Why Homer Matters (30 page)

It is true that they occasionally refer to the places they come from, but the psychological weight in those references is not to buildings or cities. The Greeks look back with longing and a sense of loss to their families, their distant fathers and their fathers' fathers, their wives and children, the brotherhood of their clans, the hearths which are defined by the people who gather around them, not to any palaces. They love their land, which gives them food and sustenance, its wheat-bearing fields and lovely orchards, but not the kind of deeply instituted fixity and built wealth they have come to get their hands on at Troy. What they miss, in a phrase that is repeated again and again, is “the loved earth of their fathers.” But in Greek there is no distinction between “fatherhood” and “fatherland.” The word for them both is
patra
, and it can apply in Homer to a shared descent, a cousinage, a sense of family or clan. Fatherhood is fatherland, and blood and heart are home.

Even the loved earth of the fathers is trumped by something else in the Greek mind. When the great owl-eyed goddess Athene, terrifying in her power, carrying her magic
aegis
, or breastplate, moves through the Greek army, putting a deep hunger for violence in their hearts, allowing them to fight without rest, home itself drops into insignificance.

And now sweeter to them than any return

In their hollow ships to the loved earth of their fathers

      Was battle.

The word Homer uses for the deliciousness of that violence in battle is
glukus
, “sugary,” even “sickly,” used of nectar and sweet wine, of the people you love. Battle, in many ways, is the Greek home. As the agents of severance, they are themselves severed from home. The most delicious thing they can imagine is a world of unrelenting violence.

*   *   *

“Beware the toils of war,” Sarpedon the Lycian hero says to Hector, “the mesh of the huge dragnet sweeping up the world.” Buried inside that terrifying image of war trawling for the lives of men, its net stretched from one horizon to the other, ushering the mortals into the cod end, is the Greek word for flax, the thread that the Fates use at the beginning of each of our lives to spin our destinies. And so the metaphor makes an assumption: war is part of destiny. It is not an aberration or a strangeness. It is, for Homer, a theater in which the structure of reality is revealed.

Simone Weil and many others have read the
Iliad
as an antiwar poem. But to see it as a polemic in that sense is to reduce it. Homer knows about the reality of suffering but never thinks of a world without conflict. On the shield of Achilles, the smith god Hephaestus creates dazzlingly opposed images of the good world and the bad, set against each other. But even in the good world of justice there is still murder and violence. We might long for peace, but we live in war, and the
Iliad
is a poem about the inescapability of it.

All of that lies behind the
Iliad
's massive oversupply of suffering. The poet's conception that the Greeks have been on this beach for nine long, dreadful years—a historical absurdity—stands in for eternity. This is how things are. This is how things have always been. This is how things are going to continue to be. War is the air a warrior society must breathe. And alongside that everlastingness of grief, its repetitive return, is a deeply absorbed knowledge that suffering can only be told in detail. No counting of casualties will do; no strategic overview will understand the reality; only the intimate engagement with the intimacy of pain and sorrow can ever be good enough for the enlightenment that is Homer's purpose.

Scholars have worked out that 264 people die in the course of the
Iliad
. It doesn't seem enough. One atrocity in some villages on the northern borders of Syria, one nighttime drowning of African refugees in the Mediterranean, one week of car bombs in Baghdad—any of them can outdo it. Only the epic engagement with At
ē
, the blind goddess of ruin, whose name means both “wrongness” and “wickedness,” can tell what those figures conceal. People are pitiably weak in the face of ruin, pathetically hoping that their prayers for happiness might prevail. That is why the goddesses of prayer in the Homeric universe are broken, tragic figures:

                                     they limp and halt,

they're all wrinkled, drawn, they squint to the side,

can't look you in the eye, and always bent on duty,

trudging after Ruin, maddening, blinding Ruin.

But Ruin is strong and swift—She outstrips them all,

loping a march, skipping across the whole wide earth

     to bring mankind to grief.

And the Prayers trail after, trying to heal the wounds.

