The Iliad by Homer: Book Review

Translated by Samuel Butler

(Book Review--Classics, Fantasy)

Started: June 27, 2022

Finished: July 22, 2022

[Editor's note: I started trying to write this book using my new format for book reviews.  But I quickly started going over my prescribed wordcount in the various sections.  So then, I got a little bit self-indulgent, and I figured to myself, "Well, why not?  It's The Iliad after all, why not just be self-indulgent and just for once go back to my old style of long rambling reviews."  So I worked on it for a couple weeks,  but then from August I got really busy at work, and it has become clear that I don't have time to finishing writing this review in long form.  So this review starts out pretty long winded, but then it comes to an abrupt end.  Sorry about that. (*1) ]

This is a re-read.  This book was a favorite of mine as an adolescent.  (Regular readers of this blog will no doubt already be familiar with my love for this book.  I've mentioned it multiple times over the years.  See HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE).  But despite talking about this book all the time, I've not re-read it since high school.  So, welcome to my long over-due re-read of The Iliad.

Background Information

Written in ancient Greek around the 8th Century B.C., The Iliad bears the distinction of being the oldest surviving extant work of Western literature.  In other words, it's kind of like the first novel--except it's not technically a novel, it's a novel-length epic poem (414 pages long in my edition).  But, it's got a plot and characters, just like a novel, so I like to think of it as a novel. Plus, depending on what English translation you get, you can get a prose translations that reads just like a novel. (The translation that I read, by Samuel Butler, is one such translation.  More on that later.)

Because The Iliad is so old, documentation about its composition and its author have long been lost to the mists of time, and we are reliant on ancient legend and modern speculation.  Legend attributes the authorship to a blind poet named Homer, but scholars have long debated whether or not a Homer actually existed, or whether The Iliad is the work of one poet or several.  

What is clear, however, is that whoever wrote The Iliad, they must have been drawing on a long established myths and oral traditions about the Trojan War that went back even further in time.

In the ancient Greek world, The Iliad was considered the most important work of literature.  Greek students were taught to read by using The Iliad.  Alexander the Great, as one historical example, was obsessed with The Iliad.  As I wrote in my review of Alexander the Great by Philip Freeman: 

    ...it’s always interesting for me to be reminded that books like The Iliad are not just regarded as ancient classics nowadays, but were already being regarded as ancient classics way back in the time of Alexander the Great. 

 As Philip Freeman illustrates, Alexander the Great was obsessed with The Iliad (he carried a copy on his campaigns with him, and many of his actions seemed consciously designed to deliberately emulate the exploits of Achilles.)  It’s fascinating to think how long this book has survived, that we today can still read and thrill to the same stories that fascinated Alexander the Great 2,000 years ago.

The Plot (*2)

The Iliad is actually not a complete story.  It's part of the much larger story of The Trojan War.  

The Trojan War is a huge epic from Greek mythology which describes a ten year war between the Greeks and the Trojans.    

As a young child, I originally thought the whole story of the Trojan War was just some silly story about soldiers hiding inside a wooden horse.  But the Trojan Horse story is merely the end of a long war.  Before we get to the Trojan Horse, there are many different stories about the Greek and Trojan heroes fighting each other on the battlefield.  

In fact, more than half of all surviving ancient Greek literature is about The Trojan War.

Given how much the Greeks were obsessed with the stories of the Trojan War, there are a couple things about this war that makes it puzzling for modern readers.  For one thing, the whole war is completely pointless.  It was a ten year war all because the Helen, the wife of one of the Greek kings, ran off with Paris, one of the Trojan princes.  So the whole Greek coalition is not fighting out of some existential necessity, but rather simply to avenge a slight.   

Secondly, there are no clear good guys or bad guys in the Trojan War.  Despite the focus of most stories being on the Greek camp (this is, after all, a story from Greek mythology), it's clear neither side has the moral high ground.  Both sides can be valiant and noble at times, but both sides can also be savage and brutal at times. 

Obviously this clashes with modern sensibilities of story-telling.  For example, if Tolkien had written the story of the Trojan War, then it would have been a story of good versus pure evil, and the stakes of the war would have been to save all of civilization. (Ditto for George Lucas. Or anything from the MCU. Or any modern storyteller.) 

As an adolescent, it always used to puzzle me why the Greeks would build their greatest epic around a war that they themselves framed as completely pointless.  

Actually it's still a question that puzzles me as an adult. 

There are two different explanations that I've come across over the years.

The explanation that I encountered back in high school, (the one that I incorporated into my old high school paper here), is that the Trojan War epic was based on a real historical event.  A coalition of Mycenaean Greek (W) cities got together and sacked the historical city of Troy (W).  

The reason for the war is, again, lost to the mists of time, but the Greek coalition probably wanted to get rid of a economic and geopolitical rival, and latched on to whatever flimsy pretext they could find.  There may well have been a Helen-of-Troy type incident.  (Think of how many wars have been started for silly- or - ridiculous - reasons just in the modern era alone.) 

