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Date published: 6/26/2004
Sing, O Goddess, the wrath of Peleus' son Achilles, which brought pains a thousand-fold upon the Achaians. WASHINGTON--So opens "The Ili- ad," the world's first great literary work. Homer's poem about the Trojan War has intrigue, politics, sex, and vast battles--all the elements of an exciting epic, whether recited in the halls of ancient palaces or made into a Hollywood blockbuster. The Bronze Age society of the Greeks who fought before Priam's fortress around 1250 B.C. was in many ways primitive and brutal. After the sack of sacred Ilium that society collapsed. Five hundred years later, Homer told the tale in a Greek society that had emerged from a dark age and was in transition to the classical civilization that marked the birth of the West. America today is at war with barbarians from a culture that also is primitive and brutal but which is, one hopes, in transition to something far better. Homer's "Iliad" thus offers lessons for us today that echo from that distance age. Wars are always brutal, ancient ones especially so. The battles described in "The Iliad" were gory, blood-soaked affairs, with spears spilling brains from skulls and swords tearing out entrails. Homer's epic portrays courage in battle, but also dramatizes a particular cause of war and violence. Achilles was a man driven by his unrestrained passions. When the Greek commander Agamemnon took from him a captive woman he was awarded by the army, Achilles sulked in his tent, seething with anger, as Hector and the Trojans killed his friends and threatened to drive the Greeks into the sea. When his beloved friend Petraclos was killed by Hector, Achilles' grief and fury turned him into a human killing machine, hacking off heads and limbs as he butchered his way to the walls of Troy and slew Hector. His anger still unsated, he committed sacrilege, dragging the body behind his chariot. Only when Hector's father, King Priam, sneaked into Achilles' tent and begged for the body of his son for a proper burial did Achilles' fury finally dissipate. He became human again, recovering his sense of decency.
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