The Iliad

It was the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday a couple of weeks ago. 100 years since June 16th, 1904, the day on which James Joyce's Ulysses is set. So, inevitably, you couldn't move for discussions of Joyce's book, and the various difficulties people encounter when attempting to read it. Time Out London published a letter in their 30/06/04 issue from Robin Hope that suggested the following: "Take it straight through from beginning to end... Do not actually skip, but go as fast as you can to get most of the sense, like revising for an exam. You will miss many subtleties, but you will have a highly enjoyable ride."

Is this a new and original approach? I don't bleedin' think so. That's exactly how I reread Ulysses for this site nearly six years ago, following its appearance at the top of a poll of greatest novels of the twentieth century. Maybe I should make it a regular feature: revisiting classics of world literature, and reviewing them like they were airport novels. In which case, the second book in this very occasional series is Homer's epic poem of the Trojan War, The Iliad. It's currently back on the pop culture radar thanks to Wolfgang Petersen, whose new film Troy retells the old story. And, of course, Homer's other classic work The Odyssey was raided by James Joyce for the structure of Ulysses, so it all ties up.

For review purposes, my chosen copy of the work was a musty 1975 Penguin Classics edition, translated by E.V. Rieu back in 1950. (It's a translation that's still available, although it was subsequently revised and updated by his son D.C.H. Not a big family for first names, the Rieus.) The suggestion to read it "like revising for an exam" strikes a chord, because that's why I own this edition: part of The Iliad was the set text for my Latin O Level. Though for the life of me, I can't remember exactly which part. I don't believe I read all of it at the time, probably just the key section that was being examined. The death and post-mortem abuse of Hector rang vague bells when I revisited them, so I guess that was part of it, but I can't be any more certain than that. It obviously didn't make much of an impression on me back in 1978.

Ulysses was interesting to analyse in this way, because there's a case for claiming it's the foundation for 20th century literature: but The Iliad could be considered as the foundation for literature, period. And given that cinema has become our prime medium for storytelling these days, it's interesting to discover how many of its contemporary cliches were established over two and a half thousand years ago. Thrill! to action scenes with a very familiar structure - cutting between parallel sequences, establishing short-term obstacles that have to be overcome on the way to the big finish, the hero uttering the ancient Greek equivalent of a zinger as he wastes the bad guy. Laugh! at some of the lowest of low comedy, climaxing in the funeral games sequence with Aias falling face first into a big pile of cow shit. Fondle yourself! during a wholly gratuitous sex scene, between two gods no less. People complain that Hollywood is dumbing down more and more these days: maybe it's just getting back to the basics.

The credits on Troy claim that the film is merely "inspired" by The Iliad. In fact, anyone coming to the book after seeing the film will be surprised by how little an overlap there is: The Iliad only covers a small section of the Trojan War, a few days at most, while Troy spans its full duration. Homer only throws in passing references to the events before his story, assuming that his audience knows them already. At the same time, he also explicitly tells us about events that have yet to happen in the book, or won't happen until after its end: Achilles must get really fed up of being repeatedly told in the final chapters that he's going to die soon. (Not to mention that individual chapters are helpfully called things like The Death Of Hector.)

Foreshadowing and flashbacks aside, the story of The Iliad is divided into 24 chapters or books, and they neatly fall into a classical structure: three acts, eight books apiece. Act 1 barely touches on the ten years of the war that have already taken place: as we start, the Achaeans are laying seige to the city of Troy (aka Ilium, hence the name). Instead, we launch straight into the event that sparks off this story, a feud between Achaean King Agamemnon and his best fighter Achilles. Like the war itself, it's all about girls: Agamemnon is having priest's daughter Chryseis taken away from him for fear of incurring the wrath of the gods, so he's taken Achilles' bird Briseis as compensation. Complaining about losing his prize, Achilles quits fighting in protest, moaning to his goddess mum Thetis about it. Her visit to Zeus to discuss the matter shows that the gods are split across battle lines too.

After the briefest of introductions to the Trojans (in comparison to the couple of chapters lavished on the Achaeans, which gives a hint as to where Homer's sympathies lie), we get out onto the battlefield. Paris, the Trojan who started the war by running off with Helen, runs out to get in the first scrap, then runs back scared like the "pretty boy" he is (according to his more valiant brother, Hector). Eventually Paris agrees to take on Menelaus in single combat, to prevent a full-on battle. Helen and King Priam of Troy watch from afar, and in the process spend even more time introducing the Achaean characters, thanks to Priam asking "who is that?" about every single man on the field. (This war's been going on for ten years now. Shouldn't he know these people?) After some divine meddling with the result of the duel, the battle starts properly, with heads smashed all over the place, entrails pouring out on the ground and night descending on many eyes.