Christians might think of prayer as something that can summon divine power; Homer knows different. “Of all that breathe and crawl across the earth,” Zeus himself says, “There is nothing alive more agonized than man.” The term the great god uses is
oïzuroteros
, “more miserable,” from the word for a wailing lament, the unbroken, everlasting, ululating cry that echoes from one end of the
Iliad
to the other.

When the poet is reaching for a comparison that will sharpen the pity of life and the futility of killing, it is fish that repeatedly drift into his consciousness. Perhaps because they are so disgusting, nibbling at the bodies of the dead; perhaps because a fish is so unable to look after itself when caught on a hook, in a net or on a spear, both fish and fishermen are for Homer absurd.

Fish gasping for the sea are not simply poignant in their hopelessness. In the
Iliad
fishing is the source of some of Homer's bitterest and jokiest comparisons. When Patroclus, the friend and childhood companion of Achilles, his great intimate in a world where no one else seems to love him, borrows Achilles's armor at a moment of great crisis for the Greeks in the war at Troy, and strides out into the mass of the Trojans, he pins them against the ships drawn up on the sand. This is his
aristeia
, his moment of greatness, his time of horror. Patroclus rampages through the Trojan bodies, repetitively and brutally: “Patroclus keeps on sweeping, hacking them down, / making them pay the price for Argives slaughtered.”

One poor Trojan, Cebriones, a bastard son of Priam, the king of Troy, is killed by Patroclus with a stone smashed into the front of his skull. Both Cebriones's eyes fall out into the dust at his feet, and the body, jerked into death, somehow dives out of the chariot to join them. The beautiful, elegant, much-loved Patroclus mocks the corpse: “Hah! look at you! Agile! How athletic is that, as if you were diving into the sea. You could satisfy an army if you were diving for oysters, plunging overboard even into rough seas as nimbly as that.” Corpse as oyster diver; ridiculous victim, vaunting killer. At one point, in describing Patroclus's safari, Homer sinks to nothing but a list of the names of those he destroys: “Erymas and Amphoterus and Epaltes and Tlepolemus son of Damastor and Echius and Pyris and Ipheus and Euippus and Polymelus, son of Argeas: corpse on corpse he piles on the all-nourishing earth.”

Patroclus moves on, as Robert Fagles translated Homer's phrase for the unstoppability of this, “in a blur of kills.” But then the rapidity, the appetite for more, stops and stills for a moment, and dwells on the detail of one particular death, one moment of heroic prowess.

Next he goes for Thestor the son of Enops

cowering, crouched in his beautiful polished chariot,

crazed with fear, and the reins jump from his grip—

Patroclus rising beside him stabs his right jawbone,

ramming the spearhead square between his teeth so hard

he hooks him by that spearhead over the chariot rail,

hoists and drags the Trojan out as an angler perched

on a jutting rock ledge drags some fish from the sea,

some precious catch, with line and glittering bronze hook.

So with the spear Patroclus gaffs him off his car,

his mouth gaping round the glittering point

And flips him down facefirst,

dead as he falls, his life breath blown away.

Man as fish, body as rag doll, killing as a form of acrobatics, the absurdity of the slaughtered corpse—this is vertigo-inducing, a plunge into the black hole of reality, fueled by the mismatch of sea-angling with war.

Christopher Logue, the most brilliant of all modern interpreters of Homer, drove these lines farther into domestic savagery.

Ahead, Patroclus braked a shade, and then and gracefully

As patient men cast fake insects over trout,

He speared the boy, and with his hip as pivot

Prised Thestor out of the chariot's basket

As easily as lesser men

Detach a sardine from an opened tin.

The first fighting does not begin until 2,380 lines into the
Iliad
, but thereafter the blood flows, increasingly, with an increasing intensity and savagery, until the climax comes in the crazed berserker frenzy of Achilles's grief-fueled rampage through the Trojans. The culmination is in the death of Hector, when steppe-man finally meets and kills the man of the city. The Greeks might think battle sweet, their warriors might see battle not as a burden but a cause for rejoicing, but Homer does not.

