This year I decided to fill in a gaping gap in my liberal arts knowledge of antiquity by committing to sitting down and reading one of the most influential works in the Western cannon – Homer’s Iliad. The Iliad is a collection of books in the style of a poem; it contains 24 books arranged in dactylic hexameter and is part of a larger collection of eight works known as the Epic Cycle. Admittedly, most of my prior knowledge of The Iliad came from watching Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom in the cinematic adaptation rather than from the transcribed oral tradition popularly attributed to Homer. While the silver screen edition is certainly entertaining, I learned much more from the methodical journey through the 15,693 lines of this Bronze Age masterpiece and was able to dispel a few myths along the way.
My journey through The Iliad was supplemented by Doug Metzger’s wonderful podcast Literature and History which I highly recommend. Without wading off into the deep waters of critical scholarship, I will simply put forward that the Iliad is popularly attributed to the Greek poet Homer and was written down based off a prior long oral tradition sometime in the late 8th or early 7th century BC. For those interested, there are numerous valid arguments extant as to whether a poet by the name of Homer ever existed or rather was a pseudonymous amalgamation. The subject matter of the Iliad is the fabled Trojan War wherein the city of Troy is besieged for a decade by a collection of Mycenaean Greek states. Whether this war ever happened and even whether the city of Troy ever existed is another matter of debate that I will not touch on.
The poem opens with these epic lines: “Sing, O muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.” Starting with no context whatsoever, it took me a good while to realize that this story does not take place at the beginning, but rather in the tenth and final year of the Trojan War. The reader is left to fill in the gaps, and perhaps the Greek audience listening to the oral tradition would not need the prior context. A brief synopsis of the war is as follows.
The Trojan War started when Paris [the son of Priam who is the king of Troy] kidnaps Helen – the wife of the Achaean king Menelaus. Helen was stated to be the most beautiful woman in the world, and her capture prompted the start of the war. The Greeks [also referred to as the Achaeans] launched a thousand ships across the sea to invade Troy, which is also known as Ilios [hence the name of the work]. The first nine years of the war are only alluded to in the Iliad, and the story really begins with Agamemnon, the overall commander of the Greek forces and brother to Menelaus, angering Achilles and provoking his rage.
Achilles was the greatest of all the Greek warriors and had supernatural skills as a warrior owing to his mother being a sea nymph. The provocation of Achilles by Agamemnon is a complicated story but essentially involves Achilles forcing Agamemnon to return the daughter of a Trojan priest of Apollo named Chryses, to stay the wrath of the gods. Agamemnon had taken Chryses’s daughter during a Greek raid, and he was very upset to part with her and considered it a personal slight. Agamemnon then took Achilles’s female slave Briseis for himself as compensation. Achilles relented but was enraged and refused to fight any longer against the Trojans.
I always assumed that the rage of Achilles was geared towards the Trojans. This is not the case, and as the opening lines state – the rage of Achilles was towards Agamemnon. His absence from the war and refusal to fight “brought countless ills upon the Achaeans” rather than “on the Trojans”. One can learn so much from this opening line, and a principal point that is demonstrated is one of inherent motivations. Agamemnon attempted to frame the entire Trojan war as being one of justice for the theft of his brother Menelaus’s wife Helen at the hands of Paris. One can see even from the opening lines that this is not the case. Agamemnon is quick to become a thief of women himself – both by stealing away the daughter of Chryseis and then by stealing Briseis. The inconsistent and obstinate nature of Agamemnon keeps Achilles out of the battle for most of the book, and the Greeks suffer accordingly.
This mistake on the part of Agamemnon was especially costly as the Greeks could not find an equal in battle to take on Hector, the champion of the Trojans. Hector was the brother of Paris, the initial instigator of the war; aside from Achilles there was no match in battle for Hector among the Greeks. At the onset of the book’s fighting, Paris and Menelaus agree to a duel to the death for the hand of Helen. Paris is a soft sort, more adapt at womanizing than the rigors of battle, and he is easily overcome by Menelaus. In the movie adaptation Troy, Hector intercedes and saves Paris from being killed by Menelaus. The Iliad has Paris being whisked away by the goddess Aphrodite and taken safely into the bed of Helen before he could be killed by Menelaus.
The Menelaus-Paris-Aphrodite saga brings me to what I view as the most fascinating aspect of the Iliad; namely, the influence of the gods on the outcome of the events and the interpretation of this story into the origin of human consciousness. It becomes readily apparent early into the Iliad that the story is as much about the fight between the flesh and blood heroes as it is between the gods and goddesses of Olympus.
The list of notable heroes on both sides of the conflict prompts near immediate recognition in the mind of the modern reader, even if we cannot explain why. On the roster of the Greeks included the illustrious Odysseus, the clever architect of Greek victory whose renown precedes him in a future story all his own regarding his return journey from Troy. Also among the Greeks is the huge Ajax, a fighter almost as skilled as Achilles and full of bravery. Next is Diomedes – the most beloved Greek by the goddess Athena – who turned the tide of battle from certain defeat innumerable times. Central to the plot is Patroclus – the best friend and cousin of Achilles whose death at the hands of Hector would bring Achilles back into the fray. Among the Trojans – Sarpedon, the very son of Zeus, held the Greeks at bay for as long as he could. Aeneas – the great hero of Troy who received his own future story in the Aeneid by Virgil.
