November 2, 2014
When I was 12, I dislocated my elbow. It was a pretty gnarly injury; it couldn't easily be popped back into place, and I had to wear an enormous cast on my left arm for like two months. The day after I injured it, I stayed home from school. My dad brought home a book for me, a childhood favorite of his: D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths by Ingri and Edgar Parin. This amazing book is in print to this day. It has fantastic illustrations, and tells the stories of the most prominent Greek gods and goddesses, myths of other demigod creatures (nymphs and centaurs and such), and stories of the great mortal heroes: Jason, Herecles, Odyseus. And it tells the complete (though very condensed) story of the Trojan War, from the contest that gave already-married Helen's hand to Paris, to to the Trojan Horse and the sacking of Ilium, which I think is the royal or capitol city of Troy.
The Iliad does not tell the complete story of the war. It isn't really meant to stand alone, but rather as one of a series of epic poems (credited to others, I assume, as The Iliad and The Odyssey are both credited to Homer). Why Homer's poems have withstood the test of time, I don't know. Maybe his attention to detail with the lives and emotions of the characters set his work above others? This poem (the translation put me in mind of Shakespeare; indeed, it wouldn't be a far cry to say that the Bard and his contemporaries were influenced by Homer) was mostly entertaining. The only truly unnecessary details were when Homer did a sort of "roll call" of the leaders of Greece and Troy and their respective allies. That part can mainly be ignored; you get to know the central characters on either side as the story progresses.
The polytheist religion of the ancient Greeks is fascinating. Their mythology, including this story, shows the gods being very personally and emotionally involved in the lives of mortals. So much so that like half the Greek and Trojan leaders had a god for a father; Achilles was somewhat unique in having a goddess mother instead. The gods are not benevolent or all-knowing; mortals are basically their playthings. Making a sacrifice won't necessarily get you a god's favor, but neglecting the sacrifice will get you the wrath of one. And if you aren't favored by a god, you better watch the fuck out. Essentially, it's like having giant human beings in charge; the Judeo-Christian god of the Old Testament sounds more like Zeus than like Jesus.
What was confusing about the poem were the names. I figured out that mortal men were called by like three different names: a given name, "son of" whomever, or by their second name (a veriation of the father's given name). Once I figured out the Agamemnon, Atreus' son, and Atrides were all the same person, things made a lot more sense. Of course, Atreus' son and Atrides could also refer to Menelaus, Agamemnon's brother and the husband Helen was taken from. Yeesh!
I was also thrown that the gods were referred to by their Roman names rather than their Greek names: Jove, Juno, Pallas, Mars, Neptune instead of Zeus, Hera, Artemis, Ares, Poseidon. But I was familiar enough with these to keep them straight.
This being a well-known story in Ancient Greece, the values of that society might be judged by this story. Plato criticized the myths as championing low morals: violence, trickery, desecration of bodies, raping and enslavement to women. All of these are hugely present in the story. Knowing the fate of the women of Troy (though the end of the war is not told in The Iliad) is cringe-worthy. The Greeks aim to pillage their city and take the women away, to toil and be degraded for the rest of their lives. Achilles' slaves, his "spoils" of war, pretend to mourn the death of his friend Patroclus, but really use it as an excuse to lament their own sorrows. And the many, many descriptions of men being beheaded, run through with spears, and disembowled in battle...Ancient Greece was pretty fucked up.
I read The Odyssey years ago, as a senior in high school, and I always intended to read The Iliad. I'm glad I did, but I think The Odyssey is the better of the two epic poems credited to Homer. There's some speculation that someone other than Homer wrote The Odyssey, but that may be something that is never known. These stories are older than the New Testament, and there's just so much that we can never know about their origins. I think, though, that if a story has survived for that long, it's worth reading.
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