The Iliad: “Very like leaves upon this earth are the generations of men”

Painting by Gavin Hamilton. 

1/ Strictly speaking, the Iliad is not quite a realistic depiction of war (I mean, one-on-one combat? with lots of talking? not to mention the gods’ involvement?), but it is true and unrelenting in its representation of the horror and brutality of war. 

“Aias Telamonios, Akhaian 

bastion on defense, attacked and broke 

a Trojan mass, showing his men the way, 

by killing the best man of all the Thracians

Akamas, Eussoros’ brawny son. 

He hit him on the forecrest, and the spearhead 

dove his frontal bone, lodged in his brain, 

filling his eyes with darkness.”

(Book 6) 

(translated by Robert Fitzgerald) 

Homer doesn’t shy away from violence. 

“Seeing him tugging at the corpse, his flank 

exposed beside the shield as he bent over, 

Agenor with his spearshaft shod in bronze 

hit him, and he crumpled. As he died 

a bitter combat raged over his body 

between the Trojan spearmen and Akhaians, 

going for one another like wolves, like wolves 

whirling upon each other, man to man. 

Then Aias Telemonios knocked down

the son of Anthemion, Simoeisios, 

in the full bloom of youth…” 

(Book 4) 

It is gruelling. 

“A west wind rising 

will cast a rippling roughness over water, 

a shivering gloom on the dear sea. Just so 

the seated mass of Trojans and Akhaians 

rippled along the plain.” 

(Book 7) 

The gods may take sides, but Homer depicts the suffering on both sides: 

“Bright Helios 

had just begun to strike across the plowlands, 

rising heavenward out of the deep 

smooth-flowing Ocean stream, when these two groups 

met on the battlefield, with difficulty 

distinguishing the dead men, one by one. 

With pails they washed the bloody filth away, 

then hot tears fell, as into waiting carts 

they lifted up their dead. All cries of mourning 

Priam forbade them; sick at heart therefore 

in silence they piled corpses on the pyre 

and burned it down. Then back they went to Ilion. 

Just so on their side the Akhaians piled 

dead bodies on their pyre, sick at heart, 

and burned it down…” 

(ibid.) 

And he doesn’t shy away from depicting the bloodlust of (some) Akhaians. 

“Agamemnon in grim haste came by 

to bar his mercy and cried: 

“What now, soft heart? 

Were you so kindly served at home by Trojans? 

Why give a curse for them? Oh Menelaos,  

once in our hands not one should squirm away 

from death’s hard fall! No fugitive, not even 

the manchild carried in a woman’s belly! 

Let them all without distinction perish, 

every last man of Ilion, 

without a tear, without a trace!””  

(Book 6) 

2/ I know that the same characters from Greek mythology in different works of art are not necessarily the same—Odysseus from Homer’s epics is different from Odysseus in Sophocles’s Aias and Odysseus in Euripides’s Hecabe and Ulysses in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida—but I suspect that when I reread Aeschylus’s Oresteia, my view of Agamemnon would be coloured by his cruelty in war and unreasonable behaviour towards Akhilleus (better known as Achilles) in the Iliad. He’s not exactly likeable, is he?  

One of the great things about the Iliad is that Homer shows war to not only be about battle, about also about politics. The poem begins with a quarrel between Agamemnon and Akhilleus: Agamemnon, forced to return his war prize Kryseis, decides to take Akhilleus’s Briseis instead and humiliates him before the troops; Akhilleus then refuses to fight. The scene in Book 9, when Odysseus, Phoinix, and Aias come to Akhilleus as emissaries, is one of the greatest scenes in the book: the three men come to offer him gifts and an apology from Agamemnon and try—in three different ways—to persuade him to return and fight the Trojans; but Akhilleus continues to refuse. 

“Why must Argives 

fight the Trojans? Why did he raise an army 

and lead it here? For Helen, was it not? 

Are the Atreidai of all mortal men 

the only ones who love their wives? I think not. 

Every sane decent fellow loves his own 

and cares for her, as in my heart I loved 

Briseis, though I won her by the spear…” 

(Book 9) 

Why should he fight for a commander he doesn’t respect, who has humiliated him in front of everyone else? He goes further: 

“Now I think 

no riches can compare with being alive…” 

(ibid.) 

3/ Like War and Peace, the Iliad is not just one battle scene after another—there are also some domestic scenes. One of the most moving moments in the poem is when Hektor (or Hector) sees his wife Andromakhe (better known as Andromache) and their baby. 

“As he said this, Hektor held out his arms 

to take his baby. But the child squirmed round 

on the nurse’s bosom and began to wail, 

terrified by his father’s great war helm—

the flashing bronze, the crest with horsehair plume 

tossed like a living thing at every nod. 

His father began laughing, and his mother 

laughed as well…” 

(Book 6)

This is such a lovely moment (but heartbreaking when you think about what would later happen to them).

I have seen numerous heroic characters from the Trojan War/ the Iliad turned inside out and upside down in the Greek plays and in Shakespeare’s works and in other places, but never seen Hektor depicted as anything less than noble—even in Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare’s most bitter and unpleasant play, Troilus is idealistic and foolish, Cressida is capricious and unfaithful, Paris and Helen are callous, Ulysses (Odysseus) is sly and cunning, Pandarus is a pimp, Patroclus (Patroklos) is “a masculine whore”, Ajax (Aias) is a fool, Thersites is deeply bitter and cynical, even Achilles is egoistic and despicable, but Hector is noble—the only noble, admirable character in Shakespeare’s play.