Observations as we finish reading Iliad
Quotations are from Donald Lateiner, 'The Iliad: an unpredictable classic,' a chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Homer.

Now that we are done reading the Iliad, you can start really reading the Iliad: it is obviously not the sort of work that you read and then put away and don't take down off the shelf again or sell back to the bookstore. By its fascinating complexity, it continuously rewards rereading.

There is so much more to say and learn about this world.

• Iliad OVERALL
  
• It's about individual males
  
• "A provoked but fiercely introspective ... young man becomes angry, and this anger trumps his community's desperate need for help."
• "Problems with a tactless but indispensable commander, and the epic protagonist's struggle to maintain honor, rank, and self-esteem while fighting a war that he cannot win or even survive."
• one-on-one combats are the norm, sometimes even in explicit duels where the armies watch
• all highly ritualized in terms of how they are fought
  
•  and also highly stylistically stereotyped narratively
• women and slaves and lower rank soldiers appear infrequently and only in secondary supporting roles at that
• these heroes are "doomed by their essential yet ruinous heroic honor"
• Both Hector and Achilles "intermittently possess longer vision than most or all of their companions and dependents. Nevertheless, both are trapped by personal obligations and issues beyond right and wrong. ... They transcend the merely heroic warriors like Diomedes, Aias, and Homer's Aineias ... and thus become tragic. ... They learn too late, they concede too late."
• in that sense, they might even transcend their maleness to be humans
  
• and it's about death
  
• 240 people with names die + many unnamed
• there are 60 different ways to say 'he died' in Homer (Garland, 1981, 50-53)
• very few are wounded, and there are no long columns of mutilated survivors: only a few leaders are wounded (but not seriously)
• for obvious narratively important reasons, they can't die
  
• "pathophysiological causes of death are precisely recorded and medically sound; many are delightfully gruesome"
  
• It's not partisan
• it presents all viewpoints sympathetically with very little judgement
• Trojans are not the enemy
• Remember, Trojans and their allies do not speak Greek: Homer mentions that, but just in passing: it plays no role in the plot or narration.
  
• Agamemnon is not declared the incompetent bully his actions show him to be (in my eyes)
• In some ways, the Achaeans are in the moral right: they are coming to get Helen, who was taken (no question seems to be raised here that she might have been willing and/or fully justified in leaving: that seems not to matter)
• that is not really forefronted and insisted upon by the words of the text
• it is problematized
  
• by Achilles' and Thersites' speeches about the greed of the leaders v. the role of the common soldiers
• and also by Helen, what she says and what is said about her
  
• it involves moral issues, but it is not a moral or moralizing text, just as it involves religious issues, but is not a religious text
  
• The opposing sides do have very different character
• the Trojans show us men fighting for preservation of ordinary life, while the Greek side shows us men fighting for material and reputational honor
• and their ordinary lives are visible in the similes, the brief glimpses of home life given in some death scenes, when Paris goes back into Troy and meets up with Andromache and Astyanax, and on Achilles' shield
  
• the women (mostly Trojan) show us the dread of victimization
  
• the few named women are stand-ins for all those who are killed, assaulted, and enslaved in raids or retaliation
  
• There may be anti-war sentiment here
• Adam Parry, related to Milman Parry (Milman pioneered oral study of these epics), claimed there was anti-war sentiment in Homer, specifically his depiction of Achilles, well before Vietnam (when much more interpretation involving anti-war sentiment came to the fore).
• And yet, it is not explicitly espoused, but only indirectly via Achilles who is the consummate warrior and Thersites who is the total loser
  
• The poem's very length is a strong presence.
• We cannot possibly feel that we have it all 'under control.'
• It is too big and too complex to grasp.
• Once finished, it's time to re-read it!
  
• And yet, there is a great deal of repetition, more than in any work of a literate age.
• The repetition trained us
• It set up expectations
• It created narrative rhythms
• the death scene, the assembly scene, the feast, the simile became familiar
  
• Which made the differences more noticeable
• Each death is unique, in spite of the repetitive pattern
  
• Some expand to fill vast numbers of poetic lines
• Some are contracted down to just a couple lines
• But so much fits into these patterns
• It's a vast fabric whose warp and weft are somewhat easily known but allow for infinite variety
• Temporally, it is VERY short
• some 40-50 days elapse between the first and last lines
• of those 40-50 days, events that occur on only 14 days are recounted
• but even so, most of the action occurs during just 3 individual days
• and little happens, really: we see no settlement conquered
• we only see a few major heroes die (Sarpedon, Patroclus, and Hector)
  
• but there is a much larger time span here: the war was a long one
  
• the war lasted 10 years
• Odysseus, the last one to return home, took 10 years to return home
• and several parallels from past generations are recounted (Heracles' siege of Troy, the Calydonian Boar hunt)
• these are called "vignettes": short scenes, mostly recounted in a speech by a character (Nestor, Phoenix)
  
• so the time span is short, and yet, by means of compression and expansion, the whole war is present
• expansion:
  
• references to the future (completely known to the poet and audience)
  
• and the past (often personally recalled by a speaker) include, in a casual unobtrusive way, the whole war
  
