PEOPLE: The most perfect stories ever told!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2024

Seeing ourselves in such texts: Today, The Iliad exists as a written text.  It's published in the form of a book. 

In an array of translations, The Iliad can be ordered from any contemporary bookstore. It didn't exactly work that way during the many years when the poem emerged in its modern form. 

This first and greatest western war poem emerged as part of an oral tradition. The leading authority on the poem describes the process in the following way:

Iliad

[...]

The Iliad and the Odyssey were likely written down in Homeric Greek, a literary mixture of Ionic Greek and other dialects, probably around the late 8th or early 7th century BC. Homer's authorship was infrequently questioned in antiquity, but contemporary scholarship predominantly assumes that the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed independently and that the stories formed as part of a long oral tradition. The poem was performed by professional reciters of Homer known as rhapsodes.

[...]

In antiquity, the Greeks applied the Iliad and the Odyssey as the bases of pedagogy. Literature was central to the educational-cultural function of the itinerant rhapsode, who composed consistent epic poems from memory and improvisation, and disseminated them, via song and chant, in his travels and at the Panathenaic Festival of athletics, music, poetics, and sacrifice, celebrating Athena's birthday.

Originally, Classical scholars treated the Iliad and the Odyssey as written poetry, and Homer as a writer. Yet, by the 1920s, Milman Parry (1902–1935) had launched a movement claiming otherwise. His investigation of the oral Homeric style—"stock epithets" and "reiteration" (words, phrases, stanzas)—established that these formulae were artifacts of oral tradition easily applied to a hexametric line.

Clarifying a bit, the poem was developed through centuries of oral tradition. It was first "written down," in Homeric Greek, "probably around the late 8th or early 7th century BC."

The poem's development came from that oral tradition. That tradition tends to produce perfectly crafted stories through endless act of oral reshaping, accidental or deliberate.

Today, The Iliad exists as a book. As Yevtushenko said in People:

There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.

But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.

Something is gone in the modern context. What is left is a set of perfect stories—the earliest stories which survive in the European literary context.

In effect, these are (among) the first stories ever recorded. For that reason, these stories are also the most direct, the least adorned—the simplest. 

A question arises:

As contemporary people, can we possibly see ourselves in the stories told in The Iliad? For example, in the brilliant bit of story-telling with which the war poem starts?

As we've noted, the poem starts near the end of what has already been a ten-year siege of Troy. As with us Americans in recent years, so too with them:

A plague is visiting the Achaean camp. Ransom is being offered for the safe return of a stolen person. What we would regard as sexual misconduct is rife.

Sexual misconduct is rife, as in our own day. There is one major cultural difference—as a general matter, no one seems to think it's morally wrong to kidnap young women for sexual purposes. 

Putting it a slightly different way, no one seems to feel the need to pretend to care about such things.

At any rate, a plague will soon be sweeping the Achaean camp. Meanwhile, there's one more story element which is highly recognizable. Agamemnon, lord of men, will soon explode in a debilitating fit of rage, a phenomenon which is hardy unknown within our political culture today.

In Robert Fagles' 1990 translation, the poem's Book One bears this title:

The Rage of Achilles

The rage of Achilles will drive this long poem. First, though, we meet the rage of Agamemnon. 

Agamemnon, lord of men, has taken a sexual slave. The story moves with brilliant speed, and it begins as shown:

Yes. Chryses approached the Achaeans' fast ships
to win his daughter back. bringing a priceless ransom
and bearing high in hand, wound on a golden staff,
the wreaths of the god, the distant deadly Archer.
He begged the whole Achaean army but most of all
the two supreme commanders, Atreus' two sons,
"Agamemnon. Menelausall Argives geared for war!
May the gods who hold the halls of Olympus give you 20
Priam's city to plunder, then safe passage home.
Just set my daughter free, my dear one. Here,
accept these gifts, this ransom..."

Chryses is a priest of Apollo. Agamemnon, lord of men, is one of the two supreme commanders of the many Achaean (Greek) armies—the armies which will be introduced through ten pages of text in Book Two.

Chryses has begged for his daughter's return. He has even said that he's willing to see the Argives plunder Troy (King Priam's city).

Chryses has begged for his daughter's return. Quickly, we're told what happens next:

And all ranks of Achaeans cried out their assent:
"Respect the priest, accept the shining ransom!"
But it brought no joy to the heart of Agamemnon.
The king dismissed the priest with a brutal order
ringing in his ears...

Agamemnon drives the old priest from the camp. Where the breakers crash and drag, the priest now prays to Apollo:

The old man was terrified. He obeyed the order,
turning, trailing away in silence down the shore
where the battle lines of breakers crash and drag.
And moving off to a safe distance, over and over
the old priest prayed to the son of sleek-haired Leto,
lord Apollo. 

Apollo visits a plague on the camp. This leads to a furious dispute between Agamemnon and Achilles as the men fight over who will be allowed to retain which sexual slave.

This story moves with lightning speed, the fruit of centuries of recitation. The events it purports to tell would have occurred thousands of years ago, but the basic elements of human behavior are highly recognizable.

The city of Troy was facing a siege. Today, a siege is being directed at the Biden White House.

The ancient war of The Iliad was fought with Bronze Age weapons. Our own siege will be decided through the weapons of information, in a war of the Information Age.

That said, undifferentiated, inchoate rage has been a major part of our national politics over the past nine years. Sexual misconduct by powerful men, or allegations of same, has also been a familiar part of the modern political context. 

To our eye and to our ear, the people we meet in The Iliad behave a great deal like us moderns. A story is unfolding there which is not unlike our own dispiriting modern-day story—and in that modern-day story, our own blue tribe, for all our apparent good intentions, could possibly be on the verge of losing a major fight.

Can we possibly see ourselves in the stories told in this ancient poem? Can literature help us take a step back, in the hope of seeing ourselves a bit more as we actually are?

If we lose November's election, we may even start to face the need to improve our own tribe's political game. Might a flight to a different world help us with some such project?

There are other published texts which might help us take a step back and see ourselves for who and what we actually are. In truth, we aren't the morally infallible people we often take ourselves to be. 

In many ways, we in our blue tribe, like everyone else, are simply people people:

Whom we knew as faulty, the earth’s creatures
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?

Yevtushenko again, suggesting that people are faulty! It's our view, here at this site, that our own blue tribe could profitably learn to improve our political game. 

Other texts may help us learn to see ourselves more fully. We think of Plato's Seventh Letter, an account of the death of the Athenian democracy.

We think of Plato's Apology, in which Socrates describes the conduct of average people but also of powerful men. Also, we think of Robert Graves' I, Claudius, an acclaimed 1934 novel which "tells the history of...the early years of the Roman Empire."

In 1976, I, Claudius became a major BBC / PBS television event. I, Claudius was very big at that time. Could it be helpful today?

At any rate, we plan to chronicle the behaviors of the warring armies as the current siege of the White House unspools through the course of the year. 

Also, as our blue tribe's judicial siege of Candidate Trump begins to emerge in its final form, possibly starting as early as March 25.

We currently live in two different worlds, in Red Nation and Blue. Can a large modern nation really function this way? 

In our view, it plainly can't. How can our imperfect blue tribe possibly learn to help?

"No people are uninteresting," Yevtushenko said. What could the Soviet-era poet possibly have meant by that?

That said, also this:

"Something we were withholding made us weak."

We recently quoted that line from Frost. Is there something our blue tribe might be withholding? 

Could it be making us weak?

Next week: Sieges