Homer

A most immersive reread, or Pope vs Cowper

It’s been years since I read The Iliad last. To make things more interesting and more immersive, I decided to read two translations at the same time, choosing Alexander Pope’s and William Cowper’s. Both are from the eighteenth century. I chuckled at Cowper’s introduction, where he expresses the utmost respect for Mr Pope, and then proceeds to say ”that he has sometimes altogether suppressed the sense of the author, and has not seldom show more intermingled his own ideas with it…”. Pope’s text is beautiful, it has a flow and a rhythm that I like. Some of his details and sometimes whole passages are very different in content compared to Cowper. Make of it what you will! Cowper reads easier, his text is more transparent. There is a joy of poetry. I will remember his “heart-freshening joy”. I can’t proclaim a winner, but my love for The Iliad has only grown. In any case, not reading Homer in Ancient Greek is a game of whispers, but whispers so powerful and persistent that you cannot help feeling overwhelmed.

Reviewing The Iliad sounds like a silly undertaking. I’ll just sit and think about things that struck me, and things that I had fun (yes, fun!) with.

🏺The descriptions of battles seem endless sometimes. Yet I saw no battle glory this time, there was nothing but blood, gore, and grief. There is a reason why everyone who is killed is named – Homer tells us who they were, what kind of persons they were, who their parents were, that they were loved. I was suddenly wondering if The Iliad was an anti-war poem. “...and in all hearts awakened joyful hope that there should end war’s long calamities.”

🏺Agamemnon is a coward, a bully, an idiot, a murderer. He is still one of the worst (the worst?) humans in Greek mythology. Down with Agamemnon!

🏺Down with meddling Athena as well, while we are on that topic.

🏺Paris: gaaah, don’t get me started. ”As smooth of face as fraudulent of mind!” This is Paris after his disastrous performance during the duel with Menelaus, as retold by yours truly:
Helen: You are a coward. I wish you were dead.
Paris: Well, I am a little embarrassed, but it was the gods’ fault anyway. Whatever. Let’s have sex already.

🏺Diomedes in action, as retold by yours truly:
Diomedes: I have the biggest cojones in the Iliad!!!
Humans: Ruuuuuun!
Gods: Eh!?
Aphrodite: Ouch, my hand, ouch. I’m out of here.
Diomedes: Apollo, I am gonna get you!
Apollo: Can’t you see I am a god? Leave me alone! Ares, you are supposed to be the god of war! Can you do something about this guy?
Ares: Sure.
Athena: Diomedes, go get Ares!
Diomedes: Raaaaah!
Ares: Diomedes, what sharp spear you have! Ouch, ouch. I’m out of here.

🏺Hector and Andromache have such wonderful domestic moments, I loved them both so much.

🏺There came a day when I wanted to tell people: “Stop discussing these utterly uninteresting and unimportant things! Don’t you know that Patroclus has just died? His horses are crying…” I didn’t, because for some reason people think that I am sensible, and I’d like to keep it that way. I was tempted, though.

🏺I waited almost a week before I could start Book XXII. It’s called “Death of Hector”, and I was being a coward about it. Is Hector going to die again? Are you sure we can’t do it differently this time?

🏺I forgot there was a chariot race. There should be more chariot races in books.

🏺I waited almost a week before I could start Book XXIV, because then The Iliad would be over. I have spent two months with it. What am I going to do now? show less

It's amazing how such beautiful language and imagery, such bloody and exciting action and adventure...can also draaaaag through the middle. I blame my fits of boredom on aborted action (Paris vs. Melelaus duel cut off when Aphrodite whisks Paris to his bedroom, Hera and Athena prep for war only to stop while riding off to battle in they're chariots because they've suddenly remembered they're afraid of Zeus) and repetitive incidents of people being introduced and then immediately dying. show more Seriously, almost no one we know or care about dies until the very end. Oh, and being a chariot driver sounds a lot like being a Star Trek redshirt--how many times does someone throw a spear only for it to miss the target and kill the driver?

All joking aside, the language and metaphors really were beautiful, even if Caroline Alexander does lean into the repetition more than Emily Wilson did with her translation of The Odyssey. (I ended up just opting to read translations by women because they're some of the newest and, with such a flooded field, why the heck not?)

