The Iliad – Rage, Honour, and the Cost of Glory

52 Books in a Year – Week 2

I want to start with the gods. Not because they are the most important thing in the Iliad, they are not, the humans are, but because they are the thing that got under my skin the most and I have not been able to stop thinking about them since.

Here is what the gods do in the Iliad. They watch. They interfere. They pick sides based on personal preference, old grudges, wounded pride, and what amounts to cosmic boredom. They make bets. They argue with each other on Olympus about whose favourite human should be allowed to live today. They swoop down and pull their chosen warriors out of danger at the last moment, invisible to everyone around them, and then swan back up to watch what happens next. And when thousands of men die on the plains of Troy over ten years of war, when entire families are destroyed and cities burn and the best of a generation is ground into the dust, the gods are largely fine. Comfortable, actually. Occasionally moved. Never truly touched.

This hit me harder than I expected. Because it is not a fantasy conceit, it is a portrait of power. Of what it looks like from below when the people making decisions about your life have no real stake in the outcome.

The Iliad is 3,000 years old, and it has never felt more relevant. Make of that what you will.

What It Actually Is

Before anything else, a moment on the scope of this, because the Iliad has a reputation for being enormous and impenetrable and I want to push back on that gently but firmly.

It is not the whole Trojan War. That surprises people. The Iliad covers roughly fifty days near the end of a ten-year siege. It begins with a quarrel and it ends with a funeral. Everything you think you know about the Trojan War, the Wooden Horse, the face that launched a thousand ships, the fall of Troy itself, none of that is in this book. Homer trusts you to know the context and he gets straight to the human story he actually wants to tell.

And the human story he wants to tell is this. What happens when the greatest warrior alive decides to stop fighting? Not because he is afraid. Because he has been disrespected by the man who is supposed to be leading him. Because something that was his was taken, and the taking of it was an insult he cannot absorb and remain who he is. And what does that decision cost, not just him, but everyone around him?

That is the Iliad. Rage, and its consequences. Homer says so in the very first line. He is not being subtle about the theme. He is telling you exactly what you are about to read and then spending the next twenty-four books proving he meant it.

Achilles

Achilles is one of the most extraordinary characters in all of literature and I want to spend real time on him because I think he is frequently misread as simply the greatest warrior, the hero, the best of the Greeks. He is all of those things. He is also considerably more uncomfortable than that framing suggests.

He is the best. He knows he is the best. And he knows something else, something that defines every choice he makes throughout the entire poem. He knows he is going to die young. His mother Thetis, a sea goddess, told him when he was young that he has a choice. A long, quiet, forgotten life. Or a short, glorious, remembered one. He chose glory. He chose to be remembered. And he came to Troy to be remembered.

This makes what Agamemnon does to him at the start of the Iliad not just an insult but an existential attack. Achilles is giving his life for glory, and Agamemnon takes the prize that represents that glory and hands it to himself. If the glory can just be redistributed by whoever has the most political power, what exactly is Achilles trading his life for?

I would argue that his withdrawal from battle is a philosophical crisis dressed in rage. He sits by the ships, the greatest warrior alive, watching his companions die because he will not fight. He knows it. Yet whilst it is happening, he stays out of it. But he does stay there, because the alternative is to accept that his sacrifice means nothing. Some could say he is having a tantrum as someone stole his toy, but I think it's deeper than that. I found that genuinely moving. And then Patroclus happens...

Patroclus

The relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is the emotional engine of the entire poem. Homer is not explicit about the nature of it and scholars have been arguing about that for centuries, but what is not arguable is the depth of it. These are two people who are, in the most complete sense of the word, everything to each other. When Patroclus is killed by Hector while wearing Achilles's armour, something in Achilles simply breaks.

What follows is one of the great depictions of grief in all of literature. Not noble grief. Not composed, photogenic grief. Achilles rolls in the dirt. He tears his hair. He makes sounds that his mother hears from under the sea and comes to the surface to find him. He is completely destroyed by the loss of this one person in a way that ten years of war and thousands of deaths around him never managed.

And then the grief becomes something else. It becomes the kind of rage that has burned through its own limits and come out the other side as something cold and focused and genuinely frightening. Achilles goes back to war. Not for glory anymore. Not for honour. To kill Hector. That is the only thing left that means anything to him.

The gods, watching from Olympus, find this fascinating.

Hector

Here is the thing about the Iliad that Homer does which is almost unfairly brilliant. He makes you love Hector.

Hector is fighting for the wrong side. The war started because his brother Paris, vain and selfish and comprehensively outclassed as a warrior, took a woman who was not his to take. Hector knows this. He tells Paris so, directly and with obvious frustration. But Hector fights anyway, because Troy is his city and his family is inside it and the alternative to fighting is watching it burn.

