Noblesse Oblige: Sarpedon’s speech, ‘Iliad’ 12:310–28
We’re at the halfway point in the Iliad. After nearly a decade beseiged and hemmed-in at their citadel the Trojans have mounted a counter-attack, and have pushed the Achaeans back to the coast (something they are able to do because Achilles, the greatest Greek warrior, is sulking in his tent rather than joining battle). The invading Greeks have built a wall around their harbour to protect their fleet, but in Book 12 Trojan Prince Hector is leading an attack that, if it can break through the wall, will destroy the Greek boats. Sarpedon, Lycian king, son of Zeus, Trojan ally, is part of this assault, and before the wall is breached he makes a famous speech of, in effect, noblesse oblige, addressing his fellow Lycian prince, Glaucus:
‘Why is it, Glaucus,
that you and I receive such lavish honours?
Why do we get the finest seats at banquets
full cups of wine, the choicest cuts of meat?
And why does everyone in Lycia gaze
at both of us as if we were divine?
Why was a large estate assigned to us
beside the banks of Xanthus, lovely land
of vineyards and of plowland thick with wheat?
Because we have to stand beside our people,
out on the front line and confront the heat
of battle, so that any Lycian fighter,
clad in thick armour, may declare “Our rulers
the men who hold great sway in Lycian lands,
are not dishonourable. They eat fat sheep
and drink good vintage wine as sweet as honey,
but they are also brave and strong. They fight
among the Lycian fighters at the front.”
You see my brother, if we could escape
this war and then be free from age and death
forever, I would never choose to fight
or join the champion fighters at the front,
nor would I urge you to participate
in war where men win glory. But in fact
a million ways to die stand all around us.
No mortal can escape or flee from death.
So let us go. Perhaps we shall succeed,
and win a triumph from another’s death,
or somebody may triumph over us.’ [Iliad 12:310–28; Emily Wilson’s translation]
It’s a very famous speech. We, says Sarpedon, are noblemen, privileged, we live above the common herd, and for that reason we must be braver, more heroic than the regular individual. So let’s have at it. It is a statement of aristocratic ᾰ̓ρετή (aretḗ) — virtue, excellence manliness, prowess, rank, valour.
Matthew Arnold’s On Translating Homer (1861) relates an anecdote connected to this passage.
Robert Wood — whose Essay on the Genius of Homer [1771] is mentioned by Goethe as one of the books which fell into his hands when his powers were first developing themselves, and strongly interested him — relates of this passage a striking story. He says that in 1762, at the end of the Seven Years’ War, being then Under-Secretary of State, he was directed to wait upon the President of the Council, Lord Granville, a few days before he died, with the preliminary articles of the Treaty of Paris. ‘I found him’, he continues, ‘so languid, that I proposed postponing my business for another time; but he insisted that I should stay, saying, it could not prolong his life to neglect his duty; and repeating the following passage out of Sarpedon’s speech, he dwelled with particular emphasis on the third line, which recalled to his mind the distinguishing part he had taken in public affairs:
ὦ πέπον, εἰ μὲν γὰρ, πόλεμον περὶ τόνδε φυγόντε,
αἰεὶ δὴ μέλλοιμεν ἀγήρω τ’ ἀθανάτω τε
ἔσσεσθ’, οὔτε κεν αὐτὸς ἐνὶ πρώτοισι μαχοίμην,
οὔτε κέ σε στέλλοιμι μάχην ἐς κυδιάνειραν·
νῦν δ’ — ἔμπης γὰρ Κῆρες ἐφεστᾶσιν θανάτοιο
μυρίαι, ἃς οὐκ ἔστι φυγεῖν βρότον, οὐδ’ ὑπαλύξαι —
ἴομεν. [Iliad 12:322–8]His Lordship repeated the last word several times with a calm and determinate resignation; and, after a serious pause of some minutes, he desired to hear the Treaty read, to which he listened with great attention, and recovered spirits enough to declare the approbation of a dying statesman (I use his own words) ‘on the most glorious war, and most honourable peace, this nation ever saw’.
So: ἴομεν, that last word which Granville repeated, means ‘let us go on’, or ‘let us advance’. The third line upon which he put particular emphasis, bolded in the passage above, means ‘neither should I fight myself in the front ranks’ and presumably speaks to the Earl’s role as a diplomat and leader rather than a footsoldier. But the key thing is that this statement of Homeric ᾰ̓ρετή precisely captured, Granville thought, his own aristocratic sense of his correlated privilege and duty.
Arnold goes on from this anecdote to consider what was, in his day, the standard translation of Homer: Alexander Pope’s.
I quote this story, first, because it is interesting as exhibiting the English aristocracy at its very height of culture, lofty spirit, and greatness, towards the middle of the 18th century. I quote it, secondly, because it seems to me to illustrate Goethe’s saying which I mentioned, that our life, in Homer’s view of it, represents a conflict and a hell; and it brings out, too, what there is tonic and fortifying in this doctrine. I quote it, lastly, because it shows that the passage is just one of those in translating which Pope will be at his best, a passage of strong emotion and oratorical movement, not of simple narrative or description.
