The Iliad · wrath, sing, goddess
the poem, the art of repetition, the Greek text, the English line, and this edition
The Iliad is not the story of the Trojan War. Everyone knows how that war ended: with a wooden horse, and a city burning. Neither is in this poem. The war lasts ten years; the Iliad covers fifty-one days of it, near the end, and all but a handful of those days pass in a line or two. There is no wooden horse in it, no fall of Troy, no abduction of Helen to start the war, no sacrifice of Iphigenia to launch the fleet. The Judgment of Paris, the beauty contest among goddesses that set everything in motion, gets one glancing mention in the last book, and ancient critics wanted to cut even that. The poem assumes you know these things the way you know the weather. What it tells is announced in its first word, mēnis, wrath: the wrath of Achilles, the greatest fighter in the Greek army, from the afternoon it is kindled by an insult to the night, some seven weeks later, when it has burned all the way through him and gone out.
The story is simple to tell. Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek army, is made to give up a captive woman, and takes Achilles' captive, Briseis, in her place. Achilles withdraws from the fighting, and his mother, the sea goddess Thetis, persuades Zeus to let the Greeks lose until they learn what her son was worth. That is Book 1. The debt comes due through the long middle of the poem. The Greeks are beaten back to their ships. Agamemnon offers Achilles a fortune to return, and Achilles refuses: given the chance to end his quarrel on magnificent terms, he finds instead that he can imagine leaving the war altogether. Then the Trojans set fire to the first ship. Here the poem turns. Achilles will not fight, but he lends his armor and his dearest friend, Patroclus, and Patroclus dies in his place, wearing his bronze, at the hands of Hector, the champion of Troy. From then on the wrath has a new object. What was aimed at Agamemnon is aimed at Hector; what was a strike becomes a hunt; and the man who would not fight for honor now fights past every limit, against a river, against decency, against the plain fact of his own approaching death, which he knows about in detail and accepts out loud. He kills Hector, drags the body behind his chariot, and cannot stop; his grief will not close. It closes only in the last book, and not by force. Priam, the old king of Troy and Hector's father, crosses the plain at night, kneels to the man who killed his son, and kisses his hands. The two of them weep, each for his own dead. Then they look at each other and marvel, and eat, and sleep. The Iliad ends with a burial and a meal shared between enemies. The city will still fall. Everyone in the poem knows it, and the poem does not need to show it.
Underneath the story, the subject is death. Achilles is the one figure in the poem who is given a choice: a long, obscure life at home, or a short one and a name that never fades. The poem lets him make the choice twice. Once in the abstract, in Book 9, when he threatens to sail home and questions whether the bargain is worth anything at all: "The portion is equal for the man who hangs back and the man who fights hard." And once for real, in Book 18, over the body of Patroclus, with nothing abstract left anywhere. Around that single free choice the poem arranges hundreds of unfree ones. Minor fighters, each given a name and a father and a home town and often a widow at the moment they die, are "broken" in the poem's flat, carpenter's word for it. And against Achilles it sets one great counter-figure: Hector, who has no choice at all, who fights because a city and a wife and an infant son stand behind him, and who is the only person in the poem we watch being loved. The Iliad's sympathy does not follow its politics. It is a Greek poem, and its most humane scenes belong to Troy: Helen on the wall, Hector's helmet frightening his baby, his wife Andromache running to the ramparts "like a madwoman." Its last line of praise is for the man its hero killed.
Above the men sit the gods, and the poem's way with them has troubled readers ever since. The gods watch the war and meddle in it. They feel real grief. Zeus rains blood on the field for his son Sarpedon, and says of mortals, in the poem's shortest theology, "they matter to me, even as they perish." But they cannot die, and so nothing for them is ever finally at stake. The poem knows exactly what that means. When gods fight gods, in Book 21, it is comedy: boxed ears and a laughing father. When men fight men, it is everything. Mortality is not the men's handicap. It is their seriousness. The gods watch the war the way we read the poem, with passionate partisanship and in perfect safety, and the discomfort of that resemblance is intended.
