The Odyssey by Homer: Book Review

Translated by T.E. Lawrence

(Book Review--Rereads, Classics, Greek Mythology)

Started: November 20, 2022

Finished: January 01, 2023

(This review is written using my new format for book reviews.) 

Background Information

Along with The Iliad, this is the other epic poem from the 8th Century B.C. attributed to Homer.  So, much of what I already said about The Iliad is going to apply here as well.

The Iliad was an epic about the Trojan War.  The Odyssey takes place after the Trojan War, and is about the long journey home of Odysseus, one of the Greek heroes of the war.  (Odyssey in ancient Greece means “The Story of Odysseus”).  So it’s a sequel, of sorts, to The Iliad, and features many of the same characters.

Although it’s not a direct sequel.  When The Iliad ends, we are still right in the thick of the Trojan War.  When The Odyssey begins, the war is over, and all the heroes are going home.  So there is a notable jump forward in time.  

This was not a problem for the original audience.  Both The Iliad and The Odyssey emerged out of an older oral tradition, so the ancient Greek audience would have already known all about the events between The Iliad and The Odyssey that weren't cover by Homer.

According to Wikipedia, The Iliad and The Odyssey were at one point part of an Epic Cycle of poems, which told the whole story of the Trojan War and the return of the heroes. 

Taken from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Cycle#Contents

...but, if I'm reading Wikipedia correctly, the other poems in the Epic Cycle were written at a later date. 

In other words, first there was the oral tradition.  Then, The Iliad and The Odyssey emerged.  Then later, the other poems in the Epic Cycle were written to fill in the gaps that were left by The Iliad  and The Odyssey.  But unfortunately, the rest of the Epic Cycle was lost to history, so now we are once again left only with The Iliad and The Odyssey.  (Fortunately we know much of what was in those lost epics from other sources--e.g. Posthomerica, etc, so we can still piece together the rough general story of the whole Trojan War.)

Of the two Homeric epics, I believe The Iliad was more influential in the ancient world.  (Someone correct me if I'm wrong).  For example, when he was on his campaigns, Alexander the Great famously carryied The Iliad around with him--not The Odyssey.   

However in the modern world, The Iliad is seen as too violent and warlike for modern readers, so The Odyssey has become more widely read in today's society.  Nowadays if you're ever looking at a school curriculum, you're far more likely to see The Odyssey on the reading list than The Iliad.  (Although upon rereading The Odyssey, I've got to say, I was surprised by how brutal some parts of it could be.  But more on that below.)

Also, in contrast to the convoluted plot of The Iliad, The Odyssey is a straightforward journey story, so that's another reason it's more accessible to modern audiences.

...except it's not that straightforward, because The Odyssey starts out in when Odysseus's journey is almost over, and then all the adventures that Odysseus had at the beginning of his journey are told in flashback.  

This is what's known as in medias res (W), and, if I remember my high school literature teachers correctly, it subsequently began a convention of epic poetry.  That is, because Homer started out The Odyssey using in medias res, this established the tradition that all epics had to start in medias res.

T.E. Lawrence Translation

I'm reading the T.E. Lawrence translation, just because this happens to be the translation currently in bookstores in Vietnam.  

And in case you're wondering... yes, it is that T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia (W).  

Did you know that in addition to becoming a messianic figure in the Middle East, and leading an epic Arab rebellion, Lawrence of Arabia also found time to do a translation of The Odyssey?  What a guy, huh?  T.E. Lawrence's translation was published in 1932.

 (I'm not sure why the publisher switched translators.  The editions of The Iliad  and The Odyssey currently being sold in Vietnam are published by Arcturus press.  They used the Samuel Butler translation for The Iliad, and Samuel Butler also published a translation of The Odyssey, so I'm not sure why they didn't just stick with Samuel Butler.   Maybe because Lawrence of Arabia is much more famous? I don't know.)

My History With This Book

My history with The Odyssey is much the same as my history with The Iliad.  I first learned the story by reading retellings designed for children and young adults.  (I couldn’t now tell you the name of it, but my school library had an illustrated retelling of The Odyssey that I read in 6th grade.)  

After having read The Iliad in 7th grade, I then moved on to The Odyssey.  Just like The Iliad, I initially tried out a verse translation, just because this was the version that was in our school library.  And, just like The Iliad, I soon gave up on the verse translation, returned it to the school library, and bought a prose translation instead from a local bookstore, which suited me much better.