However, shortly after this Greek victory, the collapse of the Bronze Age civilization occurred, the Greeks were invaded by the Dorians (W) and Greece was plunged into a dark age (W).  From the misery of this dark age, it was easy to look back and romanticize the last great military victory that had occurred during the Mycenean glory days.  And so all sorts of legends started springing up about the heroes of the Trojan War. (*3)

More recently, I heard another explanation in this YouTube video HERE.  More specifically, start from 7:29:

...if you watch the video, he argues that there are a number of events in The Iliad and the Trojan War that parallel events in the ancient Indian epic the Mahabharata (W), and thus indicate a common origin for both stories in the ancient Proto-Indo-European civilization (W).  In the Mahabharata, apparently, one of the reasons for the war is that the gods wanted a huge war to reduce the human population.  As the lecturer points out, this is somewhat similar to the opening lines of The Iliad.

(And moreover, I noticed myself when re-reading The Iliad how many times the gods egged the war on.  There were numerous times in The Iliad when the war is on the verge of ending, but the gods keep intervening to keep the war going.)

So according to this second theory, there was some sort of ancient myth from prehistoric peoples about a huge pointless epic war that only exists because the gods have forced both sides to fight.  And that eventually morphed into the Mahabhrata in India and the Trojan War in Greece.  And so the reason the Trojan War is so pointless is that this was the story that Homer inherited from ancient times. 

But getting back to The Iliad...

The Iliad covers only a few weeks from this ten year war. When The Iliad begins, the war has already been going on for a long time.  When The Iliad finishes, the war is still not over.  

The Iliad was originally one part of a collection of epic poems called "The Epic Cycle", which told the whole story of the Trojan War (see Wikipedia article HERE).  But those other books have now all been lost to us.  However, because of other sources, we know basically what was in those other books, so it is still possible to reconstruct a story of the Trojan War, into which The Iliad fits into.

But not only is The Iliad part of a larger story about the Trojan War, the Trojan War itself also sits within the larger tapestry of Greek mythology.  
You see, Greek mythology has a chronology to it.  First is the age of gods and mortals, then is the age of heroes, and the Trojan War takes place after the age of heroes.  In other words, the Trojan War is one generation after the exploits of the famous heroes like Theseus, Hercules, Jason and the Argonauts, etc, and there are various connections between the age of heroes and the Trojan War--many of the participants in the Trojan War are descended from the age of heroes, and some of the older participants in the Trojan War are even old enough to remember the age of heroes.  

Therefore, although The Iliad is about The Trojan War, it is constantly making references back to a set of earlier stories from the age of heroes.  And as such, it is very useful for scholars who want to date the establishment of Greek Mythology.  The Iliad shows us that by the 8th Century B.C., the whole tapestry of Greek Mythology was already in place in pretty much it's completed form.  

(Pretty much.  There are some small differences between Homer's mythology and some of the later traditions, but we don't have to get into that right now.)

All of which is to say that The Iliad requires a lot of background knowledge in order to make sense of it.  If you don't know anything about the Trojan War or Greek mythology, you're going to have a hard time figuring out what the book is talking about.  

Fortunately, by the time I got around to first reading The Iliad  back in 7th grade, I already knew the whole story...

My History With The Iliad

I've told this story before, but my interest in the Trojan War goes back to sixth grade when I stumbled across The Trojan War by Olivia Coolidge (A) in my school library.

My previous exposure to Greek mythology had all been skimpy picture books-- the type of mythology picture books commonly given to elementary school kids.  But The Trojan War by Olivia Coolidge was no skimpy picture book--it was a proper novel-length book, close to 300 pages.  

I saw the book sitting there on the library shelf, and I was curious.  All I knew about the Trojan War was the story of the Trojan Horse.  But how could you get 300 pages out of a story about soldiers hiding inside a wooden horse?  What other details happened in the Trojan War?

Well, my curiosity piqued, I checked the book out of the library, and was absolutely fascinated by it.  What an epic story! So many heroes! So many battles! So much violence!

But the book also confused me.  It was mostly told from the Greek perspective, so I gathered I was supposed to be cheering for the Greek side.  But then what was I supposed to feel when the Greeks did barbaric things?  What kind of message was this myth sending?  How did it want me to react?  What did it want me to feel?

Despite this confusion (or maybe because of it), I left Olivia Coolidge's book hungry for more. I started checking out more books on The Trojan War and Greek mythology from the library.

I wanted to learn all the details about the Trojan War.  But the more I read, the more I realized what a huge story it was.

I had initially thought that Olivia Coolidge's book was the complete story of the Trojan War.  I mean, 300 pages, that has to be everything, right?  But I began to realize more and more that the books in my school library were only summarizing the ancient sources.  If I wanted the complete story of the Trojan War, I would have to dig deeper.

Every book ever written about the Trojan War references The Iliad.  So eventually curiosity drew me to try out The Iliad.  And by this point in my reading, I had all the necessary background knowledge about the myth to jump right in. 

