Progress Report Number 1
July 31, 1998
To say anything negative about The Iliad is almost like cursing one's mother. It is perhaps the most ancient of poems called Great in the Western tradition. Homer may not be the sole author, but it is generally considered that he was at least the principal one. Also, Homer may not have been his name, but there was a Society for the Preservation of the Poems of Homer many years after the oral tradition had originated. Since the oral tradition did not get written down for hundreds of years, the writer had a lot of different versions to choose from, but none too widely different.
The story is really only a part of a larger story about the Trojan Wars. The "hero" is Achilles. I was a little disappointed to find out that the story about the Trojan Horse, that everybody learns as a child, is not included in The Iliad. That story follows the period of time covered by The Iliad. Also, this book does not begin at the beginning of the Trojan Wars, but takes up at a point after the Trojans and the Danaans have been fighting over Helen of Troy for nine years.
These wars really were fought over that most beautiful of women, Helen of Troy. She was actually the wife of Menelaos, a Danaan (a resident of one of the main Greek Isles). She was stolen from Menelaos by Paris, a Trojan prince (Troy is where Turkey is today). The Danaans are of lighter complexion than the Trojans, and are generally thought to be more handsome and beautiful, even by the Trojans. Menelaos wants his woman back, and the Danaans go after her in force (Helen—the face that launched a thousand ships).
Why Achilles is generally named as the hero is a mystery. The Danaans are headed by Agamemnon. The leader of the Trojans is Hector. When the story opens, Agamemnon has to give up his woman (war booty) to please the Gods, so he takes Achilles’ woman (also war booty). This angers Achilles so much that he runs to his Mom, Thetis, a God. She soothes her baby by going to Zeus, the Father of the Gods, and secures from him the promise that things will go bad for the Danaans for a long time—until they come begging Achilles to come back and fight with them.
Meanwhile, Achilles just sulks and watches the battle from the sidelines. Even the Gods are more active in the battles than he is for most of the book. Zeus has to threaten them to keep his will prevailing. The parts of the story that dealt with the Gods was really the most enjoyable, for me. The rest is just a lot of hacking and spearing, told with amazingly gory detail. Check out these two examples:
Great, huh? How about this little jewel:
I am now on page 184 of the Mentor paperback, translated by W.H.D. Rouse, that contains 297 pages of tiny print, not counting the 9 pages of pronouncing index at the end where the hundreds of Greek names are broken out into helpfully accented syllables. I am seriously considering quitting here. The endless battles are worse than monotonous; they’re agonizing. The way Homer gives you a little background about most of the slain is nice (e.g. the father of so-and-so, or the son of so-and-so who’ll never see so-and-so, his lovely wife, again, whose father was rich in bronze and iron and gold, etc.)
I tried to be nice in this review, especially since this book appears first in the list of Great books of Literature. I read most of the other books before this one, and most of those books, I enjoyed. So if this is the first of my book reviews you read, don’t think I’m some sort of harsh critic. I just tell it like it hits me.
Copyright 1998, Herman Fontenot
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