Review: The Iliad by Homer (translated by Emily Wilson)

My first encounter with The Iliad (apart from the movie Troy, which is actually a pretty solid take on the story’s major themes) was at uni when a lecturer described Homer’s epic poem and its sister The Odyssey as tales of war and peace respectively. The Iliad is the battlefield, about honour and glory, about dying. The Odyssey is the journey home, the household, about living. There’s something to that description, but the stories are also two sides of the same coin, and that coin is a society that saw men as cannon fodder and women as slaves. There’s no way around it; encoded in these two poems, so often treated as foundational to Western “civilisation”, is a profoundly unfree, patriarchal way of structuring the world. Recent books by David Graeber and David Wengrow and Angela Saini have considered how women as property is core to the emergence of modern nation states, domination and colonialism; Homer’s poems provide a clear depiction of what that looks like, clear enough that maybe we can see how it persists today.

Just consider the lot of the women of The Iliad. The Trojan War starts of course with the theft of a Greek woman, Helen, by the Trojan prince Paris. “No man ought to hurry off back home before he shares a Trojan woman’s bed to pay for Helen’s sufferings and struggles”, says Nestor, the dad with too many opinions of The Iliad, in case there was any doubt about what the Greek soldier’s are there to do. “We Greeks are good at welcoming our in-laws,” is the chilling threat of Idomeneus to the Trojan soldier betrothed to one of Troy’s princesses, Cassandra. Hector tells wife Andromache that when he’s killed (he’s a bit of a pessimist) that people will say:

‘that woman used to be the wife of Hector, who was the greatest champion of Troy during the Trojan War’. When they say that, your pain and grief will feel brand-new again, because you will not have a man like me to save you from the day of your enslavement.

Romantic. The Iliad itself begins, nine years into the war and near its end, with a dispute over women as well, with the Greek king Agamemnon forced to return the daughter of a priest, Chryseis, lest he offend the god Apollo. Agamemnon initially refuses, telling everyone:

she shall grow old a very long way from her fatherland … in my house, and work the loom, and share my bed.

When he eventually relents, he decides he must have someone else’s woman, and makes the mistake of taking the hero Achilles’, Briseis. This is a mortal wound to Achilles’ honour, and he steps out of the fighting in protest, runs crying to his mother, the sea goddess Thetis, who reminds the king of the gods Zeus that he owes her a favour (whenever you get lost in which god is on whose side, remember Thetis’ deal). That favour is the honour of Achilles’, and Zeus sets in motion a rather elaborate plot to restore it. Perversely, that means for much of the poem the Trojans succeed on the battlefield and slaughter hundreds of Greeks.

Sing, Goddess, sing, of the wrath of Achilles, is how every version of The Iliad begins (here rendered as “cataclysmic wrath”), and for over 1,000 lines and 24 books the poem never wavers from this theme, even if, for three-quarters of the poem, the hero sits out of the war (The Odyssey takes similar narrative risks). The two armies push back and forth across the battlefield, various gods intervening at their whim, until it all builds to a terrifically bloodthirsty climax. Narratively, The Iliad is hard to beat; Homer (whoever he was) tells his story with the precision of an arrow fired with the blessing of the gods.

There’s also something rather moving about the human characters’ attempts to wrestle with their mortal fates, the one thing that distinguishes them from the gods (“this man is mortal!” says an outraged Athena when Zeus is tempted to aide Hector, “He has long since been doomed by fate to die”). Achilles is offered a choice: a full life back home, but one that noone remembers him for; or dying in battle and receiving eternal glory (guess which one he picks). “If we could escape this war and then be free from age or death forever, I would never choose to fight,” says Trojan hero Sarpedon, “But in fact, a million ways to die stand all around us”. Many, many people die in The Iliad, and it’s remarkable that nearly all of them receive a unique send off from Homer, if only in a the gory detail of how they are killed before the “darkness” takes them. Here’s the death of Mydon:

His head and shoulders smashed into the ground.

It happened to be very sandy there,

so that the corpse stayed upright, upside down,

until his horses kicked him to the ground.

At the pointy end of the poem, the epic’s eye-for-an-eye morality hones in on Patroclus, Achilles’ beloved, and the Trojan prince Hector, Achilles’ equal. Now the poem becomes a startling portrayal of grief and death’s impact on the mortals who are left behind. For all the bone-crunching and sword-swinging that have come before, The Iliad’s most powerful moments are its quietest.

Speaking of Patroclus and Achilles, everyone from Plato to Oscar Wilde has acknowledged the romantic and sexual nature of their relationship, but The Iliad itself is fairly chaste, although Emily Wilson brings a little more fervour than Caroline Alexander’s 2015 translation. “I loved him like my head, my life, myself,” Achilles says, a line worthy of Lana Del Rey. Certainly there are other beloved companions in The Iliad, but none described as Patroclus’ and Achilles’. Gay scholar David Halperin has amusingly posed that sex between men could not be described as queer in Ancient Greece because everyone was doing it; but perhaps there was something queer about these two.

The other endlessly fascinating aspect of The Iliad is its imagery, here richly rendered by Wilson. For all the blood and gore of the fighting, Homer’s metaphors are wonderfully pastoral, painting in everyday Hellenic life beyond the war. Take for instance one of the numerous descriptions of the atmosphere of the battlefield:

As wind blows chaff across the winnowing floors,

while men are labouring in the sacred space,

when blonde Demeter separates the grain

from husks through driving wind – the heaped remains

grow white – so then the Greeks turned white with dust,

kicked to the sky of bronze by horses’ hooves

and sprinkling down all around them

amid the armies as the fight was joined.

For all its archaic (but perhaps not that archaic) politics and mythological mayhem, The Iliad cuts through 3,000 years like the swords of its heroes.

Gay rating: 3/5 for the intimacy between Patroclus and Achilles, and the antics of the gods.