Our school library had a copy of The Iliad, and I checked it out, but never got past the first couple chapters.  The translation in our school library was written in poetic style, which annoyed me.  I could understand it, but it was hard work.  All those line breaks annoyed me.  It didn't flow like a normal prose novel.  So I gave up on it.

A few months later, I found a prose translation of The Iliad by Samuel Butler in a bookstore, and bought that.  And that suited me much better.  I could not only read it, but I actually enjoyed it.  

This is the title page from that edition.  I've previously used this picture HERE.

Some people insist on reading The Iliad in verse.  But I'm of the opinion that you can't really translate verse anyway.  All of the original things that make up verse (meter, alliteration, rhyming) are lost as soon as you lose the original words.  Now, you could make up an all new meter, alliteration and rhyming, etc, but if you do that, you're not really translating the poem, you're just making up a new poem with the same meaning.  And if the meaning is the only thing that is congruous between the two translations..., well, then I think a prose translation is just as authentic as a verse translation. (*4)

Anyway, with Samuel Butler's prose translation, I was able to read all the way through The Iliad.

Because I had read so many retellings of The Trojan War by this point, I already knew all the big events that would happen.  But that's what you want.  You want to come into The Iliad already knowing the story, because that's the way the original Greek audience approached it. (*5)

But although I already knew the general story, the battle scenes in The Iliad are much more detailed than they were in a retellings of The Trojan War like Olivia Coolidge's.  The Iliad had page after page describing the battles in detail.  There were so many pages of who-killed-who on the battlefield.  It was a lot of fun for a 13 year old boy to read.

But as fascinating as all that violence was, I still had the same conflicted feelings about The Iliad that I had about Olivia Coolidge's The Trojan War.

The Trojan War is, of course, a story all about war, violence and fighting.  And there's nothing that boys love more than reading about war, violence and fighting.  (It's an unfortunate facet of human nature, but there's no use denying that it exists.  Who knows where it comes from--maybe blame our evolutionary heritage?)  So the Trojan War and The Iliad definitely has all the action needed to satisfy the pre-adolescent male bloodlust.

But, I was also a child of the 20th century, raised on superhero comics, Tolkien and Star Wars, in which the natural male enjoyment of violence was always justified by the framing that the violence was necessary to fight evil, and therefore it was perfectly fine to take a vicarious thrill in it. 

The Iliad, on the other hand, had some absolutely thrilling descriptions of battle scenes, but it was all for a pointless war in which there were no clear good guys or bad guys.  So what was I supposed to do with this?  Was I supposed to enjoy the thrill of battle?  Or was I supposed to be appalled at all the senseless slaughter?  

Since The Iliad is mostly told from the Greek perspective, I would try to forget about the moral vagueness and imagine that the Greeks were the good guys and that I should be cheering on their exploits.  

Now, this was always a little difficult, because the Trojans are clearly the ones who are defending their lives and their families, and the Greeks are just out for vengeance.   But at the same time, you can kind of see things from the Greek perspective.  After all, I told myself, the Trojans had started the whole war when Prince Paris violated the hospitality of King Menelaus and took away his wife Helen. And there's even a further story about how the Greeks sent initially envoys to get Helen back or negotiate a payment instead, but the Trojans refused to negotiate. 

 And, sure, maybe the Greeks wanting to burn the whole city of Troy and kill everyone inside seemed like a bit of an over-reaction. But you have to remember that hospitality rules were very sacred in the ancient world.  

Plus, The Iliad often shows a bias towards the Greeks.  The Greek heroes are usually portrayed as braver, stronger, and better than the Trojans.  The Trojans are more likely than the Greeks to be portrayed as sneaky, cowardly and duplicitous. So it just seemed easier to sympathize with the Greeks while reading.

So I would try my best to imagine The Iliad as just another action story about good guys fighting bad guys, and imagine the Greeks as the good guys.

There are sections of The Iliad where this is almost possible.  Particularly the sections in which the Greeks seem to be the sympathetic underdog--sections when one of the gods joins the Trojan side, for example, and temporarily gives the Trojans an unfair advantage.  Or the whole middle of The Iliad (books 8-16) in which the Greeks are on the defensive.

But even here, Homer just won't let you just read this as a mindless action-adventure story. Even in these sections, whenever one of the Trojans is killed, Homer tells you his background and mentions how the Trojan's family would mourn for him.

A typical example is below.  This is from the chapter describing the exploits of the Greek hero Diomed:

He [Diomed] killed Astynous, and Hypeiron shepherd of his people, the one with a thrust of his spear, which struck him above the nipple, the other with a sword-cut on the collar-bone, that severed his shoulder from his neck and back. He let both of them lie, and went in pursuit of Abas and Polyidus, sons of the old reader of dreams Eurydamas: they never came back for him to read them any more dreams, for mighty Diomed made an end of them. He then gave chase to Xanthus and Thoon, the two sons of Phaenops, both of them very dear to him, for he was now worn out with age, and begat no more sons to inherit his possessions. But Diomed took both their lives and left their father sorrowing bitterly, for he nevermore saw them come home from battle alive, and his kinsmen divided his wealth among themselves. (from book 5 pages 84-85)

The whole Iliad is like that.  Lots of killing, but Homer never lets any of the victims become anonymous.

