The Iliad and Memory

Concentration is the casualty of our digital age. Texts, emails and notifications command our immediate attention, separating our minds from prolonged thought. Simulation trumps contemplation and our souls struggle to find the true, the beautiful and the good in our everyday lives.

Reading Homer’s Iliad is an act of defiance in our dystopian digital age. Ice bucket challenges are fleeting; can I control my concentration to read all 24 books of the ancient epic? I did it in my youth – twice – and recently endeavored to do it again. While the labor was tough at first, it became easier as my concentration improved. Distant memories returned to life: will Diomedes and Odysseus be discovered during their daring nighttime raid on the Trojan Camp in Book 10?

Diomedes and Odysseus Steal the Horses of King Rhesus During their Nighttime Raid by the Lycurgus Painter, Apulia, circa 360 BC.

Contemplation of memory is central to appreciating The Iliad. In an academic sense, the epic is the glorified and romanticized memory of Greek-speaking peoples from Mycenae’s Golden Age warring against what was probably a client state of the Hittite Empire. More profoundly, the poem is the apotheosis of memory: centuries before the poem was transcribed, a bard would recite all 24 books in dactylic hexameter, probably over the course of three nights during a festival. Whatever pride our own society may take in Artificial Intelligence should be tempered by an awareness of what we have lost from the past. We ought to celebrate the extraordinary human achievements of the human mind, not only in creating a literary epic without the benefit of writing, but also its subsequent transmission from memory by centuries of bards.

A poet begins a poem, detail of an amphora by the Kleophrades Painter, 500-480 BC. The words emerging from his mouth can be translated as "Once upon a time in Tiryns". The poem may concern Bellerophon, the grandfather of the Trojan hero Glaucus.

Why would an ancient Greek spend three nights listening to a bard recite the Iliad? A society steeped in the Marvel Universe should understand its most basic appeal. The warring Greeks and Trojans were the superheroes of their day. For example, when Aeneas bravely attempts to stop the rampaging Achilles, he picks up a stone, “a huge thing which no two men could carry such as men are now, but by himself he lightly hefted it.” My own childhood favorite was Diomedes, who at one point wounded Ares, the god of war, who fought on behalf of the Trojans. “Then Ares the brazen bellowed with a sound as great as nine thousand men make.” A martial tale, well told, will forever appeal to something primordial within the human psyche.

Were the Iliad only a homage to an ancient warrior culture, the appeal of the epic would be less enduring. Its civilizational mores are often jarring; fundamental to the storyline, for example, is the argument between Achilles and Agamemnon over possession of the woman Briseis as a spoil of war. One of the earliest documented Christians in the post-Biblical age, Saint Justin Martyr, derided the Homeric epics in the second century AD as “monuments of madness and intemperance,” citing this very plot line. The Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume struggled with the lack “of humanity and of decency, so conspicuous in the characters drawn by…Homer,” whom he admired greatly. The First World War disemboweled the stature of the martial epic; in Patrick Shaw-Stewart’s haunting poem “I saw a man this morning” the fiery glory of Achilles is shaded by the shrapnel and carnage of the Gallipoli campaign. Misgivings about the Iliad have persisted through millennia.

The philosopher David Hume by Allan Ramsay

Of course, the Iliad is much more than a homage to an ancient warrior culture fighting the Trojan War. It studies human characters; it reflects upon the joys of peace and the anguish of war; it considers restraints to barbarism. During my most recent encounter with the epic, I focused on Agamemnon as the antitype of true leadership, the societal implications of the imagery on Achilles’s shield and how Achilles’s rage was tamed. Literature should not be judged by its “relevance”; such prosaic utilitarianism dulls the development of an artistic sensibility. Still, it is arguably humbling, perhaps comforting and certainly interesting to consider the consistency of human affairs across millennia.

I find no character in the Iliad more loathsome than Agamemnon. He is the leader of the Greek expedition, intent upon avenging the dishonor the Trojan Paris brought upon the house of Atreus by seducing Helen, the wife of Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus. Agamemnon was the king of Mycenae, which historically was the center of Greek civilization in the second millennium BC. He is depicted as a masterful fighter, whose aristeia – martial valor – is recounted in Book 11.

Despite Agamemnon’s political and martial prestige, however, Homer depicts Agamemnon as self-serving, ineffective and unwilling to accept responsibility for his own actions. The flaws of the Mycenean leader recur too frequently for coincidence; the ancient bard appears to emphasize that titular leadership is distinct from true leadership.

