There’s a fight a-brewin’: On September 26th, Emily Wilson’s translation of the ancient Greek epic poem the Iliad was released (published by W.W. Norton), the natural follow-up to her 2018 translation of the Odyssey. That initial project garnered a great deal of attention as being the first published translation of the Odyssey done by a woman—into English. Wilson, for her part, prefers to emphasize her work’s more immediate qualities than her own metahistorical first-ness.
The marketing campaign for Wilson’s Odyssey was very successful, however, due in whatever proportion to usage of the reliable “first woman to ____” narrative, and the book received popular acclaim as well as positive scholarly reviews. To some people, it was their first introduction to the Homeric epic. For others, it was the first time that they really connected to the story, freshly delivered to them in more idiomatically accessible language. In either case, I have anecdotally heard several people say that they first developed a deep personal connection to Homeric poetry and to Odysseus’ story through Wilson’s translation.
Other people, however, received the first translation of the Odyssey (into English) by a woman with hostility and suspicion. This too is probably ascribable to the emphasis on Wilson’s gender during the translation’s marketing. Why, reactionaries appear to have reasoned, would you put so much emphasis on the “first woman” business unless this new work was a part of some feminist agenda? Why can’t the feminists leave these traditional tales about super men alone? Now once more, with the release of Wilson’s Iliad, the controversy has been revived. At least this time around, the conversation’s nominal centering on the Iliad, the tale of Achilles’ wrath, permits us to make a cute little parallel: both Achilles, the Iliad’s central wrathful hero, and Wilson’s more strident detractors compel us to wonder, “why are you so angry?”
I don’t really wish to litigate here every specific argument that has been raised, or even just the best or worst ones, about what the Homeric epics should really be and how Wilson distorts/misses their essence. But I do wish to reflect on how these arguments play on commonly held notions about the past, for I think they will be pertinent to a fantasy-reading audience.
It is worth mentioning that I will be making some arguments here about what I infer to be broadly held beliefs. Estimating what others believe is at the best of times a tenuous proposition, and I may simply prove to be not a very good barometer. Have I done enough hedging yet? OK, here we go:
There is a lot of fat to cut through in the discourse around Wilson’s work, most of it pertaining to disagreements on translation methodologies. Is it superior to keep the translation as literal as possible, cat for chat, or is there some “spirit” of the original text that it is more important to communicate, one better achieved through the taking of certain liberties? What register of English speech is truest to the style of Homeric Greek? And so on. These are interesting but thorny topics—in whose brambles one can hide an awful lot of ideology.
A couple of weeks before her Iliad’s release, a thread criticizing Wilson’s Odyssey in anticipation of her new work made some waves on Classics Twitter, interrupting everyone’s busy schedule of making niche mythology puns and references—and even broke containment into the broader discourse by dint of being so silly that it unwittingly copied the format of a common meme. (Paging Rebecca Solnit…) One particular claim, though, stood out to me and a number of other rubberneckers: that Wilson’s rendering of the Greek adjective πολύτροπον (polytropon) as “complicated” in the Odyssey’s first line amounts to an “insult” toward Odysseus.
“Tell me about a complicated man.”
(The Odyssey, Book 1, line 1)
It’s a perplexing point, but a telling one, I think, once you untangle its logic. A more primary objection would be that the translation is off, and this objection has also been raised. But Wilson has discussed her methods and reasons for translating just this one specific word this way many, many times. It is metrically felicitous, it employs a similar kind of metaphor to the one at work in the Greek. You will either be persuaded by her explanations or you won’t. But to call the choice an “insult” is a stretch which signals that a larger point is being made—one that’s about values rather than accuracy.
I think it is fair to extrapolate that the real issue here is that “complicated” and many of Wilson’s other choices of diction are not grand enough for certain tastes. Most reactions to Wilson’s style, both the positive and negative accounts, emphasize the accessibility of her language, leading some to titter that the masses can now read the story “without excessive mental interruption.” This is a deeply unworthy criticism that at best confuses verbal floridity for complexity, and at worst snidely hides elitism behind thin intellectualism.
This lack of highfalutin’ talk—though to my ear, it is still plenty falutin’—does not overdetermine for the audience how exalted or virtuous we should think the feats of masculine achievement related in these stories are to the same degree that using language in higher register might have. To some readers, this robs the texts of what (to them) made the poems meaningful. If we are not here to bask in the glory of Achilles and Odysseus and Diomedes and Ajax and their strength and daring, then why did we even show up for the party?