Unlike my copy of The Iliad, I never saved my copy of The Odyssey.  So I cannot now tell you the name of the translation I read in 7th grade.  It may actually have been T.E. Lawrence version.  I don’t remember.

I do, however, remember not being quite as enthralled by The Odyssey as I had been with The Iliad.  

You see, The Iliad was packed full of battle scenes from beginning to end.  So even though I had thought I already knew the full story of the Trojan War from various modern retellings, there were so many more stories in The Iliad--more battles, more stories of heroes fighting each other etc.

With The Odyssey, however, I didn’t feel like I got much more out of the original book that hadn’t been in the retellings.  Odysseus’s adventures with the sirens, or the cyclops, or Circe, et cetera, were all pretty much the same in the original Odyssey as they had been in the young adult retellings that I had read.  The only difference in the original, it seemed to me, was that there were a lot more boring speeches.  Plus, I also have a memory of the end of the story, the confrontation between Odysseus and the suitors, being really drawn out in the original Odyssey.

In the years since, I've read another retelling of The Odyssey in Tales of Troy and Greece by Andrew Lang.

Why I Reread This Book

Well, once again, it's the same as with The Iliad.  Steve Donoghue's Western Canon Starter Kit (video HERE) puts Homer alongside The Bible as one of the cornerstones of Western Literature.  So I thought it would be good for me to reread The Iliad and The Odyssey.  I picked them both up at the same bookstore, and then after finishing The Iliad, I decided to continue on to The Odyssey next.  (If you're going to reread The Iliad, you pretty much have to follow it up with a rereading of The Odyssey, don't you?)

The Rereading Experience

So, I mentioned above that my memory of reading The Odyssey is that if you already know the basic story, reading the original epic doesn't really enhance the story at all, and it just adds a bunch of boring extra details and lots of speeches.

And that's pretty much my experience rereading it.

Steve Donoghue in his videos on The Odyssey remarks frequently that people who only know The Odyssey from the storybook version are frequently surprised to realize that the iconic parts of this story (Circe, the Cyclops, The Sirens, Scylla and the Charybdis, etc) actually make up only a small portion of the book.  And this perfectly describes my reading experience.

If you've not read The Odyssey (or if you, like me, have been overdue for a reread), you will be surprised to learn that the journey portion of the story, where Odysseus goes to all the strange lands and meets all the strange creatures, is actually only 4 chapters (books 9, 10, 11, 12) out of 24.  Or less than 20% of the story.

So what makes up the other 80% of the book?

The bulk of the book is building up to the confrontation with the suitors. 

Again, this is different than most modern retellings.  In modern retellings, the battle with the suitors is usually just a coda to the journeys of Odysseus.  But in The Odyssey, it is very much the central conflict of the book.  And, oh man, is there ever a lot of build up.

Odysseus finishes telling the story of his strange adventures in book 12, and the battle with the suitors doesn't happen until book 22.  During that time, there's a whole lot of talk about how Odysseus is going to get his revenge on the suitors, but actual events move forward at a snail's pace.

The translator of my edition, Lawrence of Arabia, thinks that this was deliberate padding.  In ancient Greece, these epics were sung by a travelling bard, who likely song one chapter every night at dinner, so delaying the climax for 10 more chapters meant ten more free dinners.  As Lawrence puts it:

"Perhaps the tedious delay of the climax through ten books may be a poor bard's means of prolonging his host's hospitality." (Translator's Introduction, p.9)

For a counterview, see Steve Donoghue, who believes that this long build up is just a way of expertly priming the reader (listener) so that when the hammer does finally drop on the suitors, their comeuppance is all the more satisfying because we've been primed to hate them for so many chapters.

As for me personally, I tend to side more with Lawrence of Arabia.  

I have to admit, I found the whole conflict with the suitors to be a bit boring.  And upon rereading this book, I was fully reminded of why this book never stuck with me the way The Iliad did.

I know, I know, I'm a philistine.  This is one of the foundational works of Western Literature, and through the centuries it has been praised by many men who were a lot smarter than I am.

So I don't want to give the impression that I was completely incapable of understanding it.  There were a number of things I enjoyed about the book.  So let’s talk about the positives.

The Positives 

* I mentioned above that the fantastic journey part of this book is surprisingly short--only 4 chapters out of 24.  But, short though they were, those 4 chapters are a lot of fun.  