"Mask of Agamemnon", Mycenae, 16th century BC. Despite its traditional association with the Homeric hero, the object predates the time of the Trojan War by several centuries.

The epic begins with the god Apollo bringing a plague upon the Greek camp in retribution for Agamemnon’s enslavement of the daughter of his priest Chryses as well as his rude (and distasteful) rejection of the priest’s pleas to have her returned. Achilles convenes an assembly, asking the seer Kalchas for the reason behind Apollo’s wrath. Once Agamemnon’s transgression is revealed, Achilles pleads with Agamenon to relent, offering much more booty in compensation when Troy is ultimately sacked. The wretched Agamenon first impugns the prophet Kalchas; evidently, political leaders have long hated truth-tellers. To compensate for his diminished status in surrendering his prize, Agamemnon venially demands that Achilles surrender to him the aforementioned Briseis. Achilles submits to Agamemnon’s political authority but in defiance chooses not to fight. The sidelining of the Greek’s ablest warrior – and his entire contingent - almost brings destruction to the Greek army. Even within a cultural ethos that values honor, status and glory, Agamemnon’s actions are petty and self-serving. He would sooner jeopardize the entire expedition he leads than allow a slight to his perceived status.

Relief of the Seer Calchas, second century AD.

Agamemnon’s irresolution and rhetorical ineptitude are also notable. In Book 2, he gives a speech to his army, focusing on the frustration of fighting for ten years without victory. He suggests that it’s time to give up and sail home, even if abandonment were to bring dishonor to the army. He expected his men to object and resolve to continue the fight. Instead, “the men in tumult swept to the ships, and underneath their feet the dust lifted and rose high, and the men were all shouting to one another to lay hold on the ships and drag them down to the bright sea.” The hero Odysseus then had to bail Agamemnon out, persuading the army to stay. In Book 9, when “Panic, companion of cold Terror, gripped the [Greeks]”, Agamemnon announces to his generals that they should give up – genuinely, this time. The young Diomedes and the old Nestor counter his despair; the latter tells him that the obvious solution is to make amends with Achilles, whom he publicly humiliated. In Book 14, Agamemnon again announces to his generals that it is time to give up and let the ships set sail. Odysseus boldly rebukes him, pointing out how his words are at odds with his position of authority: “I wish you directed some other unworthy army, and were not lord over us…Do not say it; for fear some other [Greek] might hear this word, which could never at all get past the lips of any man who understood inside his heart how to speak soundly, who was a sceptered king...of the [Greeks], whose lord you are.”

When Agamemnon and Achilles reconcile after the death of Achilles’s friend Patroclus, they notably diverge in their acceptance of responsibility. Coining an expression familiar to our ears, Achilles laments that too many Greeks had “bitten the dust, by enemy hands, when I was away in my anger”, thus acknowledging his responsibility for their deaths. Agamemnon, however, blames the gods for his part in the quarrel. While the Greeks “have often spoken against me and found fault with me…I am not responsible but Zeus is.” He continues:

“Yet what could I do? It is the god who accomplishes all things. Delusion is the eldest daughter of Zeus, the accursed who deludes all; her feet are delicate and they step not on the firm earth, but she walks the air above men’s heads and leads them astray. She has entangled others before me.”

Perhaps this passage is the first example of a shameless politico disavowing responsibility for his own misconduct, deflecting it onto others, and then saying it could have happened to anyone.

Agamemnon rejecting the pleas of Chryses, by Luca Ferrari. Homer recounts many instances in the Iliad when gods deceive mortals. At no point does he say Zeus deceived Agamemnon in the matter of Chryses and Briseis.

We live in an age when that daughter of Zeus inspires agitprops for leaders senile or megalomaniacal alike. But millennia ago, a blind bard could clearly see that political authority does not confer moral authority. Homer’s character study of Agamemnon is timeless; it reveals how leadership can be undermined by poor character. While the civilizational mores of ancient Mycenae may differ from our own, character types recur across human history. Studying the past helps us see the present more clearly, as our senses discern the delicate feet of Zeus’s daughter.

The second theme that made a deep impression upon me was the imagery on Achilles’s new shield in Book 18. With Achilles out of commission, the Trojans push the Greek army back to their own ships. Achilles’ friend Patroclus takes pity on his comrades and asks to borrow Achilles’ armor and to lead Achilles’ contingent to battle. Thinking Patroclus is Achilles, the Trojan army is routed and retreats to the walls of Troy. There the Trojan hero Hector kills Patroclus and strips him of his armor. Achilles vows vengeance but needs a new set of armor. His divine mother Thetis gets Hephaestus, the god of the metalworking, to construct a new one.

