Many first-time readers feel perplexed or even cheated when, by the end of the Iliad, they have not come across the story of the Trojan Horse. I know I did when I first encountered it as a junior high school student. I hadn’t missed anything: it’s just not there. In fact, the Iliad covers a surprisingly short period near the beginning of the tenth year of the war — a matter of a few days — and has another matter as its subject: it is, as its opening line states, about the wrath of Achilles.
It covers the events from the time when the hero Achilles became offended with Agamemnon and withdrew from the fighting to his re-entry at the death of Patroclus, his battle with Hector, and the final encounter with Priam. You can find the Trojan Horse story told obliquely (in recollected form) in the Odyssey or (much later) in the Aeneid of Vergil. The Iliad was only one of a larger collection of epic poems (of varying quality) that covered the narrative of the events at Troy rather thoroughly, and we have reason to believe that some of these other poems talked of the fall of Troy more directly. As it is, however, the Iliad is a very compact and self-contained story: it is, first and foremost, a character study — rooted in action narrative, but a character study nonetheless — of Achilles, the greatest of the Greek heroes.
For all that, and despite its enormous appeal through the ages, modern readers — and especially sophisticated and critical ones — often have a hard time dealing with Achilles. And indeed, from our point of view it seems hard to find him sympathetic. To many he seems peevish, self-absorbed, and arrogant. His virtues, by the heroic ethic, are the great faults of Judeo-Christian culture — pride being chief of them — and even of pagan Roman culture.
When viewed from within the context of his own culture, though, Achilles is a very different character, and we need to suspend our own attitudes at least for a while as we read the Iliad if we are to see its point. In Bronze-Age terms, and indeed for much of Greek culture, Achilles really was what he claimed to be — “the best of the Achaeans”. His attitudes were not unworthy of him, but just and proper, and (except his mistreatment of Hector’s body) his actions were justifiable — even restrained.
Several things justify Achilles’ claim to be “the best of the Achaeans”. First, and most obviously important, his prowess in battle is indisputable. None of the other heroes is his equal: of this Homer (who is remarkably even-handed) leaves no doubt. When he withdraws from the fighting due to an affront to his honor, the entire tide of battle turns against the Argives, and the venture falters. His personal absence is sufficient to prevent the Greeks from making any headway, and they are beaten back to their ships.
Second, however, is the fact that, alone among the Argives, Achilles is a self-sufficient hero. It is almost a given in early Greek literature that a hero requires a bard — that is, a poet or singer of his deeds — to endow him with the full heroic status. The theme of the poet as creator of immortality emerges everywhere, from heroic writings like this to the victory odes of Pindar, who is able to boast that without his songs, the hero or victor would be unable to achieve lasting fame — what Homer calls kleos aphthiton.
Kleos is what motivates the hero. It is something more than fame: it is the hero’s chief bid for immortality. Especially from a Christian perspective, it is hard to appreciate the fact that the pale afterlife — even that accorded to heroes in the Elysian fields — was subordinate to the enduring memory of those who were still alive. Such kleos could be bestowed only by those whose job it was to remember — the poets (a role that Homer and his tribe were unlikely to trivialize). In accurate memory was truth, and in a preliterate society, accurate oral memory was essential. Forgetfulness and falsehood are virtually synonymous — so much so that the Greek word for “forgetting” is lethe — you may recall that the river of forgetfulness in the underworld was in fact called the Lethe. But the Greek word for “truth” was aletheia perhaps translated best as “unforgetting”. Rooted in the early Greek consciousness was an idea — a very important idea — that recollection was a central point of knowledge and understanding of truth. It was no accident that the Muses who inspired the several arts were portrayed as being the daughters of Mnemosyne, whose name means “Memory”. The activities of the arts were seen and primarily valued as access to truth. The integral linkage of memory and truth is a theme that will soon be extended, twisted, and inverted in the progress of Greek consciousness. But in Homer’s day, the equation was fairly straightforward — and the truth was the peculiar prerogative of the poet, inasmuch as poetry was a form specifically optimized for remembering. (If you doubt this, consider the fact that you can probably recite a number of nursery rhymes or popular songs by memory, but probably cannot recite an equivalent body of prose.)
In any case, Achilles, being the semi-divine son of Peleus (a human) and Thetis (an immortal sea-nymph) had established the first part of his greatness in an unparallelled choice. He was told by a prophet early in his life that he had a twofold fate, and that it was up to him to choose between them. On the one hand, he could stay at home, since he was not obligated (as were many others) to go to the Trojan War; but in this case he would grow old and die uncelebrated. On the other hand, he could go to Troy, where he would surely die, but would achieve, through a brief and glorious career, the kleos that was the hero’s portion.