The Iliad comes out of a tradition of poetry composed aloud, in performance, without writing, and its style is built out of repeated pieces. There are fixed epithets: Achilles is "swift-footed," Hector is "of the flashing helmet," dawn is "rosy-fingered." There are whole lines that recur unchanged ("Then in answer spoke to him ..."). There are repeated blocks, as when a messenger delivers a message in the very words he was given. And there are type-scenes, such as a warrior arming, or a sacrifice, or a plea for mercy, whose skeletons recur with small, controlled variations. To readers trained to prize variety, all this was an embarrassment, and translators of the last two centuries mostly smoothed it away: they varied the epithets and paraphrased the repeated speeches so that the poem would read like a novel. This translation takes the opposite view, and it is the single decision from which most of its other decisions follow. The repetition is the art. A fixed phrase, once rendered, recurs in these pages in the same words. When the Greek repeats a whole line, the English repeats its own line, word for word. When a messenger relays a speech, the relay repeats the original exactly as far as the Greek does, changing "I" to "he" only where the Greek changes it.
The reason is not fidelity for its own sake. Repetition is how this poem thinks. Five different men, alone at five separate moments of crisis, ask themselves the same line: "But why does my own heart argue these things with me?" The line is the point. The poem is showing you that the solitary man debating flight is a single recurring human situation, and the fifth occurrence carries the weight of the other four. When Achilles taunts a Trojan with "Unhappy are the fathers whose sons face my fury!", he is repeating, word for word, what Diomedes said in Book 6, in a scene that ended, unforgettably, with the two enemies exchanging armor as friends. This time no one exchanges armor. When the poet describes Patroclus arming for battle in the same lines he will use for Achilles three books later, the identity of the lines is a fuse burning between the two scenes. Vary the wording and all of this disappears: the echoes, the ironies, the sense that the poem's world runs on recurrences its characters cannot see. Keep it, and an English reader can hear, for once, the machine turning.
Keeping it takes bookkeeping. Every fixed rendering, once chosen, was entered in a register that bound every later book, and the first English wording of any repeated line was binding on every recurrence. When the whole poem was done, each book was read again entire against the Greek, line against line, to hunt down the places where two occurrences of one Greek line had drifted apart in English. Where the register deliberately gives two Greek words one English word, or one Greek word two English words depending on its context, the notes say so. A companion translation of the Odyssey, made on the same principles, shares the register wherever the two poems share their formulas.
The translation follows the standard Greek text, the Oxford edition of Monro and Allen, and it follows it line for line. English line 200 of any book renders Greek line 200, so that any line here can be laid beside its original, or beside any commentary keyed to the standard numbering, without arithmetic. In three places that numbering has a gap: the four lines 9.458-461, and the single lines 11.543 and 14.269. The Oxford text, following the manuscripts, leaves those lines out, but the traditional numbering keeps their places. This edition keeps the gaps too. Each is marked where it falls, and where antiquity preserves the missing lines, as Plutarch preserves the four suppressed lines of Phoenix's confession, they are translated in the notes.
Ancient scholarship is part of this poem's history, and the edition keeps it visible. The scholars of Alexandria, above all Zenodotus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and Aristarchus, marked the lines they believed were later additions; the term for this is athetesis. Wherever the Oxford text prints such a line, this translation translates it, and a note records the doubt. So the divine singer stays in the dance on Achilles' shield, the Pelian ash spear stays in the arming of Book 19, and the Judgment of Paris stays in Book 24 over Aristarchus's objection. Where the Oxford editors themselves chose against the majority of the manuscripts, the note says so, most famously at 1.350, where their text has Achilles looking out over the "boundless sea" and nearly every manuscript has the "wine-dark" one. And where a rejected ancient variant is too interesting to lose, the notes keep it: the text of Zenodotus in which the corpses of the opening lines become a "feast" for the birds; his Book 19, which could not bear a seated Agamemnon and made him stand; the reading known to the geographer Strabo at 20.307, in which the descendants of Aeneas are to rule over "all" rather than over the Trojans, the variant Rome preferred, for obvious reasons. The apparatus of an ancient poem is not scaffolding to be struck once the building stands. It is the record of twenty-five centuries of readers arguing about the same lines, and this translation was made in their company.
The verse is plain, dignified, modern English free verse: no meter, no rhyme. The line is held to a loose five or six beats and runs to about thirteen syllables, with better than nine lines in ten falling between nine and sixteen. That is not an imitation of Homer's hexameter; English cannot sustain one for fifteen thousand lines without stilts. It is a discipline with a different purpose. Since the translation is line for line, the English line must do neither more nor less work than the Greek line it faces. It cannot pad, because the next Greek line is already waiting; it cannot sprawl, because it has to keep step for twenty-four books. What the rule buys is worth its cost. The poem's pacing survives: the single-line death sentences land as single lines, the sentences break across lines where Homer broke them, the long speeches are exactly as long as Homer made them. And every sentence of the English can be checked against its original by anyone with a parallel text and a dictionary.