So, what emotion are we going for?  Am I meant to be admiring the deeds of Diomed?  I mean, much of the framing of The Iliad seems to be setting him up as a great hero.  But then, what am I supposed to do with the information about how Diomed left the father grieving for his two children? (*6)

So, yeah, a lot of confusing emotions reading The Iliad. But on the whole I enjoyed it.

After that, the book stayed on my shelves all through the rest of middle school and high school, and I would flip through it occasionally and sometimes re-read some of the battle scenes.

In 11th grade, I got the idea that it might be fun to read The Iliad to my younger brother.  He was in 6th grade at the time, and so I thought he'd probably be old enough to appreciate it.  (I had started reading to him regularly when he was young, and it was a habit we kept up even when he got older, and could read by himself.)  

Now, here is where the memory gets a bit foggy, I don't remember if my brother and I completed this reading project.  I definitely remember we started it.  Maybe we finished it, I don't remember.

But at any rate, I've not read The Iliad since 11th grade.

Although, I have read a couple of retellings of The Iliad in the years since and reviewed them on this blog: 

* Ilium and Olympus by Dan Simmons

* Tales of Troy and Greece by Andrew Lang

In 2010, my friend Philip Christman, who was teaching literature to college freshman at the time, wrote a piece on his blog entitled "Really, Really, Lesser Homerica" in which he talked about how he had to teach The Iliad to Freshman English students, but the more he read The Iliad, the more he was convinced that it didn't have any value.  It was, he said, just a pointlessly violent story in which all of the characters acted like thugs and no one had any common sense except for Thersites (W) (who Homer portrays as a buffoon).

When I saw this post, I reflexively argued against Phil in the comments section of his blog. But that was just a knee-jerk reaction on my part.  As the years have gone by, and I've thought about it more and more, and I've wondered if Phil might actually have been right.

Phil's original post has unfortunately been deleted.  But I preserved my comments in a post on my own blog. (*7)

More recently, I've enjoyed the various read-alongs of The Iliad that Steve Donoghue has done on his channel.  I posted about my love for his read-along videos on this blog in 2019.

Why I decided to Re-read The Iliad

For most of the time I've been doing book reviews on this blog, I've avoided re-reading books.  There are so many classic books out there that I haven't read, who has time to go back and start re-reading books that I already finished?

My attitude has changed on that the past couple years.  This has been for a couple reasons.  Partly it's because I'm growing older.  There is now a large amount of time separating me from my high school reading, and it's getting harder and harder to remember the classics I read as a teenager.

Booktube has also been a part of this shift.  Since I've been on booktube, I've been realizing how important re-reading books is to so many booktubers, and it's made me realize that part of being a reader is regularly re-reading books.

But in addition to booktube generally, it's also been Steve Donoghue and his channel specifically.  

Steve Donoghue actually re-reads The Iliad every single year!  So if he finds enough value in it to re-read The Iliad every year, then I am surely due for a re-read after 30 years.

Steve also included Homer as number 2 on his Western Canon Starter Kit (video HERE).  

In my review of Genesis, I mentioned that my decision to re-read the Bible was greatly influenced by Steve Donoghue's Western Starter Kit.  So it seemed to me that it would be great fun to re-read The Iliad on the same project. (*8)

The problem, though, is where was I going to find a readable translation of The Iliad out here in Vietnam?  I browse the bookstores here in Ho Chi Minh City regularly, and I didn't ever remember seeing a copy of The Iliad on the shelves.

...until one day I did.  On a trip to Vivo City shopping mall back in February, I was browsing the bookstore and found they were carrying copies of Homer.  (As luck would have it, this was a trip I was videoing for my travelogue project.  See the video of the trip HERE.  And I also mentioned finding these books in the Weekly Reading Vlog for that week.)

The translation was by Samuel Butler--the same translator I had read as a teenager.  For better or for worse.  (Part of me was happy to return to the translation I had originally loved.  Part of me thought that it might be interesting to try out a different translation.  But I guess I'll have to wait until the day when I stumble across a different copy of The Iliad to try out a new translation.) 

I was initially going to wait until I finished some of the books I'm already reading, but then, a few weeks ago, when I was going travelling back to my wife's hometown and needed a travel book, I decided to grab The Iliad.

The Review

I guess the first thing to say is that this book is it was largely just how I remembered it.
Many of the books I've re-read on this blog (Kidnapped, The Three Musketeers, The BFG, Charlotte's Web, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, et cetera) had been so faded in my memory that re-reading them years later was like discovering them anew.  But not so with The Iliad.  All of the major events in this book were exactly as I had remembered them.  

And the reading experience was pretty much exactly the same as I remembered too.  On the one hand, the battle scenes were incredibly vivid and thrilling.  On the other hand, I felt confused about what emotions I was supposed to be feeling.  In other words, exactly the same reading experience that 12-year-old me had.