Pope translates the passage thus:
Could all our care elude the gloomy grave
Which claims no less the fearful than the brave,
For lust of fame I should not vainly dare
In fighting fields, nor urge thy soul to war:
But since, alas! ignoble age must come,
Disease, and death’s inexorable doom;
The life which others pay, let us bestow,
And give to fame what we to nature owe.Nothing could better exhibit Pope’s prodigious talent; and nothing, too, could be better in its own way. But, as Bentley said, ‘You must not call it Homer’. One feels that Homer’s thought has passed through a literary and rhetorical crucible, and come out highly intellectualised; come out in a form which strongly impresses us, indeed, but which no longer impresses us in the same way as when it was uttered by Homer. The antithesis of the last two lines —
The life which others pay, let us bestow,
And give to fame what we to nature oweis excellent, and is just suited to Pope’s heroic couplet; but neither the antithesis itself, nor the couplet which conveys it, is suited to the feeling or to the movement of the Homeric ἴομεν.
Does Emily Wilson’s version, quoted above, capture the ἴομεν? It is certainly less stiffly mannered and boxed-up than Pope’s elegant coupletting, though it’s also rather bland and unelevating. There is some cliché (‘choicest cuts of meat’, ‘the heat of battle’) and some interpolations— Sarpedon notes μυρίος (numberless, countless) ways in which a warrior might die, not ‘a million’, which is a distractingly modern piece of nomenclature I’d say. Wilson’s verse here is, I think, too weighted towards monosyllables, which gives it a choppy and ἴομεν-disrupting bittiness. And she scatters distracting rhyme-words through her whole, as if the verse is straining to burst its pentameter/hendecesyllabic rhymelessness with a longer-line set of couplets: ‘full cups of wine/ …gaze at both of us as if we were divine’; ‘a large estate/ … of vineyards and of plowland thick with wheat’; ‘stand on the front line/ … Our rulers eat fat sheep and drink good vintage wine’; ‘You see my brother/ … we could be free from age and death forever’. This messes the sonic patterning of the blank verse, tangles it.
There are a few pedantries in my reaction to Wilson’s version, too. ‘Thick armour’ (line 317) is, in the Greek, πύκα, which does mean thickly or strongly made. But is thick armour a thing? Is that an idiomatic English phrase? Heavy armour, maybe; plate armour. πύκα is from πυκάζω, which means ‘to cover closely’, which makes me wonder if close-fitting armour wouldn’t be a better rendering. That aside, the chiming resemblance, within a few lines, of ‘plowland thick with wheat’ (314: in the Greek: ἀρούρης πυροφόροιο ‘wheat-bearing cultivated land’) and ‘thick armour’ makes for a muddling parallel. And, not to be too much of a dog in the manger, but ‘they eat fat sheep’ strikes me as, really, a dumb line. Do these heroic warriors and semidivine kings really tuck into this?
Perhaps I’m being unfair. The Greek (line 319) is ἔδουσί τε πίονα μῆλα, where μῆλον is ‘sheep’, ἔδουσί is from ἔδω ‘I eat’ and πίων means ‘rich, fertile, fat’. But it is the meat that is rich, fat, delicious — the mutton or the lamb — not the animal, surely.
I don’t mean to lay into Wilson’s translation, which has many things to recommend it. It is always clear, readable, direct, and it gets you through to the Homeric meaning effectively. But that doesn’t mean that, to touch on Arnold’s terminology, it is always rapid and noble and elevating, or if it captures the elevating splendour of the original. It’s fine, according to a banalising version of fineness. I’m not sure it’s the best we have at our disposal.
What about other versions? Here’s Robert Fagles’ translation of the speech from his 1990 Iliad:
“Glaucus,/why do they hold us both in honor, first by far
with pride of place, choice meats and brimming cups,
in Lycia where all our people look on us like gods?
Why make us lords of estates along the Xanthus’ banks,
rich in vineyards and plowland rolling wheat?
So that now the duty’s ours —
we are the ones to head our Lycian front,
brace and fling ourselves in the blaze of war,
so a comrade strapped in combat gear may say,
‘Not without fame. the men who rule in Lycia,
these kings of ours who eat fat cuts of lamb
and drink sweet wine, the finest stock we have.
But they owe it all to their own fighting strength
our great men of war, they lead our way in battle.’
Ah my friend, if you and I could escape this fray
and live forever, never a trace of age, immortal,
I would never fight on the front lines again
or command you to the field where men win fame.
But now, as it is, the fates of death await us,
thousands poised to strike, and not a man alive
can flee them or escape — so in we go for attack!
Give our enemy glory or win it for ourselves!”Glaucus did not turn back or shun that call
on they charged, leading the Lycians’ main mass.
Better, I think. All my nitpicky grumbles in the previous section are addressed (or pre-addressed). And here, more fluid still, is Richmond Lattimore’s 1951 version:
‘Glaukos, why is it you and I are honoured before others
with pride of place, the choice meats and the filled wine cups
in Lykia, and all men look on us as if we were immortals,
and we are appointed a great piece of land by the banks of Xanthos,
good land, orchard vineyard and ploughland for the planting of wheat?
Therefore 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-armoured 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 valour 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 to ourselves, or yield it others.’
One Falstaffian thought. The Sarpedon logic is ‘if we were immortal, I wouldn’t urge you into battle; but since we are doomed to die, let us die in glory, now, rather, rather than shirking our duty and dying anyway, later in shame.’ I get that. But Falstaff might say: ‘isn’t this the wrong way round, thinking-wise? If we were really immortal, then you and I could plunge into the fray — as Homeric gods sometimes do — and have a jolly old time, knowing precisely that we couldn’t die. But given that we are mortal, wouldn’t it make sense to be a tad more circumspect? We owe death a life, sure, but that doesn’t mean we have to pay it, all, right here right now, surely.’
