Iliad - the Barnes & Noble review
The Iliad strikes me as an ancient Greek soap opera with lots of battle scenes. When the story opens, the Achaeans and Trojans have been at war for more than nine years all because Paris (a Trojan) ran away with Helen, the wife of Menelaus (an Achaean). Now, I may be mistaken, but Helen doesn't seem altogether too keen to go back to her husband.
A short way into the story, the Achaean's head king Agamemnon has to give back a woman he captured as part of a deal to appease one of the gods, so he decides to take Briseis, Achilles' favorite captive, in recompense. Now this is a stupid thing to do because Achilles is one of his strongest allies, and this really ticks him off. Achilles promptly pulls out of the war and spends a great deal of time moping about his ship, refusing to help his compatriots who are barely able to hold their own, even refusing Agamemnon's eventual offer to return Briseis (along with copious other gifts designed to appease him).
The gods provide the comic relief in this epic. (I don't know if this is intentional or if I just don't take them seriously enough.) Zeus is the big guy, supposedly in charge of all the other gods, but he does a lot of scheming in private because he doesn't want his wife, Hera, to find out. Zeus knows that Hera will pester him until she changes his mind. Zeus's children pay no attention to him except to keep out of his way and off his mind, and find every way they can to violate the spirit of his law without transgressing the letter of it. Ah, family dynamics.
The battle scenes are quite explicit. You find out who kills whom exactly how -- and stealing the armor off the corpse appears to be a particularly heroic action. It seems to me that if the Achaean's had spent less time carting stuff back to their ships it wouldn't have taken them nine years to get where they are (just my opinion...).
Well, the battles start going very much downhill for the Achaeans, and Achilles finally relents enough to loan his armor to his best friend Patroclus so he can take his place, rally the Achaeans and rout the Trojans. This works well enough until Patroclus gets killed. Patroclus' death finally spurs Achilles to action, and the remainder of the epic focusses primarily on Achilles' deeds in response to his grief. (There is a bit with the gods where Zeus finally approves their desire to get involved with the conflict, but they give up after awhile and decide to let the mortals meet their fates without further interference.)
For those of you who've never read this story, I won't ruin the ending for you, but I will say that it was somewhat amusing to read about Achilles chasing Hector round and round the walls of Troy.
Notwithstanding my lighthearted manner in reviewing the book, The Iliad is replete with tragedy. There is the tragedy of war and its massive toll on both sides of the conflict. The anguish a mother or wife feels when she knows her loved one will not return from battle. The shock of losing your best friend. The torment of a king losing all his sons to the enemy. The depictions of grief are as heartrending as the battle-scenes are explicit.
I think the thing that struck me the most was that this re-telling of the war is very personal. When someone is killed on either side, you find out his name, where he's from, something about his history. You know who killed him and how. This is no anonymous, let's-rack-up-the-body-count narrative. There are plenty of bodies, but you know them all.
Being but part of an epic cycle, The Iliad is neither the beginning nor end of the story, but it can definitely stand on it's own.
I read Robert Fagles' translation. The story is fast-paced, and flows very nicely. I have read some criticism of Fagles that his translation is not entirely true to the original. Well, I don't read ancient Greek so I can't make any judgment but to say that it reads exceptionally well. This is one I'm definitely keeping on the shelf for future readings.
SET - 7/16/99