Uncovering Writing

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I gave Caroline Alexander’s study of the Iliad five stars, only because I wasn’t given the option of six stars. This book was that good. I have been reading and studying Homer since the mid 1980s and this book is a perfect companion that reaffirmed some of my interpretations but also opened my eyes to many new possibilities.

Throughout this work, she challenges our assumptions about the Iliad and its epic hero, Achilles. She weaves her analysis to show how Homer really perceives war, heroes and humanity. I despised the Iliad the first time I read it. I thought it was all about anger, rage, machismo, and the glorification of war and killing. She talks about this in the preface (p. xiv) as well as throughout the text and the endnotes, discussing how Homer was received and deployed by different groups with different needs over the ages. She notes that the geographer/historian Strabo wrote about how disastrous the Trojan war was, not just for the Trojans but for the the Greeks (p. 220). Alexander sums it up so perfectly “That after the roll of centuries, this same Iliad, whose message had been so clearly grasped by ancient poets and historians, came to be perceived as a martial epic glorifying war is one of the great ironies of literary history … Homer’s insistent depiction of the war as a pointless catastrophe that blighted all it touched was thus adroitly circumvented” (p. 220). This makes me think of Horace’s “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (‘it is sweet and proper to die for one’s country’) and the retort from Wilford Owen, an English soldier and poet in World War I, who called that saying the “old Lie.”

Interlaced with thoughts on the epic, Alexander talks about each of the heroes and gods, various social and religious practices, and discusses theories about where and when these ideas originated and when they were incorporated into the Iliad itself. Some ideas came from the Mycenaean era, others from about the time the Iliad was written down. Some character traits were Greek, others from further east. She brings in other parts of the Epic Cycle, that include scenes from the Judgement of Paris through the Nostoi (“returns” of the main characters, of which the Odyssey is a standalone work).

On death, she has an excellent insight, writing “The slain warriors of the Iliad are mostly obscure fellows who have received no previous mention in the epic, but who are evoked– brought to life– at the moment they are killed by some small personalizing detail” (p. 66). In the next paragraph, she writes about how most of the deaths are of Trojans, yet “the Iliad ensures that the enemy is humanized and that the deaths of enemy Trojans are depicted as lamentable. The Iliad is insistent on keeping to the fore the price of glory” (p. 66). And in general, she shows that Achilles believes (both in the Iliad and in the Odyssey where he appears in the Underworld) that “Life is more precious than glory; this is the unheroic truth disclosed by the greatest warrior at Troy” (p. 98). Two years after Alexander’s book was published, Alice Oswald published Memorial, a ‘translation’ of the Iliad that only included the death scenes. It was a harsh read, beautifully wrought, like the reading of the names of the dead from some list. But, as Alexander notes, with some personalizing detail included. Alexander closes her book by noting that Homer ended his epic with “a sequence of funerals, inconsolable lamentation, and shattered lives. War makes stark the tragedy of mortality” (p. 225).

On leadership, I really enjoyed her thoughts on Achilles vs. Agamemnon. She discusses a potential confrontation between these two during the funeral games for Patroklos. She writes that it serves as a “bittersweet reminder of the difference real leadership could have made to the events of the Iliad” (p. 200) where Achilles defuses the situation in a “masterpiece of diplomacy” (p. 201).

Except for Book XXII, Alexander uses Richmond Lattimore’s classic translation of the Iliad from 1951. I’d read Lattimore’s Odyssey, but never his Iliad, so I blame her for enticing me with his translation. I bought it even before finishing her book. As for her translation of Book XXII, I have to mention that similar to when I read Emily Wilson’s translations of Seneca’s tragedies, I was reading Alexander while listening to classical music. Her rendition of Book XXII pairs most excellently with Schubert’s Death and the Maiden.

In a way, her translation of one book of the Iliad reminded me of Lord Derby’s translation of the Iliad in the 19th century. He translated only Book I, and shared it with some friends. He didn’t publish it. Everyone liked it so much that they encouraged him to translate the rest, which he did a few years later. In Alexander’s case, six years after releasing this analysis of the Iliad, she published her own translation of the full Iliad, which quickly became my favorite translation of Homer.

This book is worth perusing and owning simply for the massive endnotes. I don’t think I’ve ever read EVERY end note in a book. This time, I did. They were insightful and led me deeper into particular issues. They offered a mass of references for new books that I now need to check out.

There is so much here yet she keeps her narrative focused and flowing. I can’t say it enough, this is a well-executed book. I suggest you read this book and her full Iliad. It will be time well spent.