April 2022. The Iliad by Homer
circa 8th century BC, Project Gutenberg, 867 pages. Written in greek, read in English.
If there ever was a novel that fit the indication “you had to be there”, The Iliad is probably it. There, in this case, is not Troy, on the last year of defending itself from an invading force, but in Homer’s head, while he was working on constructing together this set of poems into a much larger, more inaccessible one.
Perhaps there should also be the time and place in which this novel was finally constructed. At the time, of course, it was a spoken narrative, because people usually did not read books. It is debated if a mechanism by which books were delivered was even present at Homer’s time. The novel is peppered, to an almost unreadable extent, by references to other peoples of the time, locations surrounding Greece at the time, other deities, and to occurrences that should shed light on what was being discussed — but not twenty nine centuries later. Even though the narrative appears to be topical, considering the number of references that hearers or readers should be familiar with — at the point of its collection by Homer it was already considered mythology — a story of a war that happened three centuries earlier — mythology to the point that it was also debated at the time if Troy had existed in the first place.
Add to that another layer of abstraction. Courtesy of Project Gutenberg, which enables reading, for free, eBook versions of works of literature that are in the public domain in the United States, the copy I’ve read of the Iliad was an English translation by Alexander Pope, a work that was completed in 1720. This was only about one hundred years after Shakespeare died, and the English remained pretty much the same — providing for a myriad of misreadings, due to words that had one meaning then, and a complete other meaning now. Some of the leaders of both armies, for example, are described as “generous” in the novel. That does not mean they are benevolent, it means they are of noble blood. Throughout the novel there is also a lingering inability on Pope’s side to rhyme “war” with anything that actually rhymes with “war”, which may suggest that either the phoneme for “war” was different in the 18th century, or that he was not that talented in translating rhymes.
On top of that, add the fact that the event that I was most looking for to read in the original text was not even there. The idea, construction and delivery of the Trojan horse is not mentioned at all in the Iliad. It turns out it is mentioned only briefly in the Aeneid, a work by Virgil, even more briefly in the Odyssey, which was Homer’s next project, and its reality was as debated at the time as the existence of Troy itself.
Suffice to say, summing up all of these points, that I did not enjoy the Iliad. This is a novel that requires deep annotation, one that was not fully present in this version of the book — an introduction that primarily referred to the translation efforts of the novel, and a “where are they now” section at the end, were helpful, but not sufficient. When you embark on reading this novel, it is helpful to have the context and narrative in advance, and maybe also a note about its construction. So:
The Iliad is actually a series of twenty four long poems, each depicting a specific event of note in the Trojan war. Each of those was constructed (I would not use the word written because they didn’t write them down at the time) by a different author. They are attributed to have been collected and placed in a plausible chronological, or at least thematic, order, by Homer in the 8th century BC and he has been going around the Greek kingdoms, reciting this set of poems. Apparently he was so popular, other heralds copied his work and claimed it was theirs. On top of that we should add the translation — Alexander Pope’s version is the second available translation in English, but certainly not the last. He has claimed (in the introduction to the novel) that the only reason he translated the novel was because John Dryden, who has translated several seminal works of literature from ancient Greece, was already dead.
As for its premise — the Iliad takes place in the final year of a ten year war between the united Greek kingdoms and Troy, a war that was instigated by Helen, queen of Sparta, running away with Paris, a prince of Troy; king Agamemnon, who is Helen’s brother in law, leads an expedition of armed forces to Troy, and they lay siege on the city-state for ten years. Among the officers of Agamemnon’s army is Achilles, who is a demigod, and the legend of the time (or at least the legend of three centuries later), is that he is such a fierce warrior that the mere rumor of him being part of the Grecian army on Trojan soil prevents Trojan forces from attacking the Greek forces. At the beginning of the Iliad, the united Grecian army is troubled by a plague. Following the same logic that infers any major occurrence on the will of the gods, the Trojans convince the Greeks that the plague started because of a specific war captive that Agamemnon has taken, and that if she is returned, the plague will subside. Agamemnon agrees, against the advice of his officers, but decides to take the war captive that was assigned to Achilles in her stead — an act that dishonors Achilles in front of all of the other officers. Achilles then decides to retire his army from supporting the war, and also lobbies for the help of the gods to allow the Trojans to gain advantage over the Greeks, to the point of the Greeks needing to retreat, so as to prove to Agamemnon that the war cannot be won without Achilles’ help. His plan is almost too successful, and the rest of Agamemnon’s officers have to resort even to a duel between one of them — Ulysses, who is the protagonist of Homer’s next work of literature — and a common soldier who tries to incite the rest of the army to defect. Following several battles in which the Greeks’ success is debatable, Patroclus, who is one of Achilles’ lieutenants, begs Achilles to allow him to go to the battlefield with his armor, so that it will appear as if Achilles is fighting; Patroclus is eventually killed by Hector, a prince of Troy, and Achilles is incensed and decides to rejoin the war, with armor that was specially prepared for him by Vulcan — another demigod who is a blacksmith. Among many slain Trojans, he also kills Hector and takes his body; the Trojans retreat to the city and blockade themselves inside, but Priam, the king of Troy and Hector’s father, is persuaded to go and beg Achilles to recover Hector’s body and conduct a proper funeral for him. The novel ends with the funeral and Helen’s lament for Hector.
Eventually, when all of the history and the meddling of the gods is stripped away from it, this is a novel about human traits, and how much they can affect global scale events such as ten-year-long wars — pride, self importance, misplaced bravery, crippling grief— but eventually, also forgiveness and kindness.
The May 2022 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be White Noise by Don DeLillo.
The June 2022 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler.
The July 2022 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess.
