Rare are the cases in which the combatants are tended to by literature's first field surgeons, Machaon and Podalirius, or on one occasion by Patroclus himself, who turns medic to help his comrade Eurypylus. ), The onward rush of these almost joyful descriptions of slaughter in The Iliad might cause some modern readers to question the values of the poem, or at least to measure out the long distance between us and the society from which it sprang. In her 2007 book Soldier's Heart, Elizabeth Samet, literature professor at the institution, recalls a visit by the late translator-poet Robert Fagles, who recited, in Greek, the first lines of the epic. That's how you look, Patroclus, streaming live tears . Then far off in the land of Argos you must live. The Iliad is keenly aware of its role as the keeper of memory, and credibility is central to its storytelling. Why moan about it so? Hector ­sorrowfully refuses: honour dictates he must lead his men in the field, though he has ­little doubt of the defeat that is coming. The Iliad recounts a brief but crucial period of the Trojan War, a conflict between the city of Troy and its allies against a confederation of Greek cities, collectively known as the Achaeans. In book 21, he downs the Trojan prince Lycaon. The life-and-death struggles of the human characters seem weightier and more agonisingly present when set against the meaningless existence of the gods. . The Iliad tells us that we’ll always have to make this decision. As Hector's soul departs his dying body, it does so "wailing his fate / leaving his manhood far behind, / his young and supple strength". With his pronouncement made, Zeus flies to Mount Ida, near Troy, to conduct the affairs of the war by himself. In these ways the Iliad directed not only the course of the arts, but of social history. It tells us that war is both the bringer of renown to its young fighters and the destroyer of their lives. ", But it's easy to see why Lawrence struggled to admire The Iliad's descriptions of battle. What Homer’s Iliad can tell us about worship and war, Why The Handmaid’s Tale is so relevant today, which account for over half of the Iliad’s 15,693 lines of verse. The Trojan war – a more or less mythical event – was a 10-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greeks, its purpose to restore Helen to her Spartan husband, Menelaus. This has been corrected. It is a portrait of the warrior at home, war forgotten as he watches his son play and talks with his wife. Achilles captures 12 Trojan men whom he will sacrifice on Patroclus's pyre – again, even by the standards of The Iliad, a horrific act; today, we would call it a war crime. Now, the heroic story from the vanished Mycenaean world went viral. fetching water at some spring, Messeis or Hyperia. Take its regularly used epithets: these familiar phrases ("wine-dark" sea, "rosy-fingered" dawn) have often been seen as simply as the more or less meaningless metrical building blocks that would have helped a bard to improvise lines of verse on the hoof. Introduction to the Poem. What does this section of the Iliad teach us about how to reconcile differences so vast both sides willingly slaughter the other? The Iliad, in contrast, is a linear tale, circumscribed in geography and time-frame: we are placed variously in the Greeks' camp, the plain outside Troy, the city itself, and in the gods' home on Mount Olympus. Made some of the hurt went away [sic]. Not just a monumental scene in a great, enduring story, but a seminal statement about humanity – made palpable thanks to the dogged realism of the epic’s long tradition. 1. . Achilles also gets hard, cold, merciless. When Patroclus is killed by the Trojans' best fighter, Hector, Achilles whirls into a frenzy of redoubled, re­directed rage. Perhaps what appealed to the student was the scene in which the commander arms for ­battle, around 30 lines of minutely ­described military hardware down to the bronze-tipped spears that flash in the sunlight's glare: lovingly summoned-up boys' toys. Now Priam’s mission is to beg for the body of his beloved son, Hector, whom Achilles killed to avenge the death of his own companion, Patroclus. Every time you lost a friend it seemed like a part of you was gone. That glory is inextricably allied to wrenching loss. The Iliad is an extremely compressed narrative. He prays that the boy might one day be prince of the Trojans, their best fighter, better even than his father, "a joy to his mother's heart". Early in the Iliad, Homer’s epic poem about the legendary Trojan War, there occurs a famous digression known as the catalogue of ships, which names all the Greek leaders and contingents who came to fight at Troy. It is futile to look to Homer for a condemnation of war: "People make war, they put up with it, they curse it, they even praise it in songs and verses, but it is not to be judged any more than destiny is. We are still turning to The Iliad, amid our own wars: the Australian writer David Malouf's recent