Fortunately, Daniel Walden for The Bulwark has already done an excellent job at cutting through the noise, calling out in his review reactions that confuse “criticism of taste and criticism of merit”:
Wilson has made choices, the same as any other translator has: These choices place emphasis on one thing and not on another. To complain “but there’s more to it than that!” is nearly redundant: of course there is, because we are reading English and not Greek.
Walden does not hesitate either to identify the culprits of that unsophisticated criticism as “culture-war pundits.” The usual suspects, then. But we can say a little more here about what it is that these pundits seem to believe. For whether or not we are politically aligned with the people making these sorts of arguments (whom I infer tend to be more conservative), we might share more ideas about the past with them than we realize, ideas centered around that past’s relative…well, complexity.
That is the supposed distortion taking place at Wilson’s hands, is it not? That she has taken an ancient text about virtue and either injected it with some sort of postmodern moral skepticism, or at least she has introduced it to too wide of an audience who will, by fault of being moderns with modern styles of interpretation, misinterpret it. That is a strange way to talk about art, to insist that it should leave as little room as possible for people to misunderstand, i.e., have a different perspective from yours.
It is, however, a legibly less strange way to talk about an artifact. Unlike art, where we might be more forgiving of differences in perspective borne out by critical engagement, we expect artifacts to represent a particular moment in time. The artifact tends to get held out as a more purely educational object, and as such it ought to impart clear, standard information. This will be on the test. Thus, our understanding of the artifact needs to be relatively simple. If it is very old, we might even be given to think that the culture the artifact represents really was relatively simple, in the senses of being less large, less diverse, and perhaps less self-reflective.
So here’s the crux: I suspect that we are collectively inclined to treat the Homeric epics as artifacts. They are supposed to represent an idea of ancient Greece to us, and arch narratives of historical progress prime us to accept that past societies were scientifically, politically, and ethically less complicated. Thus, we as readers may expect the Homeric epics to reflect a relatively simplistic worldview, one that is, say, uncritical of patriarchal hegemony—and we can believe that without, as some people do, trying to use it as an argument in favor of patriarchal values.
It is worth pointing out, then, that the Homeric epics invite a lot of ambivalence about the heroic world they portray.
The closest they ever come to a tidy moral lesson that I can think of is Menelaus’ statement on ideal hospitality in Odyssey book 15, imparted upon hearing that Telemachus would like to go home now, please:
I disapprove of too much friendliness
And of too much standoffishness. A balance
Is best. To force a visitor to stay
Is just as bad as pushing him to go.
Be kind to guests when they are visiting,
Then help them on their way. […](Trans. Emily Wilson)
And this is a rare universal truth, Homer. Well done. Anyone who has ever desperately tried to excuse themself from an interminable party will understand.
But neat universal truths delivered didactically are few and far between here, even more so in the Iliad than the Odyssey. Some may try to describe the former, the tale of Achilles, as one about the importance of glory over even life itself, a study in macho-ness—delivered direct from the time when men were men! I won’t outright say that this reading is wrong. It is certainly not completely out of touch with the text, which is indeed deeply concerned with honor, both that which must be paid to the gods and goddesses (Hera and Athena’s sense of slighted honor is deliciously palpable whenever they appear) and that which mortals can scrape together for themselves while they live.
But I think it is more correct to say that the poem is depicting the difficulty, nigh impossibility even, for mortals of weighing those two goods against each other, life versus glory, happiness versus honor. What is impressive about Achilles is that he bothers to stop and really try to hash out the answer. What is tragic about him is that in his selfish deliberation, he loses more than he bargained on—the life of his dearest friend. Now Achilles’ chance for a long life is gone, and the glory he purchased with it is not as sweet as he hoped. There is emotional catharsis, but no clean resolution to take home like a trophy once the dust has settled, and we and Achilles are left to make peace with that.
There is, of course, “more to it than that.” Different Greek heroes strut their hour upon the stage in Achilles’ absence (Diomedes clocks in a few more hours than others), Trojan champion Hector—contrary to the sweet, Eric Bana-fied version of him that occupies the popular consciousness—sinks slowly deeper into his own war-madness the longer he fights, and human and Olympian politics play out to alternatingly dramatic and comedic effect. There are a hundred little moments of big emotion.
The venerable Ursula K. Le Guin wrote about Homer on her blog (she had a blog!) back in 2011:
People keep going to him and discovering new things, or old things, or things for the first time, or things all over again, and saying them. This has been going on for two or three millennia. That is an amazingly long time for anything to mean anything to anybody.
Le Guin understands the magic. It’s in how these stories, with their many sparkling facets, make you think and feel, not in what they instruct you to believe.
