Introduction
by Stephen Mitchell

Reading the Iliad

We return to the Iliad because it is one of the monuments of our own magnificence. Its poetry lifts even the most devastating human events into the realm of the beautiful, and it shows us how vast and serene the mind can be even when it contemplates the horrors of war. “Every time I study this priceless work,” Goethe said, “I am thrust into a state of astonishment.”

It has always been a popular poem, in every sense of the word. In ancient Athens more than twenty thousand people, as we know from Plato’s Ion, would go to the market place, theater, or open hillside, the way we might attend a concert, to hear a famous rhapsode recite “The Death of Hector” or “The Meeting of Priam and Achilles.” Most people in these crowds weren’t educated, and they must have gone, bringing picnic baskets and the ancient Greek equivalent of popcorn, prepared to be transported by the power of the story and the gorgeousness of the language, like the groundlings at Shakespeare’s Globe. This was poetry that gave pleasure to everyone—men and women, adults and children, the simple and the very sophisticated. It still has the power to move us all.

Here are two stories about its appeal: “Last week I was in Alice Springs,” a friend wrote to me, “in the Australian outback, and I went into a tiny café serving kangaroo tacos. The young man behind the counter (he couldn’t have been more than twenty-one) had a tattoo saying MÁnin. As I looked at it, he leaned over and said, ‘Mēnin. It means ”rage.” First word of the Iliad, which is my favorite book. I wear this to tell people about the amazing text that’s out there for them to discover.’ He was so open and unembarrassed about his enthusiasm. I could tell he was ready to talk about the Iliad all day—if only he could find someone to listen.”

Second story: In 1990, the Colombian Ministry of Culture set up a system of itinerant libraries to take books to the inhabitants of hard-to-reach rural areas. Donkey drivers would travel to these remote villages in the jungle or the sierra, leave the books for a few weeks with a teacher or a village elder, then come back and pick them up. Most of the books were technical works, agricultural handbooks, collections of sewing patterns, and the like, but there was a scattering of literary works among them. In one village all the books were returned to the donkey driver except for a single volume: a Spanish translation of the Iliad. The villagers refused to give it back; they said that they couldn’t part with it, because the story so clearly reflected their own. “It told of a war-torn country in which insane gods mix with men and women who never know exactly what the fighting is about, or when they will be happy, or why they will be killed.”

Of course, we can only perceive in the Iliad what we bring to it, and there are as many ways to see it as there are minds that see. Simone Weil, in a brilliant and famous essay, portrayed the Iliad as an indictment of war, while Alexander the Great used to sleep with it under his pillow, esteeming it as “a treasury of all military virtue.” (His personal copy had been corrected by his tutor, Aristotle.) But all readers, whatever their point of view, can appreciate the sheer power of Homer’s language, even in the most prosaic or mediocre translations.

That power is where I want to begin, and not so much with comments as with examples. I want to point to the pleasures we find everywhere in the poem, the bursts of delight that lie in store for us even before we are able to appreciate the glorious architecture of the whole or the subtleties of its moral insight. Here is a ship sailing to Troy:

And as soon as the flush of dawn appeared in the heavens,
they boarded the ship and launched her. Apollo sent them
a favoring breeze, and they raised the mast, and they hoisted
the white sail aloft, and it bellied out with the wind,
and on either side of the ship’s prow, the deep blue water
sang out as the ship flew over the waves to her goal. (1.469-74)

A Trojan archer shooting an arrow:

And laying the arrow’s notched end in the ox-gut bowstring,
he pulled it back with his right hand as far as his nipple,
with the iron tip of the arrow touching the bow shaft,
and the shaft was bent back, and he aimed, and then he let go,
and the great bow twanged, and the string sang out, and the arrow
flew through the dense crowd, eager to find its mark. (4.112-17)

As the arrow is about to find its mark, the goddess Athena deflects it:

But then, Menelaus, the blessed gods did not forget you.
Athena stepped out before you and with her hand
deflected the deadly arrow, brushing it off
as a mother brushes a fly from her sleeping child. (4.118-21)

The Trojan army, after a day of sustained carnage, is camped out on the plain, dangerously close to the Achaean ships:

So, with elated hearts, they sat up all night
on the battlefield, and their watch fires blazed all around them.
As, in the night sky, around the light of the moon,
the stars emerge, when the air is serene and windless,
and the stars shine bright, and the heart of the shepherd rejoices:
just so, before Ilion, the watch fires the Trojans had set
blazed midway between the ships and the river Xanthus.
A thousand watch fires were burning upon the plain,
and around each, fifty men sat in the glow of the firelight,
and the horses stood alongside the chariots, munching
white barley and oats, and waited for dawn to arise. (8.487-97)

Where did this shepherd come from? He miraculously pops up out of the poet’s imagination, and his joy and the glittering stars and the casual chewing of the horses give a feeling of profound awe to the scene. What an astonishing image this is, with its sense of infinite serenity that arises not from any of the characters (the Trojans are revved up with anticipation; the Achaeans are terrified) but from the poet’s own peace of heart.