• without including the whole war:
• there is no mention of the specifics of the many named heroes deaths (e.g. Achilles, Ajax)
  
• or even the Trojan Horse!
• altogether different worldviews
• the similes: timeless windows onto a world of nature, peace, and everyday activities by more normal everyday people
• ecphrasis of Achilles' shield: a world at peace
  
• the gods: another world, connected mostly because gods change or participate in the human world, not the other way around
• but also, allusions to a very different worldview: the grand cosmic order
• Zeus' justice
• fate
  
• compression:
  
• the repetitiousness of battling makes it seem much longer than it actually is
• Omission of so much
  
• logistics is all but ignored: we do get report of a ship coming from Tenedos with wine and that it is bartered for, and we hear of sacking of Troy's allied cities and confiscating livestock, but that is never central or shown directly
• the quarrel of Agamemnon and Achilles is over war plunder from surrounding towns: that must be how they kept supplied
  
• there is no mention of how Trojans get their food and supplies: they seem to be under siege, but again the 'siege' doesn't seem a tight one, but that is not really said or directly depicted
• tactics all but ignored: very little about troop movement, etc.
  
• Geographically, it is very limited
• There are three main places
  
• Troy town
• Achaean camp
• Battlefield between
• And a couple divine places
• Olympus and
  
• Where Hera seduces Zeus
  
• Vantage points to watch the battle
• But we see the world nonetheless
• thru similes we see peaceful meadows, lion dens, sheepfolds, sandy beaches with children playing, stormy seas, night-time farms, women working, wasp nests, etc.
  
• Narratively, many spectacularly effective techniques are deployed
  
• the constant setting up of expectations (the duel that could end the war, the chance that Agamemnon is serious about leaving, etc.)
• slowing down/interruption of the narrative pace (the huge ecphrasis of Achilles' shield, the occasional longish speech about some other story, shifting scene to Olympus, etc.)
• individuals, not groups, but groups occasionally mentioned
  
• larger army movements hinted at, but not discussed for more than a line or two
• action-packed embedded narratives: calydonian boar hunt, Nestor's youthful exploits
• there's a huge body of pre-existing myth to draw from, and the audience knows it all
• quick allusions or long speeches bring all this in
  
• lots of misdirection (Agamemnon's dream and claim that they're going to pack up and leave, the duel between Paris and Menelaus, Zeus considering rescuing Sarpedon, prayers that paint a picture but "won't be answered")
• echoes small and large
• the smaller versions of a type scene prepare for or echo the larger versions
  
• big instance of echo:
  
• whole war is about abduction of a woman
• the crisis of the plague is about abduction of a woman
  
• rage of Achilles is about abduction of a woman
• (but, not really on a narrative technique point, in the end, when Achilles returns Hector's body to Priam, the whole thing seems pointless and almost absurd, as it does in book 9 when Achilles rejects the embassy)
• "Khryses' public plea, one almost unanimously approved by the invading troopers, miniaturizes as it foreshadows the main plot (namely a sequence of dishonor, divine pleasure, disaster and atonement by restoration and uneasy 'reconciliation'). Elderly Priam's nocturnal odyssey... affirms Akhilleus' generous understanding of compassion while echoing his earlier grasp of the protocols for heroic gifts ... their rapprochement confirms the folly of Agamemnon's refusal, his disastrous plague-producing blindness ... these framing books 1 and 24 contain unusually varied (e.g many changes of scene) and compressed actions that decisively define the plot of the Iliad)."
  
• many many viewpoints via speeches:
  
• many 'heroes,' one soldier from the ranks (Thersites), horses (!), gods, all speak
  
• the gods offer special, particularly complex opportunities
  
• they provide a definition of what it means to be human by way of contrast: they are what humans are not: NOT limited, where humans are defined by their limits (death in particular), even though there is the occasional instance where gods are also vulnerable
• they provide an internal audience: we see the battlefield, but we also see them watching it and reacting to it
• they are entertaining in their own right
• they represent all that comes upon a human from outside, what humans suffer at the hands of many forces in their world
• they make humans into pieces on a gameboard
• but they also represent the structure of the world, and that is supposedly just
  
• Insult, humiliation, and vaunting pepper the Iliad from start to finish
• public v. private: in the assembly, one-on-one in the camp, general to subordinate, enemy to enemy
• humans and gods
• the abuse is stereotyped and has patterns that come to be expected after a while
• criticise lineage, strength, skill, courage
• gloating over the dead abounds (stripping armor is its predecessor)
• these are next door to anger: they all provoke anger
• and they seem to me to be rather looked down upon in our modern world? But also rewarded and admired and even elected.
  
• Although it is all about honor and plunder, Achilles, the central character, despises them and is not motivated by them
• he rejects the embassy
• he finally does enter the fray out of grief and rage at loss
• he doesn't return Hector's body because of plunder, but because of compassion
• also, he "becomes trapped again ... . ... the corpse of the Trojan hero Hektor can be neither kept nor returned." and Priam offers him a way out.
• The Homeric world is large, complex, and indeterminate and offers no easy answers, no real reconciliation, no solution, no good v. bad. One might say it depicts its world warts and all. The plot is moved forward at the end, but the central problems it raises and forces us to consider remain.