The Iliad

"I suppose one might say ‘composed’ rather than written. It’s still a bit of a mystery how and when it was written down. Just as it’s still a bit of a mystery who Homer was—or one might even say ‘were’ because it may well be that the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed by different people. There’s clearly a very long tradition behind them that is somehow brought together. What that somehow is and how it happened, we don’t know. But it must be said that both the poems are simply too good to have been composed by a committee. There does seem to be at least a single controlling brain—if not a hand, then at least a mouth—that is behind each of these poems. I think probably most people now would go along with that, even though they might find multiple contributions, possibly after that single controlling voice. Probably more people, now, would go for two. It’s still very much disputed. Given that there’s also a possibility that it only came to be written down sometime later or by somebody other than the person that we might call Homer, there are various permutations you could have. You could have two original people—who put their shape to the poem—written down by the same person later on. Or the other way round: you could have a single person as the original poet, if you like, with all sorts of variations coming in at a later stage and finally being written down by two. It’s all highly speculative. It wasn’t even physically possible to write down works of that length in 700. You’d need a lot of papyrus. People have sometimes thought that it might have been written on leather, but you’d need a whole herd of cows to write the Iliad on. It’s not, on the whole, very plausible that that’s what writing would have been used for in the very early stages. It’s a very good question. As you say, it does stop quite suddenly. Part of the Iliad ’s brilliance is that it only takes four or five days of the action but you feel like it captures the 10 years’ war as a whole. At the beginning of the poem you often feel as if you’re going back to the beginning. There’s a catalogue of ships. Why ships? They’ve been in tents for 10 years—but this is how it would have seemed as they sailed 10 years before. There’s a duel between Paris and Menelaus. That’s something, you might think, that could easily have happened at the beginning of the war. It feels like the beginning of a war. Who knows, the first audience might have heard versions of that sung in the context of a beginning. So, you start off by going right back to the beginning. Then, at the end, there are all sorts of hints about what’s to come. Hector dies. There’s a simile towards the end: “it was as if all Troy was collapsing in flames.” And, in a sense, it is. Troy is as good as done for. “Part of the Iliad ’s brilliance is that it only takes four or five days of the action but you feel like it captures the 10 years’ war as a whole.” Also, you know Achilles is going to die. His mother comes and grieves for him as well as his friend Patroclus at Patroclus’s funeral. Achilles blames himself dreadfully for Patroclus’s death. Achilles gives away all of Patroclus’s possessions as part of the prizes but he also gives away of all his own possessions. He knows that he’s next. And he has got good reason to know this because he has been told by his mother, who has got access to the gods and is a goddess herself: ‘If you kill Hector, you are next.’ By going back to the battle, by fighting, by taking vengeance for Patroclus—which he feels he must do, as he owes this to Patroclus and to his men whom he has let down—he is killing himself as well. We know what it all means. We know what it’s going to lead to. But it casts that backwards and forwards to make it not simply an Achilleid. The clue is in the title ‘Iliad’—it’s a poem about Troy. It’s as much about Hector. Many people identify with Hector. Achilles and Hector are very different. It’s partly because they’re on different sides. Achilles is part of a military machine. There’s female company for him—and that’s where it all starts—but he’s anything but a family man. His father, back home, is important. Achilles is fighting partly because his father is there, but also because of glory. In a way, this is what he feels he is made for. Whereas for Hector, it is the baby seat in the back of the chariot, as it were. It’s the fact that he’s got a warm bath waiting for him, he’s got his wife and his child. He’s fighting for Troy and he knows that they’re going to lose, but he must do it for the community. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And these different things come together, rather than being about any one person. You feel for a lot of people. You also feel for the women, which is interesting. You think of it as a very masculine poem but you see a lot of it through the eyes of the women. Well, things start from women and then they come back to women at the end. It is a fight over a woman. Agamemnon takes Achilles’s prize away because he’s had to give up his own girl. It’s not a case of blaming women, because the males take over and it becomes an issue of masculine pride. But, at the end, you’re feeling for Hector’s wife, Andromache. You’re feeling for this family that is being destroyed and for all the other families. I think so. It’s a reflection on war, really. War was ubiquitous in the Greek world. They sometimes gave wars names like the Persian Wars. But they also gave peace names like the King’s Peace or the Thirty Years’ Peace. It was unusual enough to have peace. War was everywhere at the time; after all, it still is. There is a choice that Achilles has to make. He is told that he has two alternative fates: he could stay away from the war and live out a long life and nobody would ever know or remember him. Or he could go and win eternal fame and glory, but would have a short life. In a way, that is a version of a dilemma that keeps coming back. I start the chapter on Homer in our book with the soldiers in World War I, to whom the Iliad meant so much. They had to face that choice. And for them, too, it was a choice that could only be made one way—or that’s the way it felt to them. Perhaps, though there were plenty of other things that misled them. You could certainly say that the officer-class was saturated in the Iliad. In general, this class was very well educated: Wilfred Owen was a grammar school boy, and some of the other poets were prize-winning Etonians. In those first years of the war, they could think of the glory and of themselves as a new Achilles. Equally, poems from the end of the war, like Owen’s “Strange Meeting”, were also saturated in the Iliad . We’ve all got our mental frameworks, I suppose, and that was an important part of theirs. They could slot into it both the exhilaration and the feeling of meaningfulness and then, eventually, the feeling of ‘Well, hang on a minute. Is there that meaningfulness?’ And that’s part of the brilliance of the poem. In a way, it’s the dilemma of western literature. So much of it is already there in Homer. We’ve been struggling to keep up ever since."

"Yes it is. What’s interesting is that The Iliad is the first book, and it’s about war. Why is that? I’ve got a funny feeling that war and narrative are tightly bound together. Both narrative and conflict are the products of civilisations. Once you start building cities, having private property, creating hierarchies, etc, then the inescapable fact is that conflict will occur. And conflict is the stuff of drama, of stories. I think The Iliad has much to say to politicians now – it’s completely clear-eyed about collateral damage, about problems of post-conflict and about the ghastly things that happen to women and children in war. I think every generation reads The Iliad slightly differently and there are plenty of people who read it as anti-war because it’s so full of pity and sorrow for the victims of war, and for the young soldiers whose lives are cut short by war. And it has characters, notably Achilles, who clearly articulate the complete uselessness of war. At one point in the poem he says that he has two choices: he can go back home and live peacefully to old age or he can continue to fight and be killed as a young man. Whatever you choose you’re going to the same place, you’ll still end up dead: so what’s the point? Paradoxically, though, massive tracts of the poem are beautifully described battle scenes. And, like it or not, the poem does take a certain sort of pleasure in the glory of battle, which can be a bit unpalatable for modern readers. Yes. It’s the ten-year siege of Troy and The Iliad is set during a 40-day period in the tenth year of the war. It tells how Achilles is insulted and dishonoured by his commander-in-chief, Agamemnon, which is immediately a dramatic moment because Achilles is the best fighter and the most distinguished warrior. So you’ve got this tension between two competing alpha males. Then Achilles refuses to fight, he’s so angry with Agamemnon, and this means the Greeks start suffering terrible losses and things begin to go very badly for them. Finally, Achilles allows his beloved comrade Patroclus to go into the fighting and he is killed by Hector, prince of the Trojans. Achilles then, in redoubled and unspeakable fury, goes into battle and slaughters tens and tens of Trojans – it’s a blood-drenched series of poetic imaginings, ending when he downs Hector and drags his mutilated body around the walls of Troy. Then Priam, Hector’s old father, comes into the Greek camp and persuades Achilles to ransom the body. It’s an extraordinary scene – by no means a reconciliation but it’s a recognition of shared humanity. And there the poem ends. It’s very powerful. Troy . Terrible film. Purists might prefer Chapman, the 17th-century first English translation, and there’s the Robert Fitzgerald, which many people love. But I am fond of the Robert Fagles version partly because it has a wonderful power when spoken aloud. For me, one of the great pleasures in life is finding someone who will be persuaded to read The Iliad aloud to you. Yes!"

