The Iliad is blunt, forceful -- in terms of plot, it could even be construed as somewhat tedious, with so many reversals and counter-reversals of fortune on the fields outside sacred Ilium. On the surface, it's not as clever as the Odyssey, but ultimately it's the more profound work -- dramatically and morally.
Like it's namesake, the Odyssey is clever, playful. The Iliad doesn't have the wit, nor the complexity of embedded narratives, nor the multiplicity of voices. The framing of the story ends up being its primary genius. This is the story of Achilles' rage, and in recounting this story, Homer achieves one of the most venerable and profound insights into the essence of humanity.
I have to say, I don't much like Achilles at the beginning of the story. His hurt pride doesn't much appeal to me. If there's a war going on and the lives of others are at stake, you'd better do your duty, I tend to think. Never mind the fact that the war in question is not one that I would approve of on my own moral grounds; when you open the cover of the book, you have to buy into the idea that it's worth a ten years' war, and all the bloodshed and expenditure of resources that accompany such an undertaking, to chase after a stolen woman. That is to say, when you open the cover of the book, you have to enter into the Greek perspective -- by which I mean not the familiar take on Plato and Aristotle, washed over with centuries of Christianization, that has come to represent Greek culture in the way we usually think of it, but a more ancient and brutal, more tribal perspective. You have to invest quite a bit of yourself into the poem -- and divest quite a bit of yourself as a reader -- to get at the core of its meaning.
What literature does for us is to enable us to enter the perspetive of someone other than ourselves, and in doing so, eventually, to come to an understanding of our shared humanity. It's easy to read, as I did when I was younger, looking for myself and finding myself quite easily in, say, a Holden Caulfield or a Nick Adams or a Quentin Compson, even. Not that I was exactly any of those characters, but still I could see enough of myself in them, an aspect of myself in each. It's much harder to see myself in Achilles or even reverend Priam.
To read the Iliad, though, is, at least within the framework of the front and back covers of the book, to enter into the Greek worldview, to see humanity from the Greek perspective. To do so means that we undertake the values of warfare and honor. Achilles seems to me petulant and ultimately irresponsible. Others die for his pride. Not that I side with Agamemnon, either -- but it takes me a while to see what is at stake for Achilles when Agamemnon decides to seize the great warrior's war-prize, the girl Briseis. Here's what Daniel Mendelsohn, in an essay that first appeared in the New Yorker in 2011, has to say about the matter:
... the seizure of the girl is an intolerable affront; as the furious Achilles puts it [in Stephen Mitchell's translation], 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. (See pp. 106-107 in Mendelsohn's collection, Waiting for the Barbarians.)
So, we can see what's behind Achilles' rage. That's still not enough to validate it, though, and that is entirely the point. We don't have to validate Achilles' rage, we just have to understand where it comes from, the values that underlie his feelings and his course of action. Achilles himself will ultimately rue his own rage. In his protest over the loss of a trophy, a slave girl who represents his prowess as a warrior, a person whose humanity is symbolic and whose position is subordinate, Achilles ends up losing his greatest friend and companion, Patroclus, whose humaity is too real and whose position is, in Achilles' own estimation, equal to his own. Mendelsohn again:
The means and effects of [Achilles'] transformation are what make the Iliad the first genuinely tragic narrative in the Western tradition .... The harrowing scenes of grief that follow [Patroclus' death] 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 ... we "suffer into knowledge." (Waiting for the Barbarians, pp. 110-111.)Thus the Iliad is epic but also tragedy, and nothing gets at the soul of humanity more than tragedy. Achilles' ability to identify with the suffering of his antagonist's father is as profound a moment as you will find anywhere in literature, short-lived as the moment may be. Priam's ability to identify with his son's killer is equally profound. We understand the humanity of others when we understand their suffering. Achilles has isolated himself in his rage, separated himself from his allies and countrymen. When he reenters the war, it is not as a representative of the Greek army. He's not fighting the Trojan War, but his own war of vengeance. His Myrmidons are behind him, but they are hardly significant. When Achilles reenters the world of social relations, it's stunning that he does so not with his fellow Greeks, but with the very king of the Trojans himself. This is his first compact, his first ritually joined relationship with another living being, after the expiration of his rage.
What does Achilles learn from his rage, from his subsequent mourning for the loss of his friend Patroclus, from his encounter with the grieving father of his great enemy? One wonders how he feels on the morning of that twelfth day, after Hector's funeral, going back into battle and soon to meet his death. Homer never says, and the story ends with a great set of ellipses. It's true that the ultimate outcome of events has not changed one bit: Achilles will die; Troy will be ruined, Priam and all his blood with it. But I have to agree with Mendelsohn: the acts that take place here are too strong, too much the focus of everything, to be so trivial that there is not a change inside of these two men. Achilles has, for a moment, gained insight into the heart of his enemy. He has been prompted by the gods, no doubt, to release Hector's corpse, but there is little that happens here that has not been prompted by the gods. Achilles has reached out to his enemy in a gesture of kindness, sympathy, understanding. He has reneged on his promise to brutalize Hector's body -- and we have seen just how seriously Achilles takes his promises. He will kill again, but can it possibly be in hatred? The rage has expired from his heart.
It is strange to me that a story so thoroughly Greek -- as opposed to Trojan -- and so thoroughly dedicated to Achilles should end with a focus on Hector's funeral, as celebrated by the Trojans themselves. Then it occurs to me that maybe it is fitting, after all, for Hector's funeral is a testament to Achilles' momentary insight. The nature of that insight, maybe, can't be put into words, which is why Homer doesn't try it, but it has something to do with the universal elements of human experience -- grief, suffering, mortality, acquiescence to fate, the grand futility of all our actions, all of which are summed up in the tragic vision.
Athena
The Iliad is not just a story of humanity, though; it is a story of the gods. Stories of the gods are, indeed, ultimately stories about humanity, too, but in an anthropological sort of way. We tend to divide Greek culture into the Apollonian and the Dionysian, but from reading Homer you get a sense that there is another god (or goddess) who ought to weigh in here -- Athena. I find it impossible to read Homer without gravitating toward her as my deity of choice. Were I to build a temple, it would be to her, but I find myself wondering what exactly it is that she represents. Wisdom, warfare, crafts, yes, but beyond all that she seems to be the most thoroughly Greek of the Olympians (in the sense I described it earlier, not the Greek of the philosophers). She loves the great Greek heroes; she stands by them and embodies their values. Could Homer have been Athenian, and therefore biased? Or was his homeland Ithaca, and thus his ultimate preference for one hero above the others?
Homer
These questions lead to the bigger question of whether "Homer" actually existed or not. As I felt with the Odyssey, I feel instinctively that this text is primarily the result of a single visionary poet who has taken material from the oral tradition and adapted it to his purposes. Again, the genius is in the framing. Homer is not unlike Shakespeare in that the plots were out there in the public domain; what made both writers great was the manner in which they presented that material. There are a limited number of stories. What matters is the storytelling.
