The Iliad Lecture 2
Lecture Notes · Session II
On Homer's Iliad
Paul Cantor · University of Virginia
Homer's Binary Oppositions
Today's aim is to map the Homeric world — to see how Homer defines the human condition. These epics don't contain passages where Homer simply spells out his view of the world; we have to infer it from the poem's structure. Homer's mind keeps working in terms of binary oppositions. At one point he mentions two neighboring springs, one hot and one cold — that's simply how his mind works: if there's a hot spring, there has to be a cold one to set it against. He defines things by comparison and contrast. The shield of Achilles works the same way, setting a city at war against a city at peace. Ultimately, the Iliad and Odyssey themselves form one giant binary opposition — two contrasting views of the human condition.
It's worth looking at the poem in terms of several of these important oppositions, while remembering that the oppositions are never absolute. The point of a contrast is always some underlying similarity — the two springs are one hot and one cold, but they are both springs. Homer sets up oppositions and then either undermines them or shows how the gap between the two sides can be bridged. (Seth Benardete's Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero is a good source on this pattern.)
Aner versus Anthropos: Two Orders of Humanity
A "hero," in the poem's specific sense, occupies a place between ordinary human beings and the gods — the product of a union between the human and the divine, a demigod, a borderline figure who helps define the human condition. Achilles's mother, for instance, is a goddess. Where a hero lacks an obvious divine pedigree, Greek myth tends to invent one — there are myths making Odysseus's real father Hermes, or even Sisyphus. Even so, this is a sign that Odysseus is somehow a different kind of hero — perhaps closer to an ordinary human being than the others.
It's a distinctive feature of the Greeks that the line between gods and human beings is so hazy and so easy to cross — gods fall in love with human beings, cross-breeding occurs, and humans are sometimes elevated to divinity. Other cultures have versions of this too (Genesis 6 describes the sons of God taking human wives), but rarely to the extent found among the ancient Greeks, where the gods are drawn down and humans lifted up — the gods more human, and humans more divine. Compared to other ancient peoples, the Greeks had unusually human gods: the Egyptians, Sumerians, and Babylonians had animal-headed gods, something essentially absent among the Greeks (and the Etruscans and Romans, who took their gods from the Greeks, inherited this same humanized pantheon). We tend to think of an unbridgeable gulf between man and God — God can choose to become man, but man cannot become God. For the Greeks, by contrast, there is real intercourse between the divine and human realms, and it is a real possibility for a human being to become a god through his own efforts, not simply by birth (a possibility that shows up as a kind of tyranny in figures like Oedipus, or in Aristophanes's The Birds). Some cultures make their gods all-powerful; others (like modern secular humanism) make human beings the most important thing there is. The Greeks sit in between, which is part of what makes them so interesting.
The hero, in this sense, reflects an aristocratic society — aristos means "rule of the best" — and heroes represent a higher order of human being: bigger, stronger, more beautiful, genuinely physically different from ordinary people (which may reflect, historically, the conquest of one group by another, a master-and-slave relationship at the root of the mythology).
This difference between kinds of human beings is treated almost like a difference between species, visible in the poem's similes contrasting wild beasts and tame ones. It's reflected directly in vocabulary: aner (plural andres) versus anthropos (plural anthropoi) — roughly, "man" as opposed to "human being." Aner is the he-man, the term used the way athletes today call each other "man." In Homer, heroes address one another as aner. Anthropos means human being in the broader sense, male and female alike — ordinary humanity. This sounds sexist to us, and in a sense it is — though we'll soon see certain women in the poem addressed as aner as well. The vocabulary reflects real Greek prejudices, but the Greeks were also the first people to struggle toward a notion of common humanity — anthropos is the first word in this tradition that means all human beings as such, rather than simply "us" as opposed to "them."