I suspect that most people are already familiar with all the major events that happen in these chapters--Cyclops, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, the journey to the land of the dead, the land of the lotus-eaters, etc.  Most of us hear these stories in childhood, and remember them well even as adults.  I mean, I already knew what was going to happen with Odysseus and Circe, and I already knew how Odysseus was going to defeat the Cyclops.  But I still enjoyed reading through it again anyway.  Some good stories are just so much fun that you don’t mind hearing them again and again.  

[If by some chance you haven’t yet heard these stories, you’re in for a treat.  Be sure to check them out.  Only don’t start out with Homer’s Odyssey.  Just like The Iliad, just like anything from ancient Greek literature, the author is already assuming you know the basic story because in ancient Greece you would have already grown up in a culture where all these stories were already familiar because of the oral tradition.  So Homer isn’t going to waste any time getting you up to speed on the background information you need to know to understand the story. Instead start with the Classics Illustrated version, or Andrew Lang, or Bulfinch or any other modern retelling.  But do check these stories out.  They are so much fun.]

* In my review of The Iliad, I mentioned that one of the really fun things about that book was seeing how interconnected the whole world of Greek Mythology  was.  And this is definitely true of The Odyssey  as well.  The very first chapter starts out with Zeus talking about the story of Orestes, Agamemnon and Aegisthus.

Now, none of those characters are in The Odyssey.  To find out their story, you have to read a completely separate set of stories--the Oresteia.  (This is yet another reason why you wouldn't want to jump straight into The Odyssey before you've read a few books on Greek mythology generally.)  But I find the tapestry of Greek mythology--the web of individual, yet interconnected stories, to be fascinating.

The Odyssey isn't quite as interesting as The Iliad in this regard.  The Iliad was constantly throwing references back to the age of heroes--the generation right before the Trojan War.  The Odyssey, by contrast, only has a few references back to the age of heroes.  But although it's not quite as impressive as The Iliad, it's still fun to see.

* The scenes with the gods and goddess were also fun.

Again, this is something that was better in The Iliad.  In The Iliad, we had a lot of scenes of the gods and goddess squabbling with each other on Mount Olympus.  The Odyssey has much fewer, but the scenes they do have are still fun.  (The Greek gods were a very colorful bunch.)

One scene that I remember reading in 7th grade, and which stuck in my head very clearly in the subsequent years, was when Ares and Aphrodite were having sex together, and the god Hephaestus (the husband of Aphrodite) devised a metal net to fall down on them and trap them in the act, and then while Ares and Aphrodite were trapped in this compromising position, all the other gods gathered around to view and make jokes.  (I grew up in a very sheltered environment, so this was one of the first cases I remember of sex being referenced in literature.)

* Lastly, The Odyssey can be very interesting for its description of daily life in ancient Greece.

The Iliad, which took place almost exclusively on the battle field, didn't give us very many descriptions of what normal domestic life was like.  But The Odyssey is full of descriptions of what the dining halls were like, what kind of clothes people were wearing, what kinds of food they were eating, et cetera.

I'm reminded once again of the George R.R. Martin quote I've used a couple - times before on this blog--"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one."  Through the magic of reading this book, we get some glimpse into what life was like for people 3,000 years ago.

Speaking of which, anyone who reads The Odyssey will be immediately struck by the theme of hospitality.  This is actually not something I had remembered from my first reading, but reading it again, I was struck by how over and over again the book emphasized how important hospitality was in the ancient world.  (Characters are constantly giving speeches about the importance of hospitality.  You absolutely cannot miss it as a theme.)

On the Homeric Question

As you probably know, although tradition assigns The Iliad and The Odyssey both to Homer, there’s been a long debate about whether Homer wrote both poems, or whether Homer even existed.

Lawrence of Arabia, the translator of my edition, believed that the author of The Odyssey did not live at the same time The Iliad was composed, but was of a generation that grew up in the shadow of The Iliad.   Speaking of the writer of The Odyssey, Lawrence writes:

"His generation so rudely admired The Iliad that even to misquote it was a virtue" (translator's introduction, p.9)

For a contrasting view, see Steve Donoghue, who argues that: "when you read them, I don't think there's any doubt in the world that The Iliad and The Odyssey were both written entirely by one person."

As for me, I've got to say that after having now re-read The Iliad and The Odyssey both within the same year, to me they certainly feel like they were written by different authors.

But then, of course, I was reading the work of two different translators.  So of course these books would feel different.  Those of us who can't read the original ancient Greek really shouldn't attempt to have an opinion about the Homeric Question.

But... since this is my blog, and everyone can spout off their own two cents on their own blog, I do feel like pointing out some differences I've noticed.