novel, Ransom (Chatto & Windus), is about the encounter between Priam and Achilles in The Iliad's final book, while Caroline Alexander's new study of the poem, The War that Killed Achilles (Faber), sees it as a meditation on the catastrophic effects of conflict. It covers about 40 days during the 10th year of the war. When the warriors die, there are no flights of angels to sing them to their rest, only the prospect of a ghastly, ghostly, absence of meaning. Today's students at West Point, the elite US military academy where one may minor in "terrorism studies", study The Iliad as part of their literature course. The war was started by a fight between the gods. This was a common motif in ancient Greek and Roman... See full answer below. At the end of the poem Hector's frail and eldery father, Priam, enters the Greeks' camp and persuades Achilles to restore to him his son's body. The epic tradition originated in mainland Greece, most likely in the northern region of Thessaly, but following the collapse of the Bronze Age civilisations, migrated with poets travelling eastwards to the island of Lesbos and the northwest coast of Anatolia (now Turkey), including the region around Troy: this we know from linguistic studies, archaeology, and ancient accounts. In his book Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, American psychiatrist Jonathan Shay finds parallels between the pathologies of ­Vietnam veterans whom he has treated, and Homer's Achilles. During his outburst to Agamemnon in book one, Achilles says: The Trojans never did me damage, not in the least, they never stole my cattle or my horses, never, in Phthia where the rich soil breeds strong men. Achilles is not simply an unfeeling "thing", reduced by the unspeakable power of force. He slakes his bloodthirst by felling men, by filling the waters of the Scamander so full of bodies and gore that the river deity himself rises up from the depths in anger. He is tinged with the supernatural: his mother is a goddess; his armour is forged by the god Hephaestus; even his chariot-team consists of immortal horses, the gift of Zeus. The main focus of the Iliad is the anger of the Greek warrior Achilles and the revenge he seeks against those who wronged him, especially Agamemnon, and then Hector. . It seems glorified but on the other hand Homer shows the brutality and injustice of it. The poem's gods, who urge on the fighters and intervene to help their favoured heroes, are flimsy and flippant compared to their mortal counterparts, a source of troubling light relief rather than profundity. The regiment was initially reluctant to host a female journalist, but she was later told by the driver of the personnel carrier that became her home "Don't worry, I will never, ever leave you. In book 16 – shortly before he agrees to let Patroclus enter the fighting – Achilles finds him weeping: Like a girl, a baby running after her mother. . Achilles sings stories of heroes' deeds in battle, and Helen embroiders scenes of fighting on an elaborate textile. It is this passage that helps Samet find in Hector the blueprint of the "citizen soldier", a warrior fighting to save his home and his values – a neat Americanisation. The famous Homeric similes, for example, evoke the familiar, verifiable, natural world. That wrath is provoked by his ­commander-in-chief Agamemnon's misguided decision to seize Briseis, Achilles's captive woman, as compensation for his own bit of living loot, Chriseis, whom he has been obliged to restore to her Trojan father. For the characters of the poem, war is something that is connected with the other parts of life, something that every man must undergo as he defends his city. It tells us about the age-old dilemmas of fighters compelled to serve under incompetent superiors. The truth may be harder to take. The Iliad The Iliad: War or more than War The story of The Iliad is a story depicting 50 latter days at the Trojan War. Do the same now. At the same time, people established cults to the Iliad’s human heroes, adopting them as their heroic ancestors. It tells us about post-conflict destruction and chaos; about war as the great reverser of fortunes. . The ­Odyssey fills in some blanks, not least the story of the wooden horse. How could they? ", Shay records one of his patients recalling his own fury: "I really loved fucking killing, couldn't get enough. • This article was amended on 2 February 2010. This page is designed to be a jumping-off point to help you overcome some of the common difficulties readers have with Homer's Iliad, and also to provide tools to enhance and deepen your reading of the poem. Or perhaps, ­after all, it was the ­account of Agamemnon's brutal military prowess that transfixed him, the commander knocking the life out of every young Trojan he encounters, deaf to their cries for mercy: "And he pitched Pisander off the chariot on to earth, and plunged a spear in his chest – the man crashed on his back as.
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