Homer’s Iliad is an unforgivingly brutal book. I finished reading it this week, having started it directly after my completion of The Odyssey  which is by contrast a remarkably wonderful book. The latter is filled with mirth and magic and contains valuable and applicable life lessons that anyone may take with them and put toward any situation. On the other hand, the former is a 600-page torrential onslaught of blood, guts, and gore that leaves one with more questions than answers. Also, contrary to popular belief, the three most important events of the Trojan War, that is The Judgement of Paris; Helen’s elopement with Paris back to Troy; and of course the Trojan Horse, are not depicted and whose existence we only know about due to later mythological tracts such as the Posthomerica by Quintus of Smyrna, as well as from brief anecdotes in The Odyssey.

It seems strange to have both loved and loathed two books that are so uniquely intertwined, but this is perhaps not so strange seeing as it is almost unanimously agreed upon by scholars that Homer, whoever he was, wrote one but not the other (indeed, many arguing it was The Iliad and not The Odyssey which bears his signature.) From my standpoint as a writer, I accept the questionable nature of his joint authorship based on the wildly divergent styles of the two epic poems, especially since I read the same translator—Robert Fagles—for both, whose style was identical in each epic, yet whose tone changed to suit what I’d contend were the voices of different storytellers. The Iliad is a linear progression, stultifying in its inchworm progress, and contains few moments of epiphany or release; while The Odyssey is a wildly diverting narrative which contains stories within stories and pleasing digressions and detours; in this way the storyline seems to match the crux of what the hero Odysseus is going through as he journeys home to Ithaca, thus unifying both the message and the action.

Perhaps my distaste for The Iliad is not so much a fault of the work, but its own reluctant triumph. The depiction of war is accurate. Indeed, war is tedious and petty and backbreaking, and progress is made and lost seemingly at the behest of forces on high which do not care for man’s own preferences. Wars are begun for personal reasons, for private enmities, and sometimes spring from rumors, or in our modern parlance “bad intelligence.” This is what the great Simone Weil calls “the wantonness of the conqueror” in her classic essay The Iliad, or The Poem of Force which is a remarkable examination of the poem’s inherent negativity. As she was writing in relation to the Second World War that is also the lens she is choosing to view it through. As a humble reader of the 21st Century it is natural to tie The Iliad to current events. However, one could say, well, Putin isn’t waging his war in Ukraine for the purposes of delivering himself a kidnapped love, he’s simply conducting an outrageous and illegal land-grab. Yet reading about Agamemnon’s motivations one wonders, simply due to her bizarre lack of depiction, if Helen of Troy was simply a pretext for a wider war of aggression, especially as most kings throughout history callously and luridly availed themselves of more than one wife. It is stirring in this way that Helen’s cameo in The Odyssey is so gentle and so moving. This strikes me as another reason why the authors had to be different people, for the treatment of women in both books is remarkably at odds. Odysseus’s wife Penelope is master of her destiny—not to mention the other powerful women of that saga such as Calypso and Circe—while Briseis is a victim, ventriloquized by Homer as hopelessly in love with Achilles, the man who murdered her betrothed, and who would rather be with him than with Agamemnon who treats her as an object. It is certainly unfair to blame Briseis for her depiction, but one can’t help wondering why, amid all this bloodshed, she did not take matters into her own hands and murder the brooding Achilles in his sleep since he left himself so vulnerable to her? Perhaps if Quentin Tarantino had been dressed in Homer’s toga he would have done just that!

Another staggering and disturbing quality in The Iliad which was identified once again by Simone Weil is the way heroes who are murdered on the battlefield become “things.” Their bodies stripped of life they are fodder to be dragged around by horses, eaten by vultures, and whose armor and trinkets are ripe for plunder. Here, it is most tragic that we know next to nothing about Homer, since we do not know what perspective he was writing from, or whether the dramatic irony implicit in his works is intentional. He surely feels enough for the fallen Hector to craft the most redemptive scene in the entire narrative, Book 24, in which King Priam of Troy secretly visits Achilles to beg for the return of his son’s body so that he may be suitably honored, or in our conception buried in consecrated ground. There are several very obvious real-world parallels that could be made here regarding the return of loved ones’ remains, but I will refrain from doing so, as this is a poem that could be applied to almost any conflict, though perhaps fits better with those that are morally ambiguous in nature and which has heroes and villains on both sides.

I want to be clear: I am not writing this piece to disparage The Iliad while concurrently celebrating The Odyssey, but rather to examine whether the poem’s inherent value lies in its irony or its realism. Each gruesome death is realistic given the nature of the time period and the nature of the conflict, but what struck me as so off-putting was the utter lack of breathing room, at least in terms of narrative storytelling. “The heart must pause to breathe,” as Lord Byron wrote, who himself died during a martial folly when he volunteered to fight a war on the shores of Greece and which resulted in his ignoble malarial death. And yet we get few respites during this supposed ten-years war, the decade-long siege of Troy, an Anatolian kingdom that would have had little contact with mainland Greece otherwise.

Another image that strikes me, if you will forgive a final digression, is Dante’s placement of Homer in Hell—or rather in the austere limbo-esque province of the Nobile Castello which rests on the outer levels of the Inferno. Here all the poets, philosophers, and scientists who were born before the coming of Christ live out eternity; they never heard the message of the Son of God and thus are damned to their very own brand of grey non-existence. Yet I can’t help but feel there is a more symbolic reason for their placement here, one that Dante himself may not have been aware of when he was writing his comedia: Homer is in the Nobile Castello because he did not understand mercy. As it is nearing Christmas I feel content as a non-Christian—though one who respects religious art and feels drawn to its own particular themes and thematics—stating the most attractive element of Christianity is its highlighting of mercy as a worthy mind state that may be cultivated and shared. In Homer, both The Iliad and The Odyssey, there is no mercy for any of the characters. The gods have no mercy for mortal men and mortal men have no mercy for each other. Not even the gods treat each other with respect. This is a cosmology of oppression and disdain, a universe where might is right and pride comes before honor. However, some may argue that Achilles’s release of Hector’s body to Priam is a merciful act. Yet I think this is the best that Homer can do. For is it truly mercy when his son is already dead, having been dragged through the dirt by a chariot, his body disfigured and destroyed by his own native soil?

Perhaps Homer belongs in Dante’s Nobile Castello. Though I admit I shudder at the notion of poets being condemned by what they’ve written—or in the case of Homer, sung—there is another view which suggests he was just a mirror for his times, and did not punctuate the dramatic barbarism of The Iliad with release for the mere fact that the concept was unknown to him. Even Odysseus’s journey back to Ithaca is a long and strange one, almost relentless in its misfortunes and mishaps, and its last hopeful notes come only after the brutal and merciless slaughter of Penelope’s former suitors by father and son. I guess it just goes to show that in the ancient world even the poetry ran with blood.

Bust of Homer