At the beginning of our self-defined second act, Agamemnon is feeling deserted by the gods as his soldiers are getting thrashed. It's suggested that he should apologise to Achilles, who has been offstage sulking since halfway through the first chapter. Odysseus is sent to meet Achilles and his squire/cousin/catamite/whatever Patroclus, and make him an offer. It includes not only the return of Briseis, but also "seven women, skilled in the fine crafts, Lesbians whom I chose for their exceptional beauty as my part of the spoils when he captured the city of Lesbos." (Now I'm sure I would have remembered reading that as a 14-year-old schoolboy.) Achilles tells Agamemnon he can stuff his lesbians up his arse. With their best fighter still out of commission, the Achaeans continue to get thrashed, climaxing in Hector breaking through their defences and setting one of their ships on fire. What's needed at this stage of the war is a futile gesture, as Peter Cook said once. It comes from Patroclus, who is so shocked at these events that he begs Achilles to let him go out and fight. Patroclus goes into battle and is promptly killed by Hector. End of act 2.

So from here on in it's an old fashioned revenge plot, because Achilles is PISSED OFF! at the loss of his squire/cousin/catamite/whatever. He asks his mum for new armour, since Patroclus was wearing Achilles' old armour when he died, and his corpse is currently being abused in an irritating fashion by the Trojans. Thetis subcontracts the job to master smith Hephaestus, and we get four pages of great detail on the design and manufacture of the armour. Achilles goes out on what the movie advertisements call a roaring rampage of revenge: it reaches a wild climax as he charges into the middle of the Xanthus river, carving up people as he goes, and the river itself gets into a rage and attacks him too. (Now that's cinema. But one of the restrictions that Troy imposed on itself was the removal of all references to the gods and the supernatural, so we never got to see that in the film. Mind you, given the shitty sea effects in Petersen's The Perfect Storm, that's probably a good thing.) The big finish inevitably comes when Achilles and Hector finally sort this all out one on one.

It would, of course, be silly and wrong to consider yourself an expert on Homer's style purely on the basis of a skim read of a single book. So here goes. There are certain key tropes you can quickly identify, which could be easily knocked up into a Parodying Homer For Dummies guide, should a market exist for that sort of thing. First up, there's the huge amount of overwriting he does. The text is smothered with adjectives about how brilliant and lovely and well-made everything is, and how handsome and brave and muscly everyone is. The four pages dedicated to the fantabulousness of Achilles' new armour is where this approach gets tiring, coming as it does at a point in the narrative when we're ready to see some serious buttkicking. Diane Kruger got some flack for her portrayal of Helen of Troy in the recent film, critics snottily complaining that she wasn't remotely beautiful enough to launch a thousand ships or cause a ten-year war. Leaving aside that most movie critics could barely launch a small rubber dinghy, isn't it probably the case that Helen is just a woman that two guys are fighting over, and everything else is Homer padding out his poem with extra adjectives, as per usual?

Then there are certain narrative quirks that repeat themselves over and over again. The most annoying one for me is this: frequently, a messenger is sent to pass on instructions to someone. In an early example, Zeus sends an evil dream to Agamemnon, to persuade him (wrongly) that the gods are on his side and he should go on the attack. "Repeat to him exactly what I say", the dream is told, and it does: the entire text of Zeus' instructions is repeated word for word to Agamemnon. On awakening from the dream, Agamemnon convenes his council and tells them what he was told in the dream - again, word for word, identically. This happens every time a message is passed on. It makes you wonder if Homer had access to some sort of early cut and paste function, and if he was being paid by the word. (However, if they'd set that section for my O Level text, with one long passage repeated verbatim three times in a single chapter, I'm sure I would have considered Homer a literary genius purely on that score.)

