Echoes of the Heroic Age
Ancient Greece Part I
(Excerpted from the December 1999 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC)

By Caroline Alexander

Wrath—sing, goddess, the accursed wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus, / which placed countless sufferings on the Achaeans, / and hurled so many strong souls of heroes to Hades, but made their bodies the spoil of dogs / and all birds; and so the plan of Zeus was accomplished. . . .

For close to 3,000 years these lines have, like a drumroll, announced the beginning of Homer’s Iliad, one of the most enduring and influential works of art ever created. The epic poem’s story line is deceptively simple, being the events of a roughly two-week period in the last year of the famous Trojan War, fought between Greeks and Trojans over Helen, the runaway wife of the king of Sparta. The explosive confrontation in the opening verses between Achilles, the greatest of all the Greek warriors gathered at Troy, and his powerful if often inept commander, Agamemnon, sets the epic in motion. In a blaze of anger Achilles withdraws from the war, with disastrous results for his Greek comrades. Only when his beloved companion Patroklos is killed by the Trojan prince Hector does Achilles return to battle, smoldering for revenge. This he achieves with the brutal death of Hector, and the poem ends with the funeral of the courageous and fated Trojan.

On another level, however, the Iliad explores the deepest concerns of mankind—human limitations, the relationships of individuals to their gods and their community, honor, war, mortality, and death. Its meaning is timeless. Some years ago, watching television reports from Somalia, I observed the terrible fate of a U.S. Army Ranger dragged through the streets of Mogadishu and thought how little the world had changed. No Iliad reader can forget Achilles’ dragging the body of Hector in triumph behind his war chariot, the dead man’s “dark hair falling about him.” The Iliad gave the Greeks of classical times—as well as us today—the pantheon of Olympian gods and goddesses. As the oldest surviving European poem, the Iliad was the model for such later epic poets as Virgil, Dante, Milton, and, more recently, Derek Walcott, the West Indian poet who won the Nobel Prize in 1992. Echoes of Homer abound in popular culture—Patrick O’Brian’s best-selling novel The Wine-Dark Sea takes its title from a phrase in the Iliad. For these reasons, as much as for its compelling action and vivid characters, the Iliad remains, as we head into the 21st century, at the bedrock of human experience.

I first encountered the Iliad at the age of 14 and have remained in its thrall ever since. But my perceptions have changed with time and age. Once the Iliad’s clash of warriors struck me as glamorous and heroic. Now I read with an eye for the tragedy of lost youth. Today I would set it in an inner city, with Greeks and Trojans as two opposing gangs who governed by private codes of desperate glory, lay waste to each other’s cities and young manhood.

For Greeks of antiquity the Iliad related events from their own past; the Trojan War was taken as historical fact. Some believed they were descendants of Homer’s heroes; Alexander the Great, who slept with a copy of the Iliad, traced his maternal ancestry back to Achilles. But the reality is far more complex. The Iliad is not a “true story,” nor does it offer a realistic picture of life in Greece’s late Bronze Age—about 1600 to 1100 B.C.

Indeed, the Iliad was not composed in this period, known to historians as the Mycenaean Age, but is the end result of an inspired oral poetic tradition spanning 500 years. Between the 13th century B.C., the height of the Mycenaean Age, and the age of Homer in the eighth century B.C., lie five centuries during which generations of unknown professional poets passed down the epic-in-the-making. Each added something of his own genius, and the taste of the successive audiences who kept the Iliad in demand must have been of the same high standard as the skill of the bards themselves. The Greeks credited the final composition of this masterpiece to a poet they called theios Homeros—“divine Homer”—and we, as they, know nothing more about this person than his supposed name.

Most archaeologists and scholars study the late Bronze Age for its own sake, not because they seek to shed light on the Iliad. “I don’t care about Homer!” an archaeologist in Greece said to me, exasperated by the popular view that she was searching for the Trojan War. Nonetheless, sophisticated modern studies of this period continue to yield unmistakably Homeric details, proving that the Iliad, though not a Bronze Age work, has preserved shards of Bronze Age history. Like the archaeologist, I was not in search of the Trojan War, but I was deeply interested in all those shards of history that give the Iliad its rich texture: The land around Troy itself in northwestern Turkey, the giant walls of Mycenae and its fabled gold, warships of the Bronze Age, weaponry and armaments, scraps of Mycenaean, the language of the Greek Bronze Age—these relics were my quest.

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The author unveils her “relics”—tantalizing archaelogical finds that suggest the Iliad is more than myth—in the December 1999 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC.

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