And The Iliad itself is a fascinating historical document--even if the historicity of the Trojan war itself isn't a sure thing, the cultural details that almost certainly came from ancient Greek society were well worth the read: that grabbing someone's knees was a sign of begging for mercy, that the upper levels of society rested from battle to nosh on what sounds like wine-soaked oatmeal, that funerals could be incredibly elaborate, that ships were pulled all the way up onto the beach, and of course the whole relationship with the gods. It was interesting to see when gods were credited with great deeds and with failures; it almost seemed like blaming the gods was a way to abdicate responsibility for major mistakes...though, admittedly, the gods make a lot of mistakes, seeming pettier even than the humans, and that's saying a lot considering this war started because a husband decided he needed whole armies to go after his runaway wife.

Given all the action and the high, bloody death count, it's hard to understand how the Trojan war dragged out for ten years. The action came thick and fast, with thrilling cinematic moments that, for some reason, Troy ignored instead of, um, great balls of fire. There's the Achean wall, a powerful counterpart to the walls of Troy; sneaky spy missions by night; eyes popping out of their sockets; brains spattered inside helmets; angry river gods; leaping from beached ship to beached ship while stabbing people below with long spears; seriously, why isn't Netflix or HBO adapting this into a miniseries?

It was also notable to me how many "best of the Acheans" there were. So much is made of Achilles from the very outset ("sing of the wrath of Achilles") but we've also got the Ajax pair, Menelaus and Agamemnon, Diomedes, Petroclus, Odysseus, and a fantastic archer; and on the Trojan side it isn't just Hector, there's a Zeus-beloved demigod, Aeneas, and others whose names I now forget because, hey, there are a lot of names.

I'm talking a lot about the action in part because I'm sure much has already been made of the commentary about war, about how many lives it senselessly cuts short. Even the language used to describe death--knees cut out, biting and clenching the earth--is often gritty and real, the occasional metaphor of a great tree falling in the forest reminding readers of the pyres that will, hopefully, consume the dead and release their spirits. After the first truce to tend to the dead, I kept thinking of that every so often: whether all the many dead left on the battlefield would be left to rot, or whether they would manage to get their final rites.

I do regret that this "review" focuses so much on the action rather than the language, but alas, my copy of The Iliad is a library book and there was no way to mark the passages. Despite my efforts to avoid acquiring more books, I kind of wish I'd bought this one so I could mark it up.

Some other random thoughts that I need to jot down so I can finish this review before it's time to go to work:
> Why the heck does anyone worship these self-centered, careless gods? Perhaps the cruelties of ancient life are reflected in the changing whims of indifferent, selfish beings.
> One of my favorite moments was when Hector goes to visit his wife and baby; his baby cries when he doesn't recognize his father all dressed up in armor, and Hector and wife share a laugh and a moment of levity. It's easy to imagine it as nervous, sad laughter, and it's one of the few times when there seemed to be genuine love between a man and a woman rather than just playing politics (no matter what Achilles protests about Breisis (sp?)).
> How disturbing, to modern eyes, that rape of all Trojan woman is repeatedly thrown around as a goal.
> I found it amusing how people really ribbed Paris for causing this whole catastrophe, including getting on his case about how his major attribute is beauty, gifted by Aphrodite ("I can't help it that I'm beautiful!"). For all that, he still has some moments in battle to redeem himself.
> At the same time, I loved that Aphrodite had her moment in battle. Maybe it didn't work out the way she wanted and she didn't end up getting an Eowyn moment, but I felt that her effort and failure were very poignant.
> Um, what the heck was with a) Zeus giving away the entire plot with Patroclus wearing Achilles' armor; and b) everyone, including the Trojans, knowing it was Patroclus? What was the point if everyone knew it wasn't Achilles?
> At one point, Zeus invites Hera to bed by naming all the women he has slept with and all the demigods that had come from those unions. If Hera's goal hadn't been to distract him in the first place, I hope she'd have raged at him for that. Seriously Zeus, is that your idea of a smooth move?
> Patroclus only falls in battle because Apollo undoes Achilles' armor, which is totally cheating.
> I've heard so much made of the Achilles/Patroclus relationship that I was kind of surprised there wasn't more evidence of a romantic relationship between the two. I hate to be *that person*, but in a society where women basically counted for nothing and male friendship was the only friendship, there doesn't seem to be much to support more. Of course, I'm totally at the mercy of translator interpretation...
> Speaking of translations, while it was definitely a shock to move from Wilson's iambic pentameter in her Odyssey to Alexander's long lines of blank verse, I can't imagine how any translator could fit all the words into such rigid rules.