Zeus' dream-fiddling is an example of how the action on earth is not only mirrored by the acts of the gods, but also controlled by them. In his introduction, Rieu insists that the divine interludes of The Iliad are where Homer shows his gift for comedy. Presumably he means comedy in the Shakespearean sense, i.e. the Not Funny sense. One of Rieu's quoted examples of Homeric comedy is the description of Hephaestus wobbling about on his feet because he's lame. Nurse! My sides! As I mentioned earlier, the role of the gods in controlling the actions of men has been completely removed from the film of Troy: and that's probably a good thing for a modern audience, to whom the device feels more like lazy writing than anything else. One of your heroes in a tight spot? Have some god or other hide him in a cloud of smoke and sneak him away. The same applies to Hector's virtual indestructability for most of the book: his armour deflects all comers, like when people used to pretend to shoot you as a kid and you made the bullets bounce off with a ping!

But the thing that surprised me most was the violence, which I certainly don't recall from my teenage (partial) reading of the book. At the time I was doing O Levels, James Herbert was just starting to emerge as Britain's leading hack horror writer, and copies of The Rats and The Fog were being passed around the classroom on a fairly frequent basis. The couple of copies doing the rounds tended to fall open naturally at the pages that were outrageously violent or obscene - The Fog's description of a crazed priest as he "lifted his cassock, took out his penis, and urinated over the congregation" has stayed with me to this day. To be fair, we were a fairly literate bunch, and it's pleasing to recall that Edgar Allen Poe's Tales Of Mystery And Imagination was being passed around the class in exactly the same way. But if only we'd realised that one of our set texts could easily have outdone both Poe and Herbert combined in terms of splatter. "His spear, guided by Athene, struck Pandarus on the nose beside the eye and passed through his white teeth. His tongue was cut off at the root by the relentless bronze, and the point came out at the base of his chin." There are dozens of pages full of that sort of thing. And we missed it!

For all my carping, I really enjoyed re-reading The Iliad - but primarily because of the undeniable force of its narrative, rather than for its use of language. Of course, I'm reading it through the filter of a translation that's over half a century old, and I suspect Rieu wasn't the best choice to recreate the poetry of the original. The language of his translation reduces everything to literary tofu: bland in its own right, flavoured by everything you come into contact with during the act of reading. There were two separate occasions where external events changed the way I was perceiving The Iliad. The first one was, inevitably, seeing Troy halfway through reading it. As you'd expect, the pictures in your head start looking like Brad Pitt and Eric Bana afterwards. But it's interesting that as the film reduces the characters to their basics (as huge films tend to), you come to appreciate just how subtle Homer's character writing is: showing you, rather than telling you, who these people are from what they do.

And the other, more shameful event was seeing Round The Horne... Revisited on stage when I was two-thirds of the way through the book. Before that, I was only slightly taken aback whenever I encountered a reference to the goddess Here, wife of Zeus, taking a second or two to realise it was a name pronounced "heh-reh". But after seeing a tribute to the comic genius of Kenneth Williams, I couldn't stop mentally hearing the name as the exclamation "'ere!" in his nasal tones. As a result, my favourite example of Homeric comedy is when Zeus realises that his wife has distracted him from his battle duties with that gratuitous shag I mentioned earlier, and he reprimands her with the line "Here, you are incorrigible!" Hey, if you think that's shallow, you should see the pictures that came into my head whenever I read about Agamemnon returning to Argos. I can't help it. Being a monkey, and all.

Links

Samuel Butler (classic version, well regarded) and Ian Johnston (more modern, keeping the blank verse format) are just two of the people whose translations of The Iliad are freely available on the web, so you don't even have to buy it in a shop. Other versions are obviously available, feel free to search for them.

The Multimedia Iliad is a messy combination of text and images, with lots of hyperlinks and a whole stash of Photoshop montages that date it badly as an attempt to drag Homer's tale into the 1990s.

The Iliad Game is a more successful attempt at bringing some interactivity to the story, testing your knowledge with a series of multiple choice questions.

Deaths In The Iliad does exactly what it says on the tin - a full list of the body count, almost inna Joe Bob Briggs stylee. ("Helmets roll... spear fu...")

Troy has an official site, which will probably be around at least until the DVD release, if not beyond. But if you haven't time to sit through the whole movie, you can always try Troy in 15 minutes, from the Occupation:Girl blog of Cleolinda Jones. Movie spoilers by the ton, but I guarantee you won't care. It's particularly good on the whole squire/cousin/catamite/whatever issue.

James Herbert is still going after all this time, incredibly. Not to be confused with Garth Marenghi, of course.

July 1st 2004