After starting Lattimore’s Iliad many months ago, getting obsessed with comics, putting it down for a while, picking it up again, finishing it. LOVING it, I picked up Shaw’s Odyssey. Read that, finished it, LOVED it as well, and ever since I have been thinking nonstop about these poems. There is so much to talk about and my brain is incapable of staying organized but nevertheless here is my attempt at getting my thoughts in order. Don’t expect anything of quality.
The original plan for this post was to wait til the end of January, when I’d exhausted all the Ancient Greek stuff I’d picked up and would be able to talk about it all. These two, though, these two are incredible. I doubt any of the plays I picked up could compare and, as much as I respect his old posterior, Plato’s Republic doesn’t really give off the vibe of a dramatist.
Anyway, it’s been about a week since I finished the Odyssey, triple since the Iliad. I guess the best place to start would be authorship. Homer has traditionally been credited as the author of both, but in Richard Martin’s lovely essay preceding my Iliad I learned that scholarly opinion holds a rather interesting truth.
Two Homers
The first lived sometime around the 8th century BC, some 400 years after the Trojan war–which is believed to be historical–would have ended. This Homer, as seen in his (or her, as some scholars believe) vivid, gory, animated descriptions of battle, had seen conflict in his life. He was likely not the one to write it down. Rather, as a possibly-illiterate oral poet, he would have performed it for many and passed it down onto his students, who would also pass it down until someone took the time to transcribe it all. Some will now question the accuracy of the writings, but oral tradition can be remarkably consistent. The Vedas were famously oral texts for up to a thousand years before being written down and we have great proof of consistency between transcriptions. Such is the (current) story of the first Homer.
The second Homer went through the same oral tradition of the first but, in general, less is known about him. We can surmise that he was a fan of the First, living a handful of centuries after, what with his constant homages to the events of Troy. Also that he had not seen battle, given his more fantastical and wild descriptions of battle, a far cry from the First’s touching beauty. Shaw, in his Odyssey’s introduction, believed the Second to be a “bookworm,” “dog-lover,” and a “great if uncritical reader of the Iliad.” In my view, this Homer is one that had recently been cheated on. The poem tells what feels like a dozen stories of various wives cheating on their husbands in one way or another and getting divine punishment for it. I suppose you could argue this is just to contrast with the faithfulness of Penelope to Odysseus, but with the volume of tales appearing of adultery, one has to be at least a little confused. Nevertheless, the Odyssey is a wonderful tale of adventure, romance, and cyclopes.
Homer’s Masterpiece
With that little preamble out of the way, I think it is no contest that the Iliad is a better poem than the Odyssey. While, yes, it doesn’t have the same edge-of-your-seat drama and sense of adventure, it more than makes up for it in its humanity. The Iliad depicts a few days near the end of the Trojan war, wherein Patroclus, lover of Achilles, is killed in battle by Hector, pride of the Trojans. Achilles, at this point abstaining from battle due to mistreatment by his king Agamemnon, is given a divine fury upon hearing the news and kills Hector in the walls of Troy itself.
I’m leaving out a lot of details for both brevity and to avoid spoiling (I know it’s 3000 years old, but it’s always nice to have some plot twists), but that is the gist of it. The real genius of the Iliad lies in its humanity. Hector is not the villain, nor Achilles the hero. The Trojans are not deserving of death, but neither are the Greeks. There is a real empathy displayed in Homer’s poetry. When Patroclus dies we hear the laments of all who loved him, about how pure of heart and soul he was, how terrible a tragedy his death is, how much Hector deserves punishment. When Hector dies, the same happens. Achilles, in an act of spite and pettiness, attaches Hector to his horse and, literally, drags him through the mud. Homer describes the event in such vivid detail as to make the reader question how they ever cheered for Achilles in the first place. Later, when it is revealed Apollo was protecting Hector’s body postmortem, the man is given a hero’s funeral among his own people. It is this dichotomy, or lack thereof, that really resonates with me. Homer’s tragedy is one that affects all, Greek or Trojan. No one is spared from fate. The Trojans lose because the gods decide they will, not because they’re an evil people. It’s this humanity that makes the Iliad shine so bright.
Adaptations & White Supremacy
None of this is to disparage the Odyssey. It is also a great work, worthy of all its status, but I’d like to speak on something tangentially related. Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is coming out next July. Before I say what I’m about to say I’d like to preface with the fact that I absolutely will be seeing it.
Nolan: What are you doing? Every costume we’ve seen looks a) dull and lifeless, and b) Roman. I’ll ignore the first for now, maybe he’ll pull some magic with the lighting, but why the second? This is the same person that worked with astrophysicists on Interstellar to make sure he got the mechanics of General Relativity correct. The same person that gave us the most realistic visualization of a black hole ever in that same movie. So why now does Nolan decide to go for a populist take on history? In general, why is it so common to conflate Ancient Greek and Ancient Roman cultures? I have a theory: white supremacy.
White supremacist narratives of history are, by nature of being propaganda, distorted truths made to fit the idea of one unbroken chain of white culture. The Greeks, with their cultural impact throughout Europe, are typically the beginning of this chain. Then, it goes, the Romans came to hold that torch. This narrative is, in a word, stupid. A mythology of lies created to uplift the dregs of the world and oppress those they fear.
Unfortunately, the narrative is also pervasive, to the point of ubiquity. Most people don’t blink twice at iron armour in the Bronze age, it never crosses their mind. I don’t care about these people. The general population will always be lacking in historical knowledge. It’s creatives like Nolan that I am disappointed in. He’s somebody people point to as a thoughtful, intricate filmmaker. He’s somebody I still admire; as a kid The Dark Knight was like crack. It is nonetheless disappointing to see Nolan fall into this same trap. Best case scenario, the film is a subversion of the original in a way that makes this whole post seem idiotic. I hope so.
Until next time,