This is also where the fantasy genre comes into our discussion, for Le Guin’s new-old observation this time is that the Iliad and the Odyssey serve as ur examples of the two basic types of fantasy, the War and the Journey. (“I’m sure,” she notes, “this has occurred to others.”) But the big sticking point, what impresses Le Guin about Homer, is that he does not do the War like the many fantasies that followed in his wake. He does it better.
Le Guin takes issue with how most contemporary fantasy wars reduce the conflict to Good vs. Evil (the BBGE, she dubs it: Battle Between Good and Evil). Homer’s war, by contrast, is only people vs. people, and in those non-absolute terms it makes space for human tragedy in a way that the other kind of story can’t contain:
In the War of Good vs. Evil there can be divine or supernal justice but not human tragedy. It is by definition, technically, comic (as in The Divine Comedy): the good guys win. It has a happy ending. If the bad guys beat the good guys, unhappy ending, that’s mere reversal, flip side of the same coin. The author is not impartial. Dystopia is not tragedy.
There’s a not-so-subtle genre rebuke here over how fantasy tropes of Good battling Evil elide complexity in order to make a power fantasy. That point is itself a bit reductive, we might object, in the way that all generalizations are. We could communally probably produce a whole catalog of examples of tortured heroes (and villains) whose psychological woes keep readers from thinking that the life of a sword-swinging champion is too much fun.
Frodo Baggins immediately jumps to mind, who is not even a mighty warrior but only a humble hobbit carrying the One Ring, the essence of Evil, to where it can be destroyed. No one envies Frodo’s lot. It breaks him in ways that will never fully mend. Rand al’Thor from The Wheel of Time series, which often feels like The Lord of the Rings in photo negative, wields a tainted magic that will someday snuff out his sanity and cause him to turn on his loved ones (Greek myth scholars call that one “the Herakles.” For the inverse of this dynamic see “the Ajax”). In creating Elric of Melniboné’s vampiric runesword, Stormbringer, one gets the sense that Michael Moorcock is suggesting that all swords are really vampires that seduce and corrupt their otherwise virtuous wielders—or even if he didn’t intend it, we can still think that.
Even Le Guin herself goes in for this sort of heroic struggle in her Earthsea series. In the fourth and fifth books, the wizard Ged makes a great personal sacrifice to right the natural order of the world and subsequently must muddle his way through a kind of metaphysical bereavement.
But there is a difference between a hero who suffers in the name of his quest, which audiences are given to find ennobling and worthy in its own way, and protagonists who act in an indifferent moral landscape where the goalposts for “right” and “wrong” are not clearly established. The former are usually making a sacrifice, which is a hard decision, but one made with a certain idea of what they or the community are getting in return. The latter can experience loss without any framework to make it meaningful. That’s what Le Guin means when she talks about the “tragic,” I think. Loss existing without the comfort of some crude utilitarian gain.
The former sort of story isn’t wrong to tell or to enjoy, obviously, and it is even a useful tool for us to theorize about the nature of capital-E Evil (or conversely of Good). But the division of Good and Evil into clear, opposing camps will tend to simplify the moral calculus. Who is doing the Bad Thing? Just those guys over there. That’s part of the appeal of a solid Good vs. Evil story. They offer the comforting certainty of simplicity. Their heroes may sometimes be at a loss for what to do in the moment, but they are sure of their quest, their larger goal. We might sometimes call that “escapism”—which is yet another idea Le Guin wrote about on her blog. She’s pro-escapism, as she is pro-Homer, for its imaginative potential to confound simple, orthodox ways of thinking. But when it comes to the fantasy war, the BBGE, we probably ought to consider whether what we are escaping toward is a scenario where violence is inevitable and justified, which does not sound like much of an escape from our reality at all. Well, at least in fantasy, then it’s time to break out those super cool magical swords, baby! They all have names; I named mine Jessica.
Now, fictional violence is fun and kinetic and tense, all great things for fiction to be. I couldn’t get rid of it if I wanted to, and I don’t want to. It’s harder to make a narrative of normalizing diplomatic relations as exciting. We are just acknowledging here that the war of Good vs Evil, the setting for uncomplicated, fun violence, finds itself a ready home in the fantasy genre, which mostly consists of pseudo-historical settings, medievalesque societies and even more distant pasts in the case of sword-and-sandal stories. These fictional approximations of the past are presented as less complicated times. And if they didn’t exist, I would have nowhere to take Jessica.
