is a good person who is trapped by the image he and his society have created of himself, of what they think constitutes a hero, and who consequently makes some poor decisions.
Diomedes is a fierce warrior who can demonstrate moments of true nobility. Telamonian Aias is a quiet giant who always tries to do his best and who maintains his integrity throughout the poem.
Even Menelaos, who is depicted as a weak and colorless character, has a good side, especially when he is contrasted with his brutal bully of a brother, Agamemnon. It should be obvious that I am speaking about these characters in a book as though they were real people. Characters are just collections of words. The characters in The Iliad range from the very simple, like those who appear in a single line, just long enough to be killed, to those who are as complex as people we might know.
One of the reasons The Iliad has retained its popularity for about three millennia is because the characters are so real. To show what I mean, let me briefly explore two characters, Agamemnon and Achilleus.
Agamemnon, as I recently mentioned, is a brutal leader who bullies his men. So Agamemnon is not a military genius. He tends to get his way by threatening people or by shaming them in front of their companions.
His cruelty is always evident. In Book VI, for instance, he intervenes when a young warrior on the Trojan side, Adrestos, begs Menelaos not to kill him but to hold him for ransom. Menelaos responds by pushing Adrestos away from him.
And powerful Agamemnon stabbed him in the side and, as he writhed over, Atreides, setting his heel upon the midriff, wrenched out the ash spear. This kind of cruelty is what Agamemnon is all about. Similarly, when Agamemnon is in battle in Book XI , he is described in far more brutal terms that almost any other warrior; but when he is wounded, the description becomes quite extraordinary, as his pain is compared to the pain of a woman in childbirth.
Now we may be certain that the pain of childbirth is severe, but the comparison of a wounded warrior to a woman in labor would have been viewed as highly insulting to the warrior, of course. In short, by using this simile, the narrator reveals something else not so flattering about Agamemnon: he may be a bully, but he is also weak. Of course, at that point he also desperately needs Achilleus to re-enter the battle.
As we step back and look at Agamemnon, we can see that he is a disagreeable man, but we can also see that he is a commander who has gotten himself into a situation that is beyond his ability to understand or to control. An even more complex character, the most complex in the poem, is Achilleus.
Through most of the poem, he is little more than a spoiled child, sulking in his tent, refusing to help his comrades, weeping to his mother. None of these actions make Achilleus the least bit appealing or complex as a character, but in Book IX we learn one fact that entirely transforms him. As he explains to the delegation who have come from Agamemnon to ask him to return to battle, his mother had told him long before that he has a choice to make: he can either stay at Troy, fight, die, and gain great glory or he can leave the battle, go home, and live a long life in obscurity.
These alternatives, of course, are the same alternatives that every warrior in the poem faces, but they are stated most starkly in the case of Achilleus.
Thus, more than any other character in the poem, Achilleus must constantly confront his own mortality and the value of the heroic code, for he knows that if he stays at Troy to win glory in the battle, he will die there. We must remember that the Greek concept of an afterlife at this time was somewhat vague and frightening. In The Odyssey , when Odysseus visits the Underworld, he finds it to be a place of darkness and boredom, and the ghost of Achilleus there explains that it would be better to be the lowest kind of slave on earth than to be in the Underworld.
Such simplification is inevitable when we write about literature, just as it is when we write about people. My description of a person can never substitute for the experience of meeting the person, and my words about these characters are intended only as an introduction for readers who are about to meet the characters by reading the poem.
I paused in my discussion by inserting that last paragraph because I now must approach one of the most touching and painful scenes in The Iliad , the meeting between Priam and Achilleus in Book XXIV. Once again I will set the scene: Achilleus, having killed Hektor in battle, has kept the body, an action that outrages even the gods, who prevent the body from decaying. This is a task full of risks. It requires the aged and rather helpless king to cross through the enemy lines and to approach his deadliest enemy.
Try to imagine this scene: there is Priam, the king of Troy, on his knees as a suppliant to the man who has killed so many of his people and of his sons, including Hektor, thereby guaranteeing that the city will be destroyed. He holds Achilleus by the knees and kisses the hands that have killed his children. The emotions here are almost unimaginable. And the two remembered, as Priam sat huddled at the feet of Achilleus and wept close for manslaughtering Hektor and Achilleus wept now for his own father, now again for Patroklos.
