Battle Lines

For sheer weirdness, it would be hard to find a passage in the Western canon that can compete with the tenth book of Homer’s Iliad—the one classicists call the Doloneia, “the bit about Dolon.” Not the least of the book’s oddities is that it’s named after a nobody: Dolon is a character whom the poet conjures merely so that he can kill him off, a few hundred lines later, in literature’s nastiest episode of trick-or-treating. There’s a nighttime outing, some creepy interrogation, even outlandish costumes.

By this point in the action, we’re in the tenth year of the Trojan War, and things are going badly for the invading Greeks. Achilles, the greatest of the allied warriors, has angrily withdrawn from the fighting after being insulted by his loutish commander-in-chief, Agamemnon; without his help, the Greeks are pressed back against the sea, frantically defending their beached ships. A desperate appeal to the sulky Achilles has failed to persuade him to reënter the fray. At their wits’ end, the sleepless Greek leaders call a late-night conference and send two able warriors, the ferocious Diomedes and the crafty Odysseus, to spy on the Trojan positions.

After donning some rather unconventional gear (Odysseus, we are told, is wearing a cap decorated with rows of boars’ teeth), the two pick their eerie way through piles of corpses left over from the day’s battle. Presently they come across Dolon, who happens to be coming from the opposite direction to spy on the Greeks. (He’s wearing a wolf’s pelt and a marten-skin hat.) The Greeks capture this rather pathetic Trojan—his teeth chatter audibly after he falls into their hands—and tease him for a while, reassuring him that he will come to no harm even as they smoothly extract the information they want. Then, as Dolon begs for his life, Diomedes cuts off his head, which still gibbers away as it rolls in the dust. The pair then make for the camp of some allies of the Trojans, where they kill a handful of sleeping men and steal some fabulous horses.

When I was first studying the Iliad, as an undergraduate classics major thirty years ago, the standard interpretation of this episode was that its very grotesqueness was the point. Everything about it—nocturnal violence instead of glittering, daylit contests of arms, stealth instead of open confrontation, animal pelts instead of gleaming bronze armor—inverts the norms of Homeric warfare, as if to suggest just how complete the Greeks’ reversal of fortune is: military, ethical, moral.

Readers of Stephen Mitchell’s fast-paced and very idiosyncratic new translation of the Iliad (Free Press; $35) will have to take my word about all this, because Book 10 doesn’t appear in it. Mitchell’s is the first major English translation of the poem to implement the theories of the eminent British scholar M. L. West, stripping away what West argues are the impure, later additions to the original written text (one of these being the whole of Book 10). Merely to claim that there was an original text of the Iliad, definitively set down in writing by the poet who created it, is sensational stuff in the world of classics: for nearly a hundred years, the dominant orthodoxy has been that this greatest of all epics was the oral composition of a series of bards, evolving over centuries before finally being written down. Whatever its flaws—and Mitchell’s translation won’t suit every taste—this taut new version is likely to reignite controversies about just what the Iliad is that go back nearly as far as Homer himself.

One of the earliest aficionados of the Iliad was Aristotle, who admired an aspect of the poem that most of us don’t associate with epics: its narrow focus. In the Poetics, Western culture’s oldest extant work of literary criticism, written around 335 B.C.—which is to say nearly half a millennium after the Iliad began its long career—the philosopher declared:

Homer may be said to appear “divinely inspired” above the rest, since he did not attempt to treat the war as a whole. . . . Instead, taking up just one section, he used many others as episodes . . . with which he gives his composition diversity.

Although many people know that the Iliad is about the Trojan War, it doesn’t, in fact, contain much of what you tend to associate with that greatest of all mythological conflicts. There’s no Judgment of Paris, nor do you get the Rape of Helen—the Trojan prince Paris’s adulterous abduction of the world’s most beautiful woman, which sets in motion the gigantic Greek recovery expedition, led by her brother-in-law, Agamemnon. The poem does not include Achilles’ death, from an arrow wound to the heel, nor will you find the Wooden Horse or the Fall of Troy. A work that contained all those episodes, Aristotle argued, would be “too extensive and impossible to grasp all at once”; instead, Homer cannily focusses on just one episode from the tenth and final year of the war, and emphasizes a single theme. The Iliad is about precisely what, in the first of its 15,693 lines, it says it’s going to be about: the wrath of Achilles.

