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Notes -
War brides and loot goblins: The Iliad
(Epistemic status: The Iliad is 2700 years old and practically a field of study unto itself. I doubt anything I have to say here is original.)
(You can skip this paragraph if you're familiar with the story). The Iliad is an epic poem composed in ancient Greece by oral poet(s), first written down around 700BC and attributed to an unknown poet called Homer (along with the Odyssey). It describes events towards the end of the Trojan War - a legendary event occurring hundreds of years earlier where mainland Greeks travelled to Greek Anatolia with the ostensible goal of rescuing/re-kidnapping Helen, a beautiful woman who'd been taken away by the Trojan Paris. Notable characters on the Greek side include warrior Achilles and his close friend/possible lover Patroclus, ineffectual king Agamemnon, and got-his-own-spinoff Odysseus.
Recently after a lifetime of mostly reading sci-fi and fantasy I was thinking that I should catch up on some of the classics. After comparing a few translations of the Iliad I went with Robert Fagles' version as it seemed the most energetic. (People like to say that the Iliad was meant to be listened to rather than read, but I'm not an audiobook guy). With the high and mighty reputation of Homer I was expecting an eating-your-vegetables experience where I might be encultured but not necessarily entertained, but it was actually rather engaging. The story is mostly (rather violent) action with a bit of drama and pathos and was clearly composed as popular entertainment first and foremost. Some sections get a little repetitive (there's a bit too much back and forth action - it starts to feel like a long MOBA match after a while) but overall it was both enjoyable and an interesting insight into bronze age society. I have a few scattered thoughts, some of which touch on culture war issues.
Tropes. Some things I think of as Hollywood tropes are already present here. Random fighters die instantly and reliably in a single hit while major characters get injured if not missed entirely. The few that die get just enough time to make a dramatic speech before death. On the other hand they hadn't come up with quippy one-liners yet - when characters try to dunk on each other they make speeches.
Names. An interesting difference from almost all modern media is that almost every single character who dies in battle, no matter how minor, gets named, usually with their father's name and often even a mini-bio as well. This does get a bit repetitive at times but also takes the cost of war more seriously than the typical Hollywood mowing down of faceless mooks. One interesting exception to this is that the dozen Trojan soldiers sacrificed by Achilles for Patroclus's funeral pyre are not named - perhaps their deaths were not heroic enough.
Morality. Ingroup-outgroup morality is very strong here, as well as an absence of altruism in the modern sense. The characters don't see anything wrong with looting random cities, slaughtering men and taking women as slaves, nor with summarily killing (or human-sacrificing) prisoners or desecrating their enemies' bodies - indeed they tend to boast about these things. Achilles just barely softens a little at the end, with bribery required. The Trojans are worried that they might be sacked and killed/enslaved, but they don't seem object to this on moral grounds. Meanwhile both sides show a great deal of concern over protecting the bodies of their fallen comrades, even at great risk to themselves.
Loot. The characters are obsessed with loot and on multiple occasions get killed or injured while trying to loot their enemies' armor mid-battle. They also send people back to base with loot mid-battle instead of trying to win the battle with their full force. Even the god Ares, fighting in the battle, stops to loot one of his victims - I guess even gods could use a spare set of armor.
Gods. The gods are involved surprisingly directly and frequently in the story, going so far as to redirect spears and arrows or even fight in the battles personally. Most often the gods seem to be used to explain events that in modern times would be attributed to good or bad luck - oh your chariot broke down, or your spear missed? Must have been the interference of Zeus again. They also seem to think character's thoughts for them at times - something that formed part of the basis for The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, if I recall correctly.
Women. Human women play little role in the story except as prizes - an explicit goal of the Greeks is to take the Trojan women as slaves/war brides, and both the Trojan war and the Iliad itself start with disputes over the possession of women. At the funeral games a woman, 2nd prize for one of the events, is even rated as being worth only 4 oxen, compared to a 1st prize cauldron worth 12. (This may have been intended as a joke, perhaps implying that this woman was not so desirable - another woman is also part of the first prize for the prestigious chariot race). It's interesting that the goddess Athena is portrayed as something of an ass-kicking girlboss, unlike any of the human female characters.
Theme. The theme could perhaps be summarized as "War is harsh and tragic, but at least it's glorious. Also you can really load up on loot".
One thing I speculate about - for a long time Homer was prestigious partly because you had to know ancient Greek to read him. Then there were various English translations (famously Alexander Pope's rhyming translation), but they weren't so easy to read, so there was still some prestige from the effort. I wonder if relatively easy/readable translations like Fagles have hurt the prestigious nature of Homer and, along with feminist opposition to the very unfeminist portrayal of women in the story, contributed to the apparent decline of the classics in academia.
I'll leave you with an excerpt from the end of book 20, which reminded me a bit of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian:
Achilles now
like inhuman fire raging on through the mountain gorges
splinter-dry, setting ablaze big stands of timber,
the wind swirling the huge fireball left and right—
chaos of fire—Achilles storming on with brandished spear
like a frenzied god of battle trampling all he killed
and the earth ran black with blood. Thundering on,
on like oxen broad in the brow some field hand yokes
to crush white barley heaped on a well-laid threshing floor
and the grain is husked out fast by the bellowing oxen's hoofs—
so as the great Achilles rampaged on, his sharp-hoofed stallions
trampled shields and corpses, axle under his chariot splashed
with blood, blood on the handrails sweeping round the car,
sprays of blood shooting up from the stallion's hoofs
and churning, whirling rims—and the son of Peleus
charioteering on to seize his glory, bloody filth
splattering both strong arms, Achilles' invincible arms—
Have you ever considered reading the War Nerd translation of the Illiad? I confess to not having read the original poetic translation. But I found myself literally spontaneously guffawing and feeling as though relaxed next to a campfire storyteller in his novel format retelling. Sensations that I'm not sure are as easily flow-into-able in the more high brow accurate translations.
That said I'd like to read it in the original someday. Do you stand by the Fagles translation for the average man?
Fagles is my first and only read of the Iliad so I can't really compare it to anything else - when I said I compared translations I meant the first dozen lines, not that I read multiple versions! I did consider trying a prose version, but I figured that since it was written as poetry it should be read as poetry. I did find Fagles very readable, it's all modern language. If you enjoyed the excerpt above you'd likely enjoy the rest of it.
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