The choice he made was, of course, the heroic one to make, and virtually assured him of greatness and honor; but, having made this choice, that honor was all he had to live for. When Agamemnon insulted him by taking away Briseis, it was not his loss of her affection that wounded Achilles, but the affront to his honor that it represented — an honor in which all his identity was invested. To be insulted in such a way was to have his entire identity stolen or subverted.
Most of the rest of the Greeks, of course, were eager to achieve their share of kleos, but they were also eager for their nostos — a peculiar Greek word that means “homecoming” in the most complex sense. It is the root of our “nostalgia” — the painful longing for a homecoming, a return to a pristine original condition. For Achilles to have accepted his nostos would have obliterated his memory and so eradicated his identity. His choice was between kleos and nostos. (We will later see how, in the Odyssey, the poet weaves these antithetical strands together to make a single hero’s greatest kleos derive from his nostos — but this was not to be Achilles’ lot.)
In addition to his clear-eyed and self-sacrificing choice, however, Achilles had another attribute that was virtually unique among epic heroes (though, once again, Odysseus was able to claim it in due course): namely, that he was not just a mighty warrior, but a poet also. The embassy sent from Agamemnon in Bk. IX finds him sitting in his tent, playing the lyre and celebrating heroic deeds in song. In this, then, Achilles had achieved a kind of cosmic self-sufficiency according to the standards of the heroic culture, unlike any other — not only was he chief among the combatants of Troy, but he was also able to create the record of heroic deeds, thus establishing his own kleos unaided. In this regard, he became little short of a god.
Nevertheless, he was a human, and the genius of Homer’s story in the Iliad is that it is an exploration of his humanity — how, in the course of pursuing his wrath and vengeance, he lost his humanity, and how, through an act of mercy, he regained it. Driven to the edge of insanity by the death of his friend Patroclus, Achilles entered on a course of personal revenge that separated him from the human community. Watch the vocabulary as the death of Hector approaches in Bk. XXII — increasingly Achilles is described in extreme terms, either as a god or as an animal, but seldom if ever as a human. In his treatment of Hector’s corpse, the transformation becomes complete: as he drags the body behind his chariot, he both debases his own humanity and usurps the prerogative of the gods, to whom dead heroes properly belong. He exceeds all reasonable bounds of human behavior and loses touch with the common threads that bind all men together, even adversaries in war. In the moving final sequences with Priam, however, he recalls who he is, and what he is — significantly, by recalling his own mortal father. In the end, it is not through his kleos but through his self-understanding as a mortal that Achilles achieves wholeness and a proper balance as a human being.
The issue of balance — due proportion — is a complex one in Greek culture, both in the moral arena and in all aspects of life. The Greeks were concerned to determine where the boundaries lay in these matters, and much of epic and drama explore them with relentless vigor.
Not only were they concerned to know what a person ought to do; they were also concerned to know why he did so. It is intriguing to trace the motivation of characters throughout the Iliad. More often than not, it is ambiguous: frequently the characters will be motivated from within and from without. That is, their normal human response to the situation would, in most modern reckonings of such things, be sufficient; but Homer will provide them with divine promptings in addition. One can see this as an external personification of the internal motives, or as a second line of motivation running alongside the first. In the first book, note how Achilles’ anger at Agamemnon’s mistreatment boils up inside him, but he restrains himself. At the same time, we are told that gods are going in all directions contriving the outcome — both inciting and restraining Achilles.
This matter of personal motivation can be traced far beyond the Homeric poems through the rest of Greek literature — is it from the inside or from the outside? Are these heroes victims of passions and promptings genuinely beyond their control, or are they primarily responsible moral agents? This theme emerges in full force in the dramatic authors — in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, and the Bacchae, to pick only a few examples; in the theory of rhetoric (can persuasion force a person to act against his nature?); and in the moral philosophy of Plato and Aristotle — who arrive at different, but interesting, answers. To some extent the truth is to be found in the balance.
We will have occasion to trace the notion of the mean, or the middle way — sometimes represented as a balance of contraries — as an ongoing theme in Greek literature. The Greeks looked at the world through binary glasses, as it were: man was both a solitary creature and a political or social one; he was capable of grotesque excesses and rigorous temperance; he was divine and he was animal. It was in testing the tension between some of these apparent opposites that their culture became what it was. It receives what is perhaps its most objective articulation in the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, in which the author suggests that proper behavior is usually the mean between two forms of excess or extreme.