The Iliad by Homer: Book Review – War, Achilles, and the Gods
Homer's Iliad is one of the oldest and most influential epics in Western literature. Composed around the 9th century BCE, it tells the story of the Trojan War—but not the entire ten-year conflict. Instead, Homer focuses on just fifty-two days of rage, honor, and destruction. The central figure is Achilles, the greatest warrior of the Greek army, whose anger at Agamemnon sets in motion a chain of events that leads to the death of Hector, Troy's greatest hero. In this review, I explore Homer's portrayal of the gods, the graphic battle scenes, the historical background of Troy, and even the surprising presence of "robots" in ancient poetry. I also compare the epic to the 2004 film Troy. Whether you're new to Homer or revisiting the classics, this review will guide you through the world of the Iliad.
Homer's Iliad: A Book Review
There are works and books that have transcended the ages. Homer's epic, the Iliad, is one such work. The Iliad is an epic written by an Ionian (Anatolian) poet who lived around the 9th century BCE.
The brief plot of the Iliad is as follows: The Greek armies gather under the command of King Agamemnon and lay siege to the city of Troy (Ilium). The reason is that Alexander (Paris), son of King Priam of Troy, has abducted Helen, the wife of Agamemnon's brother Menelaus. The war that begins for this reason lasts ten years.
Homer, however, recounts only a short period of the war—a span of fifty-two days. The epic begins with swift-footed Achilles becoming enraged at Agamemnon (because Agamemnon has taken his honor prize, the war captive Briseis). Due to his anger at Agamemnon, son of Atreus, Achilles, son of Peleus (whose mother is the goddess Thetis), refuses to take part in the battle. Until he does, the Achaeans (also called Danaans) cannot see victory.
After Achilles's companion Patroclus is killed in battle by Hector, Achilles then directs his rage toward the Trojans. The epic ends with Achilles killing Hector, followed by a nine-day funeral ceremony for Hector in Troy and his burial.
Many debates have arisen about the Iliad. I will not go into these debates here. However, the translator of the work, Azra Erhat, discusses all of them at length in her introduction to the Iliad. Still, the epic draws attention in many ways. I will focus on a few of them: the gods, the narrative style, and the nature of the war itself.
See also: The Odyssey by Homer: A Book Review – Story, Characters, and Adventures
Homer's Gods
The Iliad is written as two parallel stories. One is the events happening among humans—the battles. The other is the gods, who hold power over them. They dwell on Olympus, and Homer tells us that the greatest of them is Zeus (son of Cronus). Homer introduces another important goddess as "Hera (Here), both wife and sister of Zeus." Of course, Zeus is the greatest god, but he too is the son of Cronus—a god whom Zeus imprisoned in the underworld.
Zeus has other siblings as well, but he is more powerful than them, and they fear and avoid him. When they divided the world, the sky fell to Zeus, the sea to Poseidon, and the underworld to Hades. All warriors, when they die, are sent to Hades in the land of the dead.
Many gods are named in the epic. Most of them are sons or daughters of Zeus: Athena, Apollo, Ares, Aphrodite, and others. Homer addresses them sometimes as "Muses who dwell on Olympus."
In the epic, there is a war on earth among humans. And there is also a quarrel on Olympus among the gods. Some support the Achaeans, others support the Trojans. For this reason, noisy arguments sometimes break out among them. On occasion, they even descend into the battle themselves to help their favored side.
On the other hand, Homer tells us that everything that happens in the war occurs by the will of the gods. When Agamemnon takes Achilles's honor prize, he says the gods are to blame—that they clouded his mind. When the Achaeans are defeated, they lament that they cannot win because Zeus favors the Trojans. The nine days during which the Achaeans are ravaged by plague, according to Homer, happen because the god Apollo is angry with them.
However, these gods have characteristics that might seem strange to people of monotheistic faiths. Even Zeus, the greatest of them, fears and avoids his wife Hera—though he does not show it much. The others fear Zeus, who is more powerful than all of them. Although Poseidon is Zeus's brother and in some ways his equal, he too fears him.
“Meanwhile, Poseidon rose in secret from the sea
and went among the Greeks to urge them on,
because he was so troubled they were losing,
and that the Trojans had the upper hand,
and he was furious with Zeus. These two
had shared their parentage and native land,
but Zeus was older and he knew much more.
So Lord Poseidon would not help the Greeks
openly. He went in among the troops
secretly, in the semblance of a man.