Why is Achilles so angry? Like the Trojan War itself, the trouble in the Iliad begins with the abduction of a young woman. In the first of the epic’s twenty-four books (the sections into which, at some point long after its composition, it was divided), Agamemnon is compelled to return one of his captured slave girls to her father, a priest of Apollo who comes begging for his daughter. (The god, who looks after his own, visits a plague on the Greeks until they comply.) The Greek commander makes up for this loss of property—and of face—by seizing one of Achilles’ slave girls. To us, the petty tit-for-tat might savor of the junior-high-school cafeteria (“You get to keep your own prize, yet I am forced / to . . . sit here, meekly, with nothing?” an incredulous Agamemnon sputters), but for the heroes in Homeric epic the spoils they amass—their quality, quantity, and provenance—are the symbols of their status, the markers of who they are in the world. This is why they fight. (As Achilles tartly reminds Agamemnon, “I didn’t come here to Troy because of the Trojans. / I have no quarrel with them; they have done me no harm.”) For this reason, the seizure of the girl is an intolerable affront; as the furious Achilles puts it, it makes him “a nobody.”

This is the crux of the poem. For, as Achilles later reminds his fellow-Greeks, he has been allowed to choose between a long, insignificant life and a brief, glorious one: if he stays to fight and die in Troy it is precisely because he doesn’t want to be a nobody. Agamemnon’s insult makes a mockery of his choice—it empties his short life of what meaning it had. Hence the uncanny, even inhuman rage. (The noun that Homer uses, mênis, is otherwise used only of gods; in the Greek, it’s the first word of the poem.)

The extent to which the young warrior’s world has been turned upside down is reflected in the radical course of action—or, rather, inaction—that he now decides upon. Before, he had fought to prove who he was: now he will demonstrate his worth by not fighting. For nearly the entirety of the poem—from Book 1 to Book 20, when he finally reënters the fray—Achilles, the greatest of all warriors, never lifts a weapon. He knows that, without him, the Greeks will suffer badly: their suffering, he declares, will be a “compensation.” And, indeed, his anger “hurled down to Hades the souls of so many fighters” (as Mitchell renders one of the poem’s introductory lines, in the nicely strong five-beat line he favors). But his mênis touches Heaven, too: in those same lines the poet adds that it brings to fruition a divine scheme, one we get to see unfolding in the many scenes set on Mt. Olympus. By the end of the poem, “the will of Zeus was accomplished.”

Some of the consequences of Achilles’ wrath are direct and obvious. The sinking fortunes of the Greeks, tracked in minute detail in the poem’s many battle scenes, are occasions to reflect on the horror, and the allure, of bloodshed. The rococo descriptions of the warriors’ deaths—Homer has more than sixty ways to say that someone died—suggest a connoisseurship of martial violence that is worlds away from our own squeamishness. These heroes are artisans of death, with skills that we are invited to admire as we would admire the expertise of a potter or a blacksmith. In one memorable scene, Achilles’ beloved companion, Patroclus, spears a Trojan through the jaw and pivots the wounded man over his chariot rail “like a fisherman who sits on a jutting boulder / and hauls a tremendous fish up out of the sea.” The contrast between the grisly violence of the battle scenes and such mundane evocations of ordinary life can give the poem a hallucinatory poignancy. Through the carnage, reminders of the peacetime world hover tantalizingly out of reach.