The Trojans Repulsing the Greeks, engraving, by Giovanni Battista Scultori.

Hephaestus’s shield depicts many things – astronomical bodies, bucolic and agricultural scenes, a ruler with a scepter as well as people dancing. There is also a very poignant juxtaposition between a city at peace and a city at war. The latter includes depictions of a war counsel, preparation for an ambush, killing of civilians and the battle itself: “Hate was there with Confusion among them, and Death the destructive; she was holding a live man with a new wound, and another one unhurt, and dragged a dead man by the feet through the carnage.”

Shield of Achilles (detail) by Philip Rundell (1746-1827).

The city at peace, in contrast, contains weddings, festivals, dancing and music. But there is still strife here. Most of the description concerns the proceedings of what we would call a wrongful death claim: “A quarrel had arisen, and two men were disputing over the blood price for a man who had been killed. One man promised full restitutions in a public statement, but the other refused and would accept nothing. Both then made for an arbitrator, to have a decision; and people were speaking up on either side, to help both men.”

Artists have tried to recreate this fantastically complex schema on an actual shield. With respect to the practicalities of warfare, the decorations are almost nonsensical: they would not help a warrior in battle. But symbolically, they are profound. On one level, the shield – and the warrior’s arms – help defend a society’s way of life - its marriages, its festivals, its agriculture and its political order. Ultimately, a society depends upon individuals willing to risk their lives to preserve it.

Shield of Achilles, by Angelo Monticelli, ca. 1820.

Yet, in my mind, the most striking aspect of the shield is the description of the legal proceedings in the city at peace. The one at war contains familiar images of death and destruction; certain scenes arguably allude to incidents in the Iliad itself. Conflict does exist in the city at peace, but the people look to the law to resolve it, and not to violence. The length of Homer’s description of the legal proceedings underscores its importance to peace: a system of law forms an alternative to war, violence and anarchy. This truth is so fundamental that it is depicted on the shield of the greatest warrior in the greatest war epic.

Unfortunately, as Cicero would say centuries later, “In times of war, the laws fall silent.” To avenge death of Patroclus, Achilles engages in a brutal homicidal rampage that transgress the social mores even of a warrior culture. He kills so many Trojans that their bodies dam a local river. He sacrifices twelve captured Trojan youths as part of Patroclus’s funerary rites. Finally, after slaying Hector, Achilles attempts to mutilate the Trojan prince’s body by dragging it from his chariot.

The Funeral of Patroclus by Jacques-Louis David . Note the Trojan youth being sacrificed and another's lifeless body being added to the funeral pyre. Hector's corpse remains attached to the chariot.

Homer’s description of the brutality and bloodshed is certainly vivid, but not as interesting - in my opinion - as the forces that eventually stay Achilles’s bloodlust. No mortal can: Aeneas bravely tries; he is saved from certain death by the intervention of the god Poseidon, who favors the Greeks, but cannot allow a man as virtuous as Aeneas fall victim to Achilles’s rampage. Incidentally, centuries after the Iliad was composed, the Roman poet Virgil wrote the great epic the Aeneid, in which the great Trojan hero leads the city’s refugees to the shores of the Tiber, where they become the progenitors of the Roman people.  

The only force that can thwart Achilles is the river god Scamander, who is appalled by the Trojan corpses that clog his river. At first, he politely asks the Greek hero, in effect, to move his rampage elsewhere. Achilles ignores this request, whereupon the deity takes revenge. He washes the dead bodies onto the shore, protects the living Trojans and then proceeds to consume Achilles in water. For the first time in the epic, the Greek hero is frightened – not so much of death – but rather of dying in such an inglorious manner. The goddess Athena strengthens Achilles, who escapes the river’s waves.

At that point Scamander enjoins his brother Simoeis, a neighboring river deity, to fight to protect Troy. “Beloved brother, let even the two of us join to hold back the strength of a man, since presently he will storm the great city of Lord Priam….For I say that his strength will not be enough for him nor his beauty nor his arms in their splendor, which somewhere deep down under the waters shall lie folded under mud.” Achilles is again saved – this time, by the goddess Hera – who dispatches Hephaestus with his “inhuman fire” to thwart the river deities. In this battle of the elements, fire defeats water and Achilles avoids death.