There's a vivid illustration of these two orders in the way Odysseus addresses the troops at one point, drawing a sharp distinction between officers and enlisted men. Fellow andres are treated with respect, appealed to through their sense of shame; ordinary soldiers are treated with something closer to contempt, as men without shame who have to be browbeaten into action. This notion is foreign to our own democratic assumptions (compare, for instance, Patton's later removal from field command for insulting and humiliating a shell-shocked enlisted man). Yet something like it survives in our own attitude toward athletes and movie stars — people we describe as "larger than life." Look at professional athletes: they can seem like a genuinely different order of being. The same goes for war heroes. Put together the war hero, the political leader, the movie star, and the championship athlete, and you get something close to the Greek hero — what we now call charisma, itself, fittingly, a Greek word. The Greek notion of the hero is very remote from us in some ways, and yet strangely familiar in others. And it isn't simply a matter of social rank — heroism, in the poem, can actually run counter to conventional social distinctions, which is exactly the tension we saw earlier between Agamemnon and Achilles, opening up the whole question of natural versus conventional rank — in a way, the central question of the Iliad.
Arete: Defining Heroes by Their Excellences
Heroes are distinguished by their arete — not moral virtue specifically, but excellence in the broadest sense. You can speak of the arete of a horse: a good, strong thoroughbred. A "good" horse isn't a morally good horse; it's a horse that wins races. The arete of any given thing is simply what it's good at, what it does well. Heroes are defined throughout the poem in terms of their particular excellences — this is really what the catalogue of ships amounts to, a catalogue of heroes and their distinguishing qualities. Agamemnon's own claim to excellence turns out to be fairly superficial — he's taller than the rest and has the nicest armor, rather than any deeper, innate excellence. Some forms of excellence, notably, turn out not to be especially relevant to war at all. Each hero has his own particular distinction; Homer is always looking for the best in every character he introduces.
This creates a real literary problem once you're working within a larger epic cycle that brings together heroes from many different local legends: how can each one be "the best"? In the original scattered tales of the Trojan War, each hero had his own individual cycle of poems, and in his own hometown, each hero was naturally cast as the best of all — in Salamis, for instance, Telamonian Ajax was the hero of their own local Iliad. Homer's literary problem here becomes the actual thematic core of the Iliad. How can he give every character his own chance to be a hero? It's a bit like championship boxing today, with all its overlapping sanctioning bodies and weight classes — everyone ends up being a "champion of the world" in some category or other, down to something like the WBA junior light-middleweight North American champion.
Homer's solution is to set up a hierarchy of excellences. Who, ultimately, is the champion? Telamonian Ajax is strong — a dumb ox. Ajax the son of Oileus is the best spear-thrower. Odysseus is the smartest. Achilles is simply the best across the board — fastest, strongest, the finest fighter, something like a decathlete among heroes. This is part of why Achilles's epithet, "swift-footed," matters: he's as huge as Ajax and can hold his ground in battle, but he's also fast on his feet, genuinely mobile — he can do it all. (Though notice: he is not smarter than Odysseus, which is precisely what sets up the Odyssey.) Achilles's withdrawal from the fighting is what allows the other heroes to show what they've got, to strut their stuff — they become, in effect, foils to Achilles in his absence. This is part of Homer's genius: if Achilles fights from the very beginning, no other hero ever gets a real chance. Because he sulks in his tent instead, other heroes — Diomedes especially — get the opportunity to prove something about themselves.
Greeks and Trojans: Likeness and Difference
The relationship between Greeks and Trojans is, on one hand, remarkably even-handed — a real imaginative effort to see the humanity of the other side, quite unlike most war stories, which tend to reduce the conflict to a simple "us versus them." The Trojans are not demonized in the Iliad; they are not presented as simply evil (contrast this with the later Song of Roland, or with the way Americans have often presented their own wartime enemies as demonic). In Homer, the Trojans worship the very same gods as the Greeks — this is not a case of "God is on our side," since there is divine support on both sides of the war (there are, after all, enough gods to go around). The Greeks even assimilated the Trojans into their own mythology, making Greek gods the actual founders of Troy. Some gods support the Greeks, others the Trojans, which can seem very strange to us — quite unlike our idea of God. The Homeric gods are intensely human: they bear grudges, can be spiteful, and take sides in very personal, almost petty ways. The Trojans are presented as speaking Greek and worshiping Greek gods; in reality, we don't know a great deal about the historical Trojans — mostly jewelry and other artifacts survive, and their actual language has not come down to us. But they almost certainly did not speak Greek, though they may share common ancestors with the Greeks, both peoples perhaps descending from invaders out of the north. The Trojans sit geographically between the Greeks to the west and south and the Hittites to the east — the Hittites do mention the Trojans in their own records, under the name Wilusa.
