Caitlin Campbell

ANNA SO

he war in Iraq limps on, in spite of criticism that the time for withdrawal has long since passed. The shameless, suspect leader who instigated it persists in believing that divine favor is on his side and victory at hand. It has become increasingly clear that the original justification for the war was at best insufficient, and possibly downright deceptive. Sound familiar? It ought to for incoming undergraduates reading the Iliad for Literature Humanities. The Iliad is a gorgeous, compelling read, and one that reveals that wartime attitudes and atrocities have remained disconcertingly constant throughout time.

The Iliad is a Columbia College rite of passage, one that fosters a sense of connection between past and future undergraduates. The Iliad has been part of the College's curriculum since English professor John Erskine initiated an optional two-year honors course on great books in 1920. Its importance was cemented by the 1937 launch of Humanities A, which eventually evolved into what is now affectionately known as Lit Hum.

Tradition, however, is an insufficient justification for a curriculum. Professor Gareth Williams, chair of the Classics Department and co-chair of Literature Humanities, aims to keep the class “revitalized and revitalizing” by actively investigating questions that remain pertinent to modern readers, such as “What is our primary responsibility: loyalty to ourselves or to the community?” For Williams, these questions arise because the Iliad is a “sensitive human document that captures difficulties and problems of human behavior and interaction,” and therefore has “a certain claim to timeless value.”

Senior Student Representative for the Core Jon Blitzer, CC '07, encourages focus on both the elements of the Iliad that resonate through time and those that arise exclusively from modern thought and literary criticism. Blitzer believes that one way to counteract many students' sense that the Core is irrelevant to modern life is by finding “a way of reading the Iliad that can be inclusive of traditional readings as well as more challenging or radical ones.” For Blitzer, “There needs to be room for both.”

Readers in search of a modern understanding of the Iliad will likely latch on to the questionable motives for the Trojan War. Menelaos and Agamemnon have ostensibly launched an attack on Troy to reclaim the abducted Helen. Yet, the loss of one woman, however lovely, seems insufficient cause for the ten-year war that ensues. Perhaps more offensive than the loss of Helen is Paris' breach of culturally specific laws of hospitality when he abducts his host's wife. Some historians instead suggest that political and financial motives fueled the Trojan War, the thesis of David Benioff's atrocious film Troy. Agamemnon's greed, pride, and potentially illegitimate war powerfully and insistently parallel President Bush's election and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

While the parallel between the Trojan War and America's current wars is particularly salient for modern readers, it is not the only aspect of the Iliad that begs a departure from traditional interpretations. In taking what's “useful” from the classics, scholars have tended to ignore what can't be easily incorporated into their worldview. They have understood Ancient Greece and Rome as centers of pale, austere art (much of which, according to many modern art historians, was actually garishly polychromed), philosophical excellence, and democracy.

America, particularly the American judiciary and academia, likes to construe itself as the inheritor of this tradition — to a point. Judging from the Iliad and other Greek texts such as The Symposium, parts of the ancient world approved of, if not encouraged, intimate relationships between men — a fact not bandied about the hallowed halls of Washington. While Achilleus sulks over the loss of a woman, the greater insult is to his pride, due to the theft of someone whom he considers a belonging. It is the death of Patroklos that spurs him back into battle. Anilochos holds back “the hands of Achilleus as he [grieves] in his proud heart / fearing Achilleus might cut his throat with the iron.” Aside from Hektor and Andromache, the most important relationships between mortals in the Iliad are those between men. Professors may avoid addressing questions of sexuality, finding them prurient and irrelevant. An open discussion of how homosociality informs the Iliad, instead of a sly circumvention of so obvious an issue, would open the text to diverse and relevant interpretations.

Modern views about sexual identity may help to illuminate a commonly ignored facet of the Iliad, but ancient practices in turn throw certain aspects of modern life into sharp relief. Homer's process of composing the Iliad — by turning what the Greeks believed was an actual event into myth — reveals how myths still shape national identities. It may seem simplistic to worry about whose side the gods were on, or believe that Diomedes truly wounded Aphrodite's hand, but these myths should not be dismissed. Instead they should be viewed as forerunners of American myths: from George Washington and his cherry tree to the consensus that arose, without corroborating evidence, that the tragedy of September 11 necessitated a war in Iraq.

