The Ancient Greeks’ idea of war was based around honor and respect, values that objectively seem strange, as the nature of war itself is one of savage violence and tragedy. The latter ideas have taken more prominence as time goes on, but even the Greeks had to realize that the idealized image of warfare created by the singers and the heroes was not what was actually happening on the field. This is where Homer’s The Iliad stands out, as the characters of the story both seem to value the economy of honor and glory that war sustains, but at the same time many of these characters are capable of looking at the devastation around them and questioning how logical the whole system is. The Iliad is not so much the story of the Trojan War, as the timeline in which the story takes place misses several important events in both the beginning and end of that legend, but instead it is the story of how the metaphysical values man has made for war fade away over time and reveal the ugly nature beneath. This ugly nature is the true face of war.
The Iliad takes place nine years into the Trojan war, and the story ends before said war meets its ultimate conclusion. This timeline is interesting, as it never carefully covers the various reasons for why the war is being fought, and has apparently decided that the outcome is not important to the point. So what the reader is left with is a precise picture of the war near the end of its long reign, and what takes place here is the key to the story’s depiction of war. Several cities have already been sacked, dozens of battles have been fought, and countless soldiers have no doubt perished in the thick of it. Those who have survived thus far are tired, anxious to return to their homelands and into the arms of their families, but there is still one last city to take, which means that many more still have to die, and they do, as the multitude of death scenes throughout the story draw out. For nine years these men fought ultimately just to die here, so close to the end, so close to victory. Homer certainly aims to make every detailed death sympathetic by digressing each time into a summary of the fallen’s past accomplishments. This is done to give some personality to these otherwise faceless bodies whose sole narrative purpose seems to be that of meat for the more developed characters to butcher. Surely the tragedy of perishing at the end of such an extensive war is on the minds of these men, and perhaps it can explain why the heroic values of war seem to vanish into thin air.
The soldiers of The Iliad are driven by the pursuit of glory, which is won through accomplishment on the battlefield. The more men one kills, and the more impressive those men are, the more glory and respect one gets in return. Glory gets its value from the notion of legacy, an important motivation held by warriors who hope to immortalize themselves through their heroic deeds. In this way, the flow of glory is dependent on war, which is why so many have no quarrel over putting their lives at risk. This is the case for the soldiers of Greece and Troy, yet there is something different in the air of this battlefield. The difference in the case of The Iliad to other instances is that these men have been fighting for so long. In the heat of a first battle, or even a series of battles, the glory economy works as motivation. After such a long and tiresome war, however, things are different. These men are jaded from all the fighting. Who, though, has it in them to stop chasing glory and honor? To walk away would not be to cash-out, to take the glory gained and bask in it; it would be to go bankrupt, to sacrifice all that has been gained. That’s the gamble of the glory economy, one cannot pick and choose his battles. He has to commit to combat as a lifestyle in order to gain anything. That is what makes the nine years of the Trojan War so heavy on the men fighting. They all have been at it for so long, but there is no way to cash-out, leaving all of these bitter men to fight each other to the death. This jaded attitude, driven by a desire to actually reap the benefits of hard-won victories, is where the honor of war becomes practically forgotten.
While every man who picks up a spear is participating in the glory economy, it is the heroes who have the biggest stakes, and it is from these characters that the reader is given the most insight. Arguably the most important among the heroes of The Iliad is Achilles, who spends a great deal of the story protesting, in a sense, the logic of continuing to fight this decade-long battle. Achilles has a few characteristics that allow him a unique perspective on the whole situation. For one, he differs from other men, who fear that they may die if they fight, because he knows for a fact that he will die should he continue to fight. This prophecy is widely known, though never descriptively elaborated on, but it no doubt has an effect on Achilles’ decisions throughout the story. He blatantly states that he sees no purpose in fighting to his own death for the sake of Agamemnon, whom he despises. Second, he is regarded by the Greeks as their strongest fighter by far, giving him the strongest position in terms of the glory economy. One would think that this gives him the biggest reason to fight, but this is not necessarily true. Does every rich man feel accomplished and happy? Does the husband with the most beautiful wife feel lucky and loved? Perhaps Achilles’ position on top of the food chain allows him to see the precariousness of the system, which does not help his motivation to fight. These two characteristics work together to bring about Achilles’ jaded attitude toward fighting. While he may previously have been willing to die for honor and glory, the years he has spent at the top have shown him that death is not worth the intangible value that the glory economy rewards, thus making him unwilling to return to the fight when the Greeks come begging for his assistance. If the great Achilles is starting to lose his lust for honor, then the nameless soldiers surely must not be the most enthusiastic either, but they lack the status to openly defy the Greek leaders like Achilles does. This shows how the value of glory diminishes in the eyes of men as the brutal drive of war pushes on, and without glory to give war some metaphysical value, the only thing that remains is the raw violence.