The author of The Iliad went to great lengths to make us feel sympathy with both sides of the conflict.  It was not a story of good guys versus bad guys--there were good men on both sides of the war.

The Odyssey, by contrast, definitely has a set of bad guys.  The author of The Odyssey emphasizes over and over and over again how awful the suitors are, and when they all get killed at the end, we are meant to feel that they are only getting what's coming to them.

Extended Quotation

From the end of Book 1:

Eurymachus son of Polybus then put in his word. ‘Telemachus, the question of which Greek shall reign over this island lies on the lap of the Gods. Yet assuredly you shall possess your belongings and have the lordship in your own houses: nor against your will shall any man come and strip you of them forcibly while Ithaca holds an inhabitant. But my good lad, let me question you about that visitor of yours who slipped away so suddenly that none of us had time to make him out. Yet his face was not the face of a negligible man. Whence came he and what country gave he as his own? Where do his kindred live and where are the corn-lands of his family? Did he come with news of your father, or on some business of his own?’

Discreetly Telemachus reassured him: ‘Eurymachus, the time of my father’s return is long over. I do not now credit any messages regarding him, whatever their source. Nor does any soothsaying take me in: though my mother may at whiles call some noted diviner to the palace and seek sooth of him. As for the stranger, he is a former friend of our family from Taphos called Mentes, whose father was old wise-minded Anchialus. Mentes is a man of authority among the seafaring Taphians.’ So he said: but secretly Telemachus was sure of the immortal Goddess. Howbeit the suitors turned to dance and to the enthralling song, making merry while the evening drew down; and they celebrated until evening had darkened into night. Then the longing for sleep took them and they scattered, each man to the house where he lodged.

The mind of Telemachus was perplexedly brooding over many things as he also sought his bed within his own room, which was contrived in the highest part of the main building, that stately landmark of the country-side. Eurycleia the daughter of Ops son of Peisenor, attended him, lighting his way with flaring slips of pine-wood — Eurycleia the trusted, the adept, who, in the flush of her youth, had been bought by Laertes, out of his great wealth, for the price of twenty oxen. In the house Laertes had esteemed her even as his beloved wife, but never dared have intercourse with her, fearing the temper of his wife. Of all the servants it was Eurycleia who most loved Telemachus, for she had nursed him when he was a tiny child. Accordingly it was she who lighted him to his well-built room.

He flung open its doors and sat himself on the couch. There he pulled off his long clinging tunic, which the old woman received into her skillful hands and folded and patted into smoothness before she hung it on the clothes-peg beside his fretted, inlaid bedstead. Then she quitted the chamber, pulling-to the door after her by the silver beak which served as handle and sliding the bolt across by its leathern thong. And there Telemachus lay all night, wrapped in a choice fleece, pondering in his heart how he should compass the journey enjoined upon him by Athene. (p.24-25)

***END QUOTE***

I know I took that out of context, so the conversations between Telemachus and the suitors may not make a lot of sense.  But nonetheless, notice all the little details here about daily life--the pine-wood torch, the clothes-peg by the bedstead, the sliding bolt on the door, et cetera.  The Odyssey has much more of these details than The Iliad.

Other Stray Observations

* In my review of The Iliad, I was originally intending to write about this weird empathy disconnect that I noticed in the book.  But I ended up cutting my review of The Iliad short once I realized it was getting too long, so I never wrote about it after all.

But briefly, here's what I wanted to write:

The Iliad is a very brutal book, where Achilles and the rest of the Greek heroes relentlessly slaughter the Trojans, even when the Trojans are begging them for mercy.  It's hard to read at times, but as you're reading it, you end up just telling yourself, "Well, these men lived in different times.  Back in those days, a warrior was cold and brutal and heartless."

And if the Greek heroes had been portrayed that way throughout--as cold, unfeeling, killing machines--men whose basic human emotions had just been numbed by the brutality of constant battle--then I think I could have made sense of it.

But the weird thing is--they were all constant crybabies.  Achilles cried constantly about how he was disrespected or dishonored.  At the funeral games for Patroclus, the other heroes cried whenever they lost a contest.

It was a weird disconnect to see them so cold and heartless on the battlefield, but yet so whiny and tearful.

I'm guessing that this over-emoting was done to heighten the drama of the story.  That is, I doubt the ancient Greeks actually acted like this (although who knows, maybe they did), but when you're telling a story, you want to wring as much emotion and drama as you can from it, and one way to do that is by having your characters get super emotional about every single thing.  After all, if the characters aren't emotionally invested in their own needs and wants, then how can you expect the audience to get invested?

