Homer as MAGGA

Making Ancient Greeks Great Again - Iliad Books 1-7

People keep trying to revise Homer.

I think this is in part because to get Homer you have to understand how patriotic and chauvinistic his poems are, how they are “nationalistic” even though there were not yet nation-states (only peoples, languages, nationalities). Since nationalism, patriotism, and chauvinism were all until recently very bad things to be, no one could see how Homer is all of these.

The attempts to revise Homer often come from cultural warriors of the left, people with commitments to feminism and transgender ideology. Ellen Page and Brad Pitt are two of the actors in contemporary cinematic Homer. They could have had beautiful children. Unless Elliot Page, the new transman Ellen made herself into, marries one of Brad’s non-binary kids from his marriage to Angelina Jolie, they probably won’t end up related. But they will both have acted in movie versions of one of Homer’s epics: Brad in 2004’s Troy, a film based on the Iliad, and Elliott in an upcoming remake of the Odyssey.

We don’t know how Christopher Nolan will change the 12000 line story of Homer’s Odyssey, beyond casting a trans actor. (There had already been a 1997 mini-series with Isabelli Rossellini and Armand Assante.) Troy retold the Iliad with among other things the meddling Olympian deities left out (in the poem the gods argue and their dialogue is a kind of chorus, often expressing what a reader or auditor might be thinking about what is happening in the drama). There have been other retellings of Homer’s poems. The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood wrote The Penelopiad to supplement the Odyssey with the story of what Odysseus’s wife Penelope was up to while he suffered his adventures.

There are also fresh translations of The Iliad and the Odyssey, by U. Penn. classics professor Emily Wilson, rivaling in popularity the long used translations by Bryn Mawr classicist Richmond Lattimore most people would have read in college. Prof. Wilson is the first woman to translate Homer into English, and so a lot of talk concentrates on that. Her translation is much easier to read than the Lattimore translation. I suspect though from what is written about one of her choices - she translates the Greek polytropos (“many turning”) as “complicated” - she is not conveying the essentials of the story.

In her New York Times interview she says the problem with polytropos is that we don’t know whether to think of Odysseus as passive or active - is he “many turning” or “many turned.” It’s Athena’s term for Odysseus, and it seems clear it isn’t “complicated” from the context, nor is it “many turned.” It’s “clever” or “devious.” It’s virginal, androgynous, but sapiosexual Athena’s somewhat eros-infused word of appreciation for Odysseus, like someone singing about the blue of her lover’s eyes.

The repetitive use of the hyphenated epithets (in English, which were in Greek just compound words) -"Swift-footed Achilles,” "Rosy-fingered Dawn,” Bright-helmeted Hector,” "Many-turning Odysseus,” "Sound-minded Telemachus," “Gray-eyed Athena,” “Wine-blue sea” - makes it easier to remember 12000 lines.

Another mnemonic device is lists. The last several hundred lines of Book 2 of the Iliad answers a question: “Who were the lords and leaders of the Greeks?” It’s just a list of the Greek kings and princes in the war party to Troy, where they are from, their geneaology, and how many ships, men, and horses they have brought with them, and then similarly of all the Asia Minor kings and princes who have come to fight on the side of the Trojans. Some of these people are never mentioned again, though some appear in similar long lists in other chapters of people fighting or people being killed in battle. Lists can be memorized. As you recount them you think to yourself “Did I miss a place? Did I miss a person?”

More importantly, a list of people who represent cities or regions also has a function we see when our modern bards, e.g. stand up comics, engage audiences by calling out the city they are performing in, perhaps even naming its local celebrities, politicians, or sports figures. The Iliad should be understood as a chauvinistic book that recognizes and honors certain audiences, just as a comic or singer might recognize his or her local audience.

The plot of the Iliad is that a Trojan prince, Paris, with the aid of a goddess, Aphrodite, has “abducted” a willing woman, the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, from her husband, Menelaus, a Greek king. A loose consortium of Greek kings and princes (the aforementioned list), sail to Troy (a city in what is now the piece of Turkey that lies in Asia Minor). Troy has strong walls and the Greeks cannot penetrate them nor can they quickly defeat the Trojans and their Asia Minor allies. So the battle goes on for years, with many deaths on each side.

Hektor mocking his brother Paris for being in bed with Helen rather than defending Troy on the battle field

Olympian gods are fairly evenly divided between the two warring camps. The Greeks have somewhat more articulate gods, Athena and Hera, while the Trojans are supported by somewhat less verbal and more emotion-driven gods, Ares and Aphrodite (and also Apollo). Zeus is not committed to a quick and easy victory for either side. On the Greek side, their best warrior, Achilleus (a demi-god whose mother is a goddess) eventually sits out the battle during the first half of the story, because a Greek king, Agamemnon (brother of Menelaus), disrespects him. This allows the Trojans to move toward defeating the Greeks, because their best warrior, Hektor, begins to wipe out Greek warriors in large numbers.

Hektor is the brother of Paris. At one point he leaves the battle to see, he fears for the last time, his wife Andromache and their infant son, and to persuade his brother Paris to return to the battle field (Aphrodite has stolen him away to save his life). Hektor worries that the Greeks might win, and that if they do they will kill all the Trojan males and their sons, all pregnant women, and take all the remaining women and girls back to Greece as slaves.

But at no point does Hektor argue with his father King Priam (or with his brother Paris) that they should return Helen, and give the Greeks other payments to leave and leave them alone. Perhaps if he had Priam would have agreed and Troy would have been saved. Or perhaps Priam would have refused, and Hektor might have had to consider killing his father (and brother) as many royals have used regicide to take control of the dynasty into which they were born.

But Hektor does not do this. Hektor is not complicated, or more precisely, his mind is not “many turning.” He just follows the role set for him. He’s a prince of Troy and must lead men in battle. But just performing his role means his child will die, his wife will become a slave, and his city and family will be destroyed.

You are likely familiar with the story of the Trojan horse. This story isn’t actually in the Iliad, which ends before telling us how the war ends. But in the story Odysseus comes up with the idea of pretending to leave while leaving behind a large statue of a horse (the Trojans are famously equestrians - “breakers of horses”). The Trojans assume this is a tribute to apologize for the war, bring it into their city behind the strong walls, and are thus defeated when the Greek soldiers come out of the giant horse in the night.

But the Trojans could have done the same kind of thing. They could have returned Helen to the Greeks, and also given them slaves and tributes (they actually discuss doing that). If they were a people who had “many turning” (not “turned”) leaders like Odysseus, the slaves would have been disguised saboteurs, the tribute flammable or explosive, and as the Greek ships left the shore to return to Greece, they would have been set afire and sunk, and the Trojans would have retrieved Helen.

The Iliad depicts the Greeks as superior in important ways to other cultures. Odysseus is a representative of this superiority, because of his cleverness. To call him complicated rather than clever, devious, or many-turning covers this up.

A shorter version of this ran last week at SpliceToday.