He is the better man in almost every scene he appears in. He is a devoted husband and a loving father, there is a scene with his wife Andromache and their infant son that is one of the most tender passages in the poem, and he is a genuinely great warrior who knows, at some level, that he is going to lose. That Troy is going to fall. That none of this ends well.

He fights anyway. Because what else do you do when the walls of your city are the walls of your home.

When Achilles finally kills him and then drags his body around the walls of Troy behind his chariot, you feel the wrongness of it viscerally. Not because Achilles is evil. He is not. But because Hector deserved better and Homer makes sure you know it. The greatest warrior in the poem kills the best man in the poem and neither of those facts cancels the other out.

That is not a simple moral universe. That is an honest one.

The Gods Revisited

I said at the start that the gods are what got under my skin and I want to come back to that with more precision now that I have laid out the human stakes.

Here is what happens on Olympus while Patroclus dies. While Hector kills him, while Achilles receives the news and collapses in grief, while Andromache stands at the walls of Troy watching her husband's body being dragged through the dust, the gods on Olympus are bickering. They are taking sides. Zeus is being lobbied by various goddesses. Apollo intervenes here, Athena there, Hera schemes from a distance. They treat the war like a board game where they have favourite pieces.

And the thing that Homer makes you feel, slowly and with tremendous patience across twenty-four books, is what it is like to be the piece. To be the human on the board who is bleeding and grieving and dying while the players above debate whether to let you live another round.

I like the moment when Zeus considers saving Hector from his fate, because he loves him and does not want to watch him die, same as myself. Hector is the GOAT, let’s be honest. And Hera talks him out of it. The gods discuss the life of a man who has a wife and a child and a city to protect and they discuss it the way you might discuss whether to keep a chess piece on the board. And then they decide and Hector dies and the game continues.

I found that enraging. I think Homer intended me to find it enraging. Because the anger you feel at the gods is the same anger that is available to you when you look at any system that treats human lives as variables in someone else's calculation. The Iliad is three thousand years old. The gods have changed their names and their forms. The dynamic has not.

The Similes

I want to spend a moment on something that does not always get discussed in casual conversation about the Iliad, which is how extraordinarily good the writing is on a purely technical level.

Homer's similes are one of the great pleasures of the poem. In the middle of a battle scene, at the height of violence and noise and death, he will suddenly pull back and compare the moment to a lion hunting, or bees swarming from a hive, or a wave breaking on a shore, or a woman crying over her dead husband on a battlefield, a simile that seems almost simple until you realise he is describing grief from inside a battle and calling attention to every other person grieving on every other side simultaneously.

Those similes are a technique for expanding the poem's emotional field beyond the immediate scene. They keep reminding you that the war is happening in a world that contains other things. That somewhere near Troy there are beehives and rivers and men and women doing laundry and children playing. That all of that ordinary life is continuing around the edges of the catastrophe, indifferent to it, and will continue after it ends.

That is a profound structural choice dressed as a poetic flourish. Homer knew exactly what he was doing.

What It Gives You That Modern Fiction Often Does Not

Reading the Iliad after spending most of my life consuming contemporary fiction and film, the thing that strikes me most is its absolute refusal to make the suffering mean something tidy.

People die in the Iliad. Good people, bad people, people you have just met, people you have followed for books, named and unnamed, described in detail and dispatched in a single line. They die and the war continues. There is no narrative justice operating here. The best do not survive because they are the best. The worst do not necessarily fall first. People die because they were in the wrong place or the gods had a whim or the greatest warrior alive was having a bad day.

That is not nihilism. Homer is not saying nothing matters. He is saying that meaning has to be made by the people inside the chaos, not imposed on it from outside. That the dignity of Hector matters even though he dies. That the grief of Achilles matters even though Patroclus is gone and the grief cannot bring him back. That the meeting between Achilles and Priam at the end of the poem, a father coming alone at night to beg for his dead son's body from the man who killed him, matters enormously, is one of the most moving things in all of literature, even though Troy is going to burn anyway.

Meaning made inside impossibility. That is what the Iliad is offering. And it has not gone out of date.

Final Verdict

★★★★★ (5/5)

Five stars without hesitation or qualification. The Iliad is five stars the way the sea is five stars. It was here before most of what we consider civilisation and it will outlast most of what we currently consider important. It invented the template for the war story, the grief story, the hero story, and it did all three simultaneously with a clarity and an emotional intelligence that most of what came after is still trying to match.

Five stars for Achilles in the dirt, destroyed by grief, beyond the reach of anything except revenge. Five stars for Hector kissing his son goodbye outside the walls of a city he knows is going to fall. Five stars for the gods watching from Olympus, comfortable, entertained, their favourites bleeding in the dust below.

And five stars for Priam, old and alone and unarmed, walking into the tent of the man who killed his son, because a father's love turns out to be the one thing in the Iliad that the gods cannot quite reach or replicate or understand.

Homer understood it. He wrote it down. It has never stopped being true.

Next Up: The Odyssey