An Iliad for every season

The Sydney Morning Herald & The Age

6 January 2016

Why the world’s oldest war story has been translated every 18 months this century.

The Iliad: A New Translation, Peter Green, University of California Press, $49.95

The Iliad: A New Translation, Caroline Alexander, Vintage, $79.99

"Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles." With this call to the epic muse The Iliad, and Western literature, begins. Composed around the mid-8th century BC by a reputedly blind bard named Homer, the tale of Troy's 10-year siege by a Greek alliance – enraged, improbably, by the kidnap of an adulterous Spartan queen – has endured the chaos of the ages. But it's done more than merely survive. The granddaddy of all classics is on heavy rotation.

At least two new English translations of The Iliad have appeared between hard covers: one by the nonagenarian British classicist-historian, Peter Green, and the most recent by US-based writer, Caroline Alexander.

The Iliad craze went global, and digital, last August when a 60-strong cast of Britain's finest actors intoned this spacious epic – all 15,600 lines of hexameter verse – to a live audience in London that, over the course of a very long day, was estimated to peak at 10,000. The 16-hour relay reading, one actor passing the baton to the next, was streamed live and tracked with a Twitter feed, while an estimated 30,000 watched online.

Saturated in death, The Iliad – or tale of Ilion, Homer's preferred name for his besieged city of Troy – is first and foremost a war story. In the 20th century, which endured two catastrophic world wars and a notionally cold war, there were 30 fresh translations of The Iliad; this century, a more pacific era than its predecessor despite the continuing loss of life, at least 10 new translations have appeared already. That's a new Iliad every 18 months.

Nor is Homer's amazing after life restricted to new literary translations in verse or prose. The taproot of the western literary tradition, the classic classic, is heavy going. Its second chapter is a 1000-line yawn-inducing tally of the Greek and Trojan deployments. A much easier way into the Homeric tradition is to come at it aslant, through works of Homeric commentary and exposition such as Adam Nicolson's Why Homer Matters (2014), Caroline Alexander's earlier The War that Killed Achilles (2009), and Barry Strauss' The Trojan War: A New History (2007). 

Add to the mix untold pop-fictional retellings for children, young adults and adults who want the ripping tale – not only swords and greaves but gods and heroes – without its considerable longueurs, and you have an Iliad for every taste: a pop cultural event.

The inside jacket of American poet Robert Fitzgerald's  Iliad, first published in 1998, voiced the rationale for refreshing Homer: "In every century since the renaissance, English speakers have felt compelled to possess a translation written especially for their own time of this great epic poem, the earliest and most central literary text of Western culture." Unless we have begun counting generational cycles in yearly spans, something else is fuelling the Homer boom.

The standard-issue pitch to readers, remade by every new translation, is the claim of eternal relevance. Homer is said to speak out of the deep past to our reality.

In the introduction to her new translation, Alexander relies heavily on the rhetoric of relevance. Homer's epic, she writes, is about the "enduring realities of war: the fact that an individual warrior must risk his life for a cause in which he does not believe, or must subject himself to the command of a lesser man …" 

She goes on to locate "the mythological world of The Iliad" in a "specific period of human history", the late Bronze Age. In fact the poem contains fragments, as if it were a versified archaeological site, of both the Bronze Age and the Dark Age that followed.

Alexander's alluring picture of an Iliad  anchored in reality and concerned with "enduring realities" gets an extra coat of paint when she describes the archaeological site at Hisarlik in Aegean Turkey that some experts – though certainly not all – believe to be Homer's Troy. 

The trouble with Hisarlik is that it looks nothing like the power city evoked by Homer. It's too small, too slight. Adopting some recent though contested theories in archaeology and epigraphy (the study of inscriptions), she in effect supersizes the impoverished ruins of Hisarlik to dovetail with Homer's wealthy and powerful Asian city of Troy. It has the effect of elevating Homeric myth to the status of history.

In this way the epic is brought closer to us, domesticated, stripped of some of its mythopoeic strangeness – its antiquity. We are asked to believe that the Trojan War was real and Homer a kind of war correspondent. 

There are moments in The Iliad – Achilles and Priam shedding tears over the corpse of Hector; Hector's farewell speech to Andromache – when the mythic, epic past takes on a contemporary colouring and Homer seems to speak directly to us in an emotional language we understand. And yet much of The Iliad not only describes but celebrates the viciousness of war.

Homer kills off 243 combatants by name, and many more that are unnamed. The battle scenes at the core of the poem glorify the victor, demean the victim, and turn killing into mere work: a hard day at an open-air office. Book 10 relates a grim night-time reconnoitre that results in the summary decapitation of a Trojan who is speaking when the blade strikes – "and the shrieking head went tumbling into the dust" (in Robert Fagles' 1990 acclaimed translation). It's a kind of macabre slapstick. A really bad joke.

When first encountered, the Homeric hero Achilles is little more than a champion angry that his military superior covets his prize – a captive girl named Briseis. Achilles stalks off to his tent, spends most of the poem sulking as his comrades fall around him, and returns to the fray when Patroclus, his best friend or possibly lover, is killed by the Trojans. His ultimate revenge is to slay the Trojan champion Hector – a husband, father and man of his people. This accomplished, Achilles the anarchist drags Hector's corpse behind his chariot for 12 days. The whole thing is completely, inexplicably, over the top.

An incident that is rarely discussed – perhaps, like a trauma, it is easily suppressed – occurs at the funeral of Patroclus. Onto the blazing pyre Achilles throws a menagerie of sacrificial beasts and "12  sons of the high-spirited Trojans" (in Green's translation) after first cutting their throats. Homer glides over the incident. But to fully grasp the poem's complex character you need to press the pause button at this point. We're looking at mass human sacrifice, nothing less. 

There are multiple reasons for The Iliad's defiant vitality. One is the attraction of first things – to cultural roots – at a time of fragmentation. Another is the rhetoric of relevance used time and again to plead the case for Homer. The literary culture is awash with new translations, adaptations, and even films of Homer, but very few clear-eyed critics; at least none blessed with the perspicacity of William Hazlitt, whose critical edge was never dulled by the immense cultural prestige of the two epics that kickstart the Western literary tradition. "Homer has celebrated the anger of Achilles," Hazlitt writes, "but was not the hero as mad as the poet?"

We are in reality so far removed from the 8th century BC that we don't even know if there was a Homer. Or a real Trojan war. The epic is so strange and archaic and wreathed in myth – in Book 5 the goddess Aphrodite is speared on the battlefield and forced to flee to Olympus – that too much talk of its "enduring realities" obscures its equally real unrealities. *