Whatever the historical reality, within the poem the Trojans are presented as thoroughly noble. Hector functions as a real hero in his own right — the poem ends, notably, with Hector's funeral, not Achilles's. Imagine an American World War II film ending with the funeral of Rommel or Yamamoto instead of the American hero. Some readers even argue that Hector is the true hero of the poem (James Redfield makes this case in Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector), on the grounds that Hector is closer to our own idea of a hero — more moderate, more humane, more fully human, someone who serves his community rather than simply himself. We'll later see that Virgil, in effect, agrees: he models his own hero, Aeneas, on Hector rather than on Achilles, and casts his own Achilles-figure as the villain of the Aeneid. Other foundational epic traditions tend to portray enemies as monstrous, sub-human, barely human at all (Roland's poem again, or the monkey-army of the Hindu epics). Still, real differences can be found if you look closely: the Trojans come across as somewhat more emotional and undisciplined, closer to animals, while the Greeks appear more rational and disciplined — an early version of the later distinction between Greeks and "barbarians." This is arguably the first real instance of what we would now call orientalism: defining the West by contrast with an "East" (Troy standing in, in a sense, for the Orient). The Greeks sat at the easternmost edge of the Western world, a genuine crossroads and flashpoint, later finding themselves at the very center of the conflict between West and East in their wars with Persia. Language matters enormously here too — the very meaning of "barbarian" originally just meant someone who didn't speak Greek, who spoke no real language at all as far as the Greeks were concerned. This, of course, sits uneasily with the fact that Homer's own Trojans do speak Greek in the poem — that's simply a contradiction built into the text: in practice they speak Greek, but Homer nonetheless insists they don't share a common language with the Greeks. The question of language mattered enormously to the Greeks generally, since there was no single nation of Greece — the Greeks were scattered all across the Mediterranean, a seafaring people who defined themselves above all by their shared language.
The poem's first real close-up of a Trojan warrior is Paris, presented almost as an Oriental despot — effeminate, living a life of luxury. Nastes, another Trojan figure, is presented as something of a stereotype too, a useful example of how one kind of excellence may simply not be good enough when it comes to actual battle. The only time Homer ever calls any people "barbarians" outright, it's applied to the Carians, allies of Troy, rather than to the Trojans themselves. Still, there is some lingering sense that the Trojans may be inferior after all — they do, in the end, lose the war.
Real differences can be found — but they don't always work to the Trojans' disadvantage. The Trojans, for instance, have a far stronger sense of genuine community than the Greeks do; they are fighting, quite literally, for the survival of their city, which in that sense makes them look more civilized. The Greeks, by contrast, behave more like lone wolves — marauders on the prowl, looking for conquest, fighting for themselves alone, for booty and personal honor. You see this clearly in Achilles's behavior: he is not remotely a team player, concerned only with himself. The Greeks' own families, homes, and cities are all far away; in the Iliad, unlike the Odyssey, the Greeks are not fighting to defend their homes. Troy, by contrast, appears throughout the poem as a genuinely functioning community. We see Hector among his own family, with his wife and young son, fighting specifically to protect them and his city — one real reason some readers prefer him to Achilles. Insofar as the Trojans differ from the Greeks, it's largely because they represent the value of family and city, something less overtly heroic but closer to ordinary human concerns. There is a much clearer order and hierarchy within Troy, precisely because the whole community amounts to one extended family — there isn't the same scattering of independent kings you find among the Greeks. Hector is genuinely subordinate to his father Priam in a way that Achilles simply is not subordinate to Agamemnon, even though Hector, like Achilles, is also a better fighter than his own nominal superior. Family itself supplies the basic principle of order within Troy.
Death as the Great Leveler
Still, the poem keeps circling back to the underlying similarities between the two sides. Death is treated as a genuine universal — one real source of the poem's nobility, rising above ethnic distinctions toward a vision of the universal human condition in the face of death. There's a beautifully functional use of repetition here, noted long ago by Lessing: Greeks and Trojans are repeatedly equated in the face of death — though notice that even here some difference remains, made visible precisely through the repetition: the Trojans have to be explicitly forbidden from crying, since they're considered too emotional, while the Greeks are simply allowed to express their grief openly.
