In my old undergraduate notes, I found some sections from Great Books that deal with the Iliad. I cannot give the exact reference, as whatever professor gave me the photocopy had neglected to put in that information. If anyone knows, please let me know so I can give proper credit. From David Denby’s The New Yorker article “Does Homer Have Legs?”

Here, Denby gives his initial impressions of the Iliad, supplying some background information that new readers might not be aware of. He also expresses some discomfort at the Homer’s style: in that the poet offers no guidance through the carnage that was the Trojan war.

By the time the action of the Iliad begins, the deed that set off the whole chain of events — a man making off with another man’s wife — is barely mentioned by the participants. Homer, chanting his poetry to groups of listeners, must have expected everyone to know the outrageous old tale. Years earlier, Paris, a prince of Troy, visiting the house of the Greek king Menelaus, took away, with her full consent, Helen, the king’s beautiful wife. Agamemnon, the brother of the cuckold, then put together a loose federation of kings and princes whose forces voyaged to Troy and laid siege to the city, intending to punish the proud inhabitants and reclaim Helen. But after more than nine years of warfare, the foolish act of sexual abandonment that set the whole cataclysm in motion has been largely forgotten. By this time, Helen, abashed, considers herself merely a slut (her embarrassed appearance on the walls of Troy is actually something of a letdown), and Paris, her second “husband,” more a lover than a fighter, barely comes out to the battlefield. When he does come out, and he and Menelaus fight a duel, the gods muddy the outcome and he war goes on. After nine years, the war itself is causing the war.

How can a book make one feel injured and exhilarated at the same time? What’s shocking about the Iliad is that the cruelty and the nobility of it seem to grow out of each othcr, like the good and evil twins of some malign fantasy who together form a single unstable and frightening personality. After all, Western literature begins with a quarrel beween two arrogant pirates over booty. At the beginning of the poem, the various tribes of the Greeks (whom Homer calls Achaeans — Greece wasn’t a national identity in his time), the various tribes assembled before the walls of Troy are on the verge of disaster. Agamemnon, their leader, the most powerful of the kings, has kidnapped and taken as a mistress from a nearby city a young woman, the danghter of one of Apollo’s priests; Apollo has angrily retaliated by bringing down a plague onthe Greeks. A peevish, bullying king, unsteady in command, Agamemnon, under pressure from the othcr leaders, angrily gives the girl back to her father. But then, demanding compensation, he takes for himself the slave mistress of Achilles, his greatest warrior. The women are passed around like gold pieces or helmets. Achilles is so outraged by this bit of plundering within the ranks that he comes close to killing the king, a much older man. Restraining himself at the last minute, he retires rom the combat and prays to his mother, the goddess Thetis, for the defeat of his own side; he then sits in his tent playing a lyre and “singing of men’s fame” as his friends get cut up by the Trojans. What follows is a series of battles whose savagery remains without parallel in our literature.

It is almost too much, an extreme and bizarre work of literary art at the very beginning of Western literary art. One wants to rise to it, taking full in the face, for the poem depicts life at its utmost, a nearly ceaseless activity of marshaling, deploying, advancing, and fleeing, spelled by peaceful periods so strenuous — the councils and feasts and games — that they hardly seem like relief at all. Reading the poem in its entirety is like confronting a storm that refuses to slacken or die. At first, I had to fight my way through it; I wasn’t bored but I was rebellions, my attention a bucking horse unwilling to submit to the harness. It was too long, I thought, so brutal and repetitive and, for all its power as a portrait of war, strangely distant from us. Where was Homer in all this? He was every where, selecting and shaping the material, but he was nowhere as a palpable presence, a consciousness, and for the modern reader his absence was appalling. No one tells us how to react to the brutalities or to anything else. We are on our own. Movie-fed, I wasn’t used to working so hard, and as I sat on my sofa at home, reading, my body, in daydreams, kept leaping away from the seat and into the bedroom, where I would sink into bed and turn on the TV, or to the kitchen, where 1 would open the fridge. Mentally, I would pull myself back, and eventually I settled clown and read and read, though for a long time I remained out of balance and sore.