Steve Reads

I finished reading The Iliad earlier today. What a fantastic and sad story. We know throughout that Achilles will die immediately after Hector dies, and that Troy will be razed. I’ve not read many Greek tragedies, but they really knew how to convey sadness.

Reading a book like The Iliad overpowers me for another reason: I can’t help but see myself at the end of a thousands-of-years-long line of people who’ve sat before the same text (or sat around a fire while a bard sang it to them) and thought the same thoughts. I am now one of millions, dating from six or seven centuries before the birth of Christ, who have gotten choked up as Achilles drags Hector’s corpse around Patroclus’ bier. I came to the part where Homer describes the feeling one has in a dream of chasing someone but never being able to catch him, and I wondered whether Freud marveled over the same part. Just think of it: for thousands of years, we’ve been having the same dream. It may not be much, but I find that pretty amazing. Should it surprise us that people have tried to explain this using notions of the collective unconscious? Or is it nothing more than basic biological machinery? Reading a text that predates all of our modern notions, modern confusions, and modern manias by thousands of years, I marvel at how fundamentally human the text is. We may not believe in the same forces that Homer’s characters thought drove their lives — Zeus and so forth, or even the idea of a god — but the emotions and human nature are still there in plain sight.

 . . . Which is a direction I’ve moved in over the past few years: I’ve stopped viewing religion as a collection of facts that are subject to refutation, or even a philosophy subject to logical attack. For a time, the “paradox of the stone” (Can God create a stone that He cannot lift?) seemed interesting to me, but I’ve come to realize that it is a paramount example of philosophers compulsively arching their eyebrows at one another. This “paradox” would sway no religious person, which is a sign that it doesn’t attack the fundamental motivations behind religion. (See James Grimmelmann on Kierkegaard’s Fear And Trembling.)

So when I read a text like The Iliad, I have to remind myself to look at the fundamental questions that the book is addressing: what is a human? What is human nature? What gives men the courage to fight in wars? Gods sweep in and protect their favorites, and goes imbue men with the fighting spirit, but we do ourselves a disservice if we — as good atheists — dismiss the book’s conclusions as outdated. The point is the question it asks. The point is to ask about the fundamental analogies within the culture. Their analogies place gods at the center of their explanations; ours would place man at the center. But is there a core level that we’re both talking about?

I don’t have the answers here, but I don’t think the answers are the point. There’s a reason people have read The Iliad for thousands of years, and I think that reason is that it strips back a lot of the dross and complexity of daily life and asks us what stands behind all that. What does it mean to be a human?

I’m surprised that parents’ groups aren’t up in arms when their kids read The Iliad. I just read this line over lunch:

And now in a breakneck charge Peneleos closed with Lycon —
they’d missed each other with spears, two wasted casts,
so now both clashed with swords. Lycon, flailing,
chopped the horn of Peneleos’ horsehair-crested helmet
but round the socket the sword-blade smashed to bits —
just as Peneleos hacked his neck below the ear
and the blade sank clean through, nothing held
but a flap of skin, the head swung loose to the side
as Lycon slumped down to the ground  . . .  There —
at a dead run Meriones ran down Acamas, Acamas
mounting behind his team, and gouged his right shoulder —
he pitched from the car and the mist whirled down his eyes.
Idomeneus skewered Erymas straight through the mouth,
the merciless brazen spearpoint raking through,
up under the brain to split his glistening skull —
teeth shattered out, both eyes brimming to the lids
with a gush of blood and both nostrils spurting,
mouth gaping, blowing convulsive sprays of blood
and death’s dark cloud closed down around his corpse.

That’s from the Fagles translation, lines 395 to 413 of Book 16. It’s certainly more gruesome than any film I’ve ever seen. The book gets much, much worse than that; I’m sure that if we counted the number of deaths explicitly named in The Iliad — in the same way that Homer lists Acamas’s and Erymas’s deaths in the paragraph above — it would number in the thousands.

At the same time, I wonder whether a book like The Iliad — precisely because it’s so violent (it is, after all, a book about a war) — would appeal to today’s Schwarzenegger-obsessed youth.