Eventually Achilles finds his motivation and returns to the fight, but not for the sake of his glory or honor, but for revenge. At this point, the codes of honor and respect that soldiers are expected to follow get washed away, replaced with an animalistic drive to take the life of the enemy. Achilles swiftly puts dozens of Trojans to the sword, some of whom beg for mercy and try to surrender themselves, only to be cut down in his fury. This is war in its true form, killing exchanged from one party to another without all of the forced fuss over what is the noble thing to do. The intangible rewards of respect and glory that Achilles had fought for previously no longer matter, as his thirst for revenge is now the only driving force behind his charge. Even noble Hektor, who in victory and defeat stuck to his own just code of ethics, is bested by raging Achilles. When Hektor tries to reason with Achilles, to at least come to some terms as to how things should be fought out between them, Achilles refuses. The idea of there being some heroic code of honor between people who are about to cut each other to pieces is suddenly abandoned. While it comes off as extreme for Achilles to act this way, especially since he is presented as the best of the Greeks, which one would think applies to his treatment of honor as well as combat prowess, his actions make sense pragmatically. Throughout the story there are instances where heroes stop and acknowledge areas where some heroic code dictates how they act, as when Diomedes and Glaukos stop mid-battle to exchange armor in order to honor their families’ guest friendship, which, given that they are on opposing sides, seems odd. In this lens, it would seem like killing someone with a spear thrust from behind would be deemed dishonorable, and yet this happens several times. While soldiers may try and ease things by going by this heroic code, the reality of war, that being the practice of one group of people ripping the lives away from another, does not call for such action; in fact, one would think it would call for viler behavior between peoples. This is exactly the tone by which Achilles and Hektor fight. Achilles throws Hektor’s terms aside without a second thought, declaring “there are no trustworthy oaths between men and lions,” (Homer 464). Achilles is the lion here, a creature whose aim in killing is not to prove anything or to win some made up glory, but to put down his enemy. Their battle is not one of two heroes nobly fighting to see who is the more deserving of victory, it is one man brutally hacking the other to death, because in its more pragmatic and realistic sense, this is war.
The Iliad captures the time when a war turns from what men want it to be into what it truly is. While one may want to believe that men have the capacity for civility in all things, war by its very definition defies civility. The drive for glory that draws men into the fight wears them down, and before they realize that it is not worth their lives, they are either dead, or standing over another whom they have killed. By the end, Achilles no longer lies to himself that war is fought out of some honorific quest. He embraces the savage nature of war, ignoring the trivial courtesies that somehow make the activity of murder socially agreeable. However, the attitude Homer expresses is not one of approval for this new direction. The final scene of Hektor’s funeral represents the end of honorable warfare, as the deceptive manner by which the Greeks eventually win over the Trojans is well known, and the implication is all that is needed to cement in the fact that the notion of fairness and respect between hostile armies is nothing more than words in the wind. The emphasis of ending on this character’s death, given all he represented within the story, certainly shows that Homer sees The Iliad as the tragic end of something, the final days in which men fought with civility and honor. One way or another, the days of honor coinciding with battle are over for these soldiers.
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I chose to reflect on this piece because it was one of the first essays I wrote in my first ever class as a freshman at Michigan. In the midst of my last semester as an undergraduate career, after writing thousands of words worth of additional text between this first piece and now, it feels appropriate to reflect on this work as a means of seeing how far I’ve come as a writer since first stepping onto campus.
The course was “Great Books,” and The Iliad was one of the first works the class focused on, and as such this essay was my first attempt at producing a college level academic paper. As someone who prided themselves on their writing ability throughout high school, I certainly felt a pressure to maintain that standard, but knew all too well how much higher the expectations were in this new setting. I remember being unable to just sit down and get the work done as I had so easily in the past. I needed to get up and walk away from my laptop periodically, sometimes taking long walks across campus, all the while parsing over the book and my thesis in my head, feeling the need to grasp at something deeper and more meaningful in the text than I had in my previous work.
Looking at the finished product now, I believe I was successful, by freshman-year standards, at the very least, though it’s certainly clear that I was much more concerned with the grandiose thematic content of the piece rather than the more honed-in, microscopic analyses I’ve since been more trained to do. In that vein, many sections of the piece and vital points of my argument lack what I’d now consider necessary citations from the text in order to substantiate my point, showing that I used to be much more comfortable making broad generalizations of a text and felt that such points didn’t need citations, a bad habit I’ve grown more wary of years later. Someone who is thoroughly familiar with The Iliad may read this and agree with my point, but someone less familiar would likely not find the evidence needed to justify my argument present in my writing alone.
There are some interesting deviations from style in this piece compared to my more recent writings as well. For instance, I do not use any em dashes, which have grown more and more present in my writing across my college career – in fact, I’m surprised it’s taken my this long to incorporate one into this reflection, given its prominence in my writing nowadays. There were also many more proofreading errors in the original document than I am willing to let slide today. For this post, I’ve corrected them to the best of my ability, including a shameful use of “affect” where it should have been “effect” – oh how far I’ve come. What I haven’t changed for the sake of authenticity are some of my jumbled, poorly-organized sentences, because I feel that they still convey their meaning clearly enough while showing the weakness in my writing style from that time.
While the nitty-gritty of this piece is certainly worthy of critique, I have to admit, when I went back to read this piece for the purpose of this post, I had low expectations, and am happy to say that it hold up better than expected. While I do feel I’ve genuinely grown as a writer over these last few years at Michigan, reading this now and not being absolutely embarrassed at its quality makes me realize that I was, and perhaps always have been, too hard on myself, holding myself to lofty expectations out of some need to be as good at writing as I hope to be. Knowing that I’ll be taking another major step in my life in only a few short weeks, then finding myself in a similar position of needing to measure-up as I did at the time I wrote this piece, this lesson is one I hope to take with me.
Works Cited
Homer, The Iliad of Homer. Trans. Richmond Lattimore Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951. Print.
Writer To Writer Literary Journal 