TE Lawrence esteemed Homer sufficiently to translate him (rather unsatisfactorily), but he was scornful of the poet's knowledge of military affairs. (In 2004, the bodies of American contractors were attached to the backs of cars and dragged through the streets of Fallujah.) At the end of the poem Hector's frail and eldery father, Priam, enters the Greeks' camp and persuades Achilles to restore to him his son's body. Finally, he kills Hector in single combat and attaches the corpse to his chariot, dragging it triumphantly around the walls of the city. He joins the fighting, and begins a lengthy and pitiless slaughtering spree. When Patroclus is killed by the Trojans' best fighter, Hector, Achilles whirls into a frenzy of redoubled, redirected rage. ![]() He stubbornly resists all appeals to return to battle, but eventually agrees to send his beloved comrade, Patroclus, into the fray. Achilles, his pride and honour outraged, withdraws from the fighting and persuades his mother, the goddess Thetis, to ask Zeus to turn the tide of war against the Greeks, knowing that they will suffer appalling losses. That wrath is provoked by his commander-in-chief Agamemnon's misguided decision to seize Briseis, Achilles's captive woman, as compensation for his own bit of living loot, Chriseis, whom he has been obliged to restore to her Trojan father. Instead, the subject of the poem is menis, fury – specifically, the wrath of the Greeks' best warrior, Achilles. The Iliad charts not the famous causes of the conflict (the Trojan prince Paris's abduction of Helen) nor its spectacularly bloody end (the Greeks' ruse of the wooden horse and the brutal sacking of the city). ![]() The Trojan war – a more or less mythical event – was a 10-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greeks, its purpose to restore Helen to her Spartan husband, Menelaus. The military language of the conflicts even brings with it distant echoes of Homer: Operation Achilles was a Nato offensive in 2007 aimed at clearing Helmand province of the Taliban. The 1,000 plebes in his audience must now be in command positions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In her 2007 book Soldier's Heart, Elizabeth Samet, literature professor at the institution, recalls a visit by the late translator-poet Robert Fagles, who recited, in Greek, the first lines of the epic. Today's students at West Point, the elite US military academy where one may minor in "terrorism studies", study The Iliad as part of their literature course. While she does not indulge in crass equivalences, it is hard not to be alerted by her reading to the devastation caused by the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are still turning to The Iliad, amid our own wars: the Australian writer David Malouf's recent novel, Ransom (Chatto & Windus), is about the encounter between Priam and Achilles in The Iliad's final book, while Caroline Alexander's new study of the poem, The War that Killed Achilles (Faber), sees it as a meditation on the catastrophic effects of conflict. For her, it tells a profound, human story – "Suffering and loss have stripped Hector bare," her essay "On The Iliad" begins. Her contemporary Rachel Bespaloff, a Geneva-raised philosopher who wound up in the United States, also turned to Homer's poem as a "method of facing" the second world war. Simone Weil's essay, " L'Iliade ou le poème de la force", published in 1940, holds that "the true hero, the true subject at the centre of The Iliad is force", which she defines as "that X that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing". "He esteemed it a perfect portable treasure of all military virtue and knowledge," according to Plutarch's biography. Alexander the Great, perhaps the most flamboyantly successful soldier in history, slept beside a copy annotated by his tutor, Aristotle. Many wishing to make sense of wars in their own time have reached for The Iliad. Achilles sings stories of heroes' deeds in battle, and Helen embroiders scenes of fighting on an elaborate textile. In The Iliad, two characters have the narrative urge, and something approaching a synoptic view of the scenes surging around them. ![]() Civilisation – with its settlements, its boundary lines, its hierarchies – breeds conflict and narrative alike. ![]() Why is the first book a book about war? Perhaps because war is inextricably bound up with humanity's urge to tell stories. but they are deceived only too readily," he wrote. He might note that "spin " goes back to The Iliad: the first-century writer Dio Chrysostom argued that Homer, for reasons of his own, suppressed the truth about the Trojan war – in reality, the Greeks lost. Tony Blair wove his own when giving evidence at the Chilcot inquiry yesterday: the latest, unpoetic attempt to make sense of an east-west clash of powers. T he Iliad is the first great book, and the first great book about the suffering and loss of war.
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