Scamander and Simoeis Battle Achilles, by Auguste Coudert.

Why would Homer include this conflict, so rich in thematic content? One reading is very appealing to the environmentally-minded: the river gives life to its city. The pollution wrought by Achilles’s rampage upsets the natural order; nature, in turn, will seek to correct this desecration. The river’s expulsion of the dead Trojan bodies onto land is also significant. A body buried in water cannot receive proper burial rites, so Scamander is trying to restore the correct social mores. The natural relationship between the river and its city is thus affirmed. On another level, the passage underscores how even the greatest warrior, clad in the greatest armor, can be overpowered by the forces of nature itself.

These interpretations appeal to our present sensibilities and are not necessarily incorrect. However, it is worth restating the obvious: Achilles did not die under the waves of Scamander and Simoeis. Greater gods protected him from death to allow Achilles to receive his glory and fulfil his destiny. Regardless of nature’s power, regardless of how greatly Achilles disrupts the natural order, Homer emphasizes that Achilles will succeed if Zeus grants him success. This interpretation may not be our preferred one, but the point of studying great literature is not to reaffirm our own beliefs but understand human existence through the eyes of others, even from civilizations long expired.

Zeus allow Achilles to achieve his glory by killing Hector and extracting revenge for the death of Patroclus. Achilles, however, in modern parlance, cannot find closure. He refuses to bathe and clean the gore on his body from his rampage. He drags the dead body of Hector from his chariot around the tomb of Patroclus. He nurses his own wrath but finds that hatred cannot compensate for sorrow. Yet he needs divine intervention to return to societal norms.

The god Apollo berates his fellow Olympians for their lack of compassion for the family of the slain Hector and for their indulgence of Achilles’s antics:

“You are hard, you gods, and destructive…your desire is to help this cursed Achilles within whose breast there are no feelings of justice, nor can his mind be bent, but his purposes are fierce, like a lion…So Achilles has destroyed pity, and there is not in him any shame…now he had torn the heart of life from great Hector, ties him to his horses and drags him around his beloved companion’s tomb; and nothing is gained thereby for his good, or his honor.”

Apollo, ("The Apollo Belvedere"), second century AD.

In the cause of justice, Apollo persuades the other gods to put an end to this barbarity. Thetis, the divine mother of Achilles, is dispatched to force her son to accept a clandestine visit from the Trojan King Priam, who wants to ransom Hector’s body so that his son can receive proper burial rites.

The meeting between Priam and Achilles is perhaps the most memorable scene of the Iliad. The two foes weep together to mourn their respective losses; compassion forms the bond of their common humanity.  Human existence is not easy. As Achilles explains to Priam: “There are two urns that stand on the door-sill of Zeus. They are unlike for the gifts they bestow: an urn of evils, an urn of blessings. If Zeus who delights in thunder mingles these and bestows them on man, he shifts, and moves now in evil, again in good fortune. But when Zeus [solely] bestows from the urn of sorrows, he makes a failure of man, and he wanders respected neither of gods nor mortals.” According to Homer, our best hope is to receive a mixture of blessings and misfortune. Some may receive only misfortune, but no one will receive only blessings.

The Ransom of Hector's Body, Detail of Attic Hydria, 510-500 BC, Note the potter's refined technique in marking scars on Hector's body.

Achilles allows Priam to return to Troy with the body of Hector and forces the Greek camp to observe a truce for eleven days, to allow the Trojans bury their noble prince. The scene in some ways prefigured the Christmas Truce of 1914 during the first year of World War I, when the guns of the Western Front went silent. Combatants met in no-man's land to wish each other Christmas greetings, give gifts, and share their common humanity. Fighting resumed in the Great War, as it would in the Trojan War. Although the Iliad ends with Hector’s funeral, the epic’s audience would have understood through other sources the poignant irony of Achilles’s meeting with Priam. The Greek hero would shortly thereafter be killed by Priam’s son Paris, while the Trojan king would later die at the hands of Achilles’s son Pyrrhus.  

German and British Officers Meeting in No-Man's Land, 1914.

Our society does not spend enough time contemplating the lessons of Achilles’s shield. The absence of laws – civic, international or societal mores – leads to anarchy, violence and war. Those blights, in turn, lead to our own dehumanization. Great literature obviously cannot prevent human beings’ propensity for destruction, but minds formed in critical thinking can see the challenges of their age more clearly because they can draw upon a great reservoir of knowledge. An appreciation of antiquity is itself important; it provides perspective and can temper the arrogance of contemporary society, proud of its wealth and technological progress.

