AUTHOR: HOMER
DATE: C. EIGHTH/SEVENTH CENTURY BC
The Iliad is an epic poem of the Ancient Greek world, spanning 15,693 lines and 24 books to tell the story of the Trojan War, fought between the city of Troy and its Greek enemies. In common with other works of antiquity, there is academic debate as to the precise nature of its authorship, although it is widely attributed to Homer, who is also credited with writing the Odyssey – by common consent the two works upon which Ancient Greek literature took root and blossomed, and that have proved an enduring influence on the entirety of Western culture.
The Iliad is set amid the last year of the ten-year siege of Troy by Achaean (i.e. Greek) forces, a situation precipitated by Paris, a prince of Troy, kidnapping Helen, the wife of Menelaus, king of the Greek city-state of Sparta. (Helen’s detention led to the launch of a vast fleet to save her, prompting Christopher Marlowe many centuries later to consider her beauty with the question: ‘Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships?’) The action takes place at the tail-end of the Bronze Age, around 1200 BC – some four hundred years before Homer is said to have written the poem. The historical authenticity of the saga is a moot subject. For a long time, Troy itself was regarded as a fictional creation, although archaeological evidence turned up in the nineteenth century suggests it was likely a real city located in modern-day Turkey. But whether Homer’s saga of war reflects a genuine conflict or is rather the product of his imagination, or perhaps a synthesis of several genuine historical events and strands, is uncertain.
The drama focuses on a few weeks defined by a feud between the Achaean leader Agamemnon and his greatest warrior, Achilles (the son of Thetis, a Nereid [sea nymph] and Peleus, the King of Phthia). In a tale of high drama, plots and counter-plots, and epic battles, Olympian gods and goddesses take their place alongside mere mortals. Achilles, for example, specifically seeks out the help of Zeus, the most powerful of all the gods. The bickering and feuding between deities all contributes to the fluctuating fortunes of those fighting in the human realm. Homer was perhaps the first to breathe discernible life into the array of divine figures that bestrode the Ancient Greek world, a contribution that alone changed the nature of storytelling in the classical world.
The Odyssey, the partner work to the Iliad, subsequently tells of the journey of Odysseus, King of Ithaca, as he makes for home after the fall of Troy – a trip that takes him ten years, as long as the war itself. His peril-strewn journey sees him face myriad challenges and setbacks, including the loss of his crew and encounters with, among others, the one-eyed Cyclops, the dangerous sirens luring seamen to their fates, and the Laestrygonians, a race of man-eating giants. All the while, Odysseus’s wife and son, assuming that Odysseus is dead, fend off a succession of unsuitable contenders to marry the apparently widowed queen. A central theme of both works is the influence of fate on the destinies of both humans and gods. While both the earthly and divine maintain agency and freedom of choice in the day to day, the overarching narratives of life are deemed to be pre-set so that trying to evade one’s fate becomes not only a vain enterprise, but a cowardly and foolish one too.
In some respects, the question of whether or not Homer was the single author who committed these epics to writing hardly matters. What is ultimately important is that the works themselves exist, that they altered the direction of world literature and that they continue to engage readers almost three thousand years after they were first written. Nonetheless, the question of disputed authorship always delivers delicious mysteries to ponder. It is widely accepted that both works date to a similar period, around the eighth or seventh centuries BC. However, some scholars contend that the two poems are the product of different authors, or perhaps even groups of writers working together. The predominant mode of cultural communication in the period was oral transmission, and many academics suspect that the Iliad and the Odyssey represent the literary gathering together of potentially multiple stories that had previously spread through the spoken word or song. The truth is that we know virtually nothing of Homer as a historical personality, and the few shards of pseudo-biographical information we do have, such as that he was blind, are highly questionable. The pair of poems deal with questions of memory and of the passing on of wisdom through the generations, so perhaps it makes most sense to think of Homer as a cipher for the bringing together – the memorialization – of long literary heritages into coherent, brilliant new works. The Iliad and Odyssey can be regarded not as the creations of a single great mind but as the extraordinary fruit of a cultural zeitgeist.
THE TROJAN HORSE
The Odyssey briefly mentions a military tactic that has come to captivate the imagination of generations of readers, but largely because of its more detailed retelling in Virgil’s Aeneid. The Trojan horse was a giant wooden horse built by the Greeks and hauled into Troy by the Trojans as an apparent symbol of their military victory. Little did they know that a band of Greek soldiers was hidden inside. Once within the city, they sprang from the horse to open the city gates and let their comrades in – a move that led to the final sacking of Troy.
The impact of Homer was immediate and long-lasting. The depictions of the godly realm, for instance, quickly changed the way the Ancient Greeks thought about religion, the gods and goddesses becoming less abstract and more relatable. The descriptions of military battles were also absorbed into the Greek psyche, influencing approaches to tactics and even the psychology of war. The poems soon became vital tools of education, not just as literary models but as jumping-off points for wider philosophical and ethical debates. As Plato would put it, Homer ‘has taught Greece’.
The Homeric epics introduced a new mode of dramatic storytelling that quickly spread beyond the boundaries of the Hellenic world. It is very much in evidence in the works of the great Roman poets like Virgil and Ovid, the former regularly being accused of purloining the Iliad and reconfiguring it into the Aeneid in the first century BC. But Homer’s reach has been still longer, reaching to Shakespeare, for instance, who mined similar source material (albeit with a very different spin) for Troilus and Cressida. There are those who suggest that even the modern cinematic masterpiece of the Star Wars saga owes a large debt to the tradition of the Homeric epics.
The Iliad is an epic in every sense. In the dramatic story it relates. In the spellbinding language it uses. In the existential questions it poses to its audience. In making us see the world in a different light – as the critic Longinus put it in the first century AD, ‘in recording as he does the wounding of the gods, their quarrels, vengeance, tears, imprisonment, and all their manifold passions Homer has done his best to make the men in the Iliad gods and gods men’. But perhaps most importantly, the Iliad reminds us that stories may be entertainments and may sometimes seem frivolous – all of which is fine – but at their best they bring an audience together in the most unexpected ways and help us come to a better understanding of who we are and what is our place in the world. No one prior to Homer had ever quite achieved that on such a scale or in such a masterly way.