Buy the Book
The Iliad: Translated by Emily Wilson
What is interesting about the Iliad—and what reactions to Wilson’s translation, along with Le Guin’s old blog post, have got me thinking about—is how it gives the lie to this notion that the ancient past—or at least its art—was restricted to the fabular and allegorical, morally prescriptive and didactic. That’s the way that I used to approach Greek myth, anyway. It’s not a reading framework I find that the Iliad or the Odyssey naturally fit into, which ought to be part of their appeal. I worry a little that the reviews which paint them in some totalizing manner (generally in an effort to get a dig at Wilson for missing the “one thing” about them) will turn off potential readers by making them seem more banal than they are.
I do want to tread a delicate line here and not imply that the epics were, in total contradiction of reactionary appropriations of them, secretly progressive all along. They’re not.
The Odyssey is a deeply misogynist story, not just incidentally, through matter-of-fact descriptions of the patriarchal culture in which it is set, but concertedly and thematically. The figures of Helen and Clytemnestra loom large in the text as paradigmatic “bad wives,” unfaithful and homicidal, in whose footsteps Odysseus must ensure his own wife, Penelope, has not followed. Agamemnon’s ghost stresses this to Odysseus, and that point, more than the not-so-helpful prophecy of Tiresias, feels like the true important lesson of his visit to the underworld.
And the Iliad is a story impressed by the heroic capacity to commit incredible violence. It is important and impressive that Achilles is the best at violence and has got the biggest spear. That’s not me making a funny, by the way. That’s a fact emphasized in the narrative. Book Sixteen, line 140, get a copy and see for yourself! Oh, Achilles, how will your boyfriend manage your big, enormous spear? He can’t. Patroclus has to leave it behind when he borrows the rest of Achilles’ gear. It’s just too big for him. It is an unsubtle signifier, but—look, subtlety and nuance are different things.
But these aspects of the epics are not created, as they may be in the hands of a lesser storyteller, through incurious and uncritical depictions of either women’s motivations or men’s pride. Homeric women have as much emotional and intellectual depth as the men—I’ll even disagree with Le Guin around this particular point; I think she reads Homer’s Helen as more shallow than the poet portrays her as—and Achilles’ and Odysseus’ unbending need to be lavishly credited for their greatness is a constant and unambiguous source of their folly. Is there a word for that idea? A Greek word, perhaps? I’m not sure; I’ve never heard of one…
There is a lot more we could say about the Iliad and the Odyssey here—and have said, and will say—because there’s no one thing to say about them that feels sufficient. Thus, coming to any conclusion on the subject always also feels a bit artificial, and the only one I can deliver here that feels honest, complete, and adequate is to say that I really love these poems. Considering the misogyny—this is not an imaginary past to which I yearn to return—maybe sometimes my love is as Mr. Darcy loves Elizabeth, “against my better judgement.” But my feelings will not be repressed.
I love the heroes’ big man emotions, the manipulative goddesses, the whole forest of metaphors about falling trees, and—one of my all-time favorite fantasy motifs—adoring descriptions of Really Cool Stuff. I also love their sometimes surprising and never mawkish depictions of tenderness between people, even people who are deeply out of harmony with one another, as Hector is with Andromache, or Achilles with Patroclus. I guess what I’m trying to say is, marry me, Homer. I have 10,000 a year. Your weirdo family doesn’t have to be in the picture.
I don’t think the epics are stories that will liberate me, teach me virtue, or even necessarily exalt my soul. For reasons of the dilated nature of their composition, they may not be the best document for learning about any one period in Greek history, either. But at least I love them for what they really are.
Ursula K. Le Guin and Emily Wilson seem to feel the same. Indeed, this, Wilson has repeatedly testified, is the true premise of her translation project: to render the poems in an as unmediated a way as a translator feasibly can, so that even more people can love them just as they are.
Kristen holds a master’s degree in Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies, but she also holds strong opinions on subjects in which she is not formally accredited. She reads. She is always trying to read more, MORE!
A quick note about the image at the top of this essay–we’re aware that the Trojan Horse isn’t mentioned in the Iliad, and only gets a brief mention in the Odyssey, and is very much a Virgil thing and not so much a Homeric one, BUT it was the best-looking option we had, and hey, when you’re discussing the Trojan War, all’s fair in love and images in the public domain, so please don’t hold our bit of artistic license against the article itself! Thanks :)
Dear Moderator,
re: your comment on the image used as the illustration for this piece:
I just want to say that I adore you and you’re (completely justifiable) impulse to preemptively defend a normal choice against the slings and arrows of pedants. Your pains are appreciated. Mwah! The choice of image is not only completely justifiable but inspired for the beautiful angle it gives us on a horse’s rump.