But regardless of the reason, that same empathy disconnect was all through The Odyssey.  Odysseus is constantly crying about how he misses his home and his family, and he works himself into a furious rage when he thinks about how the suitors are trying to take away his wife, and are depleting his wealth by eating his cattle and goats.

But then, this same Odysseus feels no remorse about sacking and destroying towns, killing all the men, and taking the women, just because he encounters them on his voyage home.

As Odysseus is retelling his voyages in book 9, he says, 

From Ilion, the wind served me to near Ismarus of the Cicones. I sacked the city and slew them.  Their wives and wealth we took and divided precisely, so that no one of us, through me, should go short of his just share." (p.128)

So Odysseus thinks nothing of depriving other men of their wives and wealth, but whines endlessly when other people do it to him.  What kind of a hero is that?

(Is this a problem with the text?  Or is the author of The Odyssey intentionally trying to play with the irony of making Odysseus a hypocrite.)

* Connected to the above point...

In my review of Tales of Troy and Greece by Andrew Lang, one of my many criticisms of Andrew Lang was his use of the title Ulysses, the Sacker of Cities ("Ulysses" being the Latin for "Odysseus").  But I take this particular criticism back.  Several times in The Odyssey, Odysseus is identified as someone who is prone to sack cities.  

*********************************************************************************

As I mentioned above, although The Iliad is generally more violent than The Odyssey, in some ways The Odyssey is more brutal.

Particularly at the end with the slaughter of the suitors.

And particularly when Odysseus and his son Telemachus execute the maids who had been sleeping with the suitors.

CONTENT WARNING ahead.

…but cunning Odysseus forbade her. “By no means call her yet. Bid me in those women who have been disorderly”; and away at his word went the old dame through the house, warning the women and hustling them forward: while Odysseus called to Telemachus, to the stockman and to the swineherd, saying with energy, “Start to clear away the dead, making the women do the work; and then swill down the rich seats and tables with water and fibrous sponges. Afterwards, when you have restored the whole house to order, take these servants outside the stately hall to that spot between the round vault and the courtyard’s strong boundary wall and there slaughter them with your long swords till the last life is spent and their love-passages with the suitors are whole out of mind.”

So he bade them, and the erring women trailed in, all huddled together and crying great bitter tears of woe.  First they bore out the dead and laid them in heaps along the portico of the walled court--Odysseus directing that work himself and driving them, for it took force to make them do it--and then they cleaned down the noble thrones and tables with water and soft sponges, while Telemachus with the swineherd and cattle-man scraped down the floor of the strong house with hoes, the maids carrying for them to a dump out of doors.  When the house was tidy they led the women servants beyond the great hall and penned them in that blind place between vault and boundary wall, whence escape was impossible.  “It irks me,” he said, “to give any sort of clean death to women who have heaped shame on my head and my mother’s, and have wantoned with the suitors.” That was what he said. He made fast a dark-prowed ship’s hawser to a pillar and strained it round the great spiral of the vault, at too great a height for anyone to touch the floor with her feet.  Sometimes in a shrubbery men so stretch out nets, upon which long-winded thrushes or doves alight on their way to roost: and fatal the perch proves. Exactly thus were the women’s all held a-row with a bight of cord drawn around each throat, to suffer their caitiff’s death.  A little while they twittered with their feet--only a little.  It was not long.

Melanthius they dragged through the entry and the court, sliced his nose and ears with their cruel swords and tore out his privates, which they fed raw to the dogs. Their spite made them also cut off his hands and feet…. (Book 22, pages 298-299)

Right, where to even begin with this?  

First of all, The Iliad, for all its violence, never depicted violence against women.  (I’m not forgetting anything, am I?)  So this strikes me as being more brutal than The Iliad on that note alone.

But also, as John Green points out in his video on The Odyssey, there’s a hypocritical double standard that runs all through the book.  These women are executed simply for sleeping with the wrong men.  But Odysseus sleeps with many women throughout his adventures, and not all of those women were angels (Circe, for instance, seems to have had a malevolent streak.)  Plus, as we mentioned above, earlier in The Odyssey, Odysseus had bragged about killing the Cicones and just taking their women for sexual pleasure.