But even as it traces the intense trajectory of Achilles’ wrath, the Iliad simultaneously spirals outward, giving you a picture of everything else that is at stake in this (or any) war story. Just to list the great set pieces—episodes so fully achieved that tradition has given them their own names—is to run through a remarkable variety of subjects, themes, and techniques. The “Catalogue of Ships,” in Book 2, is a prodigious history lesson, complete with the names and numbers of every contingent of the Greek fleet; the sheer recitation of it must have been an astonishing tour de force in performance—epic poetry’s answer to CinemaScope. The “Teichoscopia” (“Watching from the Wall”), in Book 3, set atop the walls of Troy, gives us glimpses of Troy’s richly civilized society, one character’s psychology, and the mechanics of the poem itself. Here Helen, by now the regretful, slightly embarrassed and embarrassing guest of Paris’s family (“bitch that I am,” she moans), points out to King Priam and his elegant courtiers the various Greeks on the field of battle below, men she knew in her former life. (It may be the end of the war, but it’s the beginning of the poem, and Homer has to come up with some way of introducing the main characters.)

The “Embassy,” in Book 9, in which the Greeks send a trio of chieftains to appeal to Achilles, shows a subtle grasp of psychology and rhetoric. And then there’s the “Dios Apatê,” the “Deception of Zeus,” an improbable moment of erotic enchantment in Book 14, in which Hera, queen of the gods, eager to distract Zeus from some divine shenanigans on the battlefield, dolls herself up and seduces her errant husband. Crocuses and hyacinths sprout and bloom beneath them as they make love.

Often the Iliad saves its greatest artistry for its quietest moments. In one of the poem’s most touching scenes, Hector, the great defender of Troy, returns from the battlefield to spend time with his troubled wife, Andromache. She begs him to stay out of the battle, but he vows to “always fight in the front line”—this despite his dreadful conviction that “a day will come when the sacred city of Troy / will be devastated.” And yet the one thing he can’t bear, he tells his wife, is the thought of her as some Greek’s slave,

“bent over the loom of some stern mistress

or carrying water up from her well— hating it

but having no choice, for harsh fate will press down upon you.

And someone will say, as he sees you toiling and weeping,

‘That is the wife of Hector, bravest of all

the Trojans, tamers of horses, when the great war

raged round Troy.’ And then a fresh grief will flood

your heart.”

The pathos of such stoicism in the face of inevitable disaster is exceeded, if that’s possible, by what comes next. Hector, who is still in his armor, leans over to pick up his young son, but the boy recoils screaming until his father takes off his terrifying helmet. It’s unlikely that literature will find a better symbol for the way in which war makes us unrecognizable—to others, to ourselves.

This war will render Achilles unrecognizable, too: both the means and the effects of his transformation are what make the Iliad the first genuinely tragic narrative in the Western tradition (just as the Odyssey, with its successful homecoming and climactic marital reunion, is the first comedy). For his wrath causes an unexpected and catastrophic loss of his own: the death of his friend Patroclus. In Book 16, Patroclus takes the field dressed in Achilles’ armor in order to give the Trojans a scare. It works for a while, but he’s no Achilles, and the Trojans slay him. The harrowing scenes of grief that follow demonstrate a truth that Achilles grasps too late: his reputation wasn’t, after all, the thing he valued most. That the insight is inseparable from the loss is what gives the poem its wrenching grandeur. Pathei mathos, Aeschylus wrote in his “Agamemnon,” one of the innumerable texts of later Greek literature that descended from the Iliad: we “suffer into knowledge.”

The Iliad ends as it began, with a desperate parent pleading to get his child back. In the last book of the poem, Priam comes in secret to Achilles’ tent to beg for the body of Hector, whom Achilles has slain. The two enemies share a moment of unexpected tenderness, one that suggests that Achilles’ capacity for recognizable human emotions has been enlarged: moved by the sight of the courageous old man, he weeps, thinking of his own father back home—the father and the home he’ll never see again, because, as we know, he has chosen a short, glorious life. The two enemies break bread together, and Achilles honorably grants Priam’s request. The finale of the poem is divided between this intimate confrontation and the public spectacle of Hector’s funeral. Together, the two scenes represent the ultimate consequences of the wrath of Achilles.