These men tore at each other tooth and claw in graphic displays of violence that will make even the most seasoned reader of violence blush. The middle portion of the Iliad is full of sinew, visceral deaths, and the glorification and even beautification of war. Sarpedon harkens to his fellow Trojans, those “glittering bronze men”, in my favorite line of the work – “if once escaped from this battle we were for ever to be ageless and immortal, neither should I myself go on fighting in the foremost, nor should I send thee into battle where men win glory.” Coming from the son of the chief of the gods, this interplay between the hero’s awareness of his own mortality and the danger in his pursuit of the Greek ideal of kleos, or glory, spills over into an impassioned frenzy.
Without delving too far into which divine figure supports which side of the conflict or which individual participant of the conflict, I do want to touch on the role of the gods in the Iliad. Not only do the Olympians intervene to save their favorite characters, but they also take on the mantle of mortal individuals themselves and join in the fighting. Brave Diomedes the mortal even wounds both the god Ares and the goddess Aphrodite. Clearly the divine figures of the Greek world were much more anthropomorphic than our modern-day concept of God.
Psychologist Julian Jaynes proposed a fascinating and controversial view of consciousness that he derived at least partly from his reading of the Iliad. He espoused a theory of the Bicameral Mind in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. In it, he argued that until around the time of the events described in the Iliad, human beings had a very different understanding of consciousness than we do today. In fact, they lacked what we would call consciousness. He made the claim that humans in the Bronze Age responded to auditory hallucinations internally and obeyed them, identifying what they heard as a command from the gods. It was not until later than humans were able to separate what they believed to be commands from the gods with the realization that what they were hearing was simply their own internal dialogue. This internal dialogue became the inner self and more conventionally, human consciousness.
He uses the Iliad to argue for this, showing that almost every single action of the work is orchestrated or directed by a god or goddess and that there is a suspect lack of introspection among the major characters in the story. They simply respond to the commands of a divine figure and act on it. In one of the final scenes of the book, Hector and Achilles are facing off outside the walls of Troy and Hector calls on his companion Deiphobus of the White Shield to aid him in the battle. Unfortunately for Hector, he realized at the moment of his greatest need that Deiphobus was not and never had been there. HE attributed this visual hallucination to deception by the goddess Athena. “Ah, so the gods have lured me to my death… Athene fooled me. An evil fate’s upon me, Death is no longer far way, and him there is no escaping. Zeus… decided all this long ago, they who were once eager to defend me, and destiny now overtakes me. But let me not die without a fight, without true glory, without some deed that men unborn may hear.”
Jaynes’s work deserves a review entirely of its own, but his central premise is beyond fascinating. He asserts that modern day schizophrenia with auditory hallucinations is not a divergent disease, but rather an evolutionary vestige that exists among some outliers and reactivates in others. We all go throughout our lives with so much subconscious background chatter and very few moments of introspection that we often forget to stop and question our actions until we are forced into a corner where active thinking is required. When we are metaphorically chased around the walls of Troy by Achilles, let us hope that Deiphobus is there when we call for him and he is not simply a hallucinatory figment of our imagination.
There are so many other and worthy topics regarding the Iliad that I could comment on but will not for the sake of brevity. It is worth pointing out that two popular events that most people myself included assume happened within the pages of the Iliad are not there at all. The death of Achilles, including the famed arrow striking his heel, does not transpire in this work. Neither does the actual conquest of Troy by the Greeks via the Trojan horse transpire in the Iliad. Both events belong to the larger body of Greek myths that are encompassed within and outside of the Epic Cycle.
The Iliad was a huge undertaking for me and the journey to completion lasted several months. It reignited my love for the myths and stories that underly our modern conception of Greek heroism, and it also showed me the deep complexity and misunderstanding that so many of these heroes have in our popular lexicon. The protagonists of these stories were no paladins, and it is pure anachronism to force them into a mold that did not yet exist. Notwithstanding their shortcomings, these characters inspire the reader with that Grecian ideal of kleos. The Iliad is a timeless story that places its audience on those killing planes of Ilios, caught up in a conflict too entangled for them to comprehend, pressing forwards towards a goal not of their own choosing. There is at once a tase of fatalism intermingled with the freedom to attain the highest degree of glory accessible to mortal men. I suspect that it is this dynamic tension that has allowed this story to persist for thousands of years and it is likely that the characters and themes within the Iliad will remain for many more years to come.
Links to referenced materials:
https://literatureandhistory.com/about/ – Literature and History podcast with Dough Metzer
https://a.co/d/66ofqvc – Jon Krakauer, “Where Men Win Glory”
https://a.co/d/doxO7yo – Homer, “The Odyssey”, Robert Fagles translation
https://a.co/d/5wsRQL4 – Virgil, “The Aeneid”, Robert Fagles translation
https://a.co/d/bkpQ4Xv – Julian Jaynes, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”
Written by Cal Wilkerson
Brains and Brawn 