I guess the one thing that was different is this time around is I think I have a better appreciation for just how ancient The Iliad is.  It's from all the way back to around the 8th century B.C.--right when Greece is just barely emerging from the dark ages, right at the dawn of Greek civilization.  

Which makes it impressive just how rich with detail The Iliad is.  I mean, here we have this whole complex story of the Trojan War (and although Homer is only telling a small part of the story, he is clearly aware of all of it), all of the different heroes who participated on both sides, all of their backstories, all of their ancestry, all of their family connections, all of which fits into the broader tapestry of Greek mythology in general...

...and we have all of this emerging in the 8th century BC from a Greek civilization that had just barely survived the dark ages! You wonder how the ancient Greeks had time to build such an elaborate story during this time.  (Shouldn't they have been using all their energy to just stay alive?)  It makes you appreciate just how important storytelling was to the ancient civilizations.  

 The amount of backstory that there is to all the characters in The Iliad makes me think of some of the convoluted continuity of some of today's fandoms.  (I'm reminded of some of the long Wikipedia articles about any characters from Marvel or DC comics.) But the ancient Greeks were able to keep track of all this continuity without the benefit of Wikipedia or Internet fan pages.  

A second thing that struck me upon re-reading (somewhat related to the above point) is what a miracle it is that this whole story has come down to us.  

I think I am more aware now than I was at 12 at just how hard it was for ancient literature to survive into the modern era.  Ancient scrolls to do not last for long, so in order for literature to survive, scribes have to continually copy it onto new manuscripts by hand.  And The Iliad is really long.  It's the length of a modern novel.  The Iliad also contains a lot of details about the fighting that are interesting to read, but not always essential to the main story.  For example, there are several chapters where the tide of battle will shift back and forth between the Greeks and the Trojans multiple times.  And I'll think to myself, "You know what?  If I was some medieval monk copying this all out by hand, I might be tempted to just cut out some of this back and forth in the battle by the time I got to page 300."  

But through some miracle, the whole Iliad made it down to us today.  (Here, I suspect, is where that fact that The Iliad is originally a poem becomes important.  You can cut some lines out of a novel without disrupting the flow, but you can't very easily cut lines out of a poem.  That probably helps to explain why The Iliad has come down to us extant.)

One of the things I remembered from adolescence was a general feeling of the battle scenes from The Iliad being really intense.  And this was something I noticed again upon re-reading.

It's kind of amazing, really, because in some ways Homer is doing everything he can to slow the action down.  

For one thing (as I already noted above), Homer insists on giving a brief biography of just about every single character who enters the battle.

The other thing that threatens to slow down the action is Homer's famous similes.  Homer is famous for his long similes (see Wikipedia article HERE) that not only occur frequently but also go on for several lines.  

And yet, despite all these mini-biographies and long similes always breaking up the action, there are still several chapters in which the reader still gets the impression of an unrelenting battle which is just growing and growing in intensity.  I'm not quite sure how Homer pulls it off, but he does.

There are plenty of confrontations between Greek and Trojan heroes.  Although one of the things I noticed upon re-reading is that although I felt like the battle was intense in general, on an individual level,  the individual confrontations between heroes was frequently underwhelming.  The confrontation between heroes would always involve both individuals throwing their spears.  

(Homer's characters almost never use their swords unless they've exhausted all other options.  The  preferred order of weapons seems to be first spear, then picking up big rocks that lie on the ground, then finally using your sword if you get really desperate.  I'm not sure how historically accurate this is. (*9)) 

Anyway, in The Iliad, two warriors will meet in battle, and both will throw their spears.  One spear will miss, and one spear will hit home and kill the victim.  And there's very seldom more to the encounter than that. (*10) It's also very predictable whose spear is going to miss and whose spear is going to hit home.  Anytime it's a major character facing off against a minor character, you pretty much know whose spear is going to miss.

So to summarize, the individual confrontations on the battlefield can be boring when taken individually, but I still felt myself swept up in the excitement of the battle when reading the book.  I just got this sense of a mad rush of battle that emerged from all these individual confrontations.

But to a large extent, the human battles are the most boring parts of The Iliad.  What really makes The Iliad fun to read is all the arguing and fighting among the gods.

People unfamiliar with The Iliad may not realize how much of The Iliad is devoted to quarreling among the gods.  After all, a lot of modern retellings of The Iliad often leave out the gods completely.  (For example this was true of the 2004 movie Troy, as well as Tales of Troy and Greece by Andrew Lang.)  But the drama among the gods is so much fun.

And it's not just the drama of the gods arguing--it's all the trappings of mythology.  
Take, for instance, the arrival of Neptune from the beginning of Book XIII.  The scene here is that Jove has forbidden the other gods from interfering in the war.  But the moment Jove leaves the scene, Neptune takes the opportunity to help the Greeks: 

Now when Jove had thus brought Hector and the Trojans to the ships, he left them to their never-ending toil, and turned his keen eyes away, looking elsewhither towards the horse-breeders of Thrace, the Mysians, fighters at close quarters, the noble Hippemolgi, who live on milk, and the Abians, justest of mankind. He no longer turned so much as a glance towards Troy, for he did not think that any of the immortals would go and help either Trojans or Danaans.