And then that part about poor Melanthius, Odysseus’s goatherd.  That’s really brutal, isn’t it?  And once again, this seems to be even in excess of anything in The Iliad.  The Iliad had plenty of scenes of violence, but no depictions of anyone being tortured.  (Again, I’m not forgetting anything, right?)  And Melanthius wasn’t even one of the hated suitors--he was just on friendly terms with them.  So his punishment seems really excessive.

I won’t lie, the description here haunts me a bit with its casual brutality--for example the way it says they actually “pulled” his privates off instead of just slicing them off.  That’s really sick and twisted, isn’t it?

…but then, I have to remind myself that this is all fiction, and it’s just words on a page and none of this actually happened.  (One of the oddities of the human brain is that sometimes our brain emotionally engages with fictional stories as if they were real events.  There’s probably an evolutionary psychology explanation behind this--perhaps something about how our brain’s desire to hear stories originated as a way to get useful information about people we had to interact with daily in our local tribe, so consequently our brain tends to engage with stories as if they were real. But that’s a digression to explore on another day.)

But anyway… what to make of all of this?  Does the author of The Odyssey just have really sick and twisted values?  Or is the author intending to evoke our disgust and revulsion?  Is the author intending for us to disapprove of Odysseus and his actions?

I had the exact same questions when I was reading The Iliad--as I wrote at some length in my review of The Iliad--and now I’m back here again with The Odyssey.  What are we supposed to make of this book?

Plans for Future Reading (and watching)

* So, after 30 years, I've now finally reread The Iliad and The Odyssey.  I probably shouldn't wait another 30 years before I read them again.

The great Steve Donoghue actually rereads these books every year.  But Steve's a much more prolific reader than I'll ever be.  I'll just aim to read them again in another 5, or maybe 10 years. 

And when I do,  I should really try out some different translations next time around.  

* And speaking of translators, I'm also overdue to rewatch Lawrence of Arabia one of these days.  I've seen it twice--once as an adolescent, once in my late 20s, but I'm due now for another viewing, and then doing a review on my Thoughts after Re-Watching project.

But as I've mentioned before, watching full movies is a bit difficult nowadays.  So it could be a few years before I get around to it.

Links

* In 2006, I thought I had finished my time in Japan, and was anxious to return to my hometown.  However, I extended my stay in Japan for a couple more months because of a girl.  I referred to her on this blog on 2 occasions as “Calypso” (here and here).  The idea being (tongue-in-cheek, of course) that she was preventing me from returning to my hometown and keeping me on island, just like the nymph Calypso had done to Odysseus.  

I thought I was being clever.   

* I've mentioned this in passing above, but see also my review of Classics Illustrated: The Odyssey.

* In preparing this review, I watched a lot of booktube and Youtube videos on The Odyssey:

Steve Donoghue: Homer-Along: The Odyssey Part 1! https://youtu.be/WeQRWGKRzvE

Steve Donoghue: Homer-Along: The Odyssey Part 2! https://youtu.be/BWa92jahXnI

Steve Donoghue: Homer-Along 2018: The Odyssey Part 3! https://youtu.be/OI62yUzn2MU

Steve Donoghue: Homer-Along 2018: The Odyssey Concludes! https://youtu.be/ZKm7u6Abxeg

Steve Donoghue: Mayberry Book Club: The Odyssey - Part 1! https://youtu.be/VMfSTZQPSDY

Steve Donoghue:  The Mayberry Book Club: The Odyssey - Part 2! https://youtu.be/3Y0z2tkMGbA

Mayberry Bookclub: The Odyssey, by Homer | Books 1-6 https://youtu.be/47-sDvCFrxI

Mayberry Bookclub: The Odyssey, by Homer | Books 7-12 https://youtu.be/PWUkQfZrRhs

A Long and Difficult Journey, or The Odyssey: Crash Course Literature 201 https://youtu.be/MS4jk5kavy4

Rating:

7 out of 10 Stars.  I gave The Iliad 9 out of 10 stars, in spite of all its many problems.  The Odyssey is in a similar category.  Massively problematic, and yet also massively fascinating.  But, for my money at least, not quite as impressive as The Iliad.

Weekly Reading Vlogs:

November 20, 2022 The Odyssey p.1-116

November 27, 2022 The Odyssey p.116-168

December 4, 2022 The Odyssey p.168-192 

December 18, 2022 The Odyssey p.192-204

December 23, 2022 The Odyssey p.204-212

January 1, 2023 The Odyssey p.212-320

Video Review (Playlist HERE)

The Odyssey by Homer Translated by T.E. Lawrence: Book Review

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