The Achilles Heel of Literature . . . Or, Hearing The Iliad For The First Time

One of the unique treats of audio books is the ability to hear certain works as they were originally intended.  According to St. Augustine in his Confessions, reading was commonly done aloud, so that he commented on St. Ambrose's oddity in reading to himself.  Alberto Manguel, who wrote A History of Reading notes that this was the first recorded instance of silent reading. 
Certainly, people read to themselves before this, but reading was meant to be communal.  That the written word conveys meaning beyond just the author is such a truism that it hardly needs to be remarked.  But you should pause a moment and consider to whom the author of any work really intends his writing.

I'm currently in the midst of listening to the audio version of Homer's Iliad.  Based on oral tradition, the Homeric cycle was not compiled until the sixth century B.C.  Even after it was written down, however, few were literate enough to read it.  So it continued to be performed for public consumption.

The version I'm listening to is the Richmond Lattimore translation.  (If you want to read the original Greek, check out the University of Chicago's online database of everything Homer.)  I prefer the Lattimore translation to Robert Fagles's translation because of its felicity to the text.

Fagles does a remarkable job rendering a verse translation but it sometimes seems forced.  Lattimore, while eschewing the epic style we've come to expect through Dante and the Old English cycles such as Beowulf, maintains a rugged verisimilitude that reads (and is heard) as genuine.  (Though hearing Helen call herself a "slut" and a "bitch" jars -- which may have been the intent.)

Both of these translations remain more or less true to the original.  For sheer poetic aesthetics, though, I prefer the Alexander Pope translation.  Rightly criticized for being as much Pope's poetry as Homer's epic, it nevertheless remains a staggering work of genius.  For example, look at these opening lines of Pope:

Declare, O Muse! in what ill-fated hour
Sprung the fierce strife, from what offended power
Latona's son a dire contagion spread,
And heap'd the camp with mountains of the dead;
The king of men his reverent priest defied,
And for the king's offence the people died.

Which are answered by Fagles:

Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.
What god drove them to fight with such fury?
Apollo the son of Zeus and Leto.  Incensed at the king
He swept a fatal plague through the army -- men were dying
and all because Agamemnon spurned Apollo's priest.

and by Lattimore:

 SING, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict
Atreus' son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus.
What god was it then set them together in bitter collision?
Zeus' son and Leto's, Apollo, who in anger at the king drove
the foul pestilence along the host, and the people perished,
since Atreus' son had dishonoured Chryses, priest of Apollo[.]

Like most things in life, this is an aesthetic preference on my part.  Many people prefer the Fagles translation, and it has continued to sell well since it was introduced.  But for myself, it seems less magisterial than the Lattimore translation, and, as importantly, it is far less mellifluous.

The Lattimore translation sings when heard; Charlton Griffin narrates exceptionally well with a rich authority that sells Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Achilles.  He manages to impart personality to all of his characters (though it can be odd hearing a baritone Briton reading Aphrodite).

But I'm forced to consider why we should listen to it at all.  Easily 3,000 year old (and probably older) it reflects the values of our forebears which no longer seem relevant to us.  Virtue to the Achaians (which is a familial designation rather than a national one, since Greeks as such did not yet exist) reflected a warrior ethos and reinforced the agrarian and pseudo hunter-gatherer lifestyle of many of them.

Acquisition through contest of arms was lauded.  Agency existed along a continuum in no one was entirely autonomous.  From Zeus derived ultimate authority, which constrained even the gods.  But the immortals were capable of inserting thoughts and manipulating the minds and actions of mortal men and women.  Women were alternately the baubles of gods and men (or both); they were manipulated, squabbled over, and traded between men without consideration.

Though women certainly were constrained, they surely were able to exercise some agency within the constraints of their society, a dynamic that Homer reflects poorly (if at all).  Indeed, the Wolfgang Petersen movie Troy suffers by including a level of agency that betrays the characters.  In the movie, Helen is a willing participant in her abduction, even as she recognizes the peril it places on her, her lover, and her adopted nation.  She predicts the danger, and though we forgive her the initial betrayal of her husband, we cannot forgive her each subsequent decision.

But Helen in Homer is a puppet of Paris and Aphrodite.  The gods wage their bitter struggle to support the Achaians against the Trojans, and vice versa, and the mortals are merely pieces on the board.  To that extent, the Homeric cycle reflects a surprising wisdom: that countering our planning, and the fullest expression of our own will are contingent moments, be they historical, cultural, or simply environmental, which serve to constrain our autonomy.  Though Homer may call them gods, we still consider luck and fate as beyond our hands and coterminous with our own will.

Homer allows us a moment to reflect on how best to express our free will in a world constrained by resources and the caprice of good or ill fate.  When Hector leaves to confront the Achaians, his wife begs him to stay.  His reply in the sixth book (translated by Ian Johnston) is not an idle boast, but reflects a warrior's ethos:

“Wife,
all this concerns me, too. But I’d be disgraced,
dreadfully shamed among Trojan men
and Trojan women in their trailing gowns,
if I should, like a coward, slink away from war.
My heart will never prompt me to do that,
for I have learned always to be brave,
to fight alongside Trojans at the front,
striving to win fame for father and myself.
My heart and mind know well the day is coming
when sacred Ilion will be destroyed,
along with Priam of the fine ash spear
and Priam’s people. But what pains me most
about these future sorrows is not so much
the Trojans, Hecuba, or king Priam,
or even my many noble brothers,
who’ll fall down in the dust, slaughtered
by their enemies. My pain focuses on you,
when one of those bronze-clad Achaeans
leads you off in tears, ends your days of freedom.
If then you come to Argos as a slave,
working the loom for some other woman,
fetching water from Hypereia or Messeis,
against your will, forced by powerful Fate,
then someone seeing you as you weep
may well say:

‘That woman is Hector’s wife.
He was the finest warrior in battle
of all horse-taming Trojans in that war
when they fought for Troy.’

Someone will say that,
and it will bring still more grief to you,
to be without a man like that to save you
from days of servitude. May I lie dead,
hidden deep under a burial mound,
before I hear about your screaming,
as you are dragged away.”

And still more poignantly, we see Hector's address to his son, whose benediction still echoes: "May people someday say [. . .] 'This man is far better than his father.'"  How Hector confronts the uncertainty of battle maps for us a possible way to confront uncertainty in our own. 

Harold Bloom, whose book Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, calls Achilles the first human being in fiction.  Every other character of course represents a human being, but Bloom sees in Achilles the transformational moment to which good literature aspires.  It is a moment of self-understanding so that one can look at oneself contemplatively.

The moment comes after Achilles has killed Hector, dragged his body round the walls of Ilian and retired to his tent.  Priam, the Trojan king, manages to infiltrate the Greek camp and begs Achilles for the body of his son. 

It’s all for him I’ve come to the ships now,
to win him back for 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.

 And Achilles, who had raged over the death of his lover Patroclus (lover fails to adequately convey the meaning in this context, but it will have to suffice) now looks at Priam, feels remorse, and is forced to concede that honor, grief, and glory have conflicted meanings.  Homer understood that this was Achilles's story, and he rightly bookends the Iliad with Achilles's petulance at the beginning with his transformation at the end.

That transformational moment is why the Iliad ought to be read.  Like all good literature, it allows us to experience life through the peculiar perspective of another and wonder the great what if of another's life.