There's a remarkable moment when Briseis is finally allowed to speak for herself, rising above the whole friend-versus-enemy distinction and extending real nobility to a woman — women are rarely given a voice at all in this poem, generally treated as property, and here a woman is given a genuinely noble and eloquent speech. What we're seeing here is a distinctly Greek characteristic: a search for universals, a movement beyond the poem's own conventional binary oppositions, transcending its normal categories altogether — an early movement toward philosophy itself. It's interesting that this move is associated here with a woman; we'll see something similar later in Sophocles's Antigone. It's a move beyond the standpoint of the aner altogether, beyond simple us-versus-them thinking. Ajax, for instance, could never make a statement like Briseis's. The aner is hyper-masculine by definition; the anthropos includes both women and men alike. The Iliad is the greatest war poem ever written — but it also shows us that war is not the only thing there is to life; there is something beyond war. The Odyssey, in turn, shows us exactly what you fight wars for in the first place: to get back home, to family.
Mortals versus Immortals
All of this leads to the poem's ultimate opposition: humans against gods, mortals against immortals. This is, above all, a great poem about mortality — which is exactly what makes it both noble and tragic, and it's a theme endlessly imitated in every subsequent epic tradition. Set against this is the laughter of the gods — a very typical Homeric moment shows the gods laughing at physical infirmity, at the lame god Hephaestus. The Homeric gods are constantly laughing at weakness and suffering. The gods, at bottom, are fundamentally comic figures, while human beings are fundamentally tragic ones — a contrast built directly into Book I of the poem, where the gods resolve their own conflict and share a laugh, while human beings, unable to resolve their conflicts in the same way, are left to suffer instead. Humans are simply more serious than the gods, which is part of why the gods take such an interest in human affairs in the first place (rather like watching a particularly dramatic episode of television). The gods' own struggles lack real seriousness — they cannot fight one another to the death — and so the gods end up functioning as spectators of human drama rather than genuine participants in tragedy of their own.
The status of the hero sits squarely between human mortality and divine immortality, overcoming this binary opposition in his own person. Heroes strive for a kind of immortality that can be granted directly by the gods (being elevated to heaven) or achieved instead through fame — kleos, quite literally "what is heard," passed on by word of mouth and granted, above all, by poets. Achilles articulates this most clearly in his own understanding of the choice before him: a long but obscure life, or a short but glorious one — the tragic choice, and really the difference between aner and anthropos in a nutshell (also framed elsewhere as a contrast between nostos, homecoming, and kleos, glory). This is exactly why Agamemnon poses such a real threat to Achilles: he threatens to erase the very distinction between hero and coward, since under Agamemnon's system, both end up receiving the same reward regardless. (Elsewhere, Sarpedon makes a related point in his own speech: that privilege confers real obligations, and that mortality itself is the spur to seeking fame.) Most people value a long life and ordinary happiness above all else; the hero is not most people — he is willing to sacrifice exactly those things in exchange for immortality.
This is what happens, more broadly, within a culture that has no real belief in an afterlife — a sharp contrast with later Christian culture, a contrast we'll keep encountering all the way up through Hamlet. Without a belief in an afterlife, your whole attitude toward death necessarily changes. The ancient Greeks did have some vague notions of an afterlife, but no uniform belief and certainly no concept of heaven — we'll see something of this in the Odyssey, a shadowy underworld you descend to after death, but it's nothing you'd ever hope for; if anything it functions as a place of punishment rather than reward, a very thin, shadowy kind of existence (Achilles himself, as we'll see, has no love for it at all). The Greek word we translate as "soul," psyche, doesn't clearly denote something separable from the body in the way we might assume — it seems to function more like a shadow that lingers around the body. This is a complicated matter that changes considerably over time, but broadly speaking, for the Greeks, whatever afterlife there is, it's nothing you'd actually want. There is no positive, desirable form of immortality available except through fame. This is exactly why how you die becomes so enormously important: the poem's focus falls again and again on the moment of death itself, since that is the moment fame is actually won or lost — whether you die as a hero or as a coward. The hero, in the end, is defined above all by the moment of his death, which is part of why Homer includes so many individual death scenes throughout the poem.