These two gods tugged the rope of cruel conflict,
pulling it tight to one side and the other.
This rope, which could not be untied or broken,
untied the limbs of many living men.”
On the other hand, these gods are immortal. Yet they still complain that humans have caused them much suffering. When they enter battle, they are wounded and feel pain. But they do not die. Aphrodite is wounded in the hand during battle, and her blood flows. Her mother speaks of how much humans have made the gods suffer.
“Dione, the majestic goddess, answered,
“My child, be strong and bear your suffering.
Many of us who live on Mount Olympus
have suffered at the hands of men, when gods
and humans have been injuring each other.”
Battle Scenes
Homer's Iliad has a poetic style of narration. This stems primarily from the fact that the Iliad is a product of oral culture. You frequently encounter repetitions in the work. However, the battle descriptions are the feature that most caught my attention. At the beginning of the epic, Homer describes the combatants one by one: where they came from, their histories, their lineages. Likewise, he describes one by one those who came to support Troy. We see similarly lengthy descriptions when reading about who killed whom in battle, and who the killed and the killer were. These sections can sometimes tire the reader, because there are so many names that one can lose track of who was who. But for this very reason, there is an approximately 50-page name list at the end of the book.
Here are two examples of scenes that describe the war in the Iliad. The fighters are introduced one by one, with detailed information about who killed whom, as well as about both the killer and the slain. Moreover, the manner of death is described so graphically that some of it may be excessively violent for the reader.
And Meges killed Antenor’s son Pedaeus,
born out of wedlock, but his stepmother,
Theano, cared for him like her own children,
to please her husband. But the skillful spearman,
Meges, the son of Phyleus, drew near him
and struck his neck with his sharp spear. The tip,
slicing up through his teeth, cut off his tongue.
He bit the cold bronze, falling in the dust.
Then, he moved towards the sons of Phaenops—Xanthus
and Thoon, who were both full-grown. The father
was frail and weakened by severe old age.
He could not get another son as heir
for his possessions. Diomedes killed
both of them there, took both their lives away,
and left their father grief and lamentation.
He would not welcome them back home again
alive, after the war. His whole estate
would be divided among distant heirs.
The Trojan War lasted approximately ten years. While reading, I often wondered how the Greek army managed to stay and endure for so long. But at the same time, Homer provides the answer. Before Troy, the Achaeans had plundered many cities in the region and filled their ships with gold, bronze, food, animals, and captive women. Meanwhile, supplies were also coming to them by ship from Greece, and in return, these spoils were taken away. In a sense, this war was also a source of income and a functioning economy for them.
Almost all of Books Five and Six consist of who struck whom and how they killed. It is described in great detail: who died, who killed, who their parents were, how they were born, legends about them, and many other details. This abundance of detail reminded me, in a way, of James Joyce's Ulysses. That book also has so many details and names. Of course, one must not forget that Joyce's Ulysses was written with references to Homer's Odyssey.
All these deaths, Homer likens to the coming and going of the human race, to the changing of the seasons, and he says:
The generations
of men are like the growth and fall of leaves.
The wind shakes some to earth. The forest sprouts
new foliage, and springtime comes. So too,
one human generation comes to be,
another ends.
Robots and Homer's Imagination
The Trojan War took place around 1200 BCE, and Homer—whether he wrote the entire work himself or compiled different epics to create the Iliad—recounts an event that has a basis in history. Archaeological excavations have proven this, even though Troy was initially assumed to be a completely imaginary city. However, many details in the epic also reveal Homer's powerful imagination. Above all, he creates a mythological world and depicts gods with various characteristics.
What caught my attention the most is Homer's description of the robots made by the lame Hephaestus, the son of Zeus, on Olympus. When you consider that Homer lived in the 9th century BCE, the presence of such a thing in the epic is remarkable. First, Homer mentions self-moving tripods on wheels, made by the lame Hephaestus, which roll themselves to and from the gatherings of the gods to serve them. Then he describes "maidservants made of gold" who have "minds" and assist their master. In modern and current terms: "artificial intelligence robots."
“Slaves hurried to assist their lord. They were
made all of gold, but looked like living women.
They had a consciousness inside their hearts,
and strength and voices. They had learned their skills
from deathless gods.”
Human Sacrifice
We have already mentioned the bloody battle scenes in the Iliad above. There are also instances of humans offering vows and sacrifices to the gods. Most often, they pour wine on the ground or burn the thigh of a slaughtered animal as an offering to the gods. However, there is also a scene in which Achilles sacrifices the young Trojan captives he has seized.