I also want to take the chance to signal to any readers that the “brief mention” the Trojan Horse gets in the Odyssey you reference–in which scene it is recounted how Helen walked around the horse’s exterior while imitating the voices of the wives of the men hiding inside–is one of the best in either epic, and everyone should seek it out immediately to familiarize themselves with it. You’ll never think of Helen the same way again.
I can’t believe you didn’t label that picture a spoiler. :)
There is also the idea (and I would love to credit specific people for this, but I’m really bad with names, and I’ve heard it from several places and can’t even remember the relationship between them) that the homeric author(s)[1] were using the form of the epic as one of the ways of talking about what war was like. One of the things that’s front-and-centre about the Iliad is how long you spend reading about people who only appear by name so that we can talk about exactly where the spear pierced them and how their life drained out (and those descriptions are also very repetitive, both because it’s easier to remember when reciting, and because there are only so many descriptions of throats being pierced or people being disemboweled, or dicks getting chopped off as the spear pierces through the body, that fit with dactylic hexameter. I’m not sure if English is lucky or unlucky that “disemboweled” fits into iambic pretty well. But I’ve seen the argument that this is also one of the points of the scenes – in this war, there are so many nearly anonymous people, all of whom have their own lives, and whose lives are reduced to being killed, in a single line, by a named character. And, well, war is like that, and that may have been part of the point. So many of the common soldiers, on both sides, didn’t have anything to do with the issues. They just happened to be living in the right (wrong) place, and be the right (wrong) age, and so they got to be shoved out into the battle line where their only contribution was to die to demonstrate someone else’s skill and glory. It’s not explicitly “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight”, but there are nuances.
And, of course, the above reasons mean that the deaths, whether of Greeks or Trojans (or Trojan allies, or whoever) all get described in the same way. And that, too, may be part of the point. In the battle scenes, the Greeks and Trojans have more in common than they have that separates them, and they all die the same way, and what, ultimately, does all of it accomplish? Troy falls and is destroyed, its people are killed or enslaved, and even a lot of the surviving Greek soldiers never make it home (and probably don’t make it home wealthy). For that matter, even the Greek leaders sometimes die randomly on the way back, or die just after getting back, or just find that they’re now in the middle of a bunch of complicated politics that arose during the years they were gone (and in some cases because they were gone), and they don’t know what to do now. If you follow what we have of the rest of the epic cycle, even Odysseus can’t manage to stay at home for more than a little bit, and he eventually gets killed by his son (not Telemachus, his son with Circe) in a random argument with no glory for anyone. And it’s certainly also not as if all of the Hellenes coming together to fight the Trojans kept them from being at each other’s throats the second the war was over.
It can also be linked up to myth in the sense that one interpretation[3] of a lot of Greek myths (especially a lot of everything involving Herakles), is that the idea of a mythical or epic hero is someone who’s really good at dealing with problems that happen outside of society, but as a result can’t fit in to that society, and doesn’t really get its benefits. Sometimes that’s PTSD, sometimes it’s just that the type of person who does well at heroic tasks just doesn’t have useful ways of reacting to complicated situations involving people. For Herakles, in particular, sometimes he gets portrayed as the guy who just can’t stop seeing everything as a fight for honor, and doesn’t have a way to respond to a (perceived) challenge that isn’t violent. Sometimes he’s the guy who shows up and has no sense of decorum or tact, and just blurts out totally inappropriate things, or acts in inappropriate ways, because he can’t even notice a hint that, say, “you know, this household is kind of acting like everyone is in mourning, maybe I shouldn’t be complaining that no one wants to party with me until the small hours of the morning, or ask people what happened to their sense of fun”. And, of course, in one play, his reaction to “you know, people aren’t happy to party with you because the mistress of the house just died and we’re all very sad” is “Oh, no problem, I’m just going to go to her grave and when Thanatos shows up to collect her I’ll wrestle him to the ground and get her back, and then she won’t be dead and there was no reason for everyone to be sad, so really I didn’t do anything insensitive in the first place” Being Herakles, of course, it works.
So ultimately, the complexity is part of the point. No one was doing just one thing for just one reason, and a lot of our surviving primary sources are effectively mash-ups of many people doing many things for many purposes. And people are absolutely, 100%, still doing all of those things.