Pushing the Limits of Divinity
One characteristic way the poem presents heroism is through the aristeia of Diomedes (again from aristos) — a hero's chance to show off his very best, his own personal "showtime." At the height of his aristeia, Diomedes even threatens the gods themselves, going so far as to wound Aphrodite — thumos gone thoroughly out of control. Is this any way to speak to a goddess? He goes on to confront Apollo directly before finally, at last, retreating before the gods. This whole episode is representative: a Greek hero pushing right up against the very limits of humanity. The Greeks do have a concept of blasphemy (in fact the word itself is Greek), and there is a real cautionary theme here running through Greek literature more broadly — precisely because challenging the gods is so tempting to begin with. What's distinctively Greek here is exactly this willingness to push the envelope of divinity, to threaten even the gods themselves. It's hard to imagine Moses ever punching out Jehovah — "forty years in the desert? Take that, old man!" (though Jacob's wrestling match with an angel comes reasonably close). Even Diomedes eventually pulls back from the brink; Achilles, by contrast, goes all the way, fighting an actual river god outright in Book XXI. Diomedes's ultimate restraint sets off Achilles's own absolutism by contrast. The ultimate meaning of thumos, taken to its furthest extreme, is a refusal to depend on anyone else at all — total self-sufficiency, a direct challenge to the gods, an aspiration to become godlike oneself.
The Gods' Withdrawal and the Space for Human Character
The actual role the gods play in the poem is genuinely complicated, hard to fully untangle. We're naturally struck by how much they do — but we should be equally struck by how little they do, since Homer also shows them steadily withdrawing from human action. If anything, these withdrawals are more striking than the interventions. One of the great overarching movements of both the Iliad and the Odyssey is exactly this: the gradual withdrawal of the gods from active participation in human life. In many other cultures, everything is simply fate, entirely the work of the gods. Homer, by contrast, leaves real room for human beings to maneuver — not completely free agents, but not entirely unfree either, with a real sense of human character (itself another Greek word) shaping how different men respond differently to the very same situation. It isn't all simply destiny. This is arguably the beginning of a characteristically Western formula: fate equals character plus circumstance (compare Hamlet: "The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.")
The Chariot Race: Nature, Chance, and the Divine
The chariot race in Book XXIII offers an excellent illustration of this whole principle, and it also shows off Homer's real subtlety — how carefully the poem is actually composed, never quite spelling everything out, always making the audience think it through for themselves. The sequence is so intricately worked out that it's genuinely hard to believe it's purely a product of oral composition; it feels almost as though it were worked out "on paper," as we would say. You can see real Greek competitiveness on display here too — this is meant to be Patroclus's funeral, a solemn occasion, and yet a boxing match still breaks out among the mourners (the ancient Greeks really did hold games at funerals, part of the deep background to the later Roman gladiatorial games). There's a genuine note of hope in all this: a transfer of thumos from war into athletics may represent something like a solution to the problem thumos created back in Book I. Here, that same aggressive energy brings out the best in men without leading to real destruction (though it comes close). The basic problem with thumos is a room full of alpha males fighting purely for themselves; the real hope for thumos lies in its capacity to attach men to larger causes — getting them to fight for their country, or, here, to fight for a team, channeling thumos toward something constructive (though these remain individual competitions for now; we'll see actual team sports once we reach the Romans).
The race lets the natural order of "the best" show itself clearly — Achilles is very much in charge throughout this whole book, even giving orders to Agamemnon himself (though Achilles has to learn some real diplomacy in the process, conceding that Agamemnon is "the best" at something or other — a concession Achilles would never have made back in Book I, even though we all know perfectly well that Ajax the son of Oileus is actually the best spear-thrower). The episode begins with the natural order among the competitors themselves. Then we see an order determined purely by chance, through the drawing of lots (lots here are not writing, simply marks). The natural order is essentially aristocratic, the order of "the best"; the order determined by lot is essentially democratic (compare how Athenian magistrates were later chosen by lot under the democracy). Then we see the actual outcome of the race itself — a genuine mixture of nature and chance together. This is where the poem's sense of divine intervention becomes clear: the gods intervene precisely to upset the outcome we'd otherwise expect purely from nature — "a god did it." But we also see the real importance of human skill: Nestor's advice to his son Antilochus underscores that skill itself is teachable, that the art of chariot racing, like any other art, can just barely overcome nature itself. Antilochus can't quite beat Diomedes outright, but he does just nudge out Menelaus (any more aggressively, and he would have properly passed him). Poor Menelaus always seems to come in third no matter what — a kind of Mr. Mediocrity (Homer even addresses him directly at one point, our own natural point of contact within the poem).