The diction aims at the register the Greek actually has: formal but not antique, plain but not flat. Homer's language was never anyone's daily speech. It is a poetic amalgam full of frozen archaisms, but it is rapid, direct, and unembarrassed, and the worst betrayal of it is pomposity. A few English choices carry particular weight and are worth declaring at the door. The word that opens the poem, mēnis, is "wrath" throughout, never "rage" or "anger": it is a grudge with divine standing, not a mood. Timē is always "honor," and geras is always "prize," meaning the concrete object, a tripod or a horse or a captive woman, in which honor is publicly embodied. The quarrel of Book 1 makes no sense unless those two words stay rigid; Achilles is not fighting over a girl but over what he is worth. Atē is "blindness," and takes a capital letter when she walks as a goddess: the god-sent delusion that Agamemnon pleads in his apology, "the eldest daughter of Zeus, who blinds all men." The enslaved of the poem are called slaves. Where the Greek says dmōs or dmōē, this translation does not say "servant" or "maid," because the difference between a servant and a slave is the difference that Briseis and Andromache spend the poem on the wrong side of, and a translation that softens the word has taken a side. The small change of the formulas is kept literal wherever literalness still works: words are winged; dawn is rosy-fingered and saffron-robed; men glare darkly before they speak; the day of death is "the pitiless day."
Proper names use the familiar Latinized forms, Achilles and Ajax and Hecuba and Clytemnestra, on the principle that this poem belongs to its readers and not to any system of transliteration.
Each of the twenty-four books opens with a short argument, a sentence saying what happens in it. Then comes the verse, numbered to the Greek, and then the book's notes, marked in the text by small raised numbers that start again with each book. The notes carry four kinds of freight. Textual matters: doubted lines, variant readings, the gaps described above. Formulas, pointed out at their first appearance in the poem and then trusted to the reader's ear. Realia: who this minor king is, where that river runs, why a helmet made of boars' tusks matters. And the occasional confession, where the English had to choose one horn of an ambiguity and the note preserves the other. Apart from the poem stand the translator's notes on the books, an essay on each: what the book is and does, where its difficulties lie, and what this translation did about them. They are kept apart so that the poem can be read without interruption, and so that a reader who wants them can find them all in one place.
A reader who wants a map before setting out can hold the poem in one hand. Book 1: the quarrel, the plague, and Thetis's bargain with Zeus. Book 2: the testing of the army and the great catalogue of the ships. Books 3 to 7: the war seen whole, as if for the first time. Paris and Menelaus fight a duel for Helen; Helen names the Greek kings from the wall; the truce is broken; Diomedes runs wild among gods and men; and at the center, Hector goes home into Troy, to his mother, to Helen, and to his wife Andromache and their baby, the poem's one visit inside the doomed city at peace. Book 8: Zeus bans the gods from the field and tilts the day to Troy. Book 9: the embassy, with Agamemnon's gifts and Achilles' refusal, the greatest speech in the poem. Book 10: the night raid. Books 11 to 15: the long third day of battle, in which the Greek captains are wounded one by one, the wall is breached, Hera seduces Zeus on Mount Ida, the tide turns twice, and Hector's hand at last closes on the first ship. Book 16: Patroclus, in Achilles' armor, saves the ships, kills Sarpedon, and dies under the walls. Book 17: the fight over his body. Book 18: the news; Achilles' choice; Thetis; and the making of the shield, on which the smith god Hephaestus forges the whole living world the rest of the poem leaves out. Book 19: the wrath against Agamemnon renounced; and the horse Xanthus, given speech for a moment, foretells his master's death. Books 20 and 21: Achilles returned, against Aeneas, against everyone, against the river itself, with the gods loosed into the battle and finally laughing in each other's faces. Book 22: Hector alone before the gates; the chase; the death; Andromache at her loom, not yet knowing. Book 23: the funeral of Patroclus, and the games, in which the poem already practices peace. Book 24: the gods' verdict; Priam's night journey; the ransom of Hector; and the twelve days of truce in which the poem, having begun with two men quarreling over what a life is worth, ends with two enemies agreeing on what a death is owed.
Read it aloud where you can. The poem was made for the ear, and its repetitions, the epithets that toll like bells, the lines that come back in new mouths, the pitiless day arriving on schedule, were composed to be heard coming. This translation has tried to keep every one of them audible.