Okay, I'm out of time. On to the Aeneid!

(No quotes because, again, library book.) show less

I loved Homer's Odyssey, and so plunged into his earlier Iliad with great confidence. Relying on the same translator (Penguin Classics' E. V. Rieu) who had provided me with such beautifully alive prose in the story of Odysseus, I anticipated a similarly ambrosial experience. However, whilst I thoroughly enjoyed The Iliad and found much to recommend, it didn't excite in quite the same way.

For one thing, the poetry of the prose (the main thing I enjoyed in The Odyssey) was not as powerful in show more this story. This is not a slight on E. V. Rieu's translation (which in my edition has been extensively revised by his son D. C. H. Rieu and Peter Jones) but, as The Iliad is set primarily on the battlefield outside the walls of Ilium as opposed to Odysseus' later far-ranging adventures, there is less scope and opportunity for Homer to wax lyrical. There are still a number of great phrases (for example, the conflict is often lamented as war with all its tears", whilst imminent death is described as "black destiny") but they often lack the room to blossom.

This is largely because a large chunk of the book is a repetitive sequence of battles in which not much is gained or lost. Battle after battle on Troy's plains, with the soldiers killed in more or less the same ways and whenever a major name becomes endangered (Ajax, say, or Hector) one of the gods (Pallas Athene, usually, or Apollo) whisks them away in a suspiciously deus ex machina "thick mist". I never thought I'd tire of reading about Greek and Trojan heroes battling it out with spear and shield in hand, but the action is ceaseless and does get more than a tad boring, especially as the most charismatic warrior on either side - Achilles - is absent for the most part from the field. There's also a lot of Chatty Cathys in the rosters of the Greek and Trojan armies: in the heat of just about every battle two opposing heroes will break off to boast (at excruciating length) about their proud family lineages. Too often, I wished some non-descript lowborn soldier would steal in and kill one of these many blowhards whilst they are regaling their opposite number with how their great-grandmother was a sea nymph who was knocked up by Zeus or something. There's so many names referenced that even the likes of George R. R. Martin would blush.

It's also worth noting at this point that, in contrast to The Odyssey, which tells the full story of Odysseus' plight after the fall of Troy, The Iliad is not the whole story of the Trojan War myth as we know it today. The Iliad covers a brief period of that long war with the focus on Achilles, from his falling out with his leader Agamemnon over a slave girl and his subsequent refusal to fight, through the death of his friend Patroclus and his vengeful return to combat, to the death and mutilation of Hector and Priam's secret visit to a sorrowful and fatalistic Achilles. In The Iliad, we do not reach the stage where Achilles is killed when Paris shoots him in the heel, nor the stage where the Trojan Horse arrives with all that entails for the fate of Troy (in fact, if I recall correctly, the Horse only gets a passing mention in The Odyssey too). The reason the war started (Paris stealing away with Menelaus' wife Helen) is mentioned, but those three characters are bit-part players here; the focus is on Achilles and Hector. It is a compelling clash between these two charismatic heroes (even if Hector running away from Achilles four times around the city does have a touch of Monty Python about it) but prospective readers should be aware that it is not the complete story as one might know it today.

It may seem my review is unduly negative, but The Iliad has much to recommend. One advantage it does have over the otherwise superior Odyssey is its achingly rich humanity. There's a lot of cold-blooded murder in The Odyssey, and whilst The Iliad has a much higher body count, the deaths are felt far more intensely, despite their relentlessness. Each individual warrior is given by Homer his own little portrait or biography (almost like a little vignette introduced into the wider story) so when he falls, often in the same paragraph, he falls with great weight. E. V. Rieu has the right of it when, in his Introduction, he assures the reader that "they will be brought closer to tears by the death of a single horse in the Iliad than by the killing of the whole gang of Suitors" in The Odyssey (pg. xlviii). There's an enduring human element to The Iliad which borders on a surprisingly modern anti-war sentiment. Even the bloodthirsty Achilles questions the reasons for waging war on Troy and notes very early on that the Trojans have never done him any personal harm; he's there for glory and duty (pg. 8). On page 155, Achilles steps outside his usual self-involved, macho posturing to deliver an impressively eloquent address which throws into even sharper relief the senseless mass bloodletting taking place on the battlefields of Troy:

"... There were often times at home when my heart's one desire was to make some well-matched girl my lawful wife and enjoy the fortune my old father Peleus had made. For nothing, as I now see it, equals the value of life - not the wealth they say prosperous Ilium possessed in earlier days, when there was peace, before the coming of the Greeks, nor all the treasure piled up behind the stone threshold of Phoebus Apollo in rocky Delphi. Cattle and fat sheep can be lifted. Tripods and chestnut horses can be procured. But you cannot lift or procure a man's life, when once the breath has left his lips."

It is this rich humanity, igniting a tremendous sense of pathos in the reader, which makes The Iliad such a rewarding read, even if it doesn't quite compare to The Odyssey. The Iliad is the Hector to The Odyssey's Achilles; an inferior fighter when matched one-on-one, but one who would wipe the floor with just about anyone else on the field." show less

A most immersive reread, or Pope vs Cowper

It’s been years since I read The Iliad last. To make things more interesting and more immersive, I decided to read two translations at the same time, choosing Alexander Pope’s and William Cowper’s. Both are from the eighteenth century. I chuckled at Cowper’s introduction, where he expresses the utmost respect for Mr Pope, and then proceeds to say ”that he has sometimes altogether suppressed the sense of the author, and has not seldom show more intermingled his own ideas with it…”. Pope’s text is beautiful, it has a flow and a rhythm that I like. Some of his details and sometimes whole passages are very different in content compared to Cowper. Make of it what you will! Cowper reads easier, his text is more transparent. There is a joy of poetry. I will remember his “heart-freshening joy”. I can’t proclaim a winner, but my love for The Iliad has only grown. In any case, not reading Homer in Ancient Greek is a game of whispers, but whispers so powerful and persistent that you cannot help feeling overwhelmed.

Reviewing The Iliad sounds like a silly undertaking. I’ll just sit and think about things that struck me, and things that I had fun (yes, fun!) with.

🏺The descriptions of battles seem endless sometimes. Yet I saw no battle glory this time, there was nothing but blood, gore, and grief. There is a reason why everyone who is killed is named – Homer tells us who they were, what kind of persons they were, who their parents were, that they were loved. I was suddenly wondering if The Iliad was an anti-war poem. “...and in all hearts awakened joyful hope that there should end war’s long calamities.”

🏺Agamemnon is a coward, a bully, an idiot, a murderer. He is still one of the worst (the worst?) humans in Greek mythology. Down with Agamemnon!

🏺Down with meddling Athena as well, while we are on that topic.

🏺Paris: gaaah, don’t get me started. ”As smooth of face as fraudulent of mind!” This is Paris after his disastrous performance during the duel with Menelaus, as retold by yours truly:
Helen: You are a coward. I wish you were dead.
Paris: Well, I am a little embarrassed, but it was the gods’ fault anyway. Whatever. Let’s have sex already.

🏺Diomedes in action, as retold by yours truly:
Diomedes: I have the biggest cojones in the Iliad!!!
Humans: Ruuuuuun!
Gods: Eh!?
Aphrodite: Ouch, my hand, ouch. I’m out of here.
Diomedes: Apollo, I am gonna get you!
Apollo: Can’t you see I am a god? Leave me alone! Ares, you are supposed to be the god of war! Can you do something about this guy?
Ares: Sure.
Athena: Diomedes, go get Ares!
Diomedes: Raaaaah!
Ares: Diomedes, what sharp spear you have! Ouch, ouch. I’m out of here.

🏺Hector and Andromache have such wonderful domestic moments, I loved them both so much.

🏺There came a day when I wanted to tell people: “Stop discussing these utterly uninteresting and unimportant things! Don’t you know that Patroclus has just died? His horses are crying…” I didn’t, because for some reason people think that I am sensible, and I’d like to keep it that way. I was tempted, though.

🏺I waited almost a week before I could start Book XXII. It’s called “Death of Hector”, and I was being a coward about it. Is Hector going to die again? Are you sure we can’t do it differently this time?

🏺I forgot there was a chariot race. There should be more chariot races in books.

🏺I waited almost a week before I could start Book XXIV, because then The Iliad would be over. I have spent two months with it. What am I going to do now? show less