Now the sun of a new day falls on the ploughlands, rising

Out of the quiet water and the deep stream of the ocean

To climb the sky. The Trojans assemble together. They find

It hard to recognize each individual dead man;

But with water they wash away the blood that is on them

And as they weep warm tears they lift them on to the wagons.

Great Priam does not let them cry out; and in silence

They pile the bodies on the pyre, and when they have burned them

      go back to sacred Ilion.

The Greek words translated here by Richmond Lattimore as “hard to recognize” carry multiple meanings.
Chalepos
(hard) means both “emotionally painful” and “difficult to do”; it is a word that can be applied either to grieving or to rough ground over which you cannot help but stumble as you walk.
Diagnonai
(to recognize, like diagnosis) means “to distinguish or discern,” to sort out a single important thing from a confused mass, to find individuality amid the blood and muck of the heaped-up bodies. So the phrase can mean either that it was physically difficult in the mounded carnage to make out who it was that was dead; or that finding your own dead amid the mass of others was the most harrowing of experiences. Or both. Those hot, silent Trojan tears,
dákrua thermà
, allied in these lines with the deep calm of the ocean and the water that washes the blood away, are among Homer's greatest legacies to us, the persistent belief, amid all this damage, that there is value and beauty in human ties.

*   *   *

Homer's portrait of the Greeks at Troy fits the historical situation in the centuries after 2000
BC
, when newly empowered northern warriors, equipped with sailing ships and chariots, could batten on the walls of a rich trading city in northwest Anatolia, clamoring to get at its women and its goods. But it is also a portrait of something more enduring: a well-set-up, well-defended establishment is under attack from outsiders who long for, envy and wish to destroy it. The siege at Troy, often seen as a kind of war, as if these were two states battling with each other, is in fact more like a gang from the ghetto confronting the urban rich. Outsiders and insiders, nomadic and settled, the needy and the leisured, the enraged and the offended—the hero complex of the Greek warriors is simply gang mentality writ large.

Iliadic behavior echoes through modern urban America. As the criminologists Bruce Jacobs and Richard Wright documented from the streets of St. Louis, Missouri, American gang members talk about themselves, their lives, their ambitions, their idea of fate, the role of violence and revenge, in ways that are strangely like the Greeks in the
Iliad
.

Revenge is at the heart of their moral world, a repeated, angry and violent answer to injustice, to being treated in a way that does not respect them as people. There appears to be no overriding authority or legitimacy on the streets of St. Louis. Authority resides in the men themselves and their ability to dominate others. “This desire for payback,” Jacobs and Wright say, “is as human and as inevitable as hunger or thirst.” Crime itself on these streets becomes moral, and revenge a form of justice.

Like the Greeks, these gangsters are “urban nomads,” not set up in their elaborate houses, but living nowhere in particular, “staying” or “resting their head” in different places according to mood or what is going on. They are rootless, dependent on themselves, displaying their glory on their bodies, in their handsomeness, their jewelry and in the sexiness of the women on their arms and in their beds.

They can only rely on themselves: “maintaining a reputation for toughness dominates day-to-day interaction.” And because any act of revenge has to deter the enemy from taking revenge in his turn, there is an accelerator built into the process. Any insult, any slight, any suggestion that you are not a man worthy of respect summons severe, intense and punitive retaliatory violence. Achilles longs to kill Agamemnon after he has humiliated him in public over a slave girl he loves. The St. Louis gangsters take revenge without a thought.

One evening a man called Red knocks into a stranger at a bar by mistake and spills his glass of cognac on him. In response, the stranger “bitch-slaps” him, not with a closed fist but with an open hand, usually reserved for women. “Everyone was watching,” Red says, “so it made me look bad.” Red leaves the bar and waits in the dark in the parking lot. When the man comes out he shoots him, not once but several times. This is the only way in a warrior society that you can be yourself or protect the fragile boundaries of the self, forever under attack from those around you who are all feeling the same.