Yes, The Iliad is long, very long, but it has all been leading to this scene. These two men, one young and vigorous, one old, both knowing that they face imminent death, commune silently. These men, despite the differences that separate them, are united by something far more powerful, their humanness, their attempts, failures though they may be, to deal with what it means to be human and mortal. It is a magnificent scene. Finally Achilleus addresses Priam, and he tells the older man that two urns stand at the door of Zeus, an urn of evil and an urn of good.
Zeus, who distributes the evil and the good, does so in two ways. Either he gives a man a mixture of good and evil or he gives a man all evil. What a picture of human existence Achilleus paints here. According to him, we face two possibilities from these urns.
Either we have all evil or, if we are fortunate, we get a mixture. No one gets all good. Priam and Achilleus have finally faced a basic truth that all the boasting, all the fighting, all the rituals of the war cannot cover up, and what Achilleus says here is also true for the good city depicted on his shield. Human beings could, if they would, increase the amount of good, but always we must accept the evil. They are part of being human. Then, of course, the war will continue to its inevitable conclusion.
Priam takes the body and returns to Troy, and The Iliad concludes with the laments of three women, Andromache, Hekabe, and Helen. There is such sadness here, such a deep feeling for those imponderable aspects of life that we face every day. It is amazing to realize that we share these imponderables with the people who composed and who listened to this poem three thousand years ago.
There are just a few things left that I would like the prospective reader of The Iliad to consider. One is the role of the gods in the poem.
As we read The Iliad , we may find it difficult to believe that anyone ever worshipped gods who were this frivolous, quarrelsome, and generally ungodly. Even when characters in the poem worship the gods, primarily they are trying to appease them; but as we saw in Book VI, even valuable gifts do not always win the favor of the gods.
Occasionally scenes that involve the gods are humorous. Some of the quarrels between Zeus and Hera, for instance, when they seem like the archetypal married couple who cannot get along or when they scheme and plot to outwit each other, are actually funny.
My favorite is when Zeus tries to tell Hera how beautiful she is and he compares her to all the young mortal women with who he has had affairs. Similarly, when Ares, the fierce god of war, whom no one likes, neither gods nor mortals, receives a minor wound in battle, he must be led groaning from the battlefield by Aphrodite, which is surely another comment on the real nature of war. But the gods are not in the poem for comic relief. They have a much more serious role. Why is it funny when Ares is wounded?
One reason, of course, is that he is the god of war, and we expect him to be a better fighter or, at least, to seem a bit more courageous when he is wounded.
But the answer goes even deeper. We can laugh at his wound because we know that it is meaningless. Ares is immortal, and no matter how badly he may be wounded, he will quickly recover. Consequently, what is deadly serious for the mortals is nothing more than a game for the gods.
No matter how deeply committed the gods may be to one side or the other, the war is only a diversion to them. From the perspective of the gods, the Trojan War is sort of fun; and it also offers them an opportunity to continue ancient alliances or rivalries. Zeus, who avoids such alliances and rivalries, knows from the beginning what the outcome will be, and while he can change the details of the war—for instance, who triumphs in a particular battle—he cannot change what is destined to happen.
There is, in fact, an implicit clash in The Iliad between destiny and free will, especially for the gods, but Homer never fully addresses the complexities of the problem. In one scene, however, Homer does address that question and at the same time shows how the war can become a serious issue even for the gods. Zeus, who knows that Sarpedon must lose in this encounter, tells Hera that he is thinking of snatching his son out of the battle and wafting him back to his homeland.
Hera, who is usually at odds with her husband, responds that Zeus certainly has the power to do what he suggests but that he should not do so because if he does, then all of the gods will want to save their favorites from death, thereby obliterating the distinction between gods and mortals. Zeus, she says, should allow Sarpedon to die, as mortals are meant to die, and then give him a good funeral. We can see a number of important points in this episode.
First, Zeus can, that is, he has the physical power to, alter the dictates of destiny.
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