[1] Whether or not Homer is a single person is probably never going to be resolved, but honestly that these poems come from an oral tradition means that, even if there is one single person who first wrote them down, there is definitely no one single person who came up with them, and they have layers upon layers of accretion as the Hellenic world redefined itself[2]
[2] One big example is just that the presence of Athens is kind of shoehorned in, because back when the oral tradition was putting the epics together Athens was a collection of unimportant villages, when it was written down Athens maybe had a bit of importance, and when we get to the era of the oldest surviving written copies Athens was important, and it really seems like, at some point, one or more Athenians decided that Athens at least had to be in the catalogue of ships, even if none of the heroes associated with Athens were there, because trying to shove them in would be a bit much for anyone to accept.
[3] Not “this is the only way to interpret Greek mythology”, but “this is one of the things that these stories were also talking about”
On a slight tangent, to anyone who might be interested, the wonderful podcast “Opera For Everyone” did a recent episode about the Strauss opera “The Egyptian Helen”, and take a deep dive into the use and misuse of the Helen mythology over the years.
Their episode on “Tosca” is also a wonderful celebration of art and its ability to transform lives.
Hmmmm. I may have to give Lit Crit more of a shot in my reading. I was turned off to it (to the point of being angry) by my mediocre high school English teachers’ attempts. Me, Miss Goody Two-Shoes and a straight-A student! It was the only class I despised.
In other words, I found this essay and some of the comments to be fascinating. Thank you.
I’m gonna try to learn some new tricks… 50 years after high school.
“how exalted or virtuous we should think the feats of masculine achievement related in these stories”
Exalted? Virtuous? Feats of masculine achievement. Stealing a comrade’s sex slave, profaning a corpse. Losing all your surviving men while spending a decade getting from Troy to Ithaca (including 7 years canoodling with Calypso) and killing a lot of the locals when you get there.
Strongly recommend Natalie Haynes’ podcast, Standing up for the Classics, which includes episodes in which she describes both the Iliad and the Odyssey in less than 30 minutes. Tissues may be needed for the former. Also her novel A Thousand Ships, covering the stories of every woman mentioned in the Iliad. Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad is also excellent. For actual peacemaking after a war, see Jo Walton’s The King’s Peace. If Homer is misogynist, a big if, he’s inspired some wonderful responses by women.
I’m currently enjoying Wilson’s version of the Odyssey, and planning to read her version of the Iliad. Maybe she can change it from the catalogue of How to Kill People with Pointy Weapons that I remember.
This really ties in more with The Odyssey than The Iliad, but I strongly recommend Claire North’s Songs of Penelope series, which deals with what is happening on the home front while Odysseus is away.
Various people from the epics make their appearance, as do the goddesses (the first book is narrated by Hera and gives a far different take on the goddess than I have ever come across), but most of the cast consists of people who don’t make it into the epics or history books-servants, slaves, old men who did not sail away to war.
The books are Ithaca, House of Odysseus, and (coming in June 2024) and The Last Song of Penelope.
@7 On the one hand, to be fair to Odysseus, the Odyssey doesn’t exactly describe seven years with Callisto as being consensual on his part. Okay, done being fair to an excellent survivor but really bad leader.
One hundred percent second anything by Natalie Haynes. Also, Madeline Miller’s Circe, although that also spends a lot of time with the extended epic cycle (or, at least, the surviving Cliff’s Notes of the extended epic cycle, via pseudo-Appollodorus, that are all that we have), as well as with Ovid.
Let me also throw in a recommendation for the podcast Let’s Talk about Myths Baby, which is yet another distinctive voice in the modern explosion of re-interpretations, dances, responses, and conversations on the Greek myths. And I love, so very much, that we’re getting all of these voices doing the same thing that must have been happening when they were first composed.
One of the saddest things, to me, is that we know there must have been versions of these stories, or other stories composed in response to them, or rebuttals, but none of them have survived (although there is an intriguing theory that I first encountered as an undergraduate that all of the stories Odysseus tells about himself in the Odyssey (because every time someone asks him who he is, he lies) are actually telling us about alternate versions of the Odysseus story that were also circulating at the same time, and that the Odyssey evolved to incorporate them as stories Odysseus told about himself[1].
[1] Although, given that, even within the Odyssey, the only source we have for most of the ten years of Odysseus’ travels is the story he tells to the Phaeacians, and we already know that every other time he tells his story he lies, there’s a decent argument that the only parts of the Odyssey that the poet is saying actually happened are the sections involving Telemachus, and everything after Odysseus leaves Circe’s island.
@9
thanks for the further recommendations, and the reminder of Circe, one of the best books about the joy of work that I have read. I should also add LeGuin’s Lavinia, which got me to read the AEneid.
As to alternate versions of the stories, they are a key enjoyment from Haynes’ work, as she includes them. And don’t forget the plays about how Helen was never at Troy at all, but hidden away in Egypt, and how Artemis saved Iphigenia at the very last moment …
And the Iliad is a story impressed by the heroic capacity to commit incredible violence.
