The Iliad

Right now I’m listening to the Iliad in my car when I travel to and from work. A lot of folks might think that crazy. I believe most people look upon Homer as a punishment inflicted on students. Let me tell you why I’m listening to it.

The first year of my undergraduate education we sat a course called Western Heritage. The idea is to give a brief overview of how we got the culture we have in America today. (If you think this is ballocks, just consider how many people do you know that have a Aristotelian view of reality, i.e. "throw open the window, there is reality!") We read most of both the Odyssey and the Aeneid. Both are sequels to the Iliad. The one thing I loved about the Odyssey was the terrifying situation Odysseus and his crew got into on the isle of the cyclops. If you have a good imagination, it plays out a lot like the Grendel attack scenes in Beowulf, only the threat is extremely immanent the whole time. It gives me goose flesh just thinking about it. But I digress, back to my main point.

I was fortunate enough during the short/intense winter term to go to Greece. (I love Greece! If I had any place I could retire to it would be Santorini and I’d take regular trips to Athens, Mycenae, and Metéora.) It was cut short when the First Gulf War was about to occur and some Greeks where not to thrilled with American policy. (Nothing ever happened to us but the college I went to always seemed to be on the over-protective side.) Our final projects were changed to writing papers on some aspect of Greek culture. I asked if I could write a Greek tragedy in the style of Aeschylus. I chose the revenge that Orestes exacts on his mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, for the killing of his father Agamemnon. Well, to get to know something of Agamemnon, you have to read the Iliad. I went through a abridged and edited version to get the project done. Essentially, every character in the story is a combination of hero and schmuck (actually a lot like most people are).

Years later, I was working on a cross-stitch project, (I’ll write about that another time) and wanted to listen to something while I worked. I came across an abridged, but very good reading on tape done by Derek Jakobi (the valet in Gosford park, the Emperor in I, Claudius). I had listen to it perhaps ten or so times in about four years. One of the cassettes broke and about a year later I got "The Anger of Achilles: Homer’s Iliad" read by Bill Kelsey. And in the past year, I’ve tried to do away with cassettes altogether and get just cds, so I now have an unabridged reading done by George Guidall (more will be forthcoming about him since he reads at least 3 other of my favorite books). It is a remarkable story. The vanity, the stupidity, the violence, and the heroism is hard to beat. Let me just go off on a couple of subjects.

There are parts of the story that are just down right boring. The most infamous is "The catalog of ships." But you have to appreciate who it is there. This was a spoken poem that performed all over Greece and this was considered actual account of history. Everyone wants to here about how their people were there. So you wind up with some long winded parts dealing with homeland stories and lists of people.

The scenes of violence, like those in the Odyssey, in the mind of the imaginative, put anything Hollywood can make to shame. The description of a spear being thrust through bottom of the jaw, piercing the tongue, and bursting out the teeth gives me shivers.

Finally, in complete opposition to "Troy," Telamonian Ajax, is a fantastic hero and is really the man who should be called best of the Achaeans. The man never whines like Agamemnon, or pouts like Achilles, or brags like Sarpedon. Great Ajax, fights hard, does his part, and is a mighty, not because he has a god behind him making him so, but on his own merit.