War correspondent Chris Hedges highlights this impulse towards mythologizing both ancient and modern wars in his articulate, unrelenting and fiercely confessional War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. In his national bestseller, Hedges uses his own experiences with war and knowledge of classics like the Iliad to explain how war is instigated. He writes, “The potency of myth is that it allows us to make sense of mayhem and violent death. It gives justification to what is often nothing more than gross human cruelty and stupidity.” Hedges implicates governments and the press alike in fostering this myth by manufacturing justifications for war, and promulgating certain buzzwords, which make other terms taboo and dissent unpatriotic.

The mythicization of war may explain one of the most appealing aspects of the Iliad: the striking wholeness of Homer's world. Warriors' identities are tied to those of their ancestors, making past glories insistently manifest in current struggles. Achilleus' shield seems to encompass the whole world. Similes make men into a sky's worth of stars, a forest's worth of leaves, and a beach's worth of grains of sand. The effect is not to belittle individuals — men as stars lends each grandness rather than insignificance — but instead suggests a refreshing unity to any student too long steeped in the postmodern emphasis on fragments (first years shouldn't worry if they can't define “postmodern”; they'll soon learn the term, and shortly thereafter learn to hate it).

The wholeness that Homer creates does not irrevocably subsume the identity of individual warriors, but instead suggests inclusivity. The Iliad is primarily Achilleus' story — he is named in the first line — and then Hektor's, Priam's, Odysseus', both Aiases' and so on. But this is an age in which everyone acts on a heroic scale, and every Opheltios, Dryops, and Astyalos gets his fifteen minutes, or at least his glorious death scene. In a time of impersonal, mechanized mass slaughters, it is difficult to suppress a pang of nostalgia for a more intimate warfare in which at least combatants knew each other's names and reputations.

This wholeness makes the Trojan War appear to be an outgrowth of Homer's grand, beautiful world rather than what it is — unnatural violence between men who share a common culture, revere the same pantheon of gods, and have no discernible stake in the war. His emphasis on the greatness of even relatively unimportant warriors arguably creates a seductive, propagandistic understanding of the Trojan War, and all other armed conflicts in general.

Hedges observes that modern conflicts, too, “[give] a sense that we can rise above our smallness and divisiveness.” Even the bravery and loyalty, then, of the greatest Iliadic hero might prove to be nothing more than the symptoms of mythicized war. If loyalty, both to a cause and to other soldiers, is only a byproduct of the false sense of purposefulness that war fosters, then the closeness between comrades comes to seem tenuous. The habits of heroes, too, become suspect, most egregiously with the claiming of a defeated opponent's armor as a sign of the victor's prowess in battle. In light of Hedges' description of the mutilation of war dead in Bosnia for the purpose of damaging the survivors' psyches, this signifier of greatness seems like yet another example of unforgivable disrespect for the dead. Force and the use of another's body as a trophy, rather than sympathy or righteousness of cause, define greatness. Achilleus' brief dispelling of the myth of war to recognize Priam as a father instead of an enemy makes the return of Hektor's body especially poignant.

DANIELLA ZALCMAN

It becomes difficult, when approached through a lens of modern wars, to see the Iliad as an unalloyed celebration of a now lost culture. If anything, it is most useful as a precautionary tale we continuously fail to heed. It warns against senseless wastes of human life and the spinning of combat as noble, virtuous, or exciting. Disheartening as it may be, it is perhaps necessary to dispense with romantic views of antiquity and accept, as Hedges encourages, the Iliad as a chronicle of the horrors of war and the process that turns them into myth. For some readers, this disabusing leads to the revelation that, as Hedges wrote via email, ancient heroes and modern readers alike “live in a morally neutral universe where we seem to be favored by the gods one day and abandoned the next.”

Long before Fight Club's Tyler Durden lectured on the possibility that God just might not like us, Homer's gods actively and irrationally hated certain humans, and betrayed even those heroes that they cared for in moments of great need. While those dealt a shoddy hand might retain hope of an afterlife in the Elysian Fields, they could not interpret their suffering as serving the plans, however mysterious, of a just God. Even for the greatest heroes, the world is a brutal place.

The ancient Greeks' understanding of misfortune as the rage of unjust gods reminds us that humans have always found life perplexingly cruel. Staggering interconnectedness, powerful leaders that seem deeply out of touch with reality and unpredictable acts of terrorist violence characterize the modern world. The resultant miasma seems unmanageably complex. It is strangely comforting to know that humans have always felt overawed by the forces around them, but continued to go on with their lives. Because we can find ourselves in the Iliadic heroes, it is hard not to admire them. They recognize that, between fate, unreasonable kings and pitiless gods, they face nearly impossible odds. Action can make only small changes against such powerful forces. Still, they persevere boldly, finding glory in the exercise of individual agency and the simultaneously paltry yet invaluable control they have over the world.