I don’t think you can read the first four lines of the Iliad and think that this is a story about how impressive it is to commit incredible violence.
“Sing, goddess, the fury of Peleus’ son Achilles
The devastation it brought; the agony it brought to the Greeks,
How many of their brave souls it condemned to Hell,
How many of their bodies it left to be eaten by dogs and carrion birds”
And don’t forget the plays about how Helen was never at Troy at all, but hidden away in Egypt
One of the most interesting bits of Herodotus is his aside in Book 2 about what probably really happened in the Trojan War:
But, when I asked the priests whether the Greek account of what happened at Troy were idle or not, they gave me the following answer, saying that they had inquired and knew from Menelaus himself. After the rape of Helen, a great force of Greeks came to the Trojan land on Menelaus’ behalf. After disembarking and disposing their forces, they sent messengers to Troy, one of whom was Menelaus himself. [When these were let inside the city walls, they demanded the restitution of Helen and of the property which Alexandrus had stolen from Menelaus and carried off, and they demanded reparation for the wrongs; but the Trojans gave the same testimony then and later, sworn and unsworn: that they did not have Helen or the property claimed, but all of that was in Egypt and they could not justly make reparation for what Proteus the Egyptian had. But the Greeks, thinking that the Trojans were mocking them, laid siege to the city, until they took it; but there was no Helen there when they breached the wall
Sorry, Menelaus, your princess is in another castle.
We know where the Helen of Mass Destruction is, it’s in the region around Troy, and to the north, south, east and west of it.
As a thing to get upset about, it kind of reminds me of book fans getting upset about the movie version, except much stupider. I mean, when a book has a bad movie adaptation it does not displace the book, which still exists as good as it ever was, but still that movie is a major event shaping the perceptions of perhaps the majority of people who have read and/or might read the book, and for most books there may never be another. But a new translation of the Iliad? Excuse me, there are already dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of translations of the Iliad; if you don’t like this one, stick to your favourite. Sheesh.
Great article.
@8 – Totally agree. I love Clair North’s books and having her write a Penelope trilogy is wonderful.
I studied Homer back at school in the mid 80s and one of the things I liked was the absolute lack of who to root for. Do we feel more Trojan than Greek? It depends who commands the stage at the time. I also loved the fact that the gods were deployed as comic relief. This all clearly resonated with me because decades later I accidentally wrote a humorous novel about shipwrecked Greek sailors & fickle, vengeful gods. Homer does tend to get under your skin a bit.
MSB @@@@@ 7: the reason these things are “exalted” or “virtuous” is because the Greek word describing “virtue” and the Greek word describing “strength” may have been, if I understand correctly, more or less the same? (Or rather, as there were of course writers on morality- calling Aristotle – I should say that it’s more likely to be an extremely common mistranslation – hopefully avoided in Wilson’s translation which I have not read – yet! As with Iesua Cristo’s “the virtue has gone out of me” in the Christian Bible actually meaning “The strength has gone out of me”.) Something like that? Not sure.
@14 Yes, as I understand it, there’s definitely a connection. with άρετή (arete) being excellence, but also battle prowess (and having a relationship to being good). Thus words like aristocracy (rule by the best). Not quite as on-the-nose as the latin virtus being the source of “virtue”, but also being based off of vir (man), so “virtue” and “manliness” being synonyms, but certainly a related set of constructions.
No sensible reader or auditor could think The Iliad praises “masculine” virtues. Nor The Odyssey. I recommend Jasper Griffin: Homer On Life And Death (C Cpb T Clarendon Paperbacks) https://amzn.eu/d/2CO3crd
@11 I think it is sometimes useful to separate feelings of impressiveness from notions of absolute good or bad, which I would argue happens in the Iliad (and Odyssey) rather often. You are right, of course, to point out that the primary emotion the first lines of the poem center is grief–but it is epic grief, of wonderous, almost inconceivable scale. These stories love bigness, and I think its fair to say they are impressed by it. Big spears, big shields, big rocks that big heroes are able to throw, and also, finally, big funerals. All of these outsized acts evoke amazement from the audience, even if they are not ultimately adjudged to be in the service of some higher good.
So we can acknowledge that the Homeric epics are wonderfully emotionally complex, but we can’t get around (and don’t need to get around) how they are indeed enamored of great physical might.