And so, paradoxically, by maintaining its tight Aristotelian grip on its single theme, the Iliad manages to suggest the whole range of human action and emotion—of an existence that, unlike that of the gods, has meaning precisely because we, like Achilles, know it will end. To underscore this, Homer puts a picture of human existence into his epic—a literal picture. In Book 18, after Achilles finds himself in need of new armor, Hephaestus, the blacksmith god, forges a shield for him. Homer devotes fully a hundred and thirty lines to the description of this intricate object, whose surface is decorated with images of a city at peace and a city at war, of weddings and a lawsuit, of people dancing and people arming for ambush, of gods and mortals and animals, of pastures and vineyards, of plowing and sheaving. To complete his masterpiece, the god sets a boundary around this teeming scene: “the powerful river of Ocean flowing / . . . along its outermost rim.”

All of which is to say that when Achilles returns to battle—returns to deal out death—he is armed with a vision of life. You could say that Western civilization has likewise armed itself, over the bloodstained centuries and millennia, with the Iliad—another richly detailed work of art that provides an image of every possible extreme of human experience, a reminder of who we are and who we sometimes strive to be.

It’s because the Iliad is both so vast and so fundamental that the nature of its text, what stays in and what comes out, is so important.

Most ancient Greeks believed that there was a poet called Homer who wrote down his poems. (A notable exception was Josephus, the Jewish historian, who argued that the early Greeks were illiterate—unlike, needless to say, the early Hebrews.) The historian Herodotus thought that Homer must have lived around four hundred years before his own time, which is to say around 800 B.C. In about 150 B.C., a scholar called Aristarchus, the head of the library at Alexandria and the greatest ancient expert on Homer’s texts, surmised that the poet had lived about a century and a half after the Trojan War itself—that is, around 1050 B.C. It was generally thought that Homer wrote both the Iliad (a product of his passionate youth) and the Odyssey (the fruit of his wise and humorous old age), but some ancient scholars, called the Separatists, thought the poems were written by two different people. (The history of Homeric scholarship is filled with factions whose names make them sound like the parties in a religious war, or at a Freud conference: Separatists and Unitarians, Oralists and Analysts.) No fewer than seven cities in ancient times claimed Homer as a son—the ancient version of “George Washington Slept Here.”

The modern history of the controversy begins late in the eighteenth century, when a French scholar discovered a manuscript of the Iliad from the tenth century A.D. that came complete with transcriptions of the marginal notes of ancient commentators (Aristarchus’ included). The notes made it clear that those earlier commentators had access to different and sometimes competing versions of the poems. This discovery soon led a German scholar named Friedrich August Wolf to argue that the texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey that we possess had not been fixed in writing until relatively late. Homer, he argued, couldn’t write, but had composed a series of ballads (or “lays”) that were short enough to be memorized and which were transmitted orally for generations, perhaps by guilds of professional reciters; these were finally assembled by someone who knew how to write into the immensely long poems we have today.

Wolf’s theory was immediately taken up and expanded by scholars known as Analysts, who combed through the two epics, confidently identifying traces of many poems by many poets. One advantage of this approach was that it explained the many inconsistencies and oddities of the texts, some historical (the poems refer to elements of both Bronze and Iron Age technology) and some linguistic. A notorious example of the latter is the “Embassy” in Book 9, in which the three Greeks supplicate Achilles to return to battle. The problem is that verbs and pronouns used in the scene are of a special type called the “dual,” which can be employed only for pairs of things (eyes, legs, oxen, etc.). The presence of the dual was clearly a remnant of an earlier version of the scene, in which only two Greeks had been sent to Achilles’ tent. The grammatically impossible dual stayed in the text, uncorrected, because there was, really, no author—no one poet overseeing the whole affair. There it remains, like a fossilized inclusion in a slab of polished stone.

The Analysts held sway throughout the nineteenth century. But early in the twentieth an American scholar named Milman Parry had a game-changing insight into one of the most striking features of the Homeric epics: the repeated use of rigidly formulaic epithets—“swift-footed Achilles,” say, or “rosy-fingered Dawn.” Like everyone else who’d read the poems in Greek, Parry knew that these epithets always fill the same position in whichever line they appear—that they were ready-made metrical placeholders. But, unlike everyone else, Parry had studied the techniques of living epic poets. (He observed and recorded Yugoslav bards in the nineteen-thirties.) What he suddenly grasped was that, while the epithets can seem wearyingly repetitive and add nothing substantive to the action of the poems, they do serve the needs of a poet who’s composing while he recites. If you’re improvising and know in advance how a line of verse is going to end—“swift-footed Achilles,” say—you can devote your attention to the middle, the part you’re actually inventing. (Think about rap, with its insistent, carrying beat and its predictable, if often approximate, end rhymes.)

