The Iliad, translated from the Greek by E.V. Rieu, Penguin Classics, 1980, first published 1950, and some random points about it and The Odyssey

 The opening lines of Rieu’s translation of the opening of Book 1 of The Iliad entitled ‘The Quarrel’ (like The Odyssey, which I wrote about in my last two posts, it’s divided into 24 sections called books) set the gruesome tone for the rest of the epic story of some of the closing weeks of the final year of the 10-year Trojan War:

The Wrath of Achilles is my theme, that fatal wrath which, in fulfilment of the will of Zeus, brought the Achaeans [ie the Greeks] so much suffering and sent the gallant souls of many noblemen to Hades, leaving their bodies as carrion for the dogs and passing birds.

The action is precipitated when Apollo, son of Zeus and Leto, punishes the Greek commander, King Agamemnon, for his discourtesy to Chryses, Apollo’s priest. He had come to Agamemnon to offer ransom and plead for the return of his daughter Chryseis, who had been captured by the Greek warrior-hero Achilles at the sacking of a town allied with Troy along with another young woman, Briseis. Agamemnon had taken Chryseis as his slave, while Achilles took Briseis – and she became his sexual possession/slave.

Agamemnon initially refused and was rude to Chryses, and the priest asked Apollo for vengeance. Apollo visited a plague on the Greeks. Urged by Achilles and others to relent, Agamemnon agreed to return Chryseis, but took Briseis from Achilles. Enraged and humiliated, Achilles insisted that he and his men would no longer fight for Agamemnon.

What follows is a catalogue of graphic and gory descriptions of the battles that follow, with the fortunes favouring at first the Trojans, who force the Greeks back to a fortification of their own before their ships, and then the Greeks. When Achilles’ close companion (and according to some commentators, his lover) Patroclus fails to break Achilles’ feud with Agamemnon and stubborn refusal to help the struggling Greek armies, he persuades Achilles to let him wear his famous armour and join the battle in this disguise. Of course he’s killed, after initial bloody successes, and Achilles, angrier still and grief-stricken, storms into murderous and terrifying action.

The climax comes with his fight with the Trojan hero Hector, followed by the funeral of Patroclus and Achilles’ desecration of his vanquished adversary’s body. His angry brutality ends with Hector’s father, aided by the god Hermes, secretly visiting Achilles in the Greek camp to beg for the release of his son’s body for decent burial. Moved by his entreaties, Achilles relents and for the first time shows some humanity and compassion.

All of the action is portrayed as being instigated or influenced by the conflicting factions of the squabbling gods, notably Athene (or Athena) and Here (or Hera), who aid the Greek cause. Not described in The Iliad is the Greek myth of the judgement of the Trojan prince, Paris, who went on to abduct or seduce Agamemnon’s wife Helen – hence the Greek armies attacking Troy to take her back and exact vengeance on the city’s inhabitants, and Paris in particular. Aphrodite sides with Paris (who chose her as the fairest of the three competing goddesses, to the disgruntlement of the other two) and the Trojans.

It’s a very different account from The Odyssey, which has a much more varied storyline. There are admittedly stirring and graphic descriptions of close-quarter fighting, and contrasting scenes of domesticity in both camps, but the themes of glory, hubris, pride, anger and fate, among others, create a less compelling story, I think, than the account of Odysseus’ ten-year struggle home to Penelope.

I’m not a classical or Greek scholar, so much of my background comment here is the result of some basic online digging; my apologies for any glaring errors.

It’s obvious why these two works constitute some of the foundations of western culture and literature, even though to modern sensibilities the depiction of warfare, gender relations, and so on, can be jarring.

Now for a few related and random comments. At the British Museum website is an interesting and informative illustrated article ‘Who was Homer?’, which includes discussion of the putative authorship of Homer, HERE. This and other links on the BM site accompanied various exhibitions from 2019 about the Trojan War and related topics.

One example: ‘Who was Achilles?’ – link HERE.

Natalie Haynes (author of A Thousand Ships [2019], a feminist retelling of the stories of the Trojan War from the perspective of women involved (see below), and, among other things, broadcaster/humorist on classical topics, including Homerian): ‘Women and goddesses of the Trojan War’ HERE.

See also the 1955 novel by Robert Graves, Homer’s Daughter, which is said to have been influenced by Samuel Butler (1835-1902, best known as the author of the novel The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously in 1903 because of its controversial critique of Victorian values and hypocrisy) and his book The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897). In this account Butler argues that the author wasn’t Homer, but a young woman from the Greek settlement in Sicily. He also suggests that this woman introduced herself into the narrative in the character of the Phaeacian princess Nausicaa, who helps Odysseus when he arrives in her country. Btw, this part of the story was omitted by Christopher Nolan in his film ‘The Odyssey’. There’s an interesting note on all this, including the information that Butler wasn’t the first to advance such a theory, in a recent blog post at the TLS by Mary Beard. She also points out that there’s some evidence Butler might not have been entirely serious with this thesis – though this is disputed.

 It was probably a catalyst for what could be said to be a sub-genre of feminist versions of the Homerian epics and related Greek classical texts:

Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad (2005).

Madeline Miller, Circe (2018); The Song of Achilles (2011) retells the story from the perspective of Patroclus, and portrays Miller’s take on the relationship between him and Achilles.

Claire North, The Songs of Penelope trilogy, beginning with Ithaca (2022).

Pat Barker, a sequence of novels beginning with The Silence of the Girls (2018 – I mentioned this one in my last post, as it’s the only one in this group that I’ve read; it tells the story of Achilles’ wrath from the perspective of his slave, Briseis).

Earlier examples include Christa Wolf, Cassandra (1983).

My googling around in this rabbit-hole (horrible mixed metaphor, appropriate for this jumbled post) turned up a scholarly collection of essays on the topic: Homer’s Daughters: women’s responses to Homer in the twentieth century and beyond (ed. Fiona Cox and Elena Theodorakopoulos, OUP, 2019), beginning with a discussion of the extensive body of poetry by the remarkable ‘first-wave feminist’ American HD (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961), colleague and collaborator with (and for a time, fiancée of) Ezra Pound, dating from 1912 onwards. She produced early imagist poems, then later frequent fragments and even epics in speculative reimaginings on this theme.

Another tangential point (this post I’m afraid is full of them): HD was for many years the partner of the author and arts patron Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman, 1894-1983), who took her name from a visit to the Scilly Islands, and her favourite island in that group. Having inherited a fortune from her shipping magnate father, she supported many early modernist writers, artists and pioneers of film, and helped finance the famous Parisian expat bookshop Shakespeare & Company.

One final minor point: the title of The Iliad comes from one of the names by which the ancient Greeks knew the city now known as Troy: Ilion or Ilios (the other was Troia). Its present-day location is said to be in western Turkey.