But King Neptune had kept no blind look-out; he had been looking admiringly on the battle from his seat on the topmost crests of wooded Samothrace, whence he could see all Ida, with the city of Priam and the ships of the Achaeans. He had come from under the sea and taken his place here, for he pitied the Achaeans who were being overcome by the Trojans; and he was furiously angry with Jove.

Presently he came down from his post on the mountain top, and as he strode swiftly onwards the high hills and the forest quaked beneath the tread of his immortal feet. Three strides he took, and with the fourth he reached his goal—Aegae, where is his glittering golden palace, imperishable, in the depths of the sea. When he got there, he yoked his fleet brazen-footed steeds with their manes of gold all flying in the wind; he clothed himself in raiment of gold, grasped his gold whip, and took his stand upon his chariot. As he went his way over the waves the sea-monsters left their lairs, for they knew their lord, and came gambolling round him from every quarter of the deep, while the sea in her gladness opened a path before his chariot. So lightly did the horses fly that the bronze axle of the car was not even wet beneath it; and thus his bounding steeds took him to the ships of the Achaeans.

Now there is a certain huge cavern in the depths of the sea midway between Tenedos and rocky Imbrus; here Neptune lord of the earthquake stayed his horses, unyoked them, and set before them their ambrosial forage. He hobbled their feet with hobbles of gold which none could either unloose or break, so that they might stay there in that place until their lord should return. This done he went his way to the host of the Achaeans.

Aren't all those details great?  The underwater golden palace, the horses that were kept in the cavern in the middle of the sea, the sea monster and their lairs!  All these elements of fantasy and mythology are what really makes The Iliad so engrossing to read. 

Other Things I Noticed When Re-Reading 

Okay, I said above that this book was pretty much how I remembered it.  But there were a few odd details that I had forgotten about:

* Achilles and Patroclus have zero chemistry together before Patroclus dies.  I mean, so much of The Iliad revolves around Achilles's grief over Patroclus's death.  But they share only one or two scenes together before Patroclus dies, and there's nothing in the book that hints at their deep intimacy.  

I suspect that because Homer's original audience was already so familiar with this story, Homer didn't feel like he needed to demonstrate the intimacy between Patroclus and Achilles.  It could be just assumed by the audience.

* The Iliad seemed to me to alternate back and forth between a deterministic view of the future and a view in which the the future is much more open ended.  In some passages, Achilles is aware that it is his fate to die at Troy.  In other passages, Achilles seems to believe it's possible that he will survive the war.  In some passages, the characters know that Troy is fated to fall, in other passages, the possibility is suggested that the Greeks could be defeated.

I suppose possibly this might be an argument in favor of the hypothesis that The Iliad had multiple authors.  Or, if you believe in Homer, possibly it means that Homer was drawing on different traditions?  (I don't know though, I'm not an expert,  just some guy with a blog).

* That fight between Hector and Ajax in book 7 was so short.  Somehow, I had remembered it as a long fight between the two heroes that went on for several back and forths, but instead they each threw a spear at each other, then they each throw a rock at each other, and then they stopped fighting.

Okay, I'm Going to Abruptly Stop Here

There's a lot more to say, but as I mentioned at the top of this review, I've become really busy at work nowadays, and I just don't have time to write these long reviews anymore.  I'm going to have to stop here.

Just a couple more things...

* Add this to my list of Classic Books Which are Fun to Read

Also:

Back in July, I sent an email to the great Steve Donoghue trying to engage him in a discussion on The Iliad.  I had a lot of questions tumbling around my mind, and I was hoping he could help me sort them out.

I'm currently re-reading The Iliad.  On your influence.  I had read it, and enjoyed it, back in high school, but I hadn't re-read it since.  

For years, I didn't really see the need to re-read classics that I had already finished, but under the influence of your channel, I've begun to see the value of re-reading, and have started re-reading a few classics.

But of course all your videos on The Iliad have made me want to revisit that book in particular.  I know most of these videos are from a few years ago, but they've stuck in my mind until I found a suitable opportunity to re-read it.  And then recently I found an English copy of The Iliad at a bookstore here in Vietnam and decided to grab it.

Anyway, now that I'm re-reading it, I'm trying to sort out my thoughts for a book review on my blog and youtube channel.  And I was wondering if you could help[ me with a few things.

1) I remember feeling conflicted about this book back in high school.  I wanted to thrill to the exciting battle scenes just like I would in any good action movie, but at the same time the narrator was constantly making me feel pathos for all the people who were dying, which made me feel guilty for thrilling at the action.  Years later, I still have this same confused reaction.  I know that there's a huge cultural gap separating me from the original audience of this book, but what reaction is the narrator going for exactly?  