The “oral theory” about the use of formulas (which could be linked together to create clusters of lines or entire prefabricated scenes) suggested not only how poems of such length were created but also how they might have been transmitted over centuries without being written down. And it also explained away the inconsistencies and repetitions that had troubled the Analysts: each successive bard used whatever traditional material suited him, even as he added and shaped and refined.

This is the orthodoxy that M. L. West has challenged, using the old techniques of the Analysts to demonstrate that hundreds of lines of the canonical text weren’t original. But original to what? For the oralists, “original” is a red herring. West’s controversial thesis is that there was in fact a Homer (although West calls him “P,” for poet) and that this poet actually wrote down a “primal text” of the Iliad, revising it over many years. This apparently regressive heresy, set forth in articles, books, and a two-volume edition of the Greek text, has led to bitter exchanges in the pages of scholarly journals, filled with abstruse proofs that, to the uninitiated, might seem like the dialogue in a “Star Trek” episode (“Movable nu was already being used in this early period for the sake of preventing hiatus caused by the loss of digamma”).

However academic the debate may appear, a lot depends on who’s right. For one thing, an Iliad without the Doloneia is a very different poem from an Iliad with one. But what’s really at stake is how we think about the whole of the classical tradition. Say West is right, and the Doloneia is a later interpolation by another poet: the fact is that Book 10 has been part of the Iliad since antiquity, commented on and interpreted for two and a half millennia, and even furnishing the material for a Greek tragedy (the “Rhesus,” attributed to Euripides). In one obvious sense, the Iliad is simply the poem that we have possessed all this while.

An imperfect but perhaps helpful analogy is Wikipedia. For the oralists, the text of the Iliad is like a wiki: it’s the thing as a whole that matters, not only the kernel of text that someone first put up but also the additions, corrections, and deletions made by others over time. You could say that, for these people, “Homer” is the process itself. For West, it’s the original kernel that counts—a text that he thinks he has been able to identify because, like someone turning on the edit function in Wikipedia, he can go in and view the accretions, where they are and who made them, and when.

West’s proposed emendations to the texts are couched in the meticulous language of classical scholarship, and take the form of suggestions and proposals; perhaps because Mitchell is not a classicist, he is emboldened to cast West’s vision in stone. His new translation not only deletes passages that West merely brackets or questions but omits even some passages that West thinks were “expansions” by P himself. For this reason, his Iliad is slimmer and leaner than anything we have seen before (and, in the end, destined to be a specialty act).

Most of the time, the elisions are small, and they do eliminate some hiccups. For instance, West brackets a line in Book 13 in which Hector springs down from his chariot, on the not unreasonable ground that Hector hasn’t been riding in a chariot. Sometimes they are larger, and will alter your sense of a passage. Here, too, it’s not necessarily for the worse. In that scene between Hector and Andromache, her moving address is followed by seven lines in which this Trojan matron suddenly gives her husband advice on the deployment of his troops. Aristarchus thought there was something fishy about these verses, although West suggests that they were an expansion by P: Mitchell omits them.