"There are always new translations of The Iliad coming out, but this one has a very specific approach, both in terms of its philosophy of translation and its approach to the text. For a number of generations now, there has been an orthodoxy among classicists that the Homeric poems were orally composed and transmitted, and represent a series of adaptations, expansions and editings that took place during performance. Rejecting that idea is the eminent classicist Martin West, who thinks that there really was a Homeric figure – an original poet who accumulated a number of texts and wrote down what we would call a definitive text of The Iliad . Right. What are suggestions in West become ossified in Mitchell into absolute statements. He tries to peel away the layers of the number of non-definitive versions to get to an original text. He cuts all of what is book 10 in the canonical version of The Iliad , which other people felt represents an excrescence in the Homeric tradition that doesn’t quite fit. So it’s a polemical text, and also a very strong, rhythmic, no-nonsense approach to the translation. “People have a hard time remembering that the myths which we associate with the Greek classics were, for the Greeks, infinitely elastic. There was no set version” Mitchell also gets rid of a typical element of the oral composition of the text – the epithets, or stock, repeated phrases like “swift-footed Achilles” or “red-haired Menelaus”. But when you peel that away, to my mind it’s problematic. The Iliad is what it is. It’s a certain moment in the development of what we call literature, and that archaic feeling is part of it. It even felt archaic when it was being performed in the 5th century BC. That’s a point where I disagree with him. Homeric Greek, to the classic Greeks in Periclean Athens, had some of the feeling that the King James Bible does to contemporary anglophone audiences today. It’s English, we understand it, but it’s not the way we talk. Yet it’s authoritative within our own language. So much of the English we speak derives from its rhythms and figures of speech that it’s inseparable from contemporary language, although identifiable in a moment in the evolution of that language. Homeric Greek, in the same way, did not feel like ordinary Greek to Athenians who were chatting about the Peloponnesian war. I have done translation myself, so I think about this a lot. To preserve that quality of archaic diction is tricky, but to strip away all the epithets leaves you with an Iliad that may be swift-footed, but doesn’t quite feel like the original does in Greek. The famous problem of translating Homer is that the Greek has many qualities – all of them set out in a definitive essay by Matthew Arnold. One of those qualities is swiftness. In the original, The Iliad is both archaic and fast-moving. The English translator has to make a choice between replicating one or the other. So it’s a nice quality of Mitchell’s translation that it drives swiftly forwards, because that is something that is in Homer. But it’s unfortunate that one has to lose the other quality en route. I’m not a Homerite, so I don’t have a dog in this game, but I’ve always gone along with the oralists. To me, it doesn’t seem likely that there was one Homer. But I don’t think that these ideas are mutually exclusive. It seems clear that all this began as oral recitation – travelling bards picking up other people’s stories, and episodes gradually accreting over time. Then at a certain point someone – let’s call him X – may have thought it would be good to get all of this down, at the moment when writing became a useful tool in society. Or maybe it was many Xs. Obviously, whoever does the gathering is himself a person of great poetic sensibility, because as the reduction or editing takes place there are choices being made, lines included or omitted. There are people who specialise in Homer whose lives are dedicated to figuring out these things. Martin West is a great and brilliant classicist, it’s not that I’m dismissing him out of town. But all you can say for certain is that it started out orally and at some point got written down – and that’s good enough for me."