@17 I’d say that’s a feature far from unique to the Greeks. I remember in my Beowulf class, early on the prof expounded to us about the Anglo Saxon (and more generally, Germanic and Scandinavian) concept of a hero. He said “To them, a hero was a man with almost unlimited power of violence.” He waved out the window at the massive boulder of jade we have sitting in a pond at our campus and said, “A hero was the kind of guy who could take that hunk of jade and throw it across the quad.”
May I offer Robin Lane Fox’s “Homer and his Iliad”?
Lane Fox taught a movie company to ride like Alexander’s Companion cavalry, no srtyrups,, no saddle, limited reins. He refused pay, but insisted he don costume and lance and ride in a cavalry charge.
Lane Fox also quotes Oliver Stone as saying that Iliad with strolling gods and goddesses described his war in Vietnam Nam. Think about that.
faced with Oliver Stone’s example, I tapped C S Lewis and use Aphrodite to explain falling in love. Not psychobble.
My twins were given a graphic novel of Odyssey. My youngest daughter asked for the Emily Wilson translation, so I converted grumpiness into discovery.
can I add Sarah Ruden on St Paul and her New Testament? Her version of the Peloponnesuan War sex strike is howling but heart breaking funny.
thus Robin Lane Fox is my favorite male Classics person
14, 15: the Greeks very definitely knew better than to confuse strength with either excellence or military prowess. “Iphikrates” here is the classical historian Roel Konendijk https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12ihmmr/deleted_by_user/?sort=new – making the point that the Greek physical ideal, aesthetically and military, was not a muscle-bound giant, but someone smaller, slimmer and tougher.
And if you read the Iliad, you’ll notice two things about Achilles. First, he isn’t invulnerable; that is a much later part of the myth. And second, he’s never described as being particularly strong. (Unlike 18, we never get descriptions of Achilles heaving boulders around). When he fights Aeneas in book 20, it’s carefully made clear that Aeneas is just as strong as Achilles, if not stronger – it’s Aeneas, not Achilles, who lifts a rock larger than two ordinary men could lift.
What Achilles is, as well as skilful and courageous, is fast. Over and over again it emphasises that Achilles can outrun anyone else on the field. His epithet is “swift-footed Achilles”. He outruns Polydoros, fastest of Priam’s sons.
@14
that may well be so, but we’re talking about translations into English, where virtue has a common meaning.
deal all, thanks for this fun and enlightening conversation!
@20 thank you, my classics education is building up rust by the year, and it’s good to be reminded of things that I had forgotten or mis-remembered.
One reason why, as Ursula K. Le Guin puts it, ‘People keep going to him and discovering new things,’ is surely the centuries of oral life of the two epics before they were captured in writing, like flies in amber. (They sure haven’t evolved much since.) A recitation in front of an audience isn’t, like a written text, a unidirectional thing, but more like a standup comedian’s routine being shaped by its reception. ‘Oh you LIKE that twist, do you? I’ll keep that in.’ I think this is most obvious in the complexities of Helen in The Iliad and Penelope in The Odyssey. Faithful or not? The narrative drive pushes for a resolution, but the telling keeps it at bay. We’re like Telemachus, impatient for mom and dad to just get back together: the story is wiser, and knows that the mystery is always better than the solution.
@23 one of the fun things that I first heard from a modern bard (Jeff Wright) that I had of course noticed, but not remarked on, is that Helen is never physically described at all in the epics. His suggestion is that the underlying reason is that the description of Helen, in the oral tradition, would be customized to the audience. If you’re singing for a royal court, Helen can have the same features as the queen. So when (a version of) the epic was written down, the part that was kind of supposed to be improvised just didn’t show up.
24 is an interesting point, but is anyone physically described in the epics? In the sense of “he’s very strong”, sure, but not in detail. Achilles has fair hair and I think that’s all we ever learn about him.
Thersites might be the exception (he’s hideously ugly, described in detail).
@25 Which means that heroes can look suspiciously like the local notables.
Well, possibly, but the thing about Jeff Wright’s hypothesis is that there’s no way of proving it because, unless there’s an ancient vampire hanging around Miletus or something, there are no witnesses left to tell us how the Iliad was performed before it was written down. So maybe he’s right but we’ll never know.
I would also point out that we don’t get any detailed physical description of Troy either, or of any other landscape. We get detailed descriptions of armour and weapons, Achilles’ shield most famously.
I don’t know enough about ancient Mediterranean epics to answer this: did any of the others have detailed physical descriptions? Do we have a pen-portrait of Enki and Gilgamesh?
I do know – at least, I think – that the Old Testament does not have them either – and that’s almost certainly not because rabbis were improvising around the text to flatter local nobles by saying that David or Samson or Solomon looked exactly like them.