2) Related to the first question: something that I have a hard time getting past is how ridiculous the origin of this whole war is.  I mean, the individual episodes inside The Iliad are incredibly epic--humans fighting with gods, gods fighting with gods, etc.  So I can really enjoy this story if I focus on the individual battles and forget the larger picture.  But if I pull back and think about how pointless this whole war is---all that suffering just for the sake of one woman--I have a hard time getting emotionally involved in it.

I know I'm not the first reader who has had this complaint, but I've never really seen a satisfactory explanation for it anywhere.  What do you make of the whole origin story of the Trojan War?  Was this just some sort of ancient tradition Homer had inherited and he was stuck with? I often feel like Homer himself is acknowledging how pointless this war is.  Did the Greeks themselves have the same problem with the overarching story that modern readers do, or is there some cultural difference that is preventing me from connecting with this story?  

3) Obviously this book clashes with modern sensibilities, because the narrator makes us feel sympathetic to both sides.  Nowadays fantasy stories are about the forces of good versus the forces of evil .That's all obvious enough.  But figuring out how it changed and when is what's confusing me.  Is this the influence of Christianity?  Or Tolkien's influence? Or the influence of the enlightenment?  

Or is the natural inclination in world literature towards stories of good versus evil, and the Greeks were just outliers?

4) I was recently watching a Youtube video on Greek Mythology.  The link is HERE if you're interested, but you don't need to watch it.  I'm sure you're familiar with the concepts in it already.  The lecturer in the video argues that there are enough similarities between the Mahabharata and the Trojan War to indicate that they both probably had a common origin in the prehistoric Indo-European civilization.    Apparently there was some sort of story about an epic war that must have been part of the Indo-European mythology, and as the peoples spread out, the Indians developed their version of this tale into the Mahabharata, and the Greeks developed it into the Trojan War.  

Like I said, I'm sure you've heard this theory before.  What do you think of it?  Is it at all plausible, or pure junk?

I never got a response on this--for what is probably an obvious reason.  These are a lot of lengthy questions to ask someone to write out an answer to when you barely know them, and when you're not paying them.  In retrospect I regret being too presumptuous by asking all these questions.  I have, however, decided to re-post my questions here on this blog, because I think these questions encapsulate perfectly the things I'm struggling with when I try to make sense of The Iliad.  (And by all means, if anyone has any good answers to these questions, go ahead and leave them in the comments.)

I should also say that Steve Donoghue has been very gracious in answering my questions in the past.  Specifically he answered some questions I had about the naming conventions for Greek and Roman mythology.  Based on some of the books I'd been reading, I had this feeling that somewhere around World War II there was a shift in how the gods were referred to in English.  Before World War II, English authors preferred to use the Latin names.  After World War II, they seemed to prefer the Greek names.  Steve confirmed what I had suspected, and said the shift was largely a result of Latin being taken out of grade school. 

I mention this because Samuel Butler is a great example of this.  His translation was written in 1898, and he uses all the Roman names for the gods--Jove, Juno and Minvera, etc, instead of Zeus, Hera and Athena.  A more modern translation would use the Greek names.

Rating:

It's really hard to rate a book like this.  On the one hand, it should probably get 10 out of 10 stars just for it's sheer scope and epicness.  But on the other hand, as I've detailed in this review, I'm also clearly having some problems with it.  I guess I'll give it 9 out of 10 stars.

Weekly Reading Vlogs:

July 3, 2022 The Iliad p.1-260

July 10, 2022 The Iliad p.260-318

July 17, 2022 The Iliad p.318-382

July 24, 2022 The Iliad p.382-414

After I finished reading the book, while I was still preparing this review, I listened to the audio version of this on Youtube to try to keep it fresh in my mind.  That audio is here: Part 1 and Part 2.

Footnotes (docs, pub)

(*1) Oh, and footnotes! I started using footnotes as well.  Sorry about that.  In the future, I'll be sticking to my short format.

(*2) I had been debating with myself whether or not I needed to explain the plot of The Iliad for the purposes of this review.  On the one hand, it's one of THE great classics of Western literature.  Surely everyone is familiar with the basic plot, right?

...but on the other hand, I thought of all the people I knew who have no idea what The Iliad is about.  Educated people.  People with advanced degrees.  In some cases, people who work as high school teachers.  

This became very clear to me when the movie Troy came out back in 2004.  I mean, classics nerds knew the story of the Trojan War before they saw that movie, but the general public really did not.  I remember a conversation I had with a high school teacher back in 2004 when he said that he liked that movie because when the final showdown happened between Achilles and Hector, he had no idea who was going to win.  

Of course, for a brief period after that movie came out, everyone knew about Achilles and Hector.  But that movie came out18 years ago already.  (ohmygodwheredoesthetimego!)  The young people today probably don't remember it.

