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By Lisa Moore LaRoe
The Crips and the Bloods, the Sharks and the Jets—modern gangs, real or fictional—pale beside the ancient Greeks when it comes to outrage over being “dissed.”
That seems a fair conclusion after reading Homer’s Iliad. This epic tale of Bronze Age Greece recounts the last weeks of the legendary ten-year war between the Greeks (or Achaeans) and Trojans. As the story begins, Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and leader of the Greeks, dishonors his greatest warrior by taking Achilles’ hard-won war prize, the lovely girl Briseis. Enraged, Achilles spits a threat: “You will tear your heart out, desperate, raging that you disgraced the best of the Achaeans!” He then withdraws from the war. Without their best warrior and his troops, countless Greeks suffer grisly deaths on the battlefield. Wounded pride keeps Achilles away until his beloved companion, Patroklos, is killed by Prince Hector of Troy. Inconsolable, Achilles reenters the war, vowing revenge. “I’ve lost the will to live,” he says, “unless, before all else, Hector’s battered down by my spear and gasps away his life, the blood-price for Patroklos.”
Honor, pride, grief, revenge, desire for glory—these universal themes still resonate, playing themselves out among gangs, among ordinary individuals, and among nations the world over.
Is this reason enough to care about the Iliad? It is, after all, a poem of dubious authorship (no one knows if Homer really existed), about a war that may or may not have happened around 1250 B.C., and written down some 500 years later at the end of Greece’s so-called dark age, about which little is known. So what can it teach us?
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It can teach that, though weapons have changed, war is still a graphic, senseless horror. Of one man’s death, Homer writes, a spear “split the archer’s nose between the eyes, it cracked his glistening teeth, the tough bronze cut off his tongue at the roots, smashed his jaw and the point came ripping out beneath his chin...and his life and power slipped away on the wind.” |
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It can warn of the bitter regret after yielding to temptation. The Trojan War was launched to avenge a cuckolded Greek king whose lovely wife, Helen, followed seductive Prince Paris of Troy to his homeland. Helen laments that she wishes she had died rather than “forsaking my marriage bed, my kinsmen and my child,” and causing the deaths of thousands. |
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It can illustrate the folly of overarching pride, the redemption of self-sacrifice, the maddening sense that fickle gods toy with mortal fate. |
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And it can illuminate truths about ancient Mycenae in modern-day Greece, and windy Troy in modern-day Turkey, the key cities of the Iliad. Archaeology has proven that Mycenae, a wealthy and powerful trading center of Bronze Age Greece, was indeed “rich in gold” as Homer described. And archaeologists at Troy recently discovered a wide ditch encircling the city, likely used as defense against the onrushing chariots of attackers. There are also piles of sling pellets, scorch marks, and half-buried skeletons that may indicate a lost war. |
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“Homer has created the most complete, exhilarating, and sensuous world that you could inhabit,” says noted translator Robert Fagles (whose work is used above). “The cunning and brutality are not all that far from the world we know. Its relevance is inescapable.”
Is it? Or is the Iliad merely a moving tale from a time long past, of unproven authenticity and outdated meaning? The fact that we’re still digging, and still asking, is proof of its continuing hold on modern hearts and minds.
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