The Iliad and the Odyssey (Classics of World Literature) (2 page)

This book gives the background to the main story of the
Iliad
– the baneful wrath of Achilles and the sorrows and heroic deaths it caused. There is, unusually, a sense of the ordinary men, those ‘without a name’, who have become caught up in their chiefs’ feud. Their concerns are voiced by the base Thersites but also by Agamemnon and Odysseus. There is a strong evocation of the past nine years of fruitless effort, of wear and tear on men and equipment,

‘ . . . now our vessels rotten grow.

Our tackling fails; our wives, young sons, sit in their doors and long

For our arrival . . . ’

In the Catalogue of Forces there are also glimpses of other
Iliad
s, other stories that would have been part of the Trojan War cycle of poems, and of other poets. The poet’s shaping of the narrative is also clearly visible in this book – in Zeus’s sending of a false dream and Agamemnon’s false reporting of it. This play of ironies is framed by a narratorial comment –

O fool, he thought to take in that next day old Priam’s town,

Not knowing what affairs Jove had in purpose . . .

The poet does know both what Zeus purposes and the outcome of the war. From his perspective he can criticise those with more limited vision. The poet is the servant of the Muses who ‘are present here, are wise, and all things know’ and who provide a true report of all the forces at Troy. The poet is the ‘servant of Fame’ – of report – in several senses: he is dependent on the tradition passed down through generations of poets, shaping, adding and refining the stories. He is also the servant of fame in being the one channel of immortality available for the heroes on both sides of the Trojan War – immortality of fame in epic song.

There is another invocation: ‘But now the man that overshined them all, Sing, muse’. Achilles’ claim to be best is borne out in the muse’s reckoning – ‘Great Ajax for strength passed all the peers of war While vex’d Achilles was away, but he surpass’d him far.’ The scene shifts to Hector at Troy, surrounded by the auxiliary leaders ‘of special excellence’, finishing with Sarpedon and Glaucus who are the major and most sympathetic characters on the Trojan side. At the very end of the list comes Amphimachus, never again mentioned, who is given a brief biography that both serves as his epitaph and his pathetic, momentary fame. He came to the battlefield dressed in the gold that marked him out to be a target and so doomed him:

The fool Amphimachus, to field, brought gold to be his wrack,

Proud-girl-like that doth ever bear her dower on her back;

Which wise Achilles mark’d, slew him, and took his gold, in strife

At Xanthus’ flood; so little Death did fear his golden life.

We suddenly remember what Achilles excels
at.

Book 3

As Book 1 gave a character sketch of the main characters in the Greek camp – Achilles caring for his honour above all, Agamemnon weak and egotistical, Nestor old, respected, drawing on the past – so Book 3 introduces the telling characteristics of those on the Trojan side. Book 3 introduces the cause of the war – the beautiful Paris, who seduced Helen away from her Spartan home. He is set against his brother Hector, the brave leader of the Trojans. Hector is ever vigilant about his own honour and that of his allies – part of his job as war leader is to sting the heroic consciousness of his leaders, spurring them on. Paris, however, is one person untouched by others’ sense of him, by others’ heroic values, by his brother’s reproaches. He is unwilling to face up to Menelaus, the wronged husband, though it was his abduction of Helen (his reward for awarding Aphrodite the goddesses’ beauty prize) that started the Trojan War. Menelaus spies Paris lounging and makes for him like ‘a serpent . . . her blue neck, swoln with poison raised, and her sting out’. Paris is scared, but unrepentant. He:

Shrunk in his beauties. Which beheld by Hector, he let go

This bitter check on him: ‘Accurs’d! Made but in beauty’s scorn,

Impostor, woman’s man! O heav’n, that thou hadst ne’er been born

. . . O wretch! Not dare to stay

Weak Menelaus! But ’twas well . . .

Your harp’s sweet touch, curl’d locks, fine shape, and gifts so exquisite,

Giv’n thee by Venus, would have done your fine dames little good,

When blood and dust had ruffled them . . .

. . . thou well deserv’st

A coat of tombstone, not of steel, in which for form thou serv’st.’

To this thus Paris spake (for form that might inhabit heav’n):

‘Hector, because thy sharp reproof is out of justice giv’n,

I take it well . . .