Mitchell’s stripping away takes other, subtler forms. In a translator’s note, he cites the now canonical judgment of the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, who, in an 1861 essay called “On Translating Homer,” enumerated what he saw as the four cardinal qualities of Homeric verse: rapidity, plainness of syntax and diction, plainness of thought, and nobility. Homer’s Greek is capacious enough that he can achieve all four, but English translators have generally had to choose one or two at the expense of the others. (The sole exception is probably Alexander Pope, whose Iliad, set in rhyming couplets and published between 1715 and 1720, is among the greatest translations of any work in any language.) Richmond Lattimore’s craggy 1951 translation, which imitates Homer’s expansive six-beat line and sticks faithfully to his archaisms (“Odysseus . . . laid a harsh word upon him”), has nobility but not rapidity; classicists tend to favor it. The enormously popular version by the late Princeton scholar Robert Fagles, published in 1990, has a gratifying plainness—my students have always preferred it—but doesn’t get the grandeur. Other interpreters go their own way: the stark “War Music” of Christopher Logue is more an adaptation than a translation; Stanley Lombardo’s 1997 version goes for a tight-lipped, soldierly toughness—a post-Vietnam Iliad.

Mitchell certainly gets the rapidity: this Iliad is by far the most swift-footed in recent memory, the iambic line driving forward in a way that gives force to the English and nicely suggests the galloping dactyls (long-short-short) of Homer’s lines. This is especially useful in those many passages in which characters speak with heated emotion—“with wingèd words,” to use the formulaic epithet. (An astonishing forty-five per cent of the poem is direct speech.) In Book 1, for instance, Achilles, at the climax of his argument with Agamemnon, rounds on his commander-in-chief and insults him openly. Here is Lattimore:

“You wine sack, with a dog’s eyes, with a deer’s heart. Never

once have you taken courage in your heart to arm with your people

for battle.”

Mitchell’s rendering is far more vivid:

“Drunkard, dog-face, quivering deer-hearted coward,

you have never dared to arm with your soldiers for battle.”

Among other things, Mitchell doesn’t make the mistake of weakening the first line by carrying it over to the next—an enjambment that isn’t in the Greek.

But too often Mitchell’s insistence on speed forces him to sacrifice nobility. Precisely because Homer’s Greek is an old inheritance—an amalgam of many styles and periods and dialects going back many centuries (no one ever spoke the Greek you read in Homer)—it has a distinctively archaic quality that, paradoxically, never gets in the way of speed. (It likely sounded to Greek ears the way the King James Bible does to ours: old-fashioned but so much a part of the language that it never registers as stuffy.) For Mitchell, Homer’s famous epithets can obscure what he calls the “meaning”: “ ‘Flashing-helmeted Hector,’ ” he writes, “means no more than ‘Hector.’ ” But “meaning” isn’t the point. Part of the way in which the epic legitimatizes its ability to talk about so many levels of existence and so many kinds of experience is its style: an ancient authority inheres in that old-time diction, the plushly padded epithets and stately rhythms.

All this, along with many other subtle effects, is gone from Mitchell’s Iliad, which, in its eagerness to reproduce what Homer says, strips away how he says it. (Mitchell’s translation, which he has said took him only two years, is marked by a certain hastiness: he misses many opportunities to render Homer’s rich linguistic effects.) It’s as if the translator, like the scholar who inspired him, were trying to get at some purer Iliad. In this, both men are indulging in a very old habit. In an article called “Homer: The History of an Idea,” the American classicist James I. Porter suggests that the very idea that there is a Homer whom we can somehow get back to, if only we work diligently enough, is a cultural fantasy of purity that dates back to ancient times. (Homer, he writes, “is, and probably always was . . . an idea of something that remains permanently lost to culture.”) But the Iliad isn’t pure, at least not in that superficial way; its richness, even its stiffness, is part of what makes it large, makes it commanding, makes it great.

The Iliad doesn’t need to be modernized, because the question it raises is a modern—indeed, existentialist—one: how do we fill our short lives with meaning? The August 22nd issue of Time featured, on its “Briefing” page, a quote from a grieving mother about her dead son. The mother’s name is Jan Brown, and her son, Kevin Houston, a Navy SEAL, was one of thirty-seven soldiers killed in a rocket attack in Afghanistan this past summer. What she said about him might shock some people, but will sound oddly familiar to anyone who has read the Iliad:

He was born to do this job. If he could do it all over again and have a choice to have it happen the way it did or work at McDonald’s and live to be 104? He’d do it all over again.

Whoever Homer was and however he made his poem, the song that he sings still goes on. ♦