"I would say, first of all, that throughout The Iliad there is a counter-narrative of lost opportunities for peace. Obviously, if peace had been achieved there would have been no Trojan war or it would have come to an end sooner. But Homer reminds us from time to time that there were alternatives. There’s a very remarkable scene in book two, near the beginning, when the entire Greek army, misunderstanding a speech by their commander Agamemnon, turns on its heels and runs to the boats, hoping to go back home. Homer is telling us that the rank and file were not bent on fighting to the end. The Gods, on that occasion, intervene to stop the Greek army from sailing away. Even the wily Odysseus is unable to stop his men from launching their boats. Book 18 is significant because it describes the making of a new shield for Achilles, who had withdrawn from battle. His friend Patroclus had borrowed his armour in his place and been killed, and his armour had been seized by the Trojans. So Achilles needed a new suit of armour, which was made for him by the heavenly blacksmith Hephaestus. If you read other accounts of Greek warriors, what you put on your shield is invariably something to frighten the enemy – a Gorgon’s head or a serpent or a wild lion. Homer instead describes a set of images on Achilles’s shield, almost all of which are concerned with peace not war – including young men and women dancing, labourers in the field bringing in the harvest grapes or ploughing the fields, and a council in which a case is arbitrated by peaceful means. This assembly of images, in my view, is designed to tell us that there is, or should be, a peaceful alternative to war. This is also an example of the passages in Homer which lead me to believe he was a single individual, because if it was stitched together from epic material then a scene such as the above would not appear – there would be stock images of a much more conventional shield instead. Homer, like Shakespeare, encompassed all humanity in his work, and in The Iliad he encompasses peace as well as war. A number of Homeric scholars have pointed out that the text, as we have it, is divided roughly into three thirds. The central third is almost entirely concerned with war and fighting. But the first third, where the plot is developed, is very different, and so is the final third. So the subject matter of The Iliad is war, but the feelings and emotions of the people concerned are much more complex."

"Stephen Fry writes, “It is worth remembering of course that Homer’s Iliad doesn’t cover the causes of the War … the Apple of Discord, the Judgement of Paris, birth of Achilles, abduction of Helen and so on – nor the end of the war. The action of the Iliad begins in the final year of the ten year siege of Troy and dramatises the weeks that begin with the feud between Agamemnon and Achilles and end with the death of Hector.” The Iliad is one of our most frequently recommended books on Five Books. If you’re interested in learning more about it, your first port of call is probably our interview with Chris Pelling , Regius Professor of Greek Emeritus at Oxford University, who explains what we know about it, when and how it was written, and what we know about its author(s), Homer."

"The Iliad is absolutely extraordinary. I read it every so often, and from the beginning it has the most incredible evocation of place, on the beach with the camp fires and Achilles sulking in his tent. There’s such a sense of camaraderie between these warriors. It’s an ancient culture, completely foreign to us now, and yet somehow we are brought to feel their day-to-day emotions. Not just on the Greek side, on the Trojan side as well. There are poignant moments, for example where Hector’s going in to fight and his wife Andromache doesn’t want him to. It’s an extraordinarily vivid account of war and a very graphic one. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The edition I read it in first, and still read it in, is E. V. Rieu’s Penguin Classics translation. When I’m doing my academic work, I check it against the Loeb Classic edition where it’s very literally translated. Rieu fought in the First World War. He was in the Maratha Light infantry in India and then in the Second World War he was in London in the Blitz, when he decided to start translating the Odyssey . He did the Odyssey first and then the Iliad . This is a veteran in war, translating the great book of war. It continues to inspire. There have been so many writers who have been influenced by it. For an epic, it manages to do both things: it has an enormous scope, but then it really focuses in. To write vividly about battle you need that human interest angle. Monomachia or hand-to-hand fighting comes out in other much later works of war literature, which focus on a single individual and their fate in war. I’m thinking now of C.S. Lewis in Surprised By Joy . He fought in the First World War and when he got to the western front he said, “This is war, this is what Homer saw.” I’m sure it was nothing like it actually, it’s dubious whether Homer was one single person and it’s unclear whether he could see. But it still carries the weight of all these centuries of cultural baggage. I think that’s possibly true. I’m not a military strategist, but what I gather is that we’re always prepared to fight the last war. We’ve learnt the technology from the last war, and so we’re ready to fight that, and the present war always comes as a surprise. A lot of people who had public school educations, classical educations, might have gone into the First World War thinking that they were fighting Homer’s war. The obvious person that comes to mind is Julian Grenfell, a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford. He wrote a poem called “ Into Battle “. He had this public school education and believed it was all heroic warfare. The morning he died—he was in a hospital—he saw the sun come through the windows and he said, “Ah, Phoebus Apollo.” When you think of the awfulness of the Western Front it’s hard to believe that you could hang on to those cultural stereotypes."