The Iliad by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson

     I decided to read the Emily Wilson versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey because Emily Wilson's versions struck me as easier to read. I am not looking for a challenge. Iambic pentameter and short words sounded a lot better than flowery language. Maybe I'll graduate up to Lawrence or Fagles one day, but this was perfect. Wilson also starts the book with a great explanation of the book itself and the themes the reader will encounter, before an editor's note about how she did the translation. Both were really good prep for the book itself.

    I didn't just read The Iliad; while I was reading it, I did a bunch of reading about Homer and his works. The Iliad is not an oral story. It is the written distillation of an oral tradition that lasted for hundreds of years before being written in the eighth century BC, at which point it became a standard part of Greek education. For millennia afterwards, Homer remains the epitome of literature in the Greek world. Plato, Alexander, and every Greek with an education was brought up reading about the Trojan War, and was told stories of Greek mythology. Something I didn't realize is that The Iliad ends before Achilles is killed and before the Greeks take Troy with the Trojan Horse. The story is neatly framed around what can't be more than a few days or maybe weeks sometime towards the end of the war, when Achilles refuses to fight, Hector goes on a rampage and kills Patroclus, and Achilles decides to rejoin the fight to avenge him (in short).

    It sounds like there was no such person as Homer. Homeric Greek, Wilson writes, is a mixture of Greek spoken at different places in times, such that it is clear to Classicists that it must have been a distillation of works created by different poets. It would be like a single speaker of English using Chaucerian, Californian, Australian, and Victorian voices in one work of literature. Instead, it was the result of an oral tradition, developed after the Greeks lost their system of writing developed in Mycenae, and then written down hundreds of years later, when they re-adopted writing from the Phoenicians, who had adapted an alphabet from Egyptian hieroglyphics.

    The Iliad occupies an interesting point right in the twilight zone between history and mythology. Historically, Troy existed, and has been discovered, although something like eight or nine cities have existed on that spot over thousands of years. The Greek states referenced in the book existed, and much of what is described is real. The Greeks who read The Iliad in the fifth century BC must have understood it to be real and in their world. Yet it is set not as a creation story, but a story uniting various creations about two to five generations later. Many, many, characters are the sons or grandsons of gods, and, of course, all the best characters are loved by different gods and directly interact with them or are controlled by them. There's a son of Heracles here, a grandson of a river there, and at one point Aeneas informs Achilles of his own lineage (right before facing him in battle, which is pretty common to do for these guys), and explains that he is not only a cousin of Hector, but that he is a son of Aphrodite and a 5x-great-grandson of Zeus. Most characters are human, but they are often described as "godlike" or an "equal of the gods," although a clear lesson of the book is that no mortal is equal to a god.

    I think my favorite thing about the style of The Iliad is its pacing, clearly meant to be delivered orally. I actually tried to read it out loud, but gave up because it was just so much reading out loud and there are a lot of places where you look like a crazy person. I listened to some of it on audiobook to get the effect, however I preferred to read it in my head in Dan Carlin's voice. If you know, you know. But the pacing. The pacing is awesome because the book is filled with encounters between major, named characters, and minor, also named characters. We basically always know that our named characters won't have a bronze spear put through their eye socket, so the narrator build the tension by telling us all about the lives of the people they are killing, and the way they do it. So the book is filled with personal encounters between two individuals where we get a lot of details. Here's one from book four:

So spoke Athena, and her words persuaded
the mindless mind of Pandarus. At once
he took the cover off his polished bow,
made from a nimble wild goat's horn, which he
had hunted. He had lain in wait and watched
till from behind a rock the goat jumped out.
Pandarus hit his chest right through the heart.
The goat fell backward on the rock. This horn
was sixteen palms in length. A master
    craftsman
had smoothed it down and polished it all over
and set a golden hook upon the tip.

All of that is an aside to just say that this guy, who never appears again, took out his bow. And then the description continues to tell the reader how Pandarus whispered a prayer to Apollo as he strung the arrow and took aim at Menelaus, but that Menelaus was saved by Athena, who brushed the arrow away "as when a mother strokes away a fly to keep it from her baby, sweetly sleeping." In a more typical example, in which Homer tells us all about the life of one of the men killed, it is written:

Then Telamonian Ajax struck and wounded
young Simoesius, Anthemion's son,
A healthy boy who had been born beside
the streames of the Simoeis when his mother
had gone to see her parents' flocks of sheep
upon Mount Ida. On the way back down
she gave birth by the river. That was why
they named him Simoesius. That boy
would never pay his loving parents back
for taking care of him. His life was short,
because the spear of Ajax cut him down.
The young man stepped in front, and Ajax struck his
chest by his right nipple, and the bronze
pierced through and came out by his shoulder blade.

The text is really humanist in this way, where the glory that comes from fighting in war and killing does not override the value of each human life killed. Those individuals are remembered by The Poet. Not only that, but the glory that a man gets for killing is gotten because of who he has killed. The listeners and readers of The Iliad probably could not tell you how many people Telamonian Ajax killed, but they could tell you who he killed.

    As someone who has read a lot and learned a lot about The Iliad before reading it, something that still surprised me was the manner of Hector's death. At least in this version, his death is basically an execution, rigged by Athena. She has Hephaestus make for Achilles a godly suit of armor. Fine. Achilles chases Hector around the city walls and is too fast for Hector to escape. Fine. But then, in the climactic moment, Hector, who has laid waste to the Greeks and just slaughtered and slaughtered them as far and away the best warrior in the battle, is just executed. Achilles throws a spear at Hector, and misses. Then Hector throws a spear, and Athena brushes it away. Then, Athena magically restores Achilles' spear to his possession while tricking Hector into thinking his buddy was there to hand him another. So it's not even a fight, let alone a fair fight. Athena just uses Achilles to clumsily kill Hector. That makes me think that it is Hector who is the greatest warrior in the Trojan War, not Achilles. Achilles, to me, feels like a villain throughout the whole book.

    This was an absolutely fantastic way to finish the last year and start the new year of reading. I don't know what took me so long. Next, I will be starting the Odyssey, which I was more familiar with growing up since I had a children's version of it. 

Miscellaneous:

• The Greek Iliad often uses "untying" or "unraveling" as a metaphor for death. People are stabbed by a sharp, bronze spear, and their limbs become undone.
• The Iliad was not always as popular as it is today. For a long time, Virgil's Aeneid (written in Latin) was the most popular work about the Trojan War. The Iliad was not translated into English until the 17th century.
• There's a random part in the book where a horse talks to Achilles. I just think its funny that at no point in this story does an animal ever talk until more than three-quarters of the way through, when a horse makes sure Achilles knows he is going to die.