A couple of months ago, for no particular reason, I grabbed my copy of Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf off the shelf and began to read. Having only read bit of Beowulf in high school, I only remembered that Beowulf fights a monster named Grendel and a dragon. While I have since learned that, though beautiful, few would consider Tolkien’s translation to be a good starting point with the ancient poem, I was hooked. And my enjoyment of Beowulf somehow stirred up a desire to familiarize myself with other epic poems that I was only semi-introduced to during school. So I’ve set eight before me: the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Beowulf (probably Heaney’s translation this time), the Divine Comedy, the Canterbury Tales, the Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost.

First up, then, was the Iliad. Although I knew of Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, and Helen, I dove in with little more context than that. And while the lectures of Elizabeth Vandiver were very helpful (and have been for the Odyssey as well), it should be sufficiently noted that the following thoughts are from an admitted Homeric novice.

With that said, the most noticeable feature of the Iliad was the violence. I knew that the premise of the story revolved around the Greek’s siege of the city of Troy, but I was not expecting the continuous brutality of war that Homer describes. Indeed, the violence is so pervasive throughout that I can quite easily open to a random page and quickly find a sample, which will be lines 526-536 of Book 11 (from Fagles’ translation):

And spinning in terror off he ran as he spun
Odysseus plunged a spear in his back between the shoulders–
straight through his chest the shaft came jutting out
and down Socus crashed, Odysseus vaunting over him:
“Socus, son of Hippasus, skilled breaker of horses,
so, Death in its rampage outraced you–no escape.
No, poor soldier. Now your father and noble mother
will never close your eyes in death–screaming vultures
will claw them out of you, wings beating your corpse!
But I, if I should die,
my comrades-in-arms will bury me in style!”

While there certainly plenty of pauses in the fighting, battles filled with such slaughter are lengthy and left me feeling as almost as ready for a respite as the combatants must have been. Indeed, if I had known how much of the Iliad was spent describing battles, I might have been quite a bit more excited to read it. After all, in epics and fantasies, the battle scenes are the showstoppers, right? Yet herein lies the wisdom of Homer, as I see it.

You see, although the warriors in the Iliad are fighting for glory and honor (Sarpedon’s cry to Glaucus may be the best expression of this: “Give our enemies glory or win it for ourselves!” 12:381), Homer seems to be showcasing the futility of it all. As a storyteller, Homer does an excellent job raising the tension throughout, even as he also directly tells us the final outcome. He shows us the might of Hector, the continuous interference of the gods, and withholds Achilles from the fight. Thus, after Patroclus’ death, we would expect the great climatic battle-scene to follow. 

Indeed, there are three scenes that ought to be climatic yet prove to be mightily anti-climatic. First, in Book 20, Zeus lifts the ban on the gods entering the battle, and they all join the fight. With the super-powered immortals donning their war-gear, we would expect the ancient equivalent of a summer blockbuster. Yet the result of the gods fighting against one another is more laughable than epic. As Bernard Knox writes in his introduction:

[The gods] cannot lose their lives–no matter what they do, they will survive. And given this crucial difference between gods and men, only men can have true dignity on the battlefield; the presence of gods there is an impertinence. The immunity of the gods, who fight their mock battles while men stand and die, casts into high relief that tragic situation of the men who risk and suffered not only pain and mutilation but the prospect, inevitable if the war goes on long enough, of death, of the total extinction of the individual personality. (43)

Second, in Book 21, we finally have a chance to see the great warrior Achilles fighting without restraint. However, in his despair over the death of Patroclus, Achilles has essentially lost his humanity, and what ought to be a display of Achilles’ glorious might only reads like a horrifying slaughter.

Finally, in Book 22, we have the long-awaited duel between Achilles, the mightiest Greek champion, and Hector, the greatest Trojan. Again, our expectations for a riveting fight are dashed by Homer. The majority of the fight sees Achilles chasing Hector around the city of Troy, but when Hector’s courage to fight is finally established (through Athena disguising herself as one of his friends), he throws a spear at Achilles and is then promptly stabbed through the neck by Achilles. Significantly less suspenseful than the duel between Achilles and Hector in the 2004 film Troy.

After those three promising yet ultimately disappointing fights, the true climax of the Iliad comes in Book 24 where Hector’s father Priam sneaks into Achilles’ tent to beg for the body of his son. Indeed, I would call lines 585-599 the most important moment in the Iliad. They begin with Priam saying to Achilles:

The one you killed the other day, defending his fatherland,
my Hector! It’s all for him I’ve come to the ships now,
to win him back from you– I bring a priceless ransom.
Revere the gods, Achilles! Pity me in my own right,
remember your own father! I deserve more pity…
I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before–
I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.”

Those words stirred within Achilles a deep desire
to grieve for his own father. Taking the old man’s hand
he gently moved him back. And overpowered by memory
both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely
for man-killing Hector, throbbing, crouching
before Achilles’ feet as Achilles wept himself,
now for his father, now for Patroclus once again,
and their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house.

After all the senseless death throughout the senseless war for Troy, these two enemies weeping together in their grief is deeply moving, and Homer clearly intends for it to be. Despite his poem being saturated with war, the ancient bard seems to be desperate for something more, for a hope of peace in the midst of human futility.

Overall, the Iliad has a fixed place within the Western canon of thought for good reason, and despite the progressive rejection of the classics, it is encouraging to see a groundswell of people desiring to reclaim that educational heritage. Indeed, my wife and I have chosen classical education for our children largely because we do not want our daughters to be as unfamiliar with what Mortimer Adler called the Great Conversation, as we were.

And although the Iliad certainly ought to be read, there is a great danger in not going further into that great conversation. In comparison to the mushiness of our postmodern world, where division is very often actively fostered, the ancient wisdom of Homer can seem like a firm foundation. Indeed, that is certainly why paganism is a growing worldview. Yet the hope of mutual shared grief in light of life’s suffering is no hope at all. Or, at best, it is hope for some kind of hope.

Christianity offers a far better wisdom and hope than Homer and paganism in general ever could. In Scripture, we do not find wicked and deceitful gods that delight in causing mischief and whose coming down into human suffering only mocks the our mortality; instead, we find the almighty Creator who is good, just, and true in all of His ways and who descended to earth to suffer and die as one of us to redeem us from futile curse of death.

And as beautiful as the scene between Achilles and Priam is, it is likewise futile. Between the Iliad and its sequel, the Odyssey, the Greek’s sack Troy and commit a multitude of atrocities against the Trojans. Here again the Bible offers us a better hope. Of course, we could point to crucial teachings such as “love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31) or “whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them” (Matthew 7:12). Yet we can also go to Paul’s marvelous words in Ephesians 2:11-22 about Jesus reconciling us to one another through His crucifixion.

Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands— remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.

Indeed, that is the better hope of the gospel. It is does not merely help us to better understand the humanity of others; rather, it unites us together in Christ, creating “in himself one new man in place of the two” (v. 15). Indeed, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). And we could easily add Greeks and Trojans to that list.

That is the better hope that Jesus offers to us and commands us to proclaim to all nations.