Sing, Goddess, of the wrath of Achilles

Unusually, many things we associate with the Iliad are not actually found in it

May 12, 2018 10:18 pm | Updated 10:31 pm IST

Like our Rig Veda , the Iliad is an oral work. It was ‘written’ around 800 years or so before the birth of Christ. Herodotus, the first historian who lived and wrote four centuries before the Christian era, dated it reasonably accurately for us. All the great figures of Athenian history — Socrates, Plato and Aristotle — were intimately familiar with the Iliad and quoted it. Alexander the Great performed the last rites of his lover Hephaestion in Iran in much the same way as the hero of the Iliad , Achilles, does for his lover Patroclus.

The proof that the Iliad was not written but recited came from a man called Milman Parry, who studied the Yugoslav bards. Parry noticed that there were certain stock lines they used in their improvisations to fit the exact meter of the verse. The same phenomenon is seen in the Iliad , where Homer often uses phrases like “Hector, breaker of horses” and “rose-fingered dawn”, most likely because ‘he’ needed to quickly fit in something to keep the meter intact.

The word ‘he’ is used in quotations because we are uncertain if Homer was one man (or a man at all) or many, and we don’t really know if he was blind. What we do know, of course, is that his work is one of the most famous and influential in history and rightly called an epic.

Epic effort

There are two kinds of epic. The first is the sort that concentrates on the story of an individual, like the Ramayana , The Odyssey and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina . The second is the one that has many characters and whose focal point is not sharp and narrow but whose narrative is broad and sprawling — like the Mahabharat , Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and the Iliad .

The Iliad is an unusual work in that many of the things we associate with it are not actually found in the book. The Trojan War began because of the seduction of Helen of Argos by Paris, the prince of Troy. But this story is not recounted by Homer; he assumes the reader is familiar with it.

We know of the death of Achilles and the vulnerability of his heel, but this too is absent. Homer begins his epic with the siege of Troy, and he ends it with the death of Hector, the brother of Paris who is the real hero of the work.

The man identified as the hero is Achilles, but he is a strange fellow and not easy to like. He sulks (when his slave girl is taken away); he is a great warrior but does not do battle for 20 of the 24 chapters. Of course, when he begins, he is irresistible and some of the greatest descriptions of man in war are from Homer (he is as good as Babur in his magnificent autobiography).

Because it is poetry and because it is a classic and because it is beautifully written, the Iliad can be read often, particularly one’s favourite parts. I have two or three copies and the one that I like best — Robert Fagles’s translation for Penguin Black Classics — has almost fallen apart. But it’s also true that much of the Iliad is reactionary, meaning opposed to progress and reform.

The great American journalist, Ira F. Stone, who singlehandedly published a weekly magazine of his own articles, wrote a book called the Trial of Socrates , in which he describes the essentially anti-democratic posture of the classical Greeks, and also of Homer. In the Iliad , one man, Thersites, protests against the war, and asks why so many must die. Thersites is described as ugly and physically deformed, and is beaten up for daring to raise this question.

Valorising war

The other aspect to the Iliad is its attraction to young men from the West who went to the world wars. Particularly those Englishmen who fought World War I in the trenches of Belgium, Northern France and southern Turkey. In the Iliad , angered by Hector’s killing of his lover Patroclus, Achilles shows up for battle in such a rage that his head is on fire. The Iliad , like all of mankind’s epics, valorises war, but the fact is man doesn’t wish to die. The myth of the soldier aching to be martyr is one that all who’ve never been soldiers have bought.

The poet Patrick Shaw Stewart, who was killed in France aged 29, wrote this about his time at war and the Iliad .

I saw a man this morning

Who did not wish to die

I ask, and cannot answer,

If otherwise wish I.

Fair broke the day this morning

Against the Dardanelles;

The breeze blew soft, the morn’s

cheeks

Were cold as cold sea-shells.

But other shells are waiting

( A monthly series on the

world literary classics.)

The writer is a columnist and translator of Urdu and Gujarati non-fiction works.

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