During the funeral ceremony in which his companion Patroclus is placed on the pyre and burned, after slaughtering sheep and cattle, Achilles offers other sacrifices, described as follows. In a sense, these victims will accompany Patroclus to Hades. Yet, when judged by today's standards, it is a savage ritual of sacrifice:
“And great Achilles took the fat from all
and covered up the corpse from head to foot,
and heaped the skinless carcasses around him.
Against the bier he propped two-handled jars
of honey and of oil. Then groaning deeply
he cast four strong-necked horses on the pyre.
Patroclus had nine dogs that shared his table.
Achilles cut the throats of two of them
and threw them on the pyre. Then with his bronze
he slaughtered twelve fine sons of valiant Trojans.”
Homer, the Iliad, and the Book as Sacred Text and Educational Tool
At the beginning of the book, there is a preface (Turkish translation of the book) written by the translator Azra Erhat about Homer and the Iliad. Today, we read the Iliad as an epic that contains some historical truths. However, Erhat mentions that after Homer's works were brought to Greece, they were first taught as a sacred text and as an educational tool. Because, above all, Homer gave life to the gods of Greek mythology through this epic. Azra Erhat says:
"It was a well-known fact that education in Greece was built upon Homer's epics. Not only Athens but all Greek states had adopted Homer as a kind of sacred text, as the essence of all knowledge. Whether it was religion, politics, military affairs, seamanship, or medicine, the Greek people would turn to Homer's epics to learn various kinds of knowledge—or rather, they carried these epics, which they knew from beginning to end by heart, inside themselves like a living library. Plato, whose works overflow with Homer's verses, was also raised in Homer's school, yet he was the first to dare to rebel against this education." (p. 10)
In her preface, Erhat touches in detail on many topics over approximately sixty pages: research and debates about Homer, Troy, the discovery of the city's ruins, a brief summary of the Iliad, its characteristics, and more. The most striking part is the censorship believed to have been carried out by Peisistratus after he brought the Iliad to Greece.
"There is a point where the Fisherman of Halicarnassus [Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı] surpasses European scholars, and it is very important for us: In this censorship carried out during the time of Peisistratus, the side of the Achaeans was favored. Although Homer, as an Anatolian, was originally on the side of the Trojans, the passages that portrayed the Achaeans as savage and bloodthirsty were removed from his work. Among the passages removed from the epic were the stories of Troilus, whom Achilles raped and killed; Palamedes, who was treacherously deceived and murdered; Polyxena, who was sacrificed; and the Amazon Penthesilea." (p. 15)
The Iliad Is an Epic of War and of Achilles
Erhat notes that the Iliad is an epic of war and of Achilles, but she also points out that the epic speaks of war and the god of war with hatred.
"The Iliad is a war epic. But in this war epic, war and the god of war are mentioned with hatred. Zeus openly says that he detests Ares (V, 890). And Agamemnon, who brought his armies from Greece to fight at Troy and who struggled to increase their war efforts, listen to what he says to Achilles (I, 176):
"I hate you more than any other leader,
any of those whom Zeus protects and loves.
You always relish war and fights and conflict."
The Film Troy
Meanwhile, while reading the book, the 2004 film Troy kept playing in my mind. Let me say from the start: I liked how the film reflects the Iliad and its adaptation. Because, while reading the book, I saw that it is a film made with maximum fidelity to the epic.
Of course, there are some differences. First of all, the epic begins with Achilles's anger and ends with Hector's death. However, the film also includes what came before: the arrival of the Achaeans by ship to wage war, the capture of Troy, and the death of Achilles—which the gods "foretell" to him many times in the book but which is not recounted in the Iliad. Another thing that is missing from the film but takes up a significant part of the book is the gods and their intervention in the war.
Nevertheless, the film focuses more on the part of the story that takes place in the world, without the gods. Many other details are almost consistent with the book: Agamemnon taking Briseis, Achilles becoming enraged, the duel between Menelaus and Paris in front of the city (the only difference being that Menelaus does not die here), the Trojans winning a few victories and burning some ships, Patroclus being killed by Hector, Achilles killing Hector and dragging his body behind his chariot...
In short, the film tells more of a story than the book, but the book teaches the reader much more about the events of that period and about Greek mythology. Both are worth reading and watching.
Title: The Iliad
Author: Homer
Translator: Emily Wilson
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Year: 2023
Pages: 846