Yet I, less practis’d than thyself in these extremes of war,

May well be pardon’d, though less bold; in these your worth exceeds,

In others, mine. Nor is my mind of less force to the deeds

Requir’d in war, because my form more flows in gifts of peace.

Reproach not therefore the kind gifts of golden Cyprides.’ [Venus]

Helen is equally beautiful, as even the old men of Troy, chattering in the sun like grasshoppers, are moved to admit:

Those wise and almost wither’d men found this heat in their years

That they were forc’d (though whispering) to say: ‘What man can blame

The Greeks and Trojans to endure for so admired a dame,

So many miseries, and so long? In her sweet countenance shine

Looks like the goddesses . . .’

Unlike Paris, however, she
does
have a pronounced sense of responsibility for coming to Troy. She looks down from the walls of Troy to see her fate decided, picking out for King Priam those Greek fighters who are left after nearly ten years, and is stricken with anguish.

Menelaus challenges Paris to a duel to the death – a simple settlement of the war. Menelaus prays to Zeus protector of marriage and guest bonds; he wounds Paris but not seriously, his sword breaks and he takes Paris by the throat; Aphrodite breaks his grip and wafts Paris from the battlefield to Helen’s bedroom. The proper, dignified solution has been frustrated by the gods. In extraordinary and outspoken human defiance, Helen refuses to be a pawn, refuses to go to Paris’s bed and suggests to Aphrodite that she herself go instead. But the gods cannot be defied . . .

Book 4

Book 4 opens on Mount Olympus with Zeus asking, over a cup of nectar, whether the gods should plant ‘war and combat’ or ‘impartial friendship’ between the two sides. With Hera and Athene, the losers, still feuding with the winner of the judgment of Paris, Aphrodite, the vote is for continued war. The chilling deal is that Zeus will allow Troy to be destroyed provided he can destroy Hera’s favourite cities next time he has a mind to.

On the ground, the mêlée continues, once the gods tempt an all-too-vain Pandarus into breaking the truce. The history and the craftsmanship of the bow he uses is described in loving detail, a haven of pastoral calm before the fateful arrow hits. The skin wound it inflicts on Menelaus is likened to the delicate staining of precious ivory – from a visual similarity a glowing miniature is painted of a very different world.

The rest of the book follows Agamemnon, seen in a more sympathetic light as he cares for his brother and puts heart into his troops. Battle is joined, like rivers in spate. Men die, after a short biography – like Simoisius, whose parents’ marriage and his birth are celebrated:

Sweet was that birth of his

To his kind parents, and his growth did all their care employ;

And yet those rites of piety, that should have been his joy

To pay their honour’d years again, in as affectionate sort,

He could not graciously perform, his sweet life was so short.

In dying he is likened to a poplar lying with curly leaves by the fen, felled by a wheelwright. He is given his moment in the history, his death is graced by a telling image before he becomes, like all the others, a victim to be despoiled, a victory to be vaunted.

Book 5

Book 5 is the book of Diomedes’ preeminence – his time for glory both on the battlefield and in the epic. Pallas Athene (‘the Maid’) grants him the vision to recognise immortals fighting on the battlefield so he can avoid them or, in the case of the gods of war and love (Ares, Aphrodite), take them on. Others, without it, attribute to some god or fate the chance happenings of battle: Pandarus, sure of his aim, attributes his failure to hit Menelaus to

‘Some great immortal, that conveys his shoulders in a cloud,

Goes by and puts by every dart at his bold breast bestow’d.’

Diomedes is preeminent, more than human, until warned by Apollo that he has gone too far: the god

. . . exceeding wrathful grew,

And asked him: ‘What! Not yield to gods? Thy equals learn to know:

The race of gods is far above men creeping here below.’

Far above, perhaps, but not more dignified – Ares lets out an unmartial bellow when stabbed by Diomedes.

Diomedes thinks it ignoble to shrink from fighting Aeneas and Pandarus; rather he sees them, and especially their horses, as an opportunity to win the two assets that establish the status of the hero – ‘exquisite prize’ and ‘exceeding renown’. Diomedes sometimes seems a very straightforward hero!

The gods, in disguise, play at Trojans and Greeks; when they get tired or hurt they can go home to have everything made better. Aphrodite’s mother strokes her grazed hand and soothes her by promising that Diomedes shall be punished for his ‘insolence’ in wounding her, a goddess, by being childless:

‘Diomed . . .