Such considerations lead to the question: how is literature being taught to students nowadays? Three problems spring to mind. The first is that technology, in particular the dependence upon screens, has shot the concentration of so many students (and, in fairness, most adults). Contemplation and concentration require effort; whatever benefits technology confers are undermined by their effect on users’ capacity for prolonged thought.

Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer, by Rembrandt van Rijn. Aristotle's "Poetics" is the first known of work of literary criticism; in it, Aristotle analyzes Homer's works.

A second problem is the faddish propensity of many educators to favor books they considered relevant to the students reading them. This approach gets liberal education completely backwards. If you study only works that comport to your existing worldview, you will not become a critical thinker; you will become at best a narrowly knowledgeable agitprop, or, more likely, intellectually lazy. A student should study literature to expand their worldview. We and the Iliad are separated by millennia. Still, we benefit not simply from its rich imagery, but its reflections on war and peace; compassion and hatred; magnanimity and pettiness. I have no desire for society to return to a warrior ethos, but I am better for understanding it. Analyzing continuity and change, particularly over vast expanses of time, helps us develop a clearer understanding of the present.

A third problem in education is the utilitarian mindset of students and parents alike, who value grades themselves as the ends of education, rather than as a tool to assess how well a student is learning. From a utilitarian perspective, the point of school is to get good grades, which will get a student into a good college, which will then lead a student to a good job. If a society embraces this ethos, then of course students will cheat by using AI to answer assignments. My previous essay on Seneca illustrated the absurdity of this mindset by analyzing a conversation at a dinner party held some 2,000 years ago. Process remains paramount; reading, thinking and then expressing one’s thoughts are what develops the mind.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Illiad is its bardic origin: the epic was recited long before it was transcribed. Virgil, in contrast, wrote the Aeneid. An individual can admire the greatness of an oral tradition, while still recognizing the benefits of a literate society. Writing forces a certain discipline upon the creator; a good essay requires organization and clarity of thought. At this point in technology’s evolution, we need to ask what are the implications for society when the value of individual writing is diminished? Will an individual accustomed to delegating writing to AI be able to analyze a situation as clearly as an individual who composes one’s own thoughts?

I remain very skeptical.

Notes on Images:

Diomedes and Odysseus Steal the Horses of King Rhesus During their Nighttime Raid by the Lycurgus Painter, Apulia, circa 360 BC, National Archeological Museum of Naples.

A poet begins a poem, detail of an amphora by the Kleophrades Painter, 500-480 BC. British Museum, 1843,1103.34. For more information, go here.

The philosopher David Hume by Allan Ramsay (1713-1784), oil on canvas, painted in 1766. National Gallery of Scotland, PG 1057. For more information, go here.

"Mask of Agamemnon", gold repousse, Mycenae, 16th century BC. Hellenic National Archaeological Museum. For more information, go here.

Relief of the Seer Calchas, marble, second century AD. The J. Paul Getty Museum, 72.AA.160. For more information, go here.

Agamemnon rejecting the pleas of Chryses, by Luca Ferrari (1605-1654), oil on canvas, executed 1640-1650, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. For further information, go here.

The Trojans Repulsing the Greeks, engraving, by Giovanni Battista Scultori (1503–1575), executed in 1538, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 53.600.996. For more information, go here. The traditional title is somewhat misleading as it appears to depict Book 14, when the Greeks, aided by Poseiden, temporarily stem the Trojan counterattack.

Shield of Achilles (detail), silver gilt, by Philip Rundell (1746-1827), executed in 1821-1822, Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 51266. For more information, go here.

Shield of Achilles, colored engraving, by Angelo Monticelli (177/-1837), from "Le Costume Ancien ou Moderne" executed ~1820.

The Funeral of Patroclus, Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), executed in 1778. National Gallery of Ireland.

Scamander and Simoeis Battle Achilles, oil on canvas, Auguste Coudert (1789-1873), executed in 1818, Musée du Louvre, Inv. 3379. For more information, go here.

Apollo, ("The Apollo Belvedere"), marble, second century AD. Vatican Museum, 1015. For more information, go here.

The Ransom of Hector's Body, Detail of an Attic Hydria, 510-500 BC, Harvard Art Museums, 1972.40. For more information, go here.

German and British Officers Meeting in No-Man's Land, 1914. Imperial War Museum. For more information, go here.

Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 – 1669 AD), oil on canvas, executed 1653. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 61.198. For more information, go here.