The overall impression left by the race is that there really is a natural order to things — it isn't all pure chanciness and arbitrary outcome. If you look closely at the underlying nature of the drivers and their horses, you can form a reasonably good sense of how the race is likely to turn out. Not with certainty, though — chance still plays its own real role, which is exactly why you have to actually hold the race, actually play the game, in the first place. That element of pure chance is, in a sense, the specifically divine element for the Greeks. What actually happens ends up being a genuinely complex interplay between natural and divine forces, between nature and chance together. In most cultures, outcomes are treated as wholly determined by the gods, leaving prayer as your only real recourse. In our own culture, by contrast, we tend to assume outcomes are determined entirely by human skill and the quality of the horses — we act as though we could handicap any race perfectly in advance, through careful pre-race analysis, as if chancy events were fully predictable after all. Homer's own view sits somewhere in between these two extremes.
Settling Disputes: Toward Community and Justice
Achilles tries to make up for the actual outcome of the race while still recognizing Eumelus's real excellence as a driver — which promptly creates its own political problem, requiring yet further adjustment. If you don't simply follow the objective order of finish, all sorts of subjective considerations creep back in and people start to argue. Notice that Achilles ends up, in effect, in Agamemnon's own earlier position — taking a prize away from a hero who arguably deserves it. Achilles handles the situation rather better than Agamemnon did, though largely because he has substitute prizes available to offer instead. What these heroes really need is some reliable mechanism for settling disputes — something like a blood price. Disputes keep threatening to spill over into outright violence: Menelaus, for instance, is furious that Antilochus beat him through a bit of a stratagem. (Some translations render the relevant term misleadingly as a "deliberate foul," with Antilochus responding that "youth breaks all the rules" — as though there really were a formal rulebook. We tend to assume sports have explicit rules everyone knows and has to obey; in fact there are essentially none here beyond simply staying on the course, with a single judge posted to check on that much. The actual Greek term Menelaus uses is dolos — not "foul" but something closer to a trick, a stratagem, the very same word used elsewhere for the Trojan Horse and for Penelope's own strategy with her suitors.)
Menelaus is upset because he is a man of real stature, driving better horses, and yet the young upstart Antilochus manages to beat him with what amounts to a clever trick — precisely what Nestor had advised his son to do in the first place, to rely on skill rather than brute superiority. The Greek word here is metis, the very same word that will come to define Odysseus himself — intelligence carrying real connotations of cunning, wiliness, trickery. You can see the whole movement toward the Odyssey taking shape right here: an older generation of pure he-men being challenged by a younger generation that relies instead on cunning, which is exactly why Menelaus is so upset. He calls for justice, effectively asking for something like a courtroom, taking up his staff and asking the other men present to judge between the two of them — a real move toward communal judgment, quite different from the earlier standoff between Achilles and Agamemnon back in Book I. But notice that Menelaus still says, in the same breath, "I'll settle this myself" — the typical Homeric hero instinct, taking matters into his own hands rather than waiting patiently for any formal arbitration, wanting the answer immediately, almost like a child. Antilochus, sensing things could get genuinely dangerous, becomes diplomatic with Menelaus instead — without ever quite admitting outright that he cheated, he simply pleads his own youth, and this succeeds in calming Menelaus down without further violence. We begin to see here, in miniature, how disputes might eventually be resolved among these fundamentally thumotic heroes — a first move toward some more properly institutional way of settling conflicts.
This connects directly to the key scene on the shield of Achilles: what is conspicuously lacking among the Greeks throughout the Iliad is the city — a real community capable of arbitrating disputes on its own. The heroes remain, in this sense, in a fundamentally pre-political situation, meaning a situation without a city, in which each man regards himself as the ultimate authority over his own affairs. The shield itself sets community-at-war against community-at-peace, much the way the Iliad as a whole stands against the Odyssey. The Odyssey shows us a larger world, of which the Iliad itself turns out to be only a part.