Not knowing he that fights with heav’n hath never long to live,

And for this deed, he never shall have a child about his knee

To call him father . . . ’

This said, with both her hands she cleans’d the tender back and palm

Of all the sacred blood they lost; and, never using balm,

The pain ceas’d, and the wound was cured . . .

Not for gods the pain, suffering, heroism or bravery of risking death, the sacrifice of leaving, as Sarpedon has done, everything that makes life worth living:

‘For far hence Asian Lycia lies, where gulfy Xanthus flows

And where my lov’d wife, infant son, and treasure nothing scant,

I left behind me . . . ’

Responding to a call to arms, Sarpedon is doomed never to see them again.

Book 6

The battle continues, with no sign of Zeus’s plan, agreed with Thetis in Book 1, to give the Trojans dominance – a dominance that would make clear to the Greeks how much they need Achilles back. The battle is a matter of individual duels, preceded by the ritual exchange of names and lineage. In battle, as in any contest, the glory of the victor rests in part on the stature and credentials of his opponent. It is the name and lineage which give each individual an identity, to combat the gods’ perspective, voiced by Apollo in Book 21, that men are no more worth quarrelling over than leaves that flourish for a time and are then replaced by others. Diomedes is here asked

‘Why dost thou so explore,’

Said Glaucus, ‘of what race I am? When like the race of leaves

The race of man is, that deserves no question, nor receives

My being any other breath. The wind in autumn strows

The earth with old leaves, then the spring the woods with new endows,

And so death scatters men on earth, so life puts out again . . . ’

But in his narrative of the history that marks Glaucus out as an individual, he unexpectedly establishes common ground with his foe, Diomedes. The meeting ends not in death but with an exchange of armour in token of a historic bond of hospitality between them. (The observance of this bond leads to Glaucus being tricked out of his gold armour!)

Hector goes back to Troy to organise prayers to Athene. The move to the non-combatants’ world – old men, women and children – in Troy emphasises both the bulwark that Hector is and the price paid by the dependants of those who lose the heroic duels that are going on outside. The non-combatants at that moment include Paris, who says he has been debating the merits of heroic battle, but will now join in and fight. Hector wards off the words of his mother and Helen, his dependants, as distractions and presses on to find his wife Andromache. In the most moving scene of the
Iliad
, he laments the fate that she will suffer, made worse because of her and her captor’s knowledge that she was the wife of the worthiest of the Trojans. His heroic stature will, after his death, be a matter of suffering not pride to those he leaves behind. Their baby cries in fear, not at the terrible future but at Hector’s helmet – the horse-hair crest he thinks grows from his father’s head. Hector tenderly reassures him and swings him through the air, and Andomache smiles through her tears. Hector prays for his son’s glorious future (a heartfelt wish that will be unfulfilled – the conquering Greeks will dash his brains out to crush the seed of Hector). He pities her, reminding her that no man escapes his fate:

‘ . . . and fate, whose wings can fly?

Noble, ignoble, fate controls: once born, the best must die.’

Both must resume their work. He collects Paris for battle while his household mourns for him:

On went his helm; his princess home, half cold with kindly fears,

When every fear turn’d back her looks, and every look shed tears.

Book 7

Hector challenges the Greeks to name a champion to meet him in single combat, ironically envisaging the mound on the shore of the Hellespont, that will stand for all time to be a monument to his and his victim’s heroic deeds:

‘Survivors sailing the black sea may thus his name renew:

“This is his monument, whose blood long since did fates imbrue,

Whom passing far in fortitude, illustrious Hector slew.”

This shall posterity report, and my fame never die.’

The irony is the poet’s. The
Iliad
ends with the making of a burial mound – Hector’s: he will be Achilles’ victim. Posterity will be the immortal report of his death, in this, the
Iliad
.

The Greeks discuss who to put up; the ranking is plain and is confirmed by the voice of the poet. Nestor voices his scorn, recalling a similar situation from his youth when he had been the victor though the youngest. In response nine come forward; the lot chooses Ajax, who speaks the traditional pre-combat words of menace, which Hector counters by saying that he is not a novice, and laying out the rules of engagement. It is a good fight, it seems, for when night intervenes the two separate in mutual respect and exchange of gifts.