I'm also thinking about what I wrote just a couple years ago in my review of The Golden Fleece:

You know, a month ago, I would have assumed that the myth of The Golden Fleece was just common cultural knowledge.  But as I was walking around with this book the past month, various friends and co-workers would ask me what I was reading, and I discovered that most people had no idea what The Golden Fleece even was.  I guess the lesson is: never assume the rest of the world is interested in the same stuff you are.

And all that is just thinking about my American friends.  The cultural awareness about this stuff gets even less when you get out to Asia.  (I promise you, no one is studying The Iliad in schools in Japan or Vietnam.  They're studying the Chinese classics instead.)

Now of course, I never really know who is reading this blog, but I've decided to try to play it safe and just try to explain everything.  Classical nerds will have to forgive me.

(*3) Although I should note that up until 1871, scholars thought the Trojan War was completely mythological, and had no basis in history.  But then in 1871, archeology discovered that there had been a city of Troy, and it had been destroyed at about the time that legend indicated (W).

(*4) I also feel that when attempting the classics, you should start with whichever translation is most accessible.  Don't make things harder for yourself than they need to be.  

And this would be my advice to any potential new readers of The Iliad.  Start with a prose translation that is easy to read for your first time through.  Then, if you really want to do a poetic version of The Iliad, you can do that for your second time through.  

(*5) A good rule of thumb for approaching any literature or plays from ancient Greece is that you want to be already familiar with the story before you even start reading.  Because that's the way the ancient Greeks themselves would have encountered these texts.  The ancient Greek audience already knew all these stories, and the job of a poet or playwright was not to tell new stories, but to bring new drama to familiar stories.  Consequently, no one in ancient Greece was ever worried about spoilers.

Nor, for that matter, is the ancient Greek author going to be concerned about catching you up on all the backstory, because he assumes you know it already.

I think a good modern analogy for this is The Passion of the Christ movie that came out in 2004. Nobody who went to see that movie was concerned about the plot being spoiled ahead of time.  Nor was the movie concerned about catching you up on the backstory of who Jesus and the disciples were.  The movie also didn't waste any time explaining who the Romans, Jews or Pharisees were, or what the political and historical situation was like in 1st century Palestine.  And the movie ended without showing the resurrection, because it just assumed that the audience knew the resurrection was coming anyway.   

That's the kind of familiarity with the story that Homer is assuming when you pick up The Iliad. 

(*6) I have, over the years, listened to lots of lectures on The Iliad (mostly on Youtube), and I have read lots of commentary on it, and I have never come across a satisfying explanation of exactly what emotion The Iliad is expecting me to feel during these battle scenes.  Which I find puzzling, because it's such a basic question.  I don't know, maybe I've just been looking in all the wrong places.

I mean, the author of The Iliad is clearly trying to wring some pathos out of every death he describes on the battlefield.  But he is also clearly trying to evoke a sense of the excitement of the battle. So what emotion are we going for?

(*7) The fact that Phil deleted that post doesn't necessarily signify anything.  He regularly deletes all this old blog posts just as a matter of habit.  I'm not sure whether or not he would hold the same views today.  
When I was re-reading The Iliad the past few weeks, I thought again about Phil's original post, and how I might respond to it now.  I think Phil is right that the modern reader should reject the values of The Iliad.  But I think the modern reader can still marvel at the complexity of the storytelling and mythology in The Iliad.  (There's more to say on the topic, but I'll just leave it at that.  There's no point writing a lengthy response to a post from 12 years ago that no longer even exists.)

(*8) Oh, and one more thing.  I haven't yet announced it on this blog, but this past year I had got it into my mind to write up and record retellings of Greek and Roman Mythology for my English Reading and Listening Practice Project.  (I'm still in the early stages of that project, however.  See some of my rough work HERE.)

But anyway, as part of that project, I thought I would start a corresponding reading project to read (or re-read as the case may be) as many sources as I can about Greek and Roman Mythology.

I may make a video announcing that project sometime in the near future.  But since I haven't yet gotten around to making that video yet, I'll let this re-read of The Iliad stand semi-independently from the rest of that project.

(*9) One of the things I learned from Professor Grant L. Voth's lecture on Homer is that Homer isn't always a reliable source for what ancient warfare actually looked like.  The example Grant L. Voth gives is chariots.  Homer portrays chariots as kind of battlefield taxis--they took the heroes to the fighting and away from the fighting.  Apparently this is not how chariots were really used during the bronze age battles, but because Homer lived after the collapse of the bronze age, he didn't know how the chariots actually functioned in battle.

(*10) in The Iliad, spears almost always kill the victim instantly.  Very seldom is someone merely wounded by a spear.  (Unless, of course, it's one of the major characters that Homer knows he can't kill off yet at this point in the story.)  And also very seldom is there any extended death throes or gore in The Iliad.  I mean, once or twice there's a bit of gore mentioned, but that's a small ratio considering how many battlefield deaths are all throughout this book.  For the most part, death is very clean in The Iliad.  Someone gets hit with a spear, and they fall down dead.

Video Review (Playlist  HERE):

The Iliad by Homer (Translated by Samuel Butler): Book Review