Here is a passage in which Homer feels his way into the very horses. It ends with a line that may at first seem chilling in its matter-of-factness and lack of sentimentality:

…just so did the Trojan troops fall, and many horses
pulled empty chariots that rattled across the plain,
and they longed for their drivers; but these lay dead on the ground,
far dearer now to the vultures than to their wives. (11.159-62)

As the Achaean hero Ajax is being pushed back by the Trojans, Homer superimposes a willful donkey onto him:

And as when a donkey is led by some boys down a road—
a stubborn beast, on whom many sticks have been broken—
and they pass a field, and his strength is too much for the boys,
and he willfully turns in to ravage the high-standing grain,
and although they beat him with sticks, their strength is too feeble,
they manage to drive him out with much effort, and only
when he has eaten his fill: just so did the Trojans
keep crowding Ajax and thrusting at him with their spears. (11.518-25)

Both the armies fight on, evenly balanced, and suddenly, again out of nowhere, a poor spinning-woman springs into vivid existence through the power of the simile:

The Trojans kept trying to drive the Achaeans back;
but both sides held on. As an honest, hardworking woman
who spins for a living will hold the scales by the beam
and keep adding wool to a pan till the weight is balanced,
and thus she can earn a wretched wage for her children:
so evenly matched were the Trojans and the Achaeans. (12.406-11)

A devastating blow by the god Apollo becomes a child’s game by the seashore:

And with utter ease he knocked down the Argives’ wall,
like a young child sitting and playing beside the sea
who amuses himself by building a sand castle, then
gleefully knocks it down with his hands and feet:
so you, Lord Apollo, demolished what the Achaeans
had toiled so hard to build, and drove panic among them. (15.332-37)

Achilles’ troops swarm into battle like wasps. What is most marvelous here is the presence of the mischievous little boys and of the unsuspecting passerby, all of whom, at one or two steps from the primary simile, are generated out of the pure abundance of the poet’s imagination:

Meanwhile the Myrmidons, greatly exhilarated,
advanced with Patroclus leading and charged at the Trojans,
swarming out all at once like wasps on a roadside
that boys, in their childish sport, have stirred up to anger,
poking them over and over again in their nest,
the little fools, creating a public nuisance
for many people; and if a man passing by
jostles the nest and disturbs them, they all fly out
in a seething rage to attack him and fight for their young:
with a spirit like this, the Myrmidons all swarmed out
from the ships, and their furious battle cries filled the heavens. (16.232-42)

When the Trojan warrior Euphorbus is killed, we are shown the mysteriously touching detail of his plaited hair:

… and the point
tore its way through the tender flesh of the neck,
and he fell with a crash, and his armor clattered upon him,
and blood soaked his hair, which was like the hair of the Graces,
the long locks plaited with spirals of silver and gold. (17.43-47)

Achilles’ slave girl Briseïs mourns for the dead Patroclus, and we are given a momentary entrance into the lives of the other slave women:

Thus she grieved, and the women joined in her wailing
for Patroclus, and each one wept for her own private sorrows. (19.309-10)

In the boxing match during the funeral games for Patroclus, as Euryalus looks for an opening,

…Epéüs rushed in and hit him
full on the cheek. He was lifted up off the ground
like a fish that leaps from the shallow seaweed-strewn waters
and falls back into the dark waves: just so did he leap,
and his legs collapsed underneath him, and down he fell. (23.701-5)

Finally, Teucer, aiming an arrow at Hector, kills a young Trojan prince:

…he missed him and hit Gorgýthion in the chest,
Priam’s son by a wife who came from Æsýmē,
Cástianíra, as beautiful as a goddess;
and his head drooped, like a poppy in a spring garden
weighed down with seeds and a heavy rain: so his head
leaned to one side beneath the weight of his helmet. (8.281-86)

Is there a more poignant image than this in all of literature? Here the pathos of the young man’s death arises from the precision of the simile: as we see his head droop, we also see a poppy slowly bending over beneath the weight of its own fertility and of the life-bestowing rain. This is not a prettifying of a brutal reality; it is a parallel reality; it springs, spaceless and timeless, from the poet’s intense noticing. Nor is it a mere memory of the pleasures of a lost peacetime far from the battlefield of Troy. The alternative world of the spring garden isn’t in the background, it is right before our eyes, presented in stereoscopic vision; the drooping poppy is just as real as the arrow-pierced body that in a moment will keel over and fall to the ground in a pool of blood. There is an immense tenderness at work here, a peacefulness